Towards a Levinasian Aesthetic : the Tension Between Implication and Transcendence in Selected Fiction by J.M. Coetzee
Towards a =,evinasian Acestheticco the Tension between 'Implication and Transcendence in Selected Fiction by J.M. Coetzee
by
Michael John Marais
submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of D.Litt. et Phil. in the Department of English, Faculty of Arts, Rand Afrikaans University
Promoter: Professor Rory Ryan
October 1997 Abstract
This study explores the tension between politics and ethics in selected novels by J.M Coetzee. It contends that, in this writer's fiction, ethics is conceived of in Levinasian terms as a relation of responsibility for the other which is grounded in an acknowledgement of the other's radical difference to the same. The thesis examines Coetzee's self-reflexive investigation of the problem for novelistic representation posed by this conception of ethics. In order to contextualise this examination, the first chapter of the study establishes that the form and medium of the novel install a relation of correlation between same and other, and that the novel-as-genre therefore routinely forecloses on, rather than maintains a relation of difference to, alterity. Chapter One also traces the various strategies through which Coetzee's novels attempt not only to prevent the medium and form of the novel-as-genre from reducing the other to an object and thereby violating it, but also to impart a sense of that which inevitably exceeds, and so transcends, this genre's representational protocols. By means of such strategies of excession, the study contends, Coetzee's texts endeavour to inscribe a responsible relation to the other. The four remaining chapters of the thesis trace Coetzee's installation of strategies of excession, and therefore of an ethical aesthetic, in Dusklands, Life and Times of Michael K, Foe, Age of Iron and The Master of Petersburg. They also consider these novels' self-conscious articulation of the ethical implications of such strategies. Chapter Four and Chapter Five pay special attention to the inscription in Coetzee's later fiction of a debate on the possible effect on the reader of the individual text's ethical relation to the other. In this regard, the thesis argues that the ultimate purpose of Coetzee's attempt to respond responsibly to alterity in his writing is to enable the other to approach the reader in the course of the literary encounter. It thereby demonstrates that Coetzee's concern with ethics is deeply political: in attempting to contrive an ethical relation between the reader and the other, the individual text seeks to secure a mediation of the political by the ethical. Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the following for their support in the completion of this project:
Sue Marais for her careful reading and thoughtful comments;
Rory Ryan for his criticisms and refusal to legislate;
Johan Geertsema for commenting on a first draft of the second chapter;
Craig MacKenzie and Haidar Eid for all their encouragement;
the staff of the RAU library;
Kyle Marais for the unsolicited but welcome distractions;
my parents for their encouragement over the years.
1 TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction 1
Chapter 1 The Novel and the Question of Respect for the Other 15
Chapter 2 The Aesthetics of Supplementarity and Rivalry in "The Narrative of Jacobus Coetzee" 75
Chapter 3 The Tension between Implication and Transcendence in Life and Times of Michael K 131
Chapter 4 The Aesthetic of Surprise in Foe 193
Chapter 5 The Aesthetic of Love in Age of Iron and The Master of Petersburg 264
Conclusion 352
Bibliography 358 1
Introduction
In an interview with David Attwell, J.M. Coetzee refers as follows to a tension between politics and ethics in his fiction: "I think you will find the contest of interpretations I have sketched here -- the political versus the ethical -- played out again and again in my novels" (Coetzee, 1992: 338; see also Attridge, 1994: 70). Much of this thesis is devoted to examining this tension and its impact on the aesthetic of Coetzee's fiction, that is, its inscription in the various novels of a singular relation to history. Since I contend that the understanding of the relation between ethics and politics which emerges from Coetzee's fiction is very similar to that of the philosopher, Emmanuel Levinas, a few preliminary remarks are necessary to clarify the latter's somewhat idiosyncratic conception of ethics. For Levinas, ethics is inextricably related to the notion of respect for alterity, and is not to be confused with conventional systems of morality which provide the norms that govern social behaviour. Such systems, according to Levinas, would form part of the order of the "same", that is, part of an order which maintains a relation with the "other" that is premised on its violent reduction (see Levinas, 1991: 26, 28, 31ff.). The relation between same and other which informs Levinas's thinking on politics and ethics may best be explained by means of the phenomenological model of intentionality (cf. Levinas, 1991: 27-29; see also Critchley, 1992: 4). 1 In terms of this model, the order of the same would consist of both the intentional acts of consciousness and the intentional objects that are constituted by these acts and, in turn, invest them with meaning. As a result of its intentional, or directional, nature, consciousness reduces the other to its object and, in so doing, it achieves a full correspondence between its representations and external 'reality'. At the most basic level, then, the relation between same and other is one of violent adequation. By contrast to this relation of power, a relation of respect for the other is one which recognises its radical difference. It is a relation in which the radical exteriority of the other is 2 not adequated with the same (see Levinas, 1991: 38-40). In such a relation, the other could therefore not be reduced to an object before intentional consciousness and, by not being an object, it would not be present (see Levinas, 1991: 27). Levinas describes the paradox of a relation that is not grounded in correlation as follows: "The relationship between separated beings does not totalize them; it is a 'unrelating relation,' which no one can encompass or thematize" (1991: 295). For this thinker, then, ethics is quite simply the event of such an 'unrelating relation' to an other which is radically exterior and, for the most part, his work may be regarded as an attempt to describe the experience of the ethical that is constituted by such a relation. Later in this thesis, I shall discuss at length the seminal notions of responsibility and ethical authority that are concomitant on such an 'unrelating relation'. Of immediate concern, though, is the problem for constative representation that is raised by an ethics that is grounded in a relation of radical difference to an absolute alterity. How can that which is not an object, and therefore not present, be represented? If ethics is premised on respect for the other, how may the other be respected in a discourse that attempts to represent its otherness? The mere attempt to describe that which is radically exterior to the same in the language and discourses of the same is bound to reduce it to an object and thereby to violate it. It is the aporia suggested by this problem to which Jacques Derrida points in his essay entitled "Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas" (1978). After Totality and Infinity (1991), Levinas's work may be regarded as an attempt to negotiate precisely this problem. Although the extent of Derrida's influence in this regard is "indeterminable", Levinas's subsequent writing is, as Simon Critchley avers, "far more conscious of the linguistic and logocentric recoils that arise when the ethical Saying is thematized within the ontological Said" (1992: 12). However, it is not my intention here to discuss the strategies through which Levinas seeks to manage the paradoxes of writing on ethics within the logocentric enclosure. My purpose is rather to establish 3 that Coetzee's conception of ethics and the ethical relation means that he confronts similar problems in his fiction. Indeed, in his most recent novel at the time of writing this thesis, The Master of Petersburg, these problems are self- reflexively announced by means of his use of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice as an analogue for the writer's attempt to respond respectfully to the other in fiction (see, for example, 1994: 5). The Orphic myth serves a similar function in Age of Iron, where it is alluded to in Mrs Curren's attempt to relate to the dead 'John' (1990: 159-160). It is surely more than an interesting coincidence that, in his reflections on the relation of literature to alterity, Maurice Blanchot uses the same mythological analogue (1982: 171 - 176). This latter philosopher, whose thought on radical difference is closely related to that of Levinas (see Libertson, 1982), interprets Orpheus's descent to the Underworld as the creative writer's desire for the other (Blanchot, 1982: 171 - 176), a desire that evinces itself not only in his/her attempt to encounter Eurydice, that is, the other, in the metaphorical night, but also in his/her need to possess, through making manifest, this absolute exteriority by returning it, in its nocturnal aspect, to the light of day. In Blanchot's own words, Orpheus's "work" does not simply "consist in assuring [the obscure point of the other night's] approach by descending into the depths. His work is to bring it back to the light of day and to give it form, shape, and reality in the day" (1982: 171). Blanchot is pessimistic about the outcome of this attempt. In terms of the gods' injunction, "Orpheus is capable of everything, except of looking this point in the face, except of looking at the center of night in the night. He can descend toward it; he can -- and this is still stronger an ability -- draw it to him and lead it with him upward, but only by turning away from it" (1982: 171). However, the approach of the 'other night' that the gods allow Orpheus through the deliberate blindness of the gesture of 'turning away', that is, through a refusal to master the other, is a mocking concession. As Joseph Libertson explains, Orpheus does look at Eurydice and his desire 4 for her, for the other, is precisely "already the inevitability of looking at her" (1982: 138). Accordingly, Libertson goes on to explain, "The detour which fails to contact a substantial Eurydice is already and always the 'looking' which contacts her excessively and loses her" (1982: 138). Coetzee, I argue in this thesis, endeavours to negotiate the above dilemma by means of strategies which, in terms of the journey metaphor in the Orphic myth, may be likened to a refusal to attempt to return with Eurydice to the 'light of day' which, in Levinasian terms, would signify the domain of the same. He makes, that is, the 'detour' of 'looking away' to which Blanchot and Libertson refer, an end in itself rather than a means to an end. Through this strategy of blindness, he refuses to engage in the attempt to give 'substance', that is, 'form, shape, and reality', to the other. Coetzee's emphasis on a 'looking away' which becomes a permanent blindness is self-consciously depicted in Mrs Curren's 'approach' of the dead 'John' in Age of Iron:
In the dead of night, with Vercueil asleep downstairs, I take up this letter to tell you one more thing about that 'John,' that sullen boy I never took to. I want to tell you that, despite my dislike of him, he is with me more clearly, more piercingly than Bheki has ever been. He is with me or I am with him: him or the trace of him. It is the middle of the night but it is the grey of his last morning too. I am here in my bed but I am there in Florence's room too, with its one window and one door and no other way out. Outside the door men are waiting, crouched like hunters, to present the boy with his death. In his lap he holds the pistol that, for this interval, keeps the hunters at bay, that was his and Bheki's great secret, that was going to make men of them; and beside him I stand or hover. . . . He is listening to the murmur of voices outside, and I listen with him. . . . His eyes are unblinking, fixed on the door through which he is going to leave the world. . . . His eyes are open and mine, though I write, are shut. My eyes are shut in order to see. Within this interval there is no time . . . . I am here in my room in the night but I am also with him, all the time, as I am with you across the seas, hovering. (my emphasis, 1990: 159 - 160)
The metaphor of 'looking away' is also applied to MrS Curren's 5 bond with her daughter which, in turn, reflects the writer's relationship to his reader: "I am feeling my way along a passage that grows darker all the time. I am feeling my way toward you; with each word I feel my way" (1990: 120). Significantly, in Age of Iron, these allusions to the Orphic descent coexist with a set of allusions to Aeneas's journey to the Underworld, a myth which differs from the former in that Aeneas does not attempt to return to the 'light of day' with his father, Anchises (1990: 83ff.). Implicit in this contrast is the suggestion that it is possible to establish a responsible relation to the other in fiction. By arresting the seemingly inevitable process through which the 'detour' becomes the 'gaze', an 'unrelating relation' may be maintained with the other. In the chapters which follow, I discuss at length the strategies through which Coetzee endeavours to establish and maintain an ethical relation to alterity by refusing to invest it with 'form, shape, and reality', thereby resisting the desire to return with it to the 'day', the domain of the same. For Levinas, an ethical relation to the other can only be established by means of a movement, without return, from same to other (see 1981: 84, 138-139). My argument is that Coetzee's aesthetic strategies are intended to install in his fiction just such an irreversible "movement of infinition" from same to other (see Lingis, 1981: xxxiii). In generating this movement and its profound and manifold ethical implications, this complex of strategies provides the novels with what I refer to as a 'Levinasian aesthetic'. At the most fundamental level, Coetzee's attempt to inscribe in his texts such a 'movement of infinition' is an attempt to acknowledge the radical difference of the other. It is a recognition that, since the other is not an object and can therefore never be present, it cannot be represented without first being violently reduced. The corollary, here, is that in order to respond ethically to it, the novel must have the forms of neither presence nor representation in its relation with the other. It is this seeming-paradox which I examine in this thesis. And, as my brief discussion of Coetzee's use of the 6 Orphic myth in Age of Iron and The Master of Petersburg indicates above, my interest is not only in the strategies with which this writer seeks to respond ethically to alterity, but also the texts' self-reflexive articulation of the ethical purpose of these strategies. A further implication of my argument in the preceding paragraph is that, in terms of its ongoing obsession with the inscription of an ethical relation to the other, there has been little or no development in this writer's oeuvre. In this regard, the title of my thesis, "Towards a Levinasian Aesthetic: The Tension between Implication and Transcendence in Selected Fiction by J.M. Coetzee", may seem somewhat contradictory. However, the preposition 'towards' here does not so much signify a development in as the metafictional exposition of this aesthetic in Coetzee's oeuvre. On the one hand, my argument is that the strategies of 'looking away' are evident in this oeuvre from the very first novel and that each succeeding text constitutes yet another attempt at installing a 'movement of infinition'. On the other hand, I contend that the succeeding texts self-reflexively explicate the ethical implications of this "dehiscent" movement from same to other in ever-more detail and with increasing insistence (see Levinas, 1981: 84). Simultaneously and paradoxically, however, their self-reflexive dimension progressively articulates an ontogenetic anxiety that they may not be able to install such a movement and thereby attain the objective of an ethical relation with alterity and this, in turn, adds to the ateleological character of the oeuvre. What the last text attempts to achieve is that which the first attempted. In neither case, however, is there the certainty of the telos of success. Ultimately, then, my use of the verb 'towards' also points to a radical ateleology at the heart of Coetzee's literary project: it signifies the ongoing nature of this project, rather than its consummation. In tracing the self-reflexive articulation of a Levinasiam aesthetic in Coetzee's fiction, I have chosen to introduce Levinas's ideas as they emerge in the texts under consideration. In other words, I construct the Levinasian context which is 7 necessary for my discussion not by way of an independent chapter but contextually, incrementally and iteratively. Such a modus operandus has the advantage of emphasising the repetitive quality of Coetzee's literary enterprise. Owing to my focus on the increasing self-reflexivity with which the texts that form Coetzee's oeuvre articulate their ethical dimension, I have decided to exclude from my discussion In the Heart of the Country and Waiting for the Barbarians. Although strategically similar to Dusklands, Coetzee's second and third novels constitute no real development on the first in terms of their self-conscious articulation of the Levinasian aesthetic that is generated by their narrative strategies. Only with Life and Times of Michael K does one encounter a significant development in this regard. After my examination of Coetzee's first text, I therefore proceed with readings of Life and Times of Michael K, Foe, Age of Iron and The Master of Petersburg. However, I do not commence this study with an examination of Coetzee's fiction per se: in my first chapter, I examine the assumption which underlies his attempt to establish an ethical relation with alterity in his fiction, namely that the form and medium of the novel are implicated in the order of the same, and that this genre's representations therefore foreclose on otherness. Such an investigation is necessary in order fully to appreciate the ethical implications of Coetzee's meta- representational engagement with the significatory protocols of this genre. The point of departure for my discussion in this first chapter is Levinas's argument that the autonomous subject is the "crucible" through which the other is 'transmuted' into the same (1987: 49-50). I contend that, through its inscription of an autonomous model of subjectivity upon its emergence, and its development of the technique of realism as a strategy aimed at preserving the illusion of autonomous subjectivity, the novel- as-genre inevitably established, and dissimulated, a violent relation to alterity. Part of my discussion of the emergence of the novel is grounded in a symptomatic reading of Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, my selection of this text being based on its popular 8 status as one of the first English novels. In addition, I shall argue, Coetzee's critique of the genre of fiction in Dusklands, Life and Times .of Michael K, and Foe proceeds by way of an intertextual engagement with this ur-novel and, by means of these intertextual links, he constructs an argument on the novel-as- genre's relation to history. In my chapters on the above- mentioned three texts, I trace this argument and relate it to Coetzee's distinction, in his essay "The Novel Today", between writing which "supplements" history and writing which "rivals" history (1988: 2 - 5). My reason for focusing on "The Narrative of Jacobus Coetzee" in my chapter on Dusklands is because it is in this section of the novel that the strategy of "intertextual citation" through which the work as a whole articulates its meta- representational debate on the 'supplementation' and 'rivalry' of history is located (see Slemon, 1989: 7). The discussion of Robinson Crusoe in the first chapter of this thesis therefore has a direct bearing on my focus in subsequent chapters on Coetzee's self-reflexive engagement with the representational protocols of the genre of the novel. As such, it facilitates my development of the argument that is hinted at in the subtitle of this study, namely that Coetzee's novelistic bid at autonomy is grounded in a tension between implication and transcendence. Through its inscription of an intertextual relation with Robinson Crusoe, each text points to the implication of the genre in the discourses of the order of the same and, by extension, to its own implication. My argument is that it is precisely through this acknowledgement of situatedness that each novel attempts to transcend the domain of the same. As I proceed, it will become clear that, paradoxically, the text depends on its implication for transcendence. An analysis of Robinson Crusoe also has the advantage of enabling an assessment of the particular complexion which the novel's indifference to the other gains in the context of the history of post-Renaissance, European colonialism. In this regard, it is significant that Coetzee's texts frequently explore the impact on the novel's representations of the colonial 9 encounter of this genre's inscription of an autonomous subjectivity. As I proceed, it will become clear that, in post- colonial contexts, the desire to contrive an ethical relation to the other in the novel form translates into a desire to decolonise the genre. With these considerations in mind, I conclude my discussion of the emergent novel's relation to alterity with a brief examination of the way in which the postmodernist and post-colonial forms of the contemporary novel have addressed the issue of respect for the other. In the process, I contextualise Coetzee's own engagement with this ethical problem. My approach to Coetzee's fiction differs significantly from previous studies in its assertion that Coetzee suggests an absolute alterity to which it may be possible to establish an 'unrelating relation'. So, for example, while I agree with Teresa Dovey's assessment of the problem of representing otherness in her discussion of Foe (1988: 335-339), I argue that in his search for a new presentation of "a sense of the unpresentable" (see - Lyotard, 1984: 81), Coetzee strives to establish a relation with the other that is not premised on presence and representation but, instead, on performance. This endeavour, I maintain, is based on the Levinasian notion of a self-substituting responsibility for the other which brings with it a divestiture of authorial authority. In other words, I contend that in imparting a 'sense of the unpresentable', Coetzee's fiction seeks not simply to self-subversively acknowledge its implication in discourse, but to create the transcendental event of an ethical relation to the other. Owing to the political exigencies of the South African context in particular, and post-colonial contexts in general, much of the emphasis in criticism on Coetzee has been on relating his fiction to history. On the one hand, commentators such as Paul Rich (1984), Michael Vaughan (1982), Nadine Gordimer (1984) and Michael Chapman (1988), to name but a few, take issue with the apparent political and social irresponsibility of Coetzee's writing, its seeming retreat into games-playing. On the other hand, critics who attempt to counter these charges often do so by 10 constructing a correspondence between the texts and evolving political circumstances in South Africa. Frequently, as in the case of Robert .M. Post (1989), this endeavour results in contrived and, at times, extravagant claims. An exception, here, is Attwell's book-length study which is arguably the most considered instance of this form of historical criticism (1993). Apart from being informed by the awareness that Coetzee's novels often refuse to accept history's status as an a priori structure, it is one of the first arguments on the ethicality of Coetzee's fiction. Although the particular relation which Coetzee's texts construct with history forms a major part of my thesis, I differ from Attwell by arguing that Coetzee's fiction postulates an a priori relation between ethics and history. I demonstrate that this postulation is grounded in the Levinasian notion of the primacy of ethics. My argument that Coetzee's fiction asserts the priority of ethics over politics and history has as its corollary the claim that, in attempting to perform the ethical relation in the literary encounter with the reader, the various texts strive to secure a mediation of the political by the ethical. By implication, then, I maintain that the division between ethics and politics is not absolute in Coetzee's fiction. Indeed, in an interview with Attwell other than the one cited earlier, this writer comments that "the last thing I want to do is to defiantly embrace the ethical as against the political" (Coetzee, 1992a: 200; see also Attridge, 1994: 70). Although I do not engage directly with those critics who accuse Coetzee's fiction of withdrawing from the political world, this part of my argument may be seen as one possible response to this charge. For Coetzee, politics starts as ethics. Of late, Coetzee's fiction has received some attention from post-colonial critics (see, for example, Jolly, 1996; and Kossew, 1996). In my first chapter, I briefly argue that, owing to its political agenda, post-coloniality usually constructs the other in opposition to the metropole. Not surprisingly, then, post- colonial readings of Coetzee's novels almost inevitably claim that Coetzee enlists the other against Empire. Should this be 11 the case, the notion of alterity that is invoked in his novels would be one that is always already implied by the discourse which it attempts to counter (cf. Dovey, 1988: 336; see also Levinas, 1991: 38). However, as I have already indicated, my claim in this thesis is that the other that is intimated in Coetzee's fiction is radically exterior to the order of the same. It is for this reason that, in my assessment of post-coloniality in the chapter which follows, I take issue with Rosemary Jolly's concept of the "specific", "embodied" 'other' in Coetzee's writing (1996: 143-144). 2 In its explication of the autonomy for which Coetzee's novels strive, Brian Macaskill and Jeanne Colleran's work on Coetzee intersects with mine in spirit if not in detail (see 1992; 1992a). With respect to detail, my argument is much closer, but by no means identical, to that of Derek Attridge who, as far as I have been able to ascertain, is the first critic to have pointed to the relevance of Levinasian ethics to Coetzee's writing (see 1994; 1994a). I develop along specifically Levinasian lines At t ridge's comments on ethical responsibility in Age of Iron and extend them to a full discussion of the aesthetic which informs Coetzee's novels. Although Attridge discusses at some length the performative dimension of the literary text (1994a), my understanding and usage of this term derives from Critchley's application of Derrida's concept of 'ethical performatives' to Levinas's postulation of the event of the ethical relation (Critchley, 1992: 7, 116; see also Coetzee, 1992: 340). Finally, my argument on Coetzee's texts' assertion of the priority of ethics over the political and their attempt to secure the mediation of the latter by the former has a direct bearing on reading strategies in general and my own in particular. I demonstrate that the novels self-reflexively thematise the political nature of the act of reading and that they frequently do so by aligning the reader with a coloniser-figure. Clearly1 , there is a certain irony in focusing on this dimension of Coetzee's fiction in a thesis on literature that is grounded in 'close readings' of literaty texts. As I proceed, it will become 12 clear that it is precisely the empirical assumptions of strategies of reading with which the texts take issue. My reading is thus not exempt from, but an instance of, that which it claims that the novels criticise. In this regard, it is important to point out that the texts themselves do not seem to admit the possibility of an ethical form of critical-theoretical reading. Indeed, their critique of interpretation does not discriminate between degrees of totalisation. This is strongly evident in the parallel which the novels construct between the acts of reading and colonising. For instance, in my first chapter, I show that the reader is aligned with Jacobus Coetzee in "The Narrative of Jacobus Coetzee". It could be argued that, after the initial shock of this alignment with a coloniser who revels in physical acts of violence wears off, it is easy for the reader to dissociate him/herself from this character and therefore from the politics of colonisation. However, I go on to indicate that, in the later novels, the reader is also identified with characters who, as Stephen Watson has pointed out, are depicted as reluctant colonisers (1996: 22- 24). In Albert Memmi's argument, which informs Watson's reading of Coetzee's characters, "the coloniser who refuses" "is part of the oppressing group and will be forced to share its destiny, as he shared its good fortune. . . . No matter how he may reassure himself, 'I have always been this way or that with the colonised,' he suspects, even if he is in no way guilty as an individual, that he shares a collective responsibility by the fact of membership in a national oppressor group" (1965: 38-39). Thus, despite their attempt to dissociate themselves from it, these characters are shown to be complicit in the violence of colonisation by sheer dint of their situatedness in the colonial context. For the interpretive act, the implication of this parallel with 'reluctant colonisation' is that, no matter how sympathetic and sensitive the reader's commerce with the text is, s/he, owing to his/her situatedness in the discourses of the culture of which s/he is a part, will foreclose on the text and thereby violate it. 13 Furthermore, the possibility of transcendence which I argue that the various texts raise does not extend to literary hermeneutics. .As I proceed, it will become clear that the process through which the novels seek to establish an ethical relation with the reader, which will then affect his/her relations in the political world, occurs on a pre-reflective level. Since the form of transcendence that is generated by the tension between politics and ethics in Coetzee's fiction is associated with anti-intellection, it does not offer the prospect of an ethical form of literary-critical practice. Within the context of the novels' critique of reading, then, my own reading practice in this study is irrevocably violent and any attempt on my part to indicate a desire to reduce the level of violence in my engagement with the texts would simply serve to confirm my status as a coloniser who attempts to refuse. 14 Notes
In Edmund,Husserl's phenomenology, all phenomena are correlated to the intentions which constitute human consciousness. Accordingly, the intentional structure of consciousness provides evidence of an apodictic subjectivity (see Husserl, 1977; 1975: 3-39). Levinas regards this phenomenological subject as a philosophical assertion of the absolute self-possession of an autonomous ego which includes in the knowledge of itself the truth of all givens and therefore responds irresponsibly to the other (see, for example, 1991: 122-127). In this thesis, the term intentionality will be used to refer to those directional acts of consciousness through which a putatively transcendental subject that is actually situated in culture instantiates discourse and thereby forecloses on alterity. For an interpretation of intentionality which differs significantly from that of Levinas, see Horst Ruthrof's discussion of the claim that for Husserl the individual consciousness is the 'zero point' of meaning (1992: 65 - 67). He contests the notion that phenomenology is a purely subjectivist theory of meaning which ignores discourse, one in which individual consciousness is the origin of representations and thus of meaning. Ruthrof goes on to argue that, although Husserl "does not write from a materialist pei.spective, there is nothing in the Lebenswelt which would deny the workings of ideological effects", and arrives at the conclusion that for Husserl "meaning itself does not originate in subjective consciousness, but consciousness plays an important role in the instantiation of discourse" (1992: 66). At the time that this thesis was nearing completion, Sue Kossew's book had only recently become available in South Africa and is therefore not covered in this discussion.
15 Chapter 1: The Novel and the Question of Respect for the Other
1.1 Introduction 16 1.2 The Autonomous Subject 17 1.3 Subject-Centred Discourse 21 1.4 The Novel and the Technique of Realism 27 1.4.1 The Occlusions of Realism: The Autonomous Subject in Colonial Space 32 1.4.2 The Occlusions of Realism: The Autonomous Subject and the Indigene 40 1.4.3 The Occlusions of Realism: The Reading Subject and the Novel 44 1.5 Contexts: Postmodernism and Post-Colonialism 47 1.6 Contexts: Levinasian Ethics 58 1.7 Conclusion 66 1.8 Notes 68
1 16
CHAPTER 1
The Novel and the Question of Respect for the Other'
1.1 Introduction
The purpose of this chapter is to establish a context within which my discussion of Coetzee's attempt to develop a respectful novelistic response to the other may take place. In formulating this context, it is necessary to establish that the form of the novel forecloses on alterity. I do this by arguing that the autonomous subject that was installed by the novel upon its inception realises its freedom by eliding the other. In its inscription of an autonomous subject, and in its occlusion of this subject's violent relation to the world by means of the technique of realism, the novel denies the very existence of otherness. I ground my discussion of the novel's relation to alterity in a reading of Defoe's Robinson Crusoe and argue that, in the context of the imperial project, the occlusions of realism supplement colonial history. I then show that a feature of the aesthetic context of postmodernism and post-colonialism, within which Coetzee's fiction is produced, is generic anxiety about the novel's indifference to the other. My argument here is that Coetzee's response to the question of novelistic respect differs significantly from those of both these modes of writing. In this regard, I contend that Coetzee's fiction neither attempts to decentre the autonomous subject nor to establish an alternative yet still free and independent subjectivity. Instead, it seeks to call into question the freedom and independence of the subject. There is implicit in this strategy an attempt at restructuring the autonomous model of subjectivity. I emphasise the importance of Levinasian ethics to this humanist endeavour. Finally, I suggest that Coetzee's writing tries to negotiate the economy of betrayal implicit in the novel's medium and representational protocols by self-reflexively announcing its refusal to attempt to represent the other and thereby violate it. 17
1.2 The Autonomous Subject
According to Levinas, the human subject is motivated by the wish to be free (1991: 84-90, 114ff.; 1987: 47-48). It seeks to realise its free will, and thereby affirm itself, by annulling all that resists its powers, even when that resistance is merely a function of the existent's obscurity (Levinas, 1987: 49). Differently put, the subject attains and assures its freedom by ensuring that otherness does not stand in its way. Knowledge is the principal means by which it achieves this end: it can only gain complete autonomy through a full comprehension of the world (Levinas, 1987: 49). As a result of this will to freedom and self-affirming cognitive procedure, the subject may be described as a self-sufficiency that does not care for other beings. Levinas implicates the entire history of western philosophy in this reduction of alterity to the transcendental activity of an autonomous subject. "Every philosophy", he asserts, is "an egology" (1987: 50). He argues that the culpability of western thought in this respect is related to its reverence for and unquestioning acceptance of autonomy:
Autonomy, the philosophy which aims to ensure the freedom, or the identity, of beings, presupposes that freedom itself is sure of its right, is justified without recourse to anything further, is complacent in itself, like Narcissus. When, in the philosophical life that realizes this freedom, there arises a term foreign to the philosophical life, other -- the land that supports us and disappoints our efforts, the sky that elevates us and ignores us, the forces of nature that aid us and kill us, things that encumber us or serve us, men who love us and enslave us -- it becomes an obstacle; it has to be surmounted and integrated into this life. (1987: 49)
In terms of the emergence of the novel in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it is significant that Levinas's interpretation of western philosophy focuses especially on modern philosophy's celebration of the ego, which begins with Rene Descartes: 18 The 'I think,' thought in the first person, the soul conversing with itself, or, qua reminiscence, rediscovering the teachings it receives, thus promote freedom. Freedom will triumph when the soul's monologue will have reached universality, will have encompassed the totality of being, encompassing even the animal individual which lodged this thought. Every experience of the world, of the elements and objects, lends itself to this dialectic of the soul conversing with itself, enters into it, belongs to it. The things will be ideas, and will be conquered, dominated, possessed in the course of an economic and political history in which this thought will be unfolded. It is doubtless for this reason that Descartes will say that the soul might be the origin of the ideas that relate to exterior things, and thus account for the real. (Levinas, 1987: 49)
The concluding reference in this passage is to the third of Descartes's Meditations in which he explains that one cannot be certain that the ideas of exterior things, including bodies, animals, and other human beings, are not products of the cogito (1969: 76-91). The immanence of this central, transcendental consciousness, which subsumes the 'truth' of all givens within knowledge of itself, has as its corollary the belief that the other is but a thought that belongs to it, a subordinate moment of its own universe (see Descartes, 1969: 85). Owing to the fact that knowledge in this conception of subjectivity consists in relating the alien entity to a system of a priori concepts and ideas, the subject can never be surprised by otherness. 'Truth' is a result of a form of Platonic anamnesis (see Plato, 1959: 121ff.), that is, it is arrived at by adequating exteriority with that which is already known. The cognitive process of the thinking I is therefore a form of remembering in which 'new' knowledge is always a function of the immanence of that subject's consciousness. It is for this reason that Levinas, as I have already mentioned, describes the "I's identification, its marvelous autarchy" as the natural crucible" of the "transmutation of the other into the same" (1987: 49 - 50). The emphasis on Descartes in Levinas's critique of western thought seems to suggest that the modern period constituted not only a continuation but also an intensification of the 19 valorisation of the autonomous ego. Just such an intensification is apparent in the close relationship between thought on language and thought on subjectivity that developed during the Enlightenment period. Before examining this nexus, it is necessary to point out that it is through language that the thinking I relates alterity to its network of a priori concepts and thereby installs itself as relational centre of all that is. It is the means through which it intends its world, anamnetically imposes on it its cognitive categories and, in the process, possesses it. It may thus be argued that a recognition that language offers no immediate access to a pre-existent 'reality', and that the subject is therefore separated from 'reality' by the word, would constitute a threat to the subject's autonomy. Being a recognition of mediation, such a recognition would lead to the concomitant realisation that the subject is not the centre of knowledge. It is in the context of this potential threat to the subject's autonomy that the Enlightenment endeavour to 'clarify' language should be read. This endeavour has elicited much comment. With reference to the work of John Locke and Thomas Hobbes, in particular, Firdous Azim claims that "Language, in eighteenth-century linguistic speculation, was seen as a perfect system of representation, issuing from the coherent and unified subject, which this system presupposed" (1993: 17). 2 Lennard Davis, discussing the "new critique of language" that emerged during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, states that for Hobbes "reason must be based on accurately perceiving objects in the material world and correctly naming them" (1983: 80 - 821; Hobbes, 1962: 81-85). Indeed, Hobbes himself cautions that since "truth consisteth in the right ordering of names in our affirmations, a man that seeketh precise truth had need to remember what every name he uses stands for, and to place it accordingly, or else he will find himself entangled in words, as a bird in lime twigs, the more he struggles the more belimed" (1962: 77; see Davis, 1983: 81). In order to avoid this fate, according to Hobbes, it is necessary to engage in the "settling of significations" by means of "definitions" (1962: 77). Owing 20 to the reliance of truth, reason and science on language, Hobbes disapproves of the figurative use of language:
To conclude, the light of human minds is perspicuous words, but by exact definitions first snuffed, and purged from ambiguity; reason is the pace; increase of science, the way; and the benefit of mankind the end. And, on the contrary, metaphors, and senseless and ambiguous words, are like ignes fatui; and reasoning upon them is wandering amongst innumerable absurdities; and their end, contention and sedition, or contempt. (1962: 86)
For Hobbes, such imprecise use of language is dangerous and has as its consequence religious and political error: so that it may accurately embody the world of things, language must be clarified (Davis, 1983: 82). Francis Barker also comments on the suspicion of verbal excess in this period. He argues convincingly that such suspicion culminated in the "attribution to discourse of an instrumental transparency", and that this shift in referentiality is a feature of the tradition of subject-centred discourse which began with Descartes (1984: 17). The outcome of rendering language transparent, Barker points out, was the "occlusion of writing itself" (1984: 17). In developing his argument, he draws a telling contrast between the apparent directness of writing such as Samuel Pepys's Diary, and the self-reflexivity of the Jacobean texts which preceded it. With regard to the latter, he comments that "representation is itself present to representation" in Thomas Middleton's A Game at Chess, and that Cyril Tourneur's The Revenger's Tragedy is "constructed by tireless reference to its own signifying; each sequence is a matrix of citation, imitation and reworking of the range of theatrical tropes and mechanisms at work on the Jacobean stage, and in this sense is only a usefully typical example of the early seventeenth-century theatre as a whole" (1984: 17, 19). In such plays, Barker argues, one encounters "a discursive situation before production has quite 'disappeared' into, in one of its modalities, the closed factory, or at the level of representation, into the conventions of that bourgeois naturalism 21 which has nothing to do with nature, and everything to do with, naturalizing the suppression of the signs of the artefact's production" (1984: 18). No doubt there are many reasons for the desire to develop a language which represents things that is so evident during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Each of the three theorists whom I have cited above provides a complex of different explanations, ranging from the ideological underpinnings of the Puritan advocacy of the "plain style" and condemnation of opaque language, to the bourgeois revolution (see Davis, 1983; Barker, 1984). Instead of adding to these accounts of the desire for clarification of language, I wish to focus on one of its effects, that is, that by occluding the discursive mediation of 'reality', this trend preserved the illusion of an autonomous subject. In fact, the suppression of language's visibility not only preserved the subject's autonomy but further secured it, by enabling the instatement of a firmer distinction between fact and fiction than had hitherto prevailed.
1.3 Subject-Centred Discourse
I shall now discuss the link between the rendering transparent of language and the fact/fiction dichotomy with specific reference to travel discourse. The examination of the linguistic and epistemological conditions which enabled the installation, in writing, of an autonomous subjectivity that forms part of this discussion will provide the theoretical context which is necessary for my argument on the novel and the question of respect for the other. Recently some commentators on the novel have contended that the distinction between fact and fiction prior to the eighteenth century was not as rigid as it subsequently became. Davis argues that the "grand categories of literary taxonomy -- fact/fiction, prose/poetry, printed/unprinted, history/fabrication, fantasy/representation -- are not . . . simply logical, self- evident ways of classifying narrative. Far from being intrinsic and autochthonous ways of seeing literature, they are part of a 22 general ideological system" (1983: 8). In support of these contentions, Davis demonstrates that a distinctive characteristic of the early novel was -- from a twentieth-century perspective -- a peculiar dynamic between fact and fiction which meant that the genre was received with ambivalence by its original readers. So, for example, the eighteenth-century reader's response to the following paragraph from Defoe's Roxana differed from that of the contemporary reader in that, while the latter has biographical and historical material available which designates Defoe's texts as fictional constructs, the former was never quite certain as to whether they were in fact true or false:
The history of this beautiful lady is to speak for itself: it is not as beautiful as the lady herself is reported to be; if it is not as diverting as the reader can desire . . . the relator says it must be from the defect of his performance; dressing up the story in worse clothes than the lady, whose words he speaks, prepared it for the world. (qtd in Davis 1983: 13)
Moreover, Davis argues, the ambivalence occasioned by the inability to take for granted that a passage such as this was fiction, traversed the period-reader's experience of the new genre and constituted one of the "major components in the phenomenology of reading during the early eighteenth century" (1983: 24). The implication here, then, is that during this period fact and fiction had not yet become firmly entrenched as the significant discriminants of genre that they later became (Davis, 1983: 10). Accordingly, it may be assumed that the discourse of print, that is, the undifferentiated ensemble of written texts of which the novel formed part, at this early stage was more extensive than it is at present and, in addition to novels and literary criticism, included "parliamentary statutes, newspapers, advertisements, printer's records, handbills, letters, and so on" (Davis, 1983: 7). Davis's notion that an undifferentiated discourse of print was extant at this time is confirmed by the findings of other researchers in this field. In discussing what he describes as the general "generic confusion" endemic in the . late seventeenth 23 century, Michael McKeon, for instance, notes that while some of the booklists of publishers and booksellers evince "the absence of any will to' distinguish consistently between 'history' and 'literature', between 'fact' and 'fiction'", those of others manifest "a more familiar and reassuring impulse", that is, they separate "'History' from 'Romances, Poems and Playes'" (1987: 26). In the context of Davis's argument, this coexistence of the desire to distinguish between history and literature with the conflation of the two, a state of affairs which, as McKeon shows, "can even be found in the same writer" (1987: 26), does not so much indicate 'generic confusion' as the reality that fact and fiction had not yet been firmly established as signifiers of genre at this time. My contention here is that the change in cultural attitudes towards the epistemological value of fact and fiction that seems to have been a significant part of eighteenth-century cultural life is directly related to the clarification of language in subject-centred discourse. For instance, travel discourse's status as a 'factual' mode of writing only developed during the modern period, and is demonstrably dependent on the existence of a relation between language and experience that is close enough to enable the inscription of an autonomous subject. Significantly in this regard, there is a pronounced interplay between fact and fiction in travel writing prior to the eighteenth century. For instance, a cursory glance at Richard Hakluyt's Voyages (1907) reveals that it included both real voyages and projected or imaginary ones. Furthermore, Percy Adams has shown that some travellers during this "age of plagiarism" frequently appropriated material from other travellers who, in many cases, had themselves resorted to the same practice (1962: 11). Adams's two exhaustive surveys of European travel literature are useful in revealing the pervasiveness of the imbrication of fact and fiction in travel literature before the eighteenth century (1962; 1983). As emerges from his use of the word 'plagiarism' and from the title of the earlier of his two studies, Travelers and Travel Liars (1962), Adams does treat the distinction between fact and fiction 24 as an intrinsic and autochthonous marker of genre. It is all the more significant, therefore, that his discussion should contradict this assumption by revealing -- albeit unintentionally -- that the fictional dimension of many of the so-called 'travel lies' which he identifies derives from the fact that European travellers' representations of 'unknown' territories were mediated by a pre-existent and recognisable European discourse. Among the numerous instances in which Adams's discussion inadvertently points to a relation between fiction and discursive mediation, the story of the Patagonian giants -- which concerns Europe's representation of South America -- stands out (1962: 43). According to Adams, one of four eyewitness accounts which emanated from Magellan's circumnavigation of the globe between 1519 and 1522 supplied many 'facts' pertaining to an encounter with tall South Americans. This account subsequently served as inspiration for many other travel narratives over the next 250 years, accounts which include those of Francis Drake's nephew, Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa, Anthonie Knivet, William Schouten, Jacob le Maire and members of Commodore Byron's party (see Adams, 1962: 22-25,. From Adams's analysis, it becomes clear that successive travellers merely rehearsed the words already spoken by their predecessors. The outcome of this repetition-with- variation of the same set of 'facts' was the eventual constitution in discourse of the Patagonians as giants and, in the process, the elision of their alterity. What is most significant about this exposé is not so much the sensational aspect of the 'travel lie' concerned, but that it and many of the other 'travel lies' cited by Adams show that the fictional dimension of travel writing during this period was largely a function of the fact that the representations prompted by the European explorations of terra incognita were almost invariably not composed from what was 'really' encountered, but produced by the commerce between existent travel discourse and the expectation that what was represented there was in fact what would be diocovered. 3 The insight that emerges from Adams's study, then, is that the fictional aspect of travel writing often signals the presence of discursive mediation in this writing's 25 representation of colonial territory. Alternatively put, it exposes the discursive separation of subject, word and 'reality', that is, the fact that the subject is not the origin of 'truth', and that 'truth' and experience cannot escape "the order of the sign" (Derrida, 1978a: 292) . To some extent, then, what Barker says about Jacobean theatre is equally applicable to the travel writing which preceded subject-centred discourse: being a matrix of citation, imitation, and reworking, it refers ceaselessly to its own signifying practice. Accordingly, instead of providing a seemingly transparent representation of the world, travel writing represented representation to itself and thereby formed an implicit comment on the subject's construction of an apparently objective world through discourse. Given the epistemological shifts in the status of fact and fiction which characterised the Enlightenment period, it is not surprising that this aspect of travel writing increasingly became an object of commentary at this time. In this regard, Adams cites numerous responses from readers in support of his argument that "in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries . . . general observers were finding travel accounts to be something less than history and much like fiction" (1983: 86). And, just as the ambivalent response of readers to the early novel can be located in the convention of authorial disavowal through which the writer asserts the factuality of his/her narrative by insisting that it is not a 'story' but a 'history' (see Davis, 1983: 15 - 16), so too the ambivalence of readers of travel literature can be detected in the constant attacks travel writers of the time launched on the credibility of other travellers' reports in order to affirm the veracity of their own accounts. In this regard, witness the disclaimer in the following excerpt from the preface to John Bulkeley and John Cummins's A Voyage to the South Seas, published in 1743: "It has been a Thing, usual, in publishing of Voyages, to introduce Abundance of Fiction; and some Authors have been esteemed merely for being marvellous . . . we have taken to deviate from [such travellers], by having a strict Regard for Truth" (qtd in Adams, 1983: 87). So, while the relation between fact and fiction was 26 indeterminate in earlier travel writing, amongst the writers and readers of the eighteenth century one finds evidence of the development of. a firmer distinction between fact and fiction. This new perception of these two categories also explains that desire for 'accurate' representation of which Azim, Davis and Barker write. In terms of my discussion thus far, it should be clear that the effect of suppressing language's visibility was to conceal precisely that which the fictional dimension of travel writing had threatened to reveal, namely the discursive mediation of the subject's interaction with 'new world' territory. And, by means of the occlusion of this mediation, the clarification of language obviously elided its trace, that is, the intertextual and therefore meta-representational aspect of this writing. Henceforth, travel writing could serve as a vehicle for 'factual' information and, as the following comment by Nathaniel Wraxall, an author of the period cited by Charles Batten, reveals, this was considered to be a new development in this form of writing: "'the age of imposition on one side, and of credulity on the other seems now to be past.' Truth and sound knowledge' can serve as the subjects of travel literature 'where formerly they scarce ever intruded" (1978: 5). 4 By concealing the relation between 'truth' and discourse, the clarification of language generated the illusion that the subject's experience of the world is pure and unmediated. In so doing, it facilitated the inscription of a transcendental subject in travel writing. Accordingly, this mode of writing was able self-assuredly to present itself as a direct transcription of the 'reality' of the writing subject's lived experience. Significantly, the journal, a form which prioritises the language of experience, gained precedence as the dominant mode of travel writing during this period. Its association with an empirical model of knowledge that privileges vision emerges clearly in Samuel Johnson's response to James Boswell's An Account of Corsica: "There is between the history and the journal that difference which there will always be found between notions borrowed from without, and notions generated within. Your history was copied from books; your journal rose out of your own 27 experience and observation" (my emphasis, qtd in Batten, 1978: 34). A similar confidence in the ability of the journal and its transparent medium to transcribe the 'truth' of the seen and experienced world is evident in Arthur Young's enumeration of the advantages of this mode of travel writing: "The journal form hath the advantage of carrying with it a greater degree of credibility; and, of course, more weight. A traveller who thus registers his observations is detected the moment he writes of things he has not seen. If he sees little, he must register little" (my emphasis, qtd in Batten, 1978: 33). Owing to the translucent language of experience, a one-to-one correspondence between text and world is now considered possible. Both the above assertions set up an equivalence between truth, experience, perception, language and the journal form which suggests that at this time travel writing came to function as a signifier of truth discourse. In so doing, this mode of writing developed the ability to conceal beneath a facade of 'fact' and 'truth' Europe's discursive appropriation of colonial territory. It should be clear from my discussion that the occlusion in travel writing of the elision of otherness which inevitably accompanied this appropriation was itself a function of the elision of the meta-representational dimension of this mode.
1.4 The Novel and the Technique of Realism
My argument has been that the autonomy of the subject, which in Levinas's argument facilitates its reduction of all alterity to its consciousness, was intensified by the clarification which language underwent during the Enlightenment period. In postulating a one-to-one relation between word and experience, this linguistic process enabled the subject to align word against thing and thus assume a position of dominance within the field of experience. A corollary of this argument is that the elision of the opacity of language facilitated the inscription in writing of a transcendental, rationalising consciousness. It is in the context of this development of subject-centrea discourse that the 28 novel emerged. In this section of the chapter, I shall demonstrate that realism, the distinguishing feature of the early (and dominant feature of the later) novel, 5 evinces the same dynamic between language and subjectivity as travel discourse, and therefore establishes a similarly violent relation to otherness. Davis argues that the fixing of a firm distinction between fact and fiction culminated in the subdivision of the previously undifferentiated matrix of the discourse of print, and that this led to the emergence of the novel-as-genre (1983). The installation of this firm distinction may be related to one of the predictable outcomes of the Enlightenment's centring of a rational, thinking I: namely, the insidious exclusion from the historical world of all that is 'non-rational' (see Schulte- Sasse, 1988: 203, 206). This exclusion formed part of an attempt to autonomise the aesthetic during this period, which involved relegating it from the realm of the existential to that of the work of art, that is, to a sphere distinct from the historical world where its role as a shaping power in that world could be ignored. With regard to the repression of the fictional dimension of factual modes such as travel writing, however, this did not mean that the category of fiction would henceforth be confined to the extant mode of fictional writing, that is, the "anti-individualist" genre of romance (McKeon 1987: 3). Instead, the split in print-as-discourse led to the rise of the novel, a genre which, far from being 'anti-individualist', inscribed a Cartesian division between a detached subjectivity and an inert world of objects. Indeed, the distinguishing feature of this new genre was realism, a technique characterised as involving a "Cartesian shift to the point of view of the perceiving individual ego" which "make(s] possible a more sharply defined picture of the outer as well as the inner world" (Watt, 1957: 295). In its formation of a technique which inscribed and naturalised the appropriative subject-object epistemological relation, the early novel thus not only distinguished itself from romance, but also aligned itself with subject-centred modes such 29 as travel writing, as is particularly evident in the novel's use of the apparatuses of the latter. In a survey of the many close structural similarities between these two modes of writing, Adams shows that a number of the stock-in-trade devices of the early novelists, such as first-person narration, the epistolary technique, and the device of the memoir and autobiography, to mention but a few, derive from travel writing (1983: 161-271). It is, of course, these techniques of narrative perspective which enable novelists to construct a division between inner and outer world. The development of the technique of realism also led to the installation of a language of experience in the new genre. Indeed, according to Davis, realism creates the illusion of reality by decreasing "the cognitive distance between language and reality" (1983: 183). In this regard, Rosalind Coward and John Ellis argue as follows:
The whole basis of mimesis is that writing is a mere transcription of the real, carrying it over into a medium that exists only as a parasitic practice because the word is identical to, the equivalent of, the real world. Realism naturalises the arbitrary nature of the sign; its philosophy is that of an identity between signifier and signified on the level of an entire text as much as that of a single word. (1977: 47)
As with the inscription of a Cartesian structure which puts "subject and object of representation into dichotomous positions" (Azim 1993: 20), the realist attempt to obscure the text's mode of signification is clearly a strategy designed to occlude the discursive separation of subject, word and 'reality', and thereby foster the illusion that the subject's experience of the world is direct and unmediated (see Robert, 1980: 32). Realism celebrates the autonomy of the ego by masking the discursive procedure through which that ego reduces to itself all that resists its powers. The efficacy of realism as a strategy of occlusion is exemplified by the reading public's reception of Robinson Crusoe, a text which is often hailed as the first novel in English and as 30 the apotheosis of formal realism. 6 Jean-Jacques Rousseau's response to this novel in Emile, for instance, testifies to the success with which its realist strategies disguise its mode of signification: 7
Since we must necessarily have books, there exists one which, to my way of thinking, furnishes the happiest treatise on natural education. This book shall be the first which my Emile will read; for a long time it will of itself constitute his whole library, and always hold a distinguished place in it. It shall be the text on which all our conversations on the natural sciences will serve merely as a commentary. During our progress it will serve as a test for the state of our judgement; and, as long as our taste is not corrupted, the reading of it will always please us. What, then, is this wonderful book? Is it Aristotle? Is it Pliny? Is it Buffon? No; it is Robinson Crusoe. [Robinson Crusoe alone on his island] is not the condition of man as a social being, and probably is not to be that of Emile; but it is with reference to this state that we are to appreciate all the others. The surest means of rising above prejudices, and of ordering our judgments in accordance with the true relation of things, is to put ourselves in the place of an isolated man, and to judge of everything as this man must judge of it, having regard to its proper utility. (1908: 162-163)
Rousseau's admiration of Robinson Crusoe is all the more significant when it is placed in the context of his deep suspicion of writing, which he variously describes as "destruction of speech and as disease of speech" and relegates to the status of a "supplement to speech", "a mediated representation of thought" (qtd in Derrida, 1976: 142-144). In Rousseau's perception, the use of writing is only justifiable when, as Derrida puts it, "Nature as self-proximity, comes to be forbidden or interrupted, when speech fails to protect presence" (1976: 144). Since writing disperses the immediacy of the subject's experience of the world of objects exterior to it, it constitutes a fall from the presence of speech. This privileging of speech over writing is part of a broad metaphysical strategy observable in western thought, a strategy which, according to Derrida: 31 . . . consists of excluding non-presence by determining the supplement as simple exteriority, pure addition or pure absence. The work of exclusion operates within the "structure of supplementarity. The paradox is that one annuls addition by considering it a pure addition. What is added is nothing because it is added to a full presence to which it is exterior. Speech comes to be added to intuitive presence (of the entity, of essence, of the eidos, of ouisa, and so forth); writing comes to be added to a living self-present speech; masturbation comes to be added to so-called normal sexual experience; culture to nature, evil to innocence, history to origin, and so forth. (1976: 167)
Paradoxically, in the pages leading up to his endorsement of Robinson Crusoe, Rousseau's adherence to the "metaphysics of presence" (Derrida, 1976) manifests itself on a number of occasions in his admonitions against mistaking the symbol for the object:
Let us transform our sensations into ideas, but let us not jump abruptly from sensible objects to intellectual objects; for it is through the first that we are to reach the second. In the first movements of the mind, let the senses always be its guides; let there be no book but the world, and no other instruction than facts (1908: 137); Things! Things! I shall never repeat often enough that we give too much power to words (1908: 157); I hate books; they merely teach us to talk of what we do not know. (1908: 161-162)
Despite this repeatedly stated aversion to the written word, Rousseau ratifies Robinson Crusoe as a text capable of realising his parable of the desert island and thus of showing the 'true relation of things'. This contradiction attests to the ability of realism as a narrative technique to obscure the text's mode of signification, thus apparently transcending the discursive separation of subject, word and 'reality' and providing a "transparency of perception of an objective universe" (Loxley, 1990: 145). Through its economy of language and its presentation as a direct transcription of actions, this novel produces a phonocentric sense of immediate presence, of originary perception 32 -- as Loxley cogently states, it "offered to the child and restored for the adult . . . the authority of experience" (1990: 8).
1.4.1 The Occlusions of Realism: The Autonomous Subject in Colonial Space
In the context of representations of the colonial encounter, the novel's installation of strategies that privilege experience by concealing the relation between discourse and knowledge not only occludes but repeats the violation of otherness which is an integral part of colonial history. This point can be illustrated by means of a symptomatic reading of Robinson Crusoe, a reading which seeks to show how the text inadvertently undermines the illusion which it wishes to propagate by means of realism, namely that the human subject is autonomous and transcendent. In this subsection of the chapter, I shall show that the metamorphoses which setting and character undergo in the course of Defoe's novel betray realism's attempt to suppress the transformative impact of discourse on entities and experience. I shall also discuss the clear corollary of these metamorphoses, that is, that human subject and physical space are discursively separated. In this regard, my argument will be that these transformations point to a contradiction in the realist representation of this relationship -- if the subject were transcendental, its identity would be stable and the terrain which it encounters would not be altered by its interaction with it. As my discussion proceeds, a further symptom of Robinson Crusoe's unconscious exposure of the interrelatedness of subject and space will become evident -- that an examination of its setting leads inevitably to an analysis of the protagonist's sense of self. Thus far in this chapter, I have focused on the historical, and by implication the cultural, specificity of conceptions of subjectivity. However, my argument that the novel supplements the history of European imperialism by occluding the subject's situatedness in language and discourse - in its representations of the colonial encounter runs the risk of suggesting a fixed and 33 reductive opposition between a European subject and a colonial other. From the outset, then, I wish to emphasise that colonialism is but one, albeit very important and particularly pernicious, manifestation of the refusal to recognise alterity that is concomitant on the construction of an autonomous subjectivity. At the same time, it should also be noted that it is through discourse that otherness is annulled and that the seemingly autonomous subject is discursively separated from all entities, not simply the colonial other. In making this obvious point, I wish to avoid the facile identification of the other with the colonial subject that is sometimes assumed in post- colonial studies. The self-subversive contradiction between Robinson Crusoe's inscription, by way of realism, of a Cartesian division between inner self and outer world and its unconscious documentation of the transformations which Robinson Crusoe and the island undergo from castaway to colonist and from alien environment to domesticated settlement, respectively, emerges upon a comparison of the following two passages, the first of which recalls Crusoe's initial reaction to the island:
Before, as I walk'd about, either on my hunting, or for viewing the country, the anguish of my soul at my condition, would break out upon me on a sudden, and my very heart would die within me, to think of the woods, the mountains, the desarts I was in; and how I was a prisoner lock'd up with the eternal bars and bolts of the ocean, in an uninhabited wilderness, without redemption. (my emphasis, 1975: 83 - 84)
The second evokes his later response:
I descended a little on the side of that delicious vale, surveying it with a secret kind of pleasure . . . to think that this was all my own, that I was king and lord of all this country indefeasibly, and had a right of possession; and if I could convey it, I might have it in inheritance, as compleatly as any lord of a manor in England. (my emphasis, 1975: 74)
The difference between these two passages is marked. The first 34 does not so much represent as allude, in highly metaphorical language, to open, uncontained space. Significantly, the subject here lacks control of this world, which threatens to abase and even obliterate him. 8 By contrast, the space described in the second passage has been contained, and is represented in a transparent language of experience. Moreover, it serves to affirm rather than diminish the perceiving subject's sense of self. Clearly, neither setting nor character is static in this novel: just as the island undergoes a transformation from wilderness to home, so too Crusoe is transformed from castaway to colonist. In its representation of the subject's relation to space, the second of these passages furnishes the reason for these metamorphoses by unconsciously capturing the process through which colonial space is mediated by European discourse. Although making use of the "monarch-of-all-I-survey" trope which, in setting up a division between perceiving subject and a world of objects, asserts the primacy of experience, 9 this excerpt betrays the fact that 'truth' is not acquired through the transparency of perception in the present, but through knowledge already assimilated elsewhere by the subject prior to its encounter with the observed entity. In other words, Defoe's realist representat:i.on of the subject's interaction with colonial space inadvertently shows that the former's knowledge of the latter is not determined by the physical terrain: Crusoe sees not a neutral 'place' void of all presuppositions, but a 'property'. It is noteworthy here that Davis has cogently demonstrated that property is a highly specific construction of space which is related to the development in Europe during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries of a transcendental and autonomous subject that evinced a strong desire to dominate space (1987: 52-65). Since the novel-as-genre is also a product of this conception of subjectivity, it is not surprising that Robinson Crusoe should inscribe its appropriative relation to space." ) Even the conception of kingship in Robinson Crusoe is, as Martin Green contends, singularly "mercantile" and "(my] property,' taken to an extreme, becomes 'my kingdom' . " (1979: 76) - .- as is apparent in 35 the second of the two passages quoted above. Since the objective essence which the observer assigns the observed in this passage is that of property, the relationship which therefore emerges between Crusoe and the island is one of ownership. So, despite the representational illusion that he is one with the presence of the world which he confronts in the present through perception, it is clear that what this "displaced percipient" (Said, 1985: 22) is described as seeing is determined by a network of pre-existing ideas and concepts which derive from, to use Immanuel Wallerstein's term, "the modern world system", that is, the system that emerged from changes in the political, economic, religious and philosophical fabric of Europe in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and which was characterised by indirect domination, capitalism, protestantism, and rationalism (1974-1989). The fact that the novel subliminally discloses Crusoe's construction of the island as property, thereby suggesting that the subject is separated from that which it perceives by discourse, thus undermines the impression of immediacy conveyed by the technique of realism. Inadvertently, then, the novel reveals that, since it is immersed in discursive structures, the subject's experience of the world is mediated. Accordingly, the transformation which the island undergoes in the course of the novel may be read as a symptom of the subject's implication in culture. It indicates, that is, that the subject produces knowledge by adequating exteriority with the already-known and is therefore seemingly incapable of being surprised by otherness. In short, owing to its situatedness in culture, the subject is the 'crucible' through which the other is 'transmuted' into the same. In depicting Robinson Crusoe in terms of a transcendental subjectivity, the technique of realism thus endeavours to conceal the fact that the subject's interaction with colonial space is mediated by discourse. By extension, it seeks to obscure the containment of the openness and alterity of such space by European discourse." Indeed, realism tends to naturalise this process of domesticatiOn, as emerges in the novel's depiction of the way in which Crusoe takes possession of the island, creates a 36 property, and thereby transforms the initially wild territory into a home which he likens to England. 12 This operation, which takes place on a perceptual, discursive level, is so inconspicuous that Pat Rogers uses it as evidence to support his argument that Crusoe is not an imperialist but an expression of "homo domesticus" and his story simply that "of a Caribbean nabob who makes a little England in remote surroundings" (1974: 390). Implicit in Rogers's argument is the assumption that the seemingly gentle process of settlement which this novel unconsciously depicts is an innocent activity and that it discounts the argument that Crusoe is an imperialist. However, as Loxley argues, the "acting out of the normal conditions of existence in a radically alien atmosphere, the imposition of an orderly and absolute Europeanness" (1990: 90) is crucial to the elaboration of discursive colonialist enterprises. To domesticate is to appropriate that which is other within a totalising system of knowledge. In the context of colonialism, the discursive alchemy through which the seemingly autonomous subject 'transmutes' otherness to the same mimics, at a conceptual level, the actual history of European imperialism. This collaboration is revealed by the subsequent course of events in this novelistic account of the capture of colonial space: the scene of discursive imperialism in which Robinson Crusoe appropriates the island is followed in time by the colonial fantasy in which he plays the part of governor in an elaborate masquerade which he stages on the island in order to , dupe the mutineers. In its turn this fantasy is realised when a community is formed from those mutineers who are left behind on the island and the party of Spaniards. Once 'known', therefore, the island becomes habitable and can be recreated in Europe's image. Thus, by the end of the novel, Robinson Crusoe is able to refer to "my new collony in the island" (1975: 221). This clear- cut progression in the novel from the level of discursive imperialism to the material realities of imperialism suggests that the one leads to the other, that conceptual settlement is a first step in a. more literal process of colonisation. 37 In terms of the politics of representation, however, Defoe's novel's depiction of the overt colonisation of the island is of less consequen6e than is its concealment of its conceptual settlement. Indeed, it is primarily through its negation of the discursive separation of subject, word and 'reality' in its portrayal of Crusoe's relation to the island that this novel repeats the violent reduction of alterity which characterised colonial history. For instance, this negation obscures the fact that, far from representing the 'thing itself' in its depiction of colonial space, the novel imitates descriptions of a space which has already, in the moment of being perceived, and thus prior to being described, been conceptually settled and thus displaced. Instead of enabling the depiction of the 'real', then, the technique of realism helps to displace it by overcoding it with the subjective definitions of western culture. In the process, to use Davis's notion of the "known unknown", 13 this representational strategy renders unknown that which it purports to make known. It therefore follows that the island in Robinson Crusoe is a displacement and denial of the alterity of colonial space. After all, as the contrasting descriptions in the two passages quoted earlier indicate, the island is a representation not of open but of contained space. Being the product of a representational strategy that is premised on the reduction of otherness, it may be construed as a negotiation of the epistemological problem constituted by the difference of colonial territory for Europe. Thus far, my discussion of the representation of the relation between subject and space in Robinson Crusoe has focused principally on the way in which the realist illusion of a transcendental subject occludes the discursive capture of colonial space. It needs to be emphasised, though, that this illusion not only hides the construction of space but also the process of subjection. To be more precise, it hides the fact that it is through constituting a world of objects that the subject asserts its subjectivity. However, this interdependence of subject and space is inadvertently revealed in the novel by the fact that Crusoe's identity expands in direct proportion to 38 the transformation of the island by European discourse. As I have indicated, the first of the two passages quoted above, which deal with Crusbe's relationship with the island, shows him to be a castaway at the mercy of natural forces. It also hints at the actual source of his terror in the Cartesian division which it constructs between an inner and an outer world. The "tremulous" self which occupies the inner world is obviously detached and alienated from that which it seeks to apprehend in the outer world (see Barker, 1984: 10). Indeed, it is the alterity of this world, its sublime difference, which leads to the self's terrible isolation." Clearly, seeing cannot here be equated with knowing. Moreover, the opacity of this passage's language -- apparent, for example, in the highly metaphorical descriptions of the island -- indicates that word cannot be aligned with thing in this alterior field of experience. What Crusoe sees therefore taxes his linguistic control over the 'wilderness'. And since he is unable to relate word to thing, he is unable to position himself in opposition to an object and thereby construct subjectivity. At this point in the novel, this character's castaway status therefore signifies a collapse of the mind/object/word formula which grounds the Enlightenment notion of the autonomy of the human subject. By contrast, in the second passage, Crusoe occupies a controlling role in his relationship with nature, and is in fact a colonist and thus an actant, a figure of achievement. The decentred subject of the first passage has adopted a position of dominance from which to control items within the field of experience, a position from which word can be matched with thing. It is for this reason that the language used at this point in the novel is a transparent language of experience which testifies to the percipient's visual control over a world of objects: what is seen has apparently always been there, and the text's verbal design seemingly merely copies the island's autochthonous organisation. The differences between these two passages indicates that the central section of the novel traces Crusoe's compoiition of self. Eventually, as the second passage suggests, Crusoe arrives 39 at the assurance of an apodictic subjectivity that can fix knowledge. Peter Hulme, for example, argues that "the island episode should' be read as . . . a parable of the anxiety surrounding the kind of 'composition of the self' performed so emblematically by Descartes" (1986: 196). 15 By implication, as with Descartes in his Discourse on Method (1960: 60-62), Crusoe negotiates selfhood relationally. The linguistic contrast between the passages insinuates the importance of language in facilitating this relational procedure: it indicates that it is language and discourse which enable the subject to intend that which it sees. By extension, then, the difference of the island is elided by language. In articulating a world of objects, language's differential structure allows the subject to elide the alterity of the island and thereby assume an oppositional position in relation to it, a position from which it is able to adequate thing with word and thereby reduce it to a thought and become "lord[] and master[] of nature" (see Descartes, 1960: 84). Through reducing radical difference, language's system of differences renders the subject indifferent to the other. Furthermore, the passages imply that, in constituting this world of objects, language encodes the island according to the values and assumptions of the subject's culture. Indeed, it is through language that the 'tremulous' self reaches out and apprehends the outer world. The transformation which the terrain undergoes in the process -- its dreadful alterity being elided and displaced by the construction of a comfortable, self- affirming familiarity -- serves as an index to the appropriative violence inherent in this relational procedure of self- composition. I indicated earlier in this section that the fact that my discussion of the island modulates into an examination of Crusoe's identity is a function of the close connection which exists between subject and space. It is by obscuring this connection in its installation of a transcendental subject that realism occludes the discursive organisation of space -- the fact that, far from being simply a representation of a geographical entity, the island is a representation of a representation of a 40 discursive construct, one which, having been mapped out according to European culture, serves the function of affirming the subject's culturally-conferred sense of self. However, as I have argued, the contrast between the two passages in Defoe's rendering of the colonial encounter undermines the realist illusion of the subject's transcendental status by positing a strong correlation between the growth of the subject's identity and the assimilation of colonial space by western discursive orders. Indeed, one may go so far as to say that Robinson Crusoe's successful composition of self signifies the victory of European order and perceptions on the island. As the island becomes 'known' through having its alterity displaced, the anxieties and doubts which initially assail Crusoe are dispelled until, .finally, what he sees (that is, not things-in-themselves, but things which have been invested with a set of cultural values) narcissistically affirms rather than challenges his sense of self. Unconsciously, therefore, this novel indicates that, upon being settled linguistically and conceptually, colonial space comes to serve a specular function. In other words, as Christopher Miller cogently states, "The colonial gesture of reaching out to the most unknown part of the world and bringing it back as language . . . ultimately brings Europe face to face with nothing but itself" (1985: 5). In constructing colonial space, then, Europe constructs itself.
1.4.2 The Occlusions of Realism: The Autonomous Subject and the Indigene
My argument thus far has been that, in attempting to conceal the way in which its depiction of the island is a representation of representations of colonial space which has already; in the moment of being perceived, and thus prior to being described, been conceptually settled, the technique of realism deployed in Robinson Crusoe supplements imperial history. Since the colonial matter which Defoe's text claims to represent has already been mediated by discourse before being described in - those accounts which then form the discursive context within which such realist 41 novels are produced, realism displaces rather than represents the 'real'. In other words, that . which it professes to 'know' as 'real' is a construct, and the 'real', having been subsumed in and displaced by discourse, remains unknown and, indeed, becomes increasingly unknowable as it recedes in an infinite regression. The novel's repetition of the violation of alterity that is implicit in this process of displacement is evident not only in its representation of Crusoe's encounter with the island but also in its portrayal of his encounter with Friday. For instance, mediated by the pre-existent and identifiable colonialist discourse of the noble savage, the following depiction of Friday describes a discursive construct and, in so doing, displaces that to which the representation purportedly refers. Alternatively put, that which is described in this passage derives from earlier descriptions of a colonial subject which in the moment of being beheld was already constructed by discourse:
He was a comely fellow, perfectly well made; with straight strong limbs, not too large; tall and well shap'd, and, as I reckon, about twenty six years of age. He had a very good countenance, not a fierce and surly aspect; but seem'd to have something very manly in his face, and yet he had all the sweetness and softness of an European in his countenance too, especially when he smil'd. His hair was long and black, not curl'd like wool; his forehead very high and large, and a great vivacity and sparkling sharpness in his eyes. The colour of his skin was not quite black, but very tawny, as the Brasilians, and Virginians, and other natives of America are; but of a bright kind of dun olive colour, that had in it something very agreeable, tho' not very easy too describe. His face was round and plump; his nose small, not flat like the negroes, a very good mouth, thin lips, and his fine teeth well set, and white as ivory. (1975: 150)
The almost self-conscious evocation of the noble savage in this description places the novel in the context of reports from the 'New World'. However, the discursive trope of the noble savage here does not serve as a critique of European civilisation, but simply as a means of repeating the elision through domestication of the otherness of the indigene. 16 What is 'agreeable' about Friday is his sameness as opposed to othernesS. 42 This reduction of alterity is further apparent in the novel's representation of the initial encounter between European self and indigene:
I was dreadfully frightened . . . when I perceived him to run my way, and especially when, as I thought, I saw him pursued by the whole body [of savages] . . It came now very warmly upon my thoughts, and indeed irresistibly, that now was my time to get me a servant, and perhaps a companion or assistant; and that I was call'd plainly by Providence to save this poor creature's life . . . I slowly advanc'd towards the two that follow'd; then rushing at once upon the foremost, I knock'd him down with the stock of my piece . . . I advanc'd a-pace towards [the other]; but as I came nearer, I perceiv'd presently he had a bow and arrow, and was fitting it to shoot at me; so I was then necessitated to shoot at him first, which I did, and kill'd him at the first shoot . . . . I beckon'd [the fleeing savage] to come to me, and gave him all the signs of encouragement that I could think of, and he came nearer and nearer, kneeling down every ten or twelve steps in token of acknowledgement for my saving his life. . . at length he came close to me, and then he kneel'd down again, kiss'd the ground, and laid his head upon the ground, and taking me by the foot, set my foot upon his head; this it seems was in token of swearing to be my slave for ever. (my emphasis, 1975: 147 - 148)
In accelerated form, one finds in this excerpt the same movement from the observing Cartesian subject's initial fear, even sublime dread, of difference to its eventual containment of alterity that is evident in the representations of Crusoe's relationship with the island discussed earlier. Here, though, the transition is precipitated by Crusoe's exhibition of technological superiority. The outcome of this exhibition is a demonstration of appreciation from the 'savage' that almost deifies the subject and, in the process, affirms its cultural superiority." Indeed, such gratitude is precisely what the subject wishes for, as it allays the horror of self-dissolution or dis-composure of self that produced by this contact with cultural difference. In fulfilling this wish, the 'savage's' gratitude enables the subject to fix a definition of otherness as savagery which self-affirmingly 43 confirms its knowledge of civilised superiority. Through the western discourse of savagery-- which, in its various permutations from the trope of the noble savage to the Herodotean construction of barbarousness, provided a "popular vocabulary" for domesticating difference" (see Hulme, 1986: 21) -- the subject is thus able to engage in the self-consolidating cognitive process of reaching out and appropriating the other. As in the case of the subject's encounter with colonial space, then, this representation of its encounter with the indigene inadvertently betrays the fact that it is mediated by a pre-existing and recognisable discourse. In so doing, it exposes the way in which the otherness of the indigene is contained by means of this discourse. Indeed, this process through which dreadful alterity is displaced by the construction of a comfortable, self-affirming familiarity is further evident immediately after the initial encounter in Crusoe's reference to "my savage" (1975: 148) and in his naming him "Friday" (1975: 150). Ultimately, then, as was the case with the island, Crusoe domesticates 'Friday'. Thus, just as conceptual settlement leads to the island's literal colonisation, so too the discursive containment of the indigene facilitates his physical enslavement. Through a symptomatic reading of the way in which Robinson Crusoe unconsciously undermines the illusion of a transcendental subjectivity which it attempts to inscribe in its representation of the subject's interaction with both space and the indigene, I have sought to emphasise the role of realism in attempting to conceal the discursive mediation of the colonial encounter. As a result of this concealment, I have argued, the novel supplements colonial history. It effaces the existence of any material which would dislocate the telos of this narrative of European success in colonial space. From this argument, it should be clear that the representational protocols in Robinson Crusoe are cognitive in nature: in reducing the alterity of the colonial world and then disguising this procedure, they render terra incognita 'known' and thereby eliminate the epistemological risk of surprise. And, since to 'know' something is to control it, the effect of the novel's displacement of deviant :new world' matter 44 is to manage such epistemological problems as arose during Europe's confrontation with the otherness of the 'new world' and thereby to "provide a sense of mastery over experience" (Zelnick, 1982: 81) or, to be more specific, a sense of European mastery over colonial experience. Once again, the kind of knowledge at issue here is an anamnetic form according to which that which is different is comprehended within totalising schemas an incorporative practice which mimics, on a conceptual level, the absorption of colonial territory by Europe.
1.4.3 The Occlusions of Realism: The Reading Subject and the Novel
The role of realism in negotiating the epistemological problem constituted by colonial territory for Europe is not only apparent in Robinson Crusoe's representation of the subject's encounter with colonial territory and the indigene, but also in the reader's relation to the text. In this regard, the promise of a surprising alterity in the full title of this novel is significant: The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe of York, Mariner. Apart from promising an alterity which it -- as a realist narrative strategy -- actually helps to elide, this title installs the reader as the point of the text's intelligibility. The title inscribes him/her in a transcendental subject position from which the text may be observed and its 'strangeness' and 'surprises' comprehended. Defoe's novel thus conforms to Coward and Ellis's description of the way in which realist narratives in general place the reader in a position of mastery:
The whole process [of narration] is directed towards the place of a reader: in order that it should be intelligible, the reader has to adopt a certain position with regard to the text. This position is that of homogeneity, of truth. . . . the subject isI then in a position of observation, understanding, synthesising. (1977: 50)
In Robinson Crusoe, though, the apparent transcendence of the 45 reader's position is belied by the fact that, as I have indicated, the alterity of colonial space has already been denied by the novel's representational manoeuvres. Besides, at the same time that it centres the reading subject as the locus of its intelligibility, the novel's title unconsciously decentres this subject, since the words 'strange' and 'surprising' imply a particular cultural perspective from which the reader views the text -- one that s/he shares with the author and narrator and from which s/he is able to contain otherness. From this perspective, then, surprise is impossible. The novel's presentation as a travel report is yet another example of the way in which the strategy of realism betrays the reader's implication in culture even as it attempts to promote the illusion of transcendence. In fact, this presentational device contradicts the promise of alterity contained in the novel's title in that it suggests that the text has been written for the "domestic audience of empire" from the perspective of an English traveller who has returned and been safely reintegrated into English society (see Pratt 1992: 63). Accordingly, the work's realism of presentation serves to reassure the reader that the epistemological problem constituted by colonial space for Europe has been successfully resolved. Not a transcendental reading subject, then, but 'home', that is, the cultural context to which Robinson Crusoe returns and within which the putative report is read, forms the site of ultimate meaning into which the island as site of otherness is finally assimilated. 18 One of the implications here, namely that Crusoe is familiar with both 'home' and alien land, points to another ideologically significant aspect of the novel's 'realistic' presentation as a travel report, namely its division into the following three stages: the setting forth of the hero, the exploits of the hero as 'displaced percipient' in an unknown land and, finally, the return of the conquering hero. This tripartite structure provides the formal underpinning for Defoe's use of the return- of-the-hero-as-master-of-two-worlds topos, a common element in the journey structure of both romance and travel writing (see Adams 1983: 150). According to Adams, this topos involves the 46 traveller-hero's return home as "the conqueror of great forces . . . master of the world he started from as well as all those worlds he encountered during his . . . years of wandering" (1983: 160). 19 In Robinson Crusoe, the effect of this topos is to dissolve the distinction between the two realms in which its European traveller-hero participates, that is, English society and the alien island. By showing that the subject is equally 'at home' in both, it domesticates the latter. The implication here, then, is that the novel serves ultimately to conflate terra incognita with the known terrain of England. Its realism of presentation assists in the capture of space. 2° Eventually, then, the presentation of the novel in line with the standard apparatuses of travel writing is at odds with the prospect of alterity suggested by its title. Since it purports to be told from the point of view of the returned traveller, its end -- fraught as it is with suggestions of reintegration into English society -- is implicit in its beginning. Consequently, any possibility of 'surprise' and 'strangeness' which the reader may encounter is always ultimately recuperable. In fact, as I have indicated, the novel's presentational strategies constantly reassure the reader that s/he will not be delivered to a world of utter 'strangeness' since, rather than being 'surprised' by a radical discontinuity between the familiarity of home and the alterity of the alien, strategies such as the return-of-the-hero- as-master-of-two-worlds topos ensure that the reader will simply be confronted with a replica of the familiar. Instead of presenting the reader with an epistemological problem that challenges his/her culturally-conferred identity, then, the novel simply confirms that identity. In Robinson Crusoe, a parallel thus exists between the eponymous hero's relationship with the domesticated island and the European reader's relationship with the text: the latter is encoded according to the same structure of knowledge as the former and, indeed, mimics it. This parallel extends to the I object of observation: like the discursively constructed island, the literary object serves a specular function, reflecting back at the perceiving subject its culture's sense-making mechanisms. 47 1.5 Contexts: Postmodernism and Post-Colonialism
I have argued that the technique of realism installed by the novel-as-genre upon its emergence supplements history in concealing the appropriative same-other relation. As I indicated in the introduction to this thesis, the same refers to both the res cogitans and its cogitata, the intentional acts of consciousness and the intentional objects which correspond to and confer meaning on these constitutive acts. It therefore follows that the apparently all-encompassing and epistemologically- innocent Cartesian division between inner self and outer world inscribed by means of realism confines the novel to the order of the same and denies the very existence of the other. By implication, the realist novel can only present the other as a thought or intention of the thinking I. In the context of imperialism, this genre's concealment of the violent same-other relation means that it inevitably repeats the elision in history of the alterity of colonial matter. Accordingly, it supplements colonial history: through its elisions, it assists in the negotiation of the epistemological problem constituted by the otherness of colonial territory for Europe. An obvious criticism of my argument is that it is based largely on the reading of a text which is sometimes seen to be not truly representative of the early English novel as a whole. Defoe's "parenthood", as Knox-Shaw points out, "is more obvious in the case of the sub-genre (of the adventure novel)" than it is in the case of the dominant genre of the domestic or courtship novel:
For while Robinson Crusoe centres in the lone hero and so hardly touches on those 'social and relative duties' which were to provide the stuff of the mainstream novel from Richardson onwards, there is scarcely a story dealing with the exploits of either adventurers or castaways which does not bear the mark of its influence. (1983: 29; cf. also Azim, 1993: 34)
A further distinction drawn between the adventure and domestic novel, one which suggests that one should not generalise about 48 the novel-as-genre on the grounds of a reading of Robinson Crusoe alone, is Green's argument that, while the domestic novel offered "silent resistance" to "the expansive thrusts of the modern system", the adventure novel "actively propagated such expansionism" (1979: 57). Such facile distinctions between dominant genre and sub- genre, however, are based solely on setting and content, and thus overlook the fact that both the so-called dominant and the sub- genre developed formal technologies which inscribed an appropriative mode of knowledge based on a radical Cartesian separation which sets autonomous subject over passive object. Whether they are used in an adventure or domestic novel, those devices of narrative perspective which, as I have indicated, the early novelists derived from travel writing, all prioritise a language of experience, and thus imply the same form of epistemological consciousness. Thus, for example, Davis maintains that Richardson's real innovation "was what he called 'spontaneous writing', that is, letters [written] by parties themselves at the very time in which the events happened" (1983: 182). This technique of writing "to the moment" (Richardson, s.a.: v) enabled Richardson "to recapture recent time past and to forcibly decrease the interval between event and transcription" and thereby "approach asymtotically the immediacy of the originating moment" (Davis, 1983: 183). As with Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, then, the effect of Richardson's use of the technique of realism in novels such as Pamela and Clarissa is to decrease "the cognitive space between language and reality" (Davis, 1983: 183). The relation of language to experience is therefore virtually identical in impulse in the major works of these two novelists, a similarity which suggests that, in terms of the form of knowledge activated by the technique of realism, the domestic novel does not differ greatly from the adventure novel. The similar emphasis here on technologies which inscribe a division between inner world and outer world and a language of experience indicates that the domestic novel shares the adventure novel's conception of subjectivity. Indeed, as Gayatri Spivak points out, "There is an affinity between the imperialist subject 49 and the subject of humanism" (1988: 202). Her point in this regard may be related to that of mine earlier in this chapter, namely that colonialism is but one manifestation of a form of violence which derives from that refusal to recognise otherness concomitant on the construction of an autonomous subjectivity. It may thus be argued that, in its installation of this model of subjectivity, the domestic novel served the important ideological function of naturalising it and thereby silently supplemented, rather than 'silently resisted', 'the expansive thrusts of the modern system'. If, as I have argued, the novel's representational protocols and medium routinely foreclose on alterity and there is no distinction in this regard between the adventure novel and the domestic novel, the question which remains is whether this genre can establish an ethical relation with otherness without betraying it. Differently put, in relation to what I have argued is the novel-as-genre's complicity with imperialism, is it possible to decolonise the novel? I shall now briefly consider some of the ways in which postmodernist and post-colonial fiction have addressed this aesthetic and ethical issue and, in so doing, I shall contextualise Coetzee's own bid to decolonise the novel. It needs to be emphasised, though, that I shall only be dealing with some of the many critical constructions of these modes of writing. I am also aware that these constructions by no means contain the diversity of texts which may be termed 'post- colonial' or 'postmodernist'. Accordingly, the conclusions which I draw in my following discussion are of necessity provisional. Postmodernist and post-colonial fiction-writing both evince an awareness of western tradition's universalising drive, its reduction of the other to the order of the same. Hence the emphasis in both these modes on states of what Linda Hutcheon calls "ex-centricity", on that which has been excluded by the discourses of the same (1989: 151, 153). As Hutcheon puts it, both "contest the imperialist devaluing of the 'other' and the I 'different' (1989: 161) by granting "value to . . . the margin or the Other" (1989: 153). In terms of my argument on novelistic respect for the other, this paradoxical emphasis on alterity, in 50 a form and medium which denies alterity, is deeply significant. What I wish to assess is the way in which these modes of writing negotiate or attempt to negotiate the seeming inevitability with which fiction forecloses on alterity in their endeavour to grant 'value' to the other. Differently put, one may ask, with Jolly, "how do we construct the space between responsibility and violence in dissident rhetoric . . . ? (1996: xv); "What is the precise relationship . . . between the violence of domination as it is portrayed by the narrative, and the violence of domination that . . . the narrative itself exemplifies in its acts of appropriation?" (1996: 40); "What kinds of narratives avoid this pitfall . . . ?" (1996: 12). In Hutcheon's construction, the postmodernist novel's response to its complicity in the universalising drive of western epistemological consciousness is to self-reflexively recognise the inevitability of this complicity and, by extension, the impossibility of aesthetic autonomy. Nevertheless, while recognising its ineluctable embeddedness in culture, the postmodernist text entertains the possibility of disrupting it. For Hutcheon, postmodernist fiction parodically incorporates and challenges the western episteme. Accordingly, such fiction "offers a new model for mapping the borderland between art and the world, a model that works from a position within both and yet not totally within either, a model that is profoundly implicated in, yet still capable of criticizing, that which it seeks to describe" (1988: 23). In other words, the criticism of which such texts are capable is grounded not only in a recognition but also an acceptance of that crisis in the "legitimation of knowledge" which Jean-Frangois Lyotard regards as a feature of the "postmodern condition" (1984: 37-41). This acknowledgment that "knowledge of the world cannot be divorced from being in the world" (Waugh, 1992: 8), which modulates into an acceptance of the "worldliness" of the literary text (Said, 1983: 35), is of course presupposed by the dominance in postmodernist fiction of parody as a strategy of disruption. According to Hutcheon, postmodernist fiction's paradoxical form of resistance-within-implication to a large extent 51 undermines the possibility of human agency (cf. Lyotard, 1984: 15). At best, the self is only able to exercise rhetorical control over the 'texts' in which it is not simply situated, but which constitute it. This, says Hutcheon, is where post- colonialism departs from postmodernism:
The current post-structuralist/postmodern challenges to the coherent, autonomous subject have to be put on hold in feminist and post-colonial discourses, for both must work first to assert and affirm a denied or alienated subjectivity: those radical postmodern challenges are in many ways the luxury of the dominant order which can afford to challenge that which it securely possesses. (1989: 151)
Helen Tiffin makes a similar point:
Post-colonial writers have from the outset been attempting to establish or rehabilitate self against either European appropriation or rejection. Because post-colonial and colonial perspectives are necessarily informed by the imperial vision with which they are always in various ways and to varying degrees, implicated, such establishing or rehabilitation of an independent identity involves the radical interrogation and fracturing of these imposed European perspectives, and their 'systematic' (in Wasserman's sense) replacement by an alternative vision, or the attack on or erosion of the very notion of system and hegemonic control itself. (1988: 172)
While understanding the post-colonial suspicion of the postmodernist decentring of the subject and consequent negation of the possibility of effective agency, I find its insistence on the establishment of an autonomous subjectivity troubling with regard to the issue of respect for the other. I have argued the Levinasian point that it is precisely the pursuit of a free, independent subjectivity which leads to the reduction of otherness. If structured in terms of freedom, the subject inevitably depends on the elision of all that is other for autb- affirmation. Its commerce with the world proceeds dialectically through an engrossment of that which is different. In the process, as Levinas points out with reference to the Cartesian 52 cogito, the subject reduces the other to a thought, an ancillary moment of a self-affirming world of its own making. The problem attendant on the post-colonial insistence on an autonomous subjectivity, then, is that such a subject is capable only of those contestatory relations which are unavoidably installed by its endless and ultimately futile struggle for recognition. Its inscription in post-colonial writing would therefore simply and inevitably reassert the 'imperial vision' in some form or another. Instead of an 'alternative vision' or 'erosion' of the 'notion of system and hegemonic control', this subject's structural dependence on the totalising violation of otherness for its self-sufficiency suggests that it would merely replicate the epistemological consciousness of the west. Grounded in a refusal to respect the other, such a structure of subjectivity cannot but conserve the violent relation of same to other. My contention is that it is unlikely that fiction which subscribes to a political agenda that emphasises an autonomous subjectivity is able to divest itself of its complicity in the western episteme -- this despite its self-reflexive admission of contamination by the 'imperial vision' and efforts to replace it with an 'alternative vision'. Indeed, much post-colonial fiction betrays its entrapment in and replication of the structures of the same in its inscription of a rigid opposition between centre and margin. This is particularly evident in the topoi of rewriting the canonical texts of the metropole and recuperating elided histories. Since the stress in both these strategies falls on marginality, which Hutcheon comes dangerously close to equating with otherness (1989: 153), their popularity in post- colonial writing, together with the amount of critical attention which they have received (see Slemon, 1989; Brydon and Tiffin, 1993; Newman, 1995), suggests an attempt to redefine the genre's relation to otherness. However, I shall argue that the ostensibly 'alternative vision' produced by these strategies is usually a foreclosure on rather than recognition of alterity, as it is always contained in and therefore presupposed by the history of the centre (cf. Dovey, 1988: 336). Instead of difference, then, one encounters more of the same in such 53 fiction. Stephen Slemon argues that the practice of "reiterative quotation" in terms of which the "'master texts' of Europe", such as The Tempest and Robinson Crusoe, are rewritten, is able both to "expose" and "purge" them of "their residual colonialist politics" and thereby "refigure their narratives to a new ideological vector" (Slemon, 1989: 8). In positioning itself in a parodic and dialectical relation to its colonialist pretexts, this post-colonial reiterative practice challenges the interpellative function of colonialist discourse, that is, its power to make the "imperial culture appear referentially seamless and the colonial culture appear radically fractured" (Slemon, 1989: 7-8). However, these claims do not take cognisance of the fact that, as Hutcheon points out, parody is a trope which installs that which it attempts to subvert. At best, then, its relation to the object of its critique is highly ambiguous. In terms of this ambiguity, it is identical to the relation between criticism and the classic as described by Coetzee:
One might even venture . . . to say that the function of criticism is defined by the classic: criticism is that which is duty-bound to interrogate the classic. Thus the fear that the classic will not survive the decentering acts of criticism may be turned on its head: rather than being the foe of the classic, criticism, and indeed criticism of the most sceptical kind, may be what the classic uses to define itself and ensure its survival. Criticism may in that sense be one of the instruments of the cunning of history. (1993: 20)
In the context of post-colonial literary production, the paradoxical nature of parody gains a dimension that is absent in metropolitan modes of writing: namely, an entrapping relation of dependence between imperial centre and margin. In other words, instead of constructing a dialectical relation, parodic strategies place the text from the margin in a static relation of dependence with the cultural productions of the centre (see Mukherjee, 1990: 6; see also Newman, 1995: 2-6). By implication, then, there can be nothing new about 'the new ideological vector' 54 of a text which uses this device. In repeating the 'master texts', parody ensures their survival and, to use Coetzee's phrase apropos the relation between criticism and the classic, becomes 'one of the instruments of the cunning of history'. Parody's installation of a relation of dependence between 'master' text and 'slave' text has Hegelian corollaries (see Hegel, 1977: 104-138). While the post-colonial texts which make use of the device of 'intertextual citation' ostensibly seek liberation from the centre (Slemon, 1989: 7), the very act of 'writing back' indicates that this liberation and independence are contingent upon being recognised by the centre. Since such post-colonial writing is motivated by the desire to establish an autonomous subjectivity, a further corollary here is that the strategy of 'reiterative quotation' serves not to assert subjective freedom but instead to confirm a dependence on the imperial 'master'. Interestingly, too, it is the desire for an autonomous subjectivity that generates the contestatory relation between margin and centre in these texts, a desire which compromises the attempt at a respectful novelistic relation to alterity that is suggested by their granting of 'value' to marginality. Through its installation of the contestatory relation, this desire ensures that otherness will be equated with marginality, and therefore positioned in opposition to centricity. As a result of this equation, the other is always a product of the same in such texts (cf. Levinas, 1991: 38). It is always already anamnetically implied by the centre and therefore incapable of surprise: by extension, it is not other. The post-colonial strategy of recuperating alterior histories also seems perforce to lead to a supplementation of colonial history. In a recent article, Andre P. Brink emphasises the need of post-apartheid South African writing to imagine and thus rehabilitate what has previously been repressed by nationalist historical discourse:
The new text has to be evaluated against the whole spectrum or palimpsest of available texts, and so a polylogue is opened through which versions of the past are drawn into the present, confronting the reader with 55 the need -- and above all with the responsibility -- to choose. . . . And because the text is not offered as definitive, final, absolute, but as the exploration of a possibility among others, it invites the reader to keep her/his critical faculties alive by pursuing the processes of imagination in order to arrive at whatever proves more relevant, more meaningful, or simply more useful in any given context. It intensifies the relationship between the individual and her/his spatial and temporal environment. And learning to inhabit the continent of our invention may well be one of the most rewarding challenges facing South Africans -- readers and writers alike -- in this time of change, knowing that neither its history nor its moral boundaries are fixed and final, but remain constantly to be reinvented and, in the process, revalorised. (1996: 23)
As Kossew points out, this statement paradoxically asserts openness and plurality whilst affirming closure in its emphasis on 'choice', 'responsibility', and 'revalorisation' (1997). "How can", she asks, "the reader choose or exercise critical faculties if the text has no fixed 'moral boundaries' and is itself subject to doubt?" (1997). Moreover, "can a text be revalorised when it exists only as a possibility for reinvention?" (1997). Equally valid is her point that Brink's latest novel, Imaginings of Sand (1996), offers itself as an "alternative history, an/other view of the past" while "privileging the act of imagining . . . over any kind of historical discourse" (1997). It might also be asked on what grounds Brink is able to authorise otherness in this manner. How does or can he know that which has been elided, and therefore rendered unknown, by nationalist history? Brink's arguments, particularly his emphasis on choice, render explicit the binaric, either/or logic that is often implied in post-colonial fiction which purports to 'rehabilitate' or 'recuperate' history. The presence of this logic entails that the notion of alterity conveyed by such fiction is constructed oppositionally, that is, in relation to a dominant system and is, accordingly, a part of that system. Differently put, that which is presented as 'other' is simply the same masquerading as alterity. It is an ontologised other rather than an other that is 'otherwise than being' (and history). An other that exceeds being and history would, of course, be radically unassimilable 56 and could therefore never be 'chosen'. So, when post-colonial fiction provides the reader with a 'choice', it signals the fact that that which it presents as 'other' has already been recuperated within the order of the same. The epistemological certitude which permits it to posit choice is thus an index to such fiction's conservative maintenance of the appropriative same-other relation. For the above-mentioned reasons much post-colonial fiction which seeks to rehabilitate elided histories does not offer a satisfactory solution to the problem of the novel's relation to otherness, a problem which has beset the genre since its emergence. Such fiction professes to be counter-discursive, but is actually implied and enabled by the very system which it purportedly challenges; it presupposes that which it seeks to transgress and in the very moment of criticising it, restores it. Instead of recuperating that which history has elided, it repeats its elisions. It could of course be argued in response to these criticisms that many post-colonial attempts at rehabilitating history and so 'writing back' to Empire successfully negotiate the inevitable contradictions inherent in attempting to represent otherness by self-subversively acknowledging the fictionality of their historiographical enterprise and, indeed, their implication in the order of the same. In other words, such fiction differs from realist fiction by recognising its 'worldliness' rather than asserting its worldlessness. In so doing, the argument goes, the putatively alterior version of history which this fiction offers does not make the epistemological claims that history does. However, Brink's contention that, once recovered in fiction, marginalised histories provide the reader with a choice, suggests that such abnegations of authority (or the grounds thereof) may assert that which they ostensibly denounce. After all, the very postulation of a choice suggests not simply that 'anything goes' as a result of an inability to legitimate knowledge, but rather that the alternative version possesses some form of epistemological legitimacy on the grounds of which it is able to displace standard versions. By parading its constructedness and 57 its implication in discourse, and thereby exposing the concealments of history (and, it may be added, the realist tradition of the novel), such writing claims a measure of 'honesty' in its relation to otherness. Paradoxically, then, its very admission of implication suggests that it is less duplicitous than historiography and realism and thus asserts a relative 'truthfulness'. In turn, this relative 'truthfulness' invests it with a measure of authority. Ultimately, what seems to be a self-subversive exposure of the representational violence implicit in language and narrative is actually a self- legitimating move. By means of the sophistry of legitimating that which it ostensibly undermines, this epistemologically- suspect topos of post-colonial fiction arrogates the ethical authority which derives from a respectful relation to otherness and claims for itself a counter-discursive function. Such fiction's self-reflexive admission of implication in the order of the same is, if anything, more suspect than the realist novel's profession of innocence: in claiming to represent an irruption of alterity into sameness, it masks what is simply another means of constituting otherness. In short, it claims to represent an otherness which is not other. If constructed in terms of the genre's preoccupation with otherness, the history of the novel forms a narrative not of progress but of stasis -- the movement is from the initial realist endeavour, with its occlusion of alterity, to twentieth- century permutations, such as the post-colonial novel, whose attempts at rehabilitation are often in themselves an elision. Indeed, as I have argued, the ethical responsibility to which the latter fiction lays claim in its articulation of its relation to alterity frequently masks a violent elision of otherness and what is at stake, therefore, is a politics and not an ethics. The question with which one is left, accordingly, is whether or not the novel can establish a relation to otherness without betraying it: how can its unknowability be made 'known' in its unknowability? Expressed differently, since novelistic attempts at respecting otherness are compromised by the structures - of knowledge installed by this genre's representational procedures, 58 how can the novel establish a relation with the other which enables it to signify ethically?
1.6 Contexts: Levinasian Ethics
From my discussion it should be clear that, at some level, the answer to these questions involves the novel's relation to subjectivity. Since it inscribes a subject that affirms its autonomy by eliding alterity, it follows that this genre can only respond responsibly to the other by calling into question the subject's freedom. In Hutcheon's construction, the postmodernist novel does not only question the autonomous subject's freedom but negates it entirely by asserting the immanence of discourses over which the decentred subject can exercise only a rhetorical control. As its strategic use of parody indicates, this mode of fiction-writing presupposes the inescapable nature of discursive mediation and therefore the impossibility of responding responsibly to otherness: being separated from alterity by discourse, the novel will always foreclose on alterity. On the other hand, the 'alternative vision' of, say, Tiffin and Slemon's post-colonialisms involves strategies which erect a contestatory relation between margin and centre that is intended to establish an autonomous subjectivity. Instead of calling into question the freedom of the subject, such strategies endorse it. What seems to be required is therefore an interruption of the subject's freedom which does not lead to a forfeiture of subjectivity. In this regard, Patricia Waugh's argument for a postmodernism which installs a dialectic between the category of the aesthetic (conceived of as a non-utilitarian alternative to Kantian Reason) and Enlightenment discourse, a dialectic which will lead not to the dissolution but to the reconsideration of the possibility of an "ethical, affective and effective historical agent" (1992: 122), is noteworthy. Waugh's position here, as she acknowledges, is very close to that of Jurgen Habermas, who contends that the project of modernity is not exhausted but simply unfinished: because Enlightenment reason has failed through too narrow an identification with purposive or 59 instrumental rationalism (based on a radical Cartesian separation which sets autonomous subject over inert object), does not mean that we should abandon reason altogether. We should rather, Habermas suggests, redefine our concepts of reason (1987: 301ff.). He then goes on to propose one such redefinition: a model of "communicative reason" which emphasises not individual autonomy but intersubjectivity (1987: 311ff.; see Waugh, 1992: 132 - 133). Drawing on examples from feminist discourse, Waugh attempts to demonstrate that it is possible to arrive at such a model, which stresses relationship and connection rather than separation and objectivity as the markers of identity, and in so doing to articulate coherent subjects "which avoid the fetishisation of Pure Reason as the locus of subjecthood" (1992: 125). Ultimately, then, Waugh argues against those literary responses to the 'postmodern condition' which nihilistically dissolve self, and for an alternative mode of writing which re- examines rather than_ refutes humanist concerns (1992: 61). In the process, she constructs a postmodernism which responds to the post-Enlightenment problematisation of subject-centred philosophies of consciousness by attempting to renegotiate modes of relationship. Although I do not wish to argue that Coetzee's writing exemplifies Waugh's form of postmodernism, it is my contention that it does set out to negotiate alternative models of subjectivity to both the thinking I and the anarchic dispersal of jouissance suggested by anti-humanist discourses. Its aim in this regard is profoundly ethical: namely, to respond responsibly to the other and, in the process, to show that even though culture shapes the individual, it does not leave him/her entirely at the mercy of its discourses. The principal difference between Waugh's model of postmodernism and Coetzee's aesthetic is that the latter is not informed by a Habermasian argument for intersubjectivity but by the Levinasian notion of ethical subjectivity. I have shown I that, for Levinas, the negation of otherness is closely related to the autonomy of the subject, and that an ethical response to the other is therefore contingent on that autonomy being put into 60 question. The subject is challenged, he contends, when it is pre-reflectively addressed by the other person in a way that obliges it to be responsible. This happens in the event of the "face to face" (1991: 202), that is, an encounter between subject and other in which "The idea of infinity, the infinitely more contained in the less, is concretely produced" (1991: 196). It is the infinity of the other's face and therefore its absolute exteriority which prevents the subject from relating it to a pre- existent phenomenon by way of anamnesis. "The idea of infinity alone", says Levinas, "maintains the exteriority of the other with respect to the same" (1991: 196). Infinity's role as guarantor of the irreducibility of the other is best explained by Levinas's interpretation of Descartes's analysis of the idea of infinity in the third of his Meditations (1969: 85-87). What is at issue here is the inconceivability and therefore radically excessive and unassimilable nature of infinity. Since the ideatum of the idea of the infinite cannot be contained by the idea itself (Levinas, 1987: 54), the relation of adequation which usually pertains between idea and ideatum is ruptured and the latter "absolves" itself from the relation (see 1987: 47 - 59; 1991: 48-52). Because of this rupture, Levinas draws the following conclusions:
. . . we can say that the alterity of the infinite is not cancelled, is not extinguished in the thought that thinks it. In thinking infinity the I from the first thinks more than it thinks. Infinity does not enter into the idea of infinity, is not grasped; this idea is not a concept. The infinite is the radically, absolutely, other. The transcendence of infinity with respect to the ego that is separated from it and thinks it constitutes the first mark of its infinitude. (1987: 54)
It is the 'concrete production' of the idea of infinity in the face to face which enables the other to 'absolve' itself from the relation. Indeed, the face is precisely "The way in which the other presents himself, exceeding the idea of the other in me" (Levinas, 1991: 50). Being unable to establish a relation of correlation with the other, the subject cannot foreclose on its 61 otherness and, owing to its irreducibility, the other surprises the subject who finds itself in a relation to something which is nothing definable. Levinas emphasises this point when he states that the idea of infinity "has been put into us. It is not a reminiscence" (1987: 54). It is "a relationship with the exterior . . . without this exteriority being able to be integrated into the same" (1987: 54). As I have indicated, this 'unrelating relation' between 'separated beings' which installs a recognition of and respect for difference is, for Levinas, the very condition of ethics (1991: 295). Importantly, the irreducibility of the other enables it to disrupt the subject's world. Since its freedom is grounded in a denial of the alterity of the other, the "epiphany" of the infinite exposes the subject to that which it has denied and thereby confronts it with the impossibility of conceiving of itself in terms of autonomous power (Levinas, 1991: 51). Levinas explains this point as follows:
The infinite does not stop me like a force blocking my force; it puts into question the naive right of my powers, my glorious spontaneity as a living being, a 'force on the move.' This way of measuring oneself against the perfection of the infinite is not a theoretical consideration in its turn, in which freedom would spontaneously take up its rights again. It is a shame freedom has of itself, discovering itself to be murderous and usurpatory in its very exercise. (1987: 58)
The fact of the face, of that which has been denied, refutes the subject's spontaneous freedom in unicity and thereby dispossesses it of what is required for the exercise of force and violence. With this refutation comes an affirmation of alterity which brings with it the imperative of responsibility for the other. Having recognised its radical difference, the subject becomes "non-indifferent" to the other (Levinas, 1981: 8, 89, 138 - 139,/ 145; see also Ziarek, 1994: 65 - 102). Alternatively put, its recognition of the otherness of the other obliges the subject to become its 'brother's keeper'. (As will become evident in the 62 course of this study, both Levinas and Coetzee frequently refer directly or allude to Cain's response to God's query regarding Abel's whereabouts in Genesis 4: 9.) Responsibility, in this sense, requires the substitution of self for the other and this constitutes a restructuring of subjectivity: structured as responsibility rather than freedom, the ego becomes an ethical subject. Its subjectivity is defined by its being for and subject to the other. What is at stake, then, is a renegotiation and not loss of subjectivity. It must be emphasised that it is the radically irreducible and disruptive infinity of the other that makes possible the movement from same to other, without return, through which ethical subjectivity is constituted. This 'movement of infinition' is the very opposite of the "move of Being" (Lingis, 1981: xxxiii), that is, the self-consolidating appropriation of everything into its totality which characterises the autonomous subject's commerce with the world. Instead of resulting in auto- affirmation, the 'movement of infinition' enables the subject to define itself by and in terms of its relation with the other, a relation which is irreducible to the subject-object dualism. The idea of infinity is thus central to Levinas's philosophy. It is not only that which puts into question the subject's autonomy but also that which enables a transcendence of the discourses of the domain of the same. In this regard, the thought on subjectivity in Levinas's writings is very different to that in the modes of post-colonial and postmodernist writing which I have discussed. The face-to-face encounter is precisely an encounter with that which exceeds conceptuality and cognitive categories. And it is by transcending the differential structure of language, which elides radical difference and thereby engenders indifference to otherness, that the subject becomes 'non-indifferent' to the other. Clearly, then, the Levinasian subject is not defined by its situatedness in a cultural totality, its "being-in-the-world" (Heidegger, 1962: 174, 223 -3
224, 321, 329 - 330). From the perspective of literary aesthetics, though, the question is whether the novel, which is grounded in language and 63 conceptuality, can 'concretely produce' the idea of infinity and thereby transcend its 'worldliness'. After all, the 'move of Being' is an inseparable part of representation which is memorably described by Martin Heidegger as "making-stand-over- against, an objectifying that goes forward and masters" (1977: 150). 21 Indeed, in novelistic representation, as I have argued, the technique of realism actively masks the presence of the 'move of Being'. In Defoe's novel, for instance, it masks the fact that the return-of-the-hero-as-master-of-two-worlds topos is not simply a structural feature confined to the presentational surface of the text. The question raised by Levinasian ethics for the novel is therefore whether or not it, as a subject- centred discourse whose representational protocols install the 'move of Being', is able to inscribe a 'movement of infinition' and thereby become an other-oriented mode of writing. Can the ethical relation to the other person be inscribed in the novel without being betrayed in the process? Or, in terms of the myth of the Orphic descent, is it possible to arrest the seeming inevitability with which the 'looking away' becomes the 'gaze' of betrayal? In short, how can the novel's medium and representational procedures, that is, its economy of betrayal, be made responsible for the other? In the chapters which follow I argue that, in Coetzee's fiction, a recognition of the novel's inevitable implication in discourse is postulated as the precondition for responsibility for the other. Thus, whilst this writer lays bare the way in which narrative representations routinely foreclose on otherness, at the same time this procedure enables him self-reflexively to advertise his text's refusal to attempt to represent otherness. In so doing, it points to the absence of otherness in his representation -- and therefore to its existence. Consequently, this meta-representational strategy of excession establishes a relationship between the novel and alterity which is premised not on adequation, but on the assertion of irreconcilable differece. As a direct result of its installation of a relationship which refuses to correlate its terms, CoetZee's fiction is able to evince both a recognition of and respect for alterity. 64 It needs to be pointed out that the individual novel's ability to indicate otherness is grounded in its insistence on its situatedness in the order of the same -- its insistence, that is, on the violence that would inevitably accompany any attempt at representing alterity. Through this insistence, the text inscribes a tension, as opposed to a dialectic, between the two poles of totality and infinity, implication and transcendence, and this tension emphasises the absence of any correlation between same and other. It is precisely through the maintenance of this tension that the novel is able to place the reading subject in an 'unrelating relation' to an otherness that is not present. And, since the terms in this relationship are not identifiable, knowledge of alterity is obviously rendered impossible and the reader is consequently prevented from mastering the other conceptually: the other 'absolves' itself from the relationship. By extension, the text seeks to thwart any attempt at choosing the other and, instead, to 'concretely produce' the idea of. infinity. After all, the concept of choice presupposes a critical judgement which follows the conclusion to a cognitive process and is thus grounded in knowledge (cf. Levinas 1981: 138). Through the tension which it inscribes between implication and transcendence, the text wishes to surprise the reader by 'putting into' him/her the radically 'exterior' idea of infinity, and it can only succeed in this endeavour by suspending 'interior' procedures of reminiscence or anamnesis such as choice. In preserving the unknowability of the other, the unrelating nature of this relationship endeavours to preclude the very possibility of choice. Just as in Levinas's philosophy, so too in Coetzee's fiction the idea of infinity occupies a central place. As I proceed, it will become clear that Coetzee's use of tropes such as the sublime, silence and inspiration is intended to resist the recuperative representational protocols of the novel and its medium by inscribing in it a 'movement of infinition' and theeby enabling it to respond responsibly to the other. To an extent, then, Dovey is. right in relating Coetzee's preoccupation with the 'unpresentable' to Lyotard's argument that the only authentic 65 mode of postmodernist expression is the sublime -- a mode, that is, which asserts the "unpresentable in presentation" (1984: 81). Very importantly , though, Coetzee's use of meta-representational strategies of excession and infinition, such as the sublime, is underpinned by the ethical notions of substitution, responsibility and obligation implicit in the irreversible movement from the order of the same to the infinity of the other which they install. Given its ethical dimension, "this writer's concern with the 'unpresentable' is thus ultimately very different to that of Lyotard. It is partly due to the ethical impact of this emphasis on infinity on his aesthetic that I disagree with Jolly's aforementioned argument that Coetzee in Foe "specifies" and "embodies" the other (1996: 143-144). Drawing on Slemon's description of post-colonial literary writing, this critic contends that Coetzee's fiction retains a "mimetic or referential purchase", and that, although it suspends "the referent in order to read the social 'text' of colonialist power", it reinstalls it "in the service of colonized and post-colonial societies" (Jolly, 1996: 143; Slemon, 1989: 9). In my opinion, it is precisely such a recuperation of alterity through representation that Coetzee eschews -- in fact, he advertises his refusal to engage in such a 'move of Being' in all his novels. Jolly's contention, though, is that such a refusal inevitably reduces "all others" to "a single other" -- "the unrepresentable" -- and that this constitutes a violation of the "distinct, embodied other" (see 1996: 143). However, in my view, the distinctness and specificity of the other is a function of its difference which is, in turn, a function of its irreducibility to representation. As the epigraph to Jolly's introduction points out, "[t]he violence of representation is the suppression of difference" (1996: 1). By extension, it might be argued that Jolly's 'specific' others are neither specific, in Levinas's sense of "singular" (1981: 86-87), nor other. After all, the specificity to which she refers is achieved through a reinstallation of the referent: by extension, the other is 'specified' by a generalising medium and form which are located 66 within the order of the same. And, in being integrated into this universal order, it forfeits the very condition of possibility for specificity, namely its difference. To refer to a 'specific' other, then, is to refer not to an other which is 'otherwise than being', but to an ontologised 'other', that is, the same dissembling otherness. 22
1.7 Conclusion
My claim here, then, is that the postulation of a radically exterior other is an integral part of Coetzee's attempt to construct an ethical mode of fiction-writing. My argument in this chapter has been that, in its inscription of an autonomous subjectivity and use of realism, the novel disguises its elision of alterity. I have contended that postmodernist and post- colonial fiction is self-reflexively aware of its generic complicity in this violence, and may be read as a response to the question of responsibility for the other. By extension, Coetzee's writing is produced in the context of a pronounced generic anxiety on the part of the contemporary novel about its relation to alterity. However, although sharing this anxiety, Coetzee's fiction responds to it ethically rather than politically. Unlike some forms of post-colonialism, it does not seek to mobilise the other as a force against the centre. To use Levinas's d:istinction between force and face, the other in Coetzee's writing is always a face: that which resists without force (1987: 58; see also 1987a: 18-19). And, unlike the anti- humanist, postmodernist decentring of the subject which leaves jouissance as the only possible reply to the immanence of the discourses of the political, it posits the possibility of an ethical subjectivity. I have indicated that, in responding thus to violence, Coetzee's writing has been strongly influenced by the philosophy of Levinas. In the chapters which follow I read Coetzee's fiction asIan elaborate and ongoing attempt at formulating an ethical response in fiction to the problem of violating the other. I also show that this concern with ethics is ultimately apolitical concern. 67 As I proceed, it will become clear that Coetzee's steadfast refusal to regard the political as an a priori structure constitutes not a retreat from the political but, instead, an attempt to secure its mediation by the ethical. In treating these issues I not only examine the meta- representational strategies of excession and infinition through which Coetzee attempts to make of the 'looking away' an end in itself. I also trace the novels' self-reflexive articulation of the ethical implications of such devices for the acts of writing and reading, and so the relation of fiction to history. I pointed out in the introduction to this thesis that the ethical perspective of Coetzee's writing does not change or develop significantly. Instead of a development across the novels, one finds an unfolding, in the form of a self-reflexive explication, of the ethical implications of the various tropes of excession. My focus on such self-reflexivity means that my argument on the ethics of Coetzee's writing proceeds iteratively and incrementally in the rest of this thesis. So, for instance, while I emphasise the strategies of excession in my reading of "The Narrative of Jacobus Coetzee" in the next chapter, I only discuss the full implications of Coetzee's use of such devices for the act of reading in my analysis of Foe, which is the novel in which they are self-consciously adumbrated for the first time. 68 1.8 Notes
Parts of the argument in this chapter have appeared in two previously-published articles (see Marais, 1996; 1997). Azim's claim is somewhat confusing. The attempt to clarify language that is evident in, say, the writing of Hobbes, indicates that language was not simply viewed in this period as a system of equivalences between things and words but as a cognitive mechanism. In other words, Hobbes's analysis of language does not equate language with being but treats it as a medium of cognition. The 'linguistic speculation' to which Azim refers thus points to an attempt at rendering transparent a sign whose materiality was becoming increasingly apparent. See Michel Foucault's account of the changes which language underwent in Europe from the seventeenth century onward (1970: 42ff.). See also Jochen Schulte-Sasse's comments in this regard (1988: 222-224). Compare Tzvetan Todorov's contentions regarding the "hermeneutic behavior" of Christopher Columbus when encountering the indigene in the 'New World': Further, Columbus believes not only in Christian dogma, but also (and he is not alone at the time) in Cyclopes and mermaids, in Amazons and men with tails, and his belief, as strong as Saint Peter's, therefore permits him to find them. He is not concerned to understand more fully the words of those who speak to him, for he knows in advance that he will encounter Cyclopes, men with tails, and Amazons. He sees clearly that the 'mermaids' are not, as he has been told, beautiful women; but rather than conclude that mermaids do not exist, he corrects one prejudice by another: the mermaids are not so beautiful as is claimed. (1984: 15-16) This commerce between existent discourse, expectation and experience is again evident in Columbus's explanation of the origin of the pearls which the 'Indians' bring him: namely, that they derive from oysters which gather in their mouths the dew which falls from the leaves of trees. As Todorov notes, this report originates not from that which "occurs before his eyes", namely experience, but from "the explanation given by Pliny" (1984: 16-17). Todorov concludes that for Columbus "the decisive argument is an argument of authority, not of experience. He knows in advance what he will find; the concrete experience is thre to illustrate a truth already possessed . . ." (1984: 17). 4.0 I do not subscribe to Batten's rather absolute division between the factual basis of travel accounts of the eighteenth century and the fictitiousness of accounts from 69 previous centuries: my argument is simply that, after the installation of a firm distinction between fact and fiction, the fictional dimension of travel writing lost the ability to expose the presence of discursive mediation in the representation of colonial space, a subversive potential which this mode had earlier threatened to gain when it was still being received with ambivalence by its readers. In other words, following the fixing of this distinction, works which relied overtly on pre-existent travel discourse in their representation of colonial space ran the risk of being dismissed as 'fictions'. The tag of mendacity could now be applied to them without being anachronistic. Indeed, Adams's surveys indicate that 'travel lies' enjoyed currency well beyond the eighteenth century (1962; 1983). Although the tradition of the metanovel dates back to writers such as Henry Fielding, Laurence Sterne and even Samuel Richardson, it must be emphasised that self- reflexivity in the novel presupposes realism and, like parody, its critique implies an affirmation. After stating that "Robinson Crusoe is certainly the first novel in the sense that it is the first fictional narrative in which an ordinary person's daily activities are the centre of continuous literary attention", Ian Watt proceeds to examine in this text "the development of the presuppositions on which the formal realism of the novel is based" (1957: 74). At this stage it is necessary to point out that, while I endorse the insights which arise from 0. Mannoni's application to Robinson Crusoe of his argument that the colonial experience is a product of the white mind alone (1956), I disagree with Hugh Ridley's use of Mannoni's claim that this novel is entirely a work of the imagination as a point of departure for his own argument that it lacks realism (1983: 3 - 13). It is clear from the opposition between imagination and reality which underpins his argument that Ridley assumes that realism is able to provide an accurate and faithful approximation of reality, a "documentary record of the new world" (1983: 12). However, my argument in this thesis has been that realism is a set of narrative techniques and conventions whose assumptions and values -- for example, the originary role of the subject and the unmediated nature of 'fact' and 'truth' -- indicate that it is a historical and cultural production. Accordingly, the representation which this strategy provides of the colonial subject is always an imposition of the European mind (see Bhabha, 1984). From the perspective of such a reading of realism, which questions distinctions between 'fact' and 'fiction', Ridley's assumption that Robinson Crusoe, as a work of the imagination, cannot be deemed a realist text is invalid. Indeed, being realist implies that this novel is not just a work of the imagination but, more specifically, a work of the European imagination. 70 I was directed to Rousseau's response to Robinson Crusoe by the discussions of both Watt (1957: 86-87) and Diana Loxley (1990: 7-9). My reading of this response relies on that of Loxley. However, its purpose is to expose, with the help of Jacques Derrida's critique of Rousseau's writing, the phonocentric assumptions which underpin the strategy of realism. Compare Wayne Franklin's discussion of American discovery narrative (1979: 42-57). See also Wendy Martin, who argues that "captivity and travel narratives make it quite clear that travel, whether voluntary or forced, presents a radical challenge to the notion of a fixed stable self" (1994: viii). Although Defoe's narrative is a novel, its representation of the subject's encounter with colonial space is remarkably similar to that found in travel literature. However, this similarity points to an obvious difference, namely that there is no representation of an actual island in Robinson Crusoe. The novel can only imitate descriptions of colonial space and of the subject's encounter with such terrain. Furthermore, as I have indicated, the spaces described in travel accounts are themselves discursively mediated at the moment of being beheld. In effect, then, the description of the island in Robinson Crusoe is a representation of a representation of a discursively mediated entity. The referent of this representation -thus disappears in an infinite regression of discursive mediation. The convoluted nature of the representational process involved here, poses many stylistic difficulties. For example, it would be awkward to gloss the above whenever I refer to Defoe's representation of the colonial encounter in the discussion which follows. Accordingly, I shall assume that such references are understood to include all the levels in this representational process. See Mary Louise Pratt (1992: 213). This trope encompasses those scenes, characteristic of travel writing, in which the "landscanning European eye" (Pratt, 1992: 60) assumes what. Coetzee in an essay on South African landscape poetry refers to as a "prospect-view" in relation to colonial space (1988a: 167). From this position it "'commands' what falls within its gaze" (Pratt, 1992: 60). Fittingly enough, Pratt's term for this trope derives from William Cowper's lines about Robinson Crusoe in "Verses Supposed to be Written By Alexander Selkirk": I am monarch of all I survey, My right there is none to dispute; From the centre all round to the sea I am lord of the fowl and the brute. (1934: 311) Davis argues that, prior to the emergence of the novel, land was not seen as the property of an individual, and sees the rise of the novel genre as being coterminous with the 71 development of an autonomous subject which asserted its control over property. In establishing this link, he contends that the novel's representation of space naturalised this property relation (1987: 52-65). The pertinence of Davis's argument to my reading of Robinson Crusoe should be self-evident, and his contentions will become even more germane in my chapter on The Life and Times of Michael K. In a discussion of the function of boundaries in the construction and representation of space, John Noyes argues that "the border functions not simply on a geographical or juridico/administrative level, but also discursively" (1989: 58). He contends that "the Realist mode of discourse (which is that favored almost exclusively by colonial literature) constantly tests this border and redraws it" and that "the typical plot construction involves the crossing of the border" (1989: 58). He then discusses the transformative gaze of the 'displaced percipient' as follows: In the Realist novel the agent of [the conflict occasioned by the crossing of the border] is generally the central figure, and the conflict which emerges between this figure and the world takes on the features of Platonic dialogue as [Michel] Serres describes it. The agreement which is implied in the crossing of the border is - the exclusion of the same disorder which the border seeks to contain. Thus a reterritorialization necessarily follows the deterritorializing act of crossing the border, and has as its consequence that new territories are created and old ones imbued with a new significance. (1989: 58)
See also Noyes (1992: 132 - 133). With regard to this process of domestication and its occlusion, compare Peter Knox-Shaw's contention that "almost magically", at this point in the novel, "the boundaries between the natural and artificial realms begin to recede" (1983: 40). As examples of this domestication of the wilderness, Knox-Shaw cites the following: "Taken from the woods Poll learns to speak. Wild cats mate with the tame, and the stakes of.[Crusoe's] enclosure send out fresh shoots" (1983: 40). Davis contends that "The novelist . . . can describe and encapsulate through language, but must also realize that any description is a simplification, a simulacrum, of any space. By making it known, the novelist makes the space unknown" (1987: 86). According to Edmund Burke, that which occasions pain, terror, horror or allied passions by straining the observer's perceptual faculties is a potential source of the feeling of the sublime (1990: 36, 53ff.). Similarly, 72 Emanuel Kant uses the term sublimity to designate the experience of an object as being radically indeterminate and therefore.as defying the faculty of judgement (1952: 245). However, as Paul Crowther points out, Burke sees the sublime as a passion which is caused by specific properties in objects, whereas Kant relates it to the subject's capacity for feeling (1989: 11). It is probably for this reason that, in Kant, the sublime eventually asserts an autonomous subjectivity. For Burke, though, it is related to a feeling of self-transcendence and an instinct for self-preservation (see Crowther, 1989: 7 - 8). I use the term here to suggest a sense of dread that 'unhomes' the subject from the epistemological security provided by language and culture and that is caused by the subject's inability to posit itself in opposition to another entity through language. So, while it is in a relation, this is to nothing which can be defined. As will become evident later in this chapter, my specific understanding of the sublime and its impact on the subject is related not to the Burkian and Kantian notions of infinity, but to Levinas's use of Descartes's idea of the infinite (Levinas, 1987; Descartes, 1969: 85ff.). Hulme makes the point that although "Descartes' autobiography is of course 'real' as opposed to Crusoe's fictional life story . . . this makes little difference to the narrative strategies involved" (1986: 316). J.M. Bernstein has taken this contention a step further, arguing persuasively that it is "a useful theoretical heuristic to treat the Discourse as an ur-novel in which [can be traced] the coming to be of the space the novel will be assigned" (1984: 165). Reductively summarised, Bernstein deconstructs the installation by way of the cogito of "a transcendental autobiographical truth" (1984: 160) in this text, and demonstrates that the "the Discourse is an autobiography and a fable, the fable of autobiography in which the self reveals itself as absolute, as prior to and determinate of all other truths" (1984: 160). Bernstein, however, cautions that Descartes' text cannot be assigned "to the domain of pure fiction for in the context of the Discourse the distinction between truth and fiction can have only a secondary and derived status" (1984: 165).
I justify my application of the term 'indigene' to Friday by reading the fact that he arrives on the island after Crusoe as a displacement of colonial history, a displacement which may be read in terms of Terry Goldie's theory concerning the coloniser's "need for indigenisation" (1995: 234-236). This strategy of displacement is a topos of colonial historiography. See, for example, Shula Marks's "The Myth of the Empty Land" (1980). Loxley (1990: 162-163) compares this passage with one in Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island in which the adventurers encounter the marooned Ben Gunn. On the grounds 73 of a number of similarities, such as the use of the gun to exhibit technological superiority and to bring about a "display of gratitude and.supplication" (1990: 162), she contends that the encounter in the later text is a rewriting of the one in the earlier novel. In the context of a discussion of the duplication of North America on the island in Jules Verne's The Mysterious Island, Loxley makes the following point: The distance (both ideological and 'physical') which once separated this remote, uncharted island from the known world can be completely erased once its situation with respect to that world has been clearly determined: once, that is, this new world can be safely mapped onto and matched up with the old. (1990: 50) She goes on to describe the 'old' world as the "site of absolute meaning and signification" (1990: 52). Clearly, the written text plays an important part in this domestication procedure in that it yokes together the old and the new. See also Loxley who, in referring to the movement from 'normality' to 'strangeness' in adventure novels, argues that this plot structure dissolves "the distance between the home and the alien land by showing that the subject (a distinctly 'ordinary' subject) has been a participant in both, and, in that progression, constructs a familiarisation of the two domains" (1990: 96). See also Noyes's discussion of the discursive functioning of the border in note 11. Compare Noyes's observation regarding "the vitally important function of the Realist novel in the capture of space" (1989: 59). The passage in which this description occurs should be quoted in full: To represent means here: of oneself to set something before oneself and to make secure what has been set in place, as something set in place. . . . Representing is no longer a self-unconcealing for . . . , but is a laying hold and grasping of. . . . What presences does not hold sway, but rather assault rules. Representing is now, in keeping with the new freedom, a going forth -- from out of itself -- into the sphere, first to be made secure, of what is made secure. That which is, is no longer that which presences; it is rather that which, in representing, is first set over against, that which stands fixedly over against, which has the character of object. Representing is making-stand- over-against, an objectifying that goes forward and masters. In this way representing drives everything together into the unity of that which is thus given the 74
character of object. Representing is coagitatio. (1977: 149-150) Owing to the mastery of representation, "man" conquers the world as a "picture". It now "stands at man's disposal as conquered, and the more objectively the object appears, all the more subjectively, i.e., the more importunately, does the subiectum rise up, and all the more impetuously, too, do observation of and teaching about the world change into a doctrine of man, into anthropology" (1977: 133). 22 Although Jolly's brief summary of Slemon's argument on post- colonial writing attempts to anticipate objections such as mine, her efforts are wholly inadequate. She makes only passing reference to the "maintenance of a mimetics that is not simplistically recuperative but is nevertheless recreative, and the simultaneous refusal of a fixed referent" (1996: 144). This point is hardly self-evident, and the paradox of a referent which is able to resist totalisation cannot simply be explained by stating that it only seems "contradictory to our (sic) postmodern-attuned ears" (1996: 143). 75
Chapter 2: The Aesthetics of Supplementarity and Rivalry in "The Narrative of Jacobus Coetzee"
2.1 Introduction 76 2.2 Coetzee's Representation of the Colonial Encounter 78 2.3 History, Narrative, and Novelistic Representation 85 2.3.1 History and Narrative 88 2.3.2 Representing History: Supplementarity and Rivalry 94 2.3.3 Transcending History 103 2.4 The Tension Between Totality and Infinity 113 2.5 The Reader and the Autonomous Text 119 2.6 Conclusion 125 2.7 Notes 127 76
CHAPTER 2
The Aesthetics of Supplementarity and Rivalry in "The Narrative of Jacobus Coetzee"
2.1 Introduction
In this chapter, I explore the tension between the self-reflexive awareness of implication in culture and the desire for transcendence that is evident in Coetzee's "The Narrative of Jacobus Coetzee".' I contend that this text exposes the fact that the apparently autonomous subject is situated in culture, and that it is, accordingly, discursively separated from experience and the 'reality' of things. On the one hand, then, I argue that "Narrative" indicates that intentionality is irrevocably grounded in discourse. On the other hand, however, I show that this text suggests that intentional structures do not necessarily occupy an a priori relation to experience, and that it thereby implies that the subject may transcend the domain of the same. In developing this latter point, I argue that Coetzee depicts the colonial encounter in "Narrative" as an encounter with the infinitude of the face. Throughout this chapter, these issues are discussed with specific reference to their implications for novelistic modes of representation -- foremost of which is the claim of realism to transparent representation. I demonstrate that "Narrative" evinces a strong self-reflexive awareness of these implications, as is evident in its intertextual engagement with Defoe's Robinson Crusoe. Allan Gardiner, for example, points out that in their treatment of the theme of exploration, both Robinson Crusoe and "Narrative" present themselves as "memoirs, each containing a journal as text-within-a-text" (1987: 176). He argues that in Robinson Crusoe this emphasis on the written, as opposed to the spoken or thought, means that the descriptions of events "appropriate the authority of empiricism" (1987: 176). I contend that it is precisely this authority, and with it the epistemological pretensions of realism, that Coetzee seeks to 77 undermine in "Narrative". By implication, I emphasise throughout the chapter the way in which Coetzee's representation of Jacobus Coetzee's cont act with the Namaquas constitutes an engagement with previous literary representations of the colonial encounter. In developing my discussion of the meta-representational aspects of "Narrative", I make extensive use of Coetzee's aforementioned distinction, in "The Novel Today", between writing which 'supplements' history and writing which 'rivals' history (1988). I argue that "Narrative" depicts colonial history as the course of necessarily conflictual events that is generated by the European autonomous subject's routine violation of otherness in its relations with entities in colonial space. It suggests, that is, that the events which form history are constituted by the irresponsible response to otherness which is an inevitable function of the divided consciousness of the autonomous subject. In this regard, the importance of Robinson Crusoe for Coetzee's fictional purpose lies in its installation of those representational procedures and protocols which are responsible for the realist novel's supplementation of history. In my reading, the point of Coetzee's intertextual engagement with Defoe's novel is therefore to signal the resistance of "Narrative" to this ur-text's representational aesthetic and, through this resistance, its attempt to contrive an autonomous mode of representation. Accordingly, I deal with Robinson Crusoe as the progenitor of the aesthetic of supplementarity with which Coetzee takes issue in his text. What is important in Coetzee's intertextual engagement with Defoe's novel, then, is not so much the individual text itself as the issue of supplementing history. For this reason, my purpose in this chapter is not simply to locate and explore the numerous links between "Narrative" and Robinson Crusoe. I have consequently ignored many of the correspondences between these two texts that are noted by Gardiner (1987) -- the motif of the gun and the experience of delirium, for example. (To these could be added the master-slave relationship.) Only those links which are of meta-representational significance are dealt with in this chapter. 78 A corollary of my argument is that the focus in Coetzee's text on the issue of supplementation and the concomitant attempt to rival history does not involve an attempt at 'writing back' to Empire. Instead, Coetzee's intertextual encounter with Robinson Crusoe proceeds by way of strategies of excession and infinition which point to that which both history and this ur-novel's representational modes have elided (cf. Castillo, 1990: 1112). By extension, "Narrative" does not seek to retrieve and enlist against the centre that which has been annulled by history and supplementary modes of writing. Through its use of strategies of excession which indicate without attempting to recuperate alterity, it strives to establish with the other an ethical relation that is informed not by the 'move of Being' but by an irreversible movement from same to other. From his use of strategies of infinition, then, it emerges that Coetzee's project in "Narrative" is ethical and not political: by means of such strategies he attempts to transcend the order of the same and thereby contrive an-autonomous mode of writing that evinces 'non- indifference' to the other.
2.2 Coetzee's Representation of the Colonial Encounter
As is intimated by Gardiner's article, the intertextual relation between Dusklands and Robinson Crusoe is most apparent in Coetzee's representation of the primal encounter between European and indigene in "Narrative". Indeed, the prominence of the colonial encounter in Dusklands is evident in the fact that three of its sections, namely Jacobus Coetzee's journal, S.J. Coetzee's historical account of the explorer's expedition and the deposition of the Dutch East India Company, contain accounts of Jacobus Coetzee's meeting with the Namaquas. In being drawn up from the perspective of the European subject as 'displaced percipient', the first of these accounts echoes Robinson Crusoe's encounter with the cannibals:
Early on the fifth morning we saw small figures advancing toward us across the plain. Ever cautious, I readied my party by distributing the smaller pieces to 79 Klawer and a steady boy named Jan Plaatje, with instructions that they load but show no hostility, biding my sign. Plaatje came up behind the wagon with the oxen to ensure that no sudden clamour from the enemy should drive my second span helter-skelter away. Klawer sat beside the driver with his gun ready. I rode out ahead. Thus we approached each other. We could make out their number, twenty, one riding on an ox. All were men. I inferred that they had heard of our coming, by what means I did not know, and were come to meet us. They carried spears. It was a long time since I had seen a Hottentot with a spear. They made no warlike sign, nor did we. On the contrary, we rode out peacefully to meet each other, as pretty a sight as you could wish, two little bands of men under a sun only a few degrees above the horizon, and the mountains blue behind us. When we came near enough to make out each other's faces I held up my hand and the wagon stopped. The Hottentots stopped too, the mounted man in the middle, the others shuffling up in a cluster around him. . . . I rode out slowly toward them. My men stayed back, obeying orders. The mounted Hottentot rode forward, matching his step to mine. . . . Tranquilly I traced in my heart the forking paths of the endless inner adventure: the order to follow, the inner debate (resist? submit?), underlings rolling their eyeballs, words of moderation, calm, swift march, the hidden defile, the encampment, the greybeard chieftain, the curious throng, words of greeting, firm tones, Peace! Tobacco!, demonstration of firearms, murmurs of awe, gifts, the vengeful wizard, the feast, glut, nightfall, murder foiled, dawn, farewell, trundling wheels, the order to follow, the inner debate, rolling eyeballs, the nervous finger, the shot, panic, assault, gunfire, hasty departure, the pursuing horde, the race for the river, the order to follow, the inner debate, the casual spear in the vitals (Viscount . d'Almeida), the fleeing underlings, pole through the fundament, ritual dismemberment in the savage encampment, limbs to the dogs, privates to the first wife, the order to follow, the inner debate, the cowardly blow, amnesia, the dark hut, bound hands, the drowsing guard, escape, night chase, the dogs foiled, the dark hut, bound hands, uneasy sleep, dawn, the sacrificial gathering, the wizard, the contest of magic, the celestial almanac, darkness at noon, victory, an amusing but tedious reign as tribal demi- god, return to civilization with numerous entourage bf cattle. (1974: 68 - 70)
Like Crusoe, Jacobus Coetzee defines difference in terms of savagery. In both texts, the signifier 'savage' is the means 80 through which the 'displaced percipient' attempts to 'know' the indigene and thus contain its dreadful anonymity. However, where Defoe's text tries to conceal the epistemological procedure through which this is accomplished, Coetzee's exposes it. For instance, the various scenarios which Jacobus Coetzee constructs as he rides out to meet the Namaquas lay bare the intentionality of subject-centred consciousness. That which the subject encounters is not the indigene in itself, but what it intends or means. Moreover, the self-consciously literary nature of these scenarios indicates that such intentionality is a function of discourse, since it suggests that what Jacobus Coetzee meets instead of the actual Khoi is the verbal and fictional construct constituted in his mind by colonialist discourse (which, of course, is partly made up of the colonialist literature from which the stereotypical plot structures which form these scenarios derive). In other words, the scenarios imply the aesthetic nature of Jacobus Coetzee's perception: that he creates (in the sense of transforms) that which he sees. By means of these scenarios, Coetzee hints at the textualised nature of colonial 'reality', the fact that the encounter between the European subject and the indigene is a textual one. The various scenarios thus reveal that Jacobus Coetzee positions himself in relation to the Khoi according to those expectations concerning the 'savage nature' of the 'native' that are generated by colonialist discourse. This is true even of those plots in which he is killed or forced to flee as, even here, the indigene's behaviour still conforms to European expectations regarding native savagery. As long as this remains the case, the other is familiar and knowable, its dreadful alterity containable. The text therefore points to the epistemological dimension of fear: physical harm, these scenarios suggest, is preferable to the radical anxiety and doubt produced by the possibility that western systems of knowledge might not be able to contain the unknown. 2 The discursive separation between European subject and colonial world that is foregrounded by the scenarios is further apparent in the naming of the Khoi. While Jacobus Coetzee refers 81 to them as "Hottentots", it becomes clear from the words with which they welcome him that the Khoi call themselves the "Khoikhoin": "We were welcome in the land of the [Khoikhoin], the people of the people, who were always glad to receive travellers and eager to hear what news they brought" (1974: 72)) Through this discrepancy, the text points to the Khoi's self-ascription. This becomes further apparent when it is later revealed that the name 'hottentot' is a term of European derivation imposed upon the Khoi: "Aten taten, aten taten', sang the natives of the Cape to the shipwrecked sailors of the Haerlem, 'aten taten, aten taten', and danced in 2/4 time. 8 Hence the appellation Hottentot" (1974: 120). Significantly, the note number in this quotation directs the reader to an endnote indicating the source of this information, that is, European travel writing, and thus suggests that the term which Jacobus Coetzee applies to the Khoi is one which has been constituted in European colonialist discourse, a discourse which determines its signification. J.M. Coetzee's description of the constitution of the 'Hottentot' by colonialist discourse in an essay entitled "Idleness in South Africa" (1988b) is important in this regard. In this essay, he shows that the early writings on the Khoi by seamen, ships' doctors and Company officials -- what he refers to as the "discourse of the Cape" -- constantly recycle the same material in their representation of the 'Hottentots', and that they therefore construct their object of study, that is, produce rather than represent the Khoi (see 1988b: 12-35). Coetzee's portrayal of the colonial encounter thus repeatedly exposes the discursive separation of the subject from the colonial entities which that subject observes and, in the process, it dramatises the assimilation of the Khoi's radical alterity by European systems of totalising knowledge. By extension, then, this emphasis on the relation between colonialist discourse and knowledge betrays the fact that 'truth' is acquired not so much through perception in the present as through knowledge already assimilated prior to the occurrence of any visual confrontation. In this regard, Coetzee's text departs radically from the realist representational aesthetic which, as I 82 argued in the first chapter of this thesis, propagates the illusion of transparent perception and thus conceals the way in which colonial space and matter are mediated and conceptually settled by European discourse in the very moment of perception. By implication, what is at issue in Coetzee's text is not simply the colonial encounter but its representation in fiction. This self-consciously meta-representational dimension of the text is apparent in the aforementioned literary nature of the scenarios which reveal Jacobus Coetzee's expectations upon encountering the Khoi. Indeed, the scenarios are easily recognisable as standard variations on the formulaic plot which characterises the colonial adventure novel, a sub-genre whose emergence, as I have indicated, is usually traced back to Defoe's Robinson Crusoe. As is evident in this ur-text, realist fiction makes use of a representational practice which conceals the discursive separation of subject from 'reality'. And since the colonial adventure novel is a highly ethnographic form of writing which depicts the colonial encounter from the perspective of the European subject, it thus follows that it naturalises for the metropole an order which has been generated by the discourses of the metropole. The fact that the plot structures which typify this sub-genre are used by Coetzee in a context which exposes rather than conceals the presence of discursive mediation in the colonial encounter must therefore be deemed highly significant, since they generate an intertextual tension which announces Coetzee's text's departure from the representational practice that characterises this mode of writing. By means of these narrative summaries, this text therefore signals its intention not to supplement the layers of European discourse through which the colonial world has been made known, but rather to suggest the existence of that which has in the process been occluded, displaced, and so rendered unknown. This is a deeply meta- representational endeavour, one which is self-consciously premised on the presence of a mode of writing which occludes alterity. Coetzee's strategy of intimating that which has been elided by European discourse is particularly evident in his depiction of 83 Jacobus Coetzee's encounter with colonial space. Indeed, this writer has his character describe himself as "a hunter, a domesticator of the wilderness, a hero of enumeration" (1974: 85), and reflect on the imperial enterprise as follows:
We cannot count the wild. The wild is one because it is boundless. We can count fig-trees, we can count sheep because the orchard and the farm are bounded. The essence of orchard tree and farm sheep is number. Our commerce with the wild is a tireless enterprise of turning it into orchard and farm. When we cannot fence it and count it we reduce it to number by other means. (1974: 85)
Colonialism is here depicted as a process of containing the unknown, or the 'wilderness', 4 subordinating it to the European will and rendering its infinitude finite by reducing it to an assortment of computable acres. Even the introduction of orchard trees and stock animals forms part of this exercise in containment, since it constitutes a means of Europeanising the land which sustains such agricultural endeavours. Plantation is thus not only an act of enclosure but also of creation in the sense of transformation. In this regard, S.J. Coetzee's subsequent description of Jacobus Coetzee's intercourse with a terrain that is earlier described as an "undifferentiated plenum" (1974: 108) is interesting: "In his way Coetzee rode like a god through a world only partly named, differentiating and bringing into existence" (1974: 124). Two conflicting models of creation inform this description. On the one hand, the inference is that the coloniser-as-god creates the colonial world ex nihilo. On the other hand, however, this conception of the authorial subject as original creator is immediately countered by the use of terminology usually associated with post-Saussurean linguistic theory -- that is, theory which suggests that the act of creation is generated by a langue which pre-exists the individual subjeCt. By implication, then, Jacobus Coetzee creates a discursive world ' on the base of a natural one. In the process, he transforms Africa. Indeed, the linguistic terms in which the description of 84 this act of creation is couched imply that the natural African 'reality' is contingent and can only be rendered accessible to European minds by being settled conceptually through language. In relating the incomprehensible and inexpressible African space to European systems of order, language provides the European mind with purchase on this landscape. The Africa which the explorer supposedly 'discovers' is therefore a European construct. The linguistic and conceptual transformation of Africa is further evident in Coetzee's foregrounding of the intentionality of subject-centred consciousness in his description of Jacobus Coetzee's 'discovery' of the 'Orange' River:
And so on 24 August Coetzee arrived at the Great River (Gariep, Orange). The sight which greeted him was majestic, the waters flowing broad and strong, the cliffs resounding with their roar. . . . He saw that the banks, clothed in trees (zwartebast, kareehout), might furnish timber for all the wants of colonization. . . . He dreamed a father-dream of rafts laden with produce sailing down to the sea and the waiting schooners. (1974: 128)
As this mercantile reverie makes clear, the 'wilderness' is not described in itself but in terms of the European principles of profit and gain. Clearly, Jacobus Coetzee is here represented as being situated in the discourses of the world, and his knowledge of that which he sees is therefore interested -- he intends the objects of his perception. In this regard, the similarities between "Narrative" and Robinson Crusoe are patent: as is the case with Robinson Crusoe, Jacobus Coetzee brings to his confrontation with territorial otherness a set of cultural and ideological presuppositions which colour his perceptions. The difference between these two texts, though, is that, as a result of its inscription of a transcendental subject, the technique of realism disguises the fact that Robinson Crusoe sees personal property and, eventually, a colony when he surveys the supposOly neutral space of the island. Conversely, the representation of the colonial encounter in Coetzee's text lays bare the grounding of the intentionality of the subject's consciousness in discourse. In the process, it negates the notion of transparent 85 perception that is endorsed by realism, and postulates instead the aesthetic, and therefore transformative, nature of perception. Implicit in the description of Jacobus Coetzee's scrutiny of the Orange River is a suggestion that the transformation which colonial space undergoes may in part be ascribed to the fact that it is codified in terms of a Euro-expansionist, capitalist future. In the next section of this chapter, I shall discuss Coetzee's exposure of the relation between history and the intentional structures of consciousness and, accordingly, of the way in which history proceeds through the elision of alterity. I shall emphasise the self-reflexive awareness in "Narrative" of the implications of this understanding of history for novelistic modes of representation. In the course of my discussion, it will eventually emerge that in this text history is not treated, as Attwell alleges, as an "a priori structure" and the "absolute horizon to consciousness" (1993: 72). What Attwell claims for the treatment of history in Coetzee's later novels is already evident in "Narrative". That is, "Narrative", too, objectifies or presents history as a discursive field and, in rivalling it, asserts its freedom from it (see Attwell, 1993: 71-72). This procedure is a necessary corollary of the tension between implication and transcendence which Coetzee inscribes in all his novels.
2.3 History, Narrative, and Novelistic Representation
Coetzee's foregrounding of the discursive mediation of the relationship of coloniser to colonised in his representation of the colonial encounter implies a critique of the pattern of events which follows this encounter, events which ultimately constitute colonial history. (It is, of course, no coincidence that this representation is based on an actual expedition undertaken by an eighteenth-century frontiersman whose name Was, indeed, Jacobus Coetzee. 5 ) In this regard, it is interesting to note that, in his essay "The Novel Today", Coetzee remarks that "history and the historical disciplines erect themselves" out of 86 the oppositions of class, race and gender (1988: 3). The least that one may deduce from this observation is that, in Coetzee's understanding,'history is a construct or, to be more precise, a product of the oppositional structure of social relations. Significantly, one of the oppositions to which Coetzee refers in the above-mentioned essay is that of coloniser/colonised. Although he does not elaborate on its conflictual structure here, in "Narrative", he develops this relationship in a way which suggests that, in the context of western imperialism, it is informed by the Cartesian subject- object dualism. So, for example, the evocation of the monarch- of-all-I-survey trope in the following passage constructs a sharp division between percipient subject and objective world:
I become a spherical reflecting eye moving through the wilderness and ingesting it. Destroyer of the wilderness, I move through the land cutting a devouring path from horizon to horizon. There is nothing from which my eye turns, I am all that I see. (1974: 84)
The detached, disembodied subject here depicted is an expression of the acosmic Cartesian ego. 6 This is evident in the passage's allusion to the Enlightenment's privileging of vision in its equation of 'eye' and 'I', and in its perversion of the cogito ergo sum proposition in the phrase 'I am all that I see'. Howeveri rather than asserting the transparency of perception and therefore the immediacy of the subject's relationship with a world of objects, this passage exposes the appropriative dimension of this relationship and therefore the illusory nature of the ego's detachment from the world. As is apparent in the assertion 'I am all that I see', the construction of an apparently apodictic subjectivity is dependent on the inner self's appropriation of otherness in the world. In order to imagine itself into being, the subject has to distinguish itself from a world of objects. And, as should be apparent from the preceding section of this chapter, this is achieved by reducing the other to its object through intentional acts of consciousness, that is, by transforming it in terms of the system 87 of intelligibility which the subject brings to this visual encounter. From my discussion it should be clear that the exposure of the Cartesian configuration of the coloniser-colonised relationship in the above passage is aimed at rejecting the notion of transparent perception and, instead, showing that this relationship is a conflictual one in which the subject-as- coloniser asserts its apparent autonomy by denying the difference of the colonised-as-object through intending it and thereby assigning it an identity which is related to a sense-making system that can be located in a particular cultural and historical moment. If, as Coetzee argues in "The Novel Today", history 'erects itself' from relations such as this one, it should follow that in "Narrative" colonial history is revealed to be rooted in mis-perception and the elision of alterity. Indeed, the above excerpt from "Narrative" implies that the sequences of events which constitute colonial history proceed from the interactions with a.world of a subjectivity that is structurally dependent on the totalising violation of otherness for its self- sufficiency. It would seem, then, that Coetzee's view of colonial history corresponds closely with Levinas's notion of history as "an identification of the same", or "a relationship between men [that] ignores a position of the I before the other in which the other remains transcendent with respect to [the subject]" (1991: 40, 52). At the most fundamental level, the very experiences which form the events that comprise history, in this conception, are grounded in a refusal of responsibility for the other. In what follows of this section of the chapter, I shall establish that just such an understanding of history emerges from the exposure in "Narrative" of the intentional and protentional-retentional structures which mediate experience. However, it is first necessary to distinguish between some recent theories of history. 88 2.3.1 History and Narrative
Theorists of history such as Hayden White (1973; 1980) and Louis Mink (1978) focus on the relation between narrative and the 'real' world. Their argument is that 'reality' is contingent and that it is invested with form by narrative. According to White, it is the narrative dimension of the historical account which endows 'reality' "with form and thereby makes it desirable, imposing upon its processes the formal coherency that only stories possess" (1980: 23). In its representation of 'reality', narrative thus distorts or falsifies the world and offers an "escape" from 'reality' (see Carr, 1986: 15-16). 7 And, since narrative structure is a feature of historiography, this form of writing is therefore incapable of constatively representing 'reality'. In explicating the distinction between historical narratives, annals and chronicles, White emphasises the transformative and fantastical elements of historiography:
Unlike the annals, the reality that is represented in the historical narrative, in 'speaking itself,' speaks to us, summons us from afar (this 'afar' is the land of forms), and displays to us a formal coherency that we ourselves lack. The historical narrative, as against the chronicle, reveals to us a world that is putatively 'finished,' done with, over, and yet not dissolved, not falling apart. In this world, reality wears the mask of a meaning, the completeness and fullness of which we can only imagine, never experience. Insofar as historical stories can be completed, can be given narrative closure, can be shown to have had a plot all along, they give to reality the odor of the ideal. This is why the plot of a historical narrative is always an embarrassment and has to be presented as 'found' in the events rather than put there by narrative techniques. (1980: 24)
Instead of being continuous with experience, this writing appears to be discontinuous from experience. Owing to its grounding in narrative, then, historical discourse's truth claims, its epistemic pretensions, must be called into question. White thus conceives of narrative form as a literary feature, a structure which is retrospectively imposed upon 89 contingent 'reality' by an aesthetic endeavour which bears no direct relation to that 'reality'. The historian, or for that matter the novelist, introduces something new to a contingent world. In the following series of questions, White emphatically rejects the notion that narrativity can serve as "a paradigm of the form which reality itself displays to a 'realistic' consciousness":
The notion that sequences of real events possess the formal attributes of the stories we tell about imaginary events could only have its origin in wishes, daydreams, reveries. Does the world really present itself to perception in the form of well-made stories, with central subjects, proper beginnings, middles, and ends, and a coherence that permits us to see 'the end' in every beginning? Or does it present itself more in the forms that the annals and chronicle suggest, either as mere sequence without beginning or end or as sequences of beginnings that only terminate and never conclude? And does the world, even the social world, ever really come to us as already narrativized, already 'speaking itself' from beyond the horizon of our capacity to make scientific sense of it? Or is the fiction of such a world, a world capable of speaking itself and of displaying itself as a form of a story, necessary for the establishment of that moral authority without which the notion of a specifically social reality would be unthinkable? (1980: 27)
White's argument concerning the aesthetic nature of narrative and the way in which this dimension of historical writing compromises historical discourse's truth claims is undoubtedly valuable. However, the fact that he locates narrative specifically in writing leads to an absolute distinction between the coherence of the literary production and the inchoate nature of everyday experience. Indeed, it is this distinction which Carr contests when he asserts "the narrative character of experience", and contends that "configuration inheres in experience itself" (1986: 45). Carr posits a narrative structure to human existence and endeavours to uncover "narrative features of everyday experience and action" and "a certain community of form between 'life' and written narratives" (1986: 16). In constructing his argument, he proceeds along 90 typically phenomenological lines by positing a "pre-theoretical" and "pre-thematic" awareness of the historical past in culture, that is, an awareness not "informed by the cognitive interest of a discipline like history but belonging to 'ordinary' experience", an awareness which informs such experience "even when we are not explicitly thinking about [the past]" (1986: 18). In other words, he argues that, on a subliminal level, our experience of the present is conditioned by this pre-theoretical and pre-thematic awareness of the historical past; it serves as a "'background' for present experience" (1986: 18). Since I shall use Carr's argument to explain the conception of time and history postulated in "Narrative", it is necessary to consider the way in which he develops his contentions concerning the individual's pre-theoretical and pre-thematic awareness of the past by drawing on Husserl's description of time- consciousness (1964a). According to Husserl, the experience of time may be compared to the experience of space (1964a: 52). Carr summarises his argument on the perception of space as follows:
To see a thing is to see it against a spatial background which extends behind it and away from it and from which it stands out. Seeing always 'takes in' this background as well as the particular object seen; that is, corresponding to the horizon is a horizon- consciousness that belongs to every perception. Just as there is no object without background (and no background without object; the two notions are correlative), so there is no perceptual consciousness of space which does not include horizon-consciousness. (1986: 21 - 22)
Using space as a metaphor, Carr then explains that "the temporal is experienced by us as a kind of 'field' like the visual field: the present is its focus and the just-past forms the background against which it stands out" (1986: 22; cf. Husserl, 1964a: 52). The individual's experience of the present is thus mediated by his/her retention of the past (cf. Husserl, 1964a: 50 - 59). (It is important not to confuse the involuntary process of retention with the willed act of recollection. The former belongs to all 91 experience and constitutes the present, whereas the latter is a volitional act which, as Carr states, renders "present something that is not present" (1986: 22; cf. Husserl, 1964a: 57-59).) Furthermore, according to Husserl, the experiencer's consciousness of the present is also affected by his/her protention, that is, subliminal anticipation of the future (1964a: 58, 76 - 78). As with retention, protention is not planned: it is a part of all temporal experience.. Moreover, it also plays a significant part in constituting the present, since its forward reference means that both present and past are always experienced as a function of the future. Carr explains this point as follows:
Since in acting we protend or intend the future goal, rather than just picturing it, there is a sense in which it occupies the center of our concern in action and reflects back upon and determines the present and past. There is indeed something quasi-retrospective about action, as if we were located at the end and from its point of view arranged and organized the present. (1986: 38)
The corollary, here, is that in the absence of past and future, there can be no conception of a present (see Carr, 1986: 29). An important implication of the configured nature of temporal experience described by Husserl and developed by Carr is that the individual does not experience time as a Bergsonian duree pure or flow of duration: "A duration", says Husserl, "is not imaginable, or better, is not positable unless it is posited in a temporal nexus, unless the intentions of the temporal nexus are there" (1964a: 77). Owing to the complex interplay between consciousness and world initiated by his/her "protentional and retentional gaze which spans future and past" (Carr, 1986: 24), the individual experiences time as a temporal configuration. Clearly, this argument concerning the structured nature of pre- reflective experience diverges from White's view that the events addressed by the historiographer are chaotic in nature (see Carr, 1986: 15ff.). Similarly, it contests Ricoeur's related contention that "the ideas of beginning, middle, and end are not 92 taken from experience. They are not features of some real action but the effects of the ordering of the poem" (1984: 39). 8 If, as these commentators agree, one of the central features of narrative is the relation of beginning to middle to end, then the temporal configuration constituted by protention-retention is itself a narrative of sorts. Indeed, the temporal closure generated by protention-retention can only be expressed in terms of a beginning, middle and end. The concomitant implication, then, is that the individual's experience of reality is mediated by narrativity. In the act of perception, protention-retention transforms events and entities, which in themselves are unstructured, into a narrative order by yoking them together and directing them towards a future. The question which raises itself at this point is whether the subject is the author of the story formed by the interplay between its consciousness and contingent events. In this regard, Carr's contention that "Narrative requires narration; and [that] this activity is not just a recounting of events but a recounting informed by a certain kind of superior knowledge" is important (1986: 59). He proceeds to demonstrate that, owing to the principle of protention which frames the present and sets it off against a retained past, the subject is able to adopt an "anticipated future-retrospective point of view on the present" which approximates the position of hindsight which the story- teller assumes in relation to his/her narrative:
The essence of the reflective and deliberative stance or activity is to anticipate the future and lay out the whole action as a unified sequence of steps and stages, as required by the envisaged end. This prospective- retrospective principle of organization, though it does not literally eliminate the noise or 'static,' does permit us to distinguish the relevant and useful from the intrusive, and allows us to push the extraneous into the background. This capacity to attend to what counts is like the author's principle of selection. (1986: 60)
It would seem to follow logically from this argument that the subject's ability to organise the present with reference to a 93 protentional future (which far from being open is largely determinate) makes of it the author of its life-story. However, such a conclusion would be premised on the Cartesian assumption that the subject-as-author, rather than being situated in culture, transcends it. According to Heidegger, the subject's 'being-in-the-world' is a "thrownness" -- that is, it is thrown without personal choice and no previous knowledge into a world which was there before it and will be there after it (1962: 174, 223 - 224, 321, 329-330). In other words, the relationship between the subject and the world is not one of causality and antecedence: instead of constructing the world, the world constructs the subject. Knowledge of the world is therefore not separable from being in the world. By implication, then, the individual's determinate expectations of the future arise out of a being-in-the-world. And a necessary consequence of the fact that these expectations generate the individual's protentional forward reference which shapes experience, is that the outlines of the story of his/her life both pre-exist and outlive him/her: they are not made ex nihilo, but are rather found by him/her when s/he enters the world. In this regard, Carr comments as follows on the view of Alasdair Maclntyre that the social world consists of roles which predate and outlast the individual (see Maclntyre, 1984: 204 - 225): "Human existence is to be understood as a matter of assuming and acting out the parts determined by the already existing repertoire of roles, finding oneself caught up in already ongoing stories -- including one's life story" (Carr, 1986: 84). At best, according to Maclntyre, the individual can only ever be a "co-author" of his/her narrative (1984: 213, 220- 221), a narrative in which s/he is, willy-nilly, entangled. To the extent that such stories are of the world, then, they are not individual or transcendental but communal. The paradox, of course, is that the notion of a unified and unitary subjectivity is entirely dependent on these public stories, since the latter provide the narrative continuity that enables the 1 subject to relate itself to a past and future, and thereby gain a sense of coherence and autonomy. Husserl argues, in this, regard, that the ego "constitutes himself for himself in, so to speak, 94 the unity of a 'history'" (1977: 75), that is, a story which the community constructs and which the 'I' then tells itself. It seems clear, therefore, that the interplay between the individual consciousness and pre-existent flux which occurs in the moment of perception leads not to an original narrative, but one which is informed by the basic presuppositions which the community has regarding itself, its future, and therefore its past. It is this 'worldliness' of the subject's narrative, its centredness in an ethnos, that is emphasised in "Narrative". In the next subsection of this chapter, I shall show how Coetzee's text foregrounds the violent and totalising nature of the narrative which is generated by the interaction between European consciousness and world in the colonial context. I shall also argue that Coetzee's depiction of this process of narrativisation in his portrayal of Jacobus Coetzee's contact with the Southern African interior constitutes a profoundly meta-representational exposure of the fact that realist fiction does not represent an immediate encounter between European subject and colonial space, but one that has always already been narratively mediated.
2.3.2 Representing History: Supplementarity and Rivalry
J.M. Coetzee's attempt to represent the coloniser's temporal mediation of colonial space emerges in the examples of Jacobus Coetzee's perception of the African terrain discussed earlier. In these examples it is evident that, in intending that which he sees, Jacobus Coetzee protends for it a future in the present of perception and, in the process, transforms unordered colonial space by giving it a "prefigurative order" (see Franklin, 1979: 27). So, for example, instead of seeing 'wilderness', he sees orchards, instead of a river, a channel of trade. Quite clearly, he indexes the world according to a specific set of purposes. In Heideggerian language, rather than adopting an attitude of "letting be" towards what he observes and thereby allowing it s total, autonomous being in itself (1956: 333-334; 1966), Jacobus Coetzee apprehends it as an, object which is "present-to-hand", that is, in terms of a scheme of human use (Heidegger, 1962: 95- 95 102). And, since the scheme of use in question is a capitalist and European one, the suggestion is that, in the moment of observation, Jacobus Coetzee codifies African space in line with a Euro-expansionist, capitalist future. For this coloniser figure, the future consummation of the colonial project and with it the victory of European order in Africa is always extant in the moment of observation. The act of seeing, then, projects European hegemony into the future -- hence Jacobus Coetzee's boast that his journey implicates the 'discovered' world in history: "Every territory through which I march with my gun becomes a territory cut loose from the past and bound to the future" (1974: 85). Upon being 'bound to the future' in this way, the raw colonial matter, which is contingent and unapproachable on its own terms, becomes part of a larger pattern and process and accordingly gains significance. The aesthetic nature of Jacobus Coetzee's mode of perception thus narrativises Africa, that is, it implicates Africa in the European plot of colonial history. (It should already be clear that this narrative is informed by the basic presuppositions which the community in question has regarding itself, its future, and its past, and that it therefore pre-exists Jacobus Coetzee.) Once narrativised in this fashion, Africa becomes a term in a plot which is highly deterministic, because the syncopation of time which occurs with the conflation of present and future in European time-consciousness prospectively determines the course of history in predicating a fixed, teleological line of development. Since there can be no deviation from this narrative line, all possibility of change is eliminated and history becomes a relatively simple affair, an inexorably advancing narrative which seeks its own end, that is, its telos -- the realisation of imperial intention in Africa. Coetzee's representation of the colonial encounter thus lays bare the subject's protentional-retentional grasp of a world of objects. It exposes the temporal mediation which takes place /at the point of contact between European consciousness and African matter. This representational strategy is, of course, a deeply meta-representational one since, by employing it, the text 96 portrays the process through which Africa is temporally configured by the European subject rather than the emplotted order which results from this mediation. In "The Novel Today", the discussion which includes Coetzee's comment that history proceeds from the oppositional structure of social relations elucidates the meta-representational issues here at stake. It is
in the course of this discussion that Coet . zee draws his distinction between a mode of writing which 'supplements' history by "depending on the model of history" for "its principal structuration", and another which 'rivals' history by "occupy[ing] an autonomous place". The latter "operates in terms of its own procedures and issues" and, in the process, is able to "show up the mythic status of history" (1988: 2-3). In terms of this distinction, "Narrative" falls into the latter category. Instead of unquestioningly representing the configured sequence of events which constitutes the plot of history, and thus occupying a secondary or supplementary relation to this plot, it endeavours to represent that interplay between subject-centred consciousness and world which generates this sequence. In so doing, "Narrative" distinguishes itself from realist fiction which, in propagating the illusion of transparent perception, and thereby disguising both the intentionality and protentionality of the subject's consciousness, conceals this interplay and, accordingly, presents as natural and given the order which emanates from it. So, for example, Defoe's Robinson Crusoe supplements history by inscribing a seemingly transcendental subject and thereby disguising not only the depiction of the supposed island-wilderness as possession but also the development to colony which it undergoes in the course of the novel. Given the nature of the telos of this transformation, it follows that in this novel realism occludes the way in which colonial space is narrativised by European history. Coetzee's choice of a historical personage as the protagonist of "Narrative", self-reflexively thematises the relationship of rivalry which he endeavours to construct between this text and history. His representation of the colonial encounter thus invites, even insists upon, being compared with 97 the historical record of Jacobus Coetzee's expedition to Namaqualand. Indeed, two 'historical' accounts of this expedition ara included in the text (in the 'Afterword' and 'Appendix' respectively), and thus coexist alongside J.M. Coetzee's fictionalisation of it. 9 When juxtaposed, it is clear that these 'historical' accounts are both informed by a single, inclusive, internally uncontradictory line of action which leads inexorably to the telos of European success in Africa:
On the fifth [day] he emerged upon a flat and grassy plain, the land of the Great Namaqua. He parleyed with their leaders, assuring them that his only intention was to hunt elephants and reminding them that he came under the protection of the Governor. Pacified by this intelligence they allowed him to pass (1974: 128-129); Arriving thus among the Great Namaquas the Narrator soon remarked that his coming was viewed by them not without suspicion, they appearing in large numbers nothing loth to tell him that his arrival little pleased them and that among them he was not without danger to his Person; but upon giving them to know that he had set out with permission from his Honour the Governor solely to shoot elephants, without having any other intention, and upon making demonstration of his weapons, they disposed themselves more peaceably and allowed him to pursue his expedition further northwards through their land. (1974: 132)
By contrast, the representation of this encounter contained in the section of the text which is presented as Jacobus Coetzee's 'narrative' is not invested with a sense of European mastery over colonial experience. Initially at least, unlike the two versions of the official account, it fails to represent a European subject acting upon and predicating what are ultimately docile objects. Instead, through the interpolation of a lengthy section dealing with Jacobus Coetzee's reception, sojourn with, and eventual expulsion by the Namaquas, J.M. Coetzee defers the telos of this narrative, namely European victory in Africa. As I have argued, the scenarios which Jacobus Coetzee imagines during his meeting with the Khoi are designed to show that he expects them to behave in a manner which confirms the identity of barbarous savagery with which he has displaced their 98 dreadful anonymity. Differently put, he expects them to respond in a way that conforms to the narrative that is generated by his protentional projection of European hegemony into the future, that is, by either adopting the position of submissive colonial objects or behaving like 'savages'. Coetzee's introduction of these scenarios into his description of this colonial encounter thus lays bare the way in which the expectations generated by the European subject's protentional-retentional grasp of time seek to determine the future course of events. However, in Coetzee's description of this meeting, the protentional future proves not to be determinate. It is disrupted in a way which completely disorients the subject. So, for instance, the Khoi do not provide the display of submission that affirms Jacobus Coetzee's knowledge of the supremacy of his civilisation (and which is evident in both the above historical accounts). Instead, they act contrarily to his expectations and therefore undermine them. Thus, when Jacobus Coetzee addresses the Namaquas "as befitted negotiations with possibly unfriendly powers" (1974: 71),"they merely become bored and drift "out of [his] firm but friendly line of vision" (1974: 71); when he anticipates an attack, he finds that they display "no organized antagonism" (1974: 74); when he thinks that they probably regard him as a god (1974: 75) and pictures himself as "an equestrian statue" (1974: 77), he finds that they call him "Long-Nose" (1974: 77); and, instead of the "greybeard chieftain" (1974: 70) he expects, he finds that the Namaquas have "only perfunctory reverence for authority" (1974: 77) and direct him to a dying man quite incapable of according him the ceremonious welcome that he expects. Finally, the epic flight which he envisages in one of his scenarios, becomes an abject scramble in which he is debased to a caricature of the glorious, intrepid "tamer of the wild" (1974: 82) that he imagines himself to be: "Held in position by Klawer I evacuated myself heroically over the tailgate" (1974: 80). Jacobus Coetzee's disorientation in the face of a radical difference which resists being reduced to pre-existing concepts approximates the experience of the sublime. Indeed, Coetzee 99 introduces the notion of infinity into his depiction of this colonial encounter. In this regard, it is important to note that the Namaquas cannot be contained by Jacobus Coetzee's idea of them. It will be remembered that, for Levinas, it is precisely the radical excession of the other which 'concretely produces' the idea of infinity and that it is this which constitutes a face-to-face encounter (see 1991: 50). By implication, Jacobus Coetzee's inability to foreclose on the alterity of the Namaquas by establishing with them a relation of adequation indicates that he is in relation with an absolute exteriority, with something which is nothing that can be defined and which, indeed, absolves itself from the relationship. Surprised by an exteriority which cannot be integrated into the domain of the same, Jacobus Coetzee is neither able to intend the Namaquas nor protend for them a future. This 'unhoming' experience amounts to denarrativisation. It is for this reason that this explorer, who requires a temporal world for the realisation of his imperial goals, one in which he can set teloi and commit himself to a certain continuity over time, is reduced to a wholly uncharacteristic, passive and inert position in this section of the text. Unable to protend a future and thereby posit a narrative relation between past, present, and future, he cannot act. It would seem, then, that Coetzee not only is at pains to show the situatedness in discourse of the intentional and protentional-retentional structures of subject-centred consciousness, but also to indicate that they may be transcended in the face-to-face encounter. Since these structures install those contestatory relations from which colonial history proceeds, it follows that Jacobus Coetzee's experience of the face, which changes his relations with others and therefore the manner in which he structures self, amounts to a transcendence of history. Indeed, according to Levinas, "When man approaches the Other he is uprooted from history" (1991: 52). The implications of Coetzee's portrayal of the colonial encounter as a relationship which produces the idea of infinity are manifold. Initially, at least, I shall limit my discussion to an examination of this depiction's meta-representational 100 purpose. In this regard, it is clear that the objective is not simply to dislocate the telos of the official historical version of this encounter. After all, this conclusion is denied by the simple fact that this telos is eventually re-installed by Jacobus Coetzee's genocide of the Namaqua tribe. Instead of teleological dislocation, then, it is more likely that Coetzee's aim in dramatising the deferment of the future protended by his protagonist's determinate expectations is to direct the reader's attention to the totalising nature of protentional narrative and narrative modes of representation. By focusing on the disruption of the determinate expectations produced by the subject's forwardly-directed apprehension of time, Coetzee's text intimates (without representing) that which the temporal consciousness of the European subject seeks to elide and which, as is suggested by the presence of the putatively official accounts of this colonial encounter in the text, has been elided by the narrative structure of historiography: namely the alterity of the indigene. As a result of this disruption, then, the text foregrounds the cognitive function of European narrative in the colonial context, that is, the way in which it renders colonial entities 'knowable' (and therefore unknowable) by effacing their otherness. Coetzee's text's rivalry of history is apparent not only in the representation of the interaction between subject-centred consciousness and colonial entities, but also, on a meta- representational plane, in its relation to writing which supplements history. Once again this meta-representational dimension of the novel is hinted at by the overtly literary nature of the scenarios which reveal the expectations that Jacobus Coetzee brings to his contact with the Namaquas. The conflation of history and fiction achieved by means of the self- consciously literary description of this encounter is also apparent in the ambivalent presentation of Jacobus Coetzee. On the one hand, set as it is against the historical record of the colonial encounter, Coetzee's representation emphasises the fact that this character is based on a historical personage. On the other hand, the incongruous use of the adverb 'heroically' in the description of his flight from the Namaquas, his reduction from 101 masterful hero to incontinent buffoon, evokes the Cartesian hero installed by Robinson Crusoe. Indeed, J.M. Coetzee's description of his protagonist's encounter with colonial matter is intertextually related to the structural movement of the adventure novel which I discussed in the previous chapter: that is, the hero's penetration of colonial space and then, after his Cartesian mastery of 'new world' phenomena, his return home as master of two worlds. 10 By dint of intertextual allusion, then, Coetzee evokes a novelistic mode which clearly supplements colonial history. Accordingly, Jacobus Coetzee's anti-heroic, anti-Cartesian loss of control over a world which he wishes to dominate by 'knowing', should be read as a disruption of the return-of-the-hero-as-master-of-two-worlds topos, and as an exposure of the way in which the adventure novel, by means of this structural topos, supplements colonial history by encoding its telos. Coetzee's eschewal of an aesthetic of supplementarity is also evident in the way in which his complication of the above- mentioned topos foregrounds the coloniser-figure's experience of the sublime. In the first chapter of this thesis, I indicated that this experience occupies a peripheral position in Robinson Crusoe: I argued that Robinson Crusoe, after being initially horrified by the sublimity of the island wilderness and assuming the aspect of a figure of endurance, becomes a figure of achievement. The novel's focus is on the way in which its protagonist successfully appropriates the alien terrain of the island by means of European systems of knowledge, and through this mastery of nature asserts his identity. Instead of repeating this pattern, "Narrative" reconfigures it in a way which stresses that which it obscures: Jacobus Coetzee sets out as a figure of achievement but, following his failure to erase traces of difference with his European systems of knowledge, is reduced to a figure of endurance unable to arrive at the certainty of an apodictic subjectivity that can ground knowledge. Significantly, this experience comprises the central section of the text. Only after a lengthy description of his encounter and sojourn with the Namaquas does the text, in its concluding 103 history's status as a construct, a product of the intentionality and protentionality of subject-centred consciousness or, in Coetzee's terms, the oppositional structure of human relations (1988: 2-3) but, just as importantly, it constantly indicates that which exceeds history, and thereby attempts to inscribe in the text a 'movement of infinition' which will enable it to rival history and the fiction which supplements history.
2.3.3 Transcending History
It may be argued, however, that Jacobus Coetzee's reassertion of an apparently autonomous subjectivity together with the resultant restoration of the telos of the plot of colonial history, means that "Narrative" does eventually supplement this plot. After all, this recentring of subjectivity reinstates the return-of- the-hero-as-master-of-two-worlds topos (as is, of course, always proleptically evident in Coetzee's presentation of this section of his text as a travel journal). My contention in this regard is that the contrary is in fact the case: for this text to sustain its rivalry of history, it is necessary, paradoxically, that it depict the reinstatement of this telos. Were the text to portray its complete dislocation, it would be forced to represent the other and, as I argued in the first chapter of this study, such attempts inevitably foreclose on the alterity of the other by adequating it with the same. In this regard, Coetzee's strategy differs from the post-colonial topoi of rehabilitating alterior histories and rewriting the 'master texts' of the metropole in that these usually construct the other in opposition to the centre. Such representations of alterity, as I have pointed out, are always already implied by the centre, and therefore not truly other. It is precisely this representational problem which Coetzee circumvents in "Narrative" by representing the reinstallation of the telos of the narrative of colonial history. Having already indicated the disproportion between Jacobus Coetzee's idea of the Khoi and the ideatum, his representation of the restoration of the colonial plot serves to underscore this restoration's elision of an alterity which always 102 section, recount his subsequent annihilation of the tribe. Owing to this transposition of the elements which comprise the narrative pattern of the return-of-the-hero-as-master-of-two- worlds topos, it is not the subject's mastery of Africa which dominates Coetzee's text, but its experience of the sublime. This foregrounding of that which is either marginalised or completely absent in adventure novels indicates a disjunction between the contingent space of the 'African wilderness' and the imported schema of European order. For a moment, the resistance to reification of the Namaquas, to whom Jacobus Coetzee refers as being "representative of that out there" (1974: 86), transforms the plot of colonial history from one that represents Africa as a realm of imperial success to one that speaks of an-other Africa which blocks artificial, European designs and which denaturalises the seemingly seamless connection between the verbal construct 'Africa', as constituted by colonialist discourse, and its referent. The consequence of this frustration of European intention is that the appearance of totality produced by the teleology of colonial history and supplemented by adventure fiction disintegrates and, in the process, the text intimates the existence of that which has been misrepresented and repressed, namely the apparently unconfined world in which the Namaquas live. Jacobus Coetzee describes this complex plural 'reality' as "an immense world of delight" (1974: 113) without polity: "What evidence was there, indeed, that they had a way of life of any coherence? I had lived in their midst and I had seen no government, no laws, no religion, no arts" (1974: 104). It is significant that it is only after he has failed to comprehend them narratively -- failed, that is, to "find a place for them in [his] history" (1974: 103) -- that Jacobus Coetzee describes the Namaquas in this way. Coetzee's focus on the process through which the European subject's experience of Africa is mediated by narrative structures is thus instrumental in asserting a disjunction between the plot of colonial history and an alterior Africa. It is important to note that this disjunction does not only emphasise the aesthetic nature of perception and, by extension, 104 exceeds the plot of history, and which the text has carefully refrained from attempting to represent. So, in stressing the totalising endeavour of colonial history, the text emphasises an infinite surplus which is the condition of impossibility for totalities (cf. Levinas, 1991: 80). In this subsection of the chapter, I shall therefore show that Coetzee's representation of the reinstallation of the plot of European success in Africa in Jacobus Coetzee's act of prospective plotting and S.J. Coetzee's retrospective plotting enables the text to further foreground an absence which it has neither presented nor represented. It paradoxically allows Coetzee to indicate an absolute other without compromising its radical exteriority. And, as my discussion of this strategy proceeds, it will become clear that "Narrative" does not simply expose the embeddedness in discourse of the intentional and protentional-retentional structures of subject-centred consciousness: although indicating that these structures determine the nature and course of the subject's interactions with others, it also suggests that they are not immanent, that it is possible to establish an ethical relation with that alterity which exceeds them. I have already argued that Coetzee's depiction of his protagonist's encounter with the Namaquas alludes to the Levinasian face to face. This, together with the ethical implications of this relation, is further evident in his description of the reassertion of an apparently autonomous subjectivity through which the telos of the colonial plot is reinstated. Since a characteristic of the face-to-face encounter is its immediacy, it cannot be represented in the novel without being belied by this genre's economy of betrayal. (In this regard, it should also be noted that the relation with the face transcends cognition and that Jacobus Coetzee, who is the narrator of this section of "Narrative", is therefore not in a position to constatively represent this dimension of his contact with the Namaquas.) As is already evident in his depiction of Jacobus Coetzee's denarrativisation, his 'uprooting' from history, Coetzee negotiates this problem by portraying the effect 105 of the encounter on Jacobus Coetzee. He thus implies a cause by describing its effect. After his expulsion by the Namaquas and during his reassertion of an ostensibly autonomous subjectivity, Jacobus Coetzee ponders the principal problem raised by his "sojourn" with, as opposed to captivity by, the Namaquas (1974: 71), namely that they have effectively resisted him, indeed have played a role in his metamorphosis from actant to a figure of endurance, but have done so without opposing him:
They had introduced poison into me. Yet could I be sure I had been poisoned? Had I not perhaps been sickening for a long time, or simply been unused to Hottentot fare? . . . But how could savages be unfamiliar with treachery and poison? But were they true savages, these Namaqua Hottentots? Why had they nursed me? Why had they let me go? Why had they not killed me? Why had their torments been so lacking in system and even enthusiasm? (1974: 103)
This problem is further stressed by his observation on the lack of any "organized antagonism" (1974: 74) towards him, and his complaint that the Namaquas treated him as a mere "irrelevance", "simply another accident" (1974: 104). The text's insistence on, but significant withholding of any explanation for, the enigmatic absence of force in the Namaquas' relations with Jacobus Coetzee indicates that his story is not a captivity narrative and that his puzzling loss of power, and with it the ability to violate the tribespeople, should not simply be read, as it so often is, as the completion of "the Hegelian process by which power inevitably shifts from the master to the servant" (Zamora, 1986: 4). 11 Instead, the novel suggests, Jacobus Coetzee's deprivation of power is a function of his encounter with the resistance of a face and not a force. It will be remembered that in the previous chapter I explained that, according to Levinas, the subject's contact with that which it has always denied, namely the infinitude of the face, prevents it from exercising force. He argues that "Violent action does not consist in being in a relationship with the other; it is in fact an action where one is as though one were alone" (1987a: 18), and 106 elaborates as follows:
In other words, what characterizes violent action, what characterizes tyranny, is that one does not face what the action is being applied to. To put it more precisely: it is that one does not see the face in the other, one sees the other freedom as a force, savage; one identifies the absolute character of the other with force. The face, the countenance, is the fact that a reality is opposed to me, but as it were in its way of being, ontologically opposed. It is what resists me by its opposition and not what is opposed to me by its resistance. . . . It is not that to which I oppose myself, but what is opposed to me. It is an opposition inscribed in its presence before me. It does not at all follow my intervention; it opposes itself to me insofar as it turns to me. The opposition of the face, which is not the opposition of a force, is not a hostility. It is a pacific opposition, but one where peace is not a suspended war or a violence simply contained. On the contrary, violence consists in ignoring the face of a being, avoiding the gaze, and catching sight of an angle whereby the no inscribed on a face by the very fact that it is a face becomes a hostile or submissive force. (1987a: 19)
The Levinasian notion of the face which resists the subject by its opposition rather than opposing it by its resistance explains the paradox of Jacobus Coetzee's strong sense of his subservience to the Namaquas despite not having been forcibly dominated by them. It is not the Namaquas who master him -- after all, they treat him as an 'irrelevance'. It is their otherness which resists him and which renders him responsible for, and so subject to, them. And, owing to this ethical responsibility, he is unable to exercise violence against them. It is for this reason that the telos of colonial history is dislodged during his encounter with the Namaquas. As I have argued, colonial history 'erects itself' from relations of contestation and is therefore grounded in the violation of alterity. Accordingly, the resistance of the imperialist subject by a face, rather than force, makes it restructure its subjectivity in terms of that which it has hitherto elided and, in the process, undermines the conflictual structure of history. 108 force, Jacobus Coetzee would be able to ignore the face and the ethical responsibility concomitant on recognising it. The relational mode thus constituted would restore the conflictual structure which informs colonial history. It follows from my argument that Coetzee's pointed description of his protagonist's reassertion of a model of subjectivity which is structured in relation to a force implies the denial of that which the text cannot represent, namely the face. In turn, the text intimates the possibility of a relation which in its recognition of difference is 'unrelating' and therefore ethical. The text also suggests that this relation, whose installation constitutes a transcendence of those discourses in which the subject is situated, is not underpinned by the subject-object dualism. Indeed, Jacobus Coetzee's attempt to construct the Namaquas as a force presupposes the absence of this dualism thus far in his encounter with them. It is noteworthy in this regard that it is precisely the subject-object dualism that is transcended in Levinas's conception of the face to face (see, for example, 1981: 145-150). These issues are raised, in the passage quoted, by Jacobus Coetzee's willingness to submit to what seems to be an alternative, Khoi narrative, a willingness which appears to suggest a readiness to forgo western forms. His fantasies of narrativisation apparently involve a reversal of roles in which the Namaquas adopt the position of subject and reduce him to an object, a character, in their plot of history. Ultimately, however, these 'omnipotent fantasies' suggest Jacobus Coetzee's authorial desire to reassert the subject-object epistemological mode in which colonial history is grounded, and thus create (in the sense of protend) a future. Moreover, their 'omnipotence' refers not to his authority as author, but to that of the mediating role of discourse. After all, the fact that the narratives are generically identical in their representation of the indigene to the various scenarios which determine Jacobus Coetzee's expectations upon first encountering the Namaquas, exposes their origin in colonialist discourse. They are versions of the standard representation of the indigene as barbarian in 107 Jacobus Coetzee's frantic desire to construct the Namaquas as savages, and therefore as a force, may also be read in terms of the ethical notion of an authority without power which stems from 'the opposition of the face, which is not the opposition of a force'. In the above quotation, Levinas describes violence as an avoidance of the face through the construction of a force. Further, Zygmunt Bauman explains that the responsibility for the other which is concomitant on a recognition of otherness is accompanied by a desire to evade that responsibility. Indeed, responsibility, he says, feverishly seeks "its own denial" and the temptation "to ask 'Am I my brother's keeper?' is inscribed in being one" (1993: 88). It is just such a 'feverish' denial of responsibility, which connotes a reassertion of autonomous subjectivity, that emerges in Jacobus Coetzee's desperate longing to be killed by the Namaquas. Tellingly, this wish for death is depicted not as a wish for self-extermination, but as a desire for renarrativisation and for the certitude that this would bring in terms of enabling him to re-affirm an independent and free identity through 'knowing' the Namaquas and thereby denying their otherness. Thus he creates the following colonial fantasies in which he is a term in a Khoi 'history':
I would gladly have expired in battle, stabbed to the heart, surrounded by mounds of fallen foes. I would have acceded to dying of fevers, wasted in body but on fire to the end with omnipotent fantasies. I might even have consented to die at the sacrificial stake: if the Hottentots had been a greater people, a people of ritual, if I had been held until moonrise and then led through rows of silent watchers to a stake where, bound by stone-faced priests, I underwent the Arcadian ordeal of losing toenails, toes, fingernails, fingers, nose, ears, eyes, tongue, and privates, the whole performance accompanied by howls of the purest anguish and climaxing in a formal disembowelling, I might, yes, I might have enjoyed it, I might have entered into the spirit of the thing, given myself to the ritual, become the sacrifice, and died with a feeling of having belonged to a satisfying aesthetic whole, if feelingp are any longer possible at the end of such aesthetic wholes as these. (1974: 88)
If he is able to construct the Namaquas as a 'foe', that is, as a 109 frontier writing, in other words, a representation which negates the indigene by displacing the fearful anonymity of his/her face with the construction of an absolute familiarity which allows the coloniser to position himself in opposition to the indigene as force and object, and thus set in motion the differential process that will enable the coloniser to structure his identity in terms of an apparent autonomy. The role which these narratives create for the Namaquas thus seeks to affirm, and not challenge or restructure, a culturally-conferred rather than autonomous selfhood. The text emphasises the role of language in Jacobus Coetzee's reinstatement of a subject-object dualism that renders possible the differential process through which he can construct the face as force and thereby assert his 'autonomy'. Indeed, he resorts to the syntactical structure of European language in order to define himself in opposition to the Namaquas. This becomes evident when he sings the following ditty: "Hottentot, Hottentot, / I am not a Hottentot" (1974: 101), and tells his reader that he chooses Dutch as the medium for this exercise in self-affirmation because "It was neater in Dutch than in Nama, which still lived in the flowering-time of inflexion" (1974: 101). Since it erects divisions between subject, verb and object, the syntactical structure of the European language accommodates notions of difference more readily than does the highly inflected structure of Nama. With regard to this distinction between a syntax based on a clearly differentiated subject and object and one based on their interconnectedness, Coetzee's description of a middle-voice practice which situates itself between the active and the passive voice is of interest. According to Coetzee, middle-voice practice does not construct the sharp divisions "between subject and verb, verb and object, subject and object" that transitive and active voice syntax does (Coetzee, 1992b: 95). The implication here is that the definite division between subject and object in the Dutch language assists Jacobus Coetzee in his attempt to predicate the other and thereby establish an autonomous subjectivity. Through the differential structure of this language he is able to inscribe cultural 110 difference which displaces the radical difference of the Namaquas and enables him to deny the face, that is, to become 'indifferent' to the other. According to Levinas, it is such 'indifference' which renders violence possible. Through the construction of a form of difference which exists within the order of the same and bears no relation to an absolute exteriority, Jacobus Coetzee reduces the Namaquas to a thought. However, the ostensibly autonomous subjectivity to which this Cartesian reduction leads is, of course, belied by the fact that the thought or intentional correlate of the Namaquas is that of 'savage' and therefore grounded in colonialist discourse. Thus, despite Jacobus Coetzee's description of himself as playing "games" against "an indifferent universe" and "inventing rules" in a "world without rules" (1974: 104), he is not an auctor who creates ex nihilo. This is made further clear by the future which he protends for the Namaquas. Since his intentional grasp of the Namaquas is situated in colonialist discourse, this future is, predictably, dictated by the telos of European success in Africa. As much emerges from the fact that of the various narrative 'games' which he itemises as a possible ending for the plot of his journey of discovery, the one which he eventually 'chooses' is "to call up an expeditionary force and return in triumph to punish my depredators and recover my property" (1974: 104 - 105). So, although he describes his genocide of the Namaqua tribe in Cartesian terms, "They died the day I cast them out of my head" (1974: 113), this assertion of autonomy is negated by the deed's supplementation of colonial history. The success with which Jacobus Coetzee restores the telos of the colonial plot by reducing the Khoi to an object of his intentional acts of consciousness is suggested by the stylistic features of this section of the text, in particular its collocations of subjects, objects and verbs. While this character's presence as an agent in the first section is virtually effaced, and he becomes a figure of endurance (a receptor rather than initiator in a static account in which passive constructions abound), in the second, he is a figure of 111 achievement. In fact, he constructs himself as the subject-hero of an epic account in which he reduces the Namaquas to the object of aggressive verbs. So, for example, the following citation invites the reader to read the genocide of the Khoi tribe as an epic battle in which Jacobus Coetzee is the hero: "WE DESCENDED on their camp at dawn, the hour recommended by the classic writers on warfare" (1974: 107). This section therefore constitutes a syntactical transformation of the previous one -- a rewriting of Jacobus Coetzee's encounter with the Namaquas in which he has been reconstituted as autonomous subject and from which, accordingly, all "anti-heroic distortions" have been eliminated (1974: 115). Jacobus Coetzee's choice of ending thus reinstates the Cartesian theme, and this enables him finally to return home after the manner of a Crusoe, that is, as a hero who is the master of two worlds. On the surface, then, the text now resembles novels, like Robinson Crusoe, which supplement history. Moreover, in terms of the telos of European success in Africa, it now too appears to resemble the accounts of the colonial encounter contained - in the 'official' versions of Jacobus Coetzee's expedition. My point, however, has been that this conjunction with history and the texts which supplement it is necessary if "Narrative" is to rival them. It is precisely through describing Jacobus Coetzee's reassertion of an apparently autonomous subjectivity and consequent restoration of the telos of colonial history that Coetzee is able to foreground that which exceeds this character's protentional-retentional grasp and, importantly, to do so without representing it. Accordingly, the text describes the 'move of Being' which is reinstated by Jacobus Coetzee's recuperation of a subject-centred intentionality without repeating this move. Indeed, in signalling the existence of an other that is absent because of its irreducible exteriority, and the possibility of establishing an ethical relation with this other, the text interrupts the order of the same. It indicates, that is, that the apparent totality of history is not total. This strategy of excession, which enables "Narrative" to 112 inscribe a 'movement of infinition' that rivals history, is further evident in the juxtaposition of Jacobus Coetzee's travelogue with an afterword in which S.J. Coetzee, a stereotype of the Afrikaner nationalist historian who is presented as a twentieth-century descendant of Jacobus Coetzee (see Attwell, 1993: 45), repeats his ancestor's actions by effacing all contending views from his own account of Jacobus Coetzee's expedition:
The present work ventures to present a more complete and therefore more just view of Jacobus Coetzee. It is a work of piety but also a work of history: a work of piety toward an ancestor and one of the founders of our people, a work which offers the evidence of history to correct certain of the anti-heroic distortions that have been creeping into our conception of the great age of exploration when the White man first made contact with the native peoples of our interior. (1974: 115)
By eliminating 'anti-heroic distortions' from his record, S.J. Coetzee protects the colonial plot from dissenting histories which challenge its centricity. Indeed, the structural juxtaposition of Jacobus Coetzee's putative document with that of S.J. Coetzee foregrounds the latter's elision of the explorer's sojourn with the Namaquas from his account of the expedition. Where his forebear, the frontiersman, engages in prospective plotting by mapping out future events, S.J. Coetzee, the historiographer, engages in retrospective plotting by ordering events that have already occurred (and which have already been structured). In both cases, the project is a patently aesthetic one which involves the rejection of material that does not fall into the ideal pattern of European experience in Africa. Through effacing the existence of such mordant matter which threatens the colonial plot with teleological dislocation, I2 these author figures try to reduce Africa to the uncontradictory, monologic course of the narrative of colonial history. As a result of this dual process of structuration, Jacobus Coetzee appears to be firmly reinstated as Cartesian hero, and his account is ostensibly invested with a Cartesian sense of mastery over experience or, to be more precise, a sense of European mastery 113 over colonial experience. The point which must be emphasised, however, is that Coetzee here again 'focuses', by 'looking away', on that which exceeds the colonial narrative and which therefore gives the lie to its apparently totalising course. After all, the significance of the text's juxtaposition of the 'documents' of Jacobus Coetzee and S.J. Coetzee is not simply that it foregrounds the omission of Jacobus Coetzee's 'sojourn' with the Namaquas from the totalising narrative of the latter, but that this 'sojourn' involves an encounter with the infinity of the face. In the first chapter of this thesis, I referred to the inscription in Coetzee's fiction of a tension between totality and infinity: it is just such a tension that is generated and elevated to a structural level by this juxtaposition of 'documents' in "Narrative". This tension points to a radical diachrony between the synchronic temporality of the narrative of colonial history and the time of the other. Accordingly, it indicates the absence of any correlation between the two, the fact that they cannot be brought together. In the process, the tension intimates that which the text cannot even attempt to represent. That is, it allows the text to 'focus' on the limits of the discourses of history and thereby suggest that which exceeds their enclosing power. By implication, then, this tension enables the text to signify its 'non-indifference' to the other.
2.4 The Tension Between Totality and Infinity
In my previous chapter, I indicated that one of the ways in which Coetzee's texts inscribe a tension between totality and infinity is by self-consciously insisting on the fact that their 'worldliness' prevents them from representing the other. It is precisely through an insistence on its implication that the individual text comes to signify ethically and so transcend the order of the same. I shall now support this claim with specific reference to "Narrative". In."Narrative", a self-reflexive awareness of 'worldliness' is already evident in the extent to which the parallels between 114 the travelogue and afterword sections foreground the issue of authorial autonomy and develop the metafictional debate on the supplementation and rivalry of history. These parallels indicate that, like Jacobus Coetzee, S.J. Coetzee is an author-figure and that the latter's historiographical enterprise is dictated by the telos of colonial history. Indeed, these analogies imply that the writing subject is not autonomous, that the subject and object of historical inquiry are indistinguishable, and therefore that being-in-the-world is being-in-history. S.J. Coetzee very clearly does not reconstruct the past ex nihilo; instead, his writing of history occurs within and is informed by an identifiable cultural and historical context. In the text, the analogous quality of Jacobus Coetzee and S.J. Coetzee's projects also shows that the events addressed by historiography are already narrative in character (See Carr, 1986: 16). By treating as fact an order which has been constructed by the intentionality and protentionality of the subject-centred consciousness of the western individual, and which is based on the elision of the alterity of Africa, the historiographer supplements that order. In the process, historiography hides the totalising nature of the narrative form which mediates the European subject's encounter with colonial objects -- that is, its aesthetic and cognitive function as a strategy of containment which systematises, homogenises and unifies disparate materials. And, in concealing narrative's totalising nature, historiography obscures the fact that the knowledge which this form produces is not pure and universal, but located in the cultural reduction of difference to sameness. The structural similarities between the putative documents written by Jacobus Coetzee and S.J. Coetzee suggest that iteration serves as a structural principle in "Narrative". Further evidence of a recursive structure emerges in the presentation of the text as a whole as a translation by J.M. Coetzee of the documents of his ancestor, Jacobus Coetzee, and father, S.J. Coetzee. By metaleptically infiltrating the text in this way, and thereby not only entering its genealogical line of Coetzees but also its line of authors, J.M. Coetzee prompts the 115 reader to consider whether his text is not part of the sequence of repetitions which it inscribes and, accordingly, supplements history. Indeed, Coetzee goes to great lengths to lay bare the narrative foundation of "Narrative" and therefore its use of and implication in that which it seeks to rival. This is evident in the very title of the text, which contains the word 'narrative'. More conspicuously, though, the text presents the reader with rival accounts of the same event, that is, Klawer's death, which coexist without final resolution (1974: 99-101). As Jonathan Crewe contends (1974: 91), the tension which results from these contradictory but equally plausible versions draws attention to the fictiveness of Coetzee's fiction. However, this tension also exposes the work's grounding in a narrative mode of representation, and does so by emphasising narrative's totalising nature, its inability to represent plurality. Further examples of the text's self-reflexive revelation of its dependence on plot structures are the scenarios which reveal Jacobus Coetzee's expectations on firt encountering the Khoi, his fantasies of becoming a term in a Namaqua plot, and the endings which he projects for his expedition. As I have suggested, most of these scenarios and fantasies are self-consciously literary and narrative in nature. Indeed, in the case of Jacobus Coetzee's dreams of emplotment, the text evinces a self-reflexive awareness of the irony of having a character in a narrative seek narrativisation. While foregrounding narrative's totalising nature, then, "Narrative" admits its own implication in this form and therefore the fact that it does not and cannot represent that which in being made 'known' by narrative has been rendered unknown. That is, it self-reflexively announces its knowledge that any attempt at representing the other would simply foreclose on its openness and thus amount to yet another colonisation. In so doing, it also indicates its awareness that all attempts at 'knowing' the unknown are futile in that they merely render it unknown. However, this admission of 'worldliness' is not an acknowledgement of the impossibility of rivalling history. It 116 will be remembered that in my first chapter I referred to the way in which Coetzee's texts advertise their refusal to represent otherness. In'"Narrative", it is precisely such a refusal to attempt to represent the other that is posited by this text's admission that its narrative base would preclude it from doing so. Through this admission, it advertises its refusal to attempt to represent that which it has already shown to have been excluded by the narrative of history. It announces its refusal to repeat the narrative violation of otherness and so supplement history in the way that those apparently independent texts which form its recursive structure do. By means of these strategies, then, Coetzee attempts to respond responsibly to alterity. He strives to fix Orpheus's averted gaze, rather than to use it as a means with which, in Blanchot's words, 'to bring [the obscure point of darkness] back to the light of day and to give it form, shape, and reality in the day'. The text's self-conscious meditation on its foundation in narrative thus points to its endeavour not to 'know' the unknown but to acknowledge it in its unknowability. Its refusal to attempt to represent the other enables it to do this by preserving that tension between totality and infinity which, I have argued, refrains from correlating the other with the same while still indicating its existence. Now, Husserl distinguishes between expressive, meaningful signs in which the terms are logically and necessarily related, and meaningless, indicative signs in which the terms are "not necessary but contingent" (1970: 272). In commenting on this distinction, Levinas notes that there is between the indicator and the indicated "a relation of pure extrinsicality of the one to the other, without there being anything in common, nor any 'correspondence' between them, a relation of absolute difference which is not the decrease of some intuition" (qtd in Critchley, 1992: 175). 13 In other words, the indicative relation is one which preserves rather than forecloses on difference. It is my contention that Coetzee's inscription of a tension between totality and infinity in his work - establishes an indicative relation between it and otherness. More precisely, the relation to alterity generated by this 117 tension works in terms not of adequation but of what Husserl terms "intimation", that is, the process of signification which occurs when expressions interlace with indications and thus function indicatively (1970: 276-278). 14 Significantly, unlike representation, which equates the thinking thought with that which is thought about, 'intimation' does not call for intellection. Indeed, Husserl states that "To understand an intimation is not to have conceptual knowledge of it, not to judge in the sense of asserting anything about it . . ." (1970: 277). Accordingly, the relation to alterity that is inscribed by the text's tension between totality and infinity is one not of correspondence but of absolute difference between idea and ideatum, that is, the tension generates an 'unrelating relation' of pure extrinsicality which maintains difference and renders impossible the "adequation of exteriority with interiority" (Levinas, 1991: 295). The other is therefore able to absolve itself from the relationship. Coetzee's refusal to represent, while still 'intimating', otherness has as its corollary an authorial abdication of authority. It constitutes an eschewal of the 'move of Being' that characterises representation and which is so strongly evident in Jacobus Coetzee and S.J. Coetzee's authorial projects. With regard to representation's masterful role in the integration of alterity into the same, Levinas comments as follows:
In clarity an object which is first exterior is given that is, is delivered over to him who encounters it as though it had been entirely determined by him. In clarity the exterior being presents itself as the work of the thought that receives it. Intelligibility, characterized by clarity, is a total adequation of the thinker with what is thought, in the precise sense of a mastery exercised by the thinker upon what is thought in which the object's resistance as an exterior being vanishes. This mastery is total and as though creative; it is accomplished as a giving of meaning: the object of representation is reducible to noemata. The intelligible is precisely what is entirely reducible to noemata and all of whose relations with the understanding reducible to those established by the light. In the intelligibility of representation the distinction between me and the object, between interior and exterior, is effaced. (1991: 123-124) 118 In terms of this understanding of representation, Coetzee's refusal to represent otherness means that the otherness 'intimated' by the text is not a product of the intentionality of his consciousness. It is never reduced to an object of representation. Furthermore, the suspension of the 'move of Being' concomitant on this refusal of representation in favour of the non-cognitive mode of 'intimation' enables a 'movement of infinition', without return, from same to other and this, in turn, allows the text to signify ethically and so rival history. Indeed, by way of its 'unrelating relation' to alterity, the text signifies the possibility of transcending the discourses of the order of the same. It 'intimates', that is, the possibility of a relational experience which in its purity and contingency transcends the a priori structures of intentionality and protentionality that seemingly condition the possibility of experience (see Lingis, 1981: xx-xxii). And, since these structures generate the contestatory relationships which determine the course of history, such transcendence enables the text to achieve an autonomy that allows it to rival history. The implications of the text's assertion of autonomy through its 'movement of infinition' are manifold. Being premised on its ability to 'intimate' an otherness which is radically exterior to, and therefore not an oppositional construction of, the order of the same, the text's rivalry of history is never simply implied by history or texts which supplement history. Strictly speaking, the opposition between rivalry and supplementarity which Coetzee discusses in "The Novel Today" and inscribes in all his fiction is therefore not an opposition at all. Moreover, the postulation in "Narrative" of a radical disjunction between same and other for its transcendence and rivalry of history implies that, although the novel-as-genre must be decolonised in order to signify ethically, it can only do so by not being decolonised. After all, this text succeeds in acknowledging the existence of the unknown without attempting to represent it by inscribing and self-reflexively announcing a tension between totality and infinity. As I have shown, it 'intimates' the other by disclosing a "dissonance" between narrative and the alterity of 119 that which this form purports to represent. I5 The paradox which follows from this strategy is that the text depends on the totalising nature of narrative in order to 'intimate' openness. In order to develop an anti-authoritarian aesthetic, the author relies on the authoritarian nature of representation. For Coetzee, then, the process of decolonising the novel can never be a fait accompli. It is a process which involves the negotiation of a tension between implication and transcendence: the individual text both acknowledges that it belongs to the novel tradition and opposes it, is neither completely determined by it, nor completely free of it. So, while "Narrative"'s grounding in excession means that its transcendence is not contained by an oppositional structure, it also entails that this transcendence is generated by and therefore premised on implication. These issues are self- reflexively elaborated upon in Coetzee's later fiction and will therefore be treated more fully in the subsequent chapters of this study. In the next section of this chapter, however, I shall briefly discuss an issue which is treated in somewhat more detail in "Narrative", namely the implications for the reader of the text's autonomy.
2.5 The Reader and the Autonomous Text
In tracing the possible effect on the reader of the text's 'movement of infinition', it is necessary to examine Coetzee's complex characterisation of the activity of reading. To this end, I shall show that "Narrative" self-reflexively depicts reading as a form of authorship and, accordingly, that the reading subject and its activity are implied by the text's genealogical line of authors. By means of this strategy the text politicises the act of reading by reflecting on whether the reader will supplement history like Jacobus Coetzee and S.J. Coetzee. It must be emphasised, though, that "Narrative" does' not depict his/her situatedness in the order of the same as absolute. By implying the reader, the text's genealogy of authors raises the possibility that s/he may rival history after 120 the fashion of J.M. Coetzee. It will become clear as I proceed that, while the reading subject's implication in the domain of the same divorces him/her from alterity, it also forms the condition of possibility for being surprised by the other. I have already indicated that the text identifies the reader with Jacobus Coetzee. This identification, which refutes the notion of an autonomous reading subject, is suggested by the blatantly aesthetic nature of the scenarios which inform Jacobus Coetzee's perception of the Khoi. Earlier in this chapter, I argued that "Narrative" characterises its protagonist as an author-figure. I shall now argue that he is also a reader-figure and, indeed, that it is in being a reader that he becomes an author. The apparent contradiction here dissolves when it is considered that Jacobus Coetzee's authorial endeavour is of a markedly hermeneutic nature: it is through attempting to understand the Namaquas that he constructs for them an identity. The hermeneutic dimension of the aforementioned scenarios contrives a significant metafictional analogy between the colonial encounter and the literary encounter of reader and text: just as the coloniser's contact with the indigene is mediated by the corpus of colonialist discourse and is therefore, as I have indicated, a textual encounter, so too the reader's approach to the text is mediated by the codes and conventions of the literary intertext. The inference to be drawn from this analogy is thus that no direct, immediate contact takes place when the reader encounters the text. Far from being transcendental, the reading subject is situated in an "interpretive community" and its knowledge of the text is determined by the assimilative strategies which inform this community's reading habits. The overriding implication of this analogy between the reader and Jacobus Coetzee is therefore that knowledge is not located 'inside' the subject, but in the culture in which the subject is situated. Coetzee's point is that literary knowing does not escape the integrative 'move of Being', and therefore' that the reading subject is a 'crucible' for the 'transmutation of the other into the same'. It is precisely this appropriative aspect of reading which Coetzee emphasises by identifying the 121 reader with Jacobus Coetzee: like the act of colonising, reading is characterised by the elision of otherness. Indeed, as the structuralists point out, a bsic feature of interpretation is recuperation, that is, a culturally-determined operation of making legible and scrutable the otherness of the literary text (see Culler, 1975: 134 - 137; Freund, 1987: 82). To recuperate the read is to obliterate its strangeness or deviance by integrating it into those significatory codes which culture makes available, deems acceptable, and assumes natural. In other words, interpretation is a form of appropriation in which inherited interpretive paradigms construct their objects of observation by suppressing from view that which threatens displacement. Owing to the cultural implication of knowledge and the resultant aesthetic nature of perception, then, interpretation is a form of creation. To some extent, reading is an author-itarian activity, one that is characterised by the intentionality of subject- centred consciousness. Accordingly, as is self-reflexively indicated by the analogy between Jacobus Coetzee and the reader and the further analogies generated by the text's recursive structure, the boundaries between reading, authoring, and colonising collapse. If the reader is an author in the sense that s/he reads a text which s/he has in part constructed, questions arise concerning the nature of the aesthetic which informs such interpretive authorship. Of course, the analogy between Jacobus Coetzee and the reader indicates that it is an aesthetic of supplementarity since, as with Jacobus Coetzee and the world of colonial entities, the reader approaches the literary text with a set of determinate expectations. This similarity suggests that reading is a temporal experience, and that the reading subject shares the time consciousness of the colonising subject: it not only intends the literary text but constructs for it a protentional future. By extension, the interpretive act is narratively mediated by the protentional-retentional perspectiire on time which the reading subject brings to the text. And, since its being-in-the-world involves situatedness in an 'interpretive - community', the narrative of reading thus constituted is 122 'worldly' and not individual or transcendental. Jonathan Culler's discussion of the "stories of reading" which emanate from various 'interpretive communities' is interesting in terms of the temporality of the reading experience. He claims that "Adventures of reading generally turn out well", and among the numerous examples of theories of reading which he cites in this regard is that of Michael Riffaterre whose "stories climax in a triumphant recovery of the matrix which masters and unifies the poem" (1983: 79). The corollary of this argument is that stories of reading pre-exist the individual reading subject and, indeed, place it in a set role. As in the case of Jacobus Coetzee's relation to the narrative of colonial history, the reader's reading of the literary text is, to some extent, determined by the telos of his/her story of reading. From my discussion thus far, it would seem that the intentional and protentional-retentional structures which condition the possibility of the reading experience lead inevitably to the reader's violent mastery of the literary text. In relating entities to a system of a priori concepts, these structures annul otherness and, through them, the reading subject anamnetically adequates all that is other with that which is already known. However, as I have argued, the strategies of infinition in Coetzee's text ultimately suggest that such structures are not immanent and moot the possibility of a level of experience which exceeds them. For Coetzee, then, although the subject is situated 'in-the-world', this situatedness is not total. The mere fact that he inscribes in "Narrative" a 'movement of infinition' which aligns this text with the other rather than the same, presupposes the possibility that the reading subject can transcend culture. Couched in Levinasian terms, the assumption here is that from its position in 'unrelating relation' to exteriority, the text can surprise the reader by 'putting into' him/her the idea of infinity. Indeed, the negotiation of textual autonomy which is so strongly evident in this text is premised on the conviction that this subject's situatedness in the domain of the same may be interrupted and that it is therefore capable of a respectful recognition of 123 otherness. For such an interruption of the reader's subjectivity, Coetzee relies heavily on the'Levinasian notion of surprise, that is, the process through which the subject is pre-reflectively addressed by a radical exteriority which cannot be related to a pre-existing idea by way of anamnesis. In terms of the analogy between the reader and Jacobus Coetzee, just such a possibility of a transcendence of the order of the same through surprise is raised by the latter's inability to establish a relation of correlation with the Namaquas upon first encountering them. Similarly, in the literary encounter, the various strategies of excession and infinition which maintain the tension between totality and infinity in the text are designed to forestall the intentional and protentional functioning of the reading subject's consciousness." They place the reader in a constant 'indicative' relation to an absent otherness, the existence of which is 'intimated' rather than represented. And, it will be remembered, 'intimation' is not a cognitive form of signification. The terms in the relation which it establishes are not identifiable and the reader is therefore never able to 'know', and thereby conceptually master, the other. A further point which I made in the first chapter should now become clear: in thus preserving the unknowability of the other, the text prevents the reader from engaging in a cognitive act of choice. So, through the 'indicative' relation that its tension between totality and infinity contrives between the reader and otherness, the text seeks to prompt the former to recognise the latter without foreclosing on it. Differently put, it tries to surprise the reader with a 'truth' that passes understanding by suspending the 'move of Being' which informs the interpretive act. As a result of 'indicating' rather than representing the other, the text, despite its linguistic medium and representational protocols which repel alterity, places the reader at the point of exteriority (which, for Levinas, is thel location of the ethical) and, in the process, endeavours to substitute knowing with respect and responsibility. 124 The eschewal of cognition evident in this aesthetic of surprise, suggests that "Narrative" strives to perform the ethical relation with the reader. It wishes to enact the very event of the 'movement of infinition' from same to other in the course of the literary encounter. Indeed, the epistemological implication of the text's heavy reliance on metacognitive categories such as surprise and 'indication' is precisely that it aspires not to represent but perform the ethical relation. By staging a transcendence of cognition in the literary encounter, it attempts to 'concretely produce' the idea of infinity in its relation with the reader. That is, it attempts to 'put into' him/her from 'outside' history this idea of infinity. And, in producing the event of the non-conceptual experience of the ethical, it endeavours to negotiate the economy of betrayal concomitant not only on its own 'worldliness', but also that of the reading subject. It is therefore quite clear that "Narrative" does suggest that the reader is able to sustain its 'movement of infinition' in his/her relation with it. However, Coetzee does not elaborate on the many implications of such a reading practice in this text. For instance, the Levinasian notions of responsibility and substitution implicit in the corollary of the suspension of the reader's faculty of choice, that is, that the other 'intimated' by the text 'chooses' the reader, are not developed in ahy way. Neither is the notion of an alterior authority suggested by this act of choice. A further issue that the text does not expand upon is the fact that, were the reader to sustain its 'movement of infinition', the infinity of the other would disrupt the totality of the same. This potential for an irruption of the ethical into the political, together with the other implications of an ethical mode of reading, is self-reflexively. explored in Coetzee's later novels and will be treated in the subsequent chapters of this thesis. 125 2.6 Conclusion
My argument has been that in "Narrative", Coetzee seeks to transcend the conflictual relations which determine history by inscribing a 'movement of infinition' which enables this text to respond responsibly to the other. I have discussed at length the various strategies of excession through which he attempts to initiate this irreversible movement from same to other. Through this movement, "Narrative" exemplifies Coetzee's argument in "The Novel Today" for a mode of writing that occupies an 'autonomous place'. It is important to note, though, that the notion of autonomy that emerges from the text does not resolve its tension between implication and transcendence. The relation between implication and transcendence is not dialectical: it does not develop into a synthesis. In this regard, I have argued that the text's refusal to attempt to represent alterity proceeds from an acceptance of the fact that representational modes are contaminated. It involves an assertion of the 'unpresentable in presentation' and therefore constitutes evidence in itself that the text does not and cannot resolve the tension between implication and transcendence. So, in the very process of enabling the text to resist being colonised by history, this strategy of refusal serves to acknowledge that its form (and, by extension, the genre of the novel) remains irrevocably implicated. It follows that, although the aesthetic of rivalry developed by the text leads to a transcendence of history, it does not purport to decolonise the novel. Such a decolonisation could only be achieved by way of a full transcendence of implication. The corollary, here, is that Coetzee's text's resistance to colonisation by history presupposes the impossibility of decolonising the novel. Indeed, its efficacy depends on the novel's being and remaining an infected site. Paradoxically, then, the transcendence that is at issue in "Narrative" is ones that is enabled by and dependent on implication. My argument in this chapter has emphasised that the ethical relation which the text attempts to establish with the other by 126 way of its transcendence of the domain of the same has a direct bearing on the reader. In this regard, I have shown that the text characterises the reader as being situated in the order of the same but, in aligning itself with the other through its 'movement of infinition', endeavours to 'put into' him/her the idea of infinity and so enable him/her to transcend the same. In the remainder of this thesis I shall investigate the way in which these issues are explicated in Coetzee's later novels. As I have already indicated, my contention in this regard is that Coetzee's reliance on strategies of excession means that it is unlikely that there can be any development in his novels in terms of the representational issues which I have discussed in this chapter. Indeed, the likelihood is that they all ritualistically assert the 'unpresentable in presentation'. On the other hand, though, it is also my contention that instead of a development in Coetzee's oeuvre, one finds a self-reflexive articulation of the ethical implications of this meta-representational strategy. In the rest of this study, I shall test these propositions in close readings of Coetzee's last four novels. 127 2.7 Notes
Hereafter, I shall' use the abbreviation "Narrative" to refer to this section of Dusklands. Since the colonial encounter in question in "Narrative" is one between Europe and Africa, I refer specifically to western systems of knowledge here and elsewhere in this chapter. Nevertheless, it should be noted that while all systems of knowledge function as strategies which seek to contain otherness, western knowledge postulates as its source an apparently autonomous subject and thereby claims universality (see, for example, Noyes, 1992). Implicit in the obvious point that "Narrative" is presented from the perspective of a European subject, then, is the corollary that the notion of subjectivity here represented is structured in terms of autonomy and that its knowledge claims therefore assume universality. The emphasis in this chapter and in much of this thesis is on the violent relation to the other that is inscribed in the realist novel by those strategies which conceal the cultural location of knowledge. The parenthetical inclusion of the word 'Khoikhoin' in this citation is ostensibly the work of 'J.M. Coetzee', the putative translator and editor of Jacobus Coetzee's supposed travel report. Since this 'editorial' adjustment is followed directly by the translation 'people of the people', it serves to emphasise the Khoi's self-ascription. See Coetzee's discussion of the term 'wilderness' in his essay entitled "The Picturesque, the Sublime, and the South African Landscape" (1988c). In one conception, he states, "the wilderness is a world where the law of nature reigns, a world over which the first act of culture, Adam's act of naming, has not been performed" (1988c: 49). See Knox-Shaw's discussion of Coetzee's historical sources (1982). In "The Picturesque, the Sublime, and the South African Landscape", Coetzee cites the following lines from Ralph Waldo Emerson's "Nature": "Standing on the bare ground, -- my head bathed in the blithe air and uplifted into infinite space, -- all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or parcel of God". The quotation is followed by this critical observation: "In the heady years of Transcendentalism it 4.s hard to find a landscape that is kept at a viewing distance from the eye, not ingested by it" (1988c: 59). In recasting this passage (and in particular the line 'I see all') in "Narrative", Coetzee gives it a definite Cartesian bias and emphasises the apparent transcendence and immanence of the 128 consciousness through which the subject reduces entities to a thought of its own, that is, a subordinate moment in its world. Accordingly, what is stressed is not the percipient- subject's abnegation of self but its realisation of its free will, and thereby affirmation of self, through the ingestion of otherness. In David Carr's reading not only of White's thought on narrative, but also that of Mink, Paul Ricoeur and Roland Barthes, this is the "best" scenario. "At worst", he continues, "narrative seeks to put across a moral view of the world in the interests of power and manipulation" (1986: 16). With regard to this contention, see in particular White (1980). The difference between White's understanding of narrative and that of Carr should now be clear. The former's emphasis on the fact that narrative structures are imposed upon contingent data by the literary act of narration seems to suggest that in life access to temporally unmediated experience is possible. Carr, however, argues for the temporally mediated nature of experience. Narrative configuration is not simply a literary accomplishment, it is a process which mediates all experience and action. These two supposedly 'authentic' accounts are in themselves reworkings of the actual Relaas. See Attwell for a discussion of the changes which Coetzee effects to the original deposition of Jacobus Coetzee in the 'Appendix' (1993: 45-46). See also Knox-Shaw (1982). At best, then, one is able to refer to 'degrees of authenticity' in the various accounts of this frontiersman's expedition as contained in the text. In terms of the discussion which follows, it is significant that some of the changes Coetzee executes, such as the omission of references to the friendliness of the Namaquas, narrow the distance between the account in the 'Appendix' and the version contained in the 'Afterword' by providing the former with a stronger sense of European mastery over African matter. As I point out in the first chapter of this thesis, this structural topos derives from romance and travel writing. Attwell points to a further problem in this regard, namely that a distinction is necessary between master and slave, and master and savage (1993: 51). What I refer to as 'teleological dislocation', here, is closely related to Franklin's concept of "terminal disorientation" (1979: 13).
I have been unable to locate an English translation of Levinas's essay, "La Pensee de l'etre et la question de l'autre" (Critique, 369 (1978) : 187 - 197) , and have therefore had to rely on Critchley's commentary (1992: 169-182). 129 Nevertheless, Levinas does make passing reference to an indicative mode of signification in "Phenomenon and Enigma", where he suggests that the alterity of the face might be preserved. in signification by "A relationship that would not create simultaneity between its terms, but would hollow out a depth from which expression approaches [by referring] to an irreversible, immemorial unrepresentable past" (1987b: 65). "What would be needed" for this to happen, he continues, "would be an indication that would reveal the withdrawal of the indicated, instead of a reference that rejoins it" (1987b: 65). As will become apparent in subsequent chapters, Coetzee frequently uses the word 'intimation' in its Husserlian sense in contexts and scenes which reject subject-centred intentionality and its representational modes and posit alternatives. Hereafter, I shall enclose the words 'indicate' and 'intimate' in single quotation marks when I wish them to convey their Husserlian sense. In a discussion of Jean Paul Sartre's La Nausee, Frank Kermode refers to "the tension or dissonance between paradigmatic form and contingent reality" (1966: 133). Stanley Fish uses the term 'interpretive community' to suggest that both texts and their interpretations are the product of public compliance with institutionalised strategies and habits of reading. He argues that "meanings are the property neither of fixed and stable texts nor of free and independent readers but of interpretive communities that are responsible both for the shape of the reader's activities and for the texts those activities produce" (1980: 322). The most obvious of these strategies is generic in nature. Dusklands consists of two parts, of which "Narrative" is the second. Since they are presented separately and set in different geographical and temporal contexts, the reader is invited to treat these narratives as two independent novellas. At the same time, there are numerous integrative links between them which suggest that they might be approached as versions of the same story. The title of the text as a whole, for instance, by implication yokes together twentieth-century America and eighteenth-century South Africa. Furthermore, both these apparently independent narratives use the name 'Coetzee'. And, in terms of the presentation of their two protagonists, it soon becomes clear that Eugene Dawn and Jacobus Coetzee are virtually interchangeable -- indeed, this link is foregrounded by the former's following words: "Had I lived two hundred years ..go I would have had a continent to explore, to map, to open to colonization" (1974: 33). Moreover, it is clear from the propaganda project in which Eugene Dawn is engaged that he, like Jacobus Coetzee and S.J. Coetzee, is a "tool in the hands of history" (1974: 114). As with these two 130 characters, then, he is an author-figure whose enterprise is informed by an aesthetic of supplementarity. It would seem, therefore, that the first part of Dusklands is absorbed into the recursive structure of the second part, and that in its entirety, the text should therefore properly be regarded as a novel. This integrative reading is seductive. However, in its drive to create of the text an aesthetic whole, it ignores, even occludes, the clear signs of atomisation which are present in Dusklands. By implication, it would be more accurate to conclude that the suggestions of cohesion between the two sections of the text coexist with these signs of atomisation. The result of the text's carefully maintained tension between centripetal and centrifugal tendencies is a radical ambivalence in its generic identity, an ambivalence which disrupts the generic expectations which the reader brings to his/her reading of narrative fiction. Through this strategy of generic ambivalence, the text attempts to secure in the reader's relation to it a repetition of Jacobus Coetzee's encounter with the Khoi. For further discussions of the links between "The Vietnam Project" and "Narrative", see Dovey (1988: 71-75), Susan VanZanten Gallagher (1991: 58-64), and Attwell (1993: 35-40).
131 Chapter 3: The Tension between Implication and Transcendence in Life and Times of Michael K
3.1 Introduction 132 3.2 Relational Modes 133 3.2.1 Supplementing History: The Autonomous Subject 135 3.2.2 Rivalling History: Renegotiating Subjectivity 137 3.2.3 The Meta-representational Implications of the Renegotiation of Subjectivity 148 3.3 The Self-Reflexive Dimension of the Novel's Critique of Autonomous Subjectivity 157 3.3.1 Renegotiating the Reader-Text Relation 167 3.4 Conclusion 185 3.5 Notes 188 132
CHAPTER 3
The Tension between Implication and Transcendence in Life and Times of Michael
3.1 Introduction
In this chapter, I trace Coetzee's inscription of an aesthetic of rivalry in Life and Times of Michael K. 2 I then examine the effect of this aesthetic on the reader of the novel. In the course of my discussion, I pay special attention to the way in which this novel self-reflexively portrays its attempt at transcending its implication in history by advertising its intertextual relation with Robinson Crusoe. The point of my discussion of this aspect of Michael K, then, is not simply to trace the links between this novel and Robinson Crusoe, but rather to explicate the meta-representational significance of this intertextual relation. 3 In other words, my emphasis in this regard in this chapter is the same as it was in the previous chapter. My discussion shows that, after initially evincing a strong similarity with Defoe's account of Crusoe's commerce with the island, Coetzee's depiction of Michael K's relation with the Karoo farm comes to rival, even reverse, the development which the eponymous hero undergoes in Robinson Crusoe. I argue that this reversal is allusively depicted in Levinasian terms as K's development of an ethical subjectivity, and then trace the meta- representational implications of Coetzee's depiction of the state that is 'otherwise than being' which arises on the farm as a result of this renegotiation of subjectivity. As is the case in "Narrative", Michael K depicts the reader as being situated in history. At first, this novel seems to suggest its ability to inspire its reader to re-enact K's* encounter with the farm and so transcend the intentional and protentional-retentional structures which determine his/her situatedness in history. However, I argue that it is only after it disrupts the implied parallel between its reader and K by 133 subverting its representation of the state of proximity with otherness in the farm scenes, and thereby inscribing a tension between totality and infinity; that the text is eventually able to establish a transcendental relation with the other. Only then can it attempt to 'put into' the reader the idea of infinity. I trace the novel's depiction of this venture by focusing on its self-reflexive elaboration of the ethical notions of choice, responsibility and authority (as opposed to power). In this regard, I pay close attention to the parallel which Coetzee constructs between the medical officer's relation with Michael K and the reader's relation with the otherness that is 'intimated' by the novel.
3.2 Relational Modes
The central section of Robinson Crusoe, which deals with the protagonist's experience of isolation on the island, is framed by two sections which describe his life in European society before and after the island episode. It is this structural division which generates the opposition between island and world which, in David Blewett's words, apparently emphasises a contrast between "two modes of existence" (1979: 28). Ultimately, though, as I demonstrated in the first chapter of this thesis, the ostensible differences between island and European world are systematically reduced to sameness as Crusoe makes of the 'wilderness' a property, thereby domesticating it and transforming it into 'a little England'. When Coetzee's distinction between modes of fiction-writing is applied to the subject's construction of space as represented in this novel, it becomes clear that this creative enterprise is informed by an aesthetic which supplements rather than rivals history. A similar structural division to that which exists in Robinson Crusoe may be located in Michael K, that is, between the sections which deal with K's stay on the Karoo farm and those which focus on his life in the larger society in which racial conflict has culminated in war. Indeed, this division is developed, in temporal terms, as a contrast between "the other 134 time in which the war had its existence" (1983: 159), and the farm, which is variously described as "a pocket outside time" (1983: 82) and. a "blessedly neglected corner", on which K "escape[s] the times" and lives "beyond the reach of calendar and clock" (1983: 159). Initially, however, this contrast does not exist, and life on the farm supplements rather than rivals South African history, as becomes apparent when the nature of the 'times' which Michael K escapes is placed in the context of Coetzee's observation that history 'erects itself' from the conflictual structure of social relations. As I have argued, in this understanding, the events which form history proceed from the interactions with the world of a subjectivity which asserts its autonomy by violating alterity. In Michael K, the conflictual nature of the relations which have shaped the 'times' in South Africa is signified by means of images of burdens and eating in terms of which one partner in a relationship is described as being weighed down by and/or devouring the other. 4 In this regard, they are remarkably similar to the portrayal in "Narrative" of Jacobus Coetzee as a transparent eye/I which 'ingests' all that it sees in its self- consolidating movement through the 'wilderness' (1974: 84). In the later novel, such imagery conflates relations which are usually assumed to be of a different order, such as the private and personal mother/child and the public state/subject relationships. For example, Michael K's relationship with his mother during their stay together in the Sea Point room is described as follows: "K saw before him the prospect . . . of sitting on the floormat with his hands over his ears enduring day after day the burden of her silence" (1983: 34). Later in the novel, this description is developed by the medical officer's depiction of the same relationship: "You made a great mistake, Michaels, when you tied her on your back and fled the burning city for the safety of the countryside. . . . I . . . think of her sitting on your shoulders, eating out your brains, glaring' about triumphantly, the very embodiment of great Mother Death" (1983: 205). The imagery here is identical to that which the medical officer uses in his portrayal of Michael K's association 135 with the state: "The state rides on the backs of earth-grubbers like Michaels; it devours the products of their toil and shits on them in return" (1983: 221). As the diverse application of this imagery suggests, all relations in what the novel depicts as the realm of 'time' are relations of power in which one partner attempts to dominate the other. Together with the fact that the imagery places the participants in such relationships in dichotomous positions, this aspect of these affiliations suggests that they are grounded in a subject-object dualism. Given the temporal terms in which the novel's structurally- installed opposition between farm and society is couched, one would expect relationships on the farm to differ radically from those in society. However, in the next two subsections of this chapter, I shall argue that relations on the farm initially replicate those in the larger society and that, since these relations define this space, the farm at first supplements instead of rivals South African history: it is only after K abruptly, and seemingly inexplicably, restructures his relations on the farm that it comes to rival South African history.
3.2.1 Supplementing History: The Autonomous Subject
The replication, on the Karoo farm, of the conflictual relations in South African society emerges when the imagery used to signify these subject-object relations is also applied to K's initial association with this terrain. For instance, burden imagery is used in the description of his hunting of the goats:
Almost under his feet one [goat] slipped and slid, kicking like a fish in the mud to regain its footing. K hurled the whole weight of his body upon it. . . . He could feel the goat's hindquarters heaving beneath him; it bleated again and again in terror; its body jerked in spasms. K straddled it, clenched his hands around its neck, and bore down with all his strength, pressing the head under the surface of the water and l into the thick ooze below. The hindquarters thrashed, but his knees were gripping the body like a vice. (1983: 73-74) 136 Later, when K reflects upon his killing of the goat the burden imagery recurs: "He had a vision of himself riding the ewe to death under the mud by the light of the moon" (1983: 75). Significantly, after killing the animal, K proceeds to eat it (1983: 76-77). The corollary to be drawn from this imagery is thus not only that a similarity rather than a contrast exists between the realms of the farm and of history, but also that this similarity may be ascribed to the fact that Michael K brings with him to the farm the relational modes which characterise South African society as a whole. In other words, he is unavoidably implicated in the history of his society and, even though he endeavours to leave this society behind him when he escapes to the Karoo, his relationship to the farm is determined by its individualistic, rationalistic concept of subjective identity. As a result of his historical situatedness, K's gaze, like Crusoe's and Jacobus Coetzee's, is informed by a pre-existing structure of knowledge which alters that which he perceives. Indeed, this transformative aspect of his mode of perception is exposed in the novel by the fact that he initially responds to the farm in a manner strongly reminiscent of Robinson Crusoe's response to the island, that is, by establishing a relationship of possession between himself and the land. For example, on his first visit, he occupies the deserted farmhouse -- a structure which, as emerges when Visagie later dispossesses him of it and relocates him to the servants' quarters, serves as a sign of ownership and thus signifies the status of the land as property. Like Crusoe, then, K denies the specificity and alterity of the entity which he views by imposing on it an identity which is related to a particular historical and cultural moment. In his commerce with the soil he is initially, therefore, a similar rather than, as Attwell argues, a "different kind of creature" to the colonist (1993: 96)) By revealing the transformative nature of K's gaze and thus emphasising his situatedness in the world, that is, his implication in history, Coetzee undermines the Enlightenment notion of a subject that is able to transcend the particularities of its cultural context, a notion of subjectivity which, I have 137 argued, was inscribed in the novel by the technique of realism. In this regard Michael K is very similar to "Narrative". Through subverting the. realist illusion of empirical observation, this novel indicates that, instead of detachedly and transparently observing a pre-existent 'object' in the present, what the subject-observer sees is constituted as an object by the system of sense which it brings to the visual encounter. This foregrounding of the. intentional nature of perception and the grounding of intentionality in discourse distinguishes Michael K from the realist novel's representation of the subject's relation to space. Not only does Coetzee's text show that the subject creates what it perceives, but it also implies that the mode of creation at stake here is of an intertextual nature which questions the centricity of the subject and thus the very notion of originality. Being implicated in rather than detached from history, K is the site of an intersection of those oppositional relations and values which characterise the context in which he is immersed and, accordingly, does not (indeed, cannot) create ex nihilo. Consequently, the space which he constructs in the Karoo supplements rather than rivals history. In other words, just as Robinson Crusoe creates 'a little England' in his commerce with the island, so too Michael K creates a little South Africa in his interaction with the farm. The difference between the two novels, though, is that while Defoe's novel makes use of realism in order to occlude this violent recuperative process, Coetzee's novel exposes it.
3.2.2 Rivalling History: Renegotiating Subjectivity
Coetzee's meta-representational strategy of revealing the subject's situatedness in history and thus countering the realist illusion of immediacy, appears to be aimed at stimulating in the reader a recognition of otherness. In uncovering the fact that what passes for empirical observation is really creation, he obviously blurs the distinction between fact and fiction -- a distinction which, as I argued in Chapter One of this thesis, was firmly entrenched during the Enlightenment period -- and thus 138 lays bare the aesthetic base of existence. By implication, then, if the reader were to be made aware of his/her situatedness in history, s/he would recognise the fact that s/he does not neutrally observe 'objects' but constitutes them by assigning them an identity which forecloses on their otherness. Coetzee's radical departure from the representationalist aesthetic of realism thus appears to be motivated by a desire to raise in the reader a reflexive awareness of the creative nature of perception -- that is, of the fact that knowledge is not a function of neutral perception but of relating alterior entities to a system of a priori concepts. His text attempts to instill in the reader a recognition of the violence inherent in the cognitive process through which s/he intends and so produces as 'given' that which s/he perceives. Such a "non-egoistic awareness [in the reader of his/her] tendency to incorporate the worlds and experiences of others into [his/her] own" (Waugh, 1992: 57), offers the possibility of a renegotiation of autonomous subjectivity and its forms of cognition. And since history, in Coetzee's understanding, 'erects' itself from the elisions that are a structural corollary of the numerous social permutations of this mode of subjectivity, such a renegotiation would culminate in a transformation of history. Evidence of this departure from realist texts which, through the illusion of immediacy, conceal and therefore collude with the appropriative tendencies of European discourse may be detected in what appears to be the anti-Cartesian trajectory of Michael K. Where the action of Robinson Crusoe is determined by the protagonist's successful composition of self and his arrival at the certitude of a subjectivity which can ground knowledge, the action of Michael K is governed by the protagonist's renegotiation of autonomous subjectivity. 6 Indeed, in this novel, Coetzee appears to enact the process through which a non- egoistic awareness of otherness may be achieved in his depiction of the change which Michael K's relationship with the farm undergoes, a change which becomes evident in the alliance which he forms with the plants he tends. Shortly after killing the , goat, K decides to "begin[] his life as a cultivator" (1983: 81). 139 Significantly, the burden imagery which earlier depicted his Cartesian separation from and objectification of the land is now replaced by gardening imagery which suggests connection and togetherness: "The impulse to plant had been reawoken in him; now, in a matter of weeks, he found his waking life bound tightly to the patch of earth he had begun to cultivate and the seeds he had planted there" (1983: 81). The allusion here to an umbilical cord recurs later in K's reference to "a cord of tenderness that stretched from him to the patch of earth beside the dam" (1983: 90), and connotes a bridging of the divide between humankind and nature -- an attempt, that is, in Coetzee's words apropos the Buberian relation, to "reconstitute . . . the 'between' of the primal I-Thou" (1992c: 72). Michael K's relationship with the plants may thus be read as an attempt, although not necessarily a Buberian one, to recuperate a mode of selfhood which transcends that dualism of inner self and external world which makes the subject the centre around which all other entities revolve as objects of experience. One of the implications of Michael K's renegotiation of subjectivity is that the farm no longer simply replicates relations in the realm of history. At this point, the contrast between life on the farm and conditions in history, a contrast foregrounded by the structural design of the novel, becomes evident. Indeed, the text's first lengthy description of K's relationship with the plants• concludes with a comment which emphasises this disjunction between farm and history: "He lived by the rising and setting of the sun, in a pocket outside time. Cape Town and the war and his passage to the farm slipped further and further into forgetfulness" (1983: 82). By insisting that it is beyond history, the novel self-consciously characterises the farm as an autonomous space in an-other time. The implication is that, in restructuring subjectivity in his relationship with the plants, K finally does "escape the times" (1983: 159), that is, transcend history. A corollary of my argument here is that K's renegotiation of subjectivity alters the aesthetics of spatial construction. However, before discussing this corollary, it is necessary to 140 examine the possible reasons for Michael K's restructuring of subjectivity and then to explore at greater length both the anti- Cartesian trajectory of the novel and the meta-representational import of this structural movement. Although the reason for the sudden and radical change in K's relationship with the farm is never divulged, its trace may be discerned in the very nature of this change. In this regard, Michael K is very similar to "Narrative" which, in its description of the effect on Jacobus Coetzee of his encounter with the Namaquas, alludes to the possibility of a pre-reflective experience of the face. The change which the protagonist of the later novel undergoes quite clearly suggests an assumption of responsibility for otherness, as is evident in the contrast which exists between the relations on the farm and those in the world. Tellingly, the relational aspect of this contrast is emphasised by the fact that K departs from the farm after the arrival of the Visagie grandson, who initially attempts to relegate him to the position of a servant. Unlike Friday -- whose relationship to Robinson Crusoe, as'I have indicated, is here evoked -- K recognises that, as the object of Visagie's perception, he has been assigned an essence and that his identity has been re- created and thus transformed in the process. Such a recognition is implicit in a later allusion to the transformative and therefore violent dimension of subject-centred intentionality in K's reflection on "the Visagie grandson who had tried to turn him into a body-servant" (my emphasis, 1983: 90). K's refusal to be reduced to a term in a power relation suggests that his interaction with others has become ethical: that is, he now recognises and respects rather than violently elides alterity. In fact, the conjunction of gardening and maternal imagery in the descriptions of his relations with the earth and plants implies not simply an awareness but an assumption of responsibility for otherness.' I have argued apropos Michael K and his mother that the novel depicts the mother-child relation as a permutation of the subject-object relation. I have also suggested, however, that relationships, and the imagery through which they are depicted, are not static 141 in the novel and, indeed, that shifts in the signification of images of relational modes point to a renegotiation of subjectivity. .Just such a shift in signification is apparent in the maternal imagery which is used to describe K's relationship with his plants in the farm section of the novel. In fact, in the following description, the political will to power is replaced by the ethical responsibility to love, care and succour:
So he watered the seeds one by one, carrying water from the dam in an old paint-tin. After this labour there was nothing to do but wait for the seed to shoot, if it would. In his burrow he lay thinking of these poor second children of his beginning their struggle upward through the dark earth toward the sun. His one misgiving was that by planting them in the latter days of summer he had not provided well. (1983: 138-139)
I have indicated that, according to Levinas, the subject is responsible for the other to the point of substitution. In that it entails a movement, without return, from same to other, ethical responsibility requires the subject's substitution of self for the other. It is thus significant that K eventually locates himself in a burrow in the earth on a farm, that is, terrain which has previously been mastered, possessed and colonised. This highly symbolic action signifies a giving of self to the earth as other. Tellingly, K is henceforth likened to underground creatures like moles (1983: 144, 248) and earthworms (1983: 147, 248), and is even associated with gnomes (1983: 246) . 8 The suggestion, here, of a substitution of self for the other is strengthened by the many descriptions of the somnolent quality of K's existence on the farm:
He slept more and more. He no longer sat outside when his tasks were finished, looking at the stars, listening to the night, or walked about in the veld, but crept into his hole and fell into deep sleep. All morning he would sleep. At noon he would begin to I emerge into an interval of languor and waking dreams, bathed in a gentle warmth that radiated down from the roof [of the burrow] . . . . ( 1983: 157) 142 The particular value which sleep accrues in Michael K is very similar to that which it has in Levinas's thought. I have already indicated that for this thinker, as for Husserl, "everything is intentionally assumed" in consciousness (Levinas, 1981: 102). As a result of the intentional or directional aspect of consciousness, "The given enters into a thought which recognizes in it or invests it with its own project, and thus exercises mastery over it" (Levinas, 1981: 101). -Accordingly, "Anything unknown that can occur to it is in advance disclosed, open, manifest, is cast in the mould of the known, and cannot be a complete surprise" (Levinas, 1981: 99). It thus follows that otherness, which is "refractory to concepts" (Levinas, 1981: 139), is repelled by consciousness. Given his view that alterity is incommensurable with the vigilance of the subject in consciousness, it is not surprising that Levinas assigns a special significance to states of un- or semi-consciousness, that is, states such as sleep and insomnia in which the subject is not fully possessed of self (see, for example, 1978: 65ff.). Significantly, it is just such a state in which subject-centred intentionality fails and the subject is therefore susceptible to possession by the other that is evoked by the descriptions of sleep, semi-consciousness, languor and idleness in Michael K. 9 As the following passage makes clear, these states of (un)consciousness are accompanied by K's "yielding up of himself" (1983: 158): "Sometimes he would emerge into wakefulness unsure whether he had slept a day or a week or a month. It occurred to him that he might not be fully in possession of himself" (1983: 163-164). Not being possessed of self means that the subject is ready to be possessed by the other. In its turn, such possession is accompanied by the process of self-substitution through which the subject structures itself as responsibility for the other. My argument, then, is that the change which K undergoes in his relationship to the Karoo farm points to the development of an ethical subjectivity. As I have shown, his initial encounter with the farm is characterised by violence. At this stage in the novel, his mode of being corresponds to what Levinas refers to as the ontological solitude of being "for-oneself" (Levinas, 1981: 143 56), by which he means the autonomous subject's entrapment in a world of objects which has been constituted by the cognitive categories that it has imposed upon the world through intentional acts of consciousness. So, although the subject is ontically with others in the world, the strategies of adequation through which the entities in it are mastered and possessed result in a state of ontological solitude. It is precisely the solitude of the 'for-oneself' or 'I am I' which renders violence possible. As I indicated in the previous chapter, Levinas argues that acts of violence consist in the subject behaving 'as though . . . alone' rather than 'in a relationship with the other'. In terms of my examination of the Karoo sections of Michael K, it seems clear that K's commerce with the farm is, at first, determined by the ontological solitude that is concomitant on subject-centred intentionality. As such, it follows that his abrupt, unexplained change from the violent freedom in unicity of the 'I am I' to a responsibility for otherness (which the novel's imagery of gardening and maternity insists is grounded in an ontic togetherness); implies a pre - reflective exposure to the infinity of the other. On the one hand, the emphasis on states of unconsciousness and semi-consciousness in this section of the novel suggests precisely the transcendence of intentional structures of consciousness which is necessary for such exposure. On the other hand, as I have indicated in my discussion of Jacobus Coetzee's inexplicable loss of force in his encounter with the Namaquas in "Narrative", for Levinas violence is suspended through the encounter with the infinity of the other. In such an encounter, the subject is faced with and therefore can no longer deny that against which its violent action is directed. Accordingly, its autonomy, that is, its freedom in oneness, is called into question. The consequent recognition of ontic togetherness means that the subject can no longer act 'as though alone' and must therefore assume responsibility for the other. It may be inferred from my discussion thus far that the trajectory of K's change from violence to responsibility should be described as Levinasian rather than anti-Cartesian. After all, it involves not a forfeiture but a restructuring of 144 subjectivity. Moreover, this Levinasian trajectory, together with the text's emphasis on modes of (un)consciousness which enable possession by the other, implies that which Coetzee pointedly forbears from describing, namely the ineffable, because pre-cognitive, encounter with the infinitude of otherness. Importantly, this 'intimation' of an encounter with infinity explains Coetzee's insistence on describing the farm in terms of its transcendence of history. 'Uprooted from history' as a result of his encounter with the infinity of the other, K no longer elides alterity in his interactions with the farm and plants. Having had the idea of infinity 'put into' him by a radical exteriority, his actions no longer supplement history and the farm now becomes an 'autonomous place'. In this regard, it must be emphasised that the autonomy through which the farm rivals history is not constructed in opposition to history. Since its autonomy is constituted by a 'movement of infinition' from the order of the same to the absolute other, the farm transcends history. It is in 'unrelating' relation to infinity rather than totality and is therefore not other than being and history but 'otherwise than being' and history. I have already indicated that K's initial, violent relation to the farm is signified by the fact that, upon his first encounter with this terrain, he takes up residence in the deserted farmhouse which serves as a sign of settlement and therefore ownership. I have also suggested that his subsequent recognition of and responsibility for the alterity of this terrain is implied by his decision, upon his return to the farm after his escape from the Jakkalsdrif camp, to live in a burrow and not in the house. He thereby settles for what Coetzee, in a description of the relation of poet to landscape in the poetry of Sidney Clouts, calls "an unsettled habitation in the landscape" (1988a: 173). It is my contention that this relocation from farmhouse to burrow symbolises the irreversible movement from the domain of the same to the other which makes of the farm an 'autonomous place'. Described as a "home in the earth" (my emphasis, 1983: 142), the burrow signifies a state that is 'otherwise than being', that is, a state which opposes the 145 farmhouse not in terms of its resistance but its absolute otherness. ° This radical opposition is stressed by K's conscious rejection of the farmhouse in *the following passage:
. . . whatever I have returned for, it is not to live as the Visagies lived, sleep where they slept, sit on their stoep looking out over their land. If this house were to be abandoned as a home for all the ghosts of all the generations of the Visagies, it would not matter to me. It is not for the house that I have come. (1983: 134)
The strong emphasis on mode of being and the passage of generations in this citation suggests that the house is a symbol of a cultural tradition and a history -- more specifically, the tradition and history of western colonialism. However, the house does not simply signify a cultural tradition and history but also the consciousness which underpins that history. After all, when its physical presence on the land -- that is, detached from, and yet straddling, the earth -- is compared with the burrow's location in the earth, it becomes clear that the house forms part of the novel's burden imagery and therefore signals the subject-object dualism from which history 'erects itself'. It thus signifies both western history and the structures of consciousness whiOh ground the universalising course of that history in the elision of alterity. The symbolic function of the house as a symbol of a mode of autonomous consciousness which elides alterity is clarified further by a comparison of the intertextual contrast which exists between it and its analogue in Robinson Crusoe, the cave (cf. Merivale, 1996: 161). In Coetzee's novel, the burrow is depicted as being situated between "two low hills" (1983: 137), a description reminiscent of the location of the cave in the following passage from Defoe's novel:
I found a little plain on the side of a rising whose front towards this little plain was steep as a house-side, so that nothing could come down upon me from the top; on the side of this rock there was a hollow place worn a little way in like the entrance or door of a cave, but there was not really any cave or 146 way into the rock at all. (1975: 44-45)
Evident in this excerpt, however, is a preoccupation with security that amounts to a fear of otherness which is totally absent from Coetzee's representation of K's burrow and which becomes increasingly apparent as Crusoe's description proceeds:
I drew a half circle before the hollow place which took in about ten yards in its semi-diameter, from its beginning and ending. In this half circle I pitch'd two rows of strong stakes, driving them into the ground till they stood very firm like piles, the biggest end being out of the ground about five foot and a half, and sharpen'd on the top. The two rows did not stand above six inches from one another. Then I took the pieces of cable which I had cut in the ship, and I laid them in rows one upon another, within the circle, between these two rows of stakes, up to the top, placing other stakes in the in-side, leaning against them, about two foot and a half high, like a spurr to a post, and this fence was so strong that neither man or beast could get into it or over it. This cost-me a great deal of time and labour, especially to cut the piles in the woods, bring them to the place, and drive them into the earth. The entrance into this place I made to be by not a door, but by a short ladder to go over the top, which ladder, when I was in, I lifted over after me, and so I was compleatly fenc'd in, and fortify'd, as I thought, from all the world and consequently slept secure in the night, which otherwise I could not have done . . . . (my emphasis, 1975: 45)
In the first chapter of this thesis I argued that, in treating the Cartesian theme of self-composition, Robinson Crusoe documents the threat of self-dissolution which Crusoe encounters upon his arrival on the island. I suggested that the real danger confronted by Crusoe is the fear of being engulfed by the other -- that is, the threat of the collapse of the subject-object dualism which separates and thus protects self from the other. In the above passage, Crusoe's preoccupation with the fence which separates him 'from all the world' symbolically conveys the protective function of the boundary formed by this dualism. As E. Pearlman argues, "Crusoe's sense of his psychological 147 boundaries is inadequate; his identity needs to be buttressed. The wall that he builds is an integument that reinforces the boundaries of the self -- it is a metaphorical psychic skin" (1976: 52; see also 47). In Coetzee's novel, it is the farmhouse and not the burrow which symbolises this integument between self and other. Accordingly, as the following passage suggests, Michael K's relocation from the farmhouse to the burrow connotes a transgression of the boundary between self and other:
He emerged [from the house] into sunlight and took the track across the veld to the dam and the field where once he had scattered his mother's ashes. Every stone, every bush along the way he recognized. He felt at home at the dam as he had never felt in the house. He lay down and rested with the black coat rolled under his head, watching the sky wheel above. I want to live here, he thought: I want to live here forever, where my mother and my grandmother lived. It is as simple as that. (1983: 135)
The fact that it is the 'movement of infinition' from the domain of the same to the other that is 'intimated' here is further evident in K's reluctance to take with him the material which he has found in the homestead:
He scratched among the odds and ends in the shed and there was nothing for which he could not imagine a use. But he was wary of conveying the Visagies' rubbish to his home in the earth and setting himself on a trail
that might lead to the re-enactment of their . misfortunes. The worst mistake, he told himself, would be to try to found a new house, a rival line, on his small beginnings out at the dam. (1983: 142 - 143)
Michael K's attitude to the farmstead and the tools which it contains stands in direct contrast to Robinson Crusoe's fascination with the wreck and concerted effort to salvage from it all that is "portable and fit to hand out" in Defoe's novel (1975: 43). It is, of course, by means of these tools that Crusoe transforms the island into a 'little England'. Thus, in the context of Coetzee's novel, they signify the technological 148 and cognitive structures through which the subject enacts the 'move of Being' which 'transmutes' other into same. By implication, K's eschewal of the tools and material that he finds in the homestead connotes a 'movement of infinition'. The inference to be drawn from this intertextual contrast is that the mode of existence on the farm can only be autonomous in the sense of 'otherwise than being', if it is the product of a 'dehiscent' movement from the order of the same to the other.
3.2.3 The Meta-representational Implications of the Renegotiation of Subjectivity
My discussion thus far has shown that Coetzee depicts in Michael K a renegotiation of subjectivity which results in a transcendence of the conflictual relations which shape the events that form the course of history. Owing to this transcendence of history, the farm is depicted as an 'autonomous place'. However, the strategy of 'intertextual citation' through which he constructs a system of contrasts between his novel and Robinson Crusoe indicates that the point of this depiction is not only to suggest the presence on the farm of a relational mode which does not exist in history, but also to expose the way in which Michael K seeks to rival history by departing from those representational practices which were inscribed in the novel at its inception and which lead to the supplementation of history. I shall argue that it is by means of this meta-representational engagement with novelistic representation that this text attempts to decolonise itself. The self-reflexive critique of the novel-as-genre's representational practice in Michael K emerges when this text's portrayal of property relations is compared with that of Robinson Crusoe. In the latter novel, as the passage describing Crusoe's fortification of his cave indicates, the various emotions which arise once it becomes possible for a subject to possess items in a world of objects (such as the disquiet which stems from the need for security), are strongly in evidence. Part of the fear expressed in this passage is therefore not just fear of the 149 other, but "anxiety of security". Indeed, Green argues that, in this novel, Defoe "gives us a very complete and all-round exploration of.the emotions of possession -- the relationship of possession, which is also a relationship of creativity. The creation of value, the joy of possession, the anxiety of security, they are all there, and their interdependence" (1979: 77). It is significant, for example, that once he has completed work on his cave, Crusoe immediately caches away all the goods he has salvaged from the wreck of the ship: "Into this fence or fortress, with infinite labour, I carry'd all my riches, all my provisions, ammunition, and stores . . . " (1975: 45). Furthermore, it is also noteworthy that he goes to these extremes in the absence of any apparent danger: "as it appear'd afterward, there was no need of all this caution from the enemies that I apprehended danger from" (1975: 45). However, Defoe's novel does not so much 'explore' as naturalise the relationship of possession and the emotions which it engenders. It is this aspect of Defoe's representation of property relations which Coetzee foregrounds by means of repeating scenes from Robinson Crusoe in his novel. In this regard, it is significant that the context within which this iterative practice takes place -- namely, the portrayal of K's bond with the farm and plants -- is one from which subject- centred intentionality, that is, the precondition for the relationship of possession, has been excluded. Accordingly, the element of possession is conspicuously absent from K's relation with the farm and plants. Thus, while Crusoe "plunders" the wreck and safeguards what he salvages in his 'fortress' (Defoe, 1975: 43), K, as I have shown, refrains altogether from using the material which he discovers in the farmhouse and shed. The total absence in Michael K of the desire to possess and the need for security, which are presented as being autochthonous in Robinson Crusoe, not only relativises property relations but defamiliarises the manner in which they have been represented in fiction. In order to explain this point, it is necessary briefly to elucidate the nature of the,connection between the representational modes of the novel and property relations to 150 which Coetzee's iterative practice seems to direct the reader. In tracing the history of English property laws from the feudal structure of tenure to the eighteenth-century system of "strict settlement" and in arguing that the "movement in law" during this period was "toward the creation of controlled, commodified property", Davis makes the obvious yet important point that the development of property relations was accompanied by a change in the relation between 'man' and space (1987: 62 - 64, 86). Implicit in this argument is the fact that the development of such relations is related to the growth in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe of an increasingly autonomous subject, whose attempt to assert control over space is, for instance, evident in that concern of Descartes in the Discourse on the Method which I mentioned earlier in this thesis, namely to establish a "practical philosophy" by which knowledge could be so deployed as to make humankind "masters and owners of nature" (1969a: 46). Since, as I argued in the first chapter of this thesis, it is precisely the division between thinking substance and external world concomitant on the development of this notion of subjectivity which the technique of realism inscribed in the novel (that is, a division which presents as autochthonous the relation between 'man' as transcendental, active subject and nature as inert object), it follows that the novel played an important role in naturalising property relations and in occluding the way in which the human subject in constructing space as property, transforms it. Indeed, in his examination of the ideological assumptions about the nature of property which underpin the representation of space in the early novel, Davis claims that detailed descriptions of terrain only emerged with the advent of the novel and testify both to the growth of a desire to control terrain and the need to justify property:
The seemingly neutral idea of describing a place ands setting action in it carries with it the freight of a middle-class interest in controlled property. . . . As readers, we are forced into the belief that location is really terrain. But locations have purposes and functions. The way that these locations embody meaning 151 is ideological -- they are indirect, naturalizing their signs, imitating the terrain, becoming the secret sharer of the original -- and finally replacing the original. . . . The ideological function of this act of appropriating space may serve to convince us that places can be summarized, controlled, and intended for specific purposes -- a conviction that is the cornerstone of the early modern and modern periods. (1987: 85-86)
Owing to this link between the construal of space as commodified property and the emergence of the novel, Davis concludes that "property is a precondition for the novel since novels must be set in controlled or claimed spaces" (1987: 64). It is precisely this precondition of novelistic representation against which Coetzee reacts in his portrayal of the change which Michael K's relation with the farm undergoes. Indeed, this change is a result of K's suspension of the will to control space, a suspension that is evident, for example, in his rejection of the farmhouse in favour of the burrow. By implication, he refuses to see the terrain as property, that is, as a 'farm'. K's growth of respect for the openness of the 'farm' is further apparent in his related reluctance to 'salvage' the material which he finds in the farmhouse and shed and his sentiment that such tools as he does use "should be of wood and leather and gut, materials the insects would eat when one day he no longer needed them" (1983: 142-143). As I have indicated, his attitude here invites comparison with Robinson Crusoe's desire to salvage from the wreck of the ship, amongst others, the tools which enable him to subject the island to his technological will. In general terms, I have argued, this desire manifests itself in the 'move of Being' through which the island is integrated into the domain of the same. More specifically, though, it leads to the transformation of the island into real estate. In this regard, Green argues that
The ship is a wreck; it is no longer any use; the 1 island is a desert; it has never been of any use. But Crusoe, swimming out to the wreck, and paddling back with loads of planks, ropes, nails, carpenters' tools, sews the two together and creates something new out of 152 the two of them; creates a property. (my emphasis, 1979: 76)
Against this intertextual background, K's eschewal of the tools and material which he finds may be read specifically as a rejection of the terrain's status as a 'farm'. The meta-representational significance of K's newly gained respect for openness is thus revealed by the links between these two novels. Coetzee's iterative practice advertises the fact that, in his representation of K's relation to the 'farm', he tries to set his novel not in a 'controlled or claimed space', or in one which is foreclosed upon in the course of the novel, but in a space which becomes increasingly open as it sheds the reifying subjective definitions of western history. Another dimension of Coetzee's reaction to the novel-as- genre's representational reliance on 'controlled or claimed spaces' becomes apparent when it is considered that in colonial contexts property is usually synonymous with colonial possession. Accordingly, K's refusal to define the land as property may also signify an absence of the will to colonise. Indeed, in Michael K, such an imperial extension to the critique of property and its representation does emerge in the symbolism of fences (see Moses, 1994: 135-136). Following his escape from the Jakkalsdrif camp, K, on his way back to the farm, passes through an apparently empty landscape which he eventually notices is traversed by fences. In what amounts to a rejection of the desire to commodify and so transform the land, he reflects upon and distances himself from the business of erecting fences and thus "dividing up the land" (1983: 133). However, when the symbolism of fences in Michael K is placed alongside the following pronouncement of Jacobus Coetzee (which I examined in the previous chapter of this thesis), it becomes clear that the form of spatial containment at issue here is not simply commodification but colonialism:
We cannot count the wild. The wild is one because it is boundless. We can count fig-trees, we can count sheep because the orchard and the farm are bounded. 153 The essence of orchard tree and farm sheep is number. Our commerce with the wild is a tireless enterprise of turning it into orchard and farm. When we cannot fence it and count it we reduce it to number by other means. (1974: 85)
The opposition between 'we' and 'the wild' in terms of which this passage is structured indicates that in Africa the western creation of space as property is commensurate with the appropriation and domestication of territorial otherness through the imposition of an orderly Europeanness. Moreover, this split between 'we' and 'the wild' lays bare the extent to which the construction of colonial space, like the creation of property, depends upon an Enlightenment conception of subjectivity. However, where Descartes's philosophical concern was to devise a form of knowledge which would make humankind 'masters and owners of nature', the enterprise of the Enlightenment subject in a colonial context is to make European man the master and owner of colonial space. The process of transformation signalled by the phrase 'turning it into' in the above passage thus involves the transformation of the 'wilderness' not only into a human construct but, more precisely, a European construct. An implication of the above passage's exposure of the imperial subject's embeddedness in European culture is that the illusion of a transcendental subject which is propagated by realism not only naturalises western culture's transformation of space into property but that, in colonial contexts, the occlusion of this transformation also amounts to a naturalisation of imperial appropriation. As should be evident from the discussion in the first chapter of this thesis, this process of naturalisation emerges clearly in Robinson Crusoe in the transformation which the island setting undergoes from 'wilderness' to property to colony. By attempting to conceal this transition, the technique of realism seeks to naturalise the process through which 'terrain' is transmuted into 'location', 1 that is, controlled and commodified space. In Michael K, Coetzee's reluctance to comply with this representational procedure's collusion with the history of European imperialism is 154 most visible on an intertextual level in his reversal of this structural movement from openness to closure by means of his thematisation of the 'movement of infinition' through which K becomes an ethical subject. So, for example, the Karoo 'farm' loses its status as property and domesticated 'wilderness' -- both of which are implied by the appellation 'farm' -- and becomes open space. Seemingly, this reversal constitutes a refusal to represent space which has been transformed by the subjective definitions of western history and, instead, an attempt to represent an 'autonomous place', that is, space which is neither property nor colonial possession. If, as I have argued, it is one of Coetzee's aims to represent 'open' space, it is necessary for him to subvert the oppositional relation which exists between autonomous subject and physical terrain by presenting his portrayal from the perspective of a character who does not assume a 'prospect position', that is, a position of oppositionality, in relation to the landscape. Indeed, the point of the Levinasian trajectory which characterises Michael K's passage through the novel seems to be to indicate that it is possible -- by renegotiating subjectivity -- to suspend the violent process of creation disguised as perception through which the apparently transcendental subject constructs space, and thereby to transcend history. It is significant in this regard that at the beginning of the novel K is employed as a gardener in Wynberg Park. In other words, his occupation implicates him in the transformation and containment of physical spaces that is, the fact that he is a gardener in this exotic, Europeanised region of South Africa suggests that, like Jacobus Coetzee, he is a 'domesticator of the wilderness'. As the following passage indicates, the change which he undergoes involves the recognition that, as Coetzee states elsewhere, "the true South African landscape is of rock, not of foliage" (1988a: 167):
When he thought of Wynberg Park he thought of an earth more vegetal than mineral, composed of last year's rotted leaves and the year before's and so on . . . an earth so soft that one could dig and never come to the 155 end of the softness. . . . I have lost my love for that kind of earth, he thought. . . . It is no longer the green and brown that I want but the yellow and the red;. not the wet but the dry; not the dark but the light; not the soft but the hard. I am becoming a different kind of man. (1983: 92 - 93)
In the final stages of this development from a radical disembeddedness, not only from nature but also from the South African landscape, to a sympathy, concomitant on responsibility, for that landscape, Michael K is described as "[a] hard little stone, barely aware of its surroundings, enveloped in itself and its interior life" (1983: 185)." It is only after this restructuring of subjectivity in terms of responsibility for the other that K, who has earlier in the novel been commended for the aptitude he displays in this regard (1983: 130 - 131), develops his dislike for the raising of fences (1983: 133). Significantly, the following reflexive insight at which he arrives, while pondering the business of 'dividing up the land', suggests that it is because of its transformative nature that he distances himself from this activity: "He thought of himself not as something heavy that left tracks behind it, but if anything as a speck upon the surface of the earth too deeply asleep to notice the scratch of ant-feet, the rasp of butterfly teeth, the tumbling of dust" (1983: 133). In other words, upon his renegotiation of subjectivity, K no longer disturbs the land in his interaction with it. By extension, this renegotiation negates the intentional and therefore constitutive nature of the mode of consciousness which accompanies the subject-object relation and, as the following passage makes clear, K now sees without transforming:
He could lie all afternoon with his eyes open staring at the corrugations in the roof-iron and the tracings of rust: his mind would not wander, he would see nothing but the iron, the lines would not transform themselves into pattern or fantasy: he was himself, lying in his own house, the rust was merely rust. (my emphasis, 1983: 158 - 159)
That which K sees is no longer determined by a pre-existing 156 system of sense which transforms its 'being-there' into 'being something' (cf. Robbe-Grillet, 1965: 19, 21). 12 Differently put, he sees not a !controlled or claimed space', but a neutral space shorn of all presuppositions. The implication here is that the interaction which occurs in the absence of subject-centred intentionality divests the land of its ratiocinative overlay and thus allows it to manifest its original condition. Consequently, Michael K gains immediate access to the undefined space which lies beneath the layers of discourse left by Europe's attempt to 'know' it -- layers which, rather than making this space known, have occluded it and thus, ironically, rendered it unknown. In the process, he finally transcends the subjective definitions of western history and achieves a condition which, seemingly, is wholly otherwise than being-in-history, a condition, that is, which is radically different from the state of situatedness in history, disguised as transcendence, which characterises Cartesian consciousness. Ultimately, then, Coetzee in Michael K reverses the pattern of colonisation wIliCh the island in Defoe's Robinson Crusoe undergoes, by representing the decolonisation of the Karoo farm. This representational manoeuvre testifies to a conscious attempt to defy the precondition of novels identified by Davis -- namely that they 'must be set in controlled or claimed spaces'. As the strategy of 'intertextual citation' shows, this manoeuvre is also aimed at distancing this novel from those realist texts which supplement history by replicating the representationalist aesthetic installed by the genre at its inception. Since, as I have contended in this thesis, this aesthetic conceals history's elision of otherness and that, in the colonial context, this amounts to complicity with the imperial project, this meta- representational manoeuvre must be read as an attempt on the part of this novel to decolonise itself. However, the efficacy of this strategy must be questioned because it involves the thematisation and therefore representation of a 'movement of infinition' rather than the installation of such a movement as, for instance, is negotiated by the strategies of excession in "Narrative". Alternatively 157 put, it depicts this movement and the transcendence which it implies by means of precisely that realist aesthetic which it has problematised,.that is, by 'clarifying' its medium and resorting to a form of focalisation which is calculated to generate the effect of immediacy. Accordingly, Michael K conceals the fact that that which it presents as 'otherwise than being' is not wholly otherwise and, indeed, is achieved by the violent means which form the subject of its meta-representational critique. In effect, then, it would seem that the text is subverted by that which it attempts to subvert. It supplements the history which it seeks to rival and, in the process, achieves not so much a decolonisation as a recolonisation of itself. Being primarily based on a reading of the Karoo sections of this novel, this conclusion is somewhat premature. Michael K is self-reflexively aware of the problems raised above and, later in this chapter, I shall show that it undermines its representation of the 'farm' as an 'autonomous place'. Since this self- subversive gesture has a direct bearing on the interpretive act, however, it is first necessary to consider this novel's depiction of reading.
3.3 The Self-Reflexive Dimension of the Novel's Critique of Autonomous Subjectivity
Earlier in this chapter, I suggested that the reason for Coetzee's subversion of the realist illusion of immediacy in revealing the subject's implication in history is to instill in the reader an awareness of violence as a first step toward arresting the anamnetic process by means of which the subject intends and thus constitutes the object of its perception. Given this purpose, it is understandable that the critique of the autonomous subject in Michael K should self-reflexively encompass the interpretive act itself. In this section of the chapter, I shall demonstrate that Coetzee makes extensive use of the internal-mirroring technique of raise en abyme in order to show the political nature of the act of reading, u that is, to show 158 that, rather than detachedly examining the literary text, the reading subject is situated in history, and that its knowledge of the text is determined by pre-existing systems of literary intelligibility. With regard to this aspect of reading, then, this novel makes the same point as does "Narrative": that is, it shows that interpretation is a form of creation which supplements history. And, as my discussion develops, it will become clear that, like this earlier text, Michael K also ultimately raises the possibility of transcending the intentional structures which determine the experience of reading. The novel's critique of reading becomes apparent upon a consideration of the way in which the shift from third-person limited point of view to first-person point of view, which occurs between Part I and Part II, lays bare the Cartesian structure of the reader-text relation. As was suggested in the first chapter of this thesis, it is the narrative technique of point of view which inscribes in the novel-as-genre the principle of Cartesian consciousness. It will be remembered that Watt argues that the distinguishing feature of the novel is the 'Cartesian shift to the point of view of the perceiving individual ego', a shift which 'makes possible a more sharply defined picture of the outer as well as the inner world'. In Coetzee's text, the development which Michael K undergoes from radical detachment to sympathy with the 'farm' has as its corollary an attempt on the level of narrative perspective to simulate a transcendence of the Cartesian dualism between inner self and outer world and thereby, in the latter sections of Part I, to generate the illusion of a world which has supposedly been reduced to its basic, immediate, material existence. Apparently neutral, that is, without presuppositions, these descriptions convey the immediacy of the relationship between self and other. So, for example, in the previously-cited passage in which K stares at the roof of his burrow (1983: 158-159), it becomes clear, as I have indicated, that his 'consciousness' does not bear within it a history in the form of a system of knowledge assimilated elsewhere in the past which confers meaning on actions and objects in the present. The world it perceives is without a past and therefore self- 159 sufficient at every moment. Accordingly, the rusted roof-iron described in the passage simply 'is' without its 'being something'. Since in K's perCeption its specificity is recognised and it is not assigned an objective essence, it does not exist beyond itself. Not having been transformed by the percipient's gaze, it will be left in the same state in which it was before being perceived. In Part II of Michael K, the boundary between inner self and outer world is reinstated by the sudden shift in point of view initiated by the highly reflective diary entries of the medical officer. On the most basic level, the constant presence of the first-person singular pronoun in this section of the novel signals this return of the thinking I and the reinstallation of the subject-object dualism which separates the self from the other. More important in terms of the Cartesian aspect of the reader-text relation, is the fact that, the reader is aligned with the 'perceiving individual ego' upon its introduction. Thus, the epistolary convention of the direct address in the following citation forces the reader to reify Michael K by viewing him as an object from the subject position occupied by the medical officer:
I stood for hours in the doorway of the ward watching you and puzzling over the mystery. . . . my glittering eye would have held you, for the time being, rooted where you stood. . . . I only want to tell you what you mean to me, then I will be through. . . . Have I understood you? (my emphasis, 1983: 225 - 229)
This strategy does more than simply align the reader with the percipient subject. Apart from the medical officer's hermeneutic obsession with the 'meaning' of Michael K, the implied pun'on 'eye' and 'I', which conflates the organ of sight with subjectivity, hints at the extent to which Enlightenment epistemology's privileging of vision fostered the notion that 'truth' is acquired through the clarity of vision in the present of perception and thus facilitated the installation of a mode of knowledge which centres meaning in a radically disembedded subject's scrutiny of an object. By extension, it is a 160 manifestation of this Enlightenment subject that comes to assume the detached superiority of the scientist in relation to the literary text.. It is clear therefore that, through these images of reading, Coetzee takes issue with the post-Enlightenment science of interpretation which has dominated literary criticism for most of the twentieth century. The assumptions which underpin this science are most apparent in the dicta of New Criticism. For example, New Criticism is well known for its emphasis on the need to focus on the "intrinsic" aspects of the literary text rather than on "extrinsic" factors (see Wellek and Warren, 1956), an emphasis which sundered the text from its historical, social and cultural contexts. It is equally true, though, that with W.K. Wimsatt and M.C. Beardsley's identification of the "affective fallacy" (1954: 2, 21), the New Critics quite effectively divorced the reader too from his/her social, cultural and historical circumstances. Radically split away from world, the impartial reader was seen to provide an unmediated account which approximated the la t ent meaning inscribed in the text. Since meaning was considered to be immanent in the object of investigation rather than in the cultural paradigms of the observer, the text could be cut off from history. And since the reader was so disinterested that his/her neutral transcription of the 'truth' of this object was controlled by the object itself, s/he too could be cut off from history. It is the appropriative mode of operation that is concealed by this notion of a detached subjectivity which Coetzee attempts to render visible in Michael K by means of mises en abyme that self-reflexively represent the reading-subject's situatedness in discursive contexts and thus the fact that its perception of the text is not transparent but is instead mediated by those structures of knowledge inscribed in history. This self- conscious critique of the transcendental subject emerges in yet another of the images of reading in Michael K -- that is, the 1 scene in Part II of the novel in which the medical officer and camp commander interrogate the protagonist. While K, as the object of scrutiny, is depicted as a text-surrogate in this 161 scene, the state functionaries, as interrogators who engage in what is a patently hermeneutic activity, are characterised as reader-surrogates. In the course of the medical officer and camp commander's interrogation of K, it becomes evident that the state has endeavoured to make sense of his enigmatic presence on the Karoo 'farm' by integrating him into the system of power relations which has shaped South Africa's colonial history. Thus, for example, his official report describes him as "an arsonist" and "an escapee from a labour camp" who "was running a flourishing garden on an abandoned farm and feeding the local guerilla population when he was captured" (1983: 179-180). And, when the medical officer questions K, he tries to place him in league with the "Swartberg insurgent gang" (1983: 193) and therefore in opposition to the state: "tell us about your recent agricultural enterprise and the friends from the mountains who drop in for a visit and a meal every now and again" (1983: 192). Having read Part I of the novel, though, the reader is aware that during his stay on the 'farm', K 'escaped the times' and, by implication, the subject-object relation of dominance and subservience which created those times (1983: 159). Indeed, s/he knows that, far from having been an "opgaarder" during his life on the Karoo 'farm' (1983: 188), K decided against joining the 'Swartberg insurgent gang' as this would have meant once again becoming a term in the subject-object relation. The reader's apprehension of this disjunction between the facts of K's presence on the 'farm' and the state's interpretation of his sojourn there, enables him/her to realise that, rather than detachedly and transparently observing K-as-object in the present, the interrogators-as-subject see what has already been determined by a pre-existing system of sense-making. The hermeneutic procedure adopted by the interrogators in their attempt to make sense of Michael K conforms to the structuralist conception of reading which I discussed in the previous chapter. According to Culler (1975: 134), "naturalisation" forms the basis of all reading strategies. All interpretive endeavours are premised on the assimilation of the 162 text into a literary system of intelligibility, a discursive order deemed 'natural' by the 'interpretive community' to which the reader belongs. From a Levinasian perspective, one could say that reading is underpinned by the 'move of Being'. A corollary of this understanding of reading is that there can be no aberrant texts because, as Elizabeth Freund sums up, totalising reading strategies ignore the specificity of the literary text: "to interpret becomes an act of obliterating the difference or otherness of literature, domesticating or coercing into 'naturalness' the strangeness which defies and resists understanding" (1987: 82). By the same token, there can also be no aberrant readings since, rather than controlling the systems of intelligibility, the reading subject is itself controlled by them. Its derivative status as the result and not the cause of these systems is expressed in Barthes' contention that the "'I' which approached the text is already itself a plurality of other texts, of codes which are infinite" (1974: 10). In Culler's words, "The reader becomes the name of the place where the various codes can be located: a virtual site" (1981: 38). By inference, then, every reading is an example of the rules which determine the system of interpretation. In the context of this theory of reading, it becomes clear that the image of interpretation formed by the interrogation scene in Michael K challenges the reading subject's status as origin and centre of meaning. Knowledge, as this scene indicates, is located in pre-existing structures which govern the reading subject's observation in the present. And, through enabling the reader to apprehend the disjunction between the facts of K's life on the 'farm' and the state's interpretation of his presence there, this scene also alerts the reader to the violently transformative nature of these structures of knowledge: in attempting to deny K's specificity, and thereby obliterate his otherness, they try to create for him another identity. To some extent, then, the reader, acted upon by an intertext, writes the literary text. As in the case of its depiction of Michael K's early relationship with the Karoo 'farm', the novel here indicates the subject's situatedness in history, thereby exposing 163 the aesthetic base of existence. In the interrogation scene, this imbrication of aesthetics with existence is laid bare by the dissolution of, the boundary between reading and writing which occurs when both the medical officer and the camp commander refer to the official account of K's supposedly subversive activities on the Karoo 'farm' as a "story" (1983: 177, 180), the implication being that it is a fiction. Moreover, the medical officer urges the camp commander to "Make up something for the report" (1983: 193) -- an adjuration to engage in the fiction- making process. In interpreting Michael K, the state author- ities thus seek to write the story of his 'life and times', in other words, they try to insert him as a character into their text, that is, history. Far more comprehensively than in "Narrative", then, Coetzee in this novel erodes the distinction between writing and reading. Such an erosion is further evident in his examination of the mode of creation at stake in interpretation -- an examination that is implicit in the conflation of the reader/author-text relation with the parent-child relation. This conflation, which initially appears to support the notion of the author/reader as originator of meaning, emerges shortly before the interrogation scene in the medical officer's description of Michael K as an "unborn creature" (1983: 185). The interrogation itself amounts to an attempt by Major Noel van Rensburg as author/reader/parent to 'bear' Michael K, with the assistance of the medical officer as midwife. Significantly, the name 'Noel' is etymologically linked to birth and, later in the novel, the link between birth and authorship materialises in the medical officer's following description of the camp commander: "What did Noel ultimately achieve labouring at his desk to balance the bodies out against the bodies in?" (1983: 214). In this sentence, the etymology of the camp commander's name and the obvious pun on 'labouring' conjoin with the image of an author writing at his desk and thereby, it initially appears, depict literary creation as a natural rather than a conventional activity. 164 Such an interpretation would, however, ignore Coetzee's deliberate conflation of parental roles, evident, for instance, in his use of the name 'Noel' . which alludes not only to maternity but also to paternity: the French variant of Father Christmas is called Pere Noel and is invoked when Noel van Rensburg is likened to Father Christmas (1983: 210; cf. Dovey, 1988: 302-303). Far from biologising the author/reader-text relation and thus centring the reader/author as the origin of the text's meaning, this conflation of parental and literary roles evokes Barthes's well-known rejection of the traditional notion of the 'Author' as sole begetter and immaculate conceiver of the literary text:
The Author, when believed in, is always conceived of as the past of his own book: book and author stand automatically on a single line divided into before and after. The Author is thought to nourish the book, which is to say that he exists before it, thinks, suffers, lives for it, is in the same relation of antecedence to his work as a father to his child. (1977: 145)
This parody of the conception of literary production as a form of creation ex nihilo is, of course, followed by Barthes's pronouncement of the "death of the author" and his assertion that a text is "a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash" (1977: 146). It is therefore significant that Coetzee's use of the conventional image of the author as father is undermined by the integration of the interrogation scene into a sequence of birth scenes involving Michael K, the iterative aspect of these scenes hinting at the operation of a process of intertextual replication. This sequence is initiated by the opening passage of the novel, in which Anna K gives birth to her son with the assistance of a midwife. A version of this scene recurs when, shortly before being taken to the Jakkalsdrif camp, K is presided over I by a nurse and a state official in the hospital in Prince Albert (1983: 97, 99). This iterative pattern again manifests itself in Part II in the scene at the Kenilworth infirmary where, as has 165 been indicated, K is presided over by a medical officer and a state official (1983: 188-192). Further parallels exist between the latter two.scenes. In the preamble to each, K is renamed: as "Michael Visagie" in the former (1983: 96), and as "Michaels" in the latter (1983: 170). The suggestion in both cases, then, is that the state, in creating a new identity for Michael K, attempts to 'give birth' to him. In Part III of the novel, the sexual encounter of the triad of K, the pimp and the prostitute enters this sequence of birth scenes. The pimp is associated with Major Noel van Rensburg because his name, December, denotes the month in which Christmas falls. Moreover, the prostitute is affiliated with the medical officer by the white dress she wears (1983: 235) -- an allusion to the standard uniform of the nursing profession -- and she is simply, but pointedly, referred to as "the sister" (1983: 236, 238, 239, 242). The scene itself depicts an attempted delivery more than coitus, as is testified to by the pun on the word "laboured" in the following sentence: "Against [Michael K's] will the memory returned". . . of the grunting girl as she laboured on him" (1983: 246). Finally, in its preamble, the pimp -- as part of his attempt "to make a new man of [him]" (1983: 239) -- renames Michael K "Mister Treefeller" (1983: 237). This sequence of birth scenes indicates that the interrogation scene is not only a repetition of a repetition, but is itself the subject of further repetition. Indeed, the iterative quality of such key episodes provides this novel with a recursive structure that is strongly reminiscent of that of "Narrative". The principle of iteration that is signified by this structure negates the suggestion of auctorial originality conveyed by the image of the author-as-father, and points to the presence of an intertext behind the creative endeavours in the various scenes. As such, it bears out one of the implications of Culler's theory of interpretation, namely that every reading (and, one might add, every creation) is a manifestation of the laws controlling the system of literary intelligibility (1975: 131 - 160). In this regard, it becomes increasingly clear that all the author/reader-figures in the various scenes attempt to create 166
K in terms of the same binary patterning of mutual opposition -- they all try to annul his otherness by reducing him to a term in a system of oppositions. So, .although the relationships in which K becomes involved are, on the surface, diverse, they always entail an attempt at placing him in a position of subservience in one of the various permutations of the subject-object relation of conflict. Accordingly, it gradually becomes clear that these creative endeavours are underpinned by the system of oppositional relations out of which history 'erects' itself. Although the scenes of (attempted or failed) creation in question are mises en abyme of reading/writing, the diversity of social relationships that they depict indicates that the intertext suggested by their iterative quality should not be narrowly conceived of in purely literary terms. Instead, in a further displacement of origins, this intertext should be more broadly construed as the relational system which generates both history and the representational modes which constitute the langue of literature. Indeed, the iterative structure of Coetzee's novel intimates that the 'text' which emanates from this mode of intertextual creation would be one that supplements history: as in Michael K's first encounter with the Karoo 'farm', the reading/writing subjects in these scenes, in their attempted rewritings of K, seek to reproduce the conflictual relations which produce the events out of which history 'erects itself'. Furthermore, while the relation between langue and parole is usually conceived of as being dialectical, with the parole resisting the langue's determinism by breaking and transforming its codes and conventions (see Culler, 1975: 28-31), the relationship of supplementarity which Coetzee's novel postulates between generative system and individual 'text' in these scenes leads simply to static repetition, and is consequently absolute and deterministic. In the next section of this chapter, the problem which now arises, namely the extent to which the reader/writer is regulated by this system of dualistic relati9ns which divorces the self from the other, will be examined. It will become clear that the issue that is at stake here is whether or not the text's 'intimations' of otherness are able to affect 167 the reader -- that is, whether or not the 'move of Being' that informs reading practice may be interrupted by a 'movement of infinition'. The importance to this issue of K's escape from the various attempts to contain him in the birth scenes will emerge in the course of my discussion.
3.3.1 Renegotiating the Reader-Text Relation
The novel's complex and multiple response to this question of determinism is evident in the various parallels which the reader- text affiliation in the birth scenes forms with other relational sets in the novel. On the one hand, as I have indicated, this affiliation evokes K's initial encounter with the 'farm'. By implication, then, it also echoes the Crusoe-island/Friday relations, an echo that is strengthened by the fact that the reading subjects in the birth scenes rename K in a manner which is strongly reminiscent of Robinson Crusoe's naming of Friday. The significance of this equation is that through it the novel anticipates the course which the reader's reading/writing of the text might t..ake. In other words, it seems to suggest that, being governed by the same system of power relations, the reader's literary encounter with the text will supplement history in the way that Crusoe's commerce with the island does in Defoe's representation of the colonial encounter. However, it must be remembered that, in his discussion of the nature of the relationship which exists between the system of power relations which constructs history and the individual novel, Coetzee does suggest the possibility of an aesthetic of rivalry (1988). In this regard, it may be argued that his use in Michael K of mises en abyme of reading which direct the reader's attention to his/her implication in history is a necessary part of an attempt to instill within the reader a non-egoistic awareness of the text's 'intimations' of otherness and thus forestall his/her attempt to foreclose on this alterity. With l this in mind, one may read the parallel between the reader-text relation and K's initial encounter with the 'farm' as positing a transcendental alternative to static repetition by suggesting 168 that, just as K's relation with the 'farm' undergoes a structural change, so too the reader's relation to the text might alter. I shall argue, though, that the contrary is true, and that the novel systematically checks any effort on the part of the reader to construct a parallel between K's changed relation with the 'farm' and his/her relation with the text's 'intimations' of alterity. Initially, this resistance seems to negate the possibility of the reader's transcendence of the intentional structures which determine the course of history. However, I shall demonstrate that it is precisely through resisting such an equation that this novel creates the possibility of transcendence. The principal means through which the text prevents the reader from identifying him/herself with K is by aligning him/her with the medical officer. As I have already indicated, Coetzee achieves this alignment in the second section of the novel by means of his use of the first-person, epistolary point of view. The reader witnesses K from the perspective of a thinking and writing I. S/he shares this perspective and, it gradually becomes clear, its discursive detachment from the other. In this regard, it needs to be emphasised that the novel foregrounds the mediating role of language in the medical officer's relationship with K. The sheer proliferation of first-person pronouns in this section, together with the use of the convention of the direct address, stresses the medical officer's linguistic separation from K. In the following excerpts, this laying bare of the strong division between subject and object in the English language suggests that, despite his attempts at immediate and proximate contact through apparently transparent perception, the medical officer is divorced from that which he perceives:
Then I would have stepped closer till I was within touching distance and you could not fail to see into my eyes (1983: 223); Then as I watched you day after day I slowly began to understand the truth (1983: 224);
I stood for hours in the doorway of the ward watching you and puzzling over the mystery. . . . but my 169 glittering eye would have held you, for the time being, rooted where you stood (1983: 225); So I would turn my gaze out again, and, yes, it would still be true . . . there was indeed a gathering, a thickening of darkness above one bed alone, and that bed was yours. (1983: 227)
The third of these citations, to which I have earlier referred, contains an allusion.to Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner", in which the mariner accosts the wedding guest -- "holds him with his glittering eye" (1949: 1.4.1) -- and tells him his story. In the context of the novel's argument on perception, this reference to authorial activity suggests that, rather than being originary, viewing involves creation. By implication, the medical officer transforms what he sees. Coetzee's use of the epistolary technique in representing the medical officer's relationship with K clearly underscores the fact that the former, who is represented throughout by the solipsistic first-person singular pronoun, is trapped as a term within language's subject-object structure without any unmediated access to the latter. In the process, it mirrors the implication in language of the reader. On the whole, then, the diary section of the novel points to the grounding of subjectivity in language. It indicates, as Emile Benveniste puts it, that the "basis of subjectivity is in the exercise of language", that 'I' can only be conceived in relation to a grammatical 'non-I' or 'you' (1971: 225-226). An important corollary of this argument is that the subject's self-consolidating assertion of its autonomy through the elision of all that is other is facilitated by the rigid division which language installs between subject, verb and object (see Coetzee, 1992b: 95). To some extent, Coetzee seems to suggest, the oppositional structure between subject and object that determines the conflictual nature of the events which form the course of history is a fact of language. In asserting the subject's implication in language, Coetzee's use of the conventions of the epistolary novel generates a structural contrast in the text between the diary section and the previous one which deals with K's relation to the 170 Karoo 'farm'. This structural contrast installs a tension in the novel between relations that are implicated in language and relations outside language, a tension which is signalled in the diary section by the difference between the medical officer's loquacity and the hare-lipped K's laconicism. So, for example, while K, in the interrogation scene, states that he is "not clever with words" (1983: 190), the medical officer responds by parading his eloquence: "Listen to me, listen how easily I fill this room with words. I know people who can talk all day without getting tired, who can fill up whole worlds talking" (1983: 192). While the second section of Michael K foregrounds the mediating role played by language in the construction of relationships, the first section creates the illusion that K's access to the land is unmediated (cf. Wright, 1992: 436; Moses, 1994: 144). As the following passage indicates, he is represented as experiencing nature not via language, but directly in its unreduced plurality and sensuous materiality:
He had become so much a creature of twilight and night that daylight hurt his eyes. He no longer needed to keep to paths in his movements around the dam. A sense less of sight than of touch, the pressure of presences upon his eyeballs and the skin of his face, warned him of any obstacle. His eyes remained unfocussed for hours on end like those of a blind person. He had learned to rely on smell too. He breathed into his lungs the clear sweet smell of water brought up from inside the earth. It intoxicated him, he could not have enough of it. Though he knew no names he could tell one bush from another by the smell of their leaves. He could smell rain-weather in the air (my emphasis, 1983: 158).
The elevation of sensibility over language and cognition in this passage may be compared with Levinas's understanding of sensibility, in which he describes the sensed as a "tenderness" which "exists between the face and the nudity of the skin" (1987c: 118). As this description implies, sensibility involves a relationship that is characterised by immediacy and proximity -- it is "an event of proximity and not of knowledge" (Levinas, 1987c: 116). By implication, sensible contact transcends the 171 'move of Being': it has its "origin in the other" (Levinas, 1987c: 119) and its proximity remains a proximity, that is, it can never become an intention of something. Thus Levinas asserts that the "relationship of proximity, this contact unconvertible into a noetico-noematic structure, in which every transmission of messages, whatever be those messages, is already established, is the original language, a language without words or propositions, pure communication" (1987c: 119). It seems to be just such a relationship of proximity that is invoked in the above passage from Michael K. Its emphasis on sensibility suggests that Michael K lacks a concept and so a thought with which to anchor and organise and so transform that which he sees. Besides, the proximity suggested by this emphasis never becomes an intention of anything. In the absence of language and therefore of concepts, this contact has its origin in the other. This is further evident in the passage quoted earlier which describes K staring at the 'tracings of rust' on the roof of his burrow without 'transforming' them 'into pattern or fantasy'. The viewing metaphor in this passage is divested of its rationalist and transformative connotations: K does not create what he perceives, he simply perceives. 14 It is thus clear that the state of proximity with the other that characterises Michael K's reconstructed relation with the Karoo 'farm' occurs in the absence of language and therefore that the medical officer's relationship with K cannot be equated with this relation. Being situated in language, the medical officer is divorced from the other. Similarly, the alignment of the reader with this character implies the former's linguistic separation from entities in the world. In emphasising the distance between relations inside and outside language, the novel therefore indicates that the reader cannot model his/her interaction with the text on Michael K's affiliation with the 'farm'. By extension, the novel seems to offer no attainable alternative to the parallel which it constructs between Michael K's initial interaction with the Karoo 'farm' (and, by extension, Robinson Crusoe's encounter with the island) and the reader's 172 relation to the text. In effect, then, the reader is, willy- nilly, aligned with Robinson Crusoe, an alignment that is hinted at by the fact that the medical officer is depicted as a Crusoe- figure in his description of himself as a "castaway marooned in a pocket of time" (1983: 216). Since he is radically separated from 'reality' not only by history but also by language -- whose binaric structure, as the comparison between the modes of being in society and on the 'farm' shows, enables the subject-object dualism which determines the conflictual nature of the events from which history proceeds -- the medical officer may aptly be described as a 'castaway'. By contrast, Michael K -- who is immersed in the sensible world -- is "not a prisoner or a castaway" (1983: 158). Significantly, in terms of the estranging media of language and history, K, unlike Crusoe, does not keep a journal or a diary and, during his time in the mountains, does "not turn his cave into a home or keep a record of the passage of the days" (1983: 93). The alignment of the medical officer and the reader with Crusoe appears to be even more absolute when it is considered that implicit in the portrayal of the former's castaway status is a reversal of the world-island opposition in Defoe's novel. So, for instance, the Karoo 'farm' -- despite its intertextual link with the island in Defoe's novel -- is not the locale of a marooned condition in Coetzee's novel, but is instead the locus of a state of proximity with the other. Conversely, it is the realm of history and language which, being detached from the sensible world, is the locus of a castaway condition. The implication of the inversion of this opposition is that, in Michael K, Crusoe's castaway status becomes a metaphor for the radically disembedded nature of culture as a whole. By depicting the reader as a castaway in history, Coetzee's novel at first appears to suggest that, since s/he is unable to transcend his/her situatedness, his/her reading of the novel is destined to supplement history in the same way that Crusoe's interaction with the island does in Defoe's portrayal of the colonial encounter. Since the reader's relationship to the novel is grounded in language and is therefore seemingly not 173 negotiable, it can never hope to rival history. Ultimately, then, the novel seriously undermines the possibility, which it initially seems to raise -- that the reader may be able to renegotiate his/her relation to the text and, accordingly, be affected by its 'intimations' of otherness. Being situated in- the-world, it ostensibly indicates, s/he will, as a matter of course, foreclose on the otherness which it attempts to 'intimate'. Even if s/he dissents, s/he is a coloniser. It is for this reason that the reader is aligned with the medical officer in Michael K. The latter is one of those characters in Coetzee's fiction who, as I indicated in my introduction, are described by Watson as colonisers who refuse, that is, who do not want to be colonisers, but who nevertheless are as a result of their situatedness in colonial history (1996: 22). Indeed, the possibility of the reader renegotiating his/her relationship with the text is apparently further denied by the novel's scepticism concerning its ability to represent a relation such as that which exists between K and his plants -- scepticism which amounts to a questioning of its ability to transcend its own 'worldliness'. This incredulity manifests itself in the guise of a self-conscious admission of the fact that the unmediated and contingent state of this relationship is compromised by the novel's medium and its formal protocols. ° Thus, the foregrounding of language in the second part of the novel serves not only to indicate the medical officer's entrapment in language and, by contrast, K's proximate mode of being beyond language, but also, paradoxically and self- subversively, to betray the novel's linguistic medium and thus advertise the fact that the impression that K's existence on the 'farm' is free of language has been created through and by language. Furthermore, the novel exposes its manipulation of narrative point of view in order to convey the illusion of immediacy in the Karoo farm section. In this section of the novel, the third- person mode of narration that is used is rendered inconspicuous. Consequently, this form of "showing'' creates the impression that a sensible world, in all its plurality, is being presented 174 directly to the reader without interference from an external mediator or mediation by language. 16 In this part of the novel, then, the masking of the narrational process through a visual emphasis on 'showing' hides language. As has been argued, the shift in point of view brought about by the second part of the novel is to a highly visible first-person mode of 'telling' which foregrounds language by laying bare the narrational process. Paradoxically, however, this shift to an overt narrational mode also renders visible the more covert mode in the preceding section, thus suggesting that 'showing' is merely a form of 'telling'. In the process, the contradiction implicit in the depiction of plurality provided by this part of the novel is revealed -- namely that, since it is represented by the closures of novelistic fiction, plurality will always be reduced to a point of view in language and, accordingly, negated. By means of this strategy of self-subversion, Michael K seems to concede that it cannot 'occupy an autonomous place' and thus, in its representation of relational modes, rival rather than supplement history. The novel therefore appears to contradict Coetzee's elaboration of the opposing ways in which South African fiction relates to history in "The Novel Today" by suggesting that, as with the reader to whom the novel initially appears to offer a choice, the writer of fiction ultimately finds that s/he has no option but to supplement history and that attempts, such as Coetzee's own, to rival history by representing a relationship of proximity to the other are thwarted by the closures of the medium and forms of novelistic fiction. One could argue that, with this self-reflexive admission, the novel subverts the apparent significance of the contrast between those sections which deal with Michael K's existence in the apparently designified, atemporal realm of the Karoo 'farm', and those which focus on society as the realm of time and language. Accordingly, it appears to become, to use Fish's term, the "vehicle of its own abandonment", that is, a "self-consumiig artifact", only able to alert the reader to its inability to represent, or say anything about, its apparent subject (1972: 3). At most, it seems to be reduced to commenting self-reflexively on 175 its inability to decolonise its representational manoeuvres. As in "Narrative", though, Michael K's admission of 'worldliness' does not suggest its inability to rival history. In undermining its representation of proximity to the other, the structural contrast between the first two sections of this novel inscribes in it precisely that tension between totality and infinity which I described at some length in my discussion of "Narrative". As in the earlier text, this tension suggests Michael K's refusal to represent the other, its knowledge, that is, that such an attempt would inevitably elide the other's otherness. Differently, put, the other which it only ostensibly seeks to represent can only remain other by remaining unknown and therefore cannot be represented. By means of this structural contrast, then, the novel self-reflexively lays bare a 'dissonance' between its form and ostensible content and, in the process, establishes a homologous and supplementary relation between its form and those totalising forms which reduce an infinite 'reality' to a manageable, rational, coherent object. Accordingly, the novel points to a radical disjunction between the order of the other and a world of language and forms. Thus, while it cannot represent the order of the other (that is, the domain which language and the systems of intelligibility which it generates have ironically rendered unknown in their attempt to make it known), it can, by emphasising the incongruity, the complete absence of any correlation, between its medium, form and ostensible content, 'intimate' the existence of such an unknown and unknowable order and, in the process, suggest a lack within the supposed plenitude of the condition of being-in-history -- a lack, that is, of immediate and proximate contact with the other. As is the case in "Narrative", then, the tension between totality and infinity which Coetzee inscribes in Michael K establishes an 'indicative' relation between the text and alterity. By means of this tension, the text contrives a relation not of correspondence but of absolute difference betwpen itself and that which it cannot even attempt to represent and which it only apparently attempts to represent. Accordingly, what it 'intimates' absolves itself from the relationship. Once 176 again, as in "Narrative", the corollary of the 'unrelating relation' established by this significatory process is that Coetzee seeks to inscribe in Michael K a 'dehiscent' movement from the order of the same to the other. As a result of this suspension of the 'move of Being' which is an inevitable part of representation, this writer is able to produce a novel that, in its relation to alterity, is not a product of the intentionality of his consciousness. Read in terms of Blanchot's argument on the inevitability with which Orpheus's 'looking away' becomes the 'gaze', the 'movement of infinition' which Coetzee installs in this novel constitutes an attempt to approach the other without possessing it by making manifest its absolute exteriority. In short, it is an attempt to devise a responsible novelistic response to the other. The implications for the reader of this ethical response to alterity in the form of a novel are identical to those which I adumbrated in my examination of "Narrative". Since Michael K's relation with the other is 'indicative' and therefore non- cognitive, It strives to forestall the intentional functioning of the reader's consciousness and thereby arrest the 'move of Being' which underpins the act of reading. By overwhelming his/her cognitive faculties, it seeks to surprise him/her and thus 'concretely produce' the idea of infinity in the literary encounter. It aspires to inspire the reader from a source that is radically exterior to the apparent totality of history by 'putting into' him/her the idea, as opposed to adequate representation, of infinity. Accordingly, it attempts to enable a mode of reading which is informed not by the recuperative 'move of Being', but by a dehiscent 'movement of infinition' -- it seeks to perform the ethical in the literary encounter. In "Narrative", Coetzee does not self-reflexively explore the ethical implications for the reader of such a non-cognitive literary encounter whilst Michael K does do so, albeit to a limited extent, by means of its emphasis on K's escape from attempts to contain his otherness. In my above discussion of the birth scenes, I focused on the parent/writer/reader-figures' endeavour to bear/create K and did not examine a crucial aspect 177 of these scenes, namely that K escapes the repeated bids at containment (see Hawthorne, 1993: 123ff.). By implication, then, it would be more accurate to describe the scenes in question as escape scenes. It is owing to this emphasis on escape that many critics see the novel as an assertion of the potential for freedom inherent in the "process of textuality". For example, Dovey maintains that "Michael K's determination to be 'out of all the camps at the same time' represents the possibilities for freedom which inhere in the process of textuality itself" (1988: 290), and Attwell describes this novel as a "muted affirmation of textual freedom" (1993: 102). If, however, the text's ethical perspective, particularly its contemplation of the notions of responsibility and care, is to emerge, attention must be paid not only to the other's absolution of itself from the subject-object relationship, but also to the effect of this absolution on the intending subject. Of all the escape scenes in the novel, this effect is most visible in the scene in which the medical officer and camp commander interrogate K. Given the fact that he is a reader/writer surrogate, it is my contention that this scene's careful depiction of the effect on the medical officer of K's silence self-consciously anticipates the possible effect on the reader of the silence constituted by the text's refusal to attempt to represent otherness. In the interrogation scene, it is K's silence which opposes the efforts of his interrogators to author him by recuperating his otherness within an a priori system of ideas. Because of his silence, he cannot be contained by the idea which they have of him. Silence in this novel is thus closely related to the role of infinity in Levinas's account of the face-to-face encounter. It ruptures the relation of adequation which the medical officer attempts to establish between K and his idea of him and, in the process, produces the idea of infinity in this encounter. Differently put, K exceeds the idea of the other in the medical officer and thus absolves himself from the relationship. This absolution is made clear by the strong link that is established between silence and the stone motif in the interrogation scene. During the interrogation, it is K's stony silence that enables 178 him to avoid becoming a term in the state's relations of power: "His face closed like a stone . . . he stared stonily back" (1983: 191-192).. Significantly, this description of K's resistance to being subsumed within (and thus transformed by) the state's system of power relations echoes the medical officer's following, earlier description of him: "He passes through these institutions and camps and hospitals and God knows what else like a stone. Through the intestines of the war" (1983: 185). When this passage is compared with another in which the medical officer reflects on Michael K as follows: "But when the state stamped Michaels with a number and gobbled him down it was wasting its time. For Michaels has passed through the bowels of the state undigested; he has emerged from its camps as intact as he emerged from its schools and orphanages" (1983: 221), it becomes clear that the state is depicted here in terms of the myth of Cronus (see Graves, 1960, I: 39-41). According to this myth, Cronus -- the archetype of the Political Fathr -- attempts to swallow all of his children to prevent any of them from overthrowing him. Rhea, however, tricks him into swallowing a stone wrapped in swaddling-clothes instead of Zeus, her youngest son, who consequently escapes his father's despotic control, remaining undigested and untransformed -- like Michael K. K's ability to absolve himself from relationships, to "take up residence in a system without becoming a term in it" (1983: 228), is also directly articulated in the medical officer's following words to him in their later, imaginary encounter: "Did you not notice how, whenever I tried to pin you down, you slipped away?" (1983: 228). These words make it clear that the emphasis on language in the diary section of the novel serves to foreground not only the medical officer's situatedness in language, but also K's absolution from the subject-object relation that is inscribed in this medium. Indeed, in the description of the imaginary encounter which, I have argued, stresses the subject's implication in language, the 'unrelating relation' established by this absolution is graphically portrayed by K's escape from the medical officer who, it transpires, is ultimately unable to 'hold' him with his 'glittering eye'. It 179 would seem, then, that in its apparent foregrounding of the totalising nature of language, the novel 'intimates' an infinity which is, in fact, the conditibn of impossibility for the totality which this medium supposedly installs. It is noteworthy in this regard that the emphasis in Michael K falls on the effect of K's transcendence of the subject-object relation on the medical officer. I have repeatedly pointed out in this study that, for Levinas, the subject's inability to find a correlate for its intentional acts of consciousness in its encounter with the infinity of the face culminates in its assumption of responsibility for the other. The subject becomes its 'brother's keeper'. In this regard, it is significant that, after the violence of his initial attempt to elide K's otherness, the medical officer suddenly and seemingly unaccountably and incongruously evinces a desire to protect K during the interrogation scene. This emerges in his following appeal to the camp commander:
'Listen to me, Noel, I have a serious request to make. Let him go. Don't try beating a story out of him . . 'Who spoke about beating?' . . . Don't try twisting a story out of him, because truly there is no story to be had. . . . there is nothing there, no story of the slightest interest to rational people.' (1983: 193-194)
This shift in emphasis from. violence to care suggests the medical officer's assumption of responsibility for K. Significantly, the fact that this sense of responsibility cannot be explained is insisted upon in the novel and, accordingly, suggests that it emanates from a pre-reflective encounter with the face of the other. So, for example, the medical officer's intercession on K's behalf during the interrogation scene elicits the following question from Major van Rensburg: "Why are you so keen to protect Michaels?" (1983: 19). In its various permutations, this question forms a refrain in the diary section of this text. Nonplussed by the medical officer's anxiety over K's health, the duty officer inquires as follows: 180 "Why are you so interested anyway?" (1983: 197). Later, Noel van Rensburg again calls attention to the medical officer's solicitude for K's welfare: "ram baffled by this interest you have in him" (1983: 200). Even K comments on the medical officer's interest in him:
'Why do you want to make me fat? Why fuss over me, why am I so important?' (1983: 186);
'What am I to this man? I ask myself, What is it to this man if I live or die?' (1983: 203)
It further transpires that the medical officer is himself unable convincingly to answer this question. On the one hand, he is certainly aware of and even articulates the sense of responsibility which he feels for K:
'Felicity and I are the only people in the world who care enough to help you' (1983: 199);
I am the only one who cares for you. I alone see you as neither a soft case for a soft camp nor a hard case for a hard camp but a human soul above and beneath classification . . . . (1983: 207)
On the other hand, his diary entries, which are an attempt to account for this caring attitude, simply expose his own perplexity in this regard. The medical officer's responsibility for Michael K is directly related to his sense of subservience to this character. This perception of subservience emerges in his following reflection on K: "Your bony arms are knotted behind my head, I walk bowed under the weight of you" (1983: 199). As Glennis Stephenson notes, the suggestion in this section of the novel is that "Michael becomes the oppressor" in this relationship (1991: 79). Significantly, though, the burden motif here and elsewhere in the portrayal of the medical officer's relation to K is rearticulated in such a way that it implies the ethical authority 181 rather than political power of the other. For example, in the interrogation scene which, as I have already noted, is also a birth scene, it conjoins with imagery of the maternal relation. This is apparent in the description of one of the silences with which K responds to the medical officer's injunction that he speak: "The silence lengthened. No81 did not speak, passing the whole burden to me" (1983: 189). Apart from its overt meaning, the word 'burden' in this context signifies 'a child in a womb: a birth'. The 'passing' of the 'burden' thus reveals that not only the camp commander but also the medical officer is depicted as a parent in this scene. However, as is evident in the fact that he appeals for a suspension of the interrogation, the latter differs from the former in that he no longer attempts to recreate K by integrating him into the system of power relations which defines the colonial history of South Africa. In his case, the metaphor of parenthood signifies an assumption of responsibility for the other. It is important to note, in this regard, that the mother- child relation that is intimated by the burden image in this scene is one not of oppression but of selfless care, and is therefore reminiscent of K's relation to the plants on the Karoo 'farm'. This is made clear by both the text's foregrounding of the medical officer's sense of responsibility for K and the pointed allusions to maternal care in the descriptions of this bond. For instance, the former not only notes that the latter is as "weak as a baby", but also feeds him "glucose and milk" with a "feed bottle" (1983: 198). Maternity therefore gains a Levinasian dimension in this scene, that is, it connotes the "gestation of the other in the same" (Levinas, 1981: 75). "In maternity", according to Levinas, "what signifies is a responsibility for others, to the point of substitution for others and suffering both from the effect of persecution and from the persecuting itself in which the persecutor sinks. Maternity, which is bearing par excellence, bears even responsibility fort the persecuting by the persecutor" (my emphasis, 1981: 75). It follows that the medical officer's feeling of subservience to K cannot stem from a Hegelian reversal of the 182 terms in a power relation. In this regard, I believe, Stephenson is mistaken in claiming that Coetzee's argument in the novel is that "as soon as two or more people are together they will usually slip into the roles of master and servant, oppressor and oppressed" (1991: 80). The medical officer's sense of subordination seems rather to be a function of the authority that is conferred on the other by the subject's assumption of responsibility for it. Both Levinas's following point and image are pertinent here: "In a sense nothing is more burdensome than a neighbour" (1981: 88), and some explanation of his views in this regard is necessary (see Levinas, 1981: 15, 87, 116). In itself, the subject's assumption of responsibility is a function of having been chosen by the other. However, the notion of 'choice' connotes volition and agency in conventional usage whereas, in Levinas's writing, it is somewhat ambivalent in this respect. In order to be surprised (and so prevented from anamnetically relating it to a system of a priori concepts), the subject must be possessed or obsessed by the other -- that is, it must have the idea of infinity 'put into' it from outside the same. It is in this sense that the subject is 'chosen' by the other. Such election is, however, concomitant on the subject's recognition of the otherness of the other. One of the implications here is that the other is not even aware that such a recognition has taken place and therefore that it has 'chosen' the subject. In short, then, the subject is inspired, possessed, and thus 'chosen' by the other in its recognition of the otherness of the other. Having thus been 'chosen', the subject assumes responsibility for the other and thereby invests it with authority -- but, since this authority emanates from the subject's responsibility, it is an authority without power. Indeed, it not only forbids the violence of the autonomous subject but also cannot be wielded by the other in its turn. These issues are self-reflexively raised in the novel by the medical officer's response to K's above-mentioned query related to the former's concern for his well-being (1983: 203 - 204): 183 For a long while we stared at each other. Then I found myself speaking, in no more than a whisper. As I 'spoke I thought: Surrender. This is how surrender will feel. 'I might ask the same question of you,' I said, 'the same question you asked: What am I to this man?' Even softer I whispered, my heart hammering: 'I did not ask you to come here. Everything was well with me before you came. I was happy, as happy as one can be in a place like this. Therefore I too ask: Why me? (1983: 204)
The fact that K feels that the medical officer has chosen him while the latter claims that the contrary is true points to the complex ambivalence of the other's 'choice' of the subject and, by extension, the other's ethical authority rather than political power. This distinction between authority and power is further evident in the medical officer's reference to "surrender". Although the term usually connotes power relations, it here suggests that K's authority is concomitant on the medical officer's gift of self. It will be remembered that, in its Levinasian sense, responsibility involves a substitution of self for the other: precisely such a 'surrender' is implied here. Like K on the 'farm', it seems that the medical officer 'yields himself up', 'surrenders' his self to the other. The implication of this apparent 'surrender' is therefore not political: it does not suggest that K masters the medical officer. Instead, by becoming responsible, to the point of substitution, for K, the medical officer invests him with ethical authority. The Levinasian corollary here would be that, in so doing, the medical officer constitutes himself as an ethical subject. Strangely, though, in the final pages of the diary section of Michael K, he appeals to K to "yield" (1983: 208). A further complication in this regard is discernible in the medical officer's following words in the imaginary encounter:
. . . I am convinced that there are areas that lie between the camps and belong to no camp . . . . I am looking for such a place in order to settle there, I perhaps only till things improve, perhaps forever. I am not so foolish, however, as to imagine that I can rely on maps and roads to -guide me. Therefore I have chosen you to show me the way.' (1983: 223) 184 This invocation of the notion of choice only apparently contradicts the clear suggestions in this section of the novel that the medical officer becomes an ethical subject. Indeed, the point that emerges in the concluding pages of this section is that the medical officer is in language and will thus always and inevitably attempt to choose K. At the same time -- and this is the significance of his escape from the medical officer during the imaginary encounter -- K will always and inevitably elude this attempt at totalisation. In its turn, this escape will affect the medical officer. By implication, the failed attempt at choosing the other is the condition of possibility for being 'chosen' by the other's otherness. Differently put, it is the attempt to choose that produceS the escape through which the otherness of the other is able to 'choose' the subject. The alterity of the other defies the subject's comprehension and thus enables that passivity which is a prerequisite for a concernful recognition of otherness. By extension, then, the moment of the other's escape is the moment of proximity with it. For Coetzee, as for Levinas, proximity or 'nearness', is not a modality of distance. The other's distance is a contact which brings with it an involvement. K's escape from the medical officer in the imaginary encounter must thus be read as a concerning escape, a moment of proximity with the other. In terms of the analogy between the medical officer and the reader which I have traced in this section of the chapter, the effect of K's silence on the former prefigures the potential impact on the latter of the significant silence that is constituted by the novel's refusal to attempt to represent otherness. By means of aligning the reader's relation to the otherness which it 'intimates' with the medical officer's relation to K, this text suggests that s/he may be able to transcend the same. It thus holds up the possibility that, through attempting to transcend its estranging medium by establishing an 'unrelating relation' to alterity, it may have created the conditions which are necessary for a relationship of proximity rather than knowledge between the reader and the alterity which it 'intimates'. 185 A further point that emerges from the parallel which the novel constructs between the reader and medical officer is that possession by the other is a prerequisite for transcendence of the domain of the same. By implication, it must involve a 'surrender' on the part of the reader, that is, his/her 'yielding him/herself up'. As the Dostoevsky character in The Master of Petersburg puts it, "reading is", in this conception at least, "giving yourself up, not holding yourself at a distance and jeering" (Coetzee, 1994: 47). Moreover, this 'giving' of self is not the result of a choice on the part of the reader. The significance of the novel's refusal to allow the reader to model his/her reading of the novel on K's relation to the 'farm' now emerges. Only with the suspension of this ostensible choice does the possibility of transcendence through reading arise. Ultimately, then, Michael K offers no model of reading as an active, cognitive endeavour. However, in constituting itself as a novel which has the form of neither presence nor representation in its relation to the other, this text opens for the reader the possibility of, in Levinas's words in a different context, "an exposure to the other without this exposure being assumed" (my emphasis, 1981: 15).
3.4 Conclusion
From my argument in this chapter, it should be clear that Michael K relies.on a number of paradoxes in order to generate its 'intimations' of otherness. It attempts to attain autonomy through a self-reflexive subversion of its representation of transcendence which, in turn, indicates that on an intertextual level it is impossible to elude entirely the relation of dependence which pertains between individual text and generative system. This self-subversive strategy thus constitutes an acknowledgement of the individual text's dependence on those conventions and representational procedures which form part ofi the langue of the novel for its independence. In other words, Michael K self-consciously recognises that the system of intertextual relations forms the condition of possibility of 186 novel-writing, and that even the act of 'intimating' that the forms and medium of the genre preclude the individual text from representing alterity is premised on and therefore enabled by their very existence. This, in turn, is a recognition that such autonomy as the text may attain is grounded in and thus reliant on both the totalising nature of language and the imperial modalities of the novel form. It should be clear that Michael K is remarkably similar to "Narrative" with regard to all these seeming paradoxes. The significant extent to which this later novel repeats themes that are already evident in the earlier text is further apparent in its close focus on the political nature of the reader-text relation and in its eventual inscription of a tension between totality and infinity. However, the greater self-reflexivity of Michael K results in a more coherent adumbration of the ethical implications of this tension for both writer and reader than may be found in "Narrative". For instance, both texts manifest an aesthetic which postulates the possibility of a non-cognitive relation between the reader and the otherness which the text 'intimates'. Nevertheless, the Levinasian elaboration of the notion of 'choice' in the later novel culminates in a fuller' expression of the nature of the kind of reading that is at issue here. If the act of reading is to sustain the text's 'movement of infinition', it must be an extreme passivity which enables an exposure of the reader to the other that, in its turn, leads to his/her assumption of responsibility for the other. In this regard, the principal difference between Michael K and "Narrative" is that the latter's adumbration of the concept of responsibility is only deducible from the depiction of Jacobus Coetzee's reassertion of autonomous subjectivity as a lapse from a condition of ethical subjectivity which is only ever implied. In Michael K, by contrast, this ethical concept is foregrounded throughout -- as, indeed, are its implications for relations of power. Thus, it soon becomes clear that responsibility for tht other generates authority but that, in its ethical conception, authority is divested of, and indeed divestsrelationships of, power. The ethics which informs this novel is therefore not 187 anti-authoritarian but anti-hegemonic. In Michael K, the possible effects on history of a subjectivity which grounds an ethical authority are not self- reflexively explored. As with "Narrative", then, this novel does not seem to elaborate upon the possibility of an irruption of the ethical into the political, a possibility which it does, in fact, suggest. This is not because the divide between ethics and politics that is evident in the text's structural contrast between 'farm' and society is unbreachable. Indeed, K's return to society and the shifting signification of the imagery used to depict relational modes (particularly the shifts discernible in the medical officer's relationship with K), suggest precisely such an irruption or, perhaps, infiltration. It is the implications of this infiltration, especially of the way in which the ethical may enter the political without being betrayed in the process, that are not self-consciously examined. By extension, the manifold ramifications of the return to the political of the reader after his/her encounter with the other in the 'autonomous place' that is constituted by the transcendental text are not dwelt upon. Among the issues which I explore in the next chapter, is precisely the self-conscious postulation of a mediation of the political by the ethical in Foe. 188 3.5 Notes
An abbreviated version of this chapter appeared in Current Writing (1996a: 19-32 ), and some of the interpretive details appeared in an earlier article published in English in Africa (1989: 31-48). However, my argument in the chapter as it now stands differs substantially from that in either of these earlier essays.
Hereafter, I shall use the abbreviation Michael K. These links are fairly clear. At one point in Coetzee's text, for example, Michael K reflects that he had thought of the Karoo farm to which he has withdrawn from the political realities of South African life as "one of those islands without an owner" (1983: 84). While the desert island becomes a deserted farm, the shipwreck becomes a dilapidated farmhouse in Coetzee's text. There are a number of further resemblances between the two novels. First, the goats discovered by Defoe's protagonist after being cast away on the island (1975: 46-47) recur in Coetzee's novel where Michael K encounters a herd of goats that has reverted to the wild (1983: 71-72; see Gallagher, 1991: 157), and both writers dwell on the difficulties experienced by their respective protagonists in hunting down these herds of goats (1975: 46-47; 1983: 72-74). Secondly, the money which Robinson Crusoe discovers and then decides to keep (1975: 43-44) is echoed in Coetzee's text when Michael K caches away the money which the Visagie boy gives him to buy provisions (1983: 89; see Gallagher, 1991: 157). Thirdly, the master-servant relationship between Robinson Crusoe and Friday in Defoe's text recurs in Michael K in the relationship between the Visagie boy and K (1983: 82-89). Finally, on a structural level, the opposition between island and world in Robinson Crusoe is echoed in Michael K by the opposition between the farm and South African society. Although it is true that for most of the novel this imagery is used to signify the subject-object relation, it should be noted that K's renegotiation of this relation on the Karoo farm is emphasised by a recurrence of eating imagery in a form divested of its predatory connotations. In the following passage, for example, this imagery is used to suggest a relationship of togetherness rather than the separation that is imposed by subject-object dualism: Then came the evening when the first pumpkin was ripe enough to cut. . . . The shell was soft, the knife sank in without a struggle. On the wire grid he had made he laid strips of pumpkin over a bed of coals . . . The fragrance of the burning flesh rose into the sky. Speaking the'words he had been taught, directing them no longer upward but to the earth on 189 which he knelt, he prayed: 'For what we are about to receive make us truly thankful.' With two wire skewers he turned the strips, and in mid-act felt his heart suddenly flow over with thankfulness. It was exactly as they had described it, like a gush of warm water. Now it is completed, he said to himself. . . . He lifted the first strip to his mouth. Beneath the crisply charred skin the flesh was soft and juicy. He chewed with tears of joy in his eyes. . . . For the first time since he had arrived in the country he found pleasure in eating. The aftertaste of the first slice left his mouth aching with sensual delight (1983: 155 - 156). Moreover, as I shall show, the mother-child relation which, in the opening section of the novel, represents relations of power becomes in K's affiliation with his plants a bond that signifies selfless care and responsibility for the other. Later in this chapter, it will also become clear that gardening imagery, which usually connotes a transgression of the Cartesian divide, is used in the opening section of the novel to suggest K's detachment from the earth. (In other words, gardening cannot simply be construed, as Attwell puts it, as "the opposite of [the] corrosive notion of power" [1993: 95]). It would be convenient to conclude that the signification of these images is determined by the novel's division between farm and society, by a rigid distinction between ethics and politics. However, it will emerge from my discussion of the medical officer's relation to K that this is not altogether true. An important aspect of my argument in this thesis is that Coetzee's novels point to the possibility of constructing an ethical subjectivity. As such, the relational modes which they signify are not fixed. It follows, then, that the imagery through which these relationships are represented is not absolute but fluid in its signification. 5. Most readers of the novel assert such an opposition between K and colonist. And, in thus overlooking the change which the protagonist's relation to the farm undergoes, they fail to detect Coetzee's inscription of a tension between implication and transcendence in the novel. A possible reason for this oversight might be Coetzee's statement that K is a figure of being rather than of becoming (1987: 455). In this regard, my contention would be that K becomes a figure of being in the course of the novel. Some readers, however, do detect a change in K's relation with the earth. Karin van Lierop, for example, argues for a "reversed process of initiation", that is, for an "entry into nature rather than culture", and for a regression from adulthood to infancy (1986: 47). Derek Wright makes a similar point (1992: 438-439). 190 In many respects, the change which this character undergoes accords with the phenomenological method for modifying the human subject's relation to the world. The outcome of the procedure.of "reduction", by which access is purportedly obtained to the "things themselves" (that is, a transcendental world of purified essences which Husserl terms the "lifeworld") through a "suspension" or "bracketing" of the "natural attitude" (namely, the assumption of empiricist methodology that 'reality' is a given which is independent of the perceiver and which may be known through the transparency of perception), is comparable to the relationship which I shall argue that K eventually establishes on the Karoo farm -- a relationship in which this tract of land which has previously been hidden by a ratiocinative overlay of western discourse gives itself to his view, "shows itself in itself" (see Husserl, 1964: 4, 13ff., 41ff.). However, despite these similarities, there are a number of significant differences between the phenomenological method of making manifest that which is usually hidden and the process through which K recognises and responds responsibly to the otherness of the Karoo 'farm'. For example, the change in K's relationship with the 'farm stems not only from a 'reduction' of the 'world' but also a renegotiation of the ego. Conversely, the fundamental goal of the phenomenological method of reduction is the reinstatement of an apodictic subjectivity. Furthermore, phenomenologists have largely ignored the link between language and subjectivity, a link which, I shall demonstrate, is foregrounded in Coetzee's novel. The question which now arises is, of course, whether the other can be non-human, even non-sentient. Can animals, plants, and terrain place humans under obligation to the extent that other humans can? Coetzee certainly seems to think so. Apart from Michael K, in which a responsible relation to non-sentient beings is articulated, one finds in The Master of Petersburg a representation of a human being under obligation to a dog (1994: 79-83). Despite Levinas's humanism, this is not as incongruous as it may at first seem. See, for instance, Levinas's thoughts on 'Bobby', a dog, in "The Name of a Dog, or Natural Rights" (1990: 151- 153). See also Critchley's discussion of this problem (1992: 180-182). For an adaptation and extension of Levinasian ethics to include obligations toward non-human entities, see John Llewelyn's cogent argument on "ecological conscience" (1991). Dovey argues that these references betray "an attitude of denigration on the part of the writer toward the victim-as- protagonist" (1988: 285). It should be noted, though, that the anthropocentric assumptions regarding the relation of 'man' to nature which underlie her charge are precisely those which the novel's critique of the subject-object relationship contests. 191 See Michael Valdez Moses's brief but insightful discussion of K's idleness (1994: 133-135). His later comments on reverie are also pertinent to my discussion. In this state, he argues, a "release from the passions . . . that are the root of the perpetual discontent of civilized man" leads to a "new (or renewed) relationship to nature": "Whereas civilized man comes to regard nature as something to be conquered, controlled, and manipulated for the sake of an ever-expanding range of desires, the solitary walker reverts to an unmediated relationship with nature, in which the subject/object distinction between human consciousness and the natural world is overcome" (1994: 144). Coetzee's representation of being-in-the-earth here may be compared with Heidegger's notion of "dwelling" in the earth, a relational mode which is characterised by a feeling of being part of the earth and which is distinct from the technological mode of "standing reserve" in which the world is used and adapted to humankind's ends and purposes (1971; 1977). It is important to note that Heidegger does not draw an absolute distinction between 'dwelling' and "living" by viewing the world as 'standing reserve'. Given his conviction that the individual is radically situated in the world, this is, of course, not surprising. From a perspective of ineluctable implication, it is impossible for the individual not to be reliant on the technological mode of experiencing the world. However, this form of living results in a "loss of Being", a state of alienation which, Heidegger asserts, may be remedied by a phenomenological process of world disclosure that culminates in the qualitatively different mode of being which he terms 'dwelling' (see 1971). Compare Wright's following contention: "Coetzee's Cape gardener, faced with the harsh, inhospitable earthscapes of the Karoo, finds himself perfectly at home with their refusal of human meanings, their preverbal nothingness, and feels himself assuming the character of the bare mineral scrubland: 'I am becoming smaller and harder and drier every day'" (1992: 436). See also Wright's earlier article on Michael K (1991: 6). Dick Penner makes a similar point when he comments as follows on this passage: "Michael is content to let things be without meaning" (1989: 99). The device of mise en abyme, stock-in-trade of postmodernist writers, is discussed at length by Hutcheon (1984: 53-56) and Brian McHale (1987: 124-128). In this thesis, I use the term to denote a structural device that transforms a component of the narrative into a mirror reflecting and reduplicating, from within the text, the process of reading. 192 It follows that the viewing metaphor is yet another image the signification of which shifts in the course of the novel. -Wright refers to the incongruity involved here in his following statement: ". . . K's pursuit of silence, paradoxically rendered into rhetoric by his white-Afrikaner author is a nonverbal one" (1992: 436). However, he does not detect the novel's self-reflexive awareness of this contradiction. Indeed, as his following conclusions show, he assumes that Michael K is a typically realist text: . . . if the novel is, finally, an unsatisfying work, it is perhaps partly because the self-implicating reflexiveness that would enable the author to make clear his degree of commitment to his white liberal's position is not available to conventional realism. In his next novel, where K's place is taken by Friday in a revision of the Robinson Crusoe fable, the dilemma Coetzee found himself in in the second half of Michael K is resolved by keeping the black character mute for the whole novel. . . . In Michael K, however, the black protagonist's thoughts, in the fashion of realistic fiction, are laid open to us as if of their own accord, although in fact by the white author . . . . In Foe the devices of Postmodern fiction render the novel capable of subverting its own ethnocentricity, a freedom that is denied conventional historical realism. Michael K marks the end of a phase in Coetzee's writing: realism has also gone to ground, the imperial text to earth. (1992: 443) In the discussion which follows, my contention is that Michael K is self-consciously cognisant of precisely these problems. Moreover, this novel is not new in this regard in Coetzee's oeuvre. My argument in this thesis has been that a metafictional awareness of the political assumptions of realism is already discernible in Coetzee's first novel. Strangely, in an earlier article, Wright makes the following point with reference to Dusklands: "To the extent that historical realism is the favored mode of the frontier and colonial narrative, the literary deconstruction of traditional realism is simultaneously a political act of decolonization, and Coetzee attempts both of these in his first novel" (1989: 114). This distinction between "showing" and "telling" dates back to Plato's discussion of mimesis and diegesis in The Republic (1974: 150ff.). In terms of the impact of the post-Enlightenment privileging of perception on the form 9f the novel, though, it became a critical precept only with Henry James. In this regard, see Percy Lubbock (1963: 62- 72). See also Norman Friedman (1967: 109-114) and Shlomith Ri-mmon-Kenan (1983: 106-108).
193 Chapter 4: The Aesthetic of Surprise in Foe
4.1 Introduction 194 4.2 Mutual Recognition: Relational Modes on the Island 195 4.2.1 Recognition and the Problem of Language 202 4.3 Ethics and Representation 213 4.3.1 The Aesthetic of the Island 215 4.3.2 Susan Barton as Author: From Supplementarity to Rivalry 220 4.3.2.1 Exceeding History: The Aesthetic of Surprise 226 4.3.3 Inspiration and the Reader 232 4.3.3.1 Silence As Inspiration 239 4.3.3.2 The Obedient Reader 245 4.3.3.3 The Mediation of the Political by the Ethical 253 4.4 Conclusion 258 4.5 Notes 261 194
CHAPTER 4
The Aesthetic of Surprise in Foe
4.1 Introduction
Coetzee's intertextual engagement with Defoe's Robinson Crusoe is announced in Foe by the title of the novel and by the names of some of the characters. In the first section of this chapter, I focus on the covert difference which Coetzee •inscribes between these two novels in his depiction of the relational modes on the island. My contention is that he portrays the island as an 'autonomous place' in which the relations between Cruso, Friday and space rival rather than supplement those in history. I shall show that Coetzee deliberately obscures, without concealing, this dimension of the nascent island community by choosing Susan Barton as the narrator of the first section of the novel, that is, a character who, because of her situatedness in history, is initially unable to -detect the singularity of relationships on the island. By constantly alluding to that which exceeds the intentionality of Susan Barton's consciousness, this writer inscribes in the text a disjunction between relationships on the island and their representation. My argument, then, is that Coetzee's concern in Foe is with the violence of subject-centred intentionality and its modes of representation. Although this concern and the aesthetic desire to which it leads, namely to devise a mode of writing which transcends history, are also evident in the earlier novels, their ethical dimension is more pronounced in Foe. This is partly because of Coetzee's direct use of Levinasian ethics in the later text. While in the previous novels this ethical system is implicit in the form of allusions to notions such as responsibility, in Foe such allusions form part of a structure which is so developed and coherent that it is able self- reflexively to articulate an aesthetic of fiction-writing -- what may be called a Levinasian aesthetic of surprise. 195 So, for example, the Levinasian notion of inspiration from a source that is outside history is foregrounded in this novel by the trope of the muse. And the autonomous mode of writing which may be inspired by such a source is self-reflexively examined by means of the aesthetic models that are presented in the text, namely Cruso and Friday's construction of the walls and terraces on the island, and Susan Barton's narrative. One of the metafictional preoccupations of Foe is whether or not, in its autonomy, it is able to surprise, and so inspire, the reader by exposing him/her to that which exceeds totality. The ontogenetic anxiety that is generated by this preoccupation will be dealt with at some length in this chapter. In the process, one of the problems which has beset this thesis will be clarified, that is, the purpose of the very clear implications which Coetzee's critique of relational modes holds for the reader-text relation. In the previous chapters of this thesis, I have shown that this relation supplements history, and have contended that Coetzee suggests a non-cognitive form of reading which may interrupt the reader's interpersonal relations in his/her community. This procedure, and the entry of the ethical into the political which it implies, is self-reflexively elaborated upon in Foe and receives special attention in this chapter. I show that the strong Levinasian overtones of the novel's meditation on reading clarify the means through which the ethical may irrupt into, without being corrupted by, the political. In this regard, my argument is that, in establishing for itself a form of autonomy and affecting the reader by inspiring him/her to contrive a responsible relation to the alterity which it 'intimates', the novel endeavours to secure the mediation of the political by the ethical.
4.2 Mutual Recognition: Relational Modes on the Island
The island section in Foe constitutes a major reworking of thel equivalent episode in Defoe's Robinson Crusoe. In this respect, it is very similar to the Karoo farm section of Michael K. Unlike Defoe's Crusoe but like K, Coetzee's Cruso eschews the 196 cognitive and technological mastery of space. This responsible response is apparent in his relations not only with the island terrain, but also with Friday: Before elaborating on these points it is necessary to indicate that an important difference between Foe and Michael K exists in their manner of presentation. While the farm episode in the earlier novel is presented directly in a way which, initially at least, suggests an absence of mediation, the island episode in Foe is presented from the perspective of Susan Barton in a way which is contrived to foreground the presence of an active, intending consciousness. The representational strategy in the later novel is therefore calculated to provide the reader not with the illusion of a direct encounter between observer and observed, but with constant 'intimations' of the existence of that which has been rendered unknown by the attempt to know it. In terms of representational strategy, then, the island episode in Foe is strongly reminiscent of "Narrative", in which Coetzee lays bare the intentionality of subject-centred consciousness by means of the scenarios which Jacobus Coetzee constructs on first encountering the Namaquas -- scenarios which point to the discursive separation of the subject from that which it perceives) In Foe, Susan Barton's reference to the discrepancy between her experience of the island and the expectations generated by "travellers' tales" (1986: 7) serves a similar function to these scenarios in that it directs the reader's attention to Coetzee's representation of the mediated nature of this character's encounter with Friday, the island and Cruso. Indeed, the intentionality of Susan Barton's consciousness is immediately evident when, on first encountering Friday, she assumes that she has "come to an island of cannibals" (1986: 6). As with the protagonist in "Narrative", then, this character positions herself in relation to Friday according to those expectations concerning the 'savage nature' of the 'native' that are generated by colonialist discourse, a discourse partly constituted by travel literature. Less obviously, but equally significantly, it soon emerges that Susan Barton makes sense of the island and Cruso by means of 197 pre-existing cultural structures of knowledge. Thus she constantly refers to the terrestrial birds which she sees on the island as "sparrows" while at the same time indicating that they belong to a species with which she is not familiar (1986: 7, 51). Moreover, she describes Cruso's strange apparel as follows: "He wore . . . a jerkin, and drawers to below his knees, such as we see watermen wear on the Thames" (1986: 8). The use of the first-person plural pronoun in this sentence refers to English culture in general, and thus signals the cultural location of knowledge, the fact that the 'old' world, in terms of which the protagonist as 'displaced percipient' describes the 'new' world, functions as the centre of absolute meaning and signification. Through the system of knowledge which Susan Barton brings to her encounter with the island, the 'new' is thus yoked to the 'old' and, in the process, its difference is elided. As a result of Coetzee's destabilisation of the authority of experience through the exposure of the discursive separation of subject from 'reality' in his presentation of Susan Barton's account of her stay on the island, the reader is obliged to question the reliability or authority of all of this character's observations -- such as, for example, her opinions on Cruso's relation to Friday. However, surprisingly few of the commentators on this novel have questioned her assessment of this relation. In an early essay on the novel, I, for one, accept at face value Susan Barton's interpretation of this relationship as that between a master and a slave (1989a: 185). So, too, Gallagher, who refers to Cruso's "patriarchal control" and to Friday's position as "the silent slave" and likens the latter's position to that of Caliban in Shakespeare's The Tempest (1991: 174, 180). Dovey relies principally on Susan Barton's interpretations in order to establish the following correspondence between the island and the South African political situation during the apartheid era:
Cruso's rule over his island kingdom represents a form of postcolonial nationalism become neo-colonialism, as the new colonizer, asserting his independence from the mother country, repeats the modes of oppression of the 198 original colonizer. As sole survivors of a wrecked slave ship, both Cruso and Friday are victims of the colonizing enterprise. (1988: 346-347)
Tiffin, too, finds depicted in Cruso's relationship with Friday the "history of European imperialism in Africa and its contemporary South African legacy" (1987: 29). Finally, the assumption that the bond between Cruso and Friday is that of master to slave also informs Attwell's argument that the island section of Coetzee's narrative pertains to conditions in South Africa at the time that Defoe was writing, that is, a period during which the Afrikaners entered "the interior of the Western Cape as pastoralists in unequal competition with the Khoisan" (1993: 107). Interestingly, then, critics almost exclusively see the relations in the island section of Coetzee's novel as supplementing those found in Defoe's text (or, alternatively, in Shakespeare's The Tempest) and, more generally, in colonial history. 2 However, a different reading of the Cruso-Friday bond offers itself if Susan Barton's story of the island is placed in the context of the critique of the Enlightenment's postulation of the transparent nature of perception which, I have argued in this study, forms an integral part of Coetzee's fiction. Indeed, as I proceed, it should become clear that this bond questions the a priori status and authority of history and of texts which supplement it which is so readily assumed in the critical assessments quoted above. The singularity of Cruso's relation to Friday is si.ntimated' as early as the description of Susan Barton's first and automatic impression of it: "A mutineer was my first thought: yet another mutineer, set ashore by a merciful captain, with one of the Negroes of the island, whom he has made his servant" (my emphasis, 1986: 8-9). This description, which self-reflexively announces its cultural grounding in assumption, indicates that Susan Barton does not pause to consider the possibility that Cruso might not be on the island under duress, or that his relation to Friday might not be one of dominance and subservience, that is, one which is underpinned by the notions of European superiority and colonial inferiority which clearly 199 determine her perceptions. Indeed, the later revelation that Cruso is on the island of his own volition raises the possibility that Susan Barton may be equally mistaken in her assumption concerning the hegemonic nature of his relationship with Friday. Of far greater significance, however, is Susan Barton's subsequent speculation on the peacefulness of life on the island, despite the absence of any apparent laws:
What had held Friday back all these years from beating in his master's head with a stone while he slept, so bringing slavehood to an end and inaugurating a reign of idleness? And what held Cruso back from tying Friday to a post every night, like a dog, to sleep the more secure, or from blinding him, as they blind asses in Brazil? It seemed to me that all things were possible on the island, all tyrannies and cruelties, though in small; and if, in despite of what was possible, we lived at peace one with another, surely this was proof that certain laws unknown to us held sway, or else that we had been following the promptings of our hearts all this time, and our hearts had not betrayed us. (1986: 36 - 37)
Later in the novel, Susan Barton tells Friday that one of the "mysteries" of the island is his "submission": "Why, during all those years alone with Cruso, did you submit to his rule, when you might easily have slain him, or blinded him and made him into your slave in turn?" (1986: 85). This question alludes to the Hegelian dialectic of recognition. Although I have referred to this dialectic earlier in this thesis and its importance in Coetzee's fiction has frequently been noted (see Steiner, 1982; Zamora, 1986; Dovey, 1988; Jolly, 1996), it is necessary to summarise its major premises here in order to illustrate Coetzee's argument for a transcendence of relations of power in Foe. In Phenomenology of Spirit, one of Georg Hegel's concerns is the problem of recognition between self-conscious individuals, of how a genuine community which is informed by "Spirit", that is, an "'I' that is 'We' and 'We' that is 'I'", might arise (1977: 110). According to Hegel, there are basically three kinds of relations that can exist among self-conscious individuals: namely, struggle to the death, domination, and community (1977: 200 104-138). He argues that the real issue of humanity's struggle with nature for cognitive and technological mastery is self- knowledge and independence (see 1977: 145 - 158). When an individual who has asserted his/her independence by pitting him/herself against nature encounters another such individual, his/her autonomy is challenged. Hegel contends that such an individual may seek to solve this problem by eliminating the challenger. This "life-and-death struggle", however, turns out to be a false solution, because what the challenger contests is not so much the individual's independence as his/her legitimacy. And, in the absence of the challenger, there is thus no one left to affirm that legitimacy (Hegel, 1977: 113-115). As a solution to the problem of independence and recognition, enslavement constitutes an advance on the life-and- death struggle: while the loser remains alive, the victor gains both independence and recognition (Hegel, 1977: 115-119). However, this relation of dominance and subservience is fundamentally unstable and "self-frustrating" (Findlay, 1977: xvii), since the master can never know whether the recognition which 'he' receives is a function of 'his' reduction of the challenger to an extension of 'his' will. Hegel argues this point as follows:
In this recognition the unessential consciousness is for the lord the object, which constitutes the truth of his certainty of himself. But it is clear that this object does not correspond to its Notion, but rather that the object in which the lord has achieved his lordship has in reality turned out to be something quite different from an independent consciousness. What now really confronts him is not an independent consciousness, but a dependent one. He is, therefore, not certain of being-for-self as the truth of himself. On the contrary, his truth is in reality the unessential consciousness and its unessential action. (1977: 116 - 117)
On the other hand, the slave may realise that it is through his/her labour that nature is dominated and, accordingly, that the master is superfluous (Hegel, 1977: 117-119). Rebellion is thus endemic in the very structure of this relationship. 201 In my discussions of "Narrative" and Michael K, I have already shown that Coetzee breaks with the Hegelian power relation in his depictions of . the renegotiation of subject- centred intentionality. This departure from the conflictual pattern of the master-slave relationship is particularly evident in his representation of the relationship between Cruso and Friday. Indeed, he directs the reader's attention to the absence of contestation in this relationship by means of Susan Barton's repeated reflection on why it is that Friday does not rebel against Cruso. Since the struggle between master and slave in Hegel's argument is related to recognition, Coetzee's foregroundiag of the absence of conflict in the Cruso-Friday relationship would appear to suggest that he represents these characters as having each acknowledged the other's right to exist. Indeed, in Hegel's account of the independence and dependence of self-consciousness, only such a mutual recognition can bring about an end to the entire struggle for affirmation (Hegel, 1977: 104-119, 263-294, 355-363; see also Findlay, 1977: xvii; and Carr, 1986: 143). In fact, such mutual recognition is the actual point of the struggle: throughout, each party has sought recognition from the other, but has failed to realise that such recognition must come from an individual whose independence has itself been acknowledged. It therefore follows that the absence of conflict which Susan Barton detects in Cruso's relationship with Friday is a consequence of the fact that what she immediately takes to be a master-servant relationship might, in fact, be a relationship grounded in a sense of community, one in which the struggle for recognition has been resolved. This would also explain the lack of laws on the island. The apparent reciprocal recognition of independence which underpins the Cruso-Friday relationship renders impossible the 'tyrannies and cruelties' to which Susan Barton refers since, in Hegel's theory, these are a function of the cycle of domination and counter-domination through which individuals vainly attempt to satisfy their desire for recognition. It seems possible, then, that Cruso and Friday constitute an ethical community in which the gap between the 'I' 202 and the other 'I' has been bridged (see Hegel, 1977: 263-294, 355-363). In Foe, Coetzee thus deals with the problem that Hegel addresses in Phenomenology of Spirit, that is, self-consciousness and recognition. It must be emphasised, though, that it does not follow that he arrives at the same conclusions as Hegel. The allusions to the Hegelian dialectic of recognition merely point to a lack of conflict on the island and therefore to an apparent resolution or negotiation of the struggle between self-conscious individuals for recognition. Moreover, in the next section of this chapter, it will emerge that Coetzee deliberately complicates the problem of recognition by introducing to it a linguistic dimension.
4.2.1 Recognition and the Problem of Language
Apart from the allusions to Hegel's theory of recognition in Coetzee's presentation of Cruso and Friday, there are many other indications that the relationship between these two characters surpasses the struggle for recognition. One of these is Coetzee's construction of an antinomy between language and silence in the novel. In the first chapter of this thesis, I stressed the role played by language in the cognitive mastery of the island by the eponymous hero in Defoe's text. I argued that in Defoe's depiction of the subject's relation to space it is through language that the dreadful alterity of the island is elided and replaced with a comfortable, self-asserting familiarity. In this ur-novel, then, language is betrayed as an agent of appropriation and thus transformation, the principal means through which space is encoded in terms of the values and assumptions of the 'displaced percipient's' culture. In the third chapter of the study, I argued that it is in the absence of language that K gains access to the sensible world of the 'farm'. Without language, the individual enjoys an unmediated intercourse with the world and, consequently, does not transform that which s/he sees. Indeed, in the absence of language and therefore of the means and will to power, the 'farm' in Michael K is gradually 203 decolonised and loses its status as possession altogether. In the context of these earlier discussions, the emphasis in Foe on the lack of human speech on the island must be deemed significant. Friday is a mute and Susan Barton who, as she puts it, is "accustomed to the fullness of human speech" (1986: 8) complains about "the morose silence which [Cruso] impressed upon our lives" (1986: 36). She also comments on Cruso's aversion to language: her rejoinder to his assertion that the unnamed island is "not England" and that there is thus no necessity for "a great stock of words" is "You speak as if language were one of the banes of life, like money or the pox" (1986: 21-22). As with the opposition between the 'farm' and South African society in Michael K, then, there is in this novel a similar distinction between England as a place of words and the island as not so much a place of silence as one that is antipathetic, even hostile, to human language. The role of language in the novel's presentation of Cruso's relationship with Friday has elicited much comment. On the whole, readers seem to agree with the character Susan Barton's conclusion that Cruso's withholding of language from Friday is proof of the utilitarian nature of his relationship with him. In the following passage, Dovey, for instance, contends that Cruso masters Friday by means of language: "Friday's tongue has been cut out, and Cruso does not attempt to communicate in alternative ways, preferring 'not to disturb his muteness', and using words 'only as the shortest way to subject [Friday] to [his] will'" (1988: 347). Dovey's interpretation is particularly noteworthy in that her supporting quotations derive from a context in which Susan Barton, upon attempting to teach Friday language, realises that language is an instrument of power. The full text of this crucial passage reads as follows:
I tell myself I talk to Friday to educate him out of darkness and silence. But is that the truth? There l are times when benevolence deserts me and I use words only as the shortest way to subject him to my will. At such times I understand why Cruso preferred not to disturb his muteness. I understand, that is to say, why a man will choose to be a slaveowner. (1986: 60-61) 204 Barton's understanding of language changes considerably in the course of the novel. 3 For instance, in a later, companion passage, she states her insight that it is a medium through which she constantly transforms Friday:
Friday has no command of words and therefore no defence against being re-shaped day by day in conformity with the desires of others. . . . No matter what he is to himself (is he anything to himself? -- how can he tell us?), what he is to the world is what I make of him. (my emphasis, 1986: 121 - 122)
The words which Dovey uses to prove that Cruso enslaves Friday with language thus actually say more about the role of language in Susan Barton's mastery of Friday. To the extent that she 'makes' or, in the etymologically-related word, 'fictionalises' him by constructing for him an identity in language, Barton authors Friday. By contrast, in attempting to exclude the medium of language from his dealings with Friday, Cruso endeavours not to transform him and thus violate his difference, but instead to recognise it. Cruso's aversion to language therefore testifies to a disavowal of authority. By extension, Susan Barton's first impression that Cruso had 'made' Friday 'his servant' is thus in itself a construction which attests to her authorial status and not to that of Cruso. 4 An important implication of this contrast between the nature of relationships within and outside of language seems to be that the problem of recognition cannot be resolved from a position inside language. The fact that the state of mutual recognition between Friday and Cruso -- to which the allusions to Hegel's dialectic of recognition direct the reader -- is attained in the virtual absence of language, and is seemingly impossible in the "world of words" (Coetzee, 1986: 60) where language forecloses on otherness, indicates that the form of recognition in question is not that between the self-conscious, independent-minded individuals which Hegel had in mind. Instead, it seems to be I premised on a respect for alterity, on that which is nullified by the intentional consciousness Of the autonomous subject which, being grounded in language, forecloses on otherness. This point 205 is, of course, constantly and emphatically made in the novel by the disjunction between Cruso and Friday's mutual recognition of otherness and the occlusions and transformations of the subject- centred discourse within which Susan Barton attempts to represent the island community. The island section of Foe is therefore not a Hegelian allegory: it 'intimates' a respectful recognition of otherness, namely that which would call into question the self- consolidating desire for freedom of the human subject. Differently put, it 'intimates' precisely that which the acknowledgment of which would suspend the concern for recognition of which Hegel writes. Coetzee's emphasis on the possibility of a recognition of alterity in the absence of language is also emphasised by the lack of paranoia on the island. Indeed, it is Susan Barton and not Cruso who introduces to the island an obsession with cannibals. In this respect, Cruso's "castle", like Michael K's burrow, bears no relation to Robinson Crusoe's stockade in Defoe's novel. Instead of the rows of stakes, there is simply a but of poles and reeds and a fence which serves to protect "a patch of wild bitter lettuce" from the apes (1986: 9). There is thus no evidence here of the fear of being engulfed by the other which in Defoe's novel manifests itself so prominently in Robinson Crusoe's attempt to 'fence' and 'fortify' himself 'from all the world'. Foe's puzzled reflection on "why a man so fearful of cannibals should have neglected to arm himself" (1986: 53) therefore stresses yet another intertextual difference between Cruso and his literary ancestor. That it is Susan Barton and not Cruso who brings to the island a fear of cannibals is apparent in her aforementioned assumption, on first seeing Friday, that he is a cannibal. Moreover, it is she who initially interprets Cruso's habit of staring out to sea as fear of cannibals (see 1986: 12). Ultimately, however, she comes to realise that she is mistaken (1986: 38). The implication of the difference between Susan 1 Barton's fear of the other and Cruso's suggested lack of such fear is that paranoia is a function of the epistemological . procedure through which the 'displaced percipient' attempts to 206 'know' that which is different and thereby contain its dreadful anonymity. By extension, paranoia would be obviated by a recognition and respect for otherness such as I have argued is implicit in Cruso's aversion to the transforming medium of language. Cruso's eschewal of language also makes possible a proximate relation with nature. So, while Susan Barton repeatedly describes the island as Cruso's possession, it becomes clear that the relationship of full recognition which he establishes with Friday extends to the island as well, and that it rules out the possibility of possession. Earlier in this thesis, I argued that Defoe's Robinson Crusoe develops from a castaway into a colonist and, in the course of this development, takes possession of the island. I argued that the island as a representation of colonial space is described throughout the novel as property and that this is particularly evident in the passage in which Crusoe, upon 'surveying' the island from an elevated position, reflects upon his 'right of possession' and regards himself as 'king and lord of all this country'. In Foe, this prototypical instance of the monarch-of-all-I-survey topos is evoked by Susan Barton's reference to Cruso's "evening posture", that is, his habit of standing "on the Bluff with the sun behind him all red and purple, staring out to sea, his staff in his hand and his great conical hat on his head" (1986: 37). Coetzee, in his aforementioned reference to the occurrence in landscape art of the "prospect-view" and "imperial gaze", links them to "conquest and domination" (1988a: 167). It is thus significant that Susan Barton should conclude her description of Cruso's stance with the following observation: "He is a truly kingly figure; he is the true king of his island" (my emphasis, 1986: 37). It seems clear therefore that Cruso's 'evening posture' should be read in terms of the monarch-of-all-I-survey topos and its conventional association with power. However, this description evokes this topos only to undermine it. For examrqe, instead of scanning the terrain with an imperial eye, Cruso looks out to sea. Furthermore, Susan Barton interprets this stance variously. As I have already indicated, she at first assumes 207 that Cruso is on guard for cannibals (1986: 12), but later she thinks that he is "searching the horizon for a sail" (1986: 38). Ultimately, though, she arrives at the following realisation: "His visits to the Bluff belonged to a practice of losing himself in the contemplation of the wastes of water and sky" (my emphasis, 1986: 38). So, instead of being self-constituting, as I have argued is the case in Defoe's representation, the relation of subject to space here depicted echoes that between Michael K and the Karoo 'farm', which is characterised by K's 'yielding up of himself'. In other words, it involves a Levinasian movement from same to other that is enabled by a substitution of self for the other. It is for this reason that I disagree with Attwell's contention that Cruso's "love of emptiness" may be accounted for in terms of "Coetzee's description in his Jerusalem Prize acceptance speech of the 'failure of love' in South Africa, that is, the settler's love of the land and landscape at the expense of the polity" (1993: 108). In terms of my argument thus far, the description of Cruso's love not so much of emptiness as of openness and infinity evokes, only to oppose, the monarch-of-all- I-survey topos -- in itself a depiction of the settler's relation to land. Once again, then, the island section of the novel 'intimates' a relationship which rivals rather than supplements history. As is evident in my discussion of Robinson Crusoe's possession of the island, the autonomous subject settles space conceptually through language and once that which is exterior has been mastered and reduced to an object by being adequated with the subject's interiority, it proceeds to affirm its ego. Instead of indicating possession, the description of Cruso's stance in relation to space connotes a relation to nothing and nowhere. The suggestion is that Cruso is 'unhomed' and thus able to forge a pure relation to that which cannot be defined by language. Paradoxically, that which he experiences is contingent and therefore not preceded by the a priori forms which constitite the condition of possibility of experience. Accordingly, the description implies the very opposite of the monarch-of-all-I- survey topos with its Cartesian inscription of humankind as 208 'masters and possessors of nature'. Rather than simply refining the first-person singular standpoint after the manner of Hegel, Coetzee thus suggests in Foe a negotiation of the problem of recognition through a Levinasian 'movement of infinition' which involves a radical restructuring of subjectivity and with it an abnegation of power. The corollary is that Cruso can be neither a master nor a possessor of man or land. And, since this renegotiation of the ego involves the substitution of self for the other and thus possession and 'mastery' by the other, it follows that Cruso is depicted not as 'master' but as 'servant'. As is the case in the depiction of the medical officer's 'mastery' by the other in Michael K, though, 'mastery' is here devoid of its usual connotations of power. Later in this chapter, I shall return to and elaborate on the Levinasian notion of an ethical authority without power which I discussed in the previous chapter and which is here again at issue. On an intertextual level, then, Coetzee's inversion of the monarch-of-all-I-survey topos constructs a contrast between the subject's self-consolidating appropriation of everything into its totality, the 'same' or 'home', and its opening and effacement of itself in its encounters with the other -- that is, between the 'move of Being' and the 'movement of infinition'. In the novel, this opposition, which is crucial in terms of the portrayal of the autonomy of the island, is developed by Coetzee's depiction of the role of language in recuperating alterity. For instance, Cruso's communion with openness is quite pointedly set in opposition to language in the novel. Upon her arrival on the island, Susan Barton wishes to tell Cruso more about herself, her "quest" for her "stolen daughter", and about the mutiny (1986: 13). However, as she explains, she is unable to do so because of Cruso's preference for silence and nothingness over speech: "But he asked nothing, gazing out instead into the setting sun, nodding to himself as though a voice spoke privately inside him that he was listening to" (1986: 13)) Moreover, it is significant that Cruso, like Michael K, keeps neither a journal nor a calendar (unlike his literary forebear in Defoe's novel). As Susan Barton realises, this is not simply because he lacks the 209 means with which to write:
What. I chiefly hoped to find was not there. Cruso kept no journal, perhaps because he lacked paper and ink, but more likely, I now believe, because he lacked the inclination to keep one, or, if he ever possessed the inclination, had lost it. I searched the poles that supported the roof, and the legs of the bed, but found no carvings, not even notches to indicate that he counted the years of his banishment or the cycles of the moon. (1986: 16)
It is important to note here that Cruso's refusal to keep a journal or calendar means that the island may be described in the same terms as the Karoo farm in Michael K, that is, as 'a pocket outside time' and language or, in terms of the aesthetics of rivalry, as an 'autonomous place'. Elsewhere in this study I have argued that travel writing is an important instrument of colonisation, that it enables the 'displaced percipient' to bring 'home' foreign places as language (see Miller, 1985: 5). Cruso's refusal to keep a journal thus forestalls the colonising process through which the ideological distance that separates terra incognita from the 'old world' is erased. The very act of writing in such a context would introduce the distinction between 'old' and 'new' world and thereby construct the former, that is, 'home', as site of ultimate meaning. All writing implies a reader and, in this context; the implied reader would inevitably form part of the 'domestic audience of Empire'. Even if the reader were only the writer as 'displaced percipient', that is not physically at home, the site of recuperation would still be 'home'. The act of not writing therefore amounts to a rejection of the 'old' world as 'home', and also constitutes a refusal to assimilate the island as site of otherness into the structures of knowledge of Europe. The resultant autonomy of the island also explains one of the principal differences between Foe and Robinson Crusoe, namely the complete and conspicuous absence in the former novel of tlie return-of-the-hero-as-master-of-two-worlds topos. At several points in the novel, Susan Barton emphasises the fact that Cruso has no desire to leave the island. After he is unable to provide 210 her with a satisfactory explanation as to why he has never attempted to build a boat and so "escape" from the island, she draws this conclusion:
Besides, as I later found, the desire to escape had dwindled within him. His heart was set on remaining to his dying day king of his tiny realm. In truth it was not fear of pirates or cannibals that held him from making bonfires or dancing about on the hilltop waving his hat, but indifference to salvation, and habit, and the stubbornness of old age. (1986: 13-14)
Most of Susan Barton's criticisms of Cruso are related to the fact that life on the island threatens to disorient the telos implicit in the return-of-the-hero-as-master-of-two-worlds topos. And, as her following question indicates, these criticisms bespeak a desire on her part to make Cruso's experience on the island conform to this topos and thereby annex the island to England: "Might he not justly be deemed a hero who had braved the wilderness and slain the monster of solitude and returned fortified by his victory?" (1986: 38). Significantly, Susan Barton describes Cruso's 'indifference to salvation' in terms of a bracketing of past history and a dislocation of the telos of the return-of-the-hero-as-master-of- two-worlds topos:
When I spoke of England and of all the things I intended to see and do when I was rescued, he seemed not to hear me. It was as though he wished his story to begin with his arrival on the island, and mine to begin with my arrival, and the story of us together to end on the island too. (1986: 34)
Later, when she repeats her "desire to be saved", Cruso tellingly responds by way of asserting the autonomy of the island: "I do not wish to hear of your desire . . . . It concerns other things, it does not concern the island, it is not a matter of the island" (1986: 36). From these descriptions, it becomes increasingly apparent that the island section of the novel 'intimates' a mode of life in which relationships are characterised by an irreversible 211 'movement of infinition' from the order of the same to the other. In terms of the opposition between the story of Ulysses and that of Abraham which Levinas uses'in order to illustrate the 'dehiscence' of the "ethical work", Cruso's relations are clearly Abrahamic in nature:
The Work thought radically is indeed a movement from the Same towards the other which never returns to the Same. To the myth of Ulysses returning to Ithaca, we would like to oppose the story of Abraham leaving his homeland forever for a still unknown land and even forbidding his son to be brought back to its point of departure. (qtd in Critchley, 1992: 109; cf. Levinas, 1987d: 91-92)
As with the conspicuous absence of the return-of-the-hero- as-master-of-two-worlds topos, Coetzee's insistence on Cruso's eschewal of language 'intimates' the presence on the island of an Abrahamic movement from same to other. Since language is the instrument with which the other is reduced and incorporated into the order of the same, its very presence renders inevitable the 'move of Being', a return to the domain of the same. In an important sense, language is 'home' and therefore, if Cruso is to be a nomad, rather than a Ulyssean monad like Defoe's Crusoe, he must be shown to be antipathetic to language. It is noteworthy in this regard that his aversion to language is related to his aversion to England, an antipathy which is stressed by the fact that, as Susan Barton points out, he chooses to die rather than return 'home':
On the island I believe Cruso might yet have shaken off the fever, as he had done so often before. For though not a young man, he was vigorous. But now he was dying of woe, the extremest woe. With every passing day he was conveyed farther from the kingdom he pined for, to which he would never find his way again. (1986: 43)
The 'movement of infinition' is a movement away from 'home' without return. In the context of the novel, the autonomy of the island, its separateness from 'home', depends on the maintenance 212 of this irreversibility. Cruso's lack of a 'home' means that he cannot be a castaway, since the castaway condition presupposes a sense of 'home'. Thus Cruso's entreaty that Susan Barton should remember that "not every man who bears the mark of the castaway is a castaway at heart" (1986: 33) must also be seen in the context of this Abrahamic movement from same to other. Moreover, as a nomad who shuns language, he is not discursively separated from the island -- as I explained with reference to Michael K in the previous chapter, the castaway condition is a metaphor for the subject's separation from 'reality' by language and history. A corollary of the fact that Cruso is not a castaway is therefore that he is not a coloniser. Indeed, I have argued in this thesis that colonisation is an inevitable consequence of the discursive separation of subject from 'reality'. It is therefore not surprising that Coetzee is at pains to indicate that it is Susan Barton and not Cruso who is castaway and coloniser, just as in Michael K it is the medical officer and not K who is the castaway. As in the earlier novel, it is the metropole, the 'world of words', which is portrayed as the locus of a marooned condition. Significantly, its status in this regard is suggested by the fact that Susan Barton starts a journal upon her return to England. In Foe, however, the difference between the island and England is not as absolute or immediately apparent as is the distinction between 'farm' and metropole in Michael K. So, for example, Susan Barton finds that life in England (which is, as she points out, also an island [1986: 26]) "grows less and less distinct" from life on the island (1986: 71). This difference between the two novels may be ascribed to narrative point of view: while the medical officer never encounters the Karoo 'farm', Susan Barton not only encounters the island but it is presented from her perspective. It is significant in this regard that she is depicted as being a castaway not only on the island but also in England. In contradistinction with Cruso, she repeatedly characterises herself as a castaway. For instance, on her first night on the island, she reflects as follows: "Last 213
night I had been bound for home; tonight I was a castaway" (1986: 14), and she later responds to Cruso's injunction that she remain in the enclosure with the words "I am a castaway, not a prisoner" (1986: 20). It is because she is a castaway that she perceives little difference between England and the island. Being irrevocably divorced from 'reality' by language and history, she is unable to see that for Cruso and Friday, at least, the island is a locus of proximity with otherness. Susan Barton's castaway status signifies that it is she who is the coloniser and not Cruso. As she eventually comes to realise, if Cruso "had truly wished to be a colonist and leave behind a colony", he would have availed himself of the "only womb there was" in order to populate the island (1986: 83). Upon this realisation, she also comes to see that he and Friday were "wary" of her and wonders if this is because they suspected that she had come "to claim dominion" over them (1986: 86). Of even greater significance in this regard is the conflation of coloniser and castaway in the following allusion to the words 'Veni, vidi, vici' with which Julius Caesar is traditionally thought to have announced the victory of Zela that concluded the Pontic campaign: "When I reflect on my story I seem to exist only as the one who came, the one who witnessed, the one who longed to be gone" (1986: 51). These words indicate that Susan Barton's commerce with the island and with Cruso and Friday is informed by the 'move of Being', the reflex to subsume the other within the domain of the same: the desire of the castaway, that is, to 'be gone', to return 'home', links unknown terrain to 'home' and thus leads to conquest.
4.3 Ethics and Representation
Susan Barton's characterisation as castaway and coloniser has far-reaching implications for the narrational process and introduces to the novel a metafictional debate on the im/possibility of decolonising aesthetic forms. The fact that a .community which may be termed ethical in its respectful recognition of the heterogeneity of the other is presented from a 214 perspective which elides and so violates it, provides the novel with a double structure which, in its turn, generates a tension between ethics. and politics. On the one hand, the novel points to the existence of a state which is 'otherwise than Being' and, on the-other hand, it apparently suggests that such a state is unattainable in the context of language -- that the individual is automatically excluded from this condition because of his/her situatedness in the transforming medium of language. Indeed, as I have indicated, this double structure suggests that a recognition of otherness cannot be achieved without negotiating the violence with which language elides otherness. By stressing that Susan Barton does not so much represent as merely present the island and therefore misrepresent it, then, the novel seems to imply that discourse is a cognitive a priori which prescribes what is seen, said and written. However, Coetzee in Foe does not advocate a passive submission to the violence of language and narrative forms of representation. In this regard, it is important to distinguish Susan Barton's 'writing' in the interpolated narrative which forms the first section of the novel from that of her author. In terms of the illusion of presentation, it is not this character's intention to 'intimate' the existence of that which exceeds the medium and manoeuvres of constative representation in 'her' narrative of the island. Quite obviously, this strategy of excession is deployed by Coetzee, and is meant to raise the reader's awareness of the way in which language, discourse and narrative annul otherness by foreclosing on openness and reducing difference sameness. Through this strategy, the novel directs the reader to occlusions of occlusions, layers of language which render unknown that which they purport to make known. The paradox here, of course, is that the reader's resultant recognition of otherness is stimulated by a novel, that is, by a form which is irrevocably implicated in, indeed dependent on, language, discourse and narrative. By means of the artificia l contrast between Susan Barton's embedded narrative and the novel proper, .then, Coetzee is able to 'intimate' otherness by self- reflexively exposing the way in which the novel's totalising form 215 and medium reduce difference to sameness. It must be emphasised that Coetzee's strategy of excession is neither a denial of the subject's implication in language nor of the 'worldliness' of the novel. Indeed, the very use of a strategy which eschews representation is grounded in a recognition of such implication. The underlying issue here is, of course, deeply ethical. Because of the novel's implication in the medium and forms of the order of the same, it is an ethical necessity, even imperative, to posit, without representing and so violating, the existence of that which this mode of writing inevitably reduces. The writer must resist that which, according to Blanchot, is always already presupposed by Orpheus's descent into the 'other night' of the Underworld, that is, to return with the other 'to the light of day and to give it form, shape, and reality in the day'. The presentation of the novel from Susan Barton's perspective thus foregrounds the issue of representation, its political nature and ethical implications. As a result of this presentational strategy and the double structure which it installs, the novel becomes a meditation on how, in writing, to respond responsibly to the unknowable, to recognise it in its unknowability. This meta-representational aspect of the text is developed by the image of aesthetic activity constituted by Cruso and Friday's construction of the walls and terraces on the island, and the transformation which Susan Barton's 'writing' undergoes. In the remainder of this chapter, I shall discuss the way in which these images of creation suggest a possible negotiation of the political and ethical problem of representation. I shall also discuss the social implications of these self-reflexively aesthetic moments in the text.
4.3.1 The Aesthetic of the Island
As an image of aesthetic endeavour, Cruso and Friday's enterp iise on the island serves a similar purpose to K's gardening in Michael K. It should be remembered, though, that in the earlier novel it soon becomes clear that K's gardening cannot serve as a 216 model for writing/reading. By contrast, the novel Foe initially appears to insist upon an analogy between the act of writing and the construction of the walls'and terraces on the island. For instance, in her following words to Friday, Susan Barton compares her writing with Cruso and Friday's "labour":
You thought that carrying stones was the hardest of labours. But when you see me at Mr Foe's desk making marks with the quill, think of each mark as a stone, and think of the paper as the island, and imagine that I must disperse the stones over the face of the island, and when that is done and the taskmaster is not satisfied (was Cruso ever satisfied with your labours?) must pick them up again (which, in the figure, is scoring out the marks) and dispose them according to another scheme, and so forth, day after day . (1986: 87)
The question which now arises is whether, in being compared to a patently literary activity, the novel suggests that Cruso's activity on the island is informed by an aesthetic of supplementarity (as is the case with Susan Barton's writing, which replicates history by eliding the alterior relational mode on the island) or an aesthetic of rivalry. My argument in support of my claim that the island constitutes an 'autonomous place' suggests that it is unlikely that the construction of walls and terraces is informed by an aesthetic of supplementarity. To this evidence may be added Cruso's total indifference to salvaging material and tools from the wreck of the ship which brought him and Friday to the island. In this regard, Susan Barton comments as follows:
It seemed a great pity that from the wreck Cruso should have brought away no more than a knife. For had he rescued even the simplest of carpenter's tools, and some spikes and bars and suchlike, he might have fashioned better tools, and with better tools contrived a less laborious life, or even built a boat and escaped to civilization. (1986: 16)
Later, she suggests to Cruso that they mount a salvaging operation: 217 If we could dive to the wreck, even now . . . we might save from it tools of the greatest utility. A saw, for instance, or an axe, both of which we lack. Timbers too we might loosen and bring back. Is there no way to explore the wreck? (1986: 32)
However, Cruso responds to this suggestion with indifference, even antipathy:
The ship lies on the bed of the ocean, broken by the waves and covered in sand . . . What has survived the salt and seaworm will not be worth the saving. We have a roof over our heads, made without saw or axe. We sleep, we eat, we live. We have no need of tools. (1986: 32)
The fact that Cruso dismisses Susan Barton's suggestion and speaks of technologically sophisticated tools as if they are "heathenish inventions" indicates more than mere contentment with the very rudimentary tools which he does have (see 1986: 15-16). His aversion to tools and reluctance to salvage material from the wreck is strongly reminiscent of Michael K's avoidance of the deserted farmhouse on the Karoo farm. And, just as K's shunning of the farmstead stands in direct contrast to the alacrity with which Defoe's Robinson Crusoe salvages from the wreck all that is 'portable and fit to hand out', so too does Cruso's aversion to the wreck in Foe. In Defoe's novel, Robinson Crusoe uses the tools which he takes from the wreck to master the island, turn it into a property and, ultimately, a 'little England'. By contrast, K's avoidance of the farmhouse and Cruso's indifference to the wreck signify their respect for the openness of terrain, their refusal to return it to the domain of the same and so colonise it. In these two novels, the farmhouse and the wreck serve as a symbolic, possible link between the history of the European metropole and autonomous sites, and must therefore be seen as repositories of the means through which history may be supplemented. Judie Newman, for example, sees the wreck in F9e as a symbol of Empire and of Cruso's "cultural inheritance" (1995: 96). One may therefore conclude that Cruso's aversion to the wreck points to the 'dehiscent' movement from same to other 218 which informs his relations to alterity and therefore connotes not only his refusal but his inability to colonise. By extension, it serves as an index of his transcendence of the discourses of the metropole in his relationship with the island. It follows, then, that in transcending history, Cruso and Friday's aesthetic enterprise on the island rivals it. This is made apparent by the failure of Susan Barton's hermeneutic endeavour to make sense of the walls and terraces by situating them in relation to an anterior system of signs, namely that of the English landscape. So, for example, in response to Cruso's stated preference of his walls and terraces to writing, Susan Barton reflects as follows: "As for myself, I wondered who would cross the ocean to see terraces and walls, of which we surely had an abundance at home . . ." (my emphasis, 1986: 19). Her ultimate inability to decipher the marks on the landscape by means of this recuperative strategy suggests that on the island, which is depicted as being outside the semiotic system that enables them to signify, these signifiers are divested of meaning. In the absence of a cultural thematics -- in particular a system of property relations -- they cannot signify and, in the novel, the depiction of this divestiture of signification signifies the autonomy of the island, its location beyond the history and language of the metropole. This contrast in the novel between a locus in which property relations invest with significance those structures which contain and control space, and a site in which a respect for the openness of space divests these signifiers of their signification, is foregrounded by the following imaginary conversation which Susan Barton has with Friday: "Here in England . . . it is our custom to grow hedges to mark the limits of our property. . . . here we grow hedges, and then cut them straight, so that our gardens shall be neatly marked out" (1986: 60). 6 An obvious corollary of this argument on the designification of the walls and terraces on the island is that Cruso and Friday's activity cannot be transformative and, accordingly, that it is an anti-hegemonic,form of authoring. This is also implicit in the fact that their enterprise is underpinned not by the 219 recuperative 'move of Being', but by an irreversible movement from same to other. At one point in the novel Susan Barton asks Cruso whether it is his intention "to clear the whole island of growth, and turn it into terraces" (my emphasis, 1986: 33), the implication being that his 'labour' is transformative. If, however, the walls and terraces are not situated in relation to 'home', the locus of absolute meaning which guarantees their ability to 'mean', that is, to signify within the conceptual field of the metropole, they cannot signify on the island, and it therefore follows that their construction does not transform the island into a replica of the English countryside. So, although part of the island is cleared of vegetation, it is not 'turned into' anything that signifies conceptually.' Having been created outside the discourses of the metropole, the walls and terraces, uncannily, do not relate to anything within those discourses. If they do relate to something which is nothing definable and thus 'signify', they do so non-conceptually, and that which they 'signify' exceeds history, the order of the same, or totality. In the novel, the terraces and walls on the island thus constitute an image of a truly autonomous and transcendental mode of creation which, in its recognition of and respect for otherness, rivals history. As a model of creation, Cruso and Friday's enterprise on the island thus points to the possibility of a Levinasian aesthetic which, being grounded in a 'movement of infinition' and thus deriving from a source beyond history, that is, from nothing or, more precisely, nowhere that is definable, is a form of creatio ex nihilo. However, the differences between this aesthetic and literary writing also allude to a number of problems which the literary text will encounter in attempting to generate such a movement. For instance, since the form of the novel is located in language and the representational protocols of the domain of the same, implication in discourse is a precondition for the writing of novels. In order to write, the writer must be a castaway and coloniser. It is precisely this 'worldliness' that Cruso and Friday's aesthetic endeavour, which significantly takes place in silence, transcends. Moreover, as signs, the walls and terraces on the island 220 have been stripped of their capacity to represent in discourse. The problem with regard to narrative writing, here, is that while such a profoundly anti-representationalist stance would be ethically sound in its refusal to foreclose on and so violate the other, it would render the text altogether inaccessible. As such, it would prevent a re-entry of the ethical into the political sphere. Later in this chapter, it will become clear that one of the principal concerns in Coetzee's Foe is precisely the irruption of the ethical into the political.
4.3.2 Susan Barton as Author: From Supplementarity to Rivalry
With regard to the issue of language and implication, Susan Barton's literary project is more helpful as an intratextual mirror of a mode of writing which rivals history than Cruso and Friday's activity on the island. I have argued earlier that her narrative of the island supplements history: however, as the novel develops, it gradually emerges that her writing changes and eventually comes to rival history. As I proceed, it will emerge that this change is directly linked to this character's development of an ethical subjectivity in the course of the novel. It will also become clear that this development is more defined than it is in the case of the medical officer in Michael K. Initially, Susan Barton believes implicitly in the power of language to convey the 'true' story of the island and of Friday. Apart from being apparent in her attempt to persuade Cruso to keep a journal (1986: 16-18), this faith in the ability of constative representation to serve as a transparent and authoritative vehicle for 'factual' experience is also evident when she tells Friday that Foe has undertaken to write the story of the island:
You do not know the gentleman, but at this very moment he is engaged in writing another story, which is your story, and your master's, and mine. Mr Foe has not met you,.but he knows of you, from what I have told him, using words. That is part of the magic of words. Through the medium of words I have given Mr Foe the 221 particulars of you and Mr Cruso and of my year on the island and the years you and Mr Cruso spent there alone, as far as I can supply them; and all these particulars Mr Foe is weaving into a story which will make us famous throughout the land, and rich too. . . . Is writing not a fine thing, Friday? Are you not filled with joy to know that you will live forever, after a manner? (1986: 58)
However, as I have already indicated, Susan Barton's perception of language changes: in the course of the novel, her confidence in the capacity of language to transcribe the subject's pure and unmediated perception of the world is repeatedly challenged and systematically eroded. Her change in this regard is carefully documented. Owing to her own attempt at transcribing her experience, she realises the fundamental instability of language, the fact that it escapes the user's intentions. Thus, at one point in her journal, she exclaims as follows: "Alas, my stories seem always to have more applications than I intend, so that I must go back and laboriously extract the right application and apologize for the wrong ones and efface them" (1986: 81). Thereafter, she recognises the transformative nature of language. Earlier in this chapter I demonstrated that this apprehension of language is related to her perception that, owing to his silence, she 'makes' or constructs Friday in language: "I say he is a cannibal and he becomes a cannibal; I say he is a laundryman and he becomes a laundryman" (1986: 121). Significantly, this passage points to Susan Barton's changed understanding of language by alluding to her initial confidence in this medium when, feeling that Cruso had "erred" in not teaching Friday language, she attempts to redress this problem and undertakes to "teach him the name of things" after having set him to work as a laundryman (1986: 56-57). Ironically, her description of this enterprise betrays its transformative nature and anticipates her eventual recognition in this regard: "I have the use of the scullery two mornings of the week, and am turning Friday into a laundryman" (my emphasis, 1986: 56). 222 Not surprisingly, Susan Barton's next attempt to teach Friday language is only upon Foe's insistence and is informed by a strong incredulity towards language's ability to represent: 8
On the slate I drew a house with a door and windows and a chimney, and beneath it wrote the letters h-o-u-s. 'This is the picture,' I said, pointing to the picture, 'and this the word.' I made the sounds of the word house one by one, pointing to the letters as I made them, and then took Friday's finger and guided it over the letters as I spoke the word; and finally gave the pencil into his hand and guided him to write h-o-u-s beneath the h-o-u-s I had written. Then I wiped the slate clean, so that there was no picture left save the picture in Friday's mind, and guided his hand in forming the word a third and a fourth time, till the slate was covered in letters. I wiped it clean again. 'Now do it alone, Friday,' I said; and Friday wrote the four letters h-o-u-s, or four shapes passably like them: whether they were truly the four letters, and stood truly for the word house, and the picture I had drawn, and the thing itself, only he knew. I drew a ship in full sail, and made him write ship, and then began to teach him Africa. Africa I represented as a row of palm trees with a lion roaming among them. Was my Africa the Africa whose memory Friday bore within him? I doubted it. (1986: 145-146)
Susan Barton's insight into language's lack of transparency coincides with her realisation that her attempt to grasp and render through language her experience on the island has failed: "The waves picked me up and cast me ashore on an island, and a year later the same waves brought a ship to rescue me, and of the true story of that year, the story as it should be seen in God's great scheme of things, I remain as ignorant as a newborn babe" (1986: 126). This awareness that her story does not proceed from a position which is.sub specie aeternitatis is, of course, a recognition that she does not occupy a position from nowhere, that her experience of the island has been mediated by language and discourse. Susan Barton's newfound understanding of language, which is also an understanding that the subject is not the centre of knowledge, radically affects her relationships with the other characters in the novel. From my argument thus far, it should be 223 clear that it enables her to comprehend the extent to which language determines her relationship with Friday and, despite her attempts at setting him free, .forces her to foreclose on his otherness and thus enslave him (cf. Jolly, 1994: 63-64). However, it also alters her relationship with Foe. The change which she undergoes in her association with the latter character is from an initial faith in his ability 'truthfully' to represent her experience on the island, to the conviction that he cannot, and that his account will merely transform and so elide the 'truth' -- the exact nature of which even she is unsure. In other words, she comes to see that his literary project is abortive and that he might be "a kind of captive too" (1986: 151). Clearly, the implication here is that Foe, too, is entrapped in language and discourse. Susan Barton's insight into the nature of language, an insight which is accompanied by the apprehension that what she has seen and experienced on the island exceeds language and therefore cannot be understood (cf. Attridge, 1996: 180), changes her writing practice. Most of the novel is presented in the form of entries from her journal. Initially, she shares the eighteenth-century valorisation of the journal as a form which is close to the present of experience and therefore to 'truth'. Indeed, in suggesting to Cruso that he keep a journal, she argues for a direct transcription of the 'reality' of lived experience: "For surely, with every day that passes, our memories grow less certain . . . seen from too remote a vantage, life begins to lose
its particularity" (1986: 17-18) ' . In terms of constructing an equivalence between truth, experience, perception and language, her argument coincides with the views of Arthur Young that were cited in the first chapter of this study: "The journal form hath the advantage of carrying with it a greater degree of credibility; and, of course, more weight. A traveller who thus registers his observations is detected the moment he writes of things he has not seen. . . . If he sees little, he must register little" (qtd in Batten, 1978: 33). However, as Susan Barton comes to doubt the ability of language to transcribe 'reality', the journal comes to signify her castaway status, that 224 is, her separation from 'reality'. The entries now no longer confidently record her experience but her doubts and inability to 'know' that experience in language. In fact, much of the novel consists of her reflections on the "touches of mystery" which she encountered on the island: the walls and terraces, Friday's tongue, his 'submission' to Cruso, the reason for the lack of sexual desire on the island, and Friday's scattering of petals on the water (1986: 83-87). Furthermore, it is significant that Susan Barton is initially exasperated with these 'touches of mystery' and feels that they mar her story. As Jolly explains, she "desires closure and expects all mysteries to be re-solved in the course of narrative. In this scheme of things, puzzles or mysteries become 'symptoms' that it is the duty of narrative to 'treat'" (1996: 7). Eventually, though, she comes to believe that these mysteries should be left unexplained rather than be elided by language and narrative. This shift suggests the development in this character of a recognition of and responsibility for otherness. Susan Barton's'loss of faith in Foe's ability to 'write up' her experience on the island is directly related to the fact that it is precisely these 'touches of mystery' which he wishes to excise in his reading and rewriting of her account. In terms of the presentation of Foe as the putative pre-text of Defoe's novel, Robinson Crusoe is figured as Foe's story of reading Susan Barton's journal. According to this presentational illusion, the 'absence' of the 'touches of mystery' in the latter novel confirms her insight that, as a result of his implication in the transformative medium of language, Foe will inevitably foreclose on the openness of her story. Instead of inscribing into what is ostensibly his text a recognition of the unknowability of the island experience, as Susan Barton eventually does in her own account, Foe elides this dimension of the story altogether. The implication thus is that Foe, in his reading of her text, does exactly what Susan Barton does upon first encountering the island: that is, he transforms and so re-creates it. 9 The intertextual juxtaposition of the twentieth-century novel with the eighteenth-century one thus lays bare the discursive 225 mediation of the literary encounter. And, together with the - intratextual parallel which it forms with Susan Barton's encounter with.the island, this intertextual strategy links the acts of reading and colonisation. It is in terms of Susan Barton's attempt to recognise the unknowability of her experience on the island and to resist her reader's attempts at colonising her story that her account serves as a raise en abyme of Coetzee's literary project. Outside the presentational illusion generated by the narrative levels within the text, the 'touches of mystery' to which the character Susan Barton refers are, of course, lacunae or signifiers of openness not only in her story, but in Coetzee's novel too. In this respect, it is noteworthy that these 'touches of mystery' are placed in opposition to the following "touches" of realistic "particularity" which Susan Barton recommends to Cruso in the first section of the text:
But seen from too remote a vantage, life begins to lose its particularity. . . . The truth that makes your story yours alone, that sets you apart from the old mariner by the fireside spinning yarns of sea-monsters and mermaids, resides in a thousand touches which today may seem of no importance, such as: When you made your needle (the needle you store in your belt), by what means did you pierce the eye? When you sewed your hat, what did you use for thread? Touches like these will one day persuade your countrymen that it is all true, every word, there was indeed once an island in the middle of the ocean where the wind blew and the gulls cried from the cliffs and a man named Cruso paced about in his apeskin clothes, scanning the horizon for a sail. (my emphasis, 1986: 18)
This passage alludes to the strategy of formal realism, that is, the kind of "particularity of description" which, according to Watt, "has always been considered typical of the narrative manner of Robinson Crusoe" and, indeed, definitive of the novel-as-genre (1957: 17, 33). In so doing, the contrast which it establishes in the novel between the patently aesthetic technique of realism and the 'touches of mystery' suggests that the foregrounding of mystery is also an aesthetic strategy. By implication, the juxtaposition presents two dichotomous modes of writing: on the 226 one hand, realism, which provides the illusion of a direct, unmediated access to an always knowable reality and, on the other hand, a strategy which is premised on a recognition of the mediated nature of experience and which, in its endeavour to acknowledge that which exceeds representation, is informed by an irreversible movement from same to other. Moreover, the fact that, presentationally, Foe occupies a position of anteriority to Robinson Crusoe means that this juxtaposition suggests that it is by way of realism that the mystery of the island which has been foregrounded in its unknowability in the ostensibly earlier text is occluded in Defoe's novel. As Watt points out, formal realism "tends to exclude whatever is not vouched for by the senses" (1957: 84). Ultimately, then, the ethical shift which Susan Barton's writing practice undergoes from a form which forecloses on alterity to one which is underpinned by a sense of respect for the other, indicates that Coetzee constructs in the novel a mirror of his own aesthetic activity. As a result of this trajectory, the text manifests a strongly ontogenetic character -- to the extent that it is about the development of a mode of writing which is informed by an aesthetic of rivalry, it deals with its own coming into being.
4.3.2.1 Exceeding History: The Aesthetic of Surprise
Susan Barton's writing thus changes from supplementing to rivalling history in the course of the novel. Instead of the recuperative impulse to integrate that which is unknowable into the known, it evinces a 'movement of infinition' which seeks to respond to the unknown in its full unknowability. By extension, it must be inspired by a source outside history. In Foe, Coetzee uses the classical notion of the muse to suggest the possibility of an aesthetic mode which emanates from an autonomous source. This trope is most explicit in Susan 1 Barton's attempts to inspire Foe with her story of the island (1986: 53, 126, 139-140). Significantly, the aesthetic activity of inspiration conjoins with the sexual and generative activity 227 of copulation and procreation in the depiction of this relationship. So, for example, Susan Barton mounts Foe with the words: "This is .the manner of the Muse when she visits her poets" (1986: 139). Clearly, then, sex and procreation serve as metaphors for literary creation in Foe. It is thus noteworthy that earlier in the novel, after having engaged in sexual intercourse with Cruso, Susan Barton receives an 'intimation' of a disjunction between the order of history in which she is situated and an-other order:
We yield to a stranger's embrace or give ourselves to the waves; for the blink of an eyelid our vigilance relaxes; we are asleep; and when we awake, we have lost the direction of our lives. What are these blinks of an eyelid, against which the only defence is an eternal and inhuman wakefulness? Might they not be the cracks and chinks through which another voice, other voices, speak in our lives? By what right do we close our ears to them? The questions echoed in my head without answer. (my emphasis, 1986: 30)
In terms of the analogy between sexual intercourse and artistic inspiration, the suggestion here is that Cruso-as-muse has inspired Susan Barton-as-writer with 'intimations' of alterity. This suggestion is confirmed by the allusions in this passage to Levinas's descriptions of the approach of the other -- descriptions in which he often refers to the other as "the Stranger" (see, for example, 1991: 39ff.). 10 I have already discussed at some length Levinas's emphasis in these descriptions on the fact that the intentionality of subject-centred consciousness inevitably reduces alterity to a given. If the subject is to be surprised, its consciousness must therefore be "affected" before it is able to form "an image of what is coming to it, affected in spite of itself" (Levinas, 1981: 102). The other must not knock, it must arrive without announcing itself (Levinas, 1981: 102). Only by being 'surprised' can the vigilance of consciousness be overwhelmed and the self possessed by the other. In my discussion of somnolence in Michael K, I also indicated that Levinas attaches much value to states of un- or 228 semi-consciousness in which the subject is not in full possession of self. By relaxing consciousness, a condition such as sleep may allow the other to approach the subject." As in Michael K, the references to sleep in Foe suggest just such a possession of the subject by the other. I2 Indeed, it gradually becomes clear in the later novel that sleep is a state in which the subject may be inspired by the other. In this state, that is, the idea of infinity may be 'put into' the subject. By extension, sleep enables the subject to transcend the condition of ontological solitude that has been imposed on it by the intentionality of its consciousness, a condition which allows it to act freely and autonomously, that is, 'as though alone'. Inspiration by the other instills in the subject the recognition that it is ontically with others and thereby curbs its freedom. In short, such possession makes the 'I am I', the 'for-oneself', become 'for-the-other'. By means of this restructuring of its identity, the autonomous subject becomes a responsible one or, to use the terms which Coetzee employs in both Michael K and in the above passage from Foe, it 'yields' or 'gives itself' to the other. It is noteworthy that Levinas explains this 'surrender' of self in very similar terms:
The I approached in responsibility is for-the-other, is a denuding, an exposure to being affected, a pure susceptiveness. It does not posit itself, possessing itself and recognizing itself; it is consumed and delivered over, dis-locates itself, loses its place, is exiled, relegates itself into itself . . . emptying itself . in a no-grounds, to the point of substituting itself for the other, holding on to itself only as it were in the trace of its exile. (1981: 138)
Barton's reference to 'blinks of an eyelid' should also be seen in the context of Levinas's view of consciousness. In his discussion of the Levinasian notion of the Augenblick, Llewelyn argues that a 'Blick' may be variously translated as a 'look', 'glimpse' or 'glance', but also carries connotations of 'blink's and 'wink'. He elaborates as follows: "The darkness when in the wink of an eye the lid is momentarily lowered would announce the way that in waking life in the world the light of consciousness, 229 as Levinas maintains, is suffused with the darkness of unconsciousness" (1995: 52). The Augenblick may thus be seen as an interstitial state in which the other may 'intimate' itself. It is, in the words which Coetzee gives Susan Barton, a 'crack' or 'chink' through which 'another voice' speaks in our lives'. This Levinasian concept is related to another, namely insomnia. For Levinas, insomnia is characterised by an "ebbing" of subject-centred consciousness: "In this anonymous nightwatch where I am completely exposed to being all the thoughts which occupy my insomnia are suspended on nothing. They have no support. I am, one might say, the object rather than the subject of an anonymous thought" (1978: 66). It is, in Llewelyn's words, a "metacategory", that is, a category beyond the categories with which the subject constitutes the world (see 1995: 52-53). Differently put, it is a category which exceeds the known world and in which subjective intentionality is arrested. Not being possessed of self while in a state of insomnia, the subject is ready to be approached and possessed by the other (see Llewelyn, 1995: 54). In Foe, such a state of 'dispossession' of self and possession by other is invoked in the description of the trance which Susan Barton experiences when, unable to sleep in the empty barn in which she and Friday take refuge while en route to Bristol, she dances Friday's dance:
Thinking these thoughts, spinning round, my eyes closed, a smile on my lips, I fell, I believe, into a kind of trance; for when next I knew, I was standing still, breathing heavily, with somewhere at my mind's edge an intimation that I had been far away, that I had seen wondrous sights. Where am I? I asked myself, and crouched down and stroked the floor; and when it came back to me that I was in Berkshire, a great pang wrenched my heart; for what I had seen in my trance, whatever it had been -- I could summon back nothing distinct, yet felt a glow of after-memory, if you can understand that -- had been a message (but from whom?) to tell me there were other lives open to me than this one in which I trudged with Friday across the English countryside, a life of which I was already heartily sick. (my emphasis, 1986: 103-104)
As in the earlier citation, then, this passage suggests that the 230 approach of the other is made possible by Susan Barton's suspension of cognition. The emphasis in both these passages on a transcendence of the intentional structures of consciousness which seemingly condition the possibility of experience and, accordingly, on a movement from same to other, indicates that Susan Barton is possessed by the other and has therefore become an ethical subject. Significantly, Levinas repeatedly uses the term 'inspiration' in his descriptions of the possession of the self by the other (see, for instance, 1981: 140ff.). In having the idea of infinity 'put into' it in its encounter with the other, the subject becomes the "surprised" "author" of that which has been received "one knows not from where" (Levinas, 1981: 148- 150). It is in the context of this description of the unknowability of an alterior origin that Susan Barton's inability to state the source of the 'message' which she has received should be read. From a Levinasian perspective, this 'message' would be the "saying", "Here I Am", with which the subject responds responsibly to the other's approach (see 1981: 144-146). Although it is the subject who 'authors' the saying, it has been 'inspired' by the other and is therefore a message of sorts. The paradox of a message which is a response that is articulated by the receiver emerges in Levinas's references to the 'Here I Am' as the "command" which "sound[s] in the mouth of the one that obeys" (1981: 147) and, more complexly, to "the coming of the order to which I am subjected before hearing it, or which I hear in my own saying" (1981: 150). The allusion to this paradox in Susan Barton's reference to 'other voices' that 'speak in our lives' points to her substitution of self for other, her possession and 'mastery' by the other. Indeed, the "infinitely exterior" can only become an "'inward' voice" by means of such a substitution, a generous and irreversible movement from same to other (Levinas, 1981: 147). The fact that Susan Barton's sexual encounter with Cruso indicates her inspiration by the other also explains the novel's insistence on the instability of language. I have repeatedly stressed that, in Levinas's description, the subject's encounter 231 with the other occurs on a level beyond conceptuality. The saying is therefore not necessarily verbal. As the subject's responsible response to the other, it constitutes a performance, an action which cannot be represented. Any attempt to do so would reduce and so violate the event of being in an ethical relation with the other. It is precisely this problem of how that which occurs on a level of performance and which involves a movement from same to other may be translated into language and narrative without being betrayed, that is, without being integrated into the order of the same, which Coetzee stages in Foe by means of his careful documentation of the change which Susan Barton's attitude to language undergoes in the course of the novel. As I have argued, her loss of confidence in the ability of language constatively to describe life on the island points to a recognition of and respect for alterity. I have also argued that her development of this respect means that her writing practice comes to be characterised by a desire to preserve the enigma of the island and that:in the process, her story becomes a mise en abyme of Coetzee's novel. Its 'touches of mystery' advertise the novel proper's strategic refusal to attempt to represent the unrepresentable. As in "Narrative" and Michael K, then, this procedure enables Coetzee to 'intimate' the existence of otherness by pointing to its absence in his novel. By admitting its implication in history and consequent inability to represent the other, this novel, like "Narrative" and Michael K, inscribes a tension between totality and infinity which enables it to acknowledge, without knowing, the other. Consequently, this meta-representational strategy establishes an 'unrelating relation' between the novel and alterity, that is, a relation which is grounded in irreconcilable difference rather than correlation. As a result of this meta-representational strategy of excession and infinition, then, Foe responds responsibly to th other in its full alterity. By implication, although linguistically and representationally located in the order of the same, this novel is profoundly 'dehiscent' in its movement from 232 the order of the same to the other. It is addressed to the other and, by extension, is structured as a performance, an enactment of the ethical relation. And,.owing to the 'giving of self' which necessarily accompanies this 'dehiscent' movement, it is not an assertion of author-ity, a mastery, but an act of obedience and obeisance. In short, it functions performatively as an articulation of the Levinasian 'Here I Am', that is, "saying with inspiration" (Levinas, 1981: 142). Instead of arguing that writing inevitably betrays the attempt to speak the "non-authoritative thought" (Bongie, 1993: 274), it would seem that Coetzee in this novel presents a case for a mode of writing which has precisely this capability.
4.3.3 Inspiration and the Reader
However, the novel does not celebrate this negotiation of the economy of betrayal that is concomitant on its 'worldliness', its location in the domain of the same. Instead, the question with which it self-reflexively preoccupies itself is whether or not, in its relationship with the reading subject, it is able to sustain its 'movement of infinition', a movement through which it attempts to disrupt and radically destabilise the totality of the same with the infinity of the other. Its ability to do so depends entirely on its reception by the reader who, after all, is its conduit to the political realm. Only if it is able to surprise the reader by inspiring him/her with its 'intimations' of alterity will its 'dehiscence' interrupt the same. In the previous chapters of this study, I have argued at some length that, for Coetzee, the interpretive act violently recuperates the otherness of the literary text within literary systems of intelligibility. Characterised by integration and totalisation, reading employs the strategies of the 'move of Being'. By implication, the reading subject is the site of the transformation of alterity into the same. In terms of this view of reading, the reader of Foe will therefore seemingly inevitably forestall the ethical trajectory of the text by returning the other to the order of the same. Accordingly, the interruption of 233 the same which this novel strives to effect will be prevented and it will be unable to perform the ethical. The novel's self-reflexive meditation on these issues becomes apparent in the sex scene involving Susan Barton and Foe to which I have already referred, a scene which forms a counterpart to that in which Cruso-as-muse inspires Susan Barton- as-writer. In the intercourse between Foe and Barton, Susan Barton straddles Foe, refers to herself as a muse, and asserts her desire to "father her offspring" (1986: 140). While Susan Barton is depicted as a muse here, however, it does not necessarily follow that Foe is cast only as an author-figure -- as I have already indicated, he is ambivalently presented as both reader and writer. In this regard, Coetzee's use of the conventions of the Richardsonian epistolary novel, a strategy which emphasises the textual nature of Susan Barton's relationship with Foe, is revealing. For example, in the following passage, the story of the island, written in the form of a letter from Susan Barton to Foe, is depicted as an inspirational message sent from muse to reader-writer:
How I wish it were in my power to help you, Mr Foe! Closing my eyes, I gather my strength and send out a vision of the island to hang before you like a substantial body, with birds and fleas and fish of all hues and lizards basking in the sun, flicking out their black tongues, and rocks covered in barnacles, and rain drumming on the roof-fronds, and wind, unceasing wind: so that it will be there for you to draw on whenever you have need. (1986: 53)
At stake in the sex scene referred to earlier, then, is Foe's response to this message, that is, whether or not he will continue the 'movement of infinition' initiated by Susan Barton's responsible response to the other, a movement which her text attempts to sustain. If, for example, he receives 'her' message which, owing to its 'intimations' of alterity originates not from her but from an unknown, because alterior, source (see Levinao, 1981: 148-150), he, as reader, will have responded responsibly to it, that is, he will have become the 'surprised' author of a 'command' which sounds in his mouth as he obeys it. As the 234 Levinasian paradox of a message which is a response that is articulated by its receiver suggests, such an authoring would constitute not an assertion of power but an act of obedience, a possession by the other. So, although reading is a form of authoring in this Levinasian view, it is a profoundly anti- authoritarian activity. Creation, here, is the reader's responsible articulation of the saying, the 'Here I Am'. If, however, Foe receives the message but assimilates it into society's structures of knowledge and consequently ignores or elides its 'intimations' of alterity, he will have responded irresponsibly to it. Differently put, he will have checked its ethical, because 'dehiscent', movement by returning it to the order of the same. To the extent that it forecloses on its 'touches of mystery', its 'intimations' of otherness, this mode of reading transforms the literary text and is therefore also a form of creation. However, it differs from the Levinasian response in that it is a deeply author-itarian activity in which the reader possesses the text by asserting his/her autonomous power and thereby mastering it. The sexual intercourse of Foe and Susan Barton (like that of Cruso and Barton) may thus be read as a deliberation on the ability, or lack thereof, of the ethical text to disrupt the order of the same by putting into question the reader's freedom. However, as I have already demonstrated, Coetzee presents Robinson Crusoe as Foe's story of reading, his violent elision of the 'touches of mystery' in Susan Barton's narrative. Besides, as Foe progresses, it becomes further apparent that Foe does not establish an ethical relation with the other in his encounter with Susan Barton's text. So, significantly, the novel is interspersed with references to sterility, barrenness, and stillborn infants. For example, while en route to Bristol, Susan Barton discovers a dead infant, either stifled or stillborn (1986: 104-105). Given the analogy between artistic creation, sex and birth, the link between this event and Susan Barton's premonition of Foe's failure in a passage in which she surmises that the pages "issuing from his pen" are the "lifeless" "story of the island" seems to be clear (my emphasis, 1986: 151). Owing 235 to the failure of Foe to receive its 'intimations' of alterity, her story cannot be 'born'. In terms of the birth metaphor, then, Robinson Crusoe is cast as a violent stifling or a stillbirth. The two sex scenes in Foe provide an elaborate image of a literary transaction which commences with a writer-surrogate being inspired by an autonomous source outside history. The text that is thus produced -- namely Susan Barton's story of the island -- is, however, apparently unable to stimulate the reader- writer into recognising its otherness. Instead it is foreclosed upon or, in the novel's imagery, 'stifled'. As an image of irresponsible reading, the second sex scene invests Foe with a high degree of anxiety over its own reception. This anxiety foregrounds the novel's ontogenetic aspect and may be read as a self-reflexive announcement that it can only come into being if the reader responds responsibly to it. However, given the Levinasian overtones of this novel and Levinas's association of Being with the domain of the same, it is necessary to qualify the term 'ontogenetic'. It is perhaps more accurate to say that the novel can only come into being by disrupting Being, by refusing to regard ontology, the same, or history as a priori structures. Far from being a peripheral issue, this anxiety about coming into being and, indeed, the nature of Being, is central in Foe. It is clearly evident, for instance, in the substance motif. At an early stage in the novel, a Susan Barton still confident in the ability of language and narrative to represent, appeals to Foe to "return to me the substance I have lost" (1986: 51). She also refers to "the true body of Cruso" (1986: 51) and to the island as a "substantial body" (1986: 53), and states that Foe would use identical words to describe Friday (1986: 122). However, as the novel progresses and she comes to doubt the efficacy of constative description, Barton complains that Foe, in reading (and therefore rewriting) her story, is reducing her from a 'substantial body' to an insubstantial phantom:
In the beginning I thought I would tell you the story of the island and, being done with that, return to my former life. But now all my life grows to be story and 236 there is nothing of my own left to me. I thought I was myself . . . . But now I am full of doubt. Nothing is left to me but doubt. I am doubt itself. Who is speaking me? Am I a phantom too? To what order do I belong? And you: who are you? (1986: 133)
It would seem, then, that the difference between substantiality and insubstantiality is related to language and narrative. Instead of conferring substance, Foe's linguistic and narrative project divests the subject of substance. ° This passage is therefore not simply another example of the standard, obligatory postmodernist insistence on the textuality of the text. Although it does indicate that Susan Barton is text, more importantly, it points to the elision of the difference of her story of the island: rather than being recognised, its enigmas, which 'intimate' the alterity of the island, are elided in being overcoded by Foe. It is for this reason that Barton's ontological crisis becomes more severe as the novel progresses: as her story is read and colonised by being made known, she is rendered unknown and-thus becomes increasingly insubstantial. Ultimately, then, in terms of the motif of substance in Foe, the absence of the character Susan Barton in Robinson Crusoe points to the erasure of the 'true' story of the island. By means of the motif of substance, then, the novel emphasises the concrete particularity of the other and the 'singularity' of the non-conceptual experience of the subject's exposure to and responsibility for the other. It thus foregrounds the way in which this substantiality is violently effaced, denied and, in ethical terms, betrayed by the very attempt at comprehending it through the conceptual resources of language. Since the reader is ineluctably implicated in language, s/he reduces and so destroys that which is wholly other to that language's conceptual field. As s/he attempts to know the other, s/he renders it unknown. It therefore appears that the novel's ontogenetic anxiety constitutes a self-reflexive acknowledgement that, as a linguistic artefact which is received within a linguistic context, it cannot exist as an ethical performance. Indeed, such 237 an admission of inevitable failure seems to be implicit in the novel's identification of the reader of the novel with the reader in the novel, an identification which means that Foe's interpretive authoritarianism prefigures that of the actual reader. This identification is apparent in Coetzee's deliberate location of the reader as letter-reader within the structure of the text. For instance, Part I is addressed to a reader who is referred to as "you" (1986: 7, 9, 11, 14, 38) and whose identity is only revealed to be Foe at the end of this section of the novel (1986: 45). By withholding this information, Coetzee gives the reader of the text the impression that it is s/he who is being addressed directly as 'you', in this way heightening his/her awareness of the reading process and identifying him/her with the internal reader, namely Foe (cf. Splendore, 1988: 56). The deliberate nature of this retention of information is laid bare in Part IV, when the first sentence of the novel is repeated, but this time together with the salutation "Dear Mr Foe" (1986: 155). However, while at is true that this strategic identification of the actual reader with Foe intensifies the novel's ontogenetic anxiety, it does not necessarily prefigure its inevitable failure. In this respect, it is noteworthy that the internal reader's elision of the enigmatic aspects of the narrative of the island does not, despite the metaphor of childbirth, terminate the 'true' story of the island. Instead, that story fails to come into being and is therefore relegated to the liminal existence of the unknown. Thus, when Susan Barton refers to Foe's inability to give birth to the story of the island, she alludes to an ongoing process, to the "same story", "in version after version", being "stillborn every time" (1986: 151). The suggestion j_s therefore that the story exists liminally but cannot be born. What is at stake, then, is not so much a failure to conceive as a failure to be born. Perhaps, after all, Foe does receive Susan Barton's story's 'intimations' of alterity Ibut in his efforts to provide this otherness with 'substance' immediately forecloses on it. If this is so, the point of the novel's ontogenetic anxiety would seem to be that the text can 238 only be by not allowing its 'intimations' of alterity to come into Being. That is, it must prevent the reader from attempting to 'give birth'. to the other. Indeed, this is suggested by the logic of the 'known unknown', in terms of which the alterior text is not destroyed by the reader but simply relegated to a threshold existence. The corollary, here, is that the story of the island escapes Foe's interpretive authoritarianism. In attempting to 'know' it, he renders it unknown and it consequently eludes conceptualisation. Like Michael K, though, Foe does not celebrate the 'freedom in textuality' that is implicit in this escape. As its focus on the futility or, to use its metaphor of generation, the 'fruitlessness' and 'barrenness' of a liminal existence indicates, this is certainly not an end in itself. Indeed, this focus foregrounds the novel's awareness of the ineffectuality of occupying an 'autonomous place' if it is unable to affect the reader in history and thus translate into practice its rivalry of history. Moreover, its ontogenetic anxiety suggests not resignation to failure but a belief that it is possible, if not probable, that it may disrupt the reader's recuperative endeavour and thus perform the ethical. If it is to do so, though, it must forestall his/her attempt to 'know', embody, or give 'substance' to its 'intimations' of alterity. With reference to the metaphor of conception, what is required is a Levinasian 'gestation of the other in the same', but a gestation which does not culminate in a birth. The attempt to give birth to the other is always already informed by the desire to integrate it into the order of the same. In terms of the myth of the Orphic descent, Coetzee seeks not only to engage the reader in the inspirational contact with the 'other night', but also to suspend the move through which s/he endeavours to return with it to the 'light of day' and invest it with 'form, shape, and reality'. Ultimately, the question which the novel's ontogenetic anxiety self-reflexively poses is how the reader may be made to 'look away'. 239 4.3.3.1 Silence As Inspiration
Foe contains a debate on the nature of silence which suggests that this category may have the potential to call into question the spontaneous freedom of the reading subject and thus sustain the novel's irreversible movement from same to other. Although silence is ambivalently presented in Foe, it is always linked to the text's examination of relations of dominance and subservience. So, for example, in the avoidance of language on the island, silence enables Cruso and Friday to enjoy an unmediated relationship with each other and the sensible world: silence renders possible a full and mutual recognition of alterity. In the 'world of words', however, its status changes. Thus, as I have indicated, Susan Barton argues that Friday's silence renders him vulnerable to linguistic reification. His silence, she avers, is "a helpless silence" (1986: 122). Although it may be true that words "do not touch his essence", 'what he is to the world' is what she 'make[s] of him' (1986: 122). On the other hand, in her relationship with Foe -- which she earlier describes as a master-servant bond that is distinguished by his attempts to dominate her text and so her (1986: 87) -- silence empowers Barton: "It is still in my power to guide and amend. Above all, to withhold" (1986: 123). For Susan Barton, silence is consequently an instrument through which she endeavours to control her story and so resist the domination of Foe, the reader-surrogate. Seen thus, silence is a weapon in the master-servant struggle. The use of silence in this struggle forms the subject of various raises en abyme in the novel which indicate Susan Barton's wish to forestall her reader's transformation of her story by regulating its reception. For example, Foe's anecdote, drawn from his experiences as a visitor to Newgate prison, which concerns a female convict's confession to a minister before she was removed to Tyburn, functions as a raise en abyme of Susan Barton's story of the island which, in turn, is a raise en abyme of the story proper, that is, Foe. Foe concludes the story with a statement clearly intended to convey its plurality of meaning and therefore the 240 reader's freedom from the control exerted by authorial intention: "You are free to give to the story what application you will" (1986: 124). To this, Susan Barton responds with a statement which conveys her assumption that intentionality should serve as a guarantee of a text's single authoritative meaning: "If I were the Irishwoman, I should rest most uneasy in my grave knowing to what interpreter the story of my last hours has been consigned" (1986: 124). The relevance of this raise en abyme to the reception of her story by Foe is made clear by her earlier words to him: "I am not, do you see, one of those thieves or highwaymen of yours who gabble a confession and are then whipped off to Tyburn and eternal silence, leaving you to make of their stories whatever you fancy" (1986: 123). 14 The text therefore appears to contend that the status of silence in the 'world of words' differs from that on the island. Far from transcending those relations of dominance and subservience that are inscribed in language, silence in the former context seems to be irrevocably implicated in power relations. A corollary of this implication is that silence is not the opposite of language but is, in fact, presupposed by its existence (cf. Attridge, 1996: 181). Ostensibly, then, silence is situated in-the-world. The importance of this point emerges in Susan Barton's argument that, while silence renders Friday's 'essence' inviolable to language, it does not protect him from being colonised by it. In foregrounding both the possibility of freedom which may be made available by silence within language, and the limitations of this form of freedom, her contentions are a self-reflexive articulation of the various considerations raised by the novel's ontogenetic anxiety. After all, her argument points to the form of freedom that derives from the process through which that which language attempts to know (and thereby contain) escapes it, and to the apparent futility of such freedom: since it is not fully transcendental but generated by language, this kind of freedom is premised on linguistic colonisation. As such, it is unable to forestall and so radically oppose colonisation. 241 What Susan Barton has not yet understood at this stage in the novel and only later comprehends, is that although language does presuppose. silence, it cannot contain it within its structures. So, while silence cannot be excluded from language, neither can it be included. Owing to this quality of excession, it possesses the ability to 'intimate' the existence of that which has been rendered unknown by language. By implication, silence may inspire a recognition of alterity and therefore serve as a means through which the subject's autonomy, its freedom in unicity, can be put into question. This capacity of silence emerges towards the end of the novel, when Susan Barton realises that the possibility exists that Friday's 'essence' has indeed remained untouched despite the various linguistic transformations which he has undergone. Thus, in the scene in which she attempts to teach him language at Foe's instruction, she receives the following 'intimation' of alterity:
I reached out and took him by the chin and turned his face toward me. His eyelids opened. Somewhere in the deepest recesses of those black pupils was there a spark of mockery? I could not see it. But if it were there, would it not be an African spark, dark to my English eye? (1986: 146)
Clearly, Friday's silence, here, points to his exteriority, his irreducibility to conceptuality. In so doing, it functions similarly to K's silence in the interrogation scene in Michael K. I argued, in my reading of the medical officer's interrogation of K, that silence performs an analogous role to infinity in Levinas's account of the face-to- face encounter. In the above passage from Foe, this link between silence and infinity is made even clearer by the allusion to the face-to-face relation. Just as the idea of infinity preserves the exteriority of the other in the face to face, so too Friday's silence enables him to exceed Susan Barton's idea of him. Her inability to establish a relation of correlation with him because of his silence points to the production of an infinite surplus between idea and ideatum in this encounter. Coetzee's use of the trope of silence in his depiction of this relationship thus 242 'intimates' that it is one in which the idea of infinity is 'concretely produced'. The effect, on Susan Barton of this encounter with Friday's silence is developed along Levinasian lines. I have already explained that exposure to the face confronts the subject with that which it in its ontological solitude has denied and thereby checks the freedom that is enabled by that solitude. In that it is confronted with the fact that it is not alone but ontically with others, the subject is no longer able to affirm itself as a freedom by reducing to itself all that resists its power. The fact of the face eliminates the condition of possibility for the exercise of violence. If, as I have contended, her relationship with Friday is allusively depicted in terms of the face to face, it follows that Susan Barton is mistaken when she states that in being 'helpless' Friday's silence allows her to author him, to 'turn' him 'into' whatever she wishes. On the contrary, it ultimately precludes, even forbids, her from doing so by producing the idea of infinity in their relationship and thereby interrupting her ontological solitude. In that it prevents her from acting 'as though alone' by confronting her with the fact of the face, it is a silence of authority. One can detect in Susan Barton's assertion of the 'helplessness' of Friday's silence a self-reflexive elaboration in this novel of the ethical notion of an authority without power which is already strongly evident in Michael K. For Levinas, the authority of the other is premised on its weakness. The other shows its infinity by means of that which is naked, exposed and defenceless: the face. Levinas argues that "The being that expresses itself imposes itself, but does so precisely by appealing to me with its destitution and nudity -- its hunger -- without my being able to be deaf to that appeal" (1991: 200). The defencelessness of the face of the other thus prevents the subject from violating it. 15 By extrapolation, it is precisely; the 'helplessness' of Friday's silence, its sheer vulnerability which opposes, without resisting, Susan Barton's violence. Differently put, Friday derives an ethical authority, rather than 243 political force or power, from the weakness of his silence. The point here is that his weakness or 'helplessness' calls into question Barton's autonomy, that is, her freedom, oneness and self-sufficiency. It demands that she care, that she be for the other. It is now possible to understand better the Levinasian notion of the command that sounds in the mouth of the one that obeys which I discussed earlier in this chapter. Quite simply, the other has authority because the subject is prepared to listen to, obey, and 'articulate' the command before it knows what the other orders it to do. As I explained in the previous chapter, only if the subject substitutes itself for the other, can the other have this authority. By assuming responsibility 'for the other', the subject gives it the right to command. It is therefore by becoming an ethical subject and, in the process, forgoing an authority that is grounded in power, that the subject invests the other with an anti - hegemonic authority. So, when the subject is 'mastered' by the other, as for example is implied in the case of Cruso's "relation to the alterity of the island and Friday, this 'mastery' is a function of the other's ethical authority rather than its exercise of power. In such cases, 'mastery' intimates' not a Hegelian relation of power, but the asymmetry (that is, unequal nature) of the Levinasian ethical relation (see Levinas, 1985: 98). It is in the context of the concept of an authority without power that the occurrence of the burden motif shortly after Susan Barton's face-to-face encounter with Friday should be read. The motif materialises in Susan Barton's following complaint to Foe about her relationship to Friday: "'Mr Foe, I must have my freedom!' I cried. 'It is becoming more than I can bear! It is worse than the island! He is like the old man of the river!'" (1986: 147). She then recounts the story of Sinbad's encounter with the old man of the river:
There was once a fellow who took pity on an old man waiting at the riverside, and offered to carry him across. Having borne him safely through the flood,,he knelt to set him down on the other side. But the old 244 man would not leave his shoulders: no, he tightened his knees about his deliverer's neck and beat him on his flanks and, to be short, turned him into a beast of burden. He took the very food from his mouth, and would have ridden him to death had he not saved himself by a ruse. (1986: 147 - 148).
This story forms part of the burden imagery which commences in the novel's opening passage, in which Friday carries Susan Barton to Cruso's enclosure (1986: 6). As my discussion of its occurrence in Michael K shows, this imagery in Coetzee's fiction usually designates relations of power but can also 'indicate' the inegalitarian nature of the ethical relation. On the one hand, Susan Barton's application of the Sinbad story to her relationship with Friday therefore suggests that their roles have been reversed: he now occupies the role of master and she that of servant. On the other hand, though, the location of the burden image directly after the face-to-face encounter indicates that this 'mastery' is of an ethical rather than political nature. The fact that this reversal is a result not of political circumstance, but of a growth towards an ethical subjectivity, a 'movement of infinition', is further evident in the food image in the above passage which, significantly, does not occur in Edward William Lane's translation of the Sinbad story (see Poole, 1859: 52-55). In discussing its exposure to the other, Levinas argues that the self "is characterized by a passivity that cannot be taken up" and that this passivity "is an offering oneself which is not even assumed by its own generosity, an offering oneself that is a suffering, a goodness despite oneself" (1981: 54). Such passivity enables "obsession by the neighbor, an obsession despite oneself, that is, a pain" (1981: 55). He goes on to emphasise the notion of "despite oneself" by using the following imagery: "To give, to-be-for-another, despite oneself, but in interrupting the for-oneself, is to take the bread out of one's own mouth, to nourish the hunger of another with one's fasting" (1981: 56; see also 142). This 'giving' involves a radical generosity exemplified by an act of effacement in which the self is possessed by the other. It is a giving which must transcend the circle of the self, and is therefore not an act in which "the 245 ego is affirmed", but one which "tears me from myself" and extends to the other without returning (Levinas, 1981: 55). It has been my argument that Susan Barton's 'exposure' to Friday, her 'passivity', is enabled by silence which, in the novel, is accordingly depicted as a category that has the ability to suspend the 'move of Being' and prompt a 'movement of infinition'. In terms of the analogy between inspiration and impregnation, it is able to produce a gestation, which never reaches full term, of the other in the same. The possibility therefore exists that silence has the ability to inspire the reader to sustain the novel's 'dehiscent' movement. Indeed, the potentiality of such an inspiration of the reader by silence is mooted by Susan Barton's face-to-face encounter with Friday, which may be read as a mise en abyme of a possible reader-text relation. The novel, too, is characterised by silence in the form of the 'touches of mystery' in Susan Barton's story which, of course, form part of Coetzee's text. Foe's following comment on one of these 'touches of mystery' is particularly revealing in this respect: "In every story there is a silence, some sight concealed, some word unspoken, I believe" (1986: 141).
4.3.3.2 The Obedient Reader
The potential of silence to 'intimate' alterity and maintain the text's 'dehiscence' is the subject of Foe's ending, which consists of the responses of reader-figures to textual silence (1986: 153-154, 155-157). In the first of these two images of reading, an anonymous first-person narrator, who furnishes a vacant subject position to be filled by the reading subject (see, Spivak, 1990: 17), enters the room occupied by Foe, Susan Barton and Friday. This narrator then describes Foe and Susan Barton as follows: "They lie side by side in bed, not touching. The skin, dry as paper, is stretched tight over their bones" (1986: 153). The paper metaphor recurs in his/her description of Friday: "After a long while, so long I might even have been asleep, he stirs and sighs and turns on to his side. The sound his body makes is faint and dry, like leaves falling over leaves" (1986: - 246 154). From these descriptions it is clear that the encounter depicted here is a textual one. This encounter alludes to.Foe's theory of reading, namely to articulate that silence which is a feature of 'every story': "Till we have spoken the unspoken we have not come to the heart of the story" (1986: 141). The allusion is evident in Foe's following injunction, which establishes a parallel between Friday and text: "We must make Friday's silence speak, as well as the silence surrounding Friday" (my emphasis, 1986: 142) and so prefigures the anonymous first-person narrator's engagement with Friday in the image of reading at the end of the novel. Significantly in this regard, however, this narrator makes no attempt whatever to 'make Friday's silence speak'. Instead of adopting a position of dominance in relation to Friday, the stance which s/he assumes is remarkably passive, as is apparent when s/he lies down on the floor beside Friday and is not sure whether or not s/he falls asleep (1986: 154). In other words, his/her relation to the text is characterised by the same somnolence which, as I have shown, Susan Barton posits as a feature of life on the island: "How easy it would have been to prolong our slumbers farther and farther into the hours of daylight till at last, locked tight in sleep's embrace, we starved to death" (1986: 82). Equally importantly, as I have also already indicated, sleep and insomnia are states in which the subject is not self-possessed and which therefore render it receptive to being possessed by the other. Furthermore, the emphasis in this image of reading is clearly not on speech but on listening. The reader-figure's relation to Friday-as-text-as-other is one of audition: s/he puts his/her "ear to his mouth" and "lie[s] waiting" (1986: 154) and, eventually, "From his mouth, without a breath, issue the sounds of the island" (1986: 154). The references to listening here form part of a motif which is most apparent in the island section of the novel. So, for instance, Susan Barton, who initially elides the mystery of the island, is on two occasions described as attempting to shut out the sounds of the island: 247 If one circumstance above all determined me to escape, whatever the cost, it was not the loneliness nor the rudeness of the life, nor the monotony of the diet, but the wind that day after day whistled in my ears and tugged at my hair and blew sand into my eyes, till sometimes I would kneel in a corner of the but with my head in my arms and moan to myself, on and on, to hear some other sound than the beating of the wind; or later, when I had taken to bathing in the sea, would hold my breath and dip my head under the water merely to know what it was to have silence (1986: 15); I made a cap with flaps to tie over my ears; I wore this, and sometimes closed my ears with plugs too, to shut out the sound of the wind. So I became deaf, as Friday was mute; what difference did it make on an island where no one spoke? (1986: 35)
By contrast, Susan Barton's descriptions of Cruso's 'evening posture' suggest that he adopts an auditory relation to otherness. As I have pointed out, Barton is offended by the fact that he displays no interest in her history prior to her arrival on the island: "But he asked nothing, gazing out instead into the setting sun, nodding to himself as though a voice spoke privately inside him that he was listening to" (my emphasis, 1986: 13). Tellingly, too, Susan Barton's 'intimation', after sexual intercourse with Cruso, of a disjunction between the order of history in which she is situated and an alterior order, is described in terms of sleep and audition as opposed to vigilance and vision. It will be remembered that in her account of this experience, she refers to 'other voices' which 'speak in our lives' and then asks the following question: 'By what right do we close our ears to them?'. The motif of audition that is foregrounded in the first of the two allegories of reading with which the novel ends is thus directly related to allusions to the approach of the other elsewhere in the novel. Moreover, it is noteworthy that the description of the reader-figure's passivity in relation to Friday precedes the description of his/her act of listening: in terms of the approach of the other, Levinas states that "Obedience precedes any hearing of the command" (1981: 148). The saying, 'Here I Am', is the 'command' which "sound[s] In the 248 mouth of the one that obeys" (Levinas, 1981: 147). It is "the coming of the order to which I am subjected before hearing it, or which I hear in my own saying"' (Levinas, 1981: 150). The paradox, here, is that while obedience precedes audition, it is also simultaneous with it. Significantly, as Llewelyn points out, obedience and audition are etymologically related (1995: 58). It would appear, then, that the imagery and allusions in the allegory of reading in the first section of the novel's ending indicate the reader-figure's exposure to, and possession and mastery by the other. Suggestively, this possession is announced by the 'sounds of the island': an allusion to the mode of existence which is 'otherwise than Being' that is 'intimated' by Coetzee's strategy of excession. The implication is therefore clear: through 'asking nothing', that is, refusing to 'make' the text'S silence 'speak', the actual reader of the novel can receive its 'intimations' of a state that is 'otherwise than being' and, in the process, be possessed by alterity. As a result of the role played by silence in this process, this will be a non-conceptual encounter. The strategy of excession, which is a strategic use of silence, thus enables the paradox of an encounter with otherness in a text, the medium of which is language. The second image of reading continues this self-reflexive meditation on textual silence but does so by contemplating the ability of the silence of the novel to oppose, without resisting, the conceptual force which the reader brings to the encounter. Through this radically oppositional silence, it suggests, the text is able to 'put into' the reader the idea of infinity. That is, it is able, muse-like, to inspire him/her with its 'intimations' of alterity. Significantly, this allegory of reading is allusively depicted as a sexual encounter: Newman points out that the reader-as-diver "enters a sexualised sea, moving through a 'great bed' of seaweed, where something 'gropes' a leg, 'caresses' an arm" (1994: 9 - 10). The diver then descends the "trunks", goes below deck and "enter[s]" a dark "hole" (Coetzee, 1986: 156; see Newman, 1994: 10). Given the strong 249 link between inspiration and sex in Foe, it is clear that this portrayal of reading as a sexual act prefigures the possibility of the actual reader's inspiration by the other. Initially, this second image of reading seems to reaffirm the text's ontogenetic anxiety by prefiguring the reading subject's mastery of the novel. Thus, for instance, it lacks the passivity which is a characteristic of the first image. Instead of lying down beside Friday, the first-person narrator kneels over him, and there is a hint of violence in the phrase "I tug his woolly hair" (1986: 157) that cannot be detected in the previous allegory, where the gesture is softened by the inclusion of the word "lightly" (1986: 154). Moreover, Friday has a chain about his throat in the second image, a detail that is conspicuously absent from the description in the first and which suggests that the relationship here depicted is one in which the reader endeavours to master the text rather than being 'mastered' by its 'intimations' of alterity. Significantly, this second depiction of the literary encounter is set in the wreck off the island. Since the wreck -- which is shunned by Coetzee's Cruso but used by Defoe's Crusoe in his transformation of the island -- functions as a symbol of European culture and history, this difference between the two images of reading suggests that the reader-figure in the latter supplements history in his/her reading of the text. By extension, his/her relation to the novel is not characterised by a 'dehiscent' movement of infinition' but by the 'move of Being' through which s/he violently recuperates the text within the order of the same. An even more important difference between these allegories of reading, however, is the fact that in the second the reader- surrogate attempts to speak to Friday:
I tug his woolly hair, finger the chain about his throat. 'Friday,' I say, I try to say, kneeling over him, sinking hands and knees into the ooze, 'what is this ship?' (1986: 157)
This bid to articulate Friday's silence must, of course, be 250 placed in the context of the novel's emphasis on the inevitability with which language forecloses on that which is wholly other to its strategies. of adequation and, in the process, renders it unknown, divests it of substance in trying to give it 'substance'. In this regard, the failure of this attempt must be deemed pivotal:
But this is not a place of words. Each.syllable, as it comes out, is caught and filled with water and diffused. This is a place where bodies are their own signs. It is the home of Friday. (1986: 157)
In my discussion of Susan Barton's encounter with Friday, I argued that her inability to reduce him to language brings her into contact with an alterity which she has previously denied and that this 'unrelating relation' to the face forbids her from violating Friday. The fact that the depiction of the reader- surrogate's failure to relate Friday to language is succeeded by the following sentence suggests that his/her autonomy, unicity, self-sufficiency, and therefore freedom, is also called into question by this character's silence: "He turns and turns till he lies at full length, his face to my face" (1986: 157). It is the helpless face and not,force that opposes the autonomous reading subject's violence. And, in the sentences which follow and which describe Friday's response to the encounter, the efficacy of this opposition emerges:
His mouth opens. From inside him comes a slow stream, without breath, without interruption. It flows up through his body and out upon me; it passes through the cabin, through the wreck; washing the cliffs and shores of the island, it runs northward and southward to the ends of the earth. Soft and cold, dark and unending, it beats against my eyelids, against the skin of my face. (1986: 157)
The reference to the reader-figure's eyelids in this passage is noteworthy. His/her eyes are shut and the suggestion is that they have been made quiet by the text's authoritative silence. In terms of the opposition in the novel between vision and 251 audition, the moment of reading here depicted is that of the Augenblick in which "opening one's eyes is called to make way for opening one's ears" (see Llewelyn, 1995: 55). The novel thus concludes with an image of a forceful relation modulating into a face-to-face encounter as the reader-surrogate subordinates him/herself to the authority of the otherness 'intimated' by the text. Taken together, then, the two images of reading with which Foe ends suggest the authority of 'helpless silence', its ability to produce in the textual encounter the idea of the infinite which, in turn, interrupts the reader's subjectivity and inspires him/her to assume responsibility for, rather than foreclose on, the otherness which the text 'indicates'. The novel's ending thus points to the possibility of an 'unrelating' textual relation, one that is grounded not in cognition but respect for the unknowability of the other and which is thus characterised by a 'movement of infinition'. It implies that such a relation will allow the text to come into being as performance. Indeed, this implication is announced by the allusions to Wordsworth's The Prelude that are contained in the above quotation's reference to a slow, uninterrupted stream, and which are introduced in the concluding sentence of the first image of reading: "From his mouth, without breath, issue the sounds of the island" (my emphasis, 1986: 154). In The Prelude, a strong contrast exists between reason, which experiences the world detachedly through vision alone, and an immersion in the world. This is particularly evident in the Mount Snowdon episode, where an openness to the world is imaged by the poet's quietening of the external eye and listening to the invisible subterranean stream:
There I beheld the emblem of a mind That feeds upon infinity, that broods Over the dark abyss, intent to hear Its voices issuing forth to silent light In one continuous stream; a mind sustained By recognitions of transcendent power, In sense conducting to ideal form, In soul of more than mortal privilege. (1971: 14. 70-77) 252 Significantly, the word 'issue' in Coetzee's allusion to these lines adopts the metaphor of creation and generation in the original. In the context of the motif of creation in Foe, the implication of this allusion is that the 'obedient', 'auditory' reader is exposed to infinity in his/her encounter with the text. Despite the fact that this encounter is a textual, linguistic one, the strategy of silence locates the reader at a point at which the novel's apparent unitary closure or totality is exceeded, and thereby enables his/her mind to 'feed upon infinity'. And, as the lines 'broods / Over the dark abyss' suggest, the outcome of this non-conceptual exposure to infinity is 'productive', in the sense that it allows the text to perform the ethical by inspiring the reader, that is, 'putting into' him/her the idea of infinity. What is at stake here, then, is maternity in the Levinasian sense of a 'gestation of the other in the same'. Moreover, the strong emphasis on the authority of silence in this section of Foe indicates that this 'gestation' is one which results in no 'birth', that is, no attempt at conferring 'substande'. The allusion to the Judeo-Christian creation myth in these latter lines from The Prelude also relates to Coetzee's novel's desire to rival rather than supplement history and to inspire the reader to sustain this 'dehiscent' movement in his/her reception of the text. After all, the myth invokes an archetype of creatio ex nihilo and, as such, points to Coetzee's text's inspiration by the other, rather than the same. Indeed, the fact that, shortly before the ending, the text is represented as Friday's creation when he dons Foe's robes and takes up his pen, suggests that it proceeds from 'one knows not where', that is, an autonomous source, a location outside history, and that it therefore approximates creation ex nihilo. In being inspired by infinity as a result of the novel's strategy of excession, the reader, too, will rival history, totality, the same, by participating in a form of creation ex nihilo. 1 It is now necessary to examine the prospect of an irruption of the other into the same, of the ethical into the political, that is announced by the novel's self-reflexive articulation of 253 the possibility that it may be able to inspire the reader with its 'intimations' of alterity.
4.3.3.3 The Mediation of the Political by the Ethical
In Foe, it becomes increasingly clear that Coetzee's critique of reading does not constitute a call for a change in literary criticism and theory, since these forms of reading are inescapably conceptual and thus modalities of the 'move of Being'. The critique, by contrast, is related to the notion of the Augenblick. It posits a non-conceptual engagement in which the masterful eyes of 'theory' (derived from theoria, meaning 'view', 'see') make way for the 'obedient' ears of 'audition' (derived from audire, edire, meaning 'hear'). The appeal to the reader-as-theoros, that is, 'spectator', is therefore that projective intentionality be replaced by what Llewelyn, after Blanchot, calls nattentionality" (1995: 53; see also Bauman, 1993: 87-88), that is, waiting for, rather than possessing, the other. The change envisaged is thus from a state of being 'for- oneself' to being 'for-the-other'. Should this occur, the reading subject will have become an ethical subject. In this possibility lies the potential for a destabilisation of history in the act of reading. The text's inspiration of the reader with alterity marks the irruption of the infinity of the ethical into the totality of the political. Indeed, the interruption of the autonomous power of the reading subject by the traces of alterity in the text constitutes an interruption of the order of the same. Having been surprised and inspired by the other, the reader's relations to others in the political will henceforth he conducted in the trace of the transcendental. At least, this is what is implied by Susan Barton's return to England from the island which, more so than K's return to society from the Karoo 'farm' in Michael K, self-reflexively points to the possible impact on the reader's relations in his/her society of the ethical relation to otherness that s/he may form during the literary encounter. The fact that not only Susan Barton herself changes but also her relationships with others are 254 transformed after her exposure to the alterity of the island, indicates quite clearly that relations in the political are affected by the ethical relation. Since Foe's aesthetic of surprise is self-reflexively constructed along Levjnasian lines, it follows that this thinker's views on the entry of the ethical into the political might prove useful in examining Coetzee's exploration of the political implications of a responsible response by the reader to the text. For Levinas, ethics leads to politics. Quite simply, the ethical relation is not "clandestine" (see Levinas, 1991: 213), it does not occur in private, outside the public domain. Thus, as he puts it, "The third party looks at me in the eyes of the Other" and "the epiphany of the face qua face opens humanity" (1991: 213). Differently put, the relation to the other is also a relation to the community, to humanity as a whole. The introduction of the third party alters the unequal status of the terms which form the ethical relation. For both Coetzee and Levinas this is a relation in which the other possesses and, by virtue of its ethical authority, 'masters' the subject. But, since the third party implies a communal bond, a relation among peers, its presence corrects the imbalance in the relation of the other to the subject. The 'servant'/'master' relation is therefore also and at•the same time an egalitarian one, that is, a relation to the third party. A further implication here, as Levinas points out, is that the presence of the third party imposes a limit on the movement of infinition that results from the subject's effacement of self in its relation to the other: "The third party introduces a contradiction in the saying whose signification before the other until then went in one direction" (1981: 157). He goes on to explain that the third party "is of itself the limit of responsibility and the birth of the question: What do I have to do with justice?" (1981: 157). According to Levinas, "Justice is necessary, that is, comparison, coexistence, contemporaneousne iss, assembling, order, thematization, the visibility of faces, and thus intentionality and the intellect, the intelligibility of a system, and thence also a copresence on an equal footing as 255 before a court of justice" (1981: 157). As Critchley elaborates, "In justice I am no longer myself in relation to an Other for whom I am infinitely responsible, but I can feel myself to be an other like the others -- that is, one of a community that can demand its rights regardless of its duties" (1992: 230-231). The issue which now arises is whether or not the entry of the ethical, or saying, into the political, or said, inevitably compromises the former. After all, the other is repelled by the process of adequation concomitant on 'comparison', 'contemporaneousness', 'assembling', 'order', 'thematization', 'intentionality', and "measure", "knowing", and "consciousness" (Levinas, 1981: 158). Levinas's reference to the fact that the presence of the third party seemingly "introduces a contradiction in the saying" indicates that he is conscious of this problem (1981:.157). This awareness is further evident in the following passage:
There is weighing, thought, objectification, and thus a decree in which my anarchic relationship with illeity is betrayed, but in which it is conveyed before us. There is betrayal of my anarchic relation with illeity, but also a new relationship with it: it is only thanks to God that, as a subject incomparable with the other, I am approached as an other by the others, that is, 'for myself.' Thanks to God' I am another for the others. God is not involved as an alleged interlocutor: the reciprocal relationship binds me to the other man in the trace of transcendence, in illeity. The passing of God, of whom I can speak only by reference to this aid or this grace, is precisely the reverting of the incomparable subject into a member of society. (1981: 158)
In order to ascertain whether or not the ethical is 'betrayed' by the political, it is necessary to examine the nature of the political order which it enters. When Levinas avers that 'the reciprocal relationship binds me to the other man in the trace of transcendence, in illeity' he means, as Critchley explains, that the community "is a commonality among equals which is at the same time based on the inegalitarian moment of the ethical relation" (1992: 227). It would seem, then, that by virtue of the 'coexistence' of the other with the third party, 256 community is invested with a "double structure" (Critchley, 1992: 227) and, in consequence, the (equal) relations among members of the community are constantly interrupted by the (unequal) ethical relation. This 'double structure' underpins Levinas's conception of justice. Thus, for instance, he is at pains to point out that "justice is not a legality regulating human masses, from which a technique of social equilibrium is drawn, harmonizing antagonistic forces", and that it "is impossible without the one that renders it finding himself in proximity [to the other]" (1981: 159). The outcome of this "doubl[ing of] all discourse" (Levinas, 1991: 213) which proceeds from society's 'double structure' would therefore be an ethical community, that is, a community which is grounded in the irreducibility of the responsible relation of same to other and which resists totality by eliciting the constant interruptions of infinity. By implication, as Critchley points out, the return of the saying to the order of the said is not a return to the "pure" said, but to an order "which maintains within itself the trace of ethical Saying" (1992: 232). This is a crucial point to bear in mind when discussing the apparent 'contradiction' and 'betrayal' involved in this return. Instead of being 'betrayed' by the said, the saying changes or, to use Critchley's term which alludes to the Levinasian conception of justice, "justifies" the said (1992: 232). It should also be added that this return does not constitute a dialectical integration of the ethical and the political which culminates in a purified said. To return to the image of child-bearing with which both Levinas and Coetzee depict the entry of the ethical into the political: the other is never 'born' into or 'embodied' in the order of the same. It is a 'gestation' in the same; a 'residence' which is not a presence. Accordingly, the 'justification' of the said is the result not of a synthesis, but of a tension between the ethical and the political, a tension which is produced by the community's 'double structure'. It is through the ability of this double structure to maintain as a constant presence, rather than resolve, the tension between the poles of saying and said that infinity is able to incessantly interrupt totality. The 'new' relationship 257 which comes into being with the advent of the third party is thus the product of tension and dissonance and not synthesis. In no way does it reduce the ethical relationship. A further important point that is implicit in this discussion is that Levinas's transcendental ethics is premised on a recognition of political implication. This is apparent in the very notion of a 'double structure'. As his argument that the third party is present in the eyes of the other indicates, the ethical implies the political. (It must be noted, though, that the ethical moment, because of society's 'double structure', is "diachronous" to and therefore not coincidental with the political moment [see Levinas, 1981: 9 - 11]). However, as is further evident from the concept of a 'double structure', Levinas refuses to accept the immanence of the political and holds instead that it can be interrupted: indeed, the notion of totality contradicts itself in that it presupposes infinity. If placed in the context of Levinas's thought on the entry of the ethical into the political, it becomes clear that Coetzee's Foe positS the possibility of an ethical community. Should, for example, the actual reader's response to the text follow the course of the reader-figure(s) in the ending, s/he will contrive an ethical relation with the alterity that the text 'intimates'. And, given the fact that the third party looks at the subject 'in the eyes of the Other', the reader's proximity to the other will inevitably interrupt his/her relations in the order of the political. His/her egalitarian relations with his/her peers will be informed by his/her unequal relation to the other. It therefore follows that, in attempting to inspire the reader to establish a responsible relation with it, the text as ethical performance contrives to install a 'double structure' in the reader's community and thereby inspire him/her to restructure the order of the political. Significantly, this modus operandus asserts the novel's autonomy, its rivalry of history. Instead of attempting to represent, and so supplement, history in the present, the novel adopts a futural perspective on history. Through its relation with the reader, it attempts to 'justify' the political order: 258 that is, it conceives of an ethical community which, because of its 'double structure', is informed by the same tension between implication and transcendence as it is itself, a tension which generates a constant interruption of the political by the ethical, the same by the other, the said by the saying. By implication, the ethical community projected by the text is grounded in an irreducible ethical relation, rather than the specular recognition of self in object, and therefore recognises difference. It follows that Foe's rejection of history as an a priori structure signals its desire to effect the mediation of the political by the ethical.
4.4 Conclusion
I have argued that, owing to Coetzee's use of strategies of excession and infinition, the novel Foe evinces a movement away from the order of the same to the infinite and, accordingly, occupies an 'autonomous place'. Indeed, these strategies constitute a refusal to master alterity conceptually, and thus enable a radically anti-hegemonic mode of authorship, an aesthetic which stands open to infinity and therefore admits the possibility of surprise. Owing to this 'movement of infinition', the novel constitutes a responsible response to alterity, a novelistic articulation of the Levinasian 'Here I Am'. By extension, it performs the ethical relation, that is, it is an instance of the non-conceptual event of 'saying with inspiration'. I have also shown that the novel attempts to come into being as an ethical performance in its relation with the reader. In this regard, the text's ethical endeavour is deeply political. Indeed, the ethical moment in which the reader experiences the event of being in relation to the other implies a political moment. Through attempting to inspire the reader with its 'intimations' of the ethical, the novel strives to secure the mediation of the political by the ethical. In other words, it asserts the primacy and priority of ethics over the political. It is for this reason that it refuses to posit history as an a 259 priori structure by representing the violent relational modes which form the political status quo. Through its.radically a posteriori stance relative to'history, it seeks not to endorse but to interrupt and 'justify' the political. The political nature of Coetzee's ethical endeavour invests the novel with a strongly futural aspect. Since the ethical community which this text projects is premised on the constant interruption of the domain of the same by virtue bf a 'double structure', it can never be a fait accompli (see Critchley, 1992: 236-241). In other words, the notion of an interrupted community which emerges from the novel is implicitly anti-teleological. The openness attendant on the strategy of interruption renders impossible the closure of consummation. By implication, then, this is not an utopian novel. Further implicit in my discussion of its attempt to 'justify' the political is the idea that Foe does not constitute a retreat from history. Indeed, the insistence in this novel on the priority of ethics over the political inscribes in it a unique relation to history. Among the issues which I examine in the remaining chapter of this thesis, is precisely this emphasis on the primacy of ethics: I show that this emphasis, together with the mediatory relation to the political which it prescribes for the text, is continued and self-reflexively elaborated upon in Age of Iron and The Master of Petersburg. Finally, it might be assumed that, since it treats with more confidence the transcendental possibility of an ethical subjectivity than does either "Narrative" or Michael K, Foe resolves that tension between implication and transcendence which I have described as being an enduring feature of all Coetzee's novels. However, just as the 'double structure' of the community which Foe projects presupposes rather than negates the totalising drive of the political, so too are its strategies of excession and infinition premised on implication in the political. Moreover, the conception of transcendence which emerges from tHis text is not grounded in a. metaphysical realm of essences but instead in the inevitability of excession: namely, the conviction that while the other will always be elided by the exclusionary 260 structures of language and culture, the fact of excession implies that the political is not immanent and therefore that the other can never be totally excluded: Once again, then, the autonomy in question here is an interstitial form of autonomy-in-implication -- a function of Coetzee's strategic negotiation of the tension between implication and transcendence. 261 4.5 Notes
An important difference,'though, is that, unlike Jacobus Coetzee, Susan Barton's political stance may loosely be defined as 'liberal humanist'. In other words, she is yet another of the reluctant colonisers that pervade Coetzee's novels (see Watson, 1996: 22). From my examination of the change which the medical officer undergoes in Michael K, it should be clear that the danger of applying Memmi's argument on 'the coloniser who refuses' too narrowly to Coetzee's fiction is that it leads to an emphasis on the subject's situatedness in-the-world. As my discussion in this chapter proceeds, it will become clear that, while Susan Barton initially (and reluctantly) colonises otherness, she eventually assumes responsibility for it. The routine nature of this assumption needs to be emphasised. See also Hanjo Beressem (1988: 228-230), Post (1989: 146), Graham Huggan (1990: 18), Susan Naramore Maher (1991: 35-36), Sheila Roberts (1991: 88), Macaskill and Colleran (1992: 436), and Chris Bongie (1993: 273). An exception in this regard is Victoria Carchidi, who points out that, despite the "harsh environment [of the island], Cruso and Friday live in harmony . . . " (1993: 81). Unfortunately, she does not elaborate on this claim. The exact nature of this change will be treated in more detail later in this chapter. In the section of this chapter which deals with Cruso and Friday's construction of the walls and terraces on the island, it will become clear that Crusoe does engage in aesthetic activity. I shall demonstrate, though, that this form of authoring is anti-hegemonic. Dovey relates this passage to the "futile wish" of South African academics to "avoid contamination from European or North American centres of learning, and to speak one's 'own' language", and sees this desire as "the natural response of the periphery to the centre" (1990: 5). A corollary of the novel's allusion to the Levinasian 'movement of infinition' is that the relation between centre and periphery is not as fixed and determinate as Dovey would have it. In the previous chapter, I indicated that the imagery which Coetzee uses to designate relational modes shifts its signification because these modes are themselves fluid in his fiction. This relativity in signification is again apparent in the imagery of walls and terraces which signifies the relation of the human subject to space. In an entirely different context, Edith W. Clowes argues as follows with regard to the representation of Cruso's labour in Foe: "In Coetzee's work the wasteland remains a wasteland 262 and cannot become the locus for a mythic transfiguration" (1995: 153). Clowes, however, sees the terraces as a symbol of "the fruitlessness of the whole colonial venture" (1995: 152; cf. Newman 1995: 96). In Bongie's Derridian reading of this attempt, Susan Barton is portrayed as a confused adherent of the metaphysics of presence (1993: 272; see also Begam, 1994: 120-122). Bongie does not seem to notice this character's pronounced scepticism regarding an adequate relationship between sign and referent in the cited passage. For a position closer to mine, see Macaskill and Colleran who argue that "What Susan comes to recognize is that she herself can no longer afford to ignore the extent to which representation carries out ideological work in determining the production of meaning" (1992: 445). Clearly, Coetzee here plays on the grounding of Robinson Crusoe in castaway accounts and on its ambivalent presentation and reception in terms of its status as fiction -- he suggests implicitly that the intentional nature of consciousness and its operation in the colonial context cannot be separated from the emergence of the novel. This term does not mean that the other is 'distant'. Thus Levinas also refers to the other as the "neighbor" and to the "strangeness of the neighbor" (1981: 91). He states quite clearly that "the neighbor" may be "an old acquaintance, an old friend, an old lover, long caught up in the fabric of my social relations" (1981: 86). Moreover, while referring to the "singularity" of the subject's responsibility for the other, Levinas alludes to Cain's evasion of his responsibility for Abel in the following way: "The neighbor is a brother" (1981: 87; see also 153). In Levinas, the categories of sleep, insomnia, wakefulness and consciousness are more complex and flexible than I have suggested thus far in this study. For instance, the subject is only really awakened by the interruption of its intending consciousness by the other. By implication, then, consciousness is, in fact, a state of sleep. I shall deal with these ambivalences and ambiguities in my discussion of Age of Iron in the next chapter. Apart from referring to sleep in the above passage, Susan Barton later comments that the "danger of island life" was "the danger of abiding sleep" (1986: 82). She makes this remark in a discussion of danger in which she compares "sleep" to "cannibals". Significantly, the implication of this comparison is that sleep is more 'dangerous' than 1 'cannibals' because it exposes the subject to the other ini the absence of consciousness. On the other hand, the 'cannibal' is 'intentionally assumed'. It is a result of intentionality, a construct through which the intending subject 'knows' the other and thus shields itself from its 263 dreadful alterity. Accordingly, the 'cannibal' cannot surprise the subject. It is also interesting that, as Susan Barton points out in this passage, Cruso's "first and only piece of furniture . . . was a bed" (1986: 82). In terms of my discussion, this detail signifies an openness to alterity. Conversely, Defoe's Crusoe's first technological feat is the stockade with which he protects himself from 'cannibals'.
Jolly relates the motif of substance to the motif of cannibalism in the novel. She argues that narrative is unable
to deal with bodies as bodies, rather than as figures of speech. The treatment of the body as a figure of speech violates the body by translating it into a term in a representative scheme. This denies the substantiality of the body and effectively effaces the body from the text . . . The only cannibals in Foe are its narrator-characters, and the only cannibalism is that which they inflict upon their subjects in the process of turning them into stories. (1996: 8)
Another anecdote which functions as a mise en abyme and which makes use of the child-story analogy follows directly after this one (see 1986: 124-126).
I find it significant that, in an interview with Tony Morphet in which he refers specifically' to Foe, Coetzee suggests that power should be questioned not from "a position of power", but from "the position of weakness" (Coetzee, 1987: 462). 264
Chapter 5: The Aesthetic of Love in Age of Iron and The Master of Petersburg
5.1 Introduction 265 5.2 The Priority of Ethics 267 5.3 Supplementing History 278 5.4 Transcending History 286 5.4.1 Age of Iron: Self 0 287 5.4.1.1 Creation as Recovery 298 5.4.2 Age of Iron: Text 300 5.4.2.1 Reading as Transcendence 304 5.4.3 Master: Self 317 5.4.4 Master: Text 329 5.4.4.1 Reading as Corruption 338 5.5 The Tension Between Implication and Transcendence in Age of Iron and Master 340 5.6 Conclusion 347 5.7 Notes 349 265
CHAPTER 5
The Aesthetic of Love in Age of Iron and The Master of Petersburg'
5.1 Introduction
In this chapter, I argue that, while neither Age of Iron nor The Master of Petersburg enters into an overt debate with Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, both of these novels are as concerned with the politics of representation as is Coetzee's earlier fiction. 2 I demonstrate that this concern is most strongly evident in the tension which they inscribe between an aesthetic of supplementarity and one of rivalry, and that the meta- representational argument for an autonomous mode of writing that is implicit in this tension is directly related to the Levinasian aesthetic which I have traced in Coetzee's fiction throughout this thesis. One of my aims in this chapter is, therefore, to show how the self-reflexive articulation of this aesthetic is developed and extended in the later two novels. To this end, I devote considerable attention to the way in which the texts postulate the primacy of ethics and how, by means of this Levinasian argument, they suggest a negotiation of 'being-in-the-world'. Owing to this postulation, the novels inscribe an opposition between the ethical and the political that is readily discernible in their extensive use of imagery of deformation which serves to point not only to the priority of the ethical relation, but also to its perversion by history. This imagery has not previously been examined in readings of either of the novels. By suggesting the a priori status of ethics, these two texts raise a number of problems that are related to those which I have discussed in Coetzee's earlier fiction and which resurface in this chapter. The first of these is whether or not it is possible to recover the 'primordial' ethical relation in history -- an issue that is apparent in the emphasis on the filial bond in both novels. The meta-representational corollary of this 266 problem is, once again, whether the novel can respond responsibly to the other when it is itself implicated in history (an aspect, of course, of the texts' argument on supplementarity and rivalry). Such self-reflexive questioning raises the further issue of the writer's responsibility for the reader, a concern, I argue, that is dealt with far more comprehensively in these two novels than in Coetzee's previous fiction. Both texts engage with these matters by way of the notion of love, or a self-substituting desire for the other. On the one hand, Age of Iron responds by constructing itself as, in Levinasian terms, an 'ethical work' which takes the form of the writer's generous substitution of self for the reader (see Levinas, 1987d: 91) -- my argument thus will be that, rather than represent and so foreclose on the other, this novel seeks to perform the ethical in its relation with the reader. On the other hand, Master responds to these issues by addressing the implications of a writer's failure to perform the ethical by substituting him/herself for the reader in his/her writing. So, while the former novel is about the development of an ability to love, the latter is ostensibly about a failure to love. It should be clear from the above that, although I consider the way in which the issue of love is dealt with in the depiction of relations among the characters in the two novels, my principal concern is with its meta-representational implications -- in particular, its connotation of an ethical mode of writing. However, I also show that love connotes the possibility of a mode of reading which is based on proximity rather than intellection. In this regard, I argue that, in being constructed as ethical performatives and thereby seeking to establish a responsible relationship with the reader, both Age of Iron and Master, like Foe, hope to achieve the mediation of the political by the ethical. Although this concern is self-reflexively articulated in Foe, it is treated more comprehensively in Age of Iron. This follows since, in the latter novel, the focus is more on love than on surprise: that is, on the effect of the event of the surprise encounter with the infinity of the other. 267 Finally, my discussion of these concerns is again based throughout on their self-conscious thematisation in the texts themselves. In the case of Age of Iron, for instance, Jean- Philippe Wade is simply mistaken to contend that it is a 'realist' novel which is "free of any metafictional 'laying bare' of its devices" (1994: 212). 3 If anything, it is arguably Coetzee's most metafictional text to date. It is certainly his most sustained self-reflexive articulation of the Levinasian aesthetic which informs his writing.
5.2 The Priority of Ethics
In Age of Iron, the protagonist's implication in culture is articulated more directly than is that of the protagonists in the other novels. Thus Mrs Curren explains her situatedness in South African culture to Vercueil in the following terms:
A crime was committed long ago. . . . So long ago that I was born into it. It is part of my inheritance. It is part of me, I am part of it. . . . Though it was not a crime I asked to be committed, it was committed in my name. I raged at times against the men who did the dirty work . . . but I accepted too that, in a sense, they lived inside me. (1990: 149-150)
As in the earlier novels, Coetzee's contention here seems to be that the world constructs the subject, that knowledge of the world cannot be separated from being in the world. Earlier, in a companion passage, Mrs Curren makes the same point when, after telling Vercueil that she wants "to rage against the men who have created these times", she concludes that "It is childish . . . to point fingers and blame others", and that "Power is power, after all. It invades. That is its nature. It invades one's life" (1990: 107). Memmi's extension of the Heideggerian notion of the 'thrownness' of the subject's 'being-in-the-world' to the colonial situation, with his argument that colonial relations . exist before the "arrival or birth" of the reluctant coloniser, appears to underpin Mrs Curren's perception of her situatedness 268 in South African society (Memmi, 1965: 38-39; see too Watson, 1996: 22ff.). In this regard she is no different from the medical officer in Michael K and Susan Barton in Foe. And, again similarly to the aforementioned protagonists in these earlier novels, this character's impression of implication in-the-world, together with her development towards an ethical subjectivity, invests the text with a strong tension between implication and transcendence. However, in Age of Iron the evocation of the aporetic situation in which the reluctant coloniser finds him/herself differs somewhat from those depicted in the earlier novels. Even as Mrs Curren articulates her sense of situatedness, for instance, Coetzee subtly suggests that the 'world', in the sense of culture and history, is not an a priori structure, but is preceded by a mode of existence which is 'otherwise than being' and which the text quite pointedly refuses to attempt to define. Thus Mrs Curren, after her visit to Guguletu, reflects as follows:
But in our dead sleep we may at least be visited by intimations. I have intimations older than any memory, unshakeable, that once upon a time I was alive. Was alive and then was stolen from life. From the cradle a theft took place: a child was taken and a doll left in its place to be nursed and reared, and that doll is what I call I. A doll? A doll's life? Is that what I have lived? Is it given to a doll to conceive such a thought? Or does the thought come and go as another intimation, a flash of lightning, a piercing of the fog by the lance of an angel's intellect? (1990: 101)
What is 'intimated', here, both to Mrs Curren and to the reader, is the existence of a mode of subjectivity which is not structured within the terms of history. As in Foe, then, this novel makes the Levinasian point that ethics comes before being (see, for example, Levinas, 1991: 304). However, this point receives fuller treatment in Age of Iron. For this reason, it is necessary to study Levinas's contention in this regard in more detail. To begin with, he understands ontology to be, very specifically, "theory as comprehension of beings" (1991: 42), and argues that it is characterised by the 269 reduction of the other to the same. He describes "comprehension" as "the logos of being" -- "a way of knowing the known being such that its alterity with regard to the knowing being vanishes" (1991: 42). Critchley is correct in stating that, in this particular understanding, "Epistemology is an ontology in so far as the object of cognition becomes an object for consciousness, an object that can be internalised by consciousness or grasped through an adequate representation" (1991: 5). Indeed, according to Levinas, ontology has dominated the western philosophical tradition. His assertion that ethics is "first philosophy" is clearly an attempt to counter this tradition, and is grounded in the conviction that the 'unrelating' ethical relation, which I have discussed in detail in this thesis, possesses a more fundamental structure than that of knowledge and comprehension (1991: 304) . (For example, he argues that sensibility is "purely qualitative", that its "representational content" dissolves into its "affective content", and that it is a form of sensation that encompasses "an enjoyment 'anterior' to the crystallization of consciousness, I and non-I, into subject and object" (1991: 187-188).) As I have repeatedly demonstrated in my reading of the Levinasian aesthetic of Coetzee's fiction, the very attempt at comprehending the irreducible infinity of the other generates an 'unrelating relation' which is radically 'anterior' to comprehension. And it is as a direct result of its 'anteriority' that Levinas argues that ethics cannot be understood as it traditionally has been, that is, as an epiphenomenon of an ontological or epistemological process: instead of being regarded as a secondary component of philosophical thinking which is based on an ontology, it should by contrast be seen as 'first philosophy'. The fundamental structure of the ethical relation means that it is not the "'superstructure' but the foundation of all knowledge" (Peperzak, 1993: 65). It is "an irreducible structure upon which all other structures rest" (Levinas, 1991: 79). Being and 'being-in-the-world' are, by implication, not all- encompassing. More radically still, the_ ethical bond to alterity, because of its primacy, forms an a priori structure: it 270 is an experience in the purest sense which, as Alphonso Lingis puts it, is "an a priori to all experience, on the 'hither side' even of the a prioris that make experience possible" (1981: xxii; see also xx). Owing to its primacy, the ethical is able to disrupt ontology (and politics). Thus, in a debate held at the Centre Sevres in Paris, Levinas describes ethics as follows: "For me, the term ethics always signifies the fact of the encounter, of the relation of myself with the Other: a scission of Being in the encounter -- without coincidence!" (qtd in Critchley, 1992: 17). As I have emphasised, this disruption is enabled by the calling into question of the subject, which is the site of the 'transmutation' of alterity into sameness: the encounter with the face of the other is an encounter with infinity, with that which disrupts ontology and serves as the condition of impossibility for totality. "If totality can not be constituted", says Levinas, "it is because Infinity does not permit itself to be integrated. It is not the insufficiency of the I that prevents totalization, but the Infinity of the Other" (1991: 80). From this discussion, it should be clear that it is misleading simply to see the ethical relation as anterior in the chronological sense of having preceded the ontological relation (cf. Bauman, 1993: 71-73). Due to the fact that the other contains the idea of infinity, it is irreducible and always exceeds ontological conceptuality. So, even when elided by the attempt to 'know' it, it is still 'there' by virtue of excession but, as the very attempt at comprehension indicates, cannot be reduced to an object for consciousness and so rendered present and representable. Being 'there' without being present means that, temporally speaking, the other does not exist at or in the same time as the subject. Same and other, said and saying, do not belong to the same temporal order. In Levinas's argument, the correlation of the saying and the said is 'diachronic' -- that is, it cannot be brought together into synchronic time (see 1981: 9 - 11). If the saying and the said occurred at the same ' time, then the ethical responsibility of the saying would be discounted by its betrayal in the said. The saying can therefore only temporalise itself excessively as diachrony. Differently 271 put, the subject's encounter with the other is, by definition, an 'uprootedness' from history. This is a point which is, of course, made by Coetzee in, for example, his depictions of Jacobus Coetzee's encounter with the Namaquas, the medical officer's encounter with Michael K, and Susan Barton's encounter with the island 'community'. If the 'primary' status of the ethical is seen to reside in the excessive and diachronous dimension of the subject's exposure to the other, it follows that the ethical relation can never be succeeded by the ontological relation: the former 'precedes', and yet is not succeeded by, the latter. The apparent contradiction here dissolves when this postulation is considered in the context of the diachronicity of the saying. To posit a 'precedence' which cannot be succeeded could only be considered contradictory if it were assumed that the saying and the said occupy the same synchronic temporality. Furthermore, if Levinas's assertion concerning the 'priority' of ethics is understood in terms of the temporality of the "transcending diachrony" that characterises the ethical relation (Levinas, 1981: 9), it also follows that this assertion connotes not a pre-ontological but a non- ontological condition. In the words of Bauman, the 'anteriority' of the ethical is "instituted not by the absence of ontology, but by its demotion and dethroning" (1993: 72). The 'before' of ethics implies a transcendence of ontological comprehension and therefore a non-ontological relation. The citation referred to earlier which describes Mrs Curren's 'intimations' of a 'prior' subjectivity that may, perhaps, be described as a state which is 'otherwise than being', thus seems to suggest the 'anteriority' of the ethical relation.' Her 'intimations' are strongly reminiscent of that "affliction of the present of consciousness with a past that it cannot render present [or] represent" which is a temporal characteristic of the relationship with alterity, and which Lingis describes in the above terms in his introduction to Otherwise than Being (1981: 1 xx). Moreover, the 'priority' of the subjectivity here 'intimated' also explains and justifies the imagery of metamorphosis that occurs not only in this passage but elsewhere 272 in the novel. This imagery connotes history's elision and transformation of those 'instants' in which time temporalises itself as diachrony in the passive 'attentionality' of the subject's encounter with the other -- 'instants' that are described by Levinas as "a lapse of time that does not return, a diachrony refractory to all synchronization" (1981: 9). The 'past' signalled by the metamorphosis imagery in Age of Iron is therefore one that cannot be reduced "to the immanence in which it is signalled" (Levinas, 1981: 10). It is a 'past' that cannot be returned "as a present nor a representation" and which is "without reference to some present it would have 'modified'" (Levinas, 1981: 10). As such, the diachronous 'past' "can not have been an origin" (Levinas, 1981: 10). If seen in the context of the 'before' of ethics, this imagery suggests the inevitable transformation of the diachronously 'past' ethical relation by the synchronous movement of history. Indeed, the image of the doll in the citation discussed above indicates not only the artificiality of Mrs Curren's identity, but also that it has been constructed and then imposed on her by the state and its discourses. This is made even clearer in the following passage, in which Mrs Curren describes the effect of the state's media, its systems of representation, and its "message":
Television. Why do I watch it? The parade of politicians every evening. . . . What absorbs them is power and the stupor of power. Eating and talking, munching lives, belching. Slow, heavy-bellied talk. Sitting in a circle, debating ponderously, issuing decrees like hammer-blows: death, death, death. Untroubled by the stench. Heavy eyelids, piggish eyes, shrewd with the shrewdness of generations of peasants. . . . And their message stupidly unchanging, stupidly forever the same. Their feat, after years of etymological meditation on the word, to have raised stupidity to a virtue. To stupefy: to deprive of feeling; to benumb, deaden; to stun with amazement. Stupor: insensibility, apathy, torpor of mind. StupA.d: dulled in the faculties, indifferent, destitute of thought or feeling. From stupere to be stunned, astounded. A gradient from stupid to stunned to astonished, to be turned to stone. The message: that the message never changes. A message that turns people 273 to stone. We watch as birds watch snakes, fascinated by what is about to devour us. . . . A thanatophany showing us our death. Viva la"muerte! their cry, their threat. Death to the young. Death to life. Boars that devour their offspring. The Boar War. I say to myself that I am watching not the lie but the space behind the lie where the truth ought to be. But is it true? (1990: 25-26)
The passage makes the point that ideology's interpellation of individuals as subjects constitutes a metamorphosis of sorts, a transformation of an 'anterior' condition. So, although depicted as an author in the novel, the state and its ideology are not an auctor in the sense of an originator: they transform and 'deform' (by attempting to invest that which is other with the forms of history) rather than form. It is for this reason that the above passage alludes to the story of the Gorgons in Greek mythology, a myth according to which Medusa had such a frightful aspect that whoever looked upon her was turned to stone (see Graves, 1960, I: 127-129). This story serves as an analogue for the 'de-forming', rather than formative or originative influence of the state. In fact, the equation is made even more apparent in the passage by the pun on 'boer', an Afrikaner nationalist, and 'boar': the Gorgons were represented with heads entwined with snakes and with huge tusks like those of a boar (see Grimal, 1986: 174). Elsewhere in the novel, a set of allusions to the myth of Circe further stresses the 'deforming' influence of the state's discourses of power. While in Guguletu, Mrs Curren describes the effect on Mr Thabane of the state-instigated violence she has witnessed:
His look had grown uglier. No doubt I grow uglier too by the day. Metamorphosis, that thickens our speech, dulls our feelings, turns us into beasts. Where on these shores does the herb grow that will preserve us from it? (1990: 95)
Like Circe's spell which metamorphosed Odysseus's men into swine, the state's power structures 'deform' and brutalise whoever is exposed to them. It is for this reason that, throughout the 274 novel, South Africans are described as ugly -- as, for example, when Mrs Curren exclaims "How ugly we are growing, from being unable to think well of ourselves!" (1990: 121). In the novel, the metaphor of sickness and disease also signifies this 'deformation': thus Mrs Curren describes her cancer as a message "sent by Saturn", that is, Cronus -- the archetypal Political Father (1990: 59). From my discussion of the ethical 'before' it is clear that these allusions indicate not only the individual's implication in history, but also, and as a result of this implication, the occlusion and transformation of . a non-ontological structure of selfhood. Since this structure which is 'otherwise than being' is also one of radical 'anteriority', it is depicted in the novel as being more 'real' than history. Mrs Curren's references, in the passage which deals with her response to state television, to the 'truth' behind the 'lie', and later to the 'men who have created these times', portray history as a derivation and 'deformation' of this 'prior' state of subjectivity. In terms of ethical 'precedence', history is a construct, a fabrication of the apartheid discourse manufactured by the white government in the "House of Lies" (1990: 128), Mrs Curren's telling term for the House of Parliament in Cape Town. In Master, there is a similar emphasis on the distortion of a 'primordial' interhuman relationship by the structures of power in the 'world'. Set in Petersburg in late 1869, this novel focuses on the murder of a young student, Ivanov, by a group of nihilists led by Sergei Nechaev. The killing of Ivanov by this group is the historical event which inspired Fyodor Dostoevsky to write The Devils (sometimes entitled The Possessed), a novel which explores the political implications of the ethical problem posed in Crime and Punishment, that is the indifference of the amoral superman, in the absence of a spiritual essence, to issues of good and evil (see Carr, 1932: 169). Dostoevsky's literary response to revolutionary nihilism revolves around the biblical .story of the Gadarene swine, that is, the tale in Mark 5: 2 - 20 of the unclean devils which, having been exorcised from a 'sick' or 'mad' man by Christ, enter a herd of swine which then rushes 275 headlong down a precipice into the sea. This story serves as a structural metaphor through which Dostoevsky explores and ultimately condemns political' nihilism in The Devils. As the following comparisons drawn by one of the nihilists in the novel indicate, the story generates a series of analogies which suggest that Russia is a 'sick' or 'mad' man possessed by devils, and that the swine which the devils enter upon being exorcised are the revolutionaries:
These devils who go out of the sick man and enter the swine -- those are all the sores, all the poisonous exhalations, all the impurities, all the big and little devils, that have accumulated in our great and beloved invalid, in our Russia, for centuries, for centuries! . . . But a great idea and a great Will shield her from on high, as with that madman possessed of the devils, and all those devils, all those impurities, all those abominations that were festering on the surface -- all of them will themselves ask to enter into swine. . . . They are we . . . and we shall cast ourselves down, the raving and the possessed, from the cliff into the sea and shall all be drowned, and serves us right, for that is all we are good for. (Dostoevsky, 1971: 647 - 648)
It is misguided to conclude, as David Coad does, that Coetzee shares Dostoevsky's conviction "that the [nihilists] are possessed by the devil, pervaded by evil"(1994: 379). However, he does employ the parallels created by The Devils, as emerges when his character Dostoevsky argues that it is futile to imprison revolutionaries such as Sergei Nechaev since nihilism is a "spirit" for which the individual is merely a "vehicle", a "host" (1994: 44). Significantly, though, he applies the story of the Gadarene swine not only to Russia and the phenomenon of revolutionary nihilism, but also to Dostoevsky himself. Thus, in Master, the character Dostoevsky is depicted as a 'sick man' possessed by devils. The outward sign of this affliction is his epilepsy, a sickness which the novel relates to demon possession. Indeed, the character speculates that not "seizure" but "possession" would be "the right word" to describe the fits from which he suffers (1994: 213). Coetzee's reworking of the story of the Gadarene swine in 276 Master clearly comments on the implication of the subject in the power dynamics or 'sickness' of the political context in which it is located. Through applying the story to Dostoevsky, Coetzee suggests that it is not only the nihilists who have been 'contaminated' by the 'sickness' of Russia: Dostoevsky is a part of Russia and is therefore also 'sick'. It is noteworthy, for example, that as the novel develops, the boundaries between this character and his social context are increasingly blurred. Thus he refers to epilepsy as "the emblematic sickness of the age" (1994: 235) and earlier, without realising the implications of his words, equates himself with Russia, "I am required to live . . a Russian life: a life inside Russia, or with Russia inside me" (1994: 221). Coetzee thus implies that Dostoevsky is situated in Russian history. He suggests, by implication, that the historical Dostoevsky is as 'possessed' by history as the nihilists whom he accuses of 'possession' in The Devils, an accusation which betrays Dostoevsky's assumption that he himself had somehow transcended history. Moreover, as in Age of Iron, the emphasis in this later novel seems to be not simply on the individual's implication in history, but on the fact that the subjectivity thus constituted occludes and distorts another, 'anterior' structure of subjectivity. The repeated visions which the Dostoevsky figure has of trying to communicate with his son underwater self- consciously 'intimate' this alterior mode of subjectivity (1994: 17 - 18, 56, 110 - 111). Since the stress in these visions falls on trying to reconstitute the filial bond, on forging a relationship which, as is hinted at by the emphasis on Pavel's face, is based on the ontic togetherness of the Levinasian face-to-face encounter rather than on ontological separation, the suggestion is that the form of subjectivity thus 'intimated' is underpinned by an ethical structure. Besides, the fact that these visions are set underwater, that is, in a setting which, like that with which Foe ends, is 'not a place of words', further suggests the possibility that the encounters which they depict are immediate, that they may be characterised by that proximity which, according to Levinas, is a prerequisite for the ethical relation. 277 It follows from Coetzee's endeavour to 'indicate' the existence of a 'primordial', ethical subjectivity in Master that, as in Age of Iron, the imagery of sickness in this novel is also imagery of metamorphosis, that it is used to depict the 'deformation' of an 'anterior' relational mode, which generates an ethical subjectivity, by the structures of power in the world. Both novels thus allude to a radically 'anterior' relational mode which has been distorted by the subject's implication in-the- world. It is therefore apposite that the portrayals in both novels of relations in history self-consciously suggest that they have developed during 'ages of iron'. Although this mythological paradigm for history is less evident in Master than it is in Age of Iron, where it is announced and therefore foregrounded by the title, the Dostoevsky character's 'intimations' of a reconstituted filial relationship may also be placed in the context of Hesiod's description, in Works and Days, of the complete ethical breakdown which characterises "the age of the iron race", an age which brings about a total transformation of the original paradisal state which prevailed during the age of the golden race:
Then the father will quarrel with his sons, the sons with their father, guest will quarrel with host, comrade will quarrel with comrade, nor will one's own brother be dear as in earlier times. Men will dishonor their parents as soon as they are old, finding them worthy of blame and cruelly railing against them, hard-hearted children without any thought of divine retribution, not repaying their parents grown old the price of their rearing. Might will be justice; and one will destroy the other's city. (1983: 103-104)
More pointedly, the relations which distinguish the social settings in both Age of Iron and Master may best be described in Coetzee's words in his "Jerusalem Prize Acceptance Speech", that is, as "elementary relations of contestation, domination, and subjugation" (1992d: 98). As such, they are markedly similar to those portrayed in the novels which I have discussed in the 278 preceding chapters of this thesis. For instance, the foregrounding of the first-person singular pronoun in Mrs Curren's phrase, "I, a white" . and in her reference to whites as a "herd of sheep" that bleats "in a thousand different inflections: 'I!"I!"I'!" (1990: 72) indicates that the relations of contestation which define South African society and history are a function of the autonomous subject's ceaseless and futile struggle for recognition. That is, they are a product of the autonomous subject's structural dependence on the violation of alterity for its sense of self-sufficiency, oneness and freedom, and they are grounded in the monadological, self- and world- constituting state of the 'I am I' rather than the ethical state of the 'I am for the other'. Significantly, in Master, the Dostoevsky-figure at one point "thinks despairingly" to himself, "I am I . . . manacled to myself till the day I die" (1994: 82). In the previous chapters of this study, I showed that Coetzee is at pains to thematise the impact on writing of the subject's entrapment in the 'I am I'. Age of Iron and Master are no different in this regard. In the next section of this chapter, I shall discuss Coetzee's treatment of the 'worldliness' of the literary text in these two novels.
5.3 Supplementing History
If the subject is implicated in and 'deformed' by the state's discourses and structures of power, it follows that its artistic productions are similarly implicated. It is therefore not surprising that, after referring to the failure in South Africa of 'love', that is, of a relation of togetherness and connection rather than separation and division, Coetzee in his "Jerusalem Prize Acceptance Speech" observes that "The deformed and stunted relations between human beings that were created under colonialism and exacerbated under what is loosely called apartheid have their psychic representation in a deformed and I stunted inner life" (1992d: 97-98). He then goes on to consider the implications for literary production of this 'deformation' of human relations: 279 All expressions of that inner life, no matter how intense, no matter how pierced with exultation or despair, suffer from the same stuntedness and deformity. I make this observation with due deliberation, and in the fullest awareness that it applies to myself and my own writing as much as to anyone else. South African literature is a literature in bondage, as it reveals in even its highest moments, shot through as they are with feelings of homelessness and yearnings for a nameless liberation. It is a less than fully human literature, unnaturally preoccupied with power and the torsions of power, unable to move from elementary relations of contestation, domination, and subjugation to the vast and complex human world that lies beyond them. It is exactly the kind of literature you would expect people to write from a prison. (1992d: 98)
Although Master is set in nineteenth-century Russia, the bearing of these remarks on its depiction of Dostoevsky's writing soon becomes apparent. As I have shown, Coetzee makes use of the story of the Gadarene swine to suggest that Dostoevsky is as implicated in Russian society as the nihilists whom he condemns in The Devils. Moreover, Coetzee also applies the tale of the Gadarene swine to this writer's literary response to nihilism, as emerges when the Dostoevsky-figure in his novel is described as shaking "his head as if to rid it of a plague of devils" (1994: 125). Later, Anna Sergeyevna tells him that he is "in the grip of something quite beyond [her]" (1994: 231) and while engaging in sexual intercourse with him, at the onset of orgasm, she utters the word "devil" (1994: 230). In this scene the sexual act is pointedly depicted not only as an inspiration -- which is the case with the sex scenes in Foe -- but also as an exorcism: on the one hand, Anna Sergeyevna occupies the role of muse; on the other hand, she is aligned with Jesus Christ in the tale of the Gadarene swine and is thus portrayed as an exorcist. Since the novel ends shortly afterwards with the Dostoevsky character commencing work on The Devils, the implication is therefore that this text is also to be equated with the exorcised spirits in the story of the Gadarene swine. This identity, which Coetzee foregrounds by playing on the title of the historical Dostoevsky's novel, suggests that, like 280 the writer, the text is not immune to the power dynamics or 'sickness' of the social context in which it has been produced. The Devils, which seeks to criticise the revolutionaries from a transcendental position, is not detached from but a part of 'all the poisonous exhalations, all the big and little devils, that have accumulated in . . . Russia'. The inevitable 'deformity' of the artistic expressions of a monadological subjectivity is also dealt with in Age of Iron. Indeed, this argument is implicit in Mrs Curren's response to the 'intimation' which she receives that her identity has been constructed by the state's discourses: "I want to sell myself, redeem myself, but am full of confusion about how to do it" (1990: 107). A little earlier, she articulates her desire to "rise above the times" (1990: 107) and, elsewhere, says that she does "not want to die in the state [she is] in, in a state of ugliness" (1990: 124). The novel's meta-representational debate is related to this desire to redeem self. Indeed, as I proceed it will become clear that there is a very close analogy, even identification, between self and text in this novel. Hence it is necessary to examine Mrs Curren's attempts at self-redemption very carefully. Initially, she considers committing suicide by self-immolation outside the House of Parliament. The choice of the 'House of Lies' as the locus for this gesture of protest indicates that her proposed suicide is a means of destroying the false self created for her by the state authorities and of regaining a 'primordial' identity. For Mrs Curren, suicide is not therefore an act of self-annihilation, but one of self- redemption. In this regard, it is significant that, once she starts planning this act of self-affirmation, she finds that "some faint glow of pride began to return to [her body]" and that "The crab had stopped gnawing" (1990: 106). As the following citation indicates, the crab image here is related to the earlier use of the doll metaphor to signify the fictionality of her state-imposed sense of self: "Were I to be opened up they would find me hollow as a doll, a doll with a crab sitting inside licking its lips" (1990: 103). Since the word 'cancer' in Latin means 'crab', the suggestion here is that Mrs Curren's illness 281 should be construed as a metaphor for the erosion of an 'anterior' selfhood by the state's structures of power. Although Mrs Curren does'not ultimately execute her plan of self-immolation, she has the following dream about it:
I have had a dream of Florence, a dream or vision. In the dream I see her striding again down Government Avenue holding Hope by the hand and carrying Beauty on her back. All three of them wear masks. I am there too, with a crowd of people of all kinds and conditions gathered around me. The air is festive. I am to provide a show. But Florence does not stop to watch. Gaze fixed ahead, she passes as if through a congregation of wraiths. The eyes of her mask are like eyes in pictures from the ancient Mediterranean: large, oval, with the pupil in the centre: the almond eyes of a goddess. I stand in the middle of the avenue opposite the Parliament buildings, circled by people, doing my tricks with fire. Over me tower great oaks. But my mind is not on my tricks. I am intent on Florence. Her dark coat, her dull dress have fallen away. In a white slip ruffled by the wind, her feet bare, her head bare, her right breast bare, she strides past, the one child, masked, naked, trotting quickly beside her, the other stretching an arm out over her shoulder, pointing. Who is this goddess who comes in a vision with uncovered breast cutting the air? It is Aphrodite, but not smile-loving Aphrodite, patroness of pleasures: an older figure, a figure of urgency, of cries in the dark, short and sharp, of blood and earth, emerging for an instant, showing herself, passing. From the goddess comes no call, no signal. Her eye is open and is blank. She sees and does not see. Burning, doing my show, I stand transfixed. The flames flowing from me are blue as ice. I feel no pain. It is a vision from last night's dream-time but also from outside time. Forever the goddess is passing, forever, caught in a posture of surprise and regret, I do not follow. Though I peer and peer into the vortex from which the visions come, the wake of the goddess and her god-children remains empty, the woman who should follow behind not there, the woman with serpents of flame in her hair who beats her arms and cries and dances. (my emphasis, 1990: 163 - 164)
The dream suggests the impossibility of redeeming self by means of this strategy. In it, Mrs Curren occupies a contestatory 282 position relative both to Florence, who is described as a goddess of war, and to the South African parliament. Consequently, the relational mode signified by the 'show' is inscribed in and derives from history. The 'show' thus assumes history as an a priori structure. By implication, then, Mrs Curren's attempt to recover an 'anterior' selfhood is inspired by history. An important signal in this regard is Coetzee's use of the motif of madness in his description of Mrs Curren's intention. My discussion of Master has shown that not only 'sickness' but also 'madness' may signify possession by history in Coetzee's writing. It is thus noteworthy that, in an earlier projection of the act of self-immolation, Mrs Curren speculates that the deed may be thought to have been inspired by madness (1990: 105). And, in her visit to Guguletu, where she witnesses the violent confrontation between black township dwellers and the state, she reflects as follows: "All of us running mad, possessed by devils. When madness climbs the throne, who in the land escapes contagion?" (1990: 97). The suggestion is therefore quite clear: namely, that having been inspired by history, this attempt at self-redemption would not recover a 'prior' structure of subjectivity but simply endorse, or supplement, the extant one. Instead of distancing her from and protesting against the "unnatural structures of power that define the South African state" (Coetzee, 1992d: 97), it would merely confirm Mrs Curren's implication within these structures. This point is hinted at by the fact that her projected act of protest is one in which she exults in unmitigated violence (see also 1990: 128): "To endure violence in enthusiasm and ecstasy and delirium", says Levinas, "is to be possessed" (1990a: 9). The meta-representational debate on the 'worldliness' of the literary text that is implicit in the novel's description of Mrs Curren's desire for self-redemption emerges in the above description of her intended act of self-immolation as a 'show'. Earlier she describes it as a "public show[]" (1990: 105), and likens her role in this 'show' to that of "a juggler, a clown, an .entertainer" (1990: 129). This motif, together with a pointed allusion to Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter and the 283 suggestion that, like a literary work, the 'show' will be open to multiple interpretations (1990: 105), indicates that the content of the dream should be seen as an image of literary production. If the "spectacle" (1990: 129) is seen as such, then the relation, in the passage quoted above, between it and, on the one hand, the mythological tableau representing Aphrodite in her aspect as a goddess of war and, on the other hand, the House of Parliament, should be construed as a figure for the relation of fiction to the political history of South Africa during the 1980s (cf. Macaskill & Colleran, 1992a: 72). The point of this metafictional meditation emerges in the description of Mrs Curren as being unable to pursue Florence and her children in her dream because she 'stands transfixed', and is 'caught in a posture of surprise and regret'. This description is remarkably similar to the earlier depiction of the impact on the individual of the Gorgon-like state's 'message' through the medium of television. It will be remembered that this 'message' is described as being able to 'stupefy', to 'stun with amazement' or, punningly, to 'astonish' the individual, that is, to turn him/her to stone. The parallels here indicate that South African literature has been 'deformed' by the state's structures of power. However, it is not simply the victim of the state's 'deforming' drive. The portrayal of Mrs Curren as 'the woman with serpents of flame in her hair' also associates her with the Gorgon Medusa (see Graves, 1960, I: 127). The suggestion is therefore that, having been 'deformed' by the state's structures of power, this literature, in its turn, proceeds to 'deform' by reproducing the power relations installed by these structures. In so doing, it is both victim and perpetrator and thus, despite its avowed intention to counter the discourse of the state, actually propagates this discourse by affirming and thus conserving the stunted relations which it creates. Consequently, in terms of Coetzee's distinction between fiction-writing which rivals and that which supplements history, it falls into the latter category. It is because of South African literature's role in supplementing history that its analogue in Age of Iron, Mrs 284 Curren's 'show', is likened to trivial forms of entertainment such as juggling. The fact that Florence ignores the show indicates that-South African literature fails to successfully intervene in history. Its protest is not heeded because, ironically, it unintentionally promotes rather than impedes the violence of history. A further implication of Coetzee's critique, here, is that the novel should intervene in history but that it should do so by changing rather than reproducing its 'deformed' relations. This suggestion of an alternative role which literature might fulfil is evident in the ambiguity which inheres in the description of Mrs Curren as 'the woman with serpents of flame in her hair'. Apart from associating her with the Gorgons, this depiction also alludes to the Furies who, in Greek mythology, were represented as crones with snakes for hair (Graves, 1960, I: 122, 37-38). According to Graves, it was the Furies' responsibility to hunt down perpetrators of crimes against society and, in particular, to protect the filial bond:
Their task is to hear complaints brought by mortals against the insolence of the young to the aged, of children to parents, of hosts to guests, and of householders or city councils to suppliants -- and to punish such crimes by hounding the culprits relentlessly, without rest or pause, from city to city and from country to country. (Graves, 1960, I: 122; see also 37-38)
It is in the context of this myth that the description of Mrs Curren as 'the woman who should follow behind' Florence and her daughters must be read. The inference to be drawn from these allusions to the Furies is that, while the social role of the novel in the South African 'age of iron' should be to protect human relations, to preserve the filial bond, it cannot perform this function because it supplements the 'deformed' relations which generate history. Like Mrs Curren, it 'stands transfixed', 'caught in a posture of surprise and regret'. 285 In "Into the Dark Chamber", Coetzee discusses the problem which faces the South African writer in representing violence in general and torture in particular. He makes the point that "there is something tawdry about following the state" in producing representations of its violence, by "making its vile mysteries the occasion of fantasy" (1992e: 364). The obvious alternative to "looking on in horrified fascination as the blows fall" is, of course, "turning one's eyes away" (1992e: 368). However, as Coetzee argues, this is not really a choice but a dilemma. The actual problem, he contends, is "how to treat something that, in truth, because it is offered like the Gorgon's head to terrorize the populace and paralyze resistance, deserves to be ignored" (1992e: 366). In order to negotiate this problem, the writer must work out how "not to allow himself to be impaled on the dilemma proposed by the state, namely, either to ignore its obscenities or else to produce representations of them" (1992e: 364). S/he must recognise the "true challenge", that is, "how not to play the game by the rules of the state, how to establish one's own authority, how to imagine torture and death on one's own terms" (1992e: 364). It is, of course, precisely this representational problem of treating 'something' which 'like the Gorgon's head' paralyze[s] resistance' that is staged in Age of Iron in Mrs Curren's attempt to redeem herself. The scene which describes her visit to Guguletu self-reflexively presents the problem of representing violence which Coetzee addresses in "Into the Dark Chamber". On the one hand, the fact that she baulks at what she sees and expresses her desire to "go home" (1990: 90) articulates the possibility of ignoring the violence. On the other hand, Mr Thabane's question "What sort of crime is it that you see? What is its name?" (my emphasis, 1990: 90), asserts the apparently indubitable imperative to represent the violence. However, the seemingly fixed choice articulated by these two possible responses is complicated by Mrs Curren's response to Mr Thabane's question: "These are terrible sights . . . . They are to be condemned. But I cannot denounce them in other people's words.. I must find my own words, from myself. Otherwise it is not the 286 truth. . . . To speak of this . . you would need the tongue of a god" (1990: 91). Despite this apparent rejection of the state-imposed dilemma in terms of aesthetic responses to violence, Mrs Curren goes on to devise her 'show' which, as my discussion has demonstrated, has been inspired by history and, significantly, may be described in Coetzee's words for literature which represents the state's violence, that is, as a case of 'looking on in horrified fascination as the blows fall'. The fact that she remains trapped in this dilemma initially appears to indicate the inevitability of the subject's and, by extension, text's implication in the culture of which it is a part. However, it should be remembered that Mrs Curren, significantly, does not execute this plan of self-immolation.
5.4 Transcending History
In this section, I shall show that the strategy of self- redemption upon which Mrs Curren ultimately decides, namely letter-writing, indicates the possibility of a mode of fiction- writing which refuses to supplement history and, instead, 'operates in terms of its own procedures', thereby establishing for itself an autonomy of sorts. From this position of autonomy it is able to rival history without being 'paralysed' by it. I have already commented on the close relationship between self and text in Age of Iron. Self, however, is not simply a metaphor for text. This will become apparent in my argument that the transcendence of the literary text is a function of the writing self's creation of an ethical subjectivity. I shall contend that Mrs Curren develops towards an ethical subjectivity in the course of the novel, and then demonstrate that this character's letter -- an image of the novel itself -- is part of the responsible response to the other through which this development is accomplished. The letter, and by implication the novel itself, is the gift of self, the very act of substituting self for the other. My argument will trace the corollary here: namely that the novel can transcend the 'I am I' by becoming the 287 writing subject's performance of generosity and care. The implications for the reading subject of this view of the novel as a vehicle for the performance'of self-substitution, that is, for the restructuring of subjectivity, will also be considered. Finally, I shall compare the argument for transcendence in Age of Iron with that in Master. In the process, I shall show that, despite the latter novel's treatment of a failure to love, it is about the possibility of love and therefore of transcendence.
5.4.1 Age of Iron: Self
The possibility of the self transcending its implication in history by recovering, through creation, an 'anterior' mode of subjectivity is raised by Coetzee's use of childbirth imagery in the opening pages of Age of Iron. In this text, as in Foe and Michael K, images of conception, pregnancy and birth are related to aesthetic activity. The childbirth motif appears in Mrs Curren's description of her reaction to the news of her terminal condition: "The news was not good, but it was mine, for me, mine only, not to be refused. It was for me to take in my arms and fold to my chest and take home, without headshaking, without tears" (1990: 3). This unusual portrayal is then followed by her strange description of her first encounter with Vercueil as "this other annunciation" (1990: 4), the childbirth metaphor again being evident here in the allusion to the biblical Annunciation. In addition, the metaphor occurs together with an allusion to the approach of the other. It is noteworthy in this regard that Vercueil is described as homeless, a stranger, and an uninvited visitor -- terms which, as I have shown, are frequently used by Levinas in his discussions of the approach of the other. The occurrence of childbirth imagery in the description of these two events points to the juxtaposition in the opening passage of the novel of two wholly different sources of inspiration. On the one hand, as the text's alignment of cancer with the ugliness, disease and 'deformity' of the South African 'age of iron' indicates, the first source is history. On the 288 other hand, the invocation of Levinas's absolute other 'intimates' that, despite the subject's possession by history, there is an alternative source of inspiration which exceeds history and ontology. That it is inspiration that is at stake here, emerges in Mrs Curren's description of Vercueil as a "visitor, visiting himself on me" (1990: 3). In the previous chapter I demonstrated that Coetzee, in Foe, uses the term 'visit' in his portrayal of Susan Barton-as-muse's relationship with Foe-as-author. The similar use of the term in a related context in Age of Iron appears to suggest that Vercueil inspires Mrs Curren to recreate herself by adopting an attitude of responsibility for the other, and that this inspiration stems from a quarter which transcends history. The key to the effect which Vercueil has on Mrs Curren emerges in their early encounters. For instance, Mrs Curren expresses concern at the fact that Vercueil does not deserve her 'charity' -- here understood as that which she is only conditionally prepared to give him (1990: 19). She also quite pointedly indicates that she does not possess the kind of generosity which seems to be required in her dealings with Vercueil:
The worst of the smell comes from his shoes and feet. He needs socks. He needs shoes. He needs a bath. He needs a bath every day; he needs clean underwear; he needs a bed, he needs a roof over his head, he needs three meals a day, he needs money in the bank. Too much to give: too much for someone who longs, if the truth be told, to creep into her own mother's lap and be comforted. (my emphasis, 1990: 17)
This issue of generosity clearly extends to her relationship with Florence, Bheki and 'John'. Thus, after she has assisted 'John' following the police attack, she complains to Florence and Bheki in terms which once again raise the question of care and generosity:
'Why did you leave me alone to look after him? Why didn't you stay and help?' I sounded querulous, certainly, but for once was I 289 not in the right? 'I do not want to be involved with the police,' said Florence. 'That is not the question. You leave me alone to take care of your son's friend. Why must I be the one to take care of him? He is nothing to me.' (my emphasis, 1990: 60)
The question which Mrs Curren asks here is a variant of Cain's response to God's question concerning Abel: 'Am I my brother's keeper?'. In commenting on Cain's response, Levinas makes the point that it is grounded in the lack of ethics: "Cain's response is sincere. Only the ethical is absent there; the answer is solely from ontology; I am I and he is he. We are beings ontologically separate" (qtd in Bauman, 1993: 70). For Levinas, Cain's question can only have meaning "if one has already supposed that the ego is concerned only with itself, is only a concern for itself" (1981: 117). Mrs Curren's question thus points to the lack of an ethical structure which informs interpersonal intercourse in South African society and, by extension, to the presence of a mode of subjectivity structured not in terms of notions of togetherness such as generosity and care, but in terms of concern for and with self. According to Levinas, in a context determined by such a conception or, as he puts it, "hypothesis" of subjectivity, it is simply inconceivable "that the absolute outside-of-me, the other, would concern me" (1981: 117). Indeed, in a society in which relationships are structured in terms of the subject-object dualism installed by intentional consciousness, the subject will violently foreclose on rather than recognise otherness. This point is made clear in Age of Iron in an early scene in which Mrs Curren puts Vercueil to work in her overgrown garden. Her reason for doing this is because she feels that it is necessary . to impose conditions on her 'generosity' (1990: 19). In the process she attempts, despite her protestations to the contrary, to transform Vercueil into a gardener (1990: 19). It is important to note that this process of transformation is causatively linked to the absence of true generosity in the following passage: 290 At five o' clock I paid him. 'I know you are not a gardener,' I said, 'and I don't want to turn you into what you are not. But we can't proceed on a basis of charity.' (1990: 19)
Mrs Curren's earlier admission that she is incapable of giving unconditionally -- incapable, that is, of care, caritas, charity (see 1990: 20) -- together with the suggestive use of the connective 'But' in this passage, means that this statement amounts to a confession that she is unable not to transform Vercueil because she cannot care enough. It would seem, then, that the ontological solitude which the 'I am I' arrives at through intending the world in such a way that it reflects back on it those cognitive categories which it has imposed, precludes the possibility of a radical generosity, that is, a generosity conceived of in terms of 'being-for-the-other', a movement without return from same to other. Somewhat incongruously, though, Mrs Curren later compares herself to Circe and Vercueil to Odysseus (1990: 77). In the myth, Circe fails to transform Odysseus into a pig because Hermes has provided him with an antidote to her spell in the form of the herb moly (see Graves, 1960, II: 358-359). The suggestion is therefore that Mrs Curren is eventually unable to transform Vercueil. In fact, it gradually becomes clear that it is Vercueil who inspires her to reconstitute and so transform herself. Significantly, the novel does not treat this process of inspiration and creation directly: it is only ever dealt with allusively by way of mythological, literary and philosophical analogues. It is also noteworthy that these analogues not only 'intimate' a dimension of the relationship between Vercueil and Mrs Curren which the novel refuses to attempt to describe, but also draw attention to this refusal. The question which is posed by the novel's withholding of detail is why it should be that Mrs Curren is unable to violate Vercueil by transforming him or, in terms of the mythological parallel with Circe and Odysseus, what the nature is of Vercueil's, moly. Although the text does not deal with this question directly, it 'intimates' a possible answer to it by way 291 of an intertextual literary reference to Leo Tolstoy's "What Men Live By" (1906), a story about a poor shoemaker who provides sustenance to a naked stranger who, it finally transpires, is an angel (Coetzee, 1990: 13). The numerous allusions to Vercueil's angelic status in Age of Iron indicate that this 'intertextual citation' may have some bearing on the characterisation of Vercueil. As I ha'Ve already indicated, Mrs Curren refers to Vercueil's arrival as 'this other annunciation', a reference which alludes to the Annunciation of the angel Gabriel to the Virgin Mary. Furthermore, shortly before referring to the Tolstoy story, Mrs Curren remarks of Vercueil: "Not an angel, certainly" (1990: 12) and later elaborates as follows:
What chance is there, if I take a walk down Mill Street, of finding my own angel to bring home and succour? None, I think. Perhaps in the countryside there are still one or two sitting against milestones in the heat of the sun, dozing, waiting for what chance will bring. Perhaps in the squatter camps. But not in Mill Street, not in the suburbs. The suburbs, deserted by the angels. When a ragged stranger comes knocking ac the door he is never anything but a derelict, an alcoholic, a lost soul. Yet how, in our hearts, we long for these sedate homes of ours to tremble, as in the story, with angelic chanting! (1990: 13)
Towards the end of the novel, she wonders when wings will sprout from Vercueil's shoulders, and tells him that when she first saw him she thought that he might be an angel who had come to "show" her "the way" (1990: 146, 153). These allusions point to a certain homology between Coetzee's novel and Tolstoy's story. In "What Men Live By", the purpose of the angel's visit is to learn what it is that sustains humankind. His encounter with the shoemaker teaches him that "though it seems to men that they live by care for themselves, in truth it is love alone by which they live" (1906: 81). On the one hand, the allusions to this short story in Coetzee's novel point to the difference between Tolstoy's shoemaker's selfless generosity and Mrs Curren's grudging charity in their respective encounters with a 'stranger'. Initially, at least, the encounter between Mrs Curren and Vercueil indicates the former's seeming 292 inability to love and care unconditionally. To use Coetzee's phrase in his "Jerusalem Prize Acceptance Speech", what is at issue here is a 'failure of love'. Unlike the house in Tolstoy's story, hers is, by her own admission, "without love" (1990: 13). On the other hand, this contrast may function proleptically by suggesting that Mrs Curren will ultimately learn what it is that 'men live by'. If this is so, Coetzee's novel will have modified the teacher-student relationship in Tolstoy's story by suggesting that it is Mrs Curren who learns from the stranger and not simply the stranger who learns from her. 5 In the process, the novel's allusive substructure will have 'intimated' that which Coetzee refuses to represent in his treatment of Mrs Curren's relationship with Vercueil: it will have 'intimated', in other words, why it is that Mrs Curren does not, or cannot, transform Vercueil. There is a suggestion that, in the course of the novel, Mrs Curren develops the capacity to love. This development, which Attridge has convincingly argued for (1994: 73-75; see also Dovey, 1994: 360-362), becomes evident upon a consideration of the particular sense in which the word 'love' is used in the text. The fact that Mrs Curren's initial inability to love is depicted in terms of the ontological solitude of the 'I am I' suggests that love is conceived of in terms of Levinas's ethical relation, that is, the 'dehiscent' movement of generosity from same to other in terms of which the I substitutes itself for the other and thereby restructures itself as an ethical subject, an 'I am for the other'. Such responsibility for the other, Attridge points out (1994: 70), is implicit in Mrs Curren's following words: "Letting go of myself, letting go of you, letting go of a house still alive with memories: a hard task, but I am learning" (1990: 119). This reference to a 'letting go' of self is, of course, strongly reminiscent of the emphasis on 'yielding' and 'losing' self in Michael K and Foe. As in the earlier novels, it connotes the responsibility for the other that comes with an effacement of self before the other. This is made further apparent by the fact that, while she repeatedly indicates that she does not like 'John' (1990: 71-72), Mrs Curren comes to 293 understand that she must love him. Being 'dehiscent', the movement of love is not toward self but other:
I must love, first of all, the unlovable. I must love, for instance, this child. Not bright little Bheki, but this one. He is here for a reason. He is part of my salvation. I must love him. But I do not love him. Nor do I want to love him enough to love him despite myself. It is because I do not with a full enough heart want to be otherwise that I am still wandering in a fog. I cannot find it in my heart to love, to want to love, to want to want to love. (my emphasis, 1990: 125)
It will be remembered that, in the previous chapter, I briefly discussed Levinas's description of the subject's 'passivity' in relation to the other as 'offering oneself' despite oneself'. In the context of this description, it is clear that the phrase 'despite myself' in the above passage indicates that Mrs Curren has begun to appreciate that love involves not sharing but a self-effacement that derives from taking responsibility for the other. She has begun to appreciate, that is, that she is her 'brother's keeper', that hers is a 'singular' responsibility. She and she alone is the one who must 'take care' of 'John', who is therefore not 'nothing' but everything to her. Where Mrs Curren's earlier complaint about having had to 'take care' of John points to the absence of the ethical, her reflections in this later passage indicate its emergence -- they suggest that she is in the process of transcending the 'I am I'. The implication of my discussion thus far is that Mrs Curren, in assuming responsibility for 'John', creates herself as an ethical subject. She forsakes the 'I am I' for the 'I am for'. The generous deed of substituting self for the other which informs this act of self-invention is suggested by Mrs Curren's self-effacing communion with the dead 'John' in the following passage which, I argued in the introduction to this thesis, alludes to Orpheus's 'looking away' in his encounter with Eurydice in the 'other night' of the Underworld: 294 In the dead of night . . . I take up this letter to tell you one more thing about that 'John,' that sullen boy I never took to. I want to tell you that, despite my dislike of him, he is with me more clearly, more piercingly than Bheki has ever been. He is with me or I am with him: him or the trace of him. It is the middle of the night but it is the grey of his last morning too. I am here in my bed but I am there in Florence's room too, with its one window and one door and no other way out. Outside the door men are waiting, crouched like hunters, to present the boy with his death. In his lap he holds the pistol that, for this interval, keeps the hunters at bay, that was his and Bheki's great secret, that was going to make men of them; and beside him I stand or hover . . . Within this interval there is no time, though his heart beats time. I am here in my room in the night but I am also with him, all the time, as I am with you across the seas, hovering. (1990: 159-160)
Clearly, the subject here is defined not by care of self but by love for the other. 6 And it is because of the 'movement of infinition' which is a function of such love that Mrs Curren is unable, Circe-like, to 'metamorphose' the other. For Coetzee, then, as I have indicated, it is just such an irreversible movement from same to other that is able to interrupt the apparently inevitable process through which, according to Blanchot, the 'detour' of 'looking away' becomes the 'gaze' with which the other's alterity is 'transmuted' into the same. While my discussion has indicated that Mrs Curren is finally unable to transform the other because she learns to love and that Vercueil plays an important role in stimulating this development, it has not satisfactorily shown why it is that he should have such an effect on her. Part of the problem here is, as I have already suggested, that Vercueil's inspiration of Mrs Curren is never constatively represented. Nonetheless, an answer to this question may be inferred from the novel's elaborate system of allusions to Levinas's views on the approach of the other. As in Michael K, there is in Age of Iron a strong emphasis on the concept of choice. Early in the novel, Mrs Curren states that she did not "choose" Vercueil, he chose her (1990: 11). Later she says to him, "You arrived. It's like having a child. You can't choose the child. It just arrives" (1990: 65). And, 295 towards the end of the novel, she asks him why he chose her (1990: 169). In addition, the notion of the uninvited visitor forms part of the motif of choice in this novel: Mrs Curren describes Vercueil as "A man who came without being invited" (1990: 165) and, when she returns from her visit to 'John' in the hospital, he follows her into her house "Uninvited" (1990: 74). In the previous chapters of this study, I have demonstrated that the theme of choice in Coetzee's fiction is directly related to the refractoriness of the absolute other to consciousness. According to Levinas, the approach of the other "is a modality not of a knowing, but of an obsession" (1981: 87). Only by being surprised and possessed by the other, can the subject be affected "without the source of the affection becoming a theme of representation" (Levinas, 1981: 101). In terms of Coetzee's metaphor of the uninvited visitor in Age of Iron, to invite or welcome the other would be to 'choose' it and therefore violate its alterity. Significantly, Levinas uses the same metaphor when he states that "To take hold of oneself for a present of welcome is already to take one's distance, and miss the neighbor" (1981: 88). The other, he argues, must not "knock" (1981: 102), but "assign[' me before I designate him" (1981: 87). Tellingly, in Levinas's writing the image of the uninvited visitor, which is here used to denote the overwhelming of the subject's consciousness, frequently modulates into imagery of burglary. When Levinas says that the "assignation" of 'me' by the other "is entry into me by burglary" (1981: 145), the implicit analogy is between the subject and a house. However, in the following passage it becomes clear that the latent image of the house also designates the integument or uncrossable boundary formed by consciousness between the subject and exteriority: 7 "The inscription of the order in the for-the-other of obedience is an anarchic being affected, which slips into me 'like a thief' through the outstretched nets of consciousness" (Levinas, 1981: 148). Possession by the other is "non-phenomenal", "beyond representation", "unbeknownst to myself, 'slipping into me like a thief" (1981: 150). It is a modality of surprise and is the event of the inspiration of the subject by a source outside 296 history. It is in the context of Levinas's use of the above imagery, which equates the subject and consciousness with a house and the assignation of the subject by the other with burglary, that Coetzee's construction of an analogy between Mrs Curren and her house should be placed. Like Mrs Curren, it is without love and in a state of decay:
This house is . . . tired of holding itself together. The floorboards have lost their spring. The insulation of the wiring is dry, friable, the pipes clogged with grit. The gutters sag where screws have rusted away or pulled loose from the rotten wood. The rooftiles are heavy with moss. A house built solidly but without love, cold, inert now, ready to die. (1990: 13)
Significantly, too, the novel contains a description of the installation of burglar bars on the windows of the house (1990: 24-25). The only points of access to the world beyond this "cage" are now through the "wires": that is, "the telephone wire", "the television wire", and "the aerial wire" (25). It is noteworthy that this description is followed directly by the passage in which Mrs Curren describes television as the medium through which the state conveys its 'message that turns people to stone'. It is a medium through which history possesses the subject and excludes the other. So, for instance, upon witnessing the violence that is elided by state television during her visit to Guguletu, Mrs Curren entreats Mr Thabane to "listen" to her and then states the following: "I am not indifferent to this . . . this war. How can I be? No bars are thick enough to keep it out" (1990: 95). If Vercueil's uninvited entry into Mrs Curren's house is read against this background, it becomes apparent that it alludes to the assignation of the subject by the other. In this regard, it is noteworthy that, once he enters the house, Mrs Curren gives him bread (1990: 74). As I pointed out in the previous chapter, the giving of bread is, in Levinasian philosophy, an image of radical generosity, of the giving of self to the other. Besides, while she watches Vercueil holding the bread with his dirty 297 hands, Mrs Curren reflects as follows: "My mind like a pool, which his finger enters and stirs. Without that finger stillness, stagnation. . . . His dirty fingernail entering me" (1990: 74). This passage makes it clear that Vercueil's uninvited entry into the house constitutes the other's infiltration of the subject's consciousness. As in Levinas's writing, the trope of the uninvited entry here signifies the subject's possession by the other. This is further suggested by the sexual innuendo in the above passage, which points once again to the frequent equation of sexual activity with inspiration in Coetzee's writing. By extrapolating from the novel's allusive explication of the notion of choice, it is therefore possible to conclude that Mrs Curren is unable to metamorphose Vercueil because she is possessed by his alterity. Her attempt to transform him is interrupted by her encounter with the infinity of his otherness, and this enables love, that is, a movement of infinition from same to other. Differently put, her unwitting contact with the infinite surplus of his otherness subordinates cognition to proximity and, in so doing, inspires her to respond responsibly, rather than foreclose on him. Finally, it must be reiterated that the novel in no way attempts constatively to describe Mrs Curren's possession and inspiration by the other. On the one hand, the imagery of burglary, together with Mrs Curren's emphasis on the fact that she did not choose Vercueil, indicates that she is not conscious, indeed, cannot be conscious, of having been possessed by his alterity. As in "Narrative", then, the omission from the text of an account of this possession may, in part, be explained by the narratological fact that this character is the first-person narrator of the novel. On the other hand, though, the stress in this imagery of choice and burglary on the inapprehendability of the other makes it clear that any attempt by Coetzee to represent this character's inspiration by Vercueil's alterity would violate the other's irreducibility to consciousness and representation. It is only by way of its elaborate substructure of Levinasian allusions that the novel is able to 'intimate', without 298 representing, that which is 'otherwise than being'. Owing to these allusions it is able to 'look away' and thus approach the other. For the rest, Coetzee'limits himself to describing the effect on history of this face-to-face encounter by depicting Mrs Curren's capacity to love and this, in turn, points to an a priori relational structure outside of history and ontology.
5.4.1.1 Creation as Recovery
From the foregoing discussion, it should be evident that the novel's imagery and allusive substructure suggest that, in being possessed by the other, Mrs Curren is inspired by that which is 'unbeknownst' to her to create an ethical subjectivity. At the same time and very importantly, however, this act of creation is figured in the novel as the recovery of and return to an 'anterior', non-ontological structure of subjectivity. I explained earlier in this chapter that, although 'anterior', the ethical relation has not been superseded by the ontological relation: it is, by virtue of excession, its 'transcending diachrony', always 'there' without ever being able to be rendered present or be represented. It is this 'anteriority' which is to be understood not chronologically, but in terms of transcendence by excession that enables the ethical to inspire the subject to create that which is a 'recovery' of and 'return' to a 'primordial' state. The novel's emphasis on the 'priority' of ethical subjectivity is evident in its allusion to Tolstoy's "What Men Live By", particularly the angel's perception that 'though it seems to men that they live by care for themselves, in truth it is love alone by which they live'. In the context of Coetzee's novel, this statement suggests that the 'I am for the other' of love 'precedes' the ontological solitude of the 'I am I', and that the latter is merely an illusion which conceals an underlying 'reality'. Significantly, in this regard, Mrs Curren's growth to ethical subjectivity is depicted as a 'return' to a fuller state of consciousness by means of the metaphor of sleep. In Michael K and Foe, sleep is figured as a transcendence 299 of quotidian consciousness which brings with it the possibility of inspiration by alterity. In Age of Iron, however, everyday consciousness is itself depicted as a state of sleep or stupor. Early in the novel, Mrs Curren describes the "soul-stunted" white South African children as "spinning themselves tighter and tighter into their sleepy cocoons" (1990: 6), and comments on their "Slumbrous" souls (1990: 7). Later, after remarking on her "childhood slumber", she asks the following question: "Have I ever been fully awake?" (1990: 100). The slumber described here and elsewhere in the novel is, in Levinasian terms, the "dogmatic slumber" constituted by the ontological solitude of the 'I am I' (qtd in Bauman, 1993: 76; see also Levinas, 1991: 86). As such, the awakening from this 'slumber' would be in the 'I am for' (see Bauman, 1993: 76). Through possession by the other, which goes together with the responsible act of self-substitution, the subject 'awakens' from the 'slumbrous' condition of the 'I am I' to the 'anterior' state of 'being-for-the-other'. The 'priority' of the 'I am for' is also indicated by the fact that the motif of slumber intersects with the motif of 'deformation' which describes the 'stupefying' and transformational ability of the state's structures of power. This intersection is apparent in the following passage, in which Mrs Curren is described as attempting to resist the stupor, the "fog of extinction" (1990: 159), induced by her medication: 8
The reason I fight against going back to hospital is that in hospital they will put me to sleep. That is the expression they use for animals, as a kindness, but they may as well use it for people. They will put me into a sleep without dreams. They will feed me mandragora till I grow drowsy and fall into the river and am drowned and washed away. That way I will never cross. I cannot allow it to happen. I have come too far. I cannot have my eyes closed. (1990: 164-165)
The novel's insistence on the 'recovery' of a 'prior' subjectivity through invention generates one of the text's central paradoxes, namely that the responsibility which Mrs Curren 'takes' and which 'creates' her as an ethical subject is presented as though it were already there. Creation is therefore 300 'recovery'. In its turn, this paradox emphasises the necessity of the 'anteriority' of ethical subjectivity, namely that it constitutes the only foundation and therefore possibility of ethics (see Bauman, 1993: 73). If, as Levinas contends, Cain's question, 'Am I my brother's keeper?', is solely from ontology, the perception of the 'singularity' of her responsibility for her 'brother' that Mrs Curren arrives at in the course of her growth towards ethical subjectivity can only have meaning in the context of the 'priority' of ethics over ontology.
5.4.2 Age of Iron: Text
Thus far my discussion has focused on Mrs Curren's development towards an ethical subjectivity. Already, though, I have touched upon some of the meta-representational implications of this development. For instance, I have suggested that Coetzee's positing of a source of inspiration outside of history constitutes a refusal to allow himself 'to be impaled on the dilemma proposed by the state, namely, either to ignore its obscenities or else to produce representations of them'. It could be added that, in its focus on love or on that which derives from a 'movement of infinition' from same to other, the text refuses to supplement the 'deformed' relations in history. However, the text's bid to transcend history only becomes fully apparent if its refusal to represent, and so foreclose on, the other is related to its performative dimension. I shall show that, in its emphasis on the otherness of the reader, this dimension of Age of Iron differs somewhat from that of the earlier novels. Coetzee attempts to perform the ethical relation in the textual relationship which he endeavours to construct with the reader by presenting the novel as the writing subject's responsible response, or 'Here I Am', to the reader - as - other. Age of Iron is therefore self-reflexively presented as the event of inspiration by the otherness of the reader. Accordingly, it is the event through which the writing subject achieves transcendence and it is for this reason that self and text are so closely linked in this novel. 301 The performative dimension of the novel is foregrounded by its presentation in the epistolary mode as Mrs Curren's letter to her daughter in exile in America (cf. Coetzee: 1992: 340). Clearly, this relationship between the writer-surrogate in the novel and the reader-surrogate in the novel mirrors the actual relationship between Coetzee and his reader. Less clearly, though, Mrs Curren's relationship with her daughter also reflects her relationship with Vercueil. Like Vercueil, Mrs Curren's daughter is depicted as a stranger -- her letters, according to Mrs Curren, are those "of someone grown strange, estranged" (1990: 127). Moreover, she has left her home in South Africa for America and is therefore, in a sense, also 'homeless'. If anything, she is even more enigmatic than Vercueil: while the reader is never certain whether Vercueil's name is "Vercueil, Verkuil or Verskuil" (1990: 34), Mrs Curren's daughter's name is simply not provided. So, like Vercueil, she is verskuil, that is, hidden. What Mrs Curren says of the inability to represent Vercueil, namely that "He is like one of those half-mythical creatures that come out in photographs only as blurs, vague forms disappearing into the undergrowth that could be man or beast or merely a bad spot on the emulsion: unproved, unattested. Or disappearing over the edge of the picture, leaving behind in the shutter-trap an arm or a leg or the back of a head" (1990: 177), is thus equally true of her daughter, who increasingly assumes the status of an absence in the novel. A further link between Mrs Curren's relationship with Vercueil and her relationship with her daughter is forged by the motif of generosity. For instance, Mrs Curren's letter is presented as her gift of self to her daughter and, in the following passage, her metamorphosis into the letter which she gives to her daughter is depicted in terms of the process of self-substitution through which an ethical subjectivity is created:
So day by day I render myself into words and pack the words into the page like sweets: like sweets for my daughter, for her bitthday, for the day of her birth. Words out of my body, drops of myself, for her to 302 unpack in her own time, to take in, to suck, to absorb. As they say on the bottle: old-fashioned drops, drops fashioned by the old, fashioned and packed with love, the love we have no•alternative but to feel toward those to whom we give ourselves to devour or discard. (1990: 8)
The generous 'giving of self' to the other that is implicit in this metamorphosis into text is further apparent in Mrs Curren's following observation: "This is my life, these words, these tracings of the movement of crabbed digits over the page" (1990: 120). Since it serves as a mise en abyme of Coetzee's relationship with his reader, Mrs Curren's relationship with her daughter implies that the novel is structured as the writer's generous substitution of himself for the reader-as-other. It is structured, that is, as a performance of the ethical relation in which the writer subjects himself to and substitutes himself for the other. Moreover, it is the medium through which this substitution takes place, and thus the means by which the writer structures himself as responsibility for the reader-as-other. In fact, in its inscription of this relation, the novel is presented as the very event of that substitution. The act of radical self-effacement connoted by the structuration of the novel as a gift to the reader-as-other, is also self-reflexively announced by means of the latent image of bread in the above citation. For example, the sentence, 'This is my life, these words', echoes Christ's words at the Last Supper and the liturgical formulae of the Eucharist. In this regard, it is noteworthy that the etymological root of Eucharist, kharizomai, means 'to offer willingly'. As I have shown, it is this sense of generosity that is stressed in Levinas's repeated use of the image of the giving of bread in his writings. The willing offering of bread is an act which is done 'despite oneself' and is thus an act of self-effacement. By means of the image of bread, then, the novel is depicted as the writer's generous offering, despite himself. This image also points to the fact that the text is structured as an 'ethical work'. It will be remembered from my discussion of Foe that this is Levinas's term for an "orientation 303 which goes freely from the Same to the Other" (1987d: 91) and forms "a departure with no return" (1987d: 92). In this regard, it is significant that the letter is to be sent to Mrs Curren's daughter only after Mrs Curren's death (see Attridge, 1994: 61, 63). "The future [for which the action of the ethical work acts]", writes Levinas, "must from the first be posited as indifferent to my death. A work which is different from play and from computations, is being-for-beyond-my-death" (1987d: 92). The 'ethical work' is therefore given to the stranger without hope of return in the form of grateful remuneration. It is 'dehiscent' to the extent that it breaks out of the circle of self-affirmation. Only by means of such a self-substituting and irreversible movement from same to other is the writer-as-Orpheus able to approach the reader-as-Eurydice without betraying his/her otherness by returning with it to the light of day, that is, the order of the same. Through this movement, in the earlier- mentioned words of Mrs Curren to her daughter, the writer is able to 'feel his way', "with each word", "along a passage that grows darker all the time" towards the reader (1990: 120). A further implication of the radical generosity of the novel, conceived of as an 'ethical work', is that it divests the author of author-ity. The generous movement of the novel involves an absolution, rather than loss, of self: indeed, the writing self is liberated from ontological solitude by the replacement of the 'I am I' with the 'I am for'. Structured as responsibility, he is now subjected to the reader-as-other. Importantly, the index to this responsibility for the reader is the novel's refusal to supplement history. In terms of the ethics of writing which emerges from this text, if Age of Iron were to provide the reader with a representation of history, it would violate his/her otherness by affirming the 'deformations' effected by the state's patterns of discourse and structures of power. It would thus serve the 'Gorgon's head' of state violence. Coetzee's refusal to supplement history must therefore be seen as an act of responsibility for the reader. It constitutes a recognition of his/her otherness. Ultimately, then, this refusal to supplement is not self-directed, that is, 304 it is not an act of self-consolidation on the part of the writer.
Instead, it is directed to the other and involves , an irreversible 'movement of infinition' away from the same. The self-abnegation of this movement restructures subjectivity as responsibility for the other, and this process of restructuring is accompanied by a radical forfeiture of autonomous power. In Age of Iron, one thus encounters a mode of writing without authorial author-ity or, more precisely, a mode which constitutes the process through which a divestiture of power may be attained. 9 From my discussions of the relation between responsibility and authority in the earlier chapters of this thesis, it should be clear that the writing subject's assumption of responsibility for the reader invests the latter with ethical authority. By being in a relationship with the otherness of the reader (see Levinas, 1987a: 18), the writer becomes responsible for him/her and it is this burden of responsibility which is the condition of the reader's authority. In terms of the 'singularity' of such responsibility, the author is his 'brother's keeper' and is thus subjected to 'him'. Ultimately, then, Coetzee's refusal to supplement history and thereby violate the alterity of the reader points to the reader's ethical authority. It makes of the novel the 'command' of the reader-as-other which 'sounds in the mouth' of the obedient and 'attentional' writing subject. As with Foe, Age of Iron is consequently a novelistic articulation of the 'Here I Am'. However, Coetzee's emphasis in the later novel on the alterity of the reader suggests that this text is inspired, in a sense authored, by the reader-as-other.
5.4.2.1 Reading as Transcendence
The question raised by this conception of the novel as the writer's gift of self, and therefore as a medium for responsible substitution, is, quite simply, how the reader responds to the text. It is through the novel as an 'ethical work' that the writer enters into an ethical relationship with the reader, one in which he encounters the reader as face, that is, the reader removed from his/her capacity of being. However, this 305 recognition comes from the writer and there is no guarantee that the reader's response will be similarly 'dehiscent'. Indeed, Mrs Curren states that her daughter is "like iron" (1990: 68) and, since the reader in the novel reflects the reader of the novel, the implication is that the latter, too, is a child of iron or, in terms of the metaphor of the 'age of iron', s/he is guilty of filial impiety. The point here is that the reader is situated in history and has been 'deformed' by its relational modes. Trapped in the 'I am I', the relationship which s/he contrives with the text is thus bound to be one in which it is 'as though' s/he 'were alone', that is, a relationship characterised by 'violent action' in which s/he forecloses on the otherness which the text endeavours to 'intimate'. The novel seeks to oppose, without resisting, this violence by attempting to induce in the reader a recognition of the otherness which it 'intimates'. Such a recognition would constitute a responsible response from the reader and, as I have indicated, this response would endow the other with authority. Through seeking to 'intimate' otherness, then, the text wishes to disarm the reader, to preclude violation by his/her autonomous power through its radical opposition and not resistance. By means of its 'unrelating relation' with alterity, the novel hopes to gain an authority which, being that of the face rather than force, derives from the reading subject's care. If it succeeds in this endeavour, it will have accomplished a "mutual election" (1990: 179). On the one hand, the novel as the writing subject's gift of self to the reading subject would signify the former's 'election' by the latter's alterity. On the other hand, the reading subject's 'assumption' of responsibility for the otherness 'intimated' by the text would signify his/her election by this alterity. This notion of a 'mutual election', which illustrates the Levinasian dictum that 'I am another for the others', is introduced by the change which Vercueil's relationship with Mrs Curren undergoes in the latter stages ofI the novel. Significantly, when Mrs Curren is at her most vulnerable,_ that is, about to be violated by the street children under a flyover, she is rescued by Vercueil, who then carries her 306 to safety (1990: 146). The burden image here indicates his 'assumption' of responsibility for the weak and helpless other, his care for her and her 'mastery' (without power) of him. He becomes his sister's 'keeper'. The ethical relationship which the novel 'intimates' at this point is further implicit in the allusion to the Levinasian face-to-face encounter in Mrs Curren's remark, "I lay face to face with him" (1990: 147), and in her later explanation of the nature of her relationship with Vercueil to the policeman: "Mr Vercueil takes care of me" (my emphasis, 1990: 157). Subsequently, in a further, and important, development of the novel's debate on the notion of choice, she realises that it is not simply Vercueil who has 'chosen' her but that it has been a 'mutual election': "it is not he who fell under my care when he arrived, I now understand, nor I who fell under his: we fell under each other, and have tumbled and risen since then in the flights and swoops of that mutual election" (1990: 179). If read in the context of my discussion of the notion of 'choice' in my chapter on Michael K, the point of this apparent conundrum is, once again, that the other can never be chosen. It is the other which 'chooses' the subject in the latter's recognition and careful response to its otherness. Vercueil does not 'choose' Mrs Curren. He is trapped in the 'I am I' and is therefore oblivious to her 'election' through possession by his otherness. It is for this reason that he is puzzled by her insinuations that he has 'chosen' her. By the same token, Mrs Curren is not aware of having 'chosen' Vercueil. The implication here, then, is that references to Vercueil's 'election' of Mrs Curren and hers of him can only make sense if 'choice' is understood to be a category which refuses the possessive case. In recognising and responding to the other's otherness, each of these characters is 'elected'
by that alterity. 10 The novel ponders its ability to inspire the reader with love, and thereby contrive a 'mutual election', by depicting itself in imagery of the life cycle of the butterfly/moth. In terms"of the identification of ethical self with text, it is understandable that this imagery is used, at first, to depict Mrs 307 Curren's development of an ethical subjectivity. For instance, insect imagery conjoins with that of sleep in Mrs Curren's reference to the 'sleepy cocoons' of white South African children. As I have indicated, the reference to sleep in this quotation evokes Levinas's 'dogmatic slumber', the state of consciousness constituted by the ontological solitude of the 'I am I'. Once she 'awakens' from this condition by learning to love, Mrs Curren is associated with a butterfly or moth (see, 1990: 118) which, as the novel pointedly indicates, bears itself (1990: 14). The use of this imagery of metamorphosis also indicates that Mrs Curren's death, with which the novel ends, is, in fact, the birth of her new identity. As much is evident in the penultimate sentence, which suggests the release of Mrs Curren's spirit, her eventual metamorphosis: "[Vercueil] took me in his arms and held me with mighty force, so that the breath went out of me in a rush" (1990: 181). The allusion here is to the representation in Greek mythology of the soul as a butterfly emerging from a dying person's mouth, an allusion that is invoked earlier when Mrs Curren refers to "A white moth, a ghost emerging from the mouth of the figure on the deathbed" (1990: 118). It is also noteworthy in this respect that Mrs Curren's words to her daughter: "It is not my soul that will remain with you but the spirit of my soul, the breath" (1990: 119), allude to the fact that the Latin word 'spiritus' signifies both 'spirit' and 'breath'. It later becomes evident that, in referring to Mrs Curren's creation of a new identity, this imagery also refers to her metamorphosis into text. Thus the butterfly or moth which serves as an image for her restructuring of subjectivity in terms of responsibility is in itself an image of the novel. In the following passage, the physical resemblance between the shape of a book and that of a winged creature like a butterfly or moth is elicited: "[Vercueil and I] share a bed, folded one upon the other like a page folded in two, like two wings folded" (1990:1 173). It is in terms of this link between butterfly or moth and . text that Mrs Curren's following words to her daughter should be read: 308 Like a moth from its case emerging, fanning its wings: that is what, reading, I hope you will glimpse: my soul readying itself for further flight. . . And after that, after the dying? Never fear, I will not haunt you. There will be no need to close the windows and seal the chimney to keep the white moth from flapping in during the night and settling on your brow or on the brow of one of the children. The moth is simply what will brush your cheek ever so lightly as you put down the last page of this letter, before it flutters off on its next journey. It is not my soul that will remain with you but the spirit of my soul, the breath, the stirring of the air about these words, the faintest of turbulence traced in the air by the ghostly passage of my pen over the paper your fingers now hold. (1990: 118-119)
I have already indicated the links which the novel constructs between butterfly, spirit, and breath. However, since the word 'inspiration' is etymologically related to both 'spirit' and 'breath', it too is connoted by the image of the butterfly/moth. Consequently, the depiction of the letter/text as moth/butterfly/breath/spirit suggests the ability of the novel to inspire the reader. By expiring, that is, being metamorphosed into a moth/text, Mrs Curren, the writer in the novel, enters and inspires her daughter, the reader in the novel. As she goes on to say, "These words, as you read them, if you read them, enter you and draw breath again. They are, if you like, my way of living on" (1990: 120). It is insightful to compare Coetzee's use of this imagery to depict the stealthy entry of the otherness that is 'intimated' by the novel into the reader with Levinas's use of breath as a metaphor for proximity. To this end, it is necessary to examine again the following passage from Otherwise than Being:
The inscription of the order in the for-the-other of obedience is an anarchic being affected, which slips into me 'like a thief' through the outstretched nets of consciousness. This trauma has surprised me completely; the order has never been represented, foF it has never been presented, not even in the past coming in memory, to the point that it is I that only says, and after the event, this unheard-of obligation. This ambivalence is the exception and subjectivity of the subject, its very psyche, a possibility of 309 inspiration. It is the possibility of being the author of what had been breathed in unbeknownst to me, of having received, one knows not from where, that of which I am author. .(my emphasis, 1981: 148 - 149)
As in Coetzee's novel, breath, here, signifies the exposure of the subject to the other. This metaphor for a radical exposure which transcends the intentionality of consciousness is particularly evident in Levinas's portrayal of the subject as a "lung" who is exposed to "invisible air" which, although "hidden from perception", "penetrates" and "obsesses" him/her "before all thematization" (1981: 180). In the course of this discussion, he proceeds to describe breathing as transcendence:
An openness of the self to the other, which is not a conditioning or a foundation of oneself in some principle . . . but a relation wholly different from the occupation of a site, a building, or a settling oneself, breathing is transcendence in the form of opening up. It reveals all its meaning only in the relationship with the other, in the proximity of a neighbor, which is responsibility for him, substitution for him. This pneumatism is not nonbeing; it is disinterestedness, excluded middle of essence, besides being and non being. (1981: 181)
It is significant that Levinas refers to the "caress of the wind" earlier in this discussion of the transcendence of breathing (1981: 180). For him breathing is thus linked to 'sensibility' which, it will be remembered from my discussion of K's relation with the Karoo 'farm', is distinguished by its ability to establish a relationship of 'proximity' and immediacy with the other. "In the caress", he states, "proximity remains a proximity and does not become an intention of something" (1987c: 118). Moreover, the caress even has the ability to allay knowledge. Through the caress, Levinas avers in this regard, "Cognition turns into proximity, into the purely sensible" (1987c: 119). Given the association of the caress with immediacy and 'pure communication', it is apposite that Coetzee should introduce this trope into his depiction of the novel and its relationship with 310 the reader. Mrs Curren, for instance, recollects her relationship with her daughter when the latter was still a child in the following telling terms:
'Come, my darling, it's time to get up!' I would whisper in your ear, not urging you too hard yet, giving myself time to sit beside you and stroke your hair, stroke after stroke, my fingertips alive with love, while you clung to the last to the body of sleep. Let it be like this forever! I would think, my hand on your head, the current of love coursing through it. (1990: 52-53)
When she decides to write the letter which forms the novel to her daughter, who is now in exile in America, she reflects that "In another world I would not need words. I would appear on your doorstep. 'I have come for a visit,' I would say, and that would be the end of words: I would embrace you and be embraced" (1990: 8). "But in this world, in this time", she continues, "I must reach out to you in words" (1990: 8). The clear distinction between caress and language here, suggests not so much a mutually-exclusive opposition between the two as the fact that the latter is an atrophied form of the former. After all, Mrs Curren still attempts to 'reach out' to her daughter, that is, to embrace her, even though she has to do so through the distancing medium of language. There is in this sentence, then, a suggestion that, although words repel the other, they may be made 'non-indifferent' to it. In fact, the phrase 'reach out to you' even hints that words may be made 'sensibly' to establish proximity with the other. This suggestion is further evident in the above passage in the evocation of the caress by the image of the letter as a moth which brushes the cheek of its reader 'ever so lightly'. The embrace has become a vestigial caress and the 'current of love' which 'courses' through the caressing hand has been reduced to the "love" which "flickers and trembles like St Elmo's fire" in "every you" written by the writing subject (19?0: 118). The point, though, is that, despite this attenuation, the possibility, no matter how remote, still exists that language and the novel may serve as a means through which an ethical relation 311 is established. Read in the context of Levinas's concepts of 'pneumatism' and 'sensibility', Coetzee's depiction of the novel as breath, and his linking of the notion of 'breath' to that of 'caress', suggests the text's ability to transcend history and to "open up" the reader, that is, enable him/her to "free" him/herself "by breathing from closure in [him/her]self" (Levinas, 1981: 180- 181). Differently put, the novel self-reflexively indicates that, despite its situatedness in language, which is antipathetic to alterity, it may through its strategy of excession 'intimate' the other and thereby place the reader in relation to infinity. Indeed, if 'love' is seen as a 'movement of infinition', and therefore as an 'unrelating relation' between self and other in which the former does not attempt to adequate the latter, to reduce him/her to a correlate of his/her intentionality, then it is precisely this potential that is implied by Mrs Curren's use of the image of St Elmo's fire to convey the liminal existence of 'love' in the language of her letter. By way of the strategy of excession, then, Coetzee seeks to expose the reader-as-lung to the breath of alterity. And since the relation which he hopes to contrive would transcend intentionality and thereby enable proximity with the other, it may be described as an event of proximity rather than of cognition. In fact, through the radical non-conceptuality of this relation, the novel, although implicated in language, attempts to facilitate the reader's inspiration by the other by subordinating knowledge to proximity. In so doing, it endeavours to perform the ethical. Ultimately, then, the text's ethical objective is to prompt the reader to respond responsibly to the other and in the process to (re-)create him/herself as an ethical subject. Its role in facilitating this process of recovery through creation is further alluded to by the fact that, after having referred to the vestigial existence of love in her letter, Mrs Curren continues as follows: "you are with me not as you are today in America, mot as you were when you left, but as you are in some deeper and unchanging form: as the beloved, as that which does not die" (1990: 118). The novel here hints at the form of subjectivity 312 which has been 'deformed' by history, that is, the 'I am for' which 'pre-exists' the 'I am I'. Moreover, the suggestion is that the letter of love may inspire its reader to recover, that is, create, this ethical self. Clearly, the novel's ethical objective is informed by the paradox of recovery through inspiration, a paradox which, I have argued, is related to Levinas's assertion of the 'primacy' of ethics over ontology. Should Age of Iron succeed in inspiring the reader with its 'intimations' of otherness, s/he will restructure his/her subjectivity as responsibility. In the process, s/he will, like Mrs Curren, structure his/her identity not in terms of the ontologically separate, self-constituting 'I am I', but the self- substituting generosity of the relation of love, that is, the 'I am for others'. Since the former structure of subjectivity is presented as a 'deformation' of the latter by history, it follows that, in effecting this reformation through inspiration, the text will have countered the 'deforming' drive of history. Age of Iron's ambition to rival history is apparent in its self-reflexive representation of itself in terms which rebut the imagery of 'deformed' relations which I have traced in this chapter. With regard to the depiction of the state as a Circe- figure that 'deforms' and brutalises the individual with its discourses of power, the novel is depicted as being the bearer of moly, of that which will preserve the individual from the state's brutalising spell. In a departure from this mythological analogue, however, the love borne by the novel is also portrayed as having the power to reverse this spell. By extension, the text might have the same effect on the reader as Vercueil on Mrs Curren: that is, it may inspire him/her to love and thus rival the 'deformed' and 'deforming' relations of history. As the bearer of moly or, punningly, "mollificans", it endeavours to 'soften' the South African 'age of iron' (1990: 75). This aspiration is further apparent in the depiction of the novel as an umbilical cord which may be able to reconstitute the 'filial bond'. As I have indicated, Hesiod's 'age of the iron race' is characterised by stunted filial relations and, in Coetzee's novel, such relations serve as a metaphor for the 313 'deformation' of the ethical bond. So, for example, the children of the townships are described as "children of iron" who have usurped the positions of their parents (1990: 46). And, as I have shown, Mrs Curren's daughter, and by implication the reader of the novel, is also described as a child of iron who has abandoned her parent. It is therefore significant that the following passage, which alludes to the change in Mrs Curren's relationship to 'John' and suggests that love is able to reconstitute the stunted filial relationship, does so by means of a veiled reference to the umbilical cord: "He was lost, I had no power to save him. Yet something went out from me to him. I ached to embrace him, to protect him" (1990: 139). Notably, too, Mrs Curren, in accusing her daughter of abandoning her, describes her letter as an attempt to reattach the umbilical cord and thus restore the filial bond: "Come, says this letter: do not cut yourself off from me" (1990: 127). The image recurs when Mrs Curren, after reflecting on whether the "line" between herself and her daughter has been "severed", refers to the letter as "a rope of words" (1990: 181). Since the letter serves as a raise en abyme of the novel, the implication is that the latter may serve as the umbilical cord through which the lost, filial relation may be reinstated. The novel's rivalry of the 'deformed' relations of history also emerges in the depiction of the letter as a Fury. In an allusion to the Fury's task of accusing and persecuting the violators of filial piety by, to quote Graves again, pursuing them 'relentlessly, without rest or pause, from city to city and from country to country', Mrs Curren first "accuses" her daughter of filial impiety and then anticipates her response to her letter: "I do not need this you say to yourself through gritted teeth: this is what I came here to get away from, why does it have to follow me?" (1990: 127, 178). Unlike the South African literature that supplements the 'deformed' relations inscribed in history by producing representations of the state's violent actions, and which is represented in the novel by the ambiguous portrayal of Mrs Curren as a Gorgon or Fury manqué who is unable to follow Florence and her children, the novel, as the self- 314 representational device of the letter indicates, is able to pursue those who have violated the filial bond. Moreover, the portrayal of the letter as a Fury also suggests that this ability to pursue violators of the filial relation is a function of the novel's attempt to perform rather than represent the ethical in its relationship with its reader. In this regard, it is noteworthy that the Furies (whose appellation is etymologically related to 'madness') not only follow but persecute and madden the perpetrators of social crimes (see Graves, 1960, II: 22, 64- 69). As I have argued, the novel's strategy of excession places the reader in a non-conceptual relation to the other which opens him/her to possession by the latter. According to Levinas, the event of possession by the other manifests itself in a disturbance of consciousness, a delirium or madness (1981: 101), which he frequently describes as an "accusation" or "persecution" (see, for example, 1981: 101, 102, 110 - 113, 124 - 127, 146, 153). In Greek mythology, the effect which the Furies have on the culprits which they pursue is thus comparable with the impact which the text may have on the reader." By inference, then, the imagery of the Furies points to the performative dimension of Coetzee's text: that is, it indicates that the difference between it and literature which supplements history is that its rivalry is grounded not in representation but in the event of possession. Coetzee's use of images of moly, of the umbilical cord, and of the Furies in Age of Iron points to this novel's self- reflexive theorisation of its relation to history, particularly its refusal to posit history as an a priori structure and its assertion of the 'primacy' of ethics. Collectively, these images form a clear and coherent expression of the novel's desire to mediate and so 'justify' history by creating, and thereby 'recovering', the ethical relation through the literary encounter. Owing to the presence of this imagery the metafictional articulation of this desire in this novel is far stronger than it is in Foe. However, in its reliance on Levinas's views on the entry of the ethical into the political, Age of Iron is very similar to the earlier novel. For example, the enabling argument for a subject who is an other for the 315 others is, as I have indicated, implicit in Coetzee's explication of the notion of a 'mutual election' in his presentation of Vercueil's eventual 'assumption' of responsibility for Mrs Curren. Significantly, this notion is further emphasised in Age of Iron by being extended to the writing subject's relation to the reading subject and the latter's to the text. The writing subject is inspired by the reader-as-other, but the reading subject is, in turn, inspired by the writing subject's 'Here I am', the "witness" which it bears of the "infinite" (see Levinas, 1981: 146). It is important to note that the reading subject's response to the text is not a response of reciprocity: that is, it is not directed to the writer or even to the text as a literary work. If it were it would constitute a grateful response which would return the 'ethical work' to Coetzee and thus disrupt its 'movement of infinition'. If this movement is to be sustained, the reader has to respond instead to the text's traces of infinity. Should s/he do so, his/her response will be generous rather than grateful: that is, it will continue the ethical work's 'movement of infinition'. What is required of the reader is therefore not a cognitive response. This is, of course, implicit in the metaphor of breathing, which suggests proximity as opposed to the distance of cognition. If the text does manage to 'inspire' the reader with its 'intimations' of otherness, its attempt to stage a 'mutual election' of writing and reading subjects will have been successful. It will have interrupted the 'move of Being' which underpins reading practice and will thus have served as a conduit through which the infinite irrupts into the totality of history. Through the reader's relation with the text, then, the other will have entered the same. As I explained in the previous chapter, the reader's proximity to the other will interrupt his/her relations in the order of the political which will now be conducted against the background of infinity. Alternatively put, s/he will be bound 'to the other man in the trace of transcendence'. Accordingly, the political which the reader re- enters after his/her encounter with text will be changed by that 316 re-entry. In his/her relations with his/her fellow human beings, the political will be mediated by the ethical. In making this point in my discussion of Foe, I argued that this process of mediation does not constitute a purification of but an attempt at 'justifying' the political. In other words, the novel endeavours to invest the community to which the reader belongs with a 'double structure' in terms of which relations among peers are continually interrupted by the asymmetrical ethical relation. It attempts, that is, to renegotiate the political, to assist in the creation of a community which nurtures within it the trace of the irreducible ethical relation (see Critchley, 1992: 232). In terms of its metaphor of breathing, Age of Iron aspires to expire and thereby inspire the reader, that is, to serve as a medium which approximates immediacy and through which the trace of the ethical is thus able to infiltrate and so alter and 'justify' the political. To attain this ethical objective, it must reject history as an a priori structure and 'intimate' the 'primacy' of ethics. In order to achieve this, I have contended, the novel 'intimates' the existence of that which exceeds culture but the very excession of which is a function of the exclusions of the epistemological (and ontological) structures which operate within culture. In an important sense, then, the quality of excession of that which is 'intimated' suggests that it has been constituted by culture but by virtue of its exclusion from that culture 'pre-exists' and transcends it. This critical ambivalence of the category of excession points to Coetzee's novel's reliance, in its critique of history and postulation of ethics as an a priori structure, on what I have called in this study a tension between implication and transcendence. The 'before' of that which transcends through'excession derives from the culture which it 'precedes'. Furthermore, although that which transcends through excession cannot be integrated within culture without being betrayed in the process, it can never be excluded from that culture. In the tension which derives from this seeming paradox, lies the potential for the destabilising irruption into culture of the trace of the known unknown. 317 5.4.3 Master: Self
If Age of Iron were to be retold from the perspective of Mrs Curren's daughter, the result would probably resemble Master. For example, although the Dostoevsky-figure is the parent in the filial relationship that is depicted in the later novel, he is characterised as the survivor who has abandoned his stepson, the deceased, and stands accused by him. This is made clear by Anna Sergeyevna's words to Dostoevsky, You ran away from him" (1994: 138; see also 5), Dostoevsky's 'exile' in Dresden, and the fact that he sees the diary of his stepson, Pavel, as an "accusation" of filial impiety (1994: 219). Moreover, like Mrs Curren's daughter, Dostoevsky -- as the recipient of his stepson's diary and short stories -- is characterised as a reader-figure. The similarities and contrasts generated by these structural parallels between Age of Iron and Master are particularly evident in the depictions of their respective protagonists. In this subsection of the chapter, I shall trace some of these points of correspondence and divergence by arguing that, while Age of Iron 'intimates' the development in Mrs Curren of an ability to love, Master depicts Dostoevsky's ultimate failure to love. I shall also demonstrate that this failure suggests as its corollary the failure of the historical Dostoevsky's The Devils to transcend history. However, it does not follow that Master is about the impossibility of transcendence: I shall argue that, implicit in its depiction of Dostoevsky and his novel's failure to transcend their historical situation, there is in Master an argument for transcendence. In this chapter I have already shown that Coetzee reveals Dostoevsky's situatedness in history by way of imagery of madness and possession. However, as with Mrs Curren in Age of Iron, the Dostoevsky character is also portrayed as being inspired by alterity in the opening chapters of Master. For instance, when he is taken to Pavel's room, he attempts to detect his smell. In the description of this attempt, the nexus, which I traced in Age of Iron, between breathing, inspiration by the other, and spirit is again apparent: "Faintly the smell of his son comes to him. 318 He breathes in deeply, again and again, thinking: his ghost, entering me" (1994: 3-4). Significantly, this description is repeated a little later in the novel: "He sits in his son's room with the white suit on his lap, breathing softly, trying to lose himself, trying to evoke a spirit that can surely not yet have left these surroundings" (1994: 12; see also 18, 19). Moreover, as is so often the case in Coetzee's novels, this character's inspiration and possession by the other is suggested by his sexual encounters. The following passages indicate that he establishes contact with Pavel, the absent other, by copulating with Anna Sergeyevna:
In the act there is nothing he can call pleasure or even sensation. It is as though they are making love through a sheet, the grey, tattered sheet of his grief. At the moment of climax he plunges back into sleep as into a lake. As he sinks Pavel rises to meet him. His son's face is contorted in despair: his lungs are bursting, he knows he is dying, he knows he is past hope, he calls to his father because that is the last thing left he can do, the last thing in the world. He calls out in a strangled rush of words. This is the vision in its ugly extremity that rushes at him out of the vortex of darkness into which he is descending inside the woman's body. It bursts upon him, possesses him, speeds on (1994: 56); She comes to his room late and without warning. Again, through her, he passes into darkness and into the waters where his son floats among the other drowned. (1994: 58)
The implication of the metaphors of breathing and sex here is that Dostoevsky, despite being situated in history, is inspired and possessed by a source whose transcendence of history is, of course, suggested by the fact that Pavel, the "absent one" (1994: 61), is dead. In Age of Iron, Mrs Curren's inspiration and possession by the other 'intimates' a mode of subjectivity which is not structured within the terms of history. Since the 'I am for others' pre-exists' the 'I am I', it exposes the constructedness of history, the fact that the violent events generated by relations of contestation are neither natural nor inevitable. In 319 the novel, the effect which this sense of a 'pre-existent' ethical relation has on Mrs Curren's relations in history is explored in the scenes which deal with her visit to Guguletu, where she is confronted with a "looming world of rage and violence" (1990: 89) in which people are "revealed in their true names" and which is at odds with and has been elided by the state-controlled media's representation of South Africa as a "land of smiling neighbours" (1990: 49). The equivalent of this scene in Master is formed by Dostoevsky's encounters with the nihilists: that is, his first meeting with them in the garret (1994: 95 - 107); his subsequent visit, led by Nechaev, to the shot tower from which Pavel either fell or was thrown (1994: 117 - 122); and his meeting with Nechaev in the cellar (1994: 174-203), where he is confronted with a "spectacle" of penury (1994: 180). I have already indicated that Mrs Curren's response to the evidence of state-instigated violence which she encounters in Guguletu forms part of the novel's meta-representational debate on the responsible novelistic response to history. I have argued that this response stages Coetzee's assertion that the writer should negotiate 'the dilemma proposed by the state', namely either to ignore or to represent its 'obscenities', by attempting to establish his/her 'own authority' through formulating ways of imagining torture and death on his/her 'own terms'. Thus Mrs Curren contends that, while that which she has seen cannot be ignored and must be condemned, she cannot do so 'in other people's words' and must 'find' her 'own words'. This desire for autonomy and wish to transcend those modes of representation which in representing violence repeat its violations suggests that her response to relations in the realm of history is mediated by her relation to the other. The same desire, and with it the suggestion of the mediation of the political by the ethical, emerges in Dostoevsky's encounters with the nihilists in Master. In Age of Iron, Mr Thabane's injunction that Mrs Curren should 'name' the crime which she has seen amounts to an adjuration to represent. In the later novel, this is matched by Sergei Nechaev's repeated admonition to Dostoevsky to write about the state's violence in 320 his novels. So, for example, upon stating that the activists "in the forefront of the struggle continue to be hunted down and tortured and killed" and that this reality is occluded by the "shameful Russian press", Nechaev remonstrates with Dostoevsky as follows: "I would have expected you to know this and write about it" (1994: 103). Later, he again reproves Dostoevsky with the question: "How can you ignore a spectacle like this . . . a spectacle that can be multiplied a thousandfold, a millionfold across this country?" (1994: 180), and enjoins him to "Make a start! Tell them about your stepson and why he was sacrificed!" (1994: 181). It is noteworthy in this regard that after his initial contact with the nihilists, Dostoevsky is loath to continue his association with them, and explains his reluctance in terms of his desire to resist contamination by "vengefulness" and thereby maintain a degree of autonomy (1994: 111). After noting that Anna Sergeyevna sees his "lack of zeal" to meet with Nechaev as "apathy", he reflects as follows:
To make her understand he would have to speak in a voice from under the waters, a boy's clear bell-voice pleading out of the deep dark. 'Sing to me, dear father!' the voice would have to call, and she would have to hear. Somewhere within himself he would have to find not only that voice but the words, the true words. Here and now he does not have the words. Perhaps -- he has an intimation -- they may be waiting for him in one of the old ballads. But the ballad is in no book: it is somewhere in the breast of the Russian people, where he cannot reach it. Or perhaps in the breast of a child. (1994: 110 - 111)
Dostoevsky's words at this juncture in the novel echo those of Mrs Curren in Age of Iron. In terms of the text's meta- representational debate, they testify to a desire to engage with history but to do so without supplementing it. An aesthetic response to the violence of history that is mediated by the ethical relation would seek not to represent and so supplement the relations of contestation which generate violence, but to 'intimate' that which they elide, the 'I am for others' or, in terms of the metaphor of the 'age of iron', the lost filial relation. The possibility of such an anti- 321 representationalist aesthetic is mooted by the mythological analogues which underlie the depiction of the trip to Guguletu in Age of Iron and the visit to the cellar in Master. In Age of Iron, the classical references and allusions (such as Aornos, the place without birds (1990: 83; cf. Virgil, 1956: 154), the direct reference to the wailing of young children who had died on the threshold of life which Aeneas heard in the Underworld (1990: 85; cf. Virgil, 1956: 160), "wraiths" and "spirits" (1990: 83; cf. Virgil, 1956: 150, 161, 168, 174), and the postulation that Hell or Hades might be located "at the foot of Africa" [1990: 101]) depict Mrs Curren's visit to Guguletu as a trip to the Underworld. 12 And, since most of the allusions here are to Aeneas's harrowing of Hades in which he seeks out his father, Anchises (Virgil, 1956: 147-174, 150, 159), 13 the implication is that Mrs Curren's response to the violence which she has witnessed will take the form of an attempt to restore the filial bond -- to restore that which the occlusion of which has enabled this violence.' 4 The equivalent of this scene in Master is formed by Dostoevsky's encounter with Sergei Nechaev in the cellar, an encounter which, because of its subterranean location, is linked to the allusions and references in the novel to Orpheus's journey to the Underworld and his attempt to save Eurydice (1994: 174- 203). One such allusion is Dostoevsky's reflection upon descending into the cellar that it is like "going into a cave" (1994: 178), an observation which hints at Orpheus's entry into the regions of the dead by way of a cave (see Virgil, 1947: 89). However, as is evident in the following passage, Dostoevsky's attempt to re-establish contact with his son is couched in terms of the Orpheus myth from the very beginning of the novel (see Kossew, 1996a: 82):
He is there: he stands by the door, hardly breathing, concentrating his gaze on the chair in the corner, waiting for the darkness to thicken, to turn into another kind of darkness, a darkness of presence. Silently he forms his lips over his son's name, three times, four times. He is trying to cast a spell. But over whom: over 322 a ghost or over himself? He thinks of Orpheus walking backwards step by step, whispering the dead woman's name, coaxing her out of the entrails of hell; of the wife in graveclothes with the blind, dead eyes following him, holding out limp hands before her like a sleepwalker. No flute, no lyre, just the word, the one word, over and over. (1994: 5)
Since this myth serves as the novel's paradigm for Dostoevsky's attempt to 'resurrect' Pavel, it also alludes to .a restoration of the filial bond. As in Age of Iron, the implication in this novel is therefore that the protagonist will respond to the 'spectacle' of suffering which he witnesses by attempting to recover the filial relationship. This emphasis on the filial bond is also apparent in the passage in which Dostoevsky explains his wish to avoid contamination by 'vengefulness', and posits as an alternative words in a ballad which, perhaps, is located in 'the breast of a child'. The allusion here to love and the lost filial affiliation as an alternative to 'vengefulness' is developed when, after having escorted him to the shot tower, Sergei Nechaev asserts that Dostoevsky should now "believe" that Pavel was murdered by the state (1994: 121 - 122). As later becomes clear in the cellar scene, Nechaev hopes that as a result of this revelation Dostoevsky will seek to avenge Pavel's death by exposing the state in his writing. However, the Dostoevsky character reflects that "To believe and to love" are "the same thing" and then enigmatically states the following: "I believe in the resurrection" (1994: 122). This statement shifts the emphasis from the contestatory relationships of the 'I am I' to the responsible relationship of love, that is, the 'I am for the other'. After all, the reference is not only to the resurrection of Christ but also to the attempt of Orpheus, who is elsewhere alluded to as the "lord of resurrection" (1994: 152), to resurrect Eurydice. By implication, then, Dostoevsky's response to Nechaev's persuasions and temptations reaffirms the filial relationship. He responds to a 'spectacle' of violence by asserting the 'priority' of the filial bond. By further implication, his response is not dictated by history but mediated 323 by his relationship of responsibility for the other. From my discussion it is apparent that both Age of Iron and Master trace the way in which' inspiration by the other rivals the dictates of history. Indeed, until Dostoevsky's visit to the cellar where he embraces Sergei Nechaev, the similarities between the two novels are patent and Master, too, seems to be about the development of an ability to love. However, the mythological analogue which informs the above-mentioned episode suggests that, although Dostoevsky attempts to restore the filial affiliation and does initially succeed in this endeavour, he nonetheless ultimately fails. In Blanchot's terms, the 'detour' of 'looking away' becomes the 'gaze'. Dostoevsky's failure in this regard emerges from the fact that, despite at first embracing Sergei Nechaev -- a gesture which signifies the generosity of love and whose mythological parallel resides in Orpheus's initial success in gaining from Pluto and Proserpine the concession of the 'detour' of 'turning away', through which he is able to approach Eurydice, by means of his argument, in song, that love has led him to the Underworld (see Ovid, 1955: 234-235) -- he does eventually succumb to 'vengeance'. 15 This failure is evident in Nechaev's success in persuading him to respond in writing to the apparent murder of Pavel (1994: 202-203) since, instead of being mediated by the ethical relation, the document which Dostoevsky writes accuses Nechaev of his son's death and thus corroborates the revolutionary's contention that Dostoevsky hates him and wishes to take revenge (1994: 187, 192-194). The document is thus inspired not by the other but by the contestatory relations of history. The reason for Dostoevsky's failure to restore the filial bond is implied by the fact that the Eurydice figure in the cellar scene is not Pavel but Nechaev. Since the Orpheus myth serves as a paradigm for the father-son relationship in this novel, its use in the cellar scene would therefore appear to identify Sergei Nechaev with Dostoevsky's (step)son. By inference, Dostoevsky's attempt to restore the filial bond is somehow tied to his relationship with Nechaev. In this particular respect, it is insightful to compare his position with 324 that of Mrs Curren in Age of Iron. The latter character comes to see that her relationship with 'John' has a direct bearing on her relationship with her daughter, that she cannot love the latter if she does not love the former (1990: 125). Love, she now begins to realise, is insatiable because of its radical generosity: "For love is not like hunger. Love is never sated, stilled. When one loves, one loves more" (1990: 125). Interestingly, Levinas says something similar in the context of his discussion on whether "the desire for the other" is "an appetite or generosity": "The desirable does not gratify my desire but hollows it out, and as it were nourishes me with new hungers" (1987d: 94). Being for the other is thus being for others. If love is conceived of as a radically generous desire for the other, it becomes clear that the reason for Dostoevsky's failure to restore the filial bond is that he never fully develops the insight that he can only love Pavel by loving Sergei Nechaev and the nihilists. In other words, Coetzee's Dostoevsky fails to act on the insight which the historical Dostoevsky gives Markel in The Brothers Karamazov and which Levinas frequently cites when making the point that responsibility for one is responsibility for all, namely that "Each of us is guilty before everyone for everyone, and I more than the others" (see, for example, Levinas, 1981: 146). Conversely, it is precisely this insight which eventually informs Mrs Curren's attitude towards 'John' in Age of Iron and which, as I have shown, not only enables her to approach 'John' but also prevents the averted look from becoming the 'gaze'. In Master, the character Dostoevsky's ultimate failure to see that responsibility for one is responsibility for all emerges from a sequence of scenes in which he attempts to call up Pavel's face in his mind, only to find that the image of Nechaev appears instead. In the first of these scenes, he tries to "dismiss the image" with the words "Go away!" (1994: 49). Significantly, this action adversely affects his attempt to "summon up Pavel's face": "'Pavel!' he whispers, conjuring his son in vain" (1994: 49). Equally significantly, the procedure which he follows in trying 325 to "summon up" Pavel takes the form of whispering his name. In the novel this procedure is linked to Orpheus's descent to the Underworld by Dostoevsky's aforementioned reflection that Orpheus leads Eurydice to the upper world by 'whispering' her name rather than playing a lyre. One of the implications of the above scene would therefore seem to be that Dostoevsky's repudiation of Nechaev impairs his ability to restore the filial affiliation. This is further evident in the fact that, following his rejection of Nechaev, his difficulties in establishing contact with Pavel increase. In a later and clearly related scene, he again tries to "conjure" up his stepson: "Pavel! he whispers over and over, using the word as a charm. But what comes to him inexorably is the form not of Pavel but of the other one, Sergei Nechaev" (1994: 60). This experience forces him to conclude that "a gap is opening between himself and the dead boy" (1994: 60). When Pavel does eventually reappear in a vision, he is together with a bride who Dostoevsky thinks may be one of the women who have lured him to the garret. Importantly, it later transpires that the woman in question is Nechaev in disguise (1994: 96). Finally, Dostoevsky's ultimate failure to love, to learn that responsibility for one is responsibility for all, is conveyed by the following question which he asks himself and then promptly dismisses towards the end of the novel: "Is that what he must learn: that in God's eyes there is no difference between the two of them, Pavel Isaev and Sergei Nechaev, sparrows of equal weight?" (1994: 238). The character Dostoevsky's failure to love generously is also staged in his encounters with the dog and the beggar. In the first of these scenes, he initially mistakes the barking of a dog for Pavel's voice. Upon realising his mistake, he arrives at the conclusion that the sound he has heard is "only a thing that does not concern him, a dog howling for its father" (1994: 80). In the context of my discussion of the notion of care in Age of Iron, it should be clear that Dostoevsky's response to the dog'is yet another variant in Coetzee's fiction of Cain's disavowal of responsibility for Abel with his question 'Am I my brother's keeper?'. Moreover, the reference to the dog's 'father' implies 326 that it is again the filial bond that is at issue in this scene. If Dostoevsky responds to the dog, he will have taken up his non- ontological responsibility for the other. In the process, his subjectivity will have been restructured in terms of concern for the 'absolute outside-of-me'. This development of an ethical subjectivity, of a 'being-for-others', would constitute a restoration of the filial relationship of care and generosity. These Levinasian overtones of the scene are exposed by Dostoevsky's reactions when the dog howls again, particularly his realisation that he can only love his son by loving everyone:
No hint of empty plains and silver light: a dog, not a wolf; a dog, not his son. Therefore? Therefore he must throw off this lethargy! Because it is not his son he must not go back to bed but must get dressed and answer the call. If he expects his son to come as a thief in the night, and listens only for the call of the thief, he will never see him. If he expects his son to speak in the voice of the unexpected, he will never hear him. As long as he expects what he does not expect, what he does not expect will not come. Therefore -- paradox within paradox, darkness swaddled in darkness -- he must answer to what he does not expect. (1994: 80)
Despite this realisation and the fact that he does eventually answer its 'call', he does not free, feed and house the dog -- that is, he does not substitute himself for it. And, when he abandons, as opposed to leaves, it, he twice more repeats Cain's question to God: "Why me? . . . Why should I bear all the world's burdens? . . . It is not my son, it is just a dog . . . What is it to me?" (1994: 81, 82). Coetzee proceeds to spell out the implications of this evasion of responsibility: "Yet even as he protests he knows the answer: Pavel will not be saved till he has freed the dog and brought it into his bed, brought the least thing, the beggarmen and the beggarwomen too, and much else he does not yet know of; and even then there will be no certainty" (1994: 82). As the occurrence of the burden motif in his deliberations indicates, what Dostoevsky baulks at here is the authority invested in the other by the self's assumption of responsibility 327 for it. If the subject is structured in terms of a careful love for the other which is insatiable and therefore not a hunger, this authority. must needs be infinite. And it is precisely its infinitude which serves as the 'foundation' of ethics: because of it, the ethical subject can have no peace of mind -- its only certainty is uncertainty. Bauman explains this point as follows:
What makes the moral self is the urge to do, not the knowledge of what is to be done; the unfulfilled task, not the duty correctly performed. . . . This uncertainty with no exit is precisely the foundation of morality. One recognizes morality by its gnawing sense of unfulfilledness, by its endemic dissatisfaction with itself. The moral self is a self always haunted by the suspicion that it is not moral enough. (1993: 80)
'Mastery' by the other thus has as its corollary ethical anxiety. Responsibility is radically anti-teleological in that it is never completed, that is, can never be a fait accompli. It is characterised by 'attentionality', a waiting for the other "to exercise her right to command, the right which no commands already given and obeyed can diminish" (Bauman, 1993: 88). In my discussion of "Narrative", I argued that Jacobus Coetzee's wish to construct the Namaquas as a force testifies to his desire to evade ethical responsibility. I pointed out that Bauman maintains that the sheer unconditionality and infinitude of the self's responsibility for the other entails that the temptation to shirk responsibility is a part of being responsible. That is, "The temptation to ask 'Am I my brother's keeper?' is inscribed in being one" (Bauman, 1993: 88). Now, like Jacobus Coetzee in "Narrative", the Dostoevsky character in Master is not only tempted to ask this question, he succumbs to the temptation. Earlier in this chapter, I demonstrated that, for Levinas, Cain's question can only have meaning if it is assumed that the subject is structured in terms of the ontological solitude of the 'I am I', that is, care for self. It is thus significant that, in the context of asking this question, Dostoevsky experiences a "terrible hopelessness" which stems from "a growing certainty that he will never again go out in the night 328 to answer a dog's call, that an opportunity for leaving himself as he is behind and becoming what he might yet be has passed" (1994: 82). At this point, as I have shown, Coetzee has this character reflect on the structure of his selfhood in terms with strongly Levinasian overtones: 'I am I . . . manacled to myself till the day I die'. It is insightful to compare this reflection with Levinas's following observation: "Substitution frees the subject from ennui, that is, from the enchainment to itself, where the ego suffocates in itself due to the tautological way of identity . . ." (1981: 124). Since, however, the ethical relation is radically 'anterior' and excessive, responsibility is always 'present' and limitless, even in its 'absence'. For this reason, it cannot be consigned to the past as a missed opportunity, no more than it can be regarded as ever having been completed. Thus Dostoevsky is aware, "even in the instant of closing the door upon himself", that "there is still a chance to return to the alley, unchain the dog" (1994: 82). And, as he returns to his room, thinking that "he will not save the dog, not this night nor even the next night, if there is to be a next night" (1994: 83), he is provided with yet another 'chance' in the form of his encounter with Ivanov disguised as a beggar. Though he takes this "stranger" home, offers him his bed, and gives him his own food, he does so conditionally and therefore ungenerously, in a manner which is reminiscent of Mrs Curren's grudging charity to Vercueil in the early stages of their relationship. Thus, once Ivanov has left, Dostoevsky finds it "a relief to be rid of him" (1994: 90). Moreover, the reason he has taken him in is that he is 'gambling' that Ivanov might bear a sign from Pavel (1994: 83-85). For the same reason, he has earlier not taken in the dog: "He is waiting for a sign, and he is betting . . . that the dog is not the sign, is not a sign at all, is just a dog among many dogs howling in the night" (1994: 83). Like Mrs Curren, he must learn that the "wager" should be "on trust" (1990: 119), which constitutes "Betting on all the numbers" (1994: 84). By 'gambling' selectively and conditionally, he evades the ethical imperative of responsibility for all that is implicit in the Dostoevskian 329 dictum of guilt 'before everyone for everyone'. It is to this dictum that the novel alludes in this character's response to his own question, "must every beggar then be treated as a prodigal son, embraced, welcomed into the home, feasted?": "Yes, that is what Pascal would say: bet on everyone, every beggar, every mangy dog; only thus will you be sure that the One, the true son, the thief in the night, will not slip through the net" (1994: 84). What is required is a leap of trust, as opposed to faith.
5.4.4 Master: Text
The novel's focus on the impact of Dostoevsky's ultimate failure to love on his literary production becomes evident in the final chapter in which this character eventually starts writing. In the preamble to the chapter, Dostoevsky tells Anna Sergeyevna that he would like to have a child with her (1994: 224). After they have engaged in sexual intercourse, she asks him whether their 'love-making' "was meant to bring about the birth of the saviour" (1994: 225). 16 Dostoevsky then reflects that for Pavel the 'child' would be "no saviour but a pretender, a usurper, a sly little devil clothed in chubby baby-flesh" (1994: 226). When they again have sex, as my discussion has shown, Anna Sergeyevna whispers the word 'devil' as she nears her climax. Since writing, inspiration by the other or by history, demon-possession, exorcism, sex and child-bearing are all metaphorically linked in the novel, it follows that these scenes form part of the novel's meta-representational debate on the possibility or impossibility of fiction's transcendence of history. If Dostoevsky has been inspired by the other, the text which he writes in the last chapter will transcend history. In terms of the identification of self with text in the novel, it will perform the Dostoevsky-figure's generous effacement and substitution of self before and for the other. And, as a result of this 'dehiscent' movement, it will renew the filial affiliation. Accordingly, it will be the means by which Dostoevsky becomes an ethical subject and, as an epiphenomenon of this process, 'saves' himself. Furthermore, it will attempt to 330 engage the reader in an ethical relation and could therefore be the means through which the latter 'saves' him/herself. On the other hand, if.the text is a product of Dostoevsky's situatedness in history and therefore his failure to love, it will supplement history, reproduce its 'deformed' relations, and so contribute to the 'deformation' of the reader. In the final chapter, shortly before Dostoevsky commences writing, he is described as follows: "He is sick and he knows the name of his sickness. Nechaev, voice of the age, calls it vengefulness, but a truer name, less grand, would be resentment" (1994: 234). Given the opposition in the novel between love and 'vengefulness', and the conjunction in this passage of the latter with the imagery of sickness which, in turn, invokes the analogue of the Gadarene swine, it is clear that this description indicates that Dostoevsky has been unable to transcend history and is a part of the 'sickness' of Russia. Besides, by making this character go on to write a story which is recognisably derived from the historical Dostoevsky's The Devils, Coetzee, as I have already argued, constructs an equation between Dostoevsky's novel and the exorcised spirits in the tale of the Gadarene swine. The implication is that the text supplements history: it too is "poisoned" (1994: 111) by the 'sickness' of 'vengefulness' or 'resentment'. Not a 'saviour' but a 'devil' is therefore 'born'. By presenting his novel as the pre-text of The Devils, Coetzee contrives to make his reader evaluate the historical Dostoevsky's novel in terms of the fictional Dostoevsky's relationship with the nihilists in Master. Against this background The Devils has to be seen as a continuation of its author's repudiation of Sergei Nechaev and the other nihilists. So construed, The Devils is a product of a failure to love. In the latter novel, the historical Dostoevsky evades precisely that responsibility which is articulated by his own dictum concerning the 'singularity' of the individual's guilt before and for everyone. Indeed, as Carr contends, this novel is a transparent attempt at demonstrating "the fundamental identity of moral evil and political nihilism" (1932: 175) and, it may be added, as a 331 result of this identification, Dostoevsky violently masters the nihilists. Instead of being informed by a responsibility which invests the other with authority, the novel forecloses on it. It is significant, in this regard, that the historical Dostoevsky's condemnation of the revolutionaries is couched in terms of the dyadic structure of conventional, western, Judeo-Christian morality. Clearly, the oppositions of God/Devil, heaven/hell, elect/reprobate, Christian/heathen, good/evil, right/wrong and, ultimately, subject/object which inform his diabolisation of the nihilists, assist in legitimising, and indeed in placing on a metaphysical plane, those relations of contestation which 'contaminate' his society. Furthermore, they facilitate the process through which the autonomous subject defines the other by integrating it as an object into its interpretive framework, and thus preclude the very possibility of responsibility, that is, the possibility of forging an 'unrelating relation' with the other. The final chapter of Master quite explicitly depicts The Devils as a product of entrapment in the 'I am I' by linking the character Dostoevsky's act of writing with the successive scenes in which he abnegates responsibility for the dog, .the beggar/Ivanov, Sergei Nechaev and, finally, Pavel himself. Before he starts writing, Dostoevsky is confronted by his image in the mirror, an image which is described in terms which evoke the Levinasian other, that is, as resembling a "stranger" who is unknowable and "excessive" (1994: 238, 236). The description of the image as being veiled (1994: 236, 237) and obscured by a "cloak of darkness" (1994: 238) also evokes Blanchot's Eurydice and the 'other night' and, accordingly, this thinker's argument on the creative writer's desire for the other (see Blanchot, 1982: 171-173). Tellingly, the image of the thief in the night which first appears in the scenes that deal with the dog and the beggar now recurs: "He has not forgotten the thief in the night. If he is to be saved, it will be by the thief in the night, for whom he must unwaveringly be on watch. Yet the thief will not come till the householder has forgotten him and fallen asleep" (1994: 236). Moreover, in pondering the excessive nature of the 332 "phantasm", its unknowability, he reflects as follows: "What is the name? Is it Ivanov? Is this Ivanov come back, Ivanov the obscure, the forgotten? What was Ivanov's true name? Or is it Pavel?" (1994: 237). A little later he speculates that "the name that is dark to him" might be "the name of the other boy, the one he repudiates: Nechaev" (1994: 238). Ultimately, in its depiction of his relationship to the 'phantasm', the scene shows Dostoevsky repeating, in the process of writing, his earlier evasions of responsibility for the other. At first, though, his following reflections on the question of authority suggest that he has a choice between authoring and being authored:
This presence, so grey and without feature -- is this what he must father, give blood to, flesh, life? Or does he misunderstand, and has he misunderstood from the beginning? Is he required, rather, to put aside all that he himself is, all he has become, down to his very features, and become as a babe again? Is the thing before him the one that does the fathering, and must he give himself to being fathered by it? (1994: 240 - 241)
The direct reference to the 'giving of self' in this passage evokes the Levinasian notion of the generous substitution of self for other and, as is suggested by the use of 'fathering' as a metaphor for mastery, the self, through this process of substitution, becomes responsible for the other and so bestows on it authority. Initially, at least, Dostoevsky resolves to substitute himself for the 'phantasm' who, in an allusion to Orpheus's descent into the Underworld, is now termed a "shade": "He will put aside everything. Following this shade he will go naked as a babe into the jaws of hell" (1994: 241). The fact that he takes up his pen and begins to write after this ostensible 'choice' indicates that this harrowing of hell will be accomplished by means of writing. Through being described in terms of the Orphic descent, writing is here apparently depicted as a 'movement of infinition' which involves 'putting aside everything' and, as is suggested by the image of the infant, a bestowal of authority on the other. In this conception, writing 333 is an 'ethical work', an act of love. The Dostoevsky character's portrayal of reading, which I cited earlier, namely that it 'is giving yourself up, not holding yourself at a distance and jeering', is equally true then of the writing process. Very significantly, though, it finally transpires that Dostoevsky's act of writing is not an act of love through which the filial bond is restored, but a "betrayal" of "everyone" (1994: 250). It would therefore seem that, in Master, Coetzee rehearses Blanchot's argument on the inevitability of Orpheus's betrayal of the 'other night', which is also a betrayal of Eurydice, the 'work' and himself (see Blanchot, 1982: 174). Interestingly, Coetzee quite specifically relates this 'betrayal' of, rather than responsibility born of limitless guilt for, 'everyone' to a failure to love in the novel: "But there is no taste at all in his mouth, just as there is no weight on his heart. His heart, in fact, feels quite empty" (my emphasis, 1994: 250). The point of these allusions to the absence of the 'burden' of love is that such responsibility for the other would have precluded the attempt at 'resurrecting' it, at making manifest its radical alterity. To attempt to 'resurrect' Eurydice, that is, to give the other 'form, shape, and reality', is precisely an attempt at mastering and possessing her by returning with her, in her nocturnal aspect, to the light of day -- to that which is not only antithetical to her but which denies her and is the very condition of her impossibility. What motivates the desire to 'resurrect', to make manifest that which is wholly other, is therefore not love's 'movement of infinition' but mastery's 'move of Being'. There is, however, another implication to Coetzee's use of the Orpheus myth in Master, namely that it is through language that Dostoevsky discards the 'burden' of love for the other and, in the process, fathers instead of being fathered. The fact that this character, after having resolved to 'give himself' to the other, seemingly inadvertently asserts author-ity by exercising language, .indicates that his failure to love is, to some extent, related to issues of language and representation. In terms of the analogy between authorship and fatherhood, he asserts author- 334 ity in taking up the pen. In this novel, as in the earlier ones, Coetzee therefore emphasises the role played by language in mastering alterity. For instance, before he starts writing, Dostoevsky intuits that the reason he cannot find a 'name' for the 'phantasm' may be "because the figure is indifferent to all names, all words, anything that might be said about it" (1994: 238). By implication, any attempt to 'know' and represent it through language would simply render it unknown. Such a representation would therefore always misrepresent, that is, distort or 'deform' the unrepresentable. Being 'excessive', the 'phantasm' would be betrayed by but would also escape any attempt at adequate representation through the conceptual resources of language. The novel's use of the Orpheus myth as an analogy for the act of writing exposes the extent to which language strives violently to reduce that which is wholly other to its conceptual field. In an allusion to Orpheus, Dostoevsky reflects that he is "called to be" a "Poet, lyre-player, enchanter, lord of resurrection", whose task it is "to gather the hoard, put together the scattered parts" (my emphasis, 1994: 152). Earlier, Anna Sergeyevna describes him as "an artist, a master" and states that it is he who must "bring" Pavel "back to life" (1994: 140), upon which Dostoevsky reflects on the strangeness of the term "Master of life" (1994: 140-141). In both these passages, the 'giving of life' or representation is depicted as a gesture of power which is antithetical to the eschewal of mastery that is inscribed in love's generous movement of infinition. By inference, then, the text argues that language, and the representational protocols which are grounded in it, can never 'embody' the other. Accordingly, the attempt to 'give' the other 'blood', 'flesh, life' or, in Blanchot's words, 'form, shape, and reality', has always already failed before it commences. That is, the desire to approach the other in language is already the inevitability of the attempt to 'resurrect' it, that is, the attempt to return with it to the order of the same. In this regard, it will be remembered that, for Blanchot, Orpheus's 'work' consists not only in 'descending into the depths', but 335 also in returning with Eurydice to the 'light of the day'. The 'movement' towards the other here involved is therefore always already one of .'Being' rather than 'infinition'. If the desire to resurrect Eurydice is ultimately a fact of language, the question which arises is, is it possible to suspend the recuperative movement which this medium inscribes in the novel? In other words, is it possible to secure in language -- a medium which asserts authority irrespective of the individual writer's intention -- that dissymmetry which is necessary if the other is to be approached? My question alludes to Blanchot's point that power may only enter the domain of the Underworld, of the 'other night', by means of the 'detour' of 'looking away' (1982: 171). Phrased in terms of the Orpheus myth, then, this question might be constructed as follows: is it possible to contrive in language that abnegation of power which enables the deliberate blindness of the 'detour'? As I proceed, it will become clear that this question leads to another: is language or writing able to accommodate the 'dehiscence' of love? By means of a contrast between lyre and language, Master draws attention to the issues at stake in these questions. In its use of the myth of Orpheus as an analogue for Dostoevsky's attempt to represent the other, it carefully points out that Dostoevsky is not a lyre-player, that his artistic medium is language, not music. The importance of this distinction rests in the fact that the lyre was the instrument with which Orpheus charmed the gods of the Underworld (see Ovid, 1955: 234 - 235). It must also be remembered that, although Orpheus eventually failed to resurrect Eurydice, the lyre's music of love is depicted as having extracted from the gods the concession of the averted gaze, that is, the disavowal of power which makes it possible for Orpheus to approach Eurydice. Apart from the passage in Master in which Orpheus is described as using words in his attempt to resurrect Eurydice (1994: 5), the distinction in the novel between lyre and language is further evident in Dostoevsky's reflection that he will have to find 'the true words' with which to articulate the plea of the boy from 'under the waters', namely, 'Sing to me, dear father!'. At the very least, this 336 pointed contrast implies that as a result of the 'move of Being' which it inscribes, it may be impossible to approach the other in language. This suggestion is further implicit in the link between lyre and language that is formed by the image of the tortoise/turtle. Traditionally, the sound-chest of the lyre is believed to have been made from the shell of the tortoise, a belief still evident in one of the names for the lyre used by Greek authors, that is, chelys, which means tortoise (see Baines, 1983: 1106). Given this link, it must be deemed significant that. in Master the tortoise/turtle is associated with writing, a paucity of love, and mastery. After having stated that he is 'called to be' a 'lyre-player' and 'lord of resurrection', Dostoevsky questions the accuracy of this characterisation: "And the truth? Stiff shoulders humped over the writing table, and the ache of a heart slow to move. A tortoise heart" (1994: 152-153). This physical resemblance of the writer engaged in writing to a tortoise is again invoked in the last chapter when, shortly after a recurrence of the tortoise/turtle motif (1994: 235), Dostoevsky "catches a quick glimpse of himself hunched over the table" (1994: 236). The association of the tortoise/turtle with an atrophied ability to love suggests that, unlike the 'dehiscence' of the lyre's music of love, writing might prove incapable of accommodating the disavowal of power that establishes the asymmetrical relationship which permits Orpheus to approach Eurydice. The implication of Coetzee's suggestive use of the Orpheus myth as an analogue for writing thus seems to be that language is antipathetic to otherness and that any attempt at approaching the other through language will inevitably involve approaching it from a position of power and will therefore, equally inevitably, attempt to elide its difference and so betray and 'lose' it. Owing to its grounding in language, writing would thus appear to be incapable of resisting adequate representation and thereby installing a 'movement of infinition' which bestows authority on the other. It is for this reason, then, that Dostoevsky fails to renounce author-ity by substituting himself for the other in his 337 writing. The desire to approach Eurydice in language is always already the desire to resurrect her. This point also seems to be made in the novel by Dostoevsky's dream in which, in the form of a turtle, he attempts to re-establish contact with Pavel:
As he swims he sometimes opens his mouth and gives what he thinks of as a cry or call. With each cry or call water enters his mouth; each syllable is replaced by a syllable of water. He grows more and more ponderous, till his breastbone is brushing the silt of the river- bed. Pavel is lying on his back. His eyes are closed. His hair, wafted by the current, is as soft as a baby's. From his turtle-throat he gives a last cry, which seems to him more like a bark, and plunges toward the boy. He wants to kiss the face; but when he touches his hard lips to it, he is not sure he is not biting. (my emphasis, 1994: 18)
The very attempt at restoring the filial bond through writing seems destined to violate it. Such a conclusion would, however, elide the sheer ambivalence of the novel's allusive depiction of the act of writing. In the above passage, for instance, it is simply not clear whether the Dostoevsky character bites or kisses Pavel's face, that is, violates or responds lovingly and therefore responsibly towards the other. Moreover, it should be noted that the tortoise/turtle motif certainly does not construct an absolute opposition between writing and the lyre's music of love. Although the tortoise symbolises a 'slow' heart, its association with both lyre and writing also clearly points to an affinity between them. The ambivalence of this image thus indicates that the novel still entertains the possibility, albeit remote, that writing may be able to restore the filial affiliation. Perhaps, after all, Coetzee does not share Blanchot's conviction concerning the inevitability of the betrayals engendered by the writer's approach of the 'other night'. In order to trace this suggestion of a responsible novelistic response to the other, it is necessary to consider the text's self-reflexive depiction of the corruptive influence of a supplementary mode of writing on 338 the reader.
5.4.4.1 Reading as Corruption
In the context of this meta-representational debate on the violation of the filial relation, it is fitting that the allusion to The Devils in the story written by the Dostoevsky character in the closing pages of Master is formed by a reconstruction of Stavrogin's confession: an episode that concerns the corruption of a child and which, although originally suppressed (see De Jong, 1995), is now usually included as an appendix to the historical Dostoevsky's novel (see 1971: 671-704). This embedded narrative extends the meta-representational argument in Master to include the reader, as becomes apparent upon an examination of the intratextual parallels which the narrative forms with Dostoevsky's story to Matryona about Pavel's self-substituting generosity towards Maria Lebyatkin (1994: 72-74), and his later idea for a chapter of a novel in which the protagonist uses a story to seduce the young daughter of his mistress (1994: 134). 17 The intratextual parallels not only expose the Dostoevsky character's transformation of a story about generosity into, in Watson's words, "an episode of gratuitous cruelty" (1994: 53), but also point to the impact of this revised narrative on its reader in the novel, namely Matryona. Significantly, in this regard, Dostoevsky leaves the pages containing the story "open on the table" (1994: 249) where Matryona is likely to find and read them. His reference to the story as "an assault on the innocence of a child" thus equates the betrayal of Pavel with the anticipated effect of the story on Matryona (1994: 249). Despite this reference to an assault on innocence, however, the novel's imagery of sickness has earlier made it clear that Dostoevsky's text's corruption of Matryona's innocence will, at most, be secondary, or supplementary, as it has already been corrupted by her political affiliations with the nihilists ands Dostoevsky himself in the realm of history (see 1994: 113, 131, 132, 135,.138, 165-168, 173, and particularly 213). In fact, then, the story will not so much "corrupt a child" as collaborate 339 in the corruption of a child (1994: 249). By implication, Dostoevsky, the writer, who has accused Sergei Nechaev, the political activist, of putting Matryona to "abominable uses" (1994: 220), is no better than Nechaev and, indeed, may be described as an accessory after the fact." The point of the embedded narrative is therefore directly related to Coetzee's distinction between novels which supplement history and those which rival it. It indicates that the former mode of writing assists in the brutalisation of the reader, that is, in the 'deformation' of the ethical relation. This argument on the impact on the reader of a literature which supplements the contestatory relations in history is also developed by Coetzee's use of the biblical analogue of the tale of the Gadarene swine. If, as I have shown, The Devils is figured in Coetzee's novel as the spirits which are exorcised from the possessed Dostoevsky, it follows that the readers within whom copies of this novel can be said to take up residence correspond to the swine in the biblical tale. The analogy here between reader and swine points to the ability of literature which supplements history to brutalise the individual and thereby sanction his/her possession by history. In producing a text which forecloses on Sergei Nechaev and the nihilists, the historical Dostoevsky reproduces history's stunted relations and, in so doing, abnegates his responsibility for the reader. Coetzee's point, here, is directly related to the depiction in Age of Iron of the writer's refusal to supplement history as an 'assumption' of responsibility for the reader. Towards the end, Master thus becomes a sustained, self- reflexive examination of the impact on the reader of the irresponsible novelistic response to the other. The final development in this examination is the novel's identification of the reader with Pavel. It will be remembered that the Gadarene swine, once possessed by the devils, hurl themselves from a cliff. The extension of the story of the Gadarene swine to the reader of The Devils thus identifies him/her with Dostoevsky's stepson who was either pushed or fell from the shot tower in Petersburg. With this identification, the concluding irony of 340 the novel becomes clear: namely that Dostoevsky -- who, once possessed by the 'spirit of vengefulness', becomes increasingly involved in an.investigation aimed at establishing whether Pavel's death is due to suicide or execution by the police or revolutionaries -- is himself responsible for his stepson's demise. His betrayal of the reader is a betrayal of the filial relation.
5.5 The Tension Between Implication and Transcendence in Age of Iron and Master
There lies a danger in drawing too absolute a distinction between Age of Iron and Master on the grounds of the fact that the former deals with the growth of an ability to love while the latter deals with a failure to love. Both texts treat the question of novelistic responsibility for the other. In this regard, it is important to note that Master is not about its own abnegation of responsibility. It focuses on Dostoevsky's betrayal of the other in writing and it is my contention that it is precisely by doing so that it is able to contrive that dissymmetry which permits it to approach the other. By means of this indirect approach which is asymmetrical in its refusal to attempt to represent, and so master, the other, it 'intimates' through 'indication' -- that is, by 'looking away', by declining to attempt to give 'form, shape, and reality' to -- that which exceeds representation. Accordingly, Master may be regarded as a "witness of the Infinite" Mevinas, 1981: 146). In its Levinasian sense, the word 'witness' implies a "unique" relation which escapes the structures of subject-object, noesis-noema, cause-effect, past- present, signifier-signified. So, as 'witness of the Infinite', the novel "does not thematize what it bears witness of" (Levinas, 1981: 146). This refusal to represent the other is a responsible response to the reader, a refusal to collude in his/her 'deformation' by the structures of power in his/her society and, instead, an attempt at inspiring him/her from a source outside history. Through this strategy of excession, Coetzee negotiates, 341 without solving, the problem of representation which Master raises by means of its allusions to Blanchot's interpretation of the Orpheus myth, that is, the obstacle constituted by language's aversion to alterity for an other-directed mode of writing. By pointing out that language and representational strategies are antipathetic to alterity, Master reveals that it does not seek to represent, embody, 'resurrect', and so father and master, the other. In representing the betrayal of the writer's attempt to approach the other by the 'resurrection' or return to the order of the same that is always already implicit in the medium and representational protocols of the novel, this text attempts to 'intimate' the other's occluded existence. It endeavours to acknowledge it in its unknowability. The approach of the other that is here involved is one in which the 'looking away' is an end in itself. It does not become the 'gaze' because it is characterised by a 'dehiscent' movement of infinition' from same to other. Importantly, the dissymmetry of the approach that is enabled by this movement is grounded in a disavowal of power that invests the other with an ethical authority which, in turn, is the condition of impossibility for violence. The approach thus negotiated is therefore not ultimately and inevitably informed by the desire to resurrect the other and thereby return with it to the order of the same. The implication, then, is that the only way in which the filial relation may be restored is by not attempting to resurrect the other and so return with it to the 'light of day'. Indeed, as I indicated in my introduction, this is the implication of the juxtaposition in Age of Iron of Orpheus's harrowing of the Underworld with that of Aeneas. The latter re-establishes the filial bond without returning to the 'light of day' with Anchises. His is a 'movement of infinition' and is therefore, properly speaking, not a harrowing at all. The tension generated by the coexistence of these two paradigms in Age of Iron points to Coetzee's renegotiation of the Orpheus myth in this novel. Despite the absence of the Aeneas story, it is precisely such a renegotiation -- consisting in the ateleology of a refusal to return with the other to the order of the same -- that one also 342 finds in Master. As with Levinas's distinction between the story of Ulysses and that of Abraham, the issue that is here at stake is an approach .of the other which invests it with an ethical authority that renders violence impossible. In the meta-representational debate which he stages in Master by means of the Orpheus myth, Coetzee thus seems to suggest that, in imparting a sense of the unrepresentable, the novel may be able to approach the other. Contrary to the tentative conclusion which I reached in my discussion of the tortoise/turtle motif in the preceding section of this chapter, then, writing is capable of love -- albeit in only an attenuated, even vestigial, form. Importantly, upon re-evaluation, the novel's image of writing, namely the tortoise/turtle motif, seems not to negate but to allude to this possibility. After all, the reference to the writer's 'tortoise heart', which is 'slow to move', does not finally suggest that it is impossible to inflect writing with the trace of love but merely that this mode of communication is ill-equipped to install love's 'dehiscence'. In this regard, the image makes the same point as Mrs Curren's reference, in Age of Iron, to an attenuated, liminal love that can only 'flicker and tremble' like 'St Elmo's fire' in the words of her letter, but which is nevertheless there. It would therefore seem that, despite the fact that the one appears to suggest the possibility and the other the impossibility of initiating a movement of love in writing, both Age of Iron and Master allude to the ability of the novel to bear the trace of love. The question which remains, though, is whether or not the trace of love is strong enough to sustain a 'movement of infinition'. Significantly, neither of these novels celebrates the possibility that the novel may be made 'non-indifferent' to the other. Instead, like Foe, they evince an ontogenetic anxiety which is generated by a self-reflexive awareness that the strategy of excession by which they negotiate language's antipathy to alterity is grounded in language and therefore in the violent mediation of otherness. Owing to their paradoxical dependence on violence for ethical transcendence, that is, on 343 strategies which rely on language, there is always a strong possibility that the novels will fail to establish a responsible relation between the reader and the other and thus fail to perform the ethical. In Master, the resultant ontogenetic anxiety is self-evident in Dostoevsky's failure to re-establish the filial bond. In Age of Iron, the apparently more optimistic of the two novels, it is evident in the fact that, as Gallagher argues, this novel presents itself as a letter which has to be conveyed to its reader by an unreliable inebriate, Vercueil, and thus advertises the prospect that the words which form it "may remain dead leaves" and "never even find an audience" (1991: 211). 19 Age of Iron therefore seriously questions its ability to ensure that the reader receives its gift of love. In this regard, it is significant that its ontogenetic anxiety directs the reader's attention to its linguistic medium and representational protocols. For instance, in raising the matter of the text's reception, Mrs Curren refers to "These papers, these words that either you read now or else will never read. Will they reach you? Have they reached you?" (1990: 28). Quite simply, the problem which the novel here articulates is that, while the relationship which it seeks to establish with the reader is one of sensible proximity, proximity presupposes immediacy. So, by foregrounding its medium, the text alludes to the inevitable difficulties attendant on a novelistic strategy which requires that the text's medium should not mediate that whose existence it seeks to acknowledge. The ontogenetic anxiety in Age of Iron is also strongly apparent in its self-reflexive obsession with the politics of representation. If the reader is to respond to that which the text 'intimates', s/he will have to detect that its apparent representations of the other in the form of Vercueil, Florence, Bheki, Beauty, Hope and 'John' are presented as inevitable misrepresentations. In this regard, it is noteworthy that these depictions all proceed from the point of view of Mrs Curren who, in discussing her initial perception of Vercueil with him, states that "We half perceive but we also half create" (1990: 153). Besides, she further questions the authority of her account by 344 calling attention to the fact that she is not sure of some of these characters' actual names (see 1990: 34, 35, 40, 84, 93, 134, 135, 155). Clearly, in its negotiation of the violence of representation, the novel is compelled to represent in order to show that it does not attempt to represent the other. Only through representing is the text able to undermine and refuse representation and thereby point to the radical unknowability of that which is other, its quality of excession. The strong anxiety engendered by this reliance on a procedure which is implicated in violence in order to transcend violence is evident in the following passage, in which the narrator implores her daughter, the internal reader, to distrust her words and representations:
I tell you the story of this morning mindful that the storyteller, from her office, claims the place of right. It is through my eyes that you see; the voice that speaks in your head is mine. Through me alone do you find yourself here on these desolate flats, smell the smoke in the air, see the bodies of the dead, hear the weeping, shiver in the rain. It is my thoughts that you think, my despair that you feel . . . To me your sympathies flow; your heart beats with mine. Now, my child, flesh of my flesh, my best self, I ask you to draw back. I tell you this story not so that you will feel for me but so that you will learn how things are. It would be easier for you, I know, if the story came from someone else, if it were a stranger's voice sounding in your ear. But the fact is, there is no one else. I am the only one. I am the one writing: I, I. So I ask you: attend to the writing, not to me. If lies and pleas and excuses weave among the words, listen for them. Do not pass them over, do not forgive them easily. Read all, even this adjuration, with a cold eye. (1990: 95-96)
Geertsema detects here an ironic tension between an assertion and disavowal of authorial authority (1997: 96-97). However, I read the passage as an articulation of the fear that the reader will repeat the violence of representation by responding to the representation and not to that which it inevitably elides. 2° ih order not to betray the other, the reader must read against what the text represents. Moreover, if s/he does respond to the representation, s/he will, of course, be violated by its 345 supplementation of history. The passage thus constitutes an admission that the novel can only sustain its 'movement of infinition' by.prompting the reader to respond to that which it is unable to represent. For this reason, Age of Iron attempts to elicit distrust, not trust, by exposing the way in which its protocols routinely reduce the other. If s/he is not to be violated by them, the reader must view the novel's representations with suspicion. S/he must distrust the mediacy, that is, the words and representations of Mrs Curren, which, of course, is that of Coetzee. Only by responding with a 'cold eye', that is, ungratefully, to Coetzee's writing will a generous response to the otherness which the text 'intimates' become possible. Ingratitude and distrust, then, may enable the generosity and trust through which the novel's 'movement of infinition' may be sustained. That is, they may enable a proximate relation to the other. The novel's ontogenetic anxiety thus lays bare the problems of language and representation which may prevent the novel from performing the ethical in its relation with the reader. It acknowledges that Coetzee requires of a medium and form to perform that for which they are least qualified. The question which now presents itself is, quite simply, why, given this anxiety, even scepticism, the writer continues to write. And the answer which the novel provides to this implied question is contained in its contemplation of trust. Although Age of Iron's self-reflexive articulation of ontogenetic anxiety is very similar to that of Foe, it develops the meta-representational debate conducted by this trope by introducing to it the notion of trust. This development is apparent in the implicit analogy between Vercueil, the bearer of the letter in which Mrs Curren gives her self to her daughter, and the novel, the bearer of Coetzee's gift of self to the reader. In discussing Vercueil's suitability, or lack thereof, as bearer of this gift, Mrs Curren comments as follows: "Because I cannot trust Vercueil I must trust him" (1990: 119). A little later, she continues this "cruciform logic" (1990: 125): "I give my life to Vercueil to carry over. I trust Vercueil because I do not trust Vercueil" 346 (1990: 120). Paradoxically, it is Vercueil's sheer unsuitability for the task, the fact that he is "No Odysseus, no Hermes, perhaps not even a messenger. • A circler-around. A ditherer" (1990: 128), which makes him 'worthy' of Mrs Curren's trust. Attridge explains this point cogently:
Trust is a relation to the future that is based on no rational grounds; to entrust a task to someone in the certainty that it will be done is not to trust, but merely to act on the basis of advance knowledge; trust, like a pure decision, is born of uncertainty and uncertainty alone. It fully emerges only in the case of someone who, like Vercueil, cannot be trusted even to carry out the most trivial of tasks. (1994: 64-65)
In terms of the analogy between Vercueil and the novel, Coetzee seems to be arguing that, because of its unsuitability for the task with which it has been entrusted, that is, because, in Attridge's description of Vercueil, it is "the least appropriate repository for anyone's trust" (1994: 62), the novel must be trusted. The point is that if the writer is to give himself to the reader, he can only do so by trusting the form of the novel which 'embodies' this gift. He must trust that the novel and its medium may be made to bear the 'inflection' produced by the excess of the other. In explicating this argument, I have used the conditional tense. However, it should be kept in mind that trusting the novel is an aspect of the 'singularity' of the writer's responsibility for the reader and that this responsibility constitutes an ethical imperative. He and only he can be responsible for the reader. Because he is the reader's 'keeper', he must entrust the novel and its medium with his self. In discussing the notion of trust, I have maintained that the ontogenetic anxiety in this novel cannot simply be explained in terms of the tired, postmodernist trope of self-subversion through which the text draws attention to the conditions of its own impossibility. While the novel is not confident about its ability to expire and so inspire the reader with the 'breath of transcendence', it trusts that it may do so. The important point here is that the novel self-reflexively explains its argument for 347 transcendence in ethical terms: trust is a modality of charity and signifies the writer's assumption of responsibility for the reader in the act of writing. • Ultimately, then, the issue at stake is not simply theoretical, but deeply ethical. By self- reflexively portraying the problem of language and form in terms of the 'priority' of ethics, the novel suspends the infinite regression of scepticism that is implied by its ontogenetic anxiety and which threatens to preclude an assumption of responsibility for the reader. 21
5.6 Conclusion
The form of transcendence projected in Age of Iron and Master, as in Coetzee's earlier fiction, is one that is dependent on implication. Indeed, the condition for this transcendence is the 'unrelating relation' to an otherness that is 'intimated' and which is characterised by a radical exteriority that precludes integration into the order of the same. However, through attempting to place the reader in a relation to this alterity which is not premised on adequation, the texts hope to interrupt his/her relations in the domain of the political. They hope to ensure that these will be conducted against the background of infinity and that the reader will henceforth be bound to the other person 'in the trace of transcendence'. So, while the subject cannot permanently transcend its implication in culture, if the texts do manage to secure such a mediation of the political by the ethical, they will have assisted in the changing of the conditions of that implication. Although the subject is still in-the-world, the world may be changed or, in ethical terms, 'justified'. It is for this reason that the novels reject history as an a priori structure. As I have maintained, the only possibility for ethics rests in its 'primacy'. By positioning themselves relative to a 'primordial' ethical relation and structure of subjectivity, the novels assert this 'priority' and create the conditions which render possible their mediation of history. 348 Through this 'prioritisation' of the ethical relative to the political, they construct for themselves a particular role in society: that of a 'witness of the Infinite', a means through which society may be constantly interrupted by that which transcends totality. If the texts are able to relate the reader to the other, the ensuing non-totalisable relation will counter attempts at totalising the social domain. My argument has been that the endeavour in Age of Iron and Master to subordinate the reader's cognition to proximity must be seen in the context of this desire to 'justify' society. I have also maintained that both novels evince an ontogenetic anxiety verging on scepticism about their ability to achieve this end and that this anxiety is related to language's role as medium for thematisation and knowledge. Although this anxiety is never displaced by confidence, I have demonstrated that Age of Iron's meditation on trust suggests that the writer, in order to exercise his 'singular' responsibility for the reader, must trust that that which cannot be trusted may be made 'non-indifferent' to the other. To this end, the novels make use of strategies of excession and infinition aimed at foregrounding the 'inflection' that the other's infinite surplus produces in their representations. 349 5.7 Notes
In terms of interpretive detail, my readings of Age of Iron and The Master of Petersburg in this chapter correspond to some extent with those in two of my previously published articles (1993; 1996b). The conclusions which I draw in the present discussion are, however, significantly different.
Hereafter, I shall use the abbreviation Master to refer to Coetzee's latter novel. For a contrasting perspective, see Macaskill and Colleran (1992a: 67-84). It should be added that this suggestion of an 'anterior' mode of being is strengthened by the fact that Coetzee's use of the word 'intimations' in this passage alludes to Wordsworth's evocation of a 'prior' subjectivity in "Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood". Later in this chapter, I shall show that Vercueil does eventually 'learn' from Mrs Curren. In Coetzee's novel, then, the learning process is not one-sided. The paradox, of course, is that Mrs Curren saves herself by learning not to care for herself but for the other. On the surface, it would thus appear that the movement of love is not entirely 'dehiscent'. The point, though, is that in this conception of love, 'care' of self only results from being careful of other and not of self. It is not a remuneration or return. In an important sense, 'care' of self is and can only ever be care of the other rather than the inverse which is implied in the Levitican injunction to "Love thy neighbour as thyself" (Lev. 19: 18). The priority is with the other, not self, and love of neighbour may never be integrated into love of self. The preoccupation with redeeming self in Age and saving self in Master should be read in the context of this seeming paradox. For an important discussion of these issues, see Llewelyn (1991: 5- 26). Compare the metaphorical function of the farmhouse in Coetzee's Michael K. Implicit in Mrs Curren's resistance here is an important point: namely that the ethical subject may again fall asleep and so return to the 'I am I'. In this regard, Bauman points out the following: "There is nothing necessary in being moral. Being moral is a chance which may be taken \ip; yet it may be also, and as easily, forfeited" (1993: 76 - 77). In Age of Iron, Mrs Curren's constant struggle to remain 'awake' foregrounds the uncertain and tenuous nature of this 'awakening' (see also 1990: 109, 117, 137). 350
9. Compare Attwell's argument that the ethicality of Age of Iron emerges from the narrator's disavowal of authority (1993: 121-122). 10 For a contrasting reading of this notion of a 'mutual election', see Huggan's contention that "Vercueil and Mrs Curren are drawn together in a charade of reciprocity: in an act, which, far from providing mutual release, seems only to signal continuing bondage" (1996: 203). In my opinion, Huggan ignores the ethical nature of the authority which underpins this 'bondage'. It is for this reason that he maintains that Mrs Curren exists in a state of being rather than becoming. See his argument on her resistance to "social change", "inertia", and attempts to justify her "political quietism" (1996: 197-198). 11 Significantly, madness is yet another image which rather than being fixed changes its value in Coetzee's writing. Thus, it does not only signify possession by history but can also suggest possession by the other. For example, in the scene in which 'John' is killed, the policewoman declares that Mrs Curren is "van haar kop af" (1990: 143), that is, insane. The fact that it is the police who describe her in this way implies that her madness is of a different order to the state-induced madness which comes with possession by history. Her delirium at this point in the novel suggests her transcendence of history through possession by the other. Compare Sheila Roberts's discussion of Coetzee's allusions to Dante's Inferno in this novel (1996: 33-44). See also Huggan (1996: 196, 202) and Gallagher (1991: 197). It must be deemed significant that the mythological analogue which Coetzee chooses to convey the attempt at restoring the filial bond, which serves as a metaphor for the ethical relation, is one in which the son, Aeneas, expresses the following desire: "may I be granted this blessing, to be allowed to come within sight of my dear father face to face" (Virgil, 1956: 150; see also 168). For a different interpretation of the Guguletu scene, see Attridge's following comment: The account of Mrs. Curren's visit to the burning township strains to achieve the power of a Conradian description of human brutality and the lucid dreadfulness of a Dantean infernal vision, but it is accompanied by her own sense that she is hopelessly out of place there -- which is also a sense that such descriptions, vitally important as they are in the arousal of international indignation, do not probe the ethical sources of the inflicted suffering to which they bear testimony. (1994a: 257) 351 Tellingly, Dostoevsky's embrace of Sergei Nechaev is preceded by an allusion to the 'true words' which he feels may be found in 'the breast of a child': "If Anna Sergeyevna were here.. . . he would .be able to speak the words to her that have been lacking all this time" (1994: 190). This allusion to the lost filial relation and representational autonomy is followed by a recurrence of the motif of inspiration: "Embracing the boy, trapping his arms at his sides, breathing in the sour smell of his carbuncular flesh, sobbing, laughing, he kisses him on the left cheek and on the right" (my emphasis, 1994: 190). Compare the association of Mrs Curren's letter with the Eucharist in Age. Kossew's discussion of the inter- and intratextual allusions at this point in the novel is insightful: So, for example, 'The Child' rewrites the story of Pavel's white suit (72-75) which itself rewrites the story of Maria Lebyatkin from The Possessed and the writing itself is 'an assault upon the innocence of a child', in which the young man enjoys corrupting the watching child's innocence by making public his love- making. This itself replicates the sense that the Dostoevsky-figure has of Matryosha being aware of the intimacies between him and Anna, and replicates, too, the seduction of the twelve-year-old girl by Stavrogin outlined in his confession in The Possessed. (1996a: 85)
See also Marianne de Jong (1995: 48-75). De Jong argues that Dostoevsky commits the "very same sin" as Nechaev and eventually concludes that he "becomes that which he fights -- Nechaev, the devil" (1995: 49, 66). See also Johan Geertsema's insightful discussion of this novel's exploration of its radically undecidable epistemological status. Note, in particular, his argument on the text's dependence on its "material conditions" (1997: 96-98). It should be clear that I disagree with the claim, no matter how tentative, that Coetzee seems to trust representational discourse in his portrayals of Florence, Mr Thabane, the township youths and inhabitants. In this regard, see Attwell (1993: 120), and Jolly (1996: 154). As I go on to argue, in the realm of representation trust can only come from d 4.strust. 21 See Coetzee's discussion of the movements of scepticism in "Confession and Double Thoughts: Tolstoy, Rousseau, Dostoevsky" (1992f: 251-293). Perhaps, in the absence of faith and grace, the infinite regression of scepticism can 352 only be suspended by a 'wager on trust' and charity, that is, by 'Betting on all the numbers'.
1 353 Conclusion
In this thesis.I have endeavoured to show some of the ways in which Coetzee attempts to develop a responsible novelistic response to otherness. I have indicated that, in terms of Blanchot's use of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth as an analogue for the creative writer's desire for the other, the 'detour' through which Orpheus 'looks away' is always already the gaze which betrays Eurydice, his 'work' and himself. My argument has been that, in his fiction, Coetzee strives to negotiate the inevitability with which the 'detour' presupposes the 'gaze', and that he does so by making use of meta-representational strategies of infinition and excession which 'indicate' that which the novel cannot represent. Differently put, Coetzee foregrounds the novel's implication in the order of the same -- its economy of betrayal -- and thereby imparts, in Lyotard's words, 'a sense of the unpresentable' which, in turn, allows him to 'intimate' that which inevitably exceeds, and so transcends, the text's form and medium. Through these strategies, then, Coetzee inscribes a tension between totality and infinity, implication and transcendence in his fiction, and this tension enables him to respond to the other without giving it 'form, shape, and reality', to use Blanchot's words -- that is, without representing and so possessing it. Since the other is never reduced to an object, it is never represented. Accordingly, Coetzee's novels have the form of neither presence nor representation in their 'unrelating relation' to the other. Throughout this study my contention has been that the novels' strategies of excession which, to continue the analogy with the Orpheus myth, constitute a refusal to return with Eurydice to the 'light of day' and therefore an attempt to make of the averted gaze an end in itself, are designed to contrive a 'movement of infinition' from same to other. The Levinasian aesthetic that is produced by this 'dehiscent' movement is alsp strongly apparent in the presentation of the novel as the writer's gift of self to the other. What is at issue here is only partly related to the conclusion that Adriaan Peperzak draws 354 from Levinas's discussion, in Totality and Infinity, of 'ontology' as a "philosophy of power" which reduces the other to the same (Levinas, 1991: 46), namely, that the only way in which to write a book about the other or about the ethical relation to the other is by offering the text to the other (Peperzak, 1993: 139). For Coetzee, however, as I have demonstrated, the novel is not simply a gift of the text, but a 'willing offering' of self to the other: it is the event of the irreversible. movement from same to other, of the writer's substitution of self for the other. In short, the novel is not a writing about the ethical relation: the act of writing is the performance of that relation and is the writer's assumption of responsibility for the other. As such, the 'movement of infinition' which Coetzee endeavours to inscribe in his fiction not only produces the averted gaze through which power may enter the order of the other but, very importantly, also invests the other with an ethical authority that renders violence impossible and so prevents the 'detour' of 'turning away' from becoming the 'gaze'. One of my principal contentions in this thesis has been that Coetzee's attempt to establish an ethics of writing which works by way of a 'movement of infinition' is already apparent in Dusklands and that there is thus no development in this writer's oeuvre with regard to the issue of responsibility for the other. Indeed, as I have indicated, 'the political versus the ethical' is, by Coetzee's own admission, 'played out again and again' in his novels. I have also maintained, though, that the successive novels become progressively more self-reflexive in their articulation of the Levinasian aesthetic which informs them. The insistence of such self-consciousness on the ethical purpose of the 'movement of infinition' that is repeated by each novel does not, however, imply that the texts attain their ethical 'goal' -- on the contrary, it suggests a radical uncertainty on this particular issue. It is possible to conclude that, in its turn, such anxiety points to the writing subject' ls assumption of the burden.of responsibility for the other. The iterative pattern of Coetzee's oeuvre is, in itself, the mark of the incumbence of the other on his writing. In this regard, it 355 will be remembered that, since it can never be sure that its actions in response to the ethical demand have been sufficient, anxiety is the.condition of being an ethical subject. It is my view that the repetition that is a characteristic of Coetzee's oeuvre is a function of the ateleological nature of ethical responsibility, the fact that such responsibility is never completed. In other words, this repetition signifies a restlessness on the part of the writing subject, a sense of 'the unfulfilled task', rather than the certitude of 'the duty correctly performed' -- it signifies that excessive desire, rather than satiable hunger, for the other which is the very foundation of ethical action. Because the writer cannot be sure that the previous novel has performed its ethical function, the next one must repeat its responsible movement from same to other without return. Such repetition is thus the sign of the infinite nature of the writer's responsibility for the reader-as-other, that is, the boundlessness of his 'bondage' to the ethical authority of the reader. In this regard, Susan Barton's previously-cited words to Friday about her relation to Foe, her reader, serve as a self-reflexive moment that transcends Foe alone and comments on the ethical burden which informs Coetzee's fiction as a whole:
You thought that carrying stones was the hardest of labours. But when you see me at Mr Foe's desk making marks with the quill, think of each mark as a stone, and think of the paper as the island, and imagine that I must disperse the stones over the face of the island, and when that is done and the taskmaster is not satisfied (was Cruso ever satisfied with your labours?) must pick them up again (which, in the figure, is scoring out the marks) and dispose them according to another scheme, and so forth, day after day . . . . (1986: 87)
Repetition, then, is the overt manifestation in Coetzee's oeuvre of a limitless desire for the other. I have also argued that the increasing self-reflexivity of Coetzee's later novels evinces an ontogenetic anxiety on the part of the individual text about its ability to inspire the reader 356 with its 'intimations' of otherness. If it is able to replace with 'attentionality' the intentionality of the reader's consciousness,•his/her interactions in the political realm will henceforth be mediated by his/her ethical relation with the transcendent other. By attempting to enable the other to approach the reader, the individual novel thus seeks to bring about the 'justification' of the political world. This, as I . have demonstrated, is the point at which ethics and politics meet, without coinciding, in Coetzee's writing. Ultimately, I have argued in this thesis, the individual text's emphasis on the 'priority' of ethics does not install an absolute division between ethics and politics. Instead, it is calculated to initiate a process through which politics is mediated by, and thus begins as, ethics. Nevertheless, as the metaphor of breath in Age of Iron and Master suggests, the reader can only be inspired by means of a direct and immediate exposure to the text's 'intimations' of alterity. And, despite its depiction of its 'intimations' of otherness in terms of this metaphor, Age of Iron evinces an ontogenetic anxiety which casts doubt on the ability of the form and medium of the novel to achieve such proximity with the other. This doubt that the text might not be able to perform the ethical is not allayed. Instead, I have argued that the analogy that exists between the novel and Vercueil introduces the notion of trust into this metafictional debate and thereby shifts its emphasis from the realm of the purely literary-theoretical to the ethical. Finally, then, Coetzee responds to the vexed problem of language and representation that is foregrounded by his novels' ontogenetic anxiety with the argument that he is his 'brother's keeper' and is therefore obliged to trust the untrustworthy form of the novel. He must trust that that which is indifferent to the other (and which is therefore like Vercueil who, at first, does not care [1990: 120]) may be made 'non-indifferent'. While unconvincing from an 'ontological' perspective, this response is, arguably, the only possible ethical one. In conclusion, I think it is necessary to allude briefly to an area of research that I have not examined but which is 357 directly related to many of the issues that I have explored in this thesis, namely the relation between language and ethics in Coetzee's fiction. Although I have discussed the way in which it repels alterity, I have not pursued the possibility that language might be inflected with the trace of otherness. The question which needs to be asked here is, to use Levinas's distinction between saying and said, how the ethical saying's momentary interruptions of the discourse of the ontological said may be made residually evident once that discourse has been re- established. In Otherwise than Being, Levinas suggestively articulates the following answer to this question: "The interruptions of the discourse found again and recounted in the immanence of the said are conserved like knots in a thread tied again, the trace of a diachrony that does not enter into the present, that refuses simultaneity" (my emphasis, 1981: 170). As Critchley maintains, Levinas's writing in Otherwise than Being enacts this "play of rending and mending" and thereby attempts to preserve the interruption of the saying within the said (1992: 121 - 129). With reference to Coetzee's writing, I believe that it could be argued that his attempt to develop a middle-voice practice is an exploration of precisely this possibility of inflecting language with the trace of alterity (see 1992b: 94-95). The strong potential that is afforded by the middle voice in this regard has been adumbrated by Llewelyn in his study of its occurrence in and importance to the work of Levinas and Heidegger (1991). I find especially significant Llewelyn's reference to the "listening middle voice, the voice in which speaking and listening are one and what the speaker regards in speaking is the other's regard" (1991: 228). This depiction of the middle voice describes exactly the form of agency that is grounded in responsibility for the other, the action that is a response to the ethical demand, that I have traced in Coetzee's fiction. 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