The failure of sympathy in the recent works of JM Coetzee

Warwick Ian Shapcott

A thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Masters of Arts (Research)

School of English University of New South Wales July 2006 ORIGINALITY STATEMENT

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Firstly, I would like thank my dedicated supervisor, Professor Peter Alexander, for his assistance in the writing of this thesis, in particular during the protracted and somewhat difficult final stages. Thanks also to my previous supervisor, Associate Professor Sue Kossew, who helped in the development of my topic and encouraged me to keep going when I thought I'd had enough. Next, thanks to Dr Dominic Fitzsimmons, a Leaming Adviser at the UNSW Leaming Centre, with whom I met regularly throughout the final year of my research. Dom's thoughtful advice taught me how to write like an academic, in the process of which I also learned how to think like one. Moreover, his genial optimism and enthusiasm for the ideas discussed in this thesis kept me writing on those days when I lacked both. Thanks also to the postgraduate students with whom over the years I have shared offices, eaten lunches, argued incessantly and laughed uproariously. In the beginning, there was Diana Jenkins, Sandra Knowles, Claire Potter, Will Martin and Barret Skuthorpe, followed in subsequent years by Tim Roberts, Justine Saidman, Katherine Russo and Dr Bronwyn Rivers (technically a postdoc, but very much at home among the postgrads). Special thanks to Luisa Webb, whose friendship and advice during the first year of my candidature helped me adjust to postgraduate life at UNSW. Likewise, special thanks to Ian Collinson, intellectual provocateur and friend. It was he, more than anyone else, who challenged me to think critically about all the things I might otherwise have taken for granted. Thanks also to Olivia Harvey, Carol Sullivan and Roger Patulny, from the UNSW School of Sociology, for allowing a curious English student to join their reading group in poststructuralism. Thanks, finally, to those postgraduates further afield who have on various occasions, in one way or another, helped me in my research, in particular John Attridge, Melinda Harvey and Olwen Pryke, all based at the University of Sydney. Lastly, I wish to thank my family, especially my parents, whose love and support throughout the course of my studies made this work possible.

Warwick Shapcott July 2006 Table of contents

Introduction ...... p. 1

Chapter 1 Critical method: content-centred ethical criticism ...... p. 6

Chapter 2 Literature review: sympathy & ethics in Coetzee studies ...... p. 20

Chapter 3 Models of sympathy ...... p. 34

Chapter 4 Elizabeth Costello ...... p. 49

Chapter 5 Disgrace ...... p. 65

Conclusion ...... p. 81

List of references ...... p. 85 Introduction

JM Coetzee is arguably one of the most important novelists writing today. As

Dominic Head (1991, p. ix) rightly asserts, Coetzee's 'importance ... to the direction of the late twentieth-century novel can scarcely be overstated'. To a large extent, this importance lies in the way Coetzee artfully engages with the practice of literature while interrogating this practice at the same time. Not content, however, to simply indulge in formal game-playing, Coetzee turns this interrogation of form to other, extra-aesthetic, ends, and the result is an unusual and very powerful collection of novels that are perhaps best described as 'a form of postmodem metafiction' (Atwell 1993, p. 1). These novels, moreover, engage with some of the most pressing historical, political and ethical concerns of the day. In this thesis, I consider Coetzee's approach to sympathy in two of his more recent works, Elizabeth Costello (2003) and Disgrace (2000), in an attempt to understand these novels as a form of ethical literature. Proceeding via a content­ centred analysis of sympathy's role in the ethical lives of the novels' characters, this thesis argues that Coetzee problematises sympathy to such an extent as to suggest it is unable to provide an adequate foundation for an ethical life.

In Chapter 1, I outline the critical method employed in the subsequent

chapters to make sense of Coetzee's approach to sympathy. In this chapter, it is

argued that despite the rise of postmodem relativism over the last forty years,

ethics continue to play an important role in both life and literature. Ethics here is

broadly defined as that which is concerned with the question of how a human life

ought to be lived (Freadman and Miller 1992, p. 52). This definition of ethics is

then used to distinguish between moral literature, on the one hand, and ethical

- 1 - literature on the other. Whereas moral literature tells the reader how a human life ought to be lived, ethical literature interrogates the question without attempting to provide definitive answers. It is in this sense that Coetzee's novels can be regarded as ethical literature. His novels thus require a form of ethical criticism, one that is not satisfied with reductive or simplistic answers to ethical questions but instead is willing to work through the ambiguities and complexities of the works in question. Moreover, since sympathy is fundamentally concerned with the relationship between the self and the other, in order to make sense of Coetzee's approach to sympathy in these novels, it is necessary to consider closely his characters and their interactions.

Chapter 2 then proceeds with a review of the critical literature that addresses sympathy and ethics in Coetzee's work to date. While most of this literature is concerned solely with ethics, there is a small number of critics who address the topic of sympathy, and there is an even smaller number of critics that deal with both. While the importance of ethics in Coetzee's novels has been recognised by critics for a number of years, the most significant work in this area adopts a form­ centred mode of ethical criticism that does not directly address the relationship between sympathy and ethics. These 'form-centred' critics, it should be noted, unanimously regard Coetzee's work as an affirmation of the possibility of ethics.

Other critics, however, have adopted a content-centred approach to ethics in

Coetzee's novels, but these critics have likewise ignored the role of sympathy,

preferring instead to focus upon the role of the body. Like the form-centred critics,

they view Coetzee's work as an affirmation of the possibility of ethics. With

regard to sympathy itself, there is now a small but growing number of critics who

- 2 - recognise the importance to Coetzee's work of sympathy, but, of these, only a handful have considered the relationship between sympathy and ethics. Again, these critics regard this relationship in a positive light, arguing that the treatment of sympathy in Coetzee's novels suggests that it is able to provide a foundation for ethical relationships between individuals. Thus, Coetzee's interrogation of sympathy and its relationship to ethics have yet to receive sustained and in-depth critical analysis. Moreover, regardless of approach, the overwhelming majority of critics have concluded that Coetzee's work affirms the possibility of ethics. This thesis, however, argues that a content-centred analysis of sympathy's role in the lives of Coetzee's characters presents a much darker, far more pessimistic vision of ethics than the majority of critics have previously acknowledged.

Chapter 3, 'Models of sympathy', examines from a historical and philosophical perspective the various ways in which sympathy has been theorised in the past. This chapter traces the idea of sympathy back to ancient Greece, before focusing upon the idea of sympathy as it was developed by eighteenth­ century thinkers such as David Hume and Adam Smith. It then concludes by briefly considering the ways in which eighteenth-century ideas regarding sympathy were further developed by early nineteenth-century Romantic thinkers.

In this way, four models of sympathy are identified. In the first model, sympathy as compassion, the individuals are said to experience the suffering of another as if it were their own. The second model augments the first by coupling this heightened awareness of another's suffering (i.e., compassion) with a desire to alleviate it. The third model of sympathy, sympathy as 'fellow-feeling', broadens

the definition of sympathy further still. Here, sympathising individuals are

- 3 - conceived of as imaginatively projecting themselves into the circumstances of another, thereby mirroring not only their feelings but also their thoughts. These feelings, moreover, may be both negative and positive. The fourth and final model of sympathy is termed the sympathetic imagination, and in this model the imagination enables individuals to actually, albeit momentarily, become the object of their sympathy. What these four models have in common, interestingly enough, is not compassion specifically, even though this is the way in which sympathy is most frequently understood. Compassion is, after all, only a feature of the first two models of sympathy. The principal similarity among all four models is their concern with the relationships between the self and the other, and it is this more than anything that makes sympathy so pertinent to ethics, concerned as it is with the individual and their relationship to others.

Chapter 4 examines Coetzee's treatment of sympathy in Elizabeth Costello, in which the novel's protagonist asserts that sympathy not only bridges the gulf between the self and the other but also compels people to act ethically. Her faith in sympathy, however, is undermined by the obvious confusions and contradictions manifest in various discussions about the idea of sympathy. In addition, sympathy is further undermined by the decidedly unsympathetic behaviour of the characters themselves. Elizabeth Costello does not deny the existence of sympathy outright, but calls into question both its consistency and

veracity, and in doing so makes readers question whether sympathy really does

bridge the gulf between the self and the other. Moreover, even if it does, readers

are also forced to question whether it could provide a stable foundation for ethics.

- 4 - Finally, Chapter 5 examines Coetzee's treatment of sympathy in Disgrace, a novel that, like Elizabeth Costello, gestures towards the hope that sympathy might provide an escape from alienation and isolation by bridging the gulf between the self and the other. Also, like Elizabeth Costello, Disgrace considers the possibility that sympathy might provide people with an impulse to act in the interests of another and thereby provide a foundation for ethics. Yet whereas Elizabeth

Costello is concerned as much with the idea of sympathy as with the experience of the phenomenon itself, Disgrace is solely concerned with the latter. More specifically, Disgrace explores a question only hinted at in Elizabeth Costello, namely whether or not individuals who lack the capacity for sympathy can learn to sympathise with others. Disgrace thus considers the extent to which one's own pain and suffering contributes to one's capacity to sympathise. Ultimately, however, Disgrace suggests that there is little possibility of individuals learning to develop their sympathetic faculties. Like Elizabeth Costello, it presents the reader with a world largely devoid of sympathy.

- 5 - Chapter 1

Critical method: content-centred ethical criticism

This chapter considers the nature of ethics, ethical literature and ethical criticism.

More specifically, it argues that Coetzee's novels constitute a form of ethical literature that is well-suited to analysis by a content-centred mode of ethical criticism. Furthermore, it argues that, in order to makes sense of Coetzee's approach to sympathy, this analysis must pay close attention to his characters and their interactions.

Firstly, however, I should like to begin by considering the nature of ethics and its relevance to literature. The spread of postmodemism relativism has led some to suggest that ethics is in decline, but as Davis and Womack (2001, p. ix) suggest, 'to pretend that the ethical or moral dimensions of the human condition were abandoned or obliterated in the shift to postmodemity certainly seems naive'. They go on to write that '[p]art of being human involves the daily struggle with the meanings and consequences of our actions and ourselves about what has

transpired or what we fear will transpire in the future' (Davis & Womack, p. ix).

Postmodem theories provide a powerful critique of many of the most important

ideas, values and beliefs that underpin Western culture and society. Yet, as Davis

and Womack point out, human beings remain social creatures whose daily lives

consist of interactions with other human beings, and thus ethics continues to play

a central role in everyday life.

- 6 - Indeed, it could be argued that the spread of postmodemism and its attendant moral relativism makes ethics more, not less, important. Clausen (1986, p. xi), for example, argues that while history and anthropology have discredited the classical and Christian belief in universal norms of human conduct, this does not render ethics either obsolete or unimportant. He writes that, on the contrary, 'it ought to make people more conscious and reflective about moral questions and to make the ethical content of literature (and of criticism) more valued, if less doctrinaire'

(Clausen 1986, pp. xii). Thus, when ethics is called into question by moral relativists, ethics and, by extension, ethical criticism only become more important.

Indeed, as Peter Singer (1993, p. 10) writes, '[t]oday the question of how we are to live confronts us more sharply than ever'.

Ethics thus continues to be of the utmost relevance, both in life and in literature; ethics, however, must not be confused or conflated with morality.

While both ethics and morality originate in the question as to how we ought to live, the way in which each responds to this question is very different. Each has its own distinct aims, and the means by which these aims are achieved are likewise very different. Morality aims to provide definitive answers to the question as to how a human being ought to live, and the means by which it does this are prescriptive in nature. Generally, these prescriptions refer to what one ought or ought not do. 1 Van Wyk ( 1990, p. 6) writes that

1 Needless to say, the conception of morality outlined above is not universal nor is it intended to be. As Van Wyk (I 990, pp. 7-8) notes, '[i]n different cultures and periods of history, discussions of moral issues take different forms and use somewhat different concepts. Virtue and vice are such concepts . . . Another concept is that of duty'. The conception of morality as prescriptive is only intended to characterise the dominant mode of moral thought within what is commonly referred to as Western culture.

- 7 - [ m]any times moral questions are about what is permissible or impermissible . . . Many moral codes tell us what types of actions are, according to that code, prohibited. Morality is also concerned about what is permissible or impermissible in a particular situation.

While morality may refer to a particular action (e.g., murder), a particular type of action (e.g., harming others) or a particular situation (e.g., euthanasia or 'mercy killing'), in all such cases it attempts to answer the question as to how a human being ought to live prescriptively.

The goal of morality, then, is provide definitive answers to the question as to how one ought to live. Ethics, however, takes a very different approach to this question. The aim of ethics is not to provide answers but to understand the nature of the question itself: to weigh their significance, to interrogate the assumptions upon which they are premised and to ponder the various, possible ways in which they might be answered. Whereas morality is prescriptive, ethics is speculative.

Note, however, that this distinction between morality ethics and morality should not be conflated with the distinction between theory and practice. It is possible, of course, to conceptualise the relationship between ethics and morality in this way, but here each is conceived of as a distinct mode by which the individuals understand 'the good life'. This is what Freadman and Miller (1992, pp. 52-53) argue when they write that the term 'ethics' is

to [be] understood in its most general sense, namely as an array of possible answers to the question 'how ought a human life to be lived?' Note that the term so construed embraces the term 'moral' but is not reducible to it ... [A]n adequate conception of the moral acknowledges its complexity and its centrality to any imaginable form of social life. And the same is true for the ethical realm in general; the realm of which the moral is a part.

- 8 - It is in this sense, then, that ethics in Coetzee's work is to be understood; i.e., as an interrogation of possible answers to the question of the good life. Ethics thus conceived cannot prescribe how one ought to live because it is primarily concerned with understanding the conditions under which the question of ethics is made meaningful. While morality takes the question as given (assuming not only that the question is worth asking but also that it is possible to answer), ethics identifies problems, considers various approaches and suggests a range of answers.

Having distinguished between ethics and morality, it is now possible to draw a further distinction between two types of literature: moral, on the one hand, and ethical, on the other. Both question how we ought to live, but each does so in a very different way, each for a very different purpose. Moral literature suggests how a human being ought to live by embodying specific principles of conduct, and it is frequently didactic in intent. Ethical literature, however, enables engaged readers to work through the possibilities inherent in the question itself. The novelist George Saunders (in Marcus 2005, p. 327) put it thus:

[w]riting can be a formal way of enacting Oliver Cromwell's plea: "I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken." When a writer does that, then I think the result is moral, in the sense of "accounting for all complexities." I think you leave the work of art not instructed, but baffled, baffled in a way that humbles you and makes you move more carefully (but fully) through your life, at least until the effect wears off.

Although, Saunders here uses the term 'moral', it is clear that what he has in mind is ethics in the sense previously defined; thus, when he speaks of a literature that accounts for all the complexities, as opposed to instructing the reader, what he is

- 9 - describing is ethical literature. Whereas moral literature provides readers with answers; ethical literature encourages them to ask more questions.2 Ethical literature thus draws attention to the complexities, contradictions and ambiguities inherent in the individual's attempt to live an ethical life. Coetzee's novels are a form of ethical literature because they interrogate the question as to how a human being ought to live. This should not be understood to mean that his work provides readers with a code of conduct; on the contrary, his novels typically leave readers feeling, to use George Saunders's word, 'baffled'. As Barnard (2003, p. 199) has noted, 'JM Coetzee's novels often leave the reader with uncomfortable, unanswerable questions' - many of which, it might be added, are questions of an ethical nature.

Coetzee's position on the ethics of writing can be found in a talk he gave at the Weekly Mail Book Week in 1987 in Cape Town. This talk, published the following year in the journal Upstream under the title 'The novel today' (Coetzee

1988), deals in a very forthright manner with the relation of novels and novel­ writing to life in South Africa in the late 1980s. His comments have added

2 James Phelan (2001) goes further still, arguing that ethics is an inextricable component of all reading. He approaches all narratives as a form of rhetoric, and as such, narrative is viewed as a rhetorical act; i.e., 'somebody telling somebody on some occasion and for some purpose that something happened' (Phelan 2001, p. 94). Thus, narrative is described as 'a multileveled communication' involving the reader's intellect, emotions, psyche and values. Moreover, these various levels of engagement with the text are constantly interacting with one another to affect the way we understand and interpret the text. Values, Phelan (2001, p. 94) suggests, are a fundamental and inescapable component of the interpretative process:

[o]ur values and those set forth by the implied author affect our judgements of characters, and our judgments affect our emotions, and the trajectory of our feelings is linked to the psychological and thematic effects of narrative.

Thus, for Phelan, to read narratives is to read ethically. Nor is the ethical dimension of the text confined to the content itself. As Phelan (2001, p. 94) points out, 'the communicative situation of narrative - somebody telling somebody else that something happened - is itself an ethical situation'.

- 10 - significance because it was his first explicit and public intervention in a long­ standing debate among South African writers, critics and intellectuals regarding how, as Tony Morphet (1996, p. 2) put its, the conditions of life in South Africa were to be represented. Moreover, this debate about representation, taking place as it did within the context of a society divided by apartheid, had, as Morphet points out, an ethical as well as an aesthetic dimension (Morphet 1996, p. 2). The ethical dimension arises here because, in this context, the debate about representation becomes a debate about resistance; that is, how one ought to resist the oppressive regime in which everybody, including writers, is situated.

For many, the one and only ethical response for writers working under these conditions was a kind of social realism, and consequently texts were critiqued in terms of their faithfulness to history. Susan Gallagher (1997, p. 2) labels this movement as 'solidarity criticism', but it took a number of forms, 'Black

Consciousness' being another (Atwell 1993, p. 13). In JM Coetzee: South Africa and the Politics of Writing, Atwell (1993, pp. 14-15) argues that Coetzee's novels have in the past been at times coldly received by South African writers and critics because of the dominance of these kinds of movements. In post-apartheid South

Africa, the cultural allegiances have obviously shifted considerably, but at the time the cultural politics of the day generally insisted that writers 'provide the

solace of truth, of political faith' (Atwell 1993, p. 15). Social realism that

represented the reality of day-to-day life in South Africa was seen by many as the

most effective means of resisting the injustice of apartheid; furthermore, the

choice not to adopt either the prescribed form or subject was seen as a failure, at

once political and ethical in nature.

- 11 - This is the subject of Coetzee's talk in 'The Novel Today': the pressure brought to bear upon the writing and reading of novels by those who demand a realistic representation of both historical circumstances and historical forces. In this talk, Coetzee speaks out against what he describes as the tendency 'to subsume the novel under history' (Coetzee 1988, p. 2). This entails, firstly, the reading of novels as investigations of history, and, secondly, treating novels that refuse or fail to do this as 'lacking in seriousness' (Coetzee 1988, p. 2). When

Coetzee speaks of novels being treated as lacking in seriousness, he is clearly referring, albeit obliquely, to the ethical dimension of the debate regarding representation.

An example of the novel's subsumption under history can be found in

Nadine Gordimer's 1984 review of Life and times ofMichael K (Coetzee 1998d), published in the New York Review of Books (Gordimer 1984). In this review,

Gordimer expresses ambivalence about not only the novel in question but also

Coetzee's work to date as a whole. She admires the novel, but her admiration is heavily qualified for reasons both ethical and political. Her primary concern is that

Michael K does not represent the resistance of black South Africans to apartheid, and, while this does not prevent the work from being a great novel, it does threaten the work's 'unity of art and life' (Gordimer 1984, p. 6). While Gordimer praises Coetzee for presenting the 'truth and meaning' of the injustices of apartheid, she criticises the novel's lack of 'the energy of the will to resist evil'

(1984, p. 6). Moreover, she goes on to contrast this failure to represent resistance with the actuality of resistance she witnesses in the world around her: '[t]hat this superb energy exists with the indefatigable and undefeatable persistence among

- 12 - the black people of South Africa ... is made evident, yes, heroically, every grinding day' (Gordimer 1984, p. 6). In essence, then, Gordimer's criticism is that, while Michael K is a well-written novel, its allegorical tendencies fail to represent the world as it really is, and this failure is both political and ethical. It is a political failure because it does not explicitly place itself in opposition to apartheid, and it is an ethical failure because this, in Gordimer's view, is precisely what Coetzee ought to be doing. It is interesting to note that while Gordimer recognises Coetzee's novel does not engage South African history and politics in a conventional, social-realist fashion, she attempts to makes sense of the novel as a social-realist work nonetheless, thereby conflating ( or perhaps confusing) historiography and fiction. It is precisely this kind of reading, which conflates history and fiction and thus ignores whatever is actually happening in the novel, that Coetzee is referring to when he speaks of the subsumption of the novel under history.

In his talk, Coetzee argued that at times of 'intense ideological pressures'

(such as those in South Africa in the late 1980s) the 'space' between the novel and historiography is reduced to 'almost nothing' (1988, p. 3). In such circumstances,

Coetzee suggests, the novel has only two choices: supplementarity or rivalry. A novel can either supplement or rival history. The supplementary novel is one that positions itself as a special kind of historical writing, and it is supplementary in the sense that it seeks to perform those functions that orthodox historiography is unable to perform itself. For Coetzee, this means revealing 'the underlying patterns of force in our public or private life' (1988, p. 3). Thus, the

- 13 - supplementary novel helps readers perceive the individual in history and, vice versa, history in the individual. 3

For Coetzee, the problem with the supplementary novel 1s both metaphysical and ethical. The metaphysical objection is that reality (past or present) is never unmediated, and to write historically-engaged realist novels is to adopt assumptions that, in his view, are untenable: 'history is not reality ... history is a kind of discourse [and] inevitably, in our culture, history will, with varying degrees of forcefulness, claim to be a master-form of discourse' (Coetzee

1988, p. 4).4 The alternative to the supplementary novel is the novel of rivalry; rather than becoming the handmaiden of history, the novel of rivalry attempts to point out that history is not reality, to reveal what Coetzee (1988, p. 3) calls the

'mythic status of history'.

While Coetzee' s refusal to write supplementary novels of the sort advocated by solidarity criticism is, in part, a metaphysical objection, it is also, it should be noted, an ethical objection. Because history is not reality but reality mediated by discourse, the writing of such novels is a kind of collusion between the novelist and history, regardless of the novelist's intentions. Coetzee (1988, p. 4) intimates that to adopt the lie that history is reality is doubly a sin for novelists since they are in the business of telling stories and, in doing so, ought to respect the free play of semiosis that this entails. While many people felt, during the forty years of

3 An example of the supplementary novel might be Gordimer's own Burger's daughter, first published in 1979, which attempts to represent history as refracted through the life of the novel's protagonist. 4 When Coetzee here claims history is a kind of discourse, it would appear that he is referring to history as historiography. As Gallagher (1997, p. 2) observers, Coetzee in this talk uses the word 'history' in a variety of ways, primarily to refer to, alternatively, historical reality (i.e., events) and historical discourse (i.e., historiography). Thus, Coetzee's point here is not, as some critics have suggested, that history has no reality. The point is that, as Atwell (1993, p. 17) puts it, 'history is not available for direct representation'.

- 14 - opposition to apartheid, that the best way to resist the forces of history was to represent them for all to see, Coetzee here suggests that to do so is to, firstly, engage in a contest the writer has little or no chance of winning, and, secondly, is to take up the tools of the oppressors and thereby compromise one's own integrity.

The novel of rivalry, which Coetzee's gestures towards in 'The novel today', is a kind of ethical literature precisely because it resists the temptation to provide obvious answers to ethical questions. As Parker ( 1994, p. 197) writes,

'[b]ooks are not good only in so far as they "mirror life", or embody propositions known in some way to be "true", "wise", or "for life" or on the side of a given conception of morality.' Books are good, he goes on to suggest, in so far as they interrogate ethical questions (Parker 1994, p. 197). Coetzee's novels neither posit nor affirm a coherent moral vision. As previously suggested, they interrogate the question as to how an individual ought to live, and thus his novels constitute a form of ethical literature.

Having distinguished, firstly, between morality and ethics, and, secondly, between moral literature and ethical literature, it is now necessary to make a further distinction between two types of criticism: ethical, on the one hand, and moral, on the other. Moral criticism seeks to draw out the lessons that moral literature provides, while ethical criticism is an explorative, reflexive activity.

While ethical literature does not provide the reader with moral principles by

which they can live their life, it nonetheless provides an opportunity for readers to

reflect upon the contradictions, complexities and ambiguities inherent in the

ethical life. As one might expect, ethical criticism is better suited to ethical

- 15 - literature than moral criticism. Likewise, moral criticism is better suited to moral literature than ethical criticism. (There is nothing, however, preventing one from adopting whatever mode of criticism one feels appropriate; for example, one might apply ethical criticism to moral literature with interesting results.) Coetzee's novels are literature of the ethical, as opposed to moral, kind, and as such, these novels lend themselves to ethical, as opposed to moral, criticism.

Ethical criticism as a discipline has, during the past forty or fifty years, enjoyed mixed fortunes. During the 1970s and 1980s, the rise of contemporary literary theory prompted critics to eschew evaluative discourse in favour of a more political understanding of literature (Parker 1994, p. 3). There were several reasons for this turn away from ethical criticism. Some critics regard it as a

'natural response' to the demise of modern humanism and the horrors of the twentieth century (Davis & Womack 2001, p. ix.). Others, however, have argued that the dominant mode of contemporary literary theory was actively hostile to ethical criticism (Adamson, Freadman & Parker 1998, p. 4). No doubt both the broader cultural and historical forces at large, coupled with the theoretical and critical developments within the university, had a role to play in the critics' movement away from ethics. Consequently, during the 1970s and 1980s many critics decided politics was more important than ethics and thus eschewed ethical criticism, while others were openly hostile to evaluative discourse (see, for example, Fredric Jameson's The political unconscious: narrative as socially symbolic act ( 1981) for one of the more influential attacks on ethical discourse from a Marxist perspective).

- 16 - The early 1990s, however, saw a resurgence of interest in ethical criticism.

This interest developed on two distinct fronts. Firstly, there was a call from traditional, humanist literary critics for a return to evaluative discourse, both aesthetic and ethical; see, for example, Palmer (1992), Goldberg (1993) and, more recently, Schwarz (2001). These critics all asserted the importance of evaluative discourse in the face of what they regarded as the indifference or hostility of contemporary literary theory. As Gibson (1999, p. 5) notes, the approach favoured by such critics is best characterised as broadly anti-theoretical and Leavisite in nature. These critics emphasise the concreteness and particularity of novels, along with the complexity diversity of values, paying special attention to contradictory values (Gibson 1999, p. 8).

At the same time, however, the proponents of postmodem and poststructural theory were also looking for ways to engage more directly and more explicitly with ethics and literature. J Hiller Miller's The ethics of reading: Kant, de Man,

Eliot, Trollope, James and Benjamin is one of the earliest and most influential attempts to elaborate a deconstructionist ethical criticism, but for more recent examples, see also, Critchley (1992), Harpham (1992), Newton (1995) and, more recently, Gibson (1999), by far the most persuasive case yet made for a postmodem ethical criticism. Yet while there is considerable disagreement over the means by which ethical criticism ought to be pursued, both camps, with the humanists on one side and the theorists (postmodem, poststructural and deconstructionist) on the other, agree that there is an important connection between ethics and literature, and this connection was worthy of sustained, detailed critical attention.

- 17 - The method of criticism employed in the subsequent chapters of this thesis

1s best described as content-centred ethical criticism, broadly humanist in conception, of the kind elaborated by Schwarz (2001, pp. 3-4). This method is founded upon broadly humanist notions of the individual and individual agency, notions that have bearing upon not only upon the understanding of the characters within the novels themselves, but also on the relationship between the author and his text and, ultimately, on the relationship between the text and the world.

Schwarz (2001, p. 4) writes that

authors write to express their ideas and emotions; the ways humans live and the values for which they live are of fundamental interest to authors and readers; literature expresses insights about human life and responses to human situations, and that is the main reason why we read, teach, and think about literature.

Thus, the literary text is viewed as a creative gesture of the text's author. In addition, Schwarz (2001, p. 3) argues that the form of a text expresses its value system. Thus, the analysis of content always entails an analysis of form; nonetheless, the elaboration of the novel's formal features is always subordinate to the elaboration of the content. Finally, Schwarz (2001, p. 4) argues that human behaviour is central to most texts and thus should be one of the major concerns of critics. Characters in Coetzee's work are viewed as fictional representations of human beings as individuals; close attention is paid to the character's personality

(their thoughts, feelings, motives and intentions) and to their actions and the consequences of these actions. In particular, close attention is paid to the characters' interactions and their attempt to relate sympathetically with one another, as well their failure to do so. Since sympathy is primarily concerned with

- 18 - the relationship between the self and the other, it makes sense to try to understand

Coetzee's approach to sympathy by closely analysing his characters and their interactions.

- 19 - Chapter 2

Literature review: sympathy and ethics in Coetzee studies

As Yeoh (2003, p. 331) has noted, critics in recent years have begun to pay increasing attention to the role of ethics in Coetzee's work. This interest, however, can be traced back as early as the late 1980s. Gallagher ( 1988) was among the first to discuss at length the importance of ethics in Coetzee's fiction. Writing about Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians, she argues that, despite the novel's gaps and absences, there remain temporary presences that can approximate a linguistic and moral centre (Gallagher 1988, p. 285).

By the early 1990s, critics had began to recognise the centrality of ethics to

Coetzee's work more generally. In his ground-breaking JM Coetzee: South Africa and the politics of writing, Atwell (1993, p. 10) describes Coetzee's work as 'a fictional oeuvre of unusual complexity . . . in which ethical questions fasten tenaciously to forms of reflexive play that elsewhere seem to have made a virtue of relativism'. Although Atwell was among the first critics to recognise that ethics is one of the central, enduring preoccupations of Coetzee's work as a whole, his work is less concerned with ethics than it is with the reflexivity and historicity of

Coetzee's novels (Atwell 1993, p. 3), and it is only more recently that ethics has come to be regarded as a subject worthy of discussion in and of itself.

Michael Marais was one of the first critics to focus solely on the ethical dimension of Coetzee's novels. He began writing about ethics in Coetzee's fiction

in the early 1990s. In this early work, Marais (1993b, p. 22) argues that Coetzee's

- 20- Age of Iron adopts a form of strategic essentialism in an attempt to inspire the reader with 'the idea of an ethical community' and thereby foster political action.

In a subsequent article on both Age of Iron and The master of Petersburg, Marais

( 1996b) again argues that Coetzee' s fiction affirms the possibility of ethics. He argues that while power as depicted in these novels is shown to pervert every aspect of life and art, love offers the possibility of an ethical system based on intersubjectivity (Marais 1996b, p. 83).

In his more recent criticism, however, Marais draws upon the work of

Emmanuel Levinas to develop a more strictly form-centred mode of ethical criticism. Marais' s (2001 b) discussion of Michael K adopts Levinasian ethics to argue that the character's encounter with the other makes the reader aware of the impossibility of comprehending this other and thus thereby acts as a call to responsibility. Levinas writes that

[t]he face in which the other - the absolutely other - presents himself does not do violence to it as do opinion or authority or thaumaturgic supernatural. It remains commensurate with him who welcomes; it remains terrestrial. This presentation is preeminently nonviolence, for instead of offending my freedom it calls it to responsibility and founds it (1969, p. 203).

By making the same argument, mutatis mutandis, with regard to literature (i.e., literature is the reader's other and thereby calls on the reader to read responsibly),

Marais asserts the ethical importance of literature. 5 Similarly, Marais's (2000b) article on Disgrace argues, again from a Levinasian perspective, that Coetzee' s novel suggests the possibility of ethical action through writing. As Marais would

5 Elsewhere, Marais writes that '[l]ike writing, then, reading may be an Orphic descent in which the reader is affected by and rendered responsible for the Other' (2000a, p. 171 ).

- 21 - have it, the novel self-reflexively suggests that writing is a way of doing justice to the other through self-substitution and sacrifice. While Marais does not overlook content entirely, the focus of his analysis is on the formal properties of Coetzee's writing. Marais here uses the Levinasian perspective to analyse the both the relationships between the reader and the text, as well as the relationships between the characters. Encounters between characters are understood as an encounter with the other, as is the reader's encounter with the text. In both cases, Marais argues that the encounter with the other points to the possibility of ethics; thus, Marais's form-centred Levinasian approach results in a relatively optimistic reading of the role of ethics in Coetzee's work.

Derek Attridge is another critic who, like Marais, utilizes a form-centred mode of ethical criticism informed by Continental philosophy, namely Levinas and Derrida, in an effort to make sense of the ethical dimension of Coetzee' s work. Yeoh (2003, p. 331 ), although critical of the Levinasian approach to

Coetzee' s work, rightly suggests that 'Attridge' s account of the ethics of the other is the fullest elaboration of Coetzee's ethics we have thus far'. Attridge (1999a) argues that creative innovation of any kind, including innovative writing, is a fundamentally ethical activity because the process of innovation is grounded in a receptiveness to and respect for the other. In this article, Attridge (1999a) stresses that ethics is a formal property of innovative writing, and this conception of

writing as an ethical activity informs all of Attridge's work on Coetzee. Attridge

(1994b, p. 244), for example, argues that an analysis of the formal properties of

Coetzee's novels is fundamental to an understanding of the ethical and political

import of Age of Iron. He asserts there is an inherently ethical dimension to all

- 22 - literary signification: 'Otherness', he writes, 'is at stake in every literary text'

(Attridge 1994b, p. 249).

Like Marais, Attridge adopts a form-centred approach to ethics in Coetzee's work and, like Marais, he argues that Coetzee's work affirms the possibility of ethics. Both Attridge and Marais have produced some intriguing readings of

Coetzee's work, drawing attention to the importance of ethics generally and elaborating the ways in which formal properties inform Coetzee's engagement with this topic.

While Marais' s and Attridge' s Levinasian approach to ethics dominates

Coetzee studies, a number of critics have adopted a different approach to

Coetzee's novels. They argue that it is the body, rather than the other, that calls individuals to an awareness of their ethical responsibility. Brian May (2001) provides one of the most coherent and persuasive attempts to understand the ethical dimension of Coetzee's work in terms of the body. May (2001, p. 414) argues that the body as represented in Coetzee's novels 'discloses, if nothing else, the possibility of disclosure, thereby stirring a distinctly ethical curiosity'.

Similarly, Eckstein (1989, p. 181) argues that the body is central to Coetzee's literary and political thinking. In Waiting for the Barbarians, she suggests, it is the vulnerability of the body that forces Coetzee's protagonists to become responsible

(Eckstein 1989, p. 195). Graham (2002, p. 4), in her discussion of Disgrace, likewise argues that it is 'felt contact' between embodied subjects that prompts ethical action in Coetzee's characters. Finally, Kossew (2003) also insists that

Disgrace suggests that physical contact between bodies can give rise to ethical awareness. It is Lurie's contact, she claims, with the suffering bodies of dogs that

- 23 - enables him to move towards a 'kind of grace' (Kossew 2003, pp. 156, 160).

While these critics focus on the body, they too, like Marais and Attridge, regard

Coetzee's treatment of ethics as an affirmation of ethics.

Burnett (1996) too affirms the possibility of ethics in Coetzee's work, but her approach is unusual in that she explores the 'mythico-religious' aspect of

Coetzee's Foe. Burnett reads Foe as the product of an author influenced by

Christian, and in particular Protestant, ideologies as manifested in colonial South

Africa (Burnett 1996, p. 240). Burnett regards Crusoe's island as a kind of Eden,

'[t]he locus of a place apart in which spiritual and ethical values can be tested'

(Burnett 1996, p. 242). It is an unusual approach and one that produces some provocative insights into the text; for example, Burnett's intriguing, if not entirely convincing, characterisation of Friday as a Christ-figure (1996, p. 248).

Provocative though Burnett's reading of Foe may be, one cannot help but feel it overlooks far too many of the novel's complications and ambiguities in an attempt to provide a coherent reading premised upon Christian ideology. Nevertheless, she, like all the critics considered thus far, regards Coetzee's novels as an affirmation of the possibility of ethics.

There are two critics, however, who take a more sceptical view of ethics in

Coetzee's fiction. While the majority of critics argues that the body in Coetzee's work has the power to prompt an ethical response from his characters, Bethlehem

(2002) takes issue with Coetzee's representation of the suffering body in

Disgrace. She writes, albeit somewhat obscurely, that 'there can be no transhistorical narrative of, say, the suffering body, the body-as-victim. We must resist the body narrative of being-victim' (Bethlehem, 2002, p. 23). Bethlehem

- 24- would here appear to suggest that the body in Coetzee's work is at once both exploited and a justification for exploitation. Bethlehem thus rejects that idea that the body in Coetzee's fiction is the site of an authentic ethical encounter, instead taking a more sceptical view of ethics.

Yeoh (2003) is another critic who takes a sceptical view of ethics m

Coetzee's fiction; he argues that Coetzee's novels demonstrate the failure of ethics. Yeoh argues that while Coetzee's fiction is ethically engaged, Coetzee ascribes to a cynical ethics of the self, one that assumes self-interest: '[w]riting is not just an epistemologically unreliable fiction; Coetzee invites us to consider it as an ethically false and self-serving fiction' (Yeoh 2003, p. 335). Yeoh's primary focus is thus Coetzee's concept of writing and the self. He goes on to argue that the narrators of both Waiting for the Barbarians and Age of Iron construct narratives of identification with the colonised and the oppressed that are shown to be both unreliable and self-serving (Yeoh 2003, p. 340). Yet Yeoh focuses upon

Coetzee's conception of writing to argue that it is language that gives readers cause to be sceptical about the possibility of ethics, while this thesis focuses upon the role of sympathy in the interactions of Coetzee's characters, arguing that is the failure of sympathy that gives readers cause to be sceptical. As we have seen, this scepticism about ethics in Coetzee's novels is quite uncommon among critics.

Thus far, this chapter has examined the various ways in which critics have made sense of the ethical dimension of Coetzee's novels. The dominant mode of ethical criticism has been the type of form-centred ethical criticism practised by

Attridge and Marais, although other critics, such as Eckstein, Graham, Kossew and May, have adopted a more content-centred mode of ethical criticism to

- 25 - approach Coetzee's work. These critics have sought to understand the ethical dimension of Coetzee's work in terms of the body, while Burnett has sought to understand the ethical dimension of Coetzee' s work in religious terms. Regardless of their approach, these critics conclude that Coetzee's fiction asserts the possibility of ethics. Only two critics, Bethlehem and Yeoh, have found reasons to take a more cynical view of the ethical dimension of Coetzee's work. While this thesis agrees with Bethlehem and Yeoh's sceptical assessment of ethics in

Coetzee's novels, it reaches this conclusion via a different route; i.e., an analysis of Coetzee's approach to sympathy. In the following section, I consider the various ways sympathy has been approached by Coetzee's critics in the analysis of his novels. Most of this criticism focuses upon Coetzee's more recent fiction, namely Disgrace and Elizabeth Costello. Of these two, however, it is Costello that has received the greatest critical attention with respect to sympathy.

Marais (2000b) rejects outright the suggestion that Coetzee's Disgrace is concerned with the sympathetic imagination in post-apartheid South Africa.

Rather than reading the novel, as some critics have, as a critique of Enlightenment liberal humanism, Marais again makes use of Levinasian ethics in order to posit a different kind of ethical relationship, one that is premised not upon Enlightenment notions of agency and the individual but upon Levinasian face-to-face relationships between the same and the other. Extrapolating upon these ideas,

Marais conceives of writing as a way of doing justice to the other through self­

substitution and sacrifice; i.e., writing always entails an inherently ethical

relationship. For Marais (2000, p. 63), 'Disgrace is ultimately a novel about death

and the curious relation of death to writing and reading'. Consequently, Marais

- 26 - regards the novel's conclusion as optimistic because the content, bleak though it may seem, is redeemed by the form. Marais's only concern here is with Disgrace, and he makes no mention of Coetzee's other novels, yet given that Marais's readings of the novels almost invariably make use of Levinas, it seems safe to assume Marais would reject any attempt to read Coetzee's work in terms of sympathy. One can, however, acknowledge the usefulness of Marais's approach without accepting Marais's wholesale rejection of sympathy. Marais's Levinasian approach to Coetzee's fiction, while interesting, is not, nor could it be, the final word on Coetzee' s work.

As Lenta (2004, p. 108) has noted, sympathy and morality are two of the dominant themes of Elizabeth Costello. In Lenta's view, this novel presents two alternative approaches to sympathy: 'the exclusive focus of sympathetic response on the cause of the innocent and the suffering in a land of AIDS and poverty, and the freedom of response possible in a luckier country' (2004, p. 114 ). She makes no attempt, however, to analyse the ways in which Coetzee's treatment of one influences the other, nor does she consider the ways in which sympathy operates in the relationships between the characters.

Donovan (2004), on the other hand, does analyse the relationship between sympathy and ethics, and her approach produces some revealing insights into

Coetzee's work. She does not use the word 'sympathy' explicitly, but she clearly has something akin to sympathy in mind when she writes that 'Coetzee's protagonists experience a kind of conversion to a heightened state of moral awareness through their growing sensitivity to animal abuse' (Donovan 2004, p.

79). A cogent discussion of sympathy and ethics in Coetzee's fiction, Donovan's

- 27 - article suggests that sympathy produces a moral conversion in the protagonists of

Waiting for the Barbarians, Disgrace and Elizabeth Costello. It is important to note, however, that for Donovan sympathy is not a product of cognitive or imaginative processes; rather, it is a bodily reaction to the suffering of another that is inexplicable in rational terms. Moreover, for Donovan, sympathy is an inherently ethical faculty because the awareness of suffering prompts concomitant regard for the sufferer's well-being. This thesis, instead, will focus upon the cognitive aspects of sympathy in Coetzee's treatment of sympathy, thereby revealing the ways in which sympathy fails to either bridge the gulf between the self and the other or provide a foundation for ethics. By overlooking the cognitive, imaginative aspects of Coetzee's treatment of sympathy, Donovan has no scope to consider Coetzee's treatment of sympathy's more sinister aspects.

Other critics, however, have engaged with the negative aspects of Coetzee's treatment of sympathy. Tremaine (2003, p. 609) argues that each of Coetzee's novels 'enacts the failure of the "sympathetic imagination"'. Tremaine's analysis is most revealing when he points out that neither Costello nor Coetzee himself ever attempt to directly represent the 'joy' of full being themselves. Tremaine observes that while Costello attempts to persuade the audience of the need to utilise the sympathetic imagination in their relationships with animals, neither

Costello nor Coetzee himself ever make this attempt to represent the other.

Coetzee's fiction represents animals, but he himself never makes use of the

sympathetic imagination to directly represent the consciousness of these animals.

Any attempt to sympathetically imagine the consciousness of an animal is made

indirectly through the eyes of his characters. With the exception of Michael K,

- 28 - Coetzee's protagonists are what Tremaine describes as 'Coetzee-like' characters.

Rather than attempting to directly represent the consciousness of creatures (human or non-human) that are markedly 'other', Coetzee almost always represents protagonists who are in many respects similar to himself. What he represents is these 'Coetzee-like' protagonists attempting to sympathetically imagine themselves into the point of view of the other. Tremaine writes that '[a]lmost all of their attempts end in despair, leaving them, along with the reader, to look upon the other from the outside' (2003, p. 597).

Tremaine's observation about the disjunction between what Costello says and what Coetzee does is an important insight, and he clearly demonstrates that animals in Coetzee's work are connected to the imagination, but he does not deal directly with the characters and their interactions. Moreover, Tremaine's focus is on the cognitive responses of Coetzee' s characters, and as such he overlooks the affective aspect of Coetzee's treatment of sympathy. Finally, Tremaine does not address the ethical dimension of the character's interaction with animals or each other.

Aside from Tremaine, the only other critic who engages with the negative aspects of Coetzee's treatment of sympathy is Jonathan Lamb (2001). He argues that in Coetzee's work sympathy is shown to be 'a perverse outcome of a defensive or hostile relation between species and things' (Lamb 2001, para. 1).

Lamb situates his reading of The Lives of Animals and Disgrace within the

tradition of what he calls 'It narratives', an eighteenth-century genre of fiction in

which an animal or thing recounts their life story (Lamb 2001, para. 2). In Lamb's

view, these narratives are an expression of the eighteenth century's dominant

- 29 - preoccupation with both metempsychosis and sympathy. However, rather than celebrating the power of sympathy to bridge the gulf between self and other, many

It narratives point to the egotistical and potentially violent aspects of sympathy.

The animals and objects who narrate such narratives reveal not only their mistreatment at the hands of human beings but suggest also that sympathy is sometimes the result of an attempt to escape from one's own loneliness and self­ loathing into the self of another. He writes that

[i]f the history of modem metamorphosis teaches humans anything, it is that the enlargement of sympathy discloses relations that are neither comfortable nor sociable. The autonomy it confers on things and creatures, far from mirroring a benevolent intention, generates narratives of human behaviour replete with arrant but unsuccessful selfishness, remorseless cruelty, and humiliating weakness. Because kindness is only the projection of defeated self-love; because tenderness can originate in perversity and tend towards violence; and because the real sense of another's loss calques upon a presentiment of the extinction of our own identity, we should worry not about extending sympathy, but that it is already disgracefully extended (Lamb 2001, para. 50).

Lamb here stresses sympathy's destructive potential and goes on to discuss

Costello's belief in limitless sympathy with what he regards as an assertion of its limits in Disgrace, wherein he finds a protagonist almost entirely lacking in sympathy (Lamb 2001, paras. 3-4). Lamb would seem to suggest that, for

Coetzee, disgrace is a means of breaking down the barrier of the imagination, a means of moving from a false to true sympathy. Here, disgrace (usually resulting from some sort of shock, such as torture) serves to destabilise the ego to such a degree that characters begin to think alien thoughts; i.e., to think as if they were thinking the thoughts of another (Lamb 2001, para. 7). Lamb's analysis of

Elizabeth Costello provides a solid elaboration of the idea of the sympathetic

- 30 - imagination, but the section on Disgrace requires further development, not only in terms of exploring how Lamb's ideas are played out in the book but also in terms of providing evidence from the novel to support his views. It is unclear whether

Lamb himself subscribes to the idea that genuine sympathy is possible through the experience of disgrace nor does he demonstrate how this operates within the novel. He does, however, draw attention to the darker aspects of Coetzee's treatment of sympathy, and its potential for movements of a perverse, egotistical nature. Thus, Lamb's analysis makes an important contribution to the discussion of sympathy in Coetzee's work.

One of the more important contributions to the analysis of sympathy in

Coetzee's work is an article by Lucy Graham (2002). Her reading of Disgrace suggests that 'ethical responsiveness depends ... on "giving up" the viewpoint of perpetrator or voyeur, in order to envision by way of a position of suffering'

(Graham 2002, p. 13). As noted previously, Graham (2002, p. 4) suggests that both Disgrace and Elizabeth Costello gesture towards the possibility for ethical action through 'felt contact' with fellow creatures. She does not explain what exactly is meant by this, but it appears she means the experience - the feeling - of being in close proximity to the suffering body of another life-form.

Graham (2002, p. 12) locates the origins of Costello's idea of sympathy in the eighteenth-century culture of sensibility, which refigured the Christian concept of compassion (caritas) as sympathy. It was this culture of sensibility that gave rise to the humanitarian movement, which sought to galvanise people to act against cruelty by representing suffering, thereby generating sympathy. Yet these beliefs about the nature of sympathy suggested that the representation of cruelty

- 31 - might have the opposite effect: people might actually grow to enJoy it (see

Halttunen 1995). Graham argues that it is this same dilemma that Coetzee himself faces in Disgrace. Ethical responsiveness requires that we put ourselves in the position of the one who suffers, that we share their suffering, i.e., sympathise. At the same time, Graham argues that Coetzee's work suggests that our imaginative sympathy might also reveal how much we have in common with perpetrators of violence. Graham (2002, p. 12) writes that

[t]he task of representing sexual violence and rape, particularly, test the ethical limits of imaginative identification, since the masturbatory rape fantasies of the Marquis de Sade are the dark side of the humanitarian empathy.

Graham's position on sympathy lies somewhere between Lenta's and Donovan's focus on the positive and Tremaine's and Lamb's focus on the negative aspects of

Coetzee's treatment of this idea. Moreover, Graham, more so than any other critic, elaborates most fully the connection between sympathy and ethics.

Thus, while Lenta draws attention to both the sympathetic imagination and morality as important themes in Coetzee's work, her discussion of sympathy fails to elaborate this connection in detail. Donovan does, however, elaborate this connection through the idea of an inherently-ethical, bodily sympathy for the suffering of others. Tremaine, likewise, provides some fine insights into Coetzee's treatment of the sympathetic imagination, but whereas Donovan focuses upon the affective component of sympathetic responses, Tremaine focuses solely on the cognitive, imaginative component. Finally, it is Graham who goes furthest in exploring the connection between sympathy and ethics. Like Lamb, she points to the more sinister aspects of sympathy, while simultaneously exploring sympathy's

- 32 - potential to provide a foundation for ethics. Graham does not, however, elaborate how her insights into the working of sympathy are played out in the lives of the characters and their various interactions.

From the outset, the critics have been inclined to regard the treatment of ethics in Coetzee's work in a positive light, and this trend continues. The overwhelming majority of critics regard his novels as affirmations of the possibility of ethics. Similarly, critics who look at sympathy in Coetzee's work are inclined to regard sympathy in an overly positive light. This thesis sides with the small number of critics who adopt a sceptical approach to Coetzee's work. It takes up the work of critics who agree that sympathy is important but argues that, if we focus upon the role of sympathy in the interactions of characters, then the limitations of sympathy as a foundation for ethical relationships is made plain.

The following chapter, 'Models of sympathy', considers more closely the idea of sympathy.

- 33 - Chapter 3

Models of sympathy

As demonstrated in the previous chapter, the importance of sympathy in Coetzee's work is well recognised by critics. The current chapter situates this discussion of sympathy within a broader historical and philosophical context. This chapter argues that while the idea of sympathy can be traced back to ancient Greek thinkers in the sixth century BC, there are in fact four distinct models of sympathy. The word 'sympathy' itself is derived from the ancient Greek sumpathes, meaning 'having a fellow feeling' ( Oxford English Dictionary 2006).

The earliest recorded use of the term 'sympathy' in English is in the late sixteenth century, where it originally meant '[a]n affinity or correspondence between particular subjects enabling the same influence to affect each subject similarly or each subject to affect or influence the other, esp. in a paranormal way' ( Oxford

English Dictionary 2006). Here, the word denotes a shared tendency among two objects to influence or be influenced, but this meaning eventually fell into disuse.

The first recorded usage of sympathy as it is commonly understood today occurs in the early seventeenth century, when it came to denote '[t]he quality or state of being affected by the suffering or grief of another; a feeling or expression of compassion or condolence' ( Oxford English Dictionary 2006). This is sympathy defined in a narrow sense, in so far as it is only concerned with negative feelings.

In the mid-eighteenth century, however, the definition is broadened to include all feelings, whether positive or negative. Sympathy in this broader sense is defined as

- 34 - [t]he quality or state of being affected with a feeling similar or corresponding to that of another; the fact or capacity of sharing or being responsive to the feelings or condition of another or others; an instance of this ( Oxford English Dictionary 2006).

Some writers, it should be noted, use the term empathy to denote sympathy in the above sense (see Davis 1994, pp. 9-12), while others argue that the term sympathy should be reserved for affective responses to others, while 'empathy' should be reserved for cognitive responses (Wispe 1986). For Wispe, empathy is 'the attempt of one self-aware self to understand the subjective experiences of another self (1986, p. 314). Empathy is thus a way of knowing that requires effort of the imagination in order to understand someone as objectively as possible. In this chapter, the four models of sympathy that are identified cover the same range of processes described by Davis and Wispe without resorting to use of the word empathy. In summary, sympathy as it is commonly understood can mean pity, but it can also denote any corresponding feeling, positive or negative, in which the observer simulates the feelings of the observed.

The idea of sympathy in the classical world can be found in the concept of oikeiosis, a Greek word denoting the fellowship of animals and humans. Plutarch and Pythagoras, along with Ovid, were among the more well-known advocates of oikeiosis, a notion founded upon a belief in both the transmigration of souls and the possibility of metamorphosis (Lamb 2001, para. 2) A consequence of this belief was that the boundary between the human and the non-human world was considered very unstable; thus, all sentient creatures (including animals) and inanimate objects (such as trees and rocks) were thought to be equally deserving of sympathy (Lamb 2001, para 2). Thus, from the very first, proponents of the

- 35 - idea of sympathy were concerned with the relationship between subject and object; moreover, as this chapter demonstrates, all subsequent attempts to theorise sympathy share this concern.

Subsequently, thinkers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries drew upon classical writers to aid them in their understanding of the sympathy.

Seventeenth-century thinkers drew upon the writings of Juvenal and Cicero, both of whom discuss sympathy in the sense of pity as compassion; they also drew upon idea of storge, a Greek work meaning 'natural affections', usually used in connection with the relationship between parents and children and which can be found in a number of classical sources (Fiering 1976, p. 196). It was through ancient sources such as these that classical ideas about sympathy influenced modem thought, yet while Greek thinkers such as Plutarch and Pythagoras believed that the relationship between subject and object was made possible by their fundamental, underlying similarity, later thinkers were to conceptualise this relationship in markedly different ways.

Indeed, sympathy was to become one of the dominant ideas of the eighteenth century. It was extremely influential not only in philosophy and psychology but also in ethics and aesthetics. Engell (1981, p. 143) writes that

' [ o]ne of the major themes of mid and late eighteenth-century thought, both moral and aesthetic, is the power of sympathy'. Little surprise, then, that the eighteenth­ century heroic ideal was the 'man of feeling', and sympathy with the suffering of others was considered a mark of virtue (Halttunen 1995, p. 303). Sympathy was thus central to the way in which the eighteenth century understood individuals and their relationships to others.

- 36 - The first, simplest and perhaps most common model of sympathy is sympathy as compassion. In this model, to feel sympathy is to experience distress when one observes, directly or indirectly, the suffering of another. David Hume, one of the most important theorists of sympathy in the eighteenth century, adopts this narrow definition of sympathy as compassion. Hume was sceptical about sympathy because, firstly, the feeling of sympathy cannot be sustained for very long, and, secondly, there is no meaningful sense in which we can 'become someone else' through an act of the imagination. An individual, Hume argued, cannot be two people at once, or, if it is possible to become another person, it can only be momentary. Hume thus observed that a great deal of what passes for sympathy is in fact simply our own feelings, albeit intense, which we mistake for the feelings of others (Engell 1981, pp. 146-8).

This first model of sympathy (sympathy as compassion) continues to play an important role in contemporary philosophical debates regarding the nature of sympathy. The philosopher Craig Taylor (2002, p. 7), for example, defines sympathy as 'the phenomenon of being moved by the suffering of another'.

Taylor argues that sympathetic responses display two essential features: firstly, they involved being moved by the suffering of another; secondly, these responses are immediate and unthinking (Taylor 2002, p. 19). To be moved by the suffering of another is to feel compassion; thus, Taylor here employs the same model of sympathy propounded by Hume and other such eighteenth-century thinkers. If nothing else, Taylor's work demonstrates the continued importance of sympathy as compassion.

- 37 - Yet this model does not, it should be noted, entail a concomitant desire to alleviate the suffering of the other. Thus, while sympathy as compassion is 'other­ directed' insofar as it arises in response to the perception of another's suffering, this model of sympathy cannot be regarded as inherently ethical since it does not prompt action on the part of the observer. Indeed, Lawrence Steme's A

Sentimental Journey, published in 1768, draws attention to exactly this point.

Rather than regarding sympathy as an impulse towards ethical behaviour, Steme's novel (1967) suggests that it can just as easily resolve itself in a form of egotism:

'[t]he · whole business of sympathy, seen in Steme's subtle way, is a self­ indulgence' (MacLean 1949, p. 409). Steme thus reminds his readers that although sympathy as compassion is 'other-directed', when viewed as an end in itself, this sympathy can result in the gratification of the subject's desires while leaving the suffering of the other untouched.

The second model of sympathy treats sympathy as compassion for the suffering of another, as in the first model, but augments this affective response with a concomitant impulse to alleviate this suffering. Thus, this second model can be seen as an attempt to render sympathy an inherently ethical faculty. Like

sympathy as compassion, this model of sympathy likewise has its origins in the

eighteenth century, where the weight of Christian providential design was added

to the classical idea of storge, resulting in 'the belief that men irresistibly have

compassion for the suffering of others and are equally irresistibly moved to

alleviate that suffering' (Fiering 1976, pp. 195-6). Furthermore, like sympathy as

compassion, this second model continues to play a role in contemporary

discussions about the nature of sympathy. Wispe (1986, p. 318), a behavioural

- 38 - psychologist, adopts this definition of sympathy when she defines sympathy as

'the heightened awareness of the suffering of another as something to be alleviated'. While Wispe uses the phrase 'heightened awareness of suffering', it is clear from her discussion that what she has in mind is equivalent to compassion.

At this point, it is worth noting that both the models considered thus far understand the relationship between the subject and object in terms of an affective response on the part of subject to the suffering of the object. This is important because the models of sympathy subsequently under consideration incorporate a cognitive element. The third model of sympathy, sympathy as fellow-feeling, is likewise concerned with affective responses, but this third model is broader in two important ways: firstly, it is concerned not only with suffering but with all affective responses, positive and negative; secondly, it includes an element of cognition lacking in the first two models.

By far the most coherent and influential treatment of sympathy as fellow­ feeling was Adam Smith's The Theory of Moral Sentiments, first published in

1759 (Smith 1976). It was an enormous success and went through six separate editions before Smith's death in 1790 (Raphael & MacFie, in Smith 1976, p. 1).

Moreover, to this day Moral sentiments remains one of the most important works on sympathy ever published. Engell (1981, p. 149) regards it as 'a landmark of mid-century writing on sympathy and the imagination', while Fiering (1976, p.

210) writes that Smith gave sympathy a 'more extended treatment than any one else before and probably since'. Wispe (1986, p. 314), too, regards Smith's work as 'the classic description of sympathy', a judgement supported by Davis (1994, p. 3), who writes that Smith gives us '[o]ne of the first, and best, accounts of

- 39 - sympathy'. Bates (1945, pp. 147-8), however, has suggested that Smith's work on sympathy was simply part of a growing trend in eighteenth-century thinking, his subsequent influence on British moral philosophy being in fact quite limited.

Smith did, of course, draw upon the work of those who preceded him, in particular the Stoic philosophers of classical Greece, the philosophy of Francis

Hutcheson (Smith's teacher) and David Hume; ultimately, however, Smith's conception of sympathy was his own since Smith was the first to define sympathy as a response to any feeling whatsoever (Raphael & MacFie, in Smith 1976, pp. 5-

15). Bates's observation that Smith was simply part of a growing trend in eighteenth-century thought fails to do justice to the originality of his contribution, and the majority of critics agree that Moral Sentiments is one of the most important and influential works on sympathy ever written.

Smith defines sympathy as 'fellow-feeling with any passion whatever'

(1976, p. 10), and he takes great care to distinguish this broader definition of sympathy from the narrower conception of sympathy as compassion for another's suffering. Sympathy, for Smith, is self-evidently a natural faculty; all normal, healthy humans beings have the capacity to sympathise with one another's suffering. Smith (1976, p. 9) writes that '[t]he greatest ruffian, the most hardened violator of the laws of society, is not altogether without it'. Moreover, Smith holds that sympathy is a product of the workings of the imagination. It is this that enables the individual to conceive of the feelings of another by enabling them to conceive of how they themselves might feel if they were in the other person's situation (Smith 1976, p. 9). Smith notes, however, that the intensity of the simulated feelings in the spectator is far less intense than the feelings of the

- 40 - person observed; furthermore, the individual's identification with the circumstances of the observed can only be momentary because the awareness that they themselves are not directly involved continually intrudes (Smith 1976, pp.

21-2). Smith thus broadens considerably the conception of sympathy as pity so that it includes affective responses to both positive and negative feelings. He does not, however, couple fellow-feeling with a concomitant impulse to alleviate the suffering observed.

Smith's conception of sympathy as fellow-feeling, it should be noted, entails imagining what it is like to be in another person's situation. It does not entail imagining what it is like to actually be that person. Like Hume, Smith rejects the suggestion that either the imagination or sympathy can enable one to actually become someone (or something) else. For Smith, individuals only imagine how they themselves would feel in the another person's situation. In a key passage, Smith (1976, p. 10) argues that

[i]n every passion of which the mind of man is susceptible, the emotions of the by-stander always corresponds to what, by bringing the case home to himself, he imagines should be the sentiments of the sufferer.

Thus, for Smith, sympathy has a cognitive as well as an affective dimension: to

sympathise involves subjects thinking themselves into the situation of another,

sometimes consciously, sometimes unconsciously. In both cases, however,

grounding sympathy in the imaginative faculty allows Smith to incorporate a

cognitive dimension lacking in the previous two models of sympathy.

Smith argues that sympathy is prompted by observing a particular

circumstance rather than observing the expression of an emotion. Smith gives the

- 41 - example of a situation where the observer feels an emotion lacking in the observed: 'when we put ourselves in his case, that passion arises in our breast from the imagination, though it does not in his from the reality' (Smith 1976, p.

12). Thus, not only does Smith broaden the conception of sympathy to include both positive and negative responses, he also considers the importance of the particular circumstances in which the sympathetic encounter occurs. Usually,

Smith regards this process of sympathising with another as both automatic and unconscious, yet he also argues that it is possible for this automatic response to be blocked by a variety of internal or external determinants. Worry over their own concerns, for example, will prevent an individual from sympathising with the concerns of another. In cases such as this, Smith (1976, p. 21) suggests that sympathy requires a conscious effort on the part of the observer, who must

'endeavour ... to put himself in the situation of the other, and to bring home to himself every little circumstance of distress'. In addition, individuals possess memories of sympathetic responses, against which they can measure their present responses. On occasions when sympathy is inhibited, individuals can draw upon these memories to remind themselves that normally they would sympathise in a given situation, even if they do not at this particular moment (Smith 1976, p. 18).

Thus, when sympathy is blocked or suppressed, it is possible either to sympathise through a conscious act of will or fake a sympathetic response based upon the recollection of previous behaviour.

This does mean, however, that sympathy as fellow-feeling has no limits.

There are two ways in which sympathy is limited. Firstly, Smith argues that it is difficult for individuals to sympathise with feelings that are not readily

- 42 - generalised. He writes that feelings that 'take their origin from a peculiar turn or habit ... [the imagination] has acquired, though they may be acknowledged to be perfectly natural, are, however, but little sympathized with' (Smith 1976, p. 31 ).

Smith claims we cannot easily sympathise, for example, with the specificities of romantic love, concerned as it is with a particular beloved. We can, however, sympathise with the generalities of the lover's condition. Smith identifies a second set of limitations with regards to what he calls 'unsocial passions', such as hatred and resentment, because feelings such as these involve more than one person (e.g., the resenter and the resented); thus, we find ourselves reluctant to sympathise entirely with one person and against another (Smith 1976, p. 37).

In addition to the limitations Smith placed on sympathy, he also called into question the veracity of the imagination itself, the faculty that in his theory made sympathy possible to begin with. Imagination, he believed, could pervert the individual's perceptions and thereby produce sympathy where perhaps none might otherwise be expected. He suggests that people sympathise with 'the great' (i.e., nobles, the wealthy and so on) because they regard their state in 'those delusive colours in which the imagination is apt to paint it' (Smith 1976, p. 52). Rather than revealing the reality of these people's lives, the imagination projects a fantasy upon them. Thus, in stark contrast to the romantic thinkers who would follow in his wake, Smith was very sceptical about the imagination's capacity to reveal veridical insights about the world around us. For Smith, it is always possible for the individual's imagination to be mistaken and thus for their sympathy to be misplaced.

- 43 - Smith is also sceptical about sympathy's capacity to provide a stable foundation for ethics. Sympathy, as we have seen, is easily suppressed by one's own concern for one's self. Moreover, self-deceit, Smith (1976, p. 157) writes, is the 'fatal weakness of mankind', a weakness moreover that is only corrected by the formation of' general rules of morality'. Certain kinds of behaviour on the part of the individual prompt certain kinds of responses from others, and over time these responses become instituted as general moral rules. Morality thus reflects unchanging (and presumably universal) natural feelings and instincts (Smith 1976, p. 159). These general rules help save individuals from self-love and self-delusion by providing a check against their emotions. Smith adds that the feelings of even the most self-less, truth-loving individual can be inconsistent and unreliable:

'[w]ithout this sacred regard to general rules, there is no man whose conduct can much be depended upon' (Smith 1976, p. 163). Sympathy is the basis for morality, but morality, once established, helps to regulate and maintain sympathy.

In this, morality is given additional support by religion. Religion reinforces our respect for the morality by perpetuating the 'opinion', as Smith (1976, p. 163) calls it, that 'those important rules of morality are the commands and laws of the

Deity, who will finally reward the obedient, and punish the transgressors of duty'.

Thus, religion reinforces our inherent moral sense (Smith 1976, p. 170). Smith clearly regards sympathy as the foundation of ethics, one that was an inherent component of human psychology, but the unreliability of both the imagination and

sympathy itself led Smith to propose that both morality and religion aid in the

maintenance and regulation of our sympathetic impulses.

- 44- The Theory of Moral Sentiments provides an extremely detailed and subtle explanation of sympathy and its operation. Sympathy as fellow-feeling thus entails the individual imaginatively mirroring the feelings of another person, whether these feelings be positive or negative. Smith defines sympathy broadly in terms of individual responses to both positive and negative emotions, responses that are primarily affective, but his model also allows for cognitive responses.

This process is typically understood to involve the observer imagining themselves into the situation of the observed; thus, it is always a question of how the observer would feel in that situation, rather than attempting to imagine how the observed might feel. These responses may be either automatic or the result of a concerted effort.

The fourth and final model of sympathy to be considered in this chapter is that of the sympathetic imagination. As with the previous model, sympathy as fellow-feeling, the relationship between subject and object is understood in terms of the imagination, but with several important differences. The idea of the sympathetic imagination grew out the psychology and aesthetics of the eighteenth century and was to become one of the key concepts of Romantic criticism in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries (Bates 1945, p. 144). The idea of sympathy was also important for Romantic poets such as Coleridge, Wordsworth and Keats, writing during this same period (Engell 1981, p. 143). Among the principal tenets of Romantic criticism were the intuitive workings of the imagination and the essential truth of the imagination as contrasted with the fallibility of reason (Bates 1945, p. 144). These tenets informed a belief in the power of the sympathetic imagination, which held that

- 45 - the imagination, by an effort of sympathetic intuition, is able to penetrate the barriers which space puts between it and its object, and by actually entering into the object, so to speak, secure a momentary but complete identification with it (Bates 1945, p. 144).

Moreover, this momentary and complete identification resulting from the operation of the sympathetic imagination was regarded as veridical; i.e., revealing the way things actually are (Bates 1945, p. 145). It has also been observed, however, that during the Romantic period, the emphasis shifted away from an equal focus upon both the feeling of pity and the desire to alleviate pity to simply feeling pity; thus, sympathetic identification with the sufferer increasingly came to be regarded as an end in itself (Fiering 1976, p. 213). One consequence of this was that compassion increasingly had less to do with practical morality and more to do with literature: '[t]he cultivation of humane literature, ironically, may be a refuge from and a substitute for affective responses to painful human situations in the real world' (Fiering 1976, p. 213).

The sympathetic imagination is also similar to sympathy as fellow-feeling in that, unlike the first two models, the individual's response to the other is not confined to negative feelings alone. There is, however, a important difference between sympathy as feeling and the sympathetic imagination. As discussed previously, Smith conceptualises sympathy as fellow-feeling in terms of the individual's capacity to imagine how they themselves would feel in the situation of another. The sympathetic imagination, on the other hand, enables the individual to actually become the other person. Moreover, eighteenth-century thinkers such as Hume and Smith were sceptical with regard to the reliability of sympathy and the veracity of the imagination, and neither of them asserted that sympathetic

- 46- responses arising from the imagination constituted an inherently true vision of the external world.

In conclusion, the idea of sympathy can be traced back to the classical world. Classical thinking was to play a significant role in the Enlightenment's engagement with sympathy in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and it was in the mid-eighteenth century that Smith gave the idea of sympathy its fullest and most coherent expression. Previously, sympathy had been commonly understood to denote pity or compassion for suffering, but it was Smith who broadened this definition to include all thoughts and feelings, positive and negative. For Smith, like those who followed in his wake, sympathy was a product of the imagination, but unlike those who came after him, Smith was extremely sceptical about both the reliability of sympathy and the veracity of the imagination. For the writers and thinkers of late eighteenth and nineteenth century, the sympathetic imagination enables complete identification with its object, a process that thereby reveals its true nature.

Thus, this history of the idea of sympathy reveals four distinct models.

Firstly, sympathy as compassion; secondly, sympathy as a heightened awareness of suffering (i.e., compassion) coupled with a desire to alleviate this suffering; thirdly, sympathy as fellow-feeling; and, fourthly, the sympathetic imagination.

The point of similarity between each of these models is not compassion specifically, which is only a feature of the first two models, but rather a concern with relations between the individual and their other, whether this other be human or non-human. While the first two models concern themselves with the individual's affective responses to the suffering of another, models three and four

- 47 - allow for both affective and cognitive responses to the other. Thus, model one and two are only concerned with the affective dimension of this relationship, while model three and four are concerned with both its affective and cognitive dimensions. All four models are concerned with the relationship between the individual and their other, and it is this that makes the idea of sympathy so relevant to Coetzee's treatment of ethics. The next two chapters draw upon this understanding of sympathy to analyse, in Chapter 4, Elizabeth Costello and, in

Chapter 5, Disgrace.

- 48 - Chapter4

Elizabeth Costello

This chapter examines Coetzee's treatment of sympathy in the novel Elizabeth

Costello. It argues that although the novel's eponymous protagonist regards sympathy as not only a means of bridging the gulf between self and other but also a foundation for ethics, the novel itself problematises sympathy in various ways to such an extent that readers are left questioning not only the consistency of the sympathetic response but also its veracity.

Elizabeth Costello is an unusual work, one that sits awkwardly amongst the conventional genres of prose fiction. The work comprises eight chapters and a postscript; each chapter is described as a 'lesson'. At first glance, this suggests that the chapters are intended to impart information, knowledge or perhaps even wisdom, but the chapters themselves in no way make the lessons explicit.

Moreover, as David Lodge (2003, para. 1) suggests, it is never made clear for whom these lessons are intended, whether for the reader or the work's central character, Elizabeth Costello - perhaps both. A number of critics have commented upon the difficulty of categorising the work. Lodge (2003, para. 1) describes it as a novel but only, he adds, 'for want of a better word', while David H. Lynn (2005, p. 126) 'hesitates' to describe the book as a novel proper because each of the chapters is so 'discrete'. It is better, he suggests, to treat Elizabeth Costello as a series of interconnected stories rather than a novel (Lynn 2005, p. 131 ). Margaret

Lenta (2004, p. 105) likewise treats the work as a series of interconnected stories,

- 49 - seeking to draw out both the 'commonalities' among, and 'differences' between, the various lessons.

The lessons themselves take the form of short narratives, not unlike short stories, that largely centre upon the character of Costello. Six of the eight lessons were first published separately, and this, in part, accounts for the apparent

'discreteness' of each chapter. By publishing the chapters together, however,

Coetzee draws our attention to both the continuities and discontinuities that manifest themselves in the work, giving the lessons a complexity and a power that they lack when read separately. Readers are encouraged in their attempts to read the work as a unified whole by the work's thematic unity, the use of the word

'lesson' to describe all eight chapters and, not least, the repeated focus upon

Costello. Most of the lessons are structured around a formal lecture, and the lecture is usually given by Costello herself; although, occasionally another character, such as her sister, Sister Blanche, will speak. These lectures provide a focus for the various discussions and debates, of varying formality, that occur between the characters.

Thus, while Elizabeth Costello is hard to classify, readers are encouraged by the work's continuities to regard it as a unified whole. At the same time, however, the attempt to do so is always frustrated by its discontinuities, and the result is perhaps best described as a 'creative tension' that encourages readers to assume responsibility for their own interpretation of the work, rather than acquiescing to the authority of the text. The analysis of sympathy in Elizabeth Costello that follows thus proceeds on two distinct but related levels: firstly, in terms of what the characters say regarding sympathy and, secondly, in terms of the role of

- 50 - sympathy in the characters' interactions. This process of analysis reveals the tensions, discontinuities and contradiction between, on the one hand, what the characters say and, on the other, what the characters do, thereby demonstrating the extent to which Coetzee problematises the concept of sympathy. While the work's protagonist, Costello, argues that sympathy has an important role to play in both ethics and writing, her argument is confused; moreover, these confusions are made explicit by the other characters in the work. Moreover, in different lessons

Costello adopts different positions on sympathy, some of which are contradictory.

In addition, when the ways in which these characters interact are also considered, it is apparent that there is a considerable lack of sympathy among the characters.

The unconventional nature of Coetzee's work results in a creative tension that from the outset challenges readers to make sense of the work for themselves; ultimately, however, it must be said that Elizabeth Costello raises more questions about sympathy than it answers.

What is most striking about the treatment of sympathy in Elizabeth Costello is not so much the absence of sympathy but its failure. While it is true that sympathy is, for most part, entirely lacking in the relationships between Coetzee's characters, this should not be understood as suggesting that sympathy does not exist or that it is unimportant. On the contrary, Costello, the novel's protagonist, is obsessed by the idea of sympathy and the role it plays both in writing and the ethical life of the individual. Moreover, both she and another character, her son

John, experience sympathy, and both regard these experiences as significant.

Sympathy would seem to promise an escape from solipsism and a basis for the ethical life, but rather than fulfilling this wish, the novel problematises the notion

- 51 - of sympathy to such an extent that readers are left questioning both the veracity and the reliability of the sympathetic faculty. This is why it makes more sense to speak of the failure of sympathy, rather than its absence.

The articulation and disputation of ideas is what drives the narrative, and in this regard, Coetzee's work is similar to a novel of ideas. Moreover, the importance of ideas is announced by the text itself:

[r ]ealism has never been comfortable with ideas. It could not be otherwise: realism is premised on the idea that ideas have no autonomous existence, can exist only in things. So that when it needs to debate ideas, as here, realism is driven to invent situations - walks in the countryside, conversations - in which characters give voice to contending ideas and thereby in a certain sense embody them. The notion of embodying turns out to be pivotal. In such debates ideas do not and indeed cannot float free: they are tied to speakers by whom they are enounced, and generated from the matrix of individual interests out of which their speakers act in the world (Coetzee 2003, p. 9).

The embodiment of ideas is, indeed, a 'pivotal' aspect of this work. Yet Elizabeth

Costello' s characters not only embody ideas, they also demonstrate the entirely contingent, tenuous and temporary nature of belief itself. This suggests that the ideas espoused by the characters do not exist in some Platonic realm apart from the people who think them.

What, then, do the characters themselves say about the nature of sympathy?

Costello is obsessed by the idea that sympathy might not only enable identification with the other, both human and non-human, but that this identification might somehow form the basis for ethical relationships. Most of the lectures are given by Costello, and because she is the main character, and because she is given the greatest opportunity to present her views, her voice and her ideas are privileged above all others; thus, Costello's views regarding sympathy deserve

- 52 - special consideration. Once her views have been discussed, however, it will then be necessary to consider the various ways in which Costello's privileged voice is undermined. Costello's thinking about sympathy is most fully elaborated in the first part of Lesson 3, 'The Lives of Animals'. This lesson centres upon a lecture in which Costello considers the role of sympathy in the ethical relationship between humans and animals. She states that '[t]he heart is the seat of a faculty, sympathy, that allows us to share at times the being of another. Sympathy has everything to do with the subject and little to do with the object' (Coetzee 2003, p.

79). For Costello, sympathy is a faculty that enables the individual to actually become the other. However, not everyone, she notes, has the same capacity to imagine themselves as someone else:

[t]here are people who have the capacity to imagine themselves as someone else, there are people who have no such capacity (when the lack is extreme, we call them psychopaths), and there are people who have the capacity but choose not to exercise it (Coetzee 2003, p. 79).

Yet for those who possess the sympathetic faculty there are, in Costello's view, no limits to sympathy. On this point, she is quite clear: 'there is no limit to the extent to which we can think ourselves into the being of another' (Coetzee 2003, p. 80).

This said, Costello ends her lecture on a bleak note. Having argued at the outset of her lecture that sin is a kind of pollution resulting from the failure to sympathise, she remarks that people do not sympathise with animals and yet remain untainted:

'our moral being is untouched. We do not feel tainted. We can do anything, it seems, and come away clean' (Coetzee 2003, p. 80).

In short, what Costello has to say about sympathy is both confused and confusing. This is due, in part, to the way in which she expresses her ideas, but

- 53 - there are times when her thinking itself seems confused. One typical example of this occurs when Costello argues that the success of her novel Eccles Street demonstrates the power of sympathy:

If I can think my way into the existence of a being who has never existed, then I can think my way into the existence of a bat or a chimpanzee or an oyster, any being with whom I share the substrate oflife (Coetzee 2003, p. 80).

Even if one were to accept the claim that Costello's novel is evidence of her ability to think her way into the existence of a being that never existed, it does not follow that she can think her way into the existence of any other life-form whatsoever. These sorts of confusions are typical of the lecture in Lesson 3 and elsewhere in the work, and this is one of the ways in which the text undermines the authority of Costello's privileged voice, prompting the reader to question the ideas she embodies.

Additionally, the confusions inherent in Costello's lecture are brought to the fore by the narrative frame in which the lecture itself is situated. Throughout the lecture, the characters in the audience provide a kind of running critique of

Costello's argument: Costello's daughter-in-law, Norma, a philosopher, at one point notes that 'She [Costello] is rambling. She has lost her thread' (Coetzee

2003, p. 75); Costello's son, John, is also critical of his mother's lecture, observing that Costello 'could do with some clarity' (Coetzee 2003, p. 81). In addition, a question from the audience at the conclusion of her talk neatly summarises the overall impression of Costello's lecture upon the reader:

- 54 - 'What wasn't clear to me,' the man is saying, 'is what are you actually targeting. Are you saying we should close down the factory farms? Are you saying we should stop eating meat? Are you saying we should treat animals more humanely, kill them more humanely? Are you saying we should stop experiments on animals? Are you saying we should stop experiments with animals, even benign psychological experiments like Kohler' s? Can you clarify? Thank you (Coetzee 2003, p. 81).'

By including such criticisms in the narrative itself, Coetzee thereby prompts the reader to go beyond the merely obvious to a more subtle consideration of the issues at hand. Moreover, by presenting Costello's lecture as part of a narrative in which her ideas are critiqued, Coetzee suggests that arguments such as these do not occur in some abstract realm of pure ideas that floats about somewhere beyond the quotidian world. On the contrary, these arguments can only ever occur in the here and now, within a particular social and historical context.

Costello's position regarding sympathy, as outlined in Lesson 3, is further complicated when situated in relation to her comments in other lessons. In Lesson

6, Costello is invited to speak at a conference in Amsterdam upon 'the problem of evil'. In her lecture, she argues that people ought not to write about evil because it puts both the writer and the reader at risk: 'she has begun to wonder if writing what one desires, any more than reading what one desires, is in itself a good thing'

(Coetzee 2003, p. 160). Having advocated the role of sympathy in both ethics and writing in Lesson 3, in Lesson 6 Costello now calls this position into question.

She tells the audience 'What arrogance, to lay claim to the suffering and death of those pitiful men! ... they are not ours to enter and possess' (Coetzee 2003, p.

174). Such comments provide a stark contrast to the claim, made in Lesson 1, 'On

Realism', that writing entails becoming other, and furthermore it is the challenge

- 55 - of doing this that makes writing worthwhile (Coetzee 2003, p. 12), while in the

'The Lives of Animals', she asserts that sympathy enables us to become other, and this is the basis of all ethical relationships. Here, however, Costello suggests that the boundless sympathy she previously advocated is itself unethical.

In Lesson 6, Costello suggests that reading is like writing, insofar as the mind of the reader follows the mind of the writer: the sympathetic reader imagines the same evils imagined by the writer. She tells her audience that

I read the ... book with sympathy ... to the point that it might as well be I as Mr West who hold the pen and trace the words. Word by word, step by step, heartbeat by heartbeat, I accompany him into the darkness (Coetzee 2003, p. 174).

Costello suggests that the role of sympathy in reading is akin to the role of sympathy in writing, i.e., it enables the reader to become other. While there would seem to be a difference, insofar as the sympathies of the reader are guided by the writing, Costello suggests otherwise, claiming that 'it might as well be I as Mr

West who hold the pen'. Rather than advocating this process, however, Costello now warns against it.

In Lesson 8, 'At the Gate', Costello again changes tack, here insisting that writers are the 'secretaries of the invisible', and they must record the voices of the guilty as much as the innocent:

I am a writer, and what I write is what I hear. I am a secretary of the invisible, one of the many secretaries over the ages. That is my calling: dictation secretary. It is not for me to interrogate, to judge what is given to me. I merely write down the words and then test them, test their soundness, to make sure I have heard right (Coetzee 2003, p. 199).

- 56 - Here, Costello suggests that writers do not discriminate between the different voices they transcribe, nor do they judge (Coetzee 2003, p. 204). This presumably would include the kinds of characters that Costello condemns in Lesson 6 in which she speaks upon the problem of evil. Yet in 'At the Gate', Costello also shifts her position with respect to the consequences of sympathising with the other in writing. When she is asked what effect this non-judgemental mode of sympathy might have on her 'humanity', she replies 'What I offer to those who read me, what I contribute to their humanity, outweighs, I would hope, my own emptiness in that respect (Coetzee 2003, p. 201).While Costello does not explicitly deny that writing has a detrimental effect upon her humanity, it is made quite clear that she believes that her writing contributes to the 'humanity' of her readers. Costello here contradicts the position outlined in 'The Problem of Evil', in which she makes it quite clear she feels that there are detrimental effects on both writer and reader.

In addition to these confusions and contradictions, Costello's belief in the power of sympathy to bridge the gulf between the self and other, and her concomitant belief in the power of sympathy to compel the individual to respond ethically to the suffering of others, is further undermined by the characters themselves and the lack of sympathy evidenced in their interactions. Coetzee's characters in Elizabeth Costello do not, it must be said, display a great deal of sympathy for one another. Yet there are two incidents that might be considered examples of sympathy. The first incident occurs when Costello's son, John, spends the night with Susan Moebius. John awakes in the middle of the night,

'overwhelmed with sadness, such deep sadness he could cry' (Coetzee 2003, p.

- 57 - 26). Looking at the woman lying next to him, he observes that she is '[h]andsome in every detail, no doubt about that, but in a blank way that no longer moves him'

(Coetzee 2003, p. 26). He feels nothing towards Moebius; she is not, it would seem, the source of his sadness. John then has a sudden and unexpected vision of his mother lying in bed with knitting needles protruding from her back.

Such loneliness, he thinks, hovering in spirit over the old woman in the bare room. His heart is breaking; sadness pours down like a grey waterfall behind his eyes. He should not have come here, to room 13 whatever it is. A wrong move. He ought to get up at once, steal out. But he does not. Why? Because he does not want to be alone. And because he wants to sleep (Coetzee 2003, p. 27).

John's response here is best described as sympathetic: the woman in his vision is hurt and lonely, and John's heart is 'breaking'. At the same time, it is not clear whether this is a true vision of Costello' s state of mind or something else, perhaps a projection of John's own loneliness and isolation. On the surface, it would appear to be the kind of sympathetic imagining that Costello talks about in her lecture on the lives of animals, but rather than confirming her ideas it raises questions about where such visions come from and to what they refer. Moreover, while the dream prompts the thought, in the form of an ethical imperative - '[h]e ought to get up at once, steal out' - John does not follow this impulse. It would seem that while he is moved by sympathy for his mother, this movement is not sufficient to compel him to act. Moreover, his excuse for not acting (his desire for sleep) is trivial at best, thus making quite plain the feebleness of his sympathetic impulse. This vision prompts no subsequent action on John's part, nor is it ever mentioned to Costello herself. While Costello propounds the power of sympathy,

- 58 - the interactions of the characters themselves point the reader towards sympathy's impotence.

A second example of a sympathetic encounter between two characters can be found in Lesson 5, 'The Humanities in Africa'. In this lesson, Costello travels to Africa to visit her sister, Bridget, otherwise known as Sister Blanche. Sister

Blanche is a nun and the administrator of a large hospital that cares for children infected with AIDS. Blanche is to be awarded an honorary degree by the local university, and this provides the reason for Costello's visit. At the presentation ceremony, Blanche gives a provocative speech in which she condemns the humanities as a failed attempt to provide salvation, and this lecture provides a focus for the subsequent discussions and debates that take place in this lesson.

Over the course of her visit, Costello and her sister argue about the relative merits of religion and humanism. Blanche rejects humanism, arguing that salvation lies in the church, while Costello attempts, not altogether successfully, to assert the value of both Hellenism and humanism. Costello writes to her sister, shortly after returning to Australia, recounting a sympathetic interaction between herself and an elderly man, Mr Phillips.

Mr Phillips, long deceased by the time Costello sits down to write her letter, was a resident of the nursing home where her mother once resided. Mr Phillips was for a brief time her mother's companion, and Costello visits Phillips at the request of her mother. After his operation, Phillips spends most of his time alone in his room. He paints, so Costello models for him. Phillips communicates to

Costello via handwritten notes - he is unable to speak clearly due to a recent laryngectomy. One day, he writes, 'Wish I could paint you in the nude ... Would

- 59 - have loved that' (Coetzee 2003, p. 147). In her letter to Blanche, she describes modelling nude for Phillips. A subsequent visit, some months later, find Mr

Phillips at death's door. Costello resumes her visits, sitting beside the dying man, saying little. On one occasion, she sits naked for him again and performs fellatio on him. She does not mention this subsequent visit to Blanche in her letter.

Costello connects these experiences to the Greeks and their idea of beauty, and describes it as an act of humanity:

Nothing compels us to do it ... But out of the overflow, the outflow of our human hearts we do it nevertheless: drop our robes, reveal ourselves, reveal the life and beauty we are blessed with (Coetzee 2003, p. 150).

Throughout her recount of this episode, Costello is mindful of Phillips's situation.

Recalling his laryngectomy, Costello observes he was unable to talk: 'It must have been deeply humiliating for such a ladies' man' (Coetzee 2003, p. 146)

When Phillips expresses the desire to paint her nude, Costello observes that '[i]t must have cost him something to come out with it' (Coetzee 2003, p. 147). Yet the focus of the story is primarily upon Costello's thoughts and feelings about the incident and her struggle to make sense of what happened. Even when she considers Phillips's plight, there is something detached about the way she regards him, as she herself observes: 'She holds his hand and tries to comfort him while marking with a cold eye the stages of his decline' (Coetzee 2003, p. 152).

Moreover, the limits of Costello's sympathy are hinted at in other ways. Costello comments that '[w]hether it worked, whether the spectacle of me in the semi-nude rekindled anything in him, I cannot say' (Coetzee 2003, p. 148). Costello sees a man in need, a man suffering, and seeks to alleviate that suffering, but as with

- 60- John's waking vision in the hotel room late at night, once again, we have a moment of what might be regarded as sympathy. Rather than confirming the power of sympathy, this incident prompts the reader to question, rather than affirm, sympathy's alleged power.

Elizabeth Costello, then, would seem more concerned to draw readers' attention to the failure of sympathy than its ability to bridge the gulf between self and other. More often than not, Coetzee's characters fail to grasp the ways in which others think and feel. There are numerous instances of this failure. John's failure, for example, to comprehend his mother's pain and confusion at the conclusion to 'The Lives of Animals' - the failure, indeed, to comprehend her point of view. Unable to accept the suffering of animals, Costello, in tears, turns to John and rhetorically asks herself 'Everyone else comes to terms with it, why can't you? Why can't you?' (Coetzee 2003, p. 115) John responds thus:

What does she want, he thinks? Does she want me to answer her question for her? They are not yet on the expressway. He pulls the car over, switches off the engine, takes his mother in his arms. He inhales the smell of cold cream, of flesh. 'There, there,' he whispers in her ear. 'There, there. It will soon be over' (Coetzee 2003, p. 115)

John cannot, it seems, sympathise with his mother. He does not understand what she wants nor, it seems, what she is thinking, and his attempts to comfort her seem forced. There is something a little chilling about his final words to his mother, the final words of the chapter itself. When John says, somewhat helplessly, that it will soon be over, it is not clear whether he is referring to her distress or her life. The former is banal, while the latter is cold comfort indeed. This coldness is reflected in Coetzee's sparse, affectless prose, and the slightly distasteful, and pointedly

- 61 - corporeal, touches of realistic details: the smell of cold cream and flesh. If one were to expect sympathy anywhere in Elizabeth Costello, it would be in a scene such as this, and yet the overall impression is a complete failure of sympathy, one that is typical of the interactions between Coetzee's characters more generally.

Yet in all three of the above-mentioned examples, Coetzee raises doubts as to both the veracity and the significance of these characters' experience of sympathy. Costello's apparent identification with the men executed in West's book raises more questions about the nature of sympathy than it answers.

Coetzee's novels are so consistently unsympathetic because to sympathise with another, the novels would seem to suggest, is an extremely difficult thing to do. It only occurs in extremis, and even when it does, there is no way of confirming the veracity of the sympathetic vision since there is no way of stepping outside oneself, no objective standpoint against which to measure the accuracy of this vision. Moreover, the novel suggests that even if the sympathetic faculty does enable the individual to accurately comprehend the other, it ultimately makes little difference to the way in which the characters live their lives.

The implications of Coetzee's approach to sympathy, however, are far from clear. Both Costello and her son, John, experience momentary identification with the suffering of another. Elizabeth is seemingly able to sympathise with the victims in Paul West's book and with Mr Phillips, while John's waking vision of

Elizabeth herself could well be characterised as sympathetic in nature. Yet the responses of the characters themselves, Costello included, to the suffering of others points to the enormous difficulties that individuals face in their attempt to comprehend the thoughts and feelings of another.

- 62 - Finally, it is worth noting that the only two characters who expenence anything akin to sympathy are associated with writing. Costello, of course, is a writer by profession, and it is her writing, and her life as a writer, that is the focus of the novel itself. Throughout the course of the novel, we see Costello talking about writing, both her own and the writing of others. She gives interviews and presents lectures, and the reader actually sees her engaged in the act of writing itself, as when she is rewriting her lecture on the problem of evil in Amsterdam.

Relatively little attention, however, is paid to her personal life. We know that she has been both a wife and mother, but no mention is made of her husband; indeed, it would seem the novel is only concerned with her personal life when it touches upon her writing. Thus, her relationships with both her son, John, and her sister,

Blanche, are framed in relationship to her writing. John is not, strictly speaking, a writer; although, he is in various ways associated with writing. Firstly, he is an academic. More importantly, however, he is described as his mother's son, i.e., the son of a writer and thus sharing her writerly vision. Writerly figures, such as

Costello and John, would seem to be more likely to experience sympathy than others. This suggests that perhaps writing is a means to sympathising with others.

Does Coetzee's writing itself, then, provide a means to sympathising with others and thereby an escape from solipsism? The reader might be inclined to think so, were it not for the fact that the novel itself problematises the question from the outset by having Costello present an almost incoherent lecture on just this topic.

The problems with Costello's argument that writing is a catalyst for sympathetic identification become Coetzee's problems, and the reader is forced to question the entire relationship between themselves and Coetzee's text. This is further

- 63 - complicated by the fact that Coetzee's characters resist the reader's attempts to sympathise with them.

Elizabeth Costello does not explicitly deny the existence of sympathy. On the contrary, it suggests that individuals, under certain conditions, believe that they are able to comprehend the thoughts, feelings and experiences of another.

Yet the novel also suggests that these experiences of momentary identification cannot be relied upon. Sympathy fails to provide a solution to solipsism because it cannot be verified, not because it does not exist. The only hope that the novel suggests is that under extreme circumstances it may be possible for one individual to imagine what it is like to be another, but the veracity of this experience remains perpetually in doubt.

- 64 - Chapter 5

Disgrace

I have argued that Elizabeth Costello suggests that, for Coetzee's characters, the attraction of sympathy is that it would appear to offer a solution to solipsism by enabling individuals to bridge the gulf between the self and the other. In Elizabeth

Costello, the characters spend a great deal of time discussing the idea of sympathy; in Disgrace, however, the characters are less concerned with ideas and more concerned with the actual experience of sympathy. More specifically,

Disgrace is concerned with an issue hinted at but not addressed directly in

Elizabeth Costello; i.e., can sympathy be learned? The first half of the novel is dominated by the protagonist's failure of sympathy, but the traumatic events that beset the novel's protagonist hint that perhaps it is possible to learn to sympathise with others through one's own pain and suffering. The concluding scenes of the novel, however, like Elizabeth Costello, encourage readers to be sceptical about an individual's capacity to develop sympathetic faculties. Moreover, this scepticism towards sympathy is reinforced by the great difficulty the reader has in sympathising with the characters.

The importance of interpersonal relationships between characters in

Disgrace has been recognised by a number of critics. Meffan and Worthington

(2001), for example, regard the novel as primarily an account of Lurie's interactions with other people. Disgrace, they write, is 'fundamentally concerned

... with the ethical nature of the relationship of the self with its Other( s)' (Meffan and Worthington 2001, p. 139). Thus, rather than approaching the relationships in

- 65 - Disgrace from the point of sympathy, Meffan and Worthington adopt a

Levinasian approach similar to both Marais and Attridge (discussed previously in

Chapter 2). De Graef (2003, p. 312) also recognises the importance of interpersonal relationships in the novel, but unlike Meffan and Worthington, he recognises the role of sympathy in these relationships, approaching the novel as

'an unnerving record of the crisis of the imagination in the exercise of sympathy'.

Despite this recognition, however, de Graef is primarily interested in Disgrace as the starting point for a critique of what he calls 'aesthetic ideology'. Indeed, de

Graef reads the novel as a kind of allegory for the gap between theory and sentiment. Thus, in Disgrace, he identifies a pattern of

theoretical positioning of a structural divorce between theory, which surveys a circulatory system of randomly producing effects, and the psychic experience of human subjects caught up in the system and trying, but failing, to reproduce its effects as ultimately governed by human intention (de Graef 2003, p. 317).

De Graef primarily regards Lurie's crisis as an instance of theoretical positioning; consequently, the role of sympathy in the character's relationships is for the most part unexplored. Similarly, Cornwell (2002, p. 315) recognises the importance of

'imaginative identification', which is obviously akin to sympathy, but again, like de Graef, Cornwell is primarily concerned with other issues, reading Disgrace in terms of the tension in Coetzee' s work between realism and allegory. As Graham

(2002, p. 6) has remarked, in cases such as this, critics must be 'vigilant' when interpretative strategies obscure the suffering encountered in the text at hand. This chapter thus situates sympathy firmly at the centre of the consideration of the characters and their interactions.

- 66 - What, then, can an analysis of the novel's protagonist, David Lurie, tell readers about the nature of sympathy? Attridge (2002, p. 317) has noted a tendency among critics to regard Lurie as an unappealing character. Meffan and

Worthington (2001, p. 147), for example, describe Lurie as a 'distasteful protagonist', and Seidel's writing (2001) evinces a contempt for Lurie that is striking. Indeed, it is difficult to sympathise with any character in the novel, largely due to Coetzee's use of free-indirect discourse to alienate the reader from both Lurie and the secondary characters. As Sarvan (2004, p. 26) has noted, the extensive use of free-indirect discourse, when combined with the protagonist's unwavering egotism, denies the reader any substantial insight into the thoughts, feelings and motivations of the novel's other characters. We never learn, for example, why Bev Shaw works at the animal shelter, although we witness, through Lurie, her deep commitment to this cause. By limiting the reader's insight into characters in this way, Coetzee's curtails the opportunities for sympathetic identification. Moreover, Seidel (2001, p. 6) points out that the lack of 'objective' narration invites readers to draw their own conclusions about the events depicted by drawing upon evidence gleaned from the novel's untrustworthy protagonist.

From the novel's outset, Lurie is presented as someone lacking in sympathy.

A professor at Cape Technical University, Lurie was once professor in modern languages, but due to 'the great rationalization' (Coetzee 2000, p. 3), he is compelled to teach communications to indifferent undergraduates. Once a year, he is permitted to lecture on his special interest subject, the Romantic poets, although, as he himself admits, '[h]e has never been much of a teacher' (Coetzee

2000, p. 4). He does not, it would seem, have a great many friends; he does not

- 67 - 'readily make friends', and his attitude to friendship is 'corroded with scepticism'

(Coetzee 2000, p. 102). At one point, later in the novel, Lurie sits in a crowded theatre reflecting upon the audience: '[t]hough they are his countrymen, he could not feel more alien among them, more of an impostor' (Coetzee 2000, p. 191). By the novel's conclusion he has become 'a mad old man who sits among the dogs singing to himself (Coetzee 2000, p. 212). Lurie, from start to finish, is an outsider figure, inhabiting a society in which he feels out of place, living a life devoid of genuine affection or authentic commitments of any kind. The novel presents. the reader with a character who is alienated not only from those around him but also from himself.

Coetzee's portrayal of Lurie as lacking in sympathy is primarily explored through his relationships to women. Disgrace opens with Lurie, confidently asserting that he has 'solved' what he characterises as 'the problem of sex'

(Coetzee 2000, p. 1). His solution to the problem of sex, as it turns out, involves regularly visiting Soraya, a prostitute who works at a local brothel. Lurie, moreover, romanticises this relationship. He regards Soraya with affection and believes that this affection is reciprocated. When they sees one another on the street, however, Soraya abruptly ends their arrangement, at which point Lurie pursues Soraya. Lurie here imagines Soraya's home-life and her family, but seems unable to imagine how Soraya herself might regard him or their relationship. This pattern will be repeated in Lurie's other relationships with women, suggesting that despite his attempts at imaginative identification, his capacity for sympathy is extremely limited.

- 68 - Lurie's predatory relations with women take a step further in his relationship with Melanie Isaacs, a student of his with whom he initiates an affair.

This relationship culminates in what might be described as coercive sex. Seidel

(2001, para. 9), for example, characterises this as a seduction but also raises the possibility it might be 'date rape'. Lurie here describes himself as 'the intruder who thrusts himself upon her' (Coetzee 2000, p. 24), and when they have sex,

Melanie goes slack: 'like a rabbit when the jaws of the fox close on its neck'

(Coetzee 2000, p. 25). Lurie here characterises himself as both an intruder and a predator, but hesitates to describe himself as a rapist. Reflecting upon the encounter, he regards it as follows: "Not rape, not quite that, but undesired nonetheless, undesired to the core' (Coetzee 2000, p. 25) By focusing on Lurie's equivocations and excluding any hint of Melanie's interiority, Coetzee heightens the ambiguity of the scene to such an extent that readers are left uncertain exactly how to think about Lurie, about Melanie, and about their relationship. This uncertainty is one of the principal ways in which Coetzee confronts readers with the limits of not only Lurie's sympathy but of their own as well.

Lurie' s lack of sympathy is evidenced by a number of failed attempts on his part to imaginatively sympathise with others. When Lurie receives a letter informing him that Melanie Isaacs, the student with whom he has had an affair, has lodged an official complaint with the university, Lurie is clearly disturbed:

'[h]e gets up, locks the door of his office, and sits with the paper in his hand, trying to imagine [my italics]what has happened' (Coetzee 2000, p. 39). In 'trying to imagine what has happened', Lurie imagines a scene, replete with characters and dialogue, that is interesting more for what it omits than for what it includes:

- 69 - Melanie would not have taken such a step by herself, he is convinced. She is too innocent for that, too ignorant of her power. He, the little man in the ill-fitting suit, must be behind it, he and cousin Pauline, the plain one, the duenna. They must have talked her into it, worn her down, then in the end marched her to the administration offices (Coetzee 2000, p. 39).

Interestingly, Lurie's waking fantasy is figured largely in the form of a dialogue and contains very little description, except towards the end. Lurie imagines a scene in which Melanie's interiority is completely elided; she does not speak during the entire scene, and participates, in Lurie's imagination, only reluctantly.

In fact, more attention is paid to Melanie's hand and her signature than her subjective experience. This fantasy demonstrates the limitations of his capacity to sympathise with others.

This inability to sympathise, despite the operation of his imaginative faculties, is also reflected in Lurie's relationship with his daughter, Lucy. Lurie's relationship with his daughter, like all his relationships, is strained from the outset. Although he professes his love for his daughter on a number of occasions, he is frequently dismissive of her, the choices she has made in her life and her motivations. He dismissively recalls, for example, Lucy's former partner, and characterises the lesbian relationship as an excuse for women to let themselves go

(Coetzee 2000, p. 86). Lurie here demonstrates an inability to put himself in

Lucy's position. He obviously cares for his daughter and is concerned about her, but he is nonetheless incapable of sympathising with her. Consequently, his care and concern are rendered ineffectual. The strain in their relationship only increases when Lurie and his daughter are attacked by a group of men on their farm: Lurie is both beaten and set on fire, while Lucy is raped. Despite Lurie's

- 70 - insistence that she return to the city, Lucy decides to stay on the farm. Moreover, she refuses, at least initially, to talk about either her reasons for staying or the rape itself:

'I can't talk anymore David, I just can't,' she says, speaking softly, rapidly, as though afraid the words will dry up. 'I know I am not being clear. I wish I could explain. But I can't. Because of who you are and who I am, I can't. I'm sorry. And I'm sorry about your car. I'm sorry about the disappointment' (Coetzee 2000, p. 155).

Lurie is left baffled. At first, he attempts to make sense of Lucy's experience by reference to a variety of texts. He remembers trying to understand rape by reading newspaper reports, and seeing 'The rape of the Sabine women' in an art-book and wondering 'What had all this attitudinising to do with what he suspected rape to be: the man lying on top of the woman and pushing himself into her?' (Coetzee, p.

160) Lurie also attempts to make sense of Lucy's experience through reference to

Romanticism and his hero, Byron, in particular:

[ a]mong the legions of countesses and kitchenmaids Byron pushed himself into there were no doubt those who called it rape. But none surely had cause to fear that the sessions would end with her throat being slit. From where he stands, from wb.ere Lucy stands, Byron looks very old-fashioned indeed (Coetzee 2000, p. 160).

There is something disturbingly cavalier - one might even say callous - about the way in which Lurie ponders those women 'who called it rape'; the inference being, presumably, that their categorisation of the experience is questionable. The issue raised here would seem to be the limitations of not only everyday discourse but 'high' art to adequately represent certain kinds of experience, in this case an experience in extremis about which Lurie knows little. Even his suspicion, that

- 71 - rape involves a 'man pushing himself into' a women seems abstracted. As a prof~ssional critic, Lurie is required to think both abstractly and analytically about aesthetic works of various kinds, but this attempt to approach Lucy's experience through representation results in a 'thin', disembodied description that seems to prevent him from grasping the reality of her rape.

Lurie' s aestheticisation of experience also prevents him from drawing the analogy between Lucy's experience, which dominates the second half of the novel, and his relationship with Melanie, which dominates the first. This is despite the fact that Lucy herself encourages him, in a oblique fashion, to do so. She tells him that

Maybe, for men, hating the woman makes sex more exciting. You are a man, you ought to know. When you have sex with someone strange - when you trap her, hold her down, get her under you, put all your weight on her - isn't it a bit like killing? Pushing the knife in; exiting afterwards, leaving the body behind covered in blood - doesn't it feel like murder, like getting away with murder? (Coetzee2000, p. 158)

Lucy's use of the word 'ought' - 'you ought to know' - echoes the use of the word earlier in the novel, and suggests Lurie has an ethical obligation to understand his own violent nature, as a man. Thus, Lurie's 'defence' of Byron is partly a defence of himself. Byron and, indeed, Lurie may be rapists, but they do not threaten their victims with death. They are not, therefore, the same as the men who raped Lucy.

Having moved from considerations of the representation of rape in newspapers to Byron as rapist, Lurie now attempts to imagine what the experience may have been like for Lucy.

- 72 - Lucy was frightened, frightened near to death. Her voice choked, she could not breathe, her limbs went numb. This is not happening, she said to herself as the men forced her down; it is just a dream, a nightmare. While the men, for their part, drank up her fear, revelled in it, did all they could to hurt her, to menace her, to heighten her terror. Call your dogs! they said to her. Go on, call your dogs! No dogs? Then let us show you dogs! You don't understand, you weren't there, says Bev Shaw. Well, she is mistaken. Lucy's intuition is right after all: he does understand; he can, if he concentrates, if he loses himself, be there, be the men, inhabit them, fill them with the ghost of himself. The question is, does he have it in him to be the woman? (p.160-1)

Comparing this willed fantasy about Lucy's rape with Lurie's fantasy about

Melanie's filing of a complaint, we see that, while Lurie's fantasy completely elides Melanie's subjective experience, his fantasy about Lucy goes further, perhaps suggesting that his disgrace and the trauma of the attack have enabled him to sympathise with others. Lurie imagines Lucy's feelings ('frightened near to death'), her bodily experience ('her limbs went numb') and her thoughts ('this is not happening'). Mid-way through this fantasy, however, Lurie's fantasy shifts from Lucy's point of view to that of her rapists, who 'drink up her fear'. Lurie shows himself aware of this; he realises that 'he can, if he concentrates, if he loses himself, be there, be the men'. The question that is left hanging at the conclusion of Lurie's fantasy is 'does he have it in him to be the woman?' This is a question that Lurie himself does not answer, although the concluding scenes of the novel would seem to suggest that he does not.

Meffan and Worthington (2001, p. 144) characterise the tension that arises between Lurie and his daughter Lucy as a 'crisis of difference', a crisis that can only be resolved by, firstly, Lurie's respect for the ways in which he and Lucy differ and, secondly, his attempt to imagine himself into her subjective

- 73 - experience. As the authors acknowledge, Lurie fails in his attempt to imagine himself into his daughter's situation, but they also suggest that this failure might be 'ethically productive' since it results in self-critique and recognition of the

'limitations of perceptions' (Meffan and Worthington 2001, p. 145). They write that

what is offered in Disgrace is an account of the ethical as self­ directed evaluative process, not extra-personal imperative: in the face to the alterity asserted by Lucy, Lurie attempts to imagine himself as Other and, recognising the failure of that attempt, continues to try (p. 145).

However, the events in the second half of the novel suggest that readers ought to be sceptical about the potential to develop our sympathetic faculties. Lurie returns to his habitual, unsympathetic ways. Shaken by his encounter with Ryan outside the theatre where Melanie is acting in her play, Lurie leaves. The prostitute Lurie picks up on the way home is evidently drunk or on drugs, only increasing the seaminess of the encounter, and she looks, to Lurie, younger than Melanie

(Coetzee 2000, p. 194). Despite the use Lurie has made of her, he indulges in feelings of 'protectiveness' and contentment (Coetzee 2000, p. 194).

Critics have commented on the bleakness of the novel's conclusion, m which Lurie sacrifices the dog who has befriended him, but Lurie's encounter with the prostitute, and the feelings it arouses in him, are equally troubling. The last thing Lurie says to the girl is, 'I'm taking you back to where I found you'

(Coetzee 2000, p. 195). The encounter is both exploitative and sordid, and Lurie's comparison between the prostitute and Melanie only serves to remind readers how little he has changed over the course of the novel. This one scene, more than any

- 74 - other scene in the novel, undermines any attempt to regard Lurie' s disgrace as increasing his capacity to sympathise with others.

This is compounded further by the novel's penultimate scene, a typical pastoral encounter between Lurie and his daughter, Lucy. Approaching the farm on foot, his vision of the farm has all the features of the pastoral:

From the last hillcrest the farm opens out before him: the old house, solid as ever, the stables, Petrus's new house, the old dam on which he can make out specks that must be the ducks and larger specks that must be the wild geese, Lucy's visitors from afar. At this distance the flowerbeds are solid blocks of colour: magenta, carnelian, ash-blue. A season of blooming. The bees must be in their seventh heaven. Of Petrus there is no sign, nor of his wife or the jackal boy who runs with them. But Lucy is at work among the flowers, and, as he picks his way down the hillside, he can see the bulldog too, a patch of fawn on the path beside her. He reaches the fence and stops. Lucy, with her back to him, has not yet noticed him. She is wearing a pale summer dress, boots and a wide straw hat. As she bends over, clipping or pruning or tying, he can see the milky, blue-veined skin and broad vulnerable tendons of the backs of her knees: the least beautiful part of a women's body, the least expressive, and therefore perhaps the most endearing. Lucy straightens up, stretches, bends down again. Field­ labour; peasant tasks, immemorial. His daughter is becoming a peasant (Coetzee 2000, p. 216-7).

Lurie here romanticises both the landscape and its occupants by once agam aestheticising his experience.

Barnard (2003, p. 205) observes that in Disgrace Coetzee foregoes what she describes as the 'maternal and deconstructive' pastoral mode evidenced in his earlier works, such as Life and times of Michael K. Barnard points out, for example, that Disgrace undermines the opposition, so typical of the pastoral mode, between the city and the country. Disgrace thus can be read as a sort of

- 75 - 'anti-pastoral'. Barnard's (2003, p. 218) reading of the novel's penultimate scene recognises the masculine, European and traditional elements of Lurie's pastoral vision while arguing that this vision is not entirely 'retrograde'. To support this reading, Barnard points to Lurie's use of the phrase 'Das Ewig-Weibliche', a phrase from Faust usually translated as 'the eternal feminine'. Barnard points out that while Lurie's use of this phrase might be read as some sort of phallocentric essentialism on his part, Goethe in fact wrote that 'the eternal feminine draws us onward', implying a transcendental, rather than sexual, relationship with women.

Barnard thus suggests that Lurie's use of the phrase points to the possibility of a sudden transfiguration and thereby the hope of grace.

Yet this attempt to recuperate Lurie's vision, and to some extent Lurie himself, seems to rely too heavily upon a reading of Goethe's phrase that is at odds with Lurie's own use of Romantic discourse to legitimate his own selfish desires, as when Lurie draws a comparison between his daughter's rapists and his hero, Byron (Coetzee 2000, p. 160). More significantly, however, Barnard overlooks the pointed absence of black South Africans from Lurie's vision. Lurie notes that Petrus, his wife and Pollux are all absent. It is Petrus who, in Lurie's mind at least, is the source of much of his and Lucy's trouble; furthermore, it is trouble of a kind that Lurie is unable to deal with. It is significant, then, that in his pastoral vision of South Africa black South Africa is absent. In his acceptance speech for the Jerusalem Prize, which he received in 1987, Coetzee comments upon exactly this: the tendency of white South Africans to love the land they had colonised but not the people. Coetzee (1992, p. 97) observes that

- 76 - [ a]t the heart of the unfreedom of the hereditary masters o°f South Africa is a failure of love. To be blunt: their love is not enough today and has not been enough since they arrived on the continent; furthermore, their talk, their excessive talk, about how they love South Africa has consistently been directed toward the land, that is, toward what is least likely to respond to love: mountains and deserts, birds and animals and flowers.

Lurie's pastoral vision is emblematic of this failure of love, a failure of sympathy.

Thus, regardless of what Goethe himself might have intended by the phrase 'Das

Ewig-Weibliche', it is doubtful that Lurie is as close to transcendence as Barnard suggests. While this vision prompts feelings of acceptance in Lurie for Lucy and her baby (Coetzee 2000, p. 217), Lurie is still unable to sympathise with Lucy from her own point of view.

In his analysis of visionary closure in the modernist novel, Thicksum (1988) argues that modernist writers invented a new form of fiction by drawing upon the traditions of Christianity and Romanticism in order to preserve the integrity of their characters while also meeting the aesthetic demands of closure. This desire to prioritise character over plot leads modernists to conclude their novels with a visionary experience that draws upon the culminating revelation the restructures the preceding narrative, taken from Christianity, and the embodied muse, taken from Romanticism. Thicksum writes that '[t]he two traditions come together in

Augustine and Dante, are adapted to secular literature in Romantic poetry, and are reshaped again by the modernists to create a new form of closure in the novel'

(1988, p, 27). Lurie's pastoral vision, described above, parodies the visionary closure of the modernist novel in two ways. Firstly, rather than constituting the final scene of the novel, Lurie's vision is followed by the killing of the dog that has befriended him. Secondly, the pastoral invokes the muse in the form of Lucy,

- 77 - but at the same time leaves the reader wondering if Lurie's vision signals his redemption or a refusal to change. This scene, then, rather than providing closure, raises more questions about Lurie's capacity to sympathise than it answers.

In isolation, the novel's pastoral vision might be read as an authentic moment of sympathetic identification. Understood within the context of the novel as a whole, however, Lurie's vision suggests something else entirely. His identification with Romanticism in general and Byron in particular, established at the outset of the novel, when coupled with his habitually unsympathetic treatment of women only serves to undermine both the legitimacy of Romantic discourse itself and Lurie's reliance upon this discourse to aestheticise his experience. As previously, Lucy, here the object of Lurie's imagination, is rendered without reference to her thoughts and feelings, i.e., unsympathetically. Lurie's pastoral vision suggests that, despite his disgrace, Lurie's capacity to sympathise has changed very little over the course of the novel.

The novel's concluding scene only complicates this issue further. Lurie's decision to put down the dog is disturbing in and of itself, but it is doubly disturbing because there would appear to be no apparent justification for the decision. The detached tone in which the act itself is described, in concert with

Lurie's apparent resolve, has encouraged some critics to read the novel's conclusion optimistically. Attridge (2002, p. 318), for example, characterises

Lurie's growing concern for animals in the second half of the novel, along with the protagonist's efforts to compose an opera, as a commitment to the 'singularity of the other', which Attridge situates in opposition to the bureaucratic rationalism that forms the backdrop of the novel. Thus, Attridge regards Lurie's concern for

- 78 - animals and opera as evidence of the character's integrity in the face of a 'world of calculation and accumulation'. However, we need not, as Attridge seems to suggest, choose between, on the one hand, a bureaucratic rationalism whereby the end justifies the means and, on the other, Lurie's more Kantian approach to value.

Elaborating upon interpretation elsewhere, Attridge (2000, p. 109) writes that such concerns are significant not because they provide a solution to the problems encountered in Disgrace, but because such concerns possess an inherent value that is beyond 'rational estimate'. Thus, for Attridge, the appeal of Lurie's concerns seems to lie in the treatment of these 'others' as an end in themselves rather than a means to an end. Yet he is also keen to stress Lurie's 'integrity', as if a commitment of any sort to anything whatsoever is preferable to commitments premised upon 'rational estimates'. Given the time and place in which Lurie finds himself, his commitment to opera and dogs is wholly inadequate to the needs of those around him.

Seidel casts the novel's final scene in darker, more despairing light, drawing out the parallels between Lurie and the dog (both lame, both enamoured of music) to suggest Lurie's sacrifice is a ritualised acknowledgment that his 'period of grace' is at an end: "'disgrace" means not only humiliation, but all loss of grace, the possibility of salvation, if present, not apparent, the final event in the story a kind of spiritual suicide on the part of a man who feels unmanned' (Seidel 2001, p. 15). Yet the act itself defies interpretation. Why doesn't Lurie keep the dog, if only for a few more weeks? Lurie himself seems to regard his decision as 'the right thing to do', his act an act of kindness, but the logic behind these decisions eludes us.

- 79- Lurie is thus a challenge to readers' capacity to sympathy. Indeed, Seidel

(2001, p. 6) goes so far as to raise the question of whether we should even attempt to sympathise with Lurie at all. 'Should we', she asks, 'pay attention to the fall of a self-absorbed, middle-aged white man?' Seidel, it should be noted, asks this question within the context of post-apartheid South Africa, where suffering is plentiful and sympathy is no doubt in short supply. In a context such as this,

Seidel's question is an important one, but as Meffan and Worthington (2001, p.

14 7) suggest, in presenting us with such an 'morally repugnant alterity', Coetzee may be inviting the reader to reflect upon reading itself as an act of the imagination. I would qualify this only by adding that Coetzee's own writing encourages us to conceive of reading not simply as an act of the imagination but an act of sympathy. This is the challenge with which Disgrace presents the reader, while at the same time suggesting, through the character of Lurie himself, that developing the capacity to sympathise with others is a very difficult process indeed.

- 80 - Conclusion

In his acceptance speech for the 1987 Jerusalem Prize, Coetzee (1992) described South Africa under apartheid as a society of masters and slaves. In a society such as this, he suggests, no one is free: '[t]he slave is not free, because he is not his own master; the master is not free, because he cannot do without the slave' (Coetzee 1992, p. 96). The root cause of the problem, however, is what

Coetzee describes as 'a failure of love' (1992, p. 97). The word 'love' is not a common one in Coetzee' s writing; indeed, the experience of love, as most people would recognise it, is almost entirely absent from his work. There are, of course, many different kinds oflove: romantic love, filial love, love of one's country, and so on. But if the word is understood in terms of the social, historical and political context to which Coetzee refers, then it would seem that what he has in mind is a regard for the other that goes beyond merely fulfilling one's moral or political obligations. Indeed, I would argue that what he has in mind is something akin to sympathy.

Coetzee here might seem to suggest that the answer to South Africa's problems lies in sympathy, but is sympathy able to provide a foundation for ethics? Some would argue it can. In 'Conscience, sympathy, and the foundation of morality', Jiwei Ci (1991) argues that there are, broadly speaking, two kinds of moral psychology. One is founded upon the concept of conscience, while the other is founded upon the concept of sympathy. Conscience, he argues, is inward

looking. Conscience is primarily concerned with moral integrity and what Ci calls the 'inner harmony' of the self. Sympathy, on the other hand, is outward looking.

It is primarily directed towards others; it is 'other-centred' and 'other-directed'.

- 81 - For Ci, the problem with moral psychologies founded upon conscience is that conscience does not necessarily prevent one from harming others. So long as harming others does not upset one's 'inner harmony', one's conscience remains untroubled. Conscience, Ci argues, is an inadequate foundation for moral psychology, and so sympathy is required in order to internalise moral principles that orientate the conscience towards regard for others. In brief, Ci argues for 'a position that gives priority to sympathy as the psychological foundation of morality while also taking the role of conscience into account' ( 1991, p. 49).

Ci' s account of sympathy demonstrates the fundamental importance placed upon sympathy by those who would make it the foundation of ethics. Ci' s critique of conscience raises some important issues, but his article takes much for granted, treating sympathy as if it is self-evident what it meant by the word; moreover, he suggests that sympathy itself is a ubiquitous, inherently stable, entirely reliable faculty of the mind. Given the importance assigned to sympathy in Ci's account of ethics, however, there are certain questions that must be asked. What is the nature of sympathy? Under what conditions do sympathetic responses occur? Are such responses predictable or reliable? When sympathy does occur, can it be shown to provide consistently veridical insight into the thoughts and feelings of another?

What, if any, are the limits of sympathy? If an individual is lacking in sympathy for others, can they learn how to sympathise?

It is precisely these questions that Elizabeth Costello and Disgrace encourage readers to interrogate, and because sympathy is primarily concerned with the relationship between the individual and others, Coetzee's approach to these questions has implications for his treatment of ethics generally. Despite the

- 82 - rise of postmodern relativism, ethics continues to play an important role in life, literature and (by extension) literary criticism. Ethics must be distinguished, however, from morality. Morality prescribes how a human life ought to be lived, while ethics explores the possibilities inherent in the question itself. It is thus possible to distinguish between two distinct types of literature: moral, on the hand, and ethical on the other. Coetzee's work is ethical literature because it interrogates the question of how a human being ought to live, rather than attempting to answer it. Consequently, his novels demand a form of ethical criticism that is exploratory and self-reflexive, not satisfied with reductive or simplistic answers to ethical questions but willing instead to trace complexities of his work without resorting to reductivism. Moreover, because sympathy is fundamentally concerned with the relationship between the self and the other, it is necessary to pay close attention to

Coetzee's characters and their interactions in order to make sense of his approach to ethics in terms of sympathy.

As this thesis has demonstrated, the idea of sympathy goes back to ancient

Greece, although it was not until the eighteenth century that it was rigorously theorised by thinkers such as Adam Smith, whose ideas were subsequently adapted by early nineteenth-century Romantic writers and critics. A survey of the idea of sympathy in history revealed there are four models of sympathy; these all have one thing in common, but it is not, as one might suspect, compassion.

Compassion is only a feature of the first two models of sympathy. The principal similarity between the four models is their concern with the relationships between the self and the other. It is this that makes sympathy of such great relevance to ethics, concerned as it is with individuals and their relationship to others.

- 83 - Despite the bleakness of Coetzee's work, the overwhelming majority of critics regard his novels as affirming the possibility of ethics. Most of this criticism is not directly concerned with sympathy, adopting either a 'form­ centred' mode of ethical criticism or focussing upon the body or religion, but even those critics who address Coetzee's treatment of sympathy directly regard his work as affirming the possibility of ethics. A content-centred analysis of sympathy's role in the lives of Coetzee's characters, however, reveals a much darker, far more pessimistic vision of ethics than the majority of critics have acknowledged.

Despite the characters' attempts to sympathise, the identification with the experience of another is far from common; moreover, when an individual lacks the capacity for sympathy, it is not, it would seem, something easily acquired. On the few occasions when characters do experience sympathy, it is usually prompted by unusual or extreme circumstance, and even then neither the characters themselves nor the reader can be certain that this sympathetic vision is accurate.

Most tellingly, the characters' experience of sympathy does not prompt any direct action on their part, and as such their sympathy seems unable to address the needs of others. Thus, while Coetzee's novels do not deny the existence of sympathy, they problematise sympathy to such an extent as to suggest it is unable to provide an adequate foundation for an ethical life.

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