Despite the ninety-degree (32 Centigrade for my non-North American readers) heat and an air conditioner in need of a new filter, I managed to stay comfortable enough to get some work done, albeit sweatily. I read another bit of Boyhood, which I continue to find fascinating. I've not read many memoirs and, to be honest, some recent "masterpieces" of the form have not gripped me strongly enough for me to share the enthusiasm for the genre that has been blossoming in recent years. That said, I do believe memoirists have the potential to transform their lives into the stuff of universally relevant art and Coetzee, in my opinion, does precisely this with Boyhood.
Other than reading the memoir, I have been taking it a bit easier than I have for some time, largely because the amount of academic writing I read in June began taking a toll on my ability to concentrate. Having grown accustomed to reading such material, however, I continue to feel a tiny twinge of obligation to pick up an article each day, especially because there are still so many essays to read and only a finite number of summer afternoons and evenings left in which to splay myself out on the futon or sit leisurely at a cafe, highlighter in hand. But we'll get through it all eventually (why I resort to a rhetorical strategy like the royal we is beyond me).
At any rate, I did want to briefly mention the two essays I read last week but had not gotten around to discussing. Rosemarie Buikema's "Literature and the Production of Ambiguous Memory: Confession and Double Thoughts in Coetzee's Disgrace" falls into what I have begun referring to as the Truth and Reconciliation school of Disgrace criticism. Broadly speaking, there are roughly three major clusters of scholarly discussion surrounding the novel. Naturally, a good deal of the criticism on the novel falls outside the umbrage cast by these umbrella categories but I would venture to say at least half of the commentary on Disgrace could be classified as one of the following three types:
1.Truth and Reconciliation: criticism in this category tends to focus on Coetzee's treatment of the reconciliation process in post-Apartheid South Africa. It deals extensively with race relations and often views David Lurie's disciplinary hearing as either a metaphor for the TRC itself or as an expression and exploration of the dynamics underlying such attempts at reconciling historically antagonistic parties. Lucy Lurie's attitudes towards Peturus, Pollux, and the two unnamed assailants and David's encounter with Mr. Isaacs in George also figure prominently in such criticism.
2.Animals and human-animal relations: this school of criticism tends to focus on Lurie's relationship with dogs. Anthropomorphism and de-humanization are often major threads in this type of essay. The Lives of Animals and Elizabeth Costello, understandably, provide a wealth of intertextual insights and critics often discuss Coetzee's use of the figure of the absolute other as evidence of the novel's continuation of the author's career-long concern with issues relating to alterity and representation.
3.Socio-political criticism: often sharing a concern for issues of interest to Truth and Reconciliation critics, socio-political criticism also focuses on representations of post-Apartheid violence, racism, sexism, and related tensions not exclusively the focus of the TRC. Lucy's rape, Lurie's assault on Melanie, and Petrus's relationship to the Luries tend to be central concerns for such critics. Much of the criticism in this vein, though certainly not all, views Disgrace in a negative manner, as a hopelessly bleak portrayal of the still-nascent Rainbow Nation.
Obviously, most articles extend beyond the concerns of a given category, quite a few could fall into at least two of them, and many do not fit into any at all. But I do find it helpful to arrange my mental notes in this way.
At any rate, Buikema's essay fits into the first category and save for a few factual errors (Lurie's assailants do not "pour gasoline on Lurie," as she claims, for instance; the men actually pour mentholated spirits on him), it provides a strong reading of the novel as deceptively and problematically allegorical (192). Readers interested in examining the ways in which literature can help shape and question the production of memory (especially that which has been shaped by officially-sanctioned organizations) will find it indispensable.
Elleke Boehmer's "Sorry, Sorrier, Sorriest: The Gendering of Contrition in J . M. Coetzee's Disgrace," like many articles, interprets the novel's depiction of violence in South Africa as a bleak portrait of a society in which enduring the manifestation of historically-repressed animosity is the only option for those people unfortunate enough to live during an era "where the present is more often than not a rehearsal and prolongation of the past" (136). Where Boehmer differs from critics similarly convinced of the novel's "grin and bear it" attitude is in her frustration with Coetzee's depiction of female acquiescence. Understandably, Boehmer finds Lucy's attitude towards her rape problematic. After all, Boehmer asks, "[i]s reconciliation with a history of violence possible if the woman . . . is, as ever, barefoot and pregnant, and biting her lip?" (146).
For tomorrow: Read some more of Boyhood.
Works Cited
Boehmer, Elleke. "Sorry, Sorrier, Sorriest: The Gendering of Contrition in J . M. Coetzee's Disgrace." J. M. Coetzee and the Idea of the Public Intellectual. Athens, Ohio: Ohio UP, 2006. 135-147.
Buikema, Rosemarie. "Literature and the Production of Ambiguous Memory: Confession and Double Thoughts in Coetzee's Disgrace." European Journal of English Studies 10.2 (2006): 187-197.
Owing to an obligation to grade a rather thick stack of student papers -- a task which has kept me up until the wee hours of the morning -- I haven't the energy to write much today. Fortunately, the papers I have spent the last few hours marking up with my trusty ol' red pen have been largely well-written, leaving me in a good enough mood to at least write this tiny bit of prose before setting of for the Land of Nod.
Although I read a good deal of Boyhood this afternoon, I will actually be finishing up my self-assigned reading in bed tonight. I opted to spend the evening with some friends and had a much-needed break from the solipsistic existence I have been leading these past few days. Fortunately, I am enjoying the book, so I don't reckon my fatigue will prevent me from finishing. All I can say is that it has been really nice to have switched back to narrative prose after spending so much time reading academic writing. I find that if I read literary criticism on one specific text exclusively for too long, the articles begin to blend together and I grow frustrated by the often overlapping content of the essays. Taking a break, I've learned, gives one's brain a chance to process and synthesize information, allowing one to digest a good deal of material and sift through the details for those little nuggets of priceless insight. At any rate, it's after two in the morning and I'll have to get cracking on my reading if I want to get to bed at a decent hour. . .
I began reading Boyhood this afternoon and I enjoyed the first few chapters. From what little I have read thus far, I can certainly see why so many critics have found Coetzee's memoirs to be useful resources when working with his fiction. I mean, even though I try not to conflate an author's biographical details with those of his or her fictional creations, it is hard not to notice the striking similarities between, say, father-son relationships in Boyhood and The Master of Petersburg. That many people use the clearly Joycean phrase "a portrait of the artist as a young man" to refer to Coetzee's book, too, strikes me as relevant: the memoir does, in fact, read quite a bit like James Joyce's famous novel. Needless to say, there's a lot going on in the book, much more than I could possibly say at two-thirty in the morning, so I will wrap this up now and sign off for the evening, again promising to discuss the two articles that I haven't yet had the time or energy to cover these past few days.
As much as I would like to sit down and write a nice, long entry about what I have been reading lately, I will have to put that off for a little while because it is getting a bit too late for me to think clearly enough to write anything worth reading.
I have also decided that I will take a bit of a break from reading criticism, using the next couple of days to read Boyhood. I find that I get tired of doing any one part of the dissertation for too long, so I like to break up my work so that I can progress a bit more smoothly. Lately, it has been taking me longer to read the criticism I have set aside for myself, so I think I have reached the point at which a break is a wise idea.
Since it's really, really late and I am too tired to write much, I will just report that I opted to read an essay today, which I will discuss tomorrow when I am a bit more alert.
For tomorrow: Read another essay and/or read a bit of Boyhood.
Rita Barnard, in my opinion, is one of the most consistently excellent Coetzee scholars around. Although "Coetzee's Country Ways" does not appear to figure into my discussion of Disgrace, I would like to at least mention the essay because I appreciate the depth of thought and clarity of language in Barnard's article. Part adroit linguistic analysis, part intertextual exploration, "Coetzee's Country Ways" examines the novel's contribution to and commentary on the South African pastoral tradition. Contrasting Disgrace with Life & Times of Michael K and Charles van Onselen's The Seed is Mine, Barnard makes a convincing case for reading Coetzee's novel as the author's "anti-pastoral . . . contribution to a larger discursive and narrative project of re-imaging rural life in South Africa" in the still-nascent post-Apartheid era (393).
For tomorrow: Largely because I really need a break from reading nothing but literary criticism, I will give myself the option of starting Boyhood if I do not feel like reading another essay tomorrow.
Work Cited
Barnard, Rita. "Coetzee's Country Ways." interventions 4.3 (2002): 384-394.
The article I read today, Mike Marais's "The Possibility of Ethical Action: JM Coetzee's Disgrace," only superficially addresses the Booker Prize-winning novel. Despite its title and Marais's lament that "[w]hile the novel has been widely discussed, nothing much has been said about it," the essay is more of a theoretical treatise on the other than an analysis of Coetzee's novel. Still, since Marais is an important Coetzee scholar and the author of many texts central to the critical discussion surrounding his fiction, researchers may find this brief essay to be a useful supplementary reading when approaching the ever-expanding body of Coetzee criticism.
For tomorrow: read another essay.
Work Cited
Marais, Mike. "The Possibility of Ethical Action: J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace." scrutiny2 5.1 (2000): 57-63.
One of the more rewarding aspects of this dissertation, for me, has been learning a decent amount about South Africa and that nation's social and political history. As I have mentioned before, I had not initially planned on writing a dissertation specifically on J. M. Coetzee. In fact, I had assumed he would not be the subject of much more than a fifth of the project. Not surprisingly, then, my interest in the author had little do do with his status as a South African writer. As the focus of my dissertation has narrowed into a single author study, however, I have had to read quite a bit of material related to a place and an epoch to which I hadn't paid as much attention as I have to those a bit closer to home. And this has been surprisingly fulfilling. I have always had a predilection for Scandinavian history and culture and have more than a passing interest in the sociological aspects of circumpolar studies, so shifting my attention to a country like South Africa has certainly been a wholly new as well as enlightening and enriching experience.
Of course, as a literature graduate student, I have spent a significant amount of time reading postcolonial literature and theory and I have even pursued those studies beyond the confines of the classroom in my own leisure reading, so I am well acquainted with much of the critical and philosophical language one finds in the criticism surrounding J. M. Coetzee's fiction. Words like alterity, the other, and liminality (and the concepts they signify) have long been part of my academic vocabulary, but this project has given my understanding a much more nuanced texture, which I appreciate.
Of the central concerns of postcolonial studies, not surprisingly, is the concept of the border, the subject of the essay I read yesterday afternoon. As Grant Farred asserts, "the border [is] the meeting of difference," the site of hybridity and conflict, a physical or metaphysical plain in which the familiar mingles with the foreign (16). Farred, like several other commentators, views Disgrace as a novel problematically situated "on the historical frontier" of the Eastern Cape, the "site where race, racism and race relations are most deeply embedded, most resistant to being reconstructed" (17). The "psycholandscape" that comes into being in such a historically-contested region (the indigenous population, Afrikaner Trekkers, and British colonists have a long history of bloody conflict in the area) is one in which "change - the dominant rhetoric in post-apartheid South Africa - comes last, not first" (17). It is here that David Lurie, arguably an embodiment of pre-apartheid white privilege, comes into direct conflict with the cultural and social reconfigurations of the "new South Africa," as embodied by the increasingly powerful figure of Petrus. Of course, Lucy, David's daughter, also figures prominently in Farred's essay. Consistent with the negative (which should not be confused with "poor") reading of the novel that he articulates elsewhere, Farred argues that "Disgrace transforms the frontier into a site that is even more disturbing because it functions not through confrontation but complicity . . . the novel leaves the women with no option but to exchange the violation of their bodies for a minimal safety," a particularly dismal version of "post-apartheid white acquiescence" (18):
At the borderlines, at the fringes of the new society, subjects rely not on new inscriptions for and of the land, but on older forms of exchange: the tacit compact: violence is endured, vague safety is expected. Life at the border works not because of the regognition that the language of both liberation and reconciliation has failed. Historical changes can be absorbed and transformed into new racial codes, new forms of enfranchisements, reinstating older forms of violence. (19)
Though his reading is decidedly bleaker than most, Farred's analysis of Disgrace is consistently intelligent and thought-provoking and, for readers interested in understanding why so many South Africans found Coetzee's version of the Rainbow Nation so difficult to swallow, an extremely useful resource.
I also read an interesting review of Andre Brink's The Rights of Desire in the Norwegian journal Vinduet. I don't know if Norwegian literary criticism is inherently clearer than its anglophone counterpart, but despite it being written in my second language, Kristen Skare Orgeret's essay is an extremely lucid example of literary criticism. Although Orgeret focuses on Brink's novel, she devotes a significant amount of attention to Coetzee's novel (from which Brink draws the title for his book). Although her reading of Disgrace is not quite as bleak as Farred's, Orgeret does view the novel as an extremely dark portrait of contemporary South African society. She does, however, conclude that "[s]elv om baade Vanaere og Attraaens rett er moerke, brutale og paa mange maaater pessimiske fremstillinger av regnbuenatsjonen som gikk tapt, handler de ogsaa om haap og om muligheten ti aa leve ansvarlig med andre," echoing the sentiments of many anglophone critics. Of her many insightful comments on both novelists, readers interested in a comparative reading of the two books may find Orgeret's assertion that while Brink's Ruben Olivier represents the Afrikaner's position in the new South Africa, David Lurie embodies the British-descended part of South African society to be most valuable. There is, however, much more to be found in the essay (for those readers who can read Norwegian, at least).
For tomorrow: Read another essay.
Work Cited
Farred, Grant. "Back to the Borderlines: Thinking Race Disgracefully." scrutiny2 7.1 (2002): 16-19.
Orgeret, Kristin Skare. "Der Smaafugl skjelver." Vinduet 18 March 2002. Available online.
Since it's almost two in the morning, I'll keep this post short. I had an extremely productive day, though. Having finished the essay I set out for myself rather early in the afternoon, I managed to prepare for the next week's teaching and wash clothes before spending seven hours with friends. Of course, I find, it's much easier to get through critical readings when I know that I will have something nice to do later in the day. It sorta gives me a reason to work diligently...
One of the more difficult aspects of the dissertation-writing process, for me, has been ensuring that I have read virtually everything on Coetzee. Every time I finish photocopying and ordering articles, it seems, I come across a reference to another, even-harder-to-find essay that I must then attempt to locate. More often than not, the source of the article I cannot find is a South African publication ('cuz, you know, I'm writing about one of that nation's most famous authors), which makes it considerably more difficult to obtain in the States than, say, a Canadian magazine. If anything, the process has taught me that supporting freely-assessable web-based e-journals should figure high on the list of the Academy's priorities. There's so much information out there and we have the means to distribute it efficiently and cost-effectively. . .let's do it!
Anyway, I read Carrol Clarkson's "'Done because we are too menny': Ethics and Identity in J M Coetzee's Disgrace" this evening. Focusing largely on the ethical implications of Darwinian theory, Clarkson uses Coetzee's allusions to Hardy's Jude the Obscure to enter into a discussion of human ephemerality in Disgrace. Ultimately, Clarkson argues, Coetzee presents his reader with a document that emphasizes "the transtemporality of the individual life as a carrier of something larger than" one's own existence (87). Also, in a completely unrelated note, Clarkson pens what may be the single greatest bit of prose I have ever seen in a piece of literary criticism, especially when taken out of context:
Humankind shares 40% of its genes with the banana. This may surprise you, but I would hazard a guess that the staggering ontological fact in itself does little to appease your general sense of miserable alienation, let alone your more profound European Angst... (84)
Overall, Clarkson's essay is a solid study of the role of animals in Coetzee's novel as agents of humility, their very existence forcing humanity to reconsider its assumptions about the value of individual existence.
For tomorrow: Read another essay.
Work Cited
Clarkson, Carrol. "'Done because we are too menny': Ethics and Identity in J M Coetzee's Disgrace" Current Writing 15.2 (2003): 77-90.
I've given myself a bit of a break these past two days. I have continued reading essays on Disgrace as I had planned, but the two most recent articles have been book reviews. I did, however, get quite a bit of time-consuming e-library work done this afternoon, so I may be misrepresenting how much effort I have put into things a bit.
At any rate, the one full-length article I read (on Tuesday) was Kai Easton's "J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace: Reading Race/Reading Scandel," an extremely interesting look at the ways in which the South African public received Coetzee's novel upon its publication in 1999. As part of a collection of essays dealing with "scandalous fictions," Easton's study discusses how Disgrace offended a great many South Africans with its bleak depiction of black-on-white violence in the immediate aftermath of Apartheid. Considering the responses of Coetzee's colleagues in academia and among the South African literati in addition to the ANC's use of the novel to demonstrate lingering racial tensions in the country, Easton provides an intelligent survey of the most negative emotional and political interpretations of the book. Interestingly, Easton suggests that Coetzee may have deliberately crafted his novel in such a way as to encourage and even solicit such harsh criticism in an effort to ask readers "Can we read beyond race?" (200).
Of the two review essays I read, I enjoyed Andrew O'Hehir's article for Salon the most. Although it does not make any startlingly novel observations, O'Hehir's review covers virtually all of the themes that would come to dominate the critical discussion of the novel in the decade following its publication. In fact, it may well serve as an ideal introduction to a collection of criticism centered around the novel. The second review I read, Adam Mars-Jones's "Lesbians are like that because they're fat" also makes some very good observations, though the title is misleadingly salacious and draws the reader's attention away from an article that has next-to-nothing to do with lesbian women. Mars-Jones's most important contribution to the larger critical discussion of Disgrace, in my opinion, is his reading of the novel as:
simultaneously a story of redemption and of collapse, just as a famous optical illusion is simultaneously a duck and a rabbit, but can only be seen at any one moment as one or the other. The reading mind responds to the possibilities in disconcerting alternation.
In other words, Mars-Jones suggests that Disgrace tells two stories "built from the same set of materials" -- namely, David Lurie's evolution from the selfish, proud, anachronistic Romantic he is at the novel's outset to the humble manual laborer content to tend to dying dogs at the book's conclusion and a disparaging portrait of racial relations in the 'new South Africa" -- that one must focus on individually in order to fully appreciate.
For tomorrow: Read another article.
Works Cited
Easton, Kai. "J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace: Reading Race/Reading Scandal." Scandalous Fictions: The Twentieth-Century Novel in the Public Sphere. Eds. Jago Morrison and Susan Watkins. Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan (2006): 187-205.
Mars-Jones, Adam. "Lesbians Are Like That Because They're Fat." The Observer 18 July 1999. 26 June 2008.
O'Hehir, Andrew. Rev. of Disgrace, by J . M. Coetzee. Salon.com. 5 Nov. 1999. 6 June 2008.
Since I just finished a twenty-three mile loop on my bike, I'm feeling a bit tired and don't really have the energy to write much tonight. I did, however, keep up with my reading, which I will discuss at greater length tomorrow when, presumably, I will be so sore and immobile that I will have plenty of time to sit in front of the computer.
For tomorrow: Read another article or begin reading Youth.
Since it is getting quite late and I need to wake up fairly early tomorrow (and by "tomorrow," of course, I mean "today, after I have slept") morning, I will keep this post brief. I can say that today has been a productive day, though, and that my meeting with my dissertation advisor was very pleasant and encouraging. I will write more soon, when I am not as groggy.
When I first decided to write an essay on Disgrace several years ago, I found that the bulk of the published criticism focusing on the novel (at least those articles I encountered) dealt in some way with Coetzee's conception(s) of (dis)grace. Now, I find, much of the critical discussion tends to take up one of two principal concerns, either the novel's reflection upon the Truth and Reconciliation Commission or Coetzee's treatment of animals -- especially in light of the assertions presented in the Tanner Lectures delivered by the author at Princeton University and subsequently published as The Lives of Animals and the eponymous chapters of Elizabeth Costello. Onno Oerlemans's "A Defense of Anthropomorphism: Comparing Coetzee and Gowdy" is a particularly strong example of the latter strain of critical concern. In it, Oerlemans examines Coetzee's careful treatment of the alterity of non-human presences in Disgrace, focusing, as many of his fellow commentators have done, on the oft-cited concluding scene of the novel in which David Lurie consigns Driepoot, the crippled dog with whom he has forged a tenuous bond, to Bev Shaw's needle. The ambiguous ending of the novel, Oerlemans concludes, while apparently "calculated to shock readers out of a sense that Lurie might finally" achieve some semblance of the elusive and ill-defined "grace" he has somehow lost, "it is thematically consonant with the rest of the novel's depiction of animals" (188). "The shock of emotion" the concluding scene elicits from the reader, Oerlemans continues, "forces us to acknowledge the reality of animal being," indicating that "Lurie's moral progress in the novel is not marked by his failed chance to save the animal" but by his newfound ability to focus his love on the doomed canine as it dies (188-189).
Still, Oerelmans maintains, Coetzee refuses to fully anthropomorphize the dogs, emphasizing the ultimate alterity of the animal-as-other as well as highlighting the undeniable physical presence of non-human existence. Animals, then, remind readers "of the problem of representation itself," a theme of central importance to Coetzee's entire ouevre (189). Thus, like many behaviorist ethologists, Coetzee strives to represent "the unbridgeable nature of the divide between human and non-human sentience," refusing to appropriate the subjectivity of the non-human other by endowing animals with human characteristics (185). In the end, we may glimpse some of the animality within ourselves and we may sense a very real individuality in the non-human other, but these realizations remain, necessarily, vague, enigmatic, and inscrutable. In other words, it's a delightfully existential understanding that we can never fully know an/other and that we can never properly depict the other's complete reality.
For tomorrow: Read another article and/or do some library work.
Work Cited
Oerlemans, Onno. "A Defense of Anthropomorphism: Comparing Coetzee and Gowdy." Mosaic 40.1 (2007): 181-196.
About half an hour ago, a friend of mine lamented that she has been suffering from a bout of writer's block and -- BAM! -- it hit me. I have been suffering from reader's block. That's why it has been taking me so long to get through some of the criticism I have been reading. Once the flashbulb went off in my mind (I should emphasize that the flashbulb in question is metaphorical; I am not, as far as I can tell, some sort of Philip K. Dick/Ridley Scott replicant), I felt a tiny bit better. Once in a while, I find, it's nice to label something, compartmentalize it, and make it manageable. So there, reader's block! I stick my tongue at thee!
Anyway, once I stomped the reader's block into submission, I finished reading the introductory essay Derek Attridge penned for the special issue of interventions devoted to Disgrace. As always, Attridge synthesizes an extremely large amount of material (in this case, the rapidly-expanding critical discussion of Coetzee's 1999 novel) into an extremely readable and thoughtful essay. For anyone interested in a quick introduction to the various strains of scholarly debate surrounding Disgrace, Attridge's essay is a wonderful place to start. One of the more pleasing aspects of Attridge's essay, too, is his staunch support for reading Coetzee's novel as literature rather than "historical reportage, political prescription, or allegorical scheme," defending literature as "a challenge to other discourses, including the discourse of politics, which so often attempts to close it down" and as a text that "disturbs. . .any simple faith in the political efficacy of literature - a faith upon which some styles of postcolonial criticism are built" (319-320).
I read Rebecca Saunders's "Disgrace in the Time of a Truth Commission" this evening. Although I have come across scads of essays connecting Disgrace to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Saunders's is among the best that I have seen. She makes a thoroughly convincing case for reading Coetzee's novel as "structured around a series of disturbing interrogations" that essentially interrogate interrogation:
These scenes of interrogation, I wish to argue, not only interrogate each other, but engage a number of urgent ethical problems opened up by teh TRC, at the core of which lie a series of significant tensions between the 'visceral' and 'reason'. Both Disgrace and the TRC question, that is, whether the visceral (conceived as the emotional, instinctive and deeply embodied) can be reasonable, or is in necessaryopposition to reason; or whether reason, and the justice and truth that derive from it, are by nature eviscerated, whether they inevitably translate the visceral into abstract value, disembodied meaning or immaterial recovery. (99)
For instance, drawing upon Nietzsche's observations on the almost economic nature of justice, Saunders argues that "Lurie's position [during his disciplinary hearing] insists that justice is a matter of calculable adequation, of indemnity and exchange" (100). Of course, Farodia Rassool and the committee members are not satisfied with David's admission of guilt; they want to see that he is sorry. This is where Saunders's essay gets really interesting. She locates the schism between the reasonable functionality of an organized judiciary body (like the university committee or the TRC) and the visceral, emotive, and even irrational needs and desires of the people involved within such a body. The essay, like Coetzee's novel, raises more questions than it answers: what role, if any, must outward performance play in reconciliation?; if one admits to guilt, must he or she also be genuinely sorry for the wrongdoing or is it sufficient to "pay" a judicial penalty?; how can the law measure something like sincerity?; is it reasonable to expect a guilty party to transform into a different type of person as part of reconciliation?; will the victim of wrongdoing accept any punishment?; is reconciliation even possible? And on and on. Ultimately, Saunders concludes, Disgrace "leaves us with a messy nettle-strewn bed on which the social conscience is destined to find little rest" (105). And this, I imagine, is Coetzee's point: there are no easy answers; we should toss and turn on questions like these.
For tomorrow: Read another essay.
Work Cited
Saunders, Rebecca. "Disgrace in the Time of a Truth Commission." Parallax 11.3 (2005): 99-106.
I struggled to get any reading done today. I mean, I really struggled. Anything and everything seemed more interesting to me and, no matter what I did or where I went, I could not get myself to focus. This may, of course, be the result of knowing that I have to get through literally thousands of pages of criticism on Disgrace -- a daunting task, to say the least. Whatever the reason, though, I had the attention span of a gnat for much of the day and, eventually, after I abandoned two longer essays, I managed to read Anne Longmuir's extremely brief "Coetzee's Disgrace." Basically, Longmuir reviews the negative criticism of Disgrace and, using the text-based analysis that is the staple of The Explicator, refutes some of the harsher assessments of the novel by suggesting "Coetzee carefully undercuts and undermines" the possibly racist nature of David Lurie's narrative (119).
In addition to Longmuir's discussion of Disgrace, I read several other essays over the past few days. Ute Kauer's "Nation and Gender: Female Identity in Contemporary South African Writing" touches upon Disgrace in a larger discussion of South African fiction. Although Kauer's reading of Disgrace is relatively brief, she makes several interesting observations about Lucy Lurie's pragmatic approach to life in the aftermath of the rape at the center of the novel. Colleen M. Sheils's "Opera, Byron, and a South African Psyche in J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace" is one of the more overtly psychoanalytic readings of the novel. Heavily indebted to Jacqueline Rose's States of Fantasy, Sheils's essay offers an interpretation of Disgrace in which the opera David Lurie attempts to write towards the end of the book reveals the former academic's tumultuous unconscious. Among other things, in her troubling (though plausible) reading of the composition, Sheils suggests that Lurie experiences a nostalgia for the benefits of Apartheid, a longing which manifests itself in the ex-professor's inability to resurrect Lord Byron through music. In the end, Lurie "chooses to be disengaged from the difficulties of life" and "condemns Byron to hell" (49). The opera's failure is also Lurie's failure; he simply will not adjust to the often difficult racial milieu of post-Apartheid society.
Additionally, I read a pair of essays from the special issue of interventions devoted to Coetzee: Mark Sanders's "Disgrace" and Graham Pechey's "Coetzee's Purgatorial Africa." Sanders's essay is an interesting linguistic study of Coetzee's novel. Comparing Coetzee's critique of university "rationalization" and the syntactical quirks of David Lurie and Petrus with Njabulo Ndebele's socio-linguistic theories about the role of English as a tool of colonialism in Africa, Sanders suggests that Coetzee presents an unfinished linguistic state, capturing a moment of African history in which the English language is in a heightened state of flux, bridging the gap between a colonial then and the post-Apartheid future with a linguistically slippery now.
Pechey's essay disappointed me somewhat. Having praised his "eminently readable prose" in a previous entry, I was a bit surprised by the long-windedness of this essay. Sharing some of Sanders's linguistic concern (but discussing several other issues as well), Pechey also focuses on an Africa in flux, a society that is no longer mired in the Hell of Apartheid but not yet the paradise of a racially-integrated and peaceful post-Apartheid state.
I regret not having the time to discuss the essays any further since there is much more to each reading that the tiny bit that I have discussed here, but it is quite late and I must be getting to bed.
For tomorrow: Read another essay
Works Cited
Kauer, Ute. "Nation and Gender: Female Identity in Contemporary South African Writing." Current Writing 15.2 (2003): 106-116.
Longmuir, Anne. "Coetzee's Disgrace." The Explicator 65 (2007): 119-121.
Pechey, Graham. "Coetzee's Purgatorial Africa: The Case of Disgrace." interventions 4.3 (2002): 374-383.
All right. It's been a few days since I last wrote anything of substance. The big development, if one can regard the isolated toiling of an obscure academic as "big," has been the completion of the second chapter of my dissertation, the seemingly endless section on The Master of Petersburg that I put together between February and May. Although I finished writing the sprawling beast a couple of weeks ago (wow, has it really been that long?), I was not comfortable regarding it as finished until it met with the approbation of my supervisor. I'm funny that way, I suppose.
The real problem, though, is one of faith. Although I use the term in a purely secular sense, I realize that faith inevitably invokes the spiritual. And this is not without good reason: faith, after all, requires us to discard empiricism and suspend our truth-seeking faculties in favor of paradoxically accepting something unverifiable as fact. That's the principle behind much of the world's religious belief: the individual senses or feels something to be true to the point of "knowing," but ultimately can't "prove" it. But, let's drop the quasi-spiritual for the moment.
But by taking the whole seeing is believing thing, we see the problem: there is, quite obviously, a difference between believing that, as I write this, my right hand is attached to my right wrist (which I see) and believing that the sun will rise tomorrow (which I do not see). And yet, were I to say that I do not believe the sun will rise tomorrow, I would likely be regarded as something of a fool with an eschatological fixation. The ceaseless string of dawns spanning the millennia of recorded human history, of course, has made such statements essentially absurd. (But, seriously, try prove in the present what will occur in the future).
In other words, we accept the extremely frequent as axiomatic or inevitable (how many people bet their bottom dollar on the 18-0 Patriots winning just one more?). And we do this in every facet of our existences. I mean, how do you really know your parents didn't kidnap you as an infant, forge a birth certificate, and feed you an elaborate story? We just believe it and take it for granted, right?
That's sort of what this whole dissertation thing is like. I know that people have written dissertations in the past and I know that I have written literary criticism that is of the quality sought by academic journals and dissertation panels. The problem for someone like me is in the therefore that will link these tangible observations to an as-yet unrealized (and thus wholly unprovable) future scenario. I have to take it for granted that my hard work will, in the end, result in a doctorate. Like George Michael says, I gotta have faith in something as intangible as this:
An individual
A) Displays an ability to write literary criticism at the level deemed appropriate for successful doctoral work;
B) Knows that others with a similar aptitude have written dissertations and received their PhDs;
and
C) Works hard and steadily.
D) Therefore, he or she will be able to earn a PhD.
The logic, though appealing, is flawed. Such a doctoral student will have to go on faith that A + B + C will equal D when, in truth, A + B + C has only been shown to frequently result in D. That's on the macro level. On the micro level, it's more like this: I know that I have written a solid chapter. Therefore, if I work as hard as I did on that chapter, I will write another solid chapter this time around.
The root of the problem, of course, is that, while I am engaged in a discipline that teaches the virtues of doubt, skepticism, and adamantine refusal to accept the fundamentally unknowable, I am also encouraged to do precisely that towards which I am wholly disinclined.
And then there's the waiting. I often feel like Vladimir or Estragon, patiently waiting for the unseen Godot. Were I a Tralfamadorian, this would not be an issue because I would see what comes after the now.
Instead, I have to be like Little Orphan Annie: the sun'll come up tomorrow . . . (we'll not mention, for the moment, that I live in one of the cloudiest regions of the nation). At any rate, I've already bet my bottom dollar on it . . . (and that's on an adjunct's salary!)
Since I hardly slept last night and I do not anticipate staying up much longer, I'll just post another very brief entry to acknowledge that I did read the article that I intended to go over today. Again, I fully intend to discuss the articles I've read these past few days in a future entry, but I am too tired at the moment to write much of substance.
I will write more later, but I want to to get to bed now. I will, however, acknowledge that, despite my horrible sleep schedule, I did get my reading done today.
Although it's only a few minutes to one, I'd like to try to get to bed at what might be called a reasonable hour, so I won't write much today. I did read an article (which I will discuss later) and I did manage to enjoy a few hours of daylight, so it has been a good day.
And, to top it off: stunningly, my supervisor seems to like my chapter on The Master of Petersburg despite the fact that I had more than a few doubts about the quality of that Brobdinagian block of text. So, yeah. I'm, like, eighty pages into my dissertation now, which is nice. It sort of validates the past few months for me. I mean, sure, there's still loads more to be done, but it's considerably harder for me to shake a stick at eighty pages than, say, thirty. At any rate, if I accept that the "average" dissertation length is somewhere in the 250-300 page range, I'm somewhere between a quarter and one-third done with the raw text of mine. Now it's just a matter of reading a few thousand pages of criticism and I can start the next chapter...
I'm still wrestling with my completely out-of-whack sleep schedule and, as a result, I tend to finish my reading much later than I would like. Still, I suppose, I have been getting things done. I just have this nagging feeling that I would get more done if I could return to a schedule a bit more in sync with the rest of the world. I mean, I have never been comfortable with getting myself out of bed earlier than, say, ten in the morning but this sleep-by-day, work-by-night thing doesn't work too well when you live in an area where you are essentially the only person on that schedule. In other words, I want to work when other people are also working. Otherwise, I'll keep feeling thoroughly disconnected from the world, a feeling that tends to have an adverse effect on my productivity.
Part of my difficulty, too, stems from the critical reading that I have been doing and will continue working on for the foreseeable future. Were an individual merely preparing to teach a course on a topic, he or she might read some of the "canonized" criticism surrounding a given work and then move on to the next text on which he or she intended to focus, bypassing many of the hard-to-locate articles from obscure international journals. (Although, ideally, one would like to have as complete a knowledge of his or her subject as possible and might, time permitting, seek out the truly rare texts). With a dissertation (or any other book-length project), however, one has the obligation to perform an exhaustive amount of research, culminating in an elite state of expertise. Now, the end result is delightful, I'm sure, but the road to getting there is another story entirely. When working on an author as prominent as J. M. Coetzee, tackling the sheer amount of critical writing can be a quite daunting -- and, after a while, rather monotonous -- task. My problem, then, is pushing my way through the many articles that repeat the same information that I have already read several times over. Of course, many of the articles are, in themselves, wholly original readings of the text but, having read scads of other essays, I find that much of the information in one paper can be found piecemeal in a selection of other essays. Thus, once one has plowed through a few dozen essays, say, any new essay is not likely to shed much light on the text. Unless, of course, it is the rare article that either identifies an important narrative thread that had hitherto been passed over or the annoyingly left-field essay that advances untenably absurd theories about the text. Basically, if my reading does not engage my attention with new or interesting insights, I have a harder time focusing, which often results in my spending much longer on an article than I would like. So, the longer it takes to read, the more likely I will be up late and, consequently, the later I will sleep in the next day. Repeat.
As for my reading today, Grant Farred's "The Mundanacity of Violence: Living in a State of Disgrace," I really haven't much to say. The essay is another of the more negative readings of Disgrace, highlighting what the author terms the "mundanacity" of horrific violence in post-Apartheid South Africa. Basically, Farred shares a convincing, if pedestrian, impression of Coetzee's novel as depicting a state of existence in which indifference and acquiescence have become epidemic and people no longer bat a proverbial eyelid at the most disturbing instances of crime. In other words, rape, murder, and robbery have become so ubiquitous in the South Africa that Coetzee depicts that they recede into the background with the equally unnoticeable chirruping of birds and rustling of leaves.
For tomorrow: Read another essay.
Work Cited
Farred, Grant. "The Mundanacity of Violence: Living in a State of Disgrace." interventions 4.3 (2002): 352-362.
