Representation and Materiality in Coetzee, Ellis, Cooper

VIOLENCE, IMMEDIATELY:

REPRESENTATION AND MATERIALITY IN COETZEE, ELLIS, COOPER,

BECKETT, GODARD, AND NOÉ

AMY NEDA VEGARI

A.B., HARVARD UNIVERSITY, 2002

A.M., BROWN UNIVERSITY, 2005

A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE

REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN THE

DEPARTMENT OF COMPARATIVE LITERATURE AT BROWN UNIVERSITY

PROVIDENCE, RHODE ISLAND

MAY, 2008

“Do your politics fit between the headlines? Are they written in newsprint? Are they distant? Mine are crossing an empty parking lot; They are a woman walking home at night, alone— They are six strings that sing and wood that hums against my hipbone.” -Ani DiFranco This dissertation by Amy Neda Vegari is accepted in its present form

by the Department of Comparative Literature as satisfying

the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.

Date ______Timothy Bewes, Director

Date ______Rey Chow, Director

Recommended to the Graduate Council

Date ______Kevin McLaughlin, Reader

Approved by the Graduate Council

Date ______Sheila Bonde, Dean of the Graduate School

CURRICULUM VITAE

Amy Neda Vegari was born on May 15, 1981 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

After graduating from The Episcopal Academy in Merion, Pennsylvania in 1998, she attended Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She graduated magna cum laude in June 2002 with an A.B. in Literature. In September 2002, she matriculated into the Ph.D. program in the Department of Comparative Literature at Brown University, where she received her A.M. in May 2005. In the following academic year, she received a Graduate Research Fellowship from the Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women, published an article in Michigan Feminist Studies entitled “Calling the Shots:

Women as Deleuzian Material in the Cinema of Godard,” and was awarded the Albert

Spaulding Cook Prize in Comparative Literature. In the 2007-08 academic year, she held a Graduate Fellowship from the Cogut Center for the Humanities. She served as a teaching assistant in the Departments of Comparative Literature, English, and French

Studies.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This project is deeply indebted to the guidance, encouragement, and friendship that have supported me throughout the process of writing this dissertation. I am grateful for the passionate enthusiasm, keen intelligence, and unflagging humor of my graduate colleagues at Brown in the Departments of French Studies, English, and especially

Comparative Literature. Ariane Helou and Ghenwa Hayek for their emotional and gastronomical comforts. Kelley Kreitz and her husband Weston Smith for similar boons, which they continue to generously offer (and I, eagerly, to take), but which particularly sustained me during my first year in Providence. Corey McEleney for laughter that is equal parts cynical and soulful, and for his penetrating readings of my writing. Teresa

Villa-Ignacio for food and shelter, for conversation intellectual and otherwise, and for strength and fidelity. And to my friends in Philadelphia, especially Meghan O’Brien for always listening, always assuaging, always smiling.

I must express my appreciation for the generous support I have received in fellowships at Brown, from the Department of Comparative Literature, from the Graduate

School, and especially from the Cogut Center for the Humanities and the Pembroke

Center for Teaching and Research on Women, each of which offered a community of talented and dedicated scholars in addition to financial support.

This dissertation has benefited immeasurably from the insight and input of the members of my committee, who let me get away with nothing, and, in so doing, have allowed me to accomplish something. Kevin McLaughlin, who guided and instructed this project in its most formative stages; Tim Bewes, who endured early drafts as I tried

vi to learn how to “really write,” and thus taught me the gravity that a real idea commands;

Rey Chow, for her simultaneous patience and pragmatism, rigor and sensitivity. My vast intellectual debt to them goes without saying. And Elliott Colla, at times surrogate committee-member and mentor, always teacher and friend.

I will never find an adequate way to express my gratefulness to my friend and ancienne colloc , Katie Chenoweth. For illuminating conversation, for take-out dinners, for laughing, for playing the piano, for acquiring a taste for violent cinema, for hours spent planted on the abject couch. For reading almost every page of everything that I turned in at Brown. For always listening and never judging—an absolute acceptance that is generously indulgent, and profoundly kind. This dissertation would not be the same without every person I have named; I suspect it would not exist without Katie.

Most of all, my family—without whom I would not be the same, nor could I exist.

Matthew, for the happiest laughter, and the richest companionship I have known, especially in these last two years. Dave, for showing me through his own example what it means to work hard, to care, to be committed, to be autonomous. Mom, for being the one who, through her own experience, understands the peculiar rigors of academic life; and more, for supporting me without indulging me, always loving me while challenging me. Dad, for teaching me how to think and how to read, in every sense; for showing me in himself a mind unparalleled in incisiveness, and an incisiveness unique in its infinite generosity and warmth: the best example of intellectualism I will ever encounter. To all four of them, for promising to always settle for me, without ever letting me settle for less than what I grudgingly know is enough. For their love. This dissertation is dedicated to them.

vii

TABLE OF CONTENTS

VITA v

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS vi

INTRODUCTION: 1 Violence and Mediation

CHAPTER 1 19 The Mediated Body of J. M. Coetzee’s Fiction

CHAPTER 2 87 Textuality and Materiality I: American Psycho and the Politics of Representation

CHAPTER 3 132 Textuality and Materiality II: Dennis Cooper’s Endless Mimesis

CHAPTER 4 178 Violence to the Absent Body: Beckett’s “Post-Mortem Voices”

CHAPTER 5 237 Red, Blood, and the Image in Godard and Noé: Or, the Formula

WORKS CITED 275

viii

INTRODUCTION

Violence and Mediation

“The movie never ends; it goes on and on and on…” -Journey

I. Cultural Context

Following the infamous Duke University lacrosse case in 2006, I was struck by the report of a piece of “evidence” that surfaced several weeks into the investigation. The case began, we will recall, when a woman hired as a stripper for a men’s lacrosse team party accused three of Duke’s players of raping her on the night of March 13, 2006. The scandal continued to escalate as it became clear that questions of race, socioeconomic class, institutional privilege, and even state politics were all at stake in the investigation.

In early April, the news media revealed that, on the night of the alleged crime, the following message was sent to the members of the lacrosse team from the e-mail account of one team member:

To whom it may concern tommrow night, after tonights show, ive decided to have some strippers over to edens 2c. all are welcome.. however there will be no nudity. i plan on killing the bitches as soon as the walk in and proceeding to cut their skin off while cumming in my duke issue spandex.. all in besides arch and tack please respond (cited in Boyer, 53)

The e-mail was ascribed an evidentiary function, as many people, including Duke’s president, read the offensive text as proof of the lacrosse players’ guilt, while some interpreted it as proof of their innocence. 1

1 “While the language of the e-mail is vile, the e-mail itself is perfectly consistent with the boys' unequivocal assertion that no sexual assault took place that evening,” said attorney Robert Ekstrand. The e-

1 2

When I encountered the story, I was surprised that what had incited such a strong reaction in others had so minimal effect on me, as the e-mail did not strike me as evidence of anything criminal (or, for that matter, exonerating). I must have been working on violence for too long, I decided, unable to muster up the horrified response that the e-mail seemed to provoke in others. To me, it sounded like something out of one of the novels I was working on, and I had a difficult time understanding how any conclusions regarding the lacrosse players’ guilt or innocence could be reached from such a text—or from any text at all. The fact that my reading stressed the e-mail’s textuality, while others read the e-mail as the reflection of a real violent act, raised a host of concerns for me. These necessitated a re-evaluation of my approach to the subject of my dissertation, which confronted representations of violence by emphasizing their inherent mediatedness. Perhaps my approach was flawed, and violence in textual form should sometimes be read as a mirroring of real events; this seemed to be the case with the e- mail in question. And if violent representation can work in this transparent way, I thought, with text offering a documentation of acts of violence, then perhaps my failure to condemn the violent works that I study amounted to a failure to condemn violent acts in the extratextual world.

But soon after reports of it appeared in the news media, the e-mail was defended by its recipients as a work of “humorous irony,” 2 an attempt to mimic the style of Bret

Easton Ellis’s American Psycho (a text that I examine at length in Chapter 2). Thus, it was determined, the e-mail did not support or refute the prosecution’s allegation.

Furthermore, this meant that the e-mail did not constitute a textual record of real events, mail “demonstrates that its writer is completely unaware that any act or event remotely similar to what has been alleged ever occurred” (http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,190720,00.html). 2 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_Duke_University_lacrosse_team_scandal#McFadyen_e-mail

3 but rather offered an example of textual citation. However, its treatment by those involved in the case illuminated a widespread assumption that language could be reduced to the direct communication of real events—an assumption that both subordinates language to and excludes it from a presumably stable category called reality. Moreover, the fact that the e-mail was deemed innocent because of its author’s intended irony reiterates the strong tendency to ignore the mediation inherent in language. That is, what came to light was an inability to determine whether the reality the e-mail reflected was an ironic or murderous one: either way, the text was endowed with the ability to deliver information about the actions of its author (and even its recipients). In terms of my re- evaluation of my own work, this suggested to me that my emphasis on the mediation of representational forms like language was not misguided, because such mediation was not being adequately acknowledged.

The affair that became known as the “MySpace Suicide Hoax,” which also received a great deal of popular attention, further convinced me of the significance of this emphasis. On October 16, 2007, an argument took place over the Internet between a teenaged girl named Megan and her boyfriend, Josh, whom she knew exclusively through their interactions on MySpace.com. Several hours later, Megan hanged herself in her bedroom closet. A month after her suicide, it came to light that Josh was not a real person, but rather a character invented by a former friend of Megan’s and that ex-friend’s mother, Lori Drew. A scandal exploded focusing largely on Lori’s role in the suicide, which she denied with “little remorse,” casting herself as the “undeserving victim” of popular criticism (Collins 40).

Coverage of the case in The New Yorker ends with the citation of a post that appeared on Megan’s MySpace page soon after her death: “we’re doing everything we can to stop bullying…because we dont [sic] want something this terrible to have to happen to anyone again” (cited in Collins 41). The moral of Megan’s tragic story appears to be that people (and especially the parents of adolescents) should be nicer to each other—that “bullying” leads to death. While this may well be the case, it misses the enormous issue of mediation that is at stake in the story of the MySpace suicide.

Although it is unfortunate that Megan was told by Josh that “you’re a shitty person, and the world would be a better place without you in it” (41), what is devastating is not the content of the message, but rather its uncomplicated reception. The media coverage of the case confirms this: what made the story so controversial is that the identity of the sender of the message was not real—not that the message itself was cruel. Those masquerading as Josh hid the fictional quality of his message, and Megan was not able to recognize the artistry that went into it. The mimetic illusion was perfect: Megan did not identify the mediation of the text she read, and she responded with a mimesis of her own, performing the suicide that the message invited her to execute.

Although what follows is a study of violence in works of art—not, as in the examples I have just cited, in the extratextual world—it is motivated by my belief that this distinction is predicated upon the false assumption of an opposition between the immediacy of the extratextual world, and the mediatedness of what we choose to identify as fiction. This false distinction impedes our understanding that the techniques required in examining the latter are crucial to our comprehension of the former as well. The works I explore in this project demonstrate this—perhaps counterintuitively—by

5 highlighting their fictionality in a variety of ways. Thus the chapters of my dissertation offer extensive analyses of how certain novels and films underscore their status as artistic representation—what stylistic and generic conventions they employ or manipulate in order to call the audience’s attention to their mediatedness. To a great extent, this project was founded on the observation that, in the period from the mid-twentieth century to the early twenty-first century, films and texts expose their literary and cinematic mediation with a notable frequency where they represent acts of violence. All of the examples investigated in the following chapters confirm this. Moreover, these two examples speak to this coincidence of violence and exposed textuality: although their reception is shown to be dependent upon an uncomplicated distinction between the real and the fictional, their textuality plays a significant role in the unfolding of violent events. That is, the mediatedness of these examples constitutes a crucial component of the violence that took place.

This project identifies the authority realist convention continues to command over representation. It proceeds by studying works in which violent content coincides with the rupture of such convention, and articulates what effect this phenomenon has on those texts. I do not mean to assert that it is only violent artworks that highlight their representational status. But I do mean to suggest that it happens with a curious regularity that they do, and that regularity seems to be increasing all the time—in works popularized in mass culture, as well as works taken up for criticism in the academy.

Consider that, in the space of one year, two cinematic adaptations of Truman Capote’s In

Cold Blood ( Capote 2005, and Infamous 2006) received a wide release. Capote’s novel, of course, is often hailed as inaugurating the modern true crime genre, and both Infamous

6 and Capote foreground the problematic relationship between an extratextual reality that is presumed to be unmediated, and its representation by adding a layer of metafiction to their narration: they present the true story of Capote’s construction of his true crime novel. That two films would more or less simultaneously undertake the adaptation of In

Cold Blood forty years after the novel’s initial publication (in 1965), with no discernible reason for their simultaneity (no new publication of the text, for example), and that they would each address that murder story by representing the author’s process of representing it, suggests a peculiar timeliness about the intersection of violent content and formal self- consciousness.

Dexter (2006), a series created by Showtime that now airs on network television as well, also highlights a popular engagement with the self-conscious representation of violence, as a show about a serial killer who murders other serial killers. Another example of self-reflexivity in the portrayal of violence occurs in Vantage Point (2008), in which the president of the United States gets shot at a summit on global terror in Spain, and the would-be assassin can only be identified by assembling the stories of six witnesses, each of whom has observed different details of the shooting. (The film alludes to Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon (1950), without that film’s more complicated conclusion that the different narratives ultimately do not reconstruct the original scene of violence.)

A similar move is made in another, very different film that recently received a wide viewership: Atonement (2007), a cinematic rendering of Ian McEwan’s acclaimed novel of the same name. Both novel and film highlight the mediation of narrative by offering competing accounts of the story’s major plotlines, which contradict each other on the question of whether or not acts of violence have taken place. The suggestion here, as

7 with all of these examples, is that narrative constructedness becomes a compelling theme when it is shown to be a matter of life or death.

This prevalence of the coincidence of violence and artistic self-reflexivity was perhaps best manifest in the series finale of The Sopranos (2007), as the show ended with millions of HBO fans staring with confusion at television sets gone suddenly blank and soundless. With tension mounting in the show’s concluding episode, the question of whether Tony Soprano would finally be “whacked” seemed about to be answered in the affirmative, only to be inconclusively settled by an abrupt cut to black and mute. Tony’s murder, set up by ominous shots of suspicious persons in the restaurant (and years of viewer speculation that the series would end with the protagonist’s death), is replaced by the absolute withholding of any resolution to the diegesis. Instead, the audience receives a jarring reminder that the story we have been following is just that—a fiction, a televisual construction without reference to actual events, and therefore lacking a definitive ending that would be truer than any other.

II. Violence, Matter, Immediacy

Violence serves as the occasion for artworks to reveal their constructedness: this is a principle that is manifest continually in mass culture, and it is one to which we will continually return in this dissertation. The following question arises: what effect does this link between violence and the revelation of artistic mediation have on the works in which it appears? I posit that, when themes of bodily harm serve to expose a work’s representational apparatus, the violence we identify is not, properly speaking, that of the physical abuse being depicted. Rather, it is a violence that is entirely textual—the violence of the artwork against itself. For example, as we will see in Chapter 1, J. M.

Coetzee’s novel In the Heart of the Country offers several accounts of the rape of Magda, the protagonist, by Hendrik, the family servant. In the accounts that follow the first, the details of the sex act change, its location is adjusted, and the dialogue between the two characters is altered. The novel showcases its ability to change its narrative with no diegetical justification, with the result that its constructedness is highlighted. In this case, the various descriptions of the violent act interrupt the flow of Magda’s story, constituting an instance of textual violence that sharply undercuts the authoritative conventions of narrative continuity.

To be sure, what I am offering here is a definition of violence to artistic form, and, in some ways, it is not a definition that will seem particularly new. Insofar as it is conceived as the rupture of established generic or stylistic conventions, and especially insofar as it constitutes a break with the idea of art as a degraded imitation of reality, what I am calling representational violence has already been duly identified as a defining characteristic of twentieth-century fiction (and, more generally, contemporary culture). 3

However, this is not merely a metaphorical argument that offers a slippery elision of violence and rupture in order to attribute violence to literary and cinematic formalism. If it were, the violent acts described in Coetzee’s novels (or in the works of the other artists

I consider) would be immaterial to our discussion; the coincidence of violent content and formal manipulation would be, precisely, coincidental, in the “accidental” sense.

3 In fact, it has become rather commonplace to view artworks of this period as challenges to an enduring model of mimetic representation. Certainly the concept of defamiliarization presented in Russian formalist criticism presented such an argument. Likewise, in the literary analyses she sets forth in Pouvoirs de l’horreur , Julia Kristeva also identifies the rupture of formal convention as a specifically modern cultural phenomenon. Theodor Adorno makes an analogous argument in his texts on Franz Kafka and Samuel Beckett. Moreover, theories of the postmodern also stress such a break from the representational model wherein artworks aim to transparently imitate reality; Jean-François Lyotard offers one such account, characterizing postmodern formalism as “that which, in the modern, puts forward the unpresentable in presentation itself,” “deny[ing] itself the solace of good forms” (Lyotard 81).

My contention is, on the contrary, that there is no accident about it. I stress the concurrence of scenes of bodily abuse and formal manipulation here because the texts I study seem to posit such manipulation as their means of expressing the materiality of the violence they represent—because the revelation of the text’s textuality that is effected by self-reflexive form is the revelation of the text’s materiality. This artistic materiality is highlighted in order to underscore the way in which acts of violence are generally seen to highlight the materiality of the body. In the well-known account offered by Elaine Scarry in her book The Body in Pain , physical suffering interrupts whatever level of mediation is generally assigned to one’s relation to the body (especially where that mediation is understood to be linguistic). Scarry argues that that “physical pain does not simply resist language but actively destroys it, bringing about an immediate reversion to a state anterior to language” (Scarry 4). For our purposes here, it is not particularly relevant whether or not this “anterior” state exists, or whether or not it is possible to access it immediately through bodily pain. What is important to note is its widespread acceptance.

It is this assumed immediacy of the physical body, and especially of the physical body in pain, that artworks representing such violence must grapple with. Such immediacy is inherently at odds with the mediatedness by which artistic representation is defined; thus literature, cinema, and other art forms cannot deliver the immediacy attributed to bodily suffering, and must search for adequate ways to express it.

Scenes of violence therefore compel the works in which they appear to address their own mediation as they attempt to represent the immediacy of bodily experience.

Recognizing the impossibility of delivering the materiality of the injured body, the works

I take up in this project undertake the revelation of this impossibility, and they reveal it

10 through formal rupture. In this way, the artwork is shown to possess its own materiality, and it is this purely artistic materiality that is delivered—immediately—by the representation of violence. Therefore, it is not simply that formal or self-reflexive techniques in works of cinema and literature offer a formal violence that is analogous to violence in the extratextual world; it is rather that the representation of this latter kind of violence necessarily introduces the question of immediacy, which, given the mediation of artistic production, the text can only address through its own conspicuous self- identification as such.

Thus, when we read the competing versions of Magda’s sexual violation in In the

Heart of the Country , it is the constructedness of her narration that is revealed. That is, where the novel deviates from the dominant standards of fiction-writing, we are made to recognize those textual materials out of which Coetzee’s text is composed. To begin with, the presentation of a noticeably different version of the story each time demonstrates that no single version is truer than any other; thus the fictional nature of the narrative is displayed to the reader as a defining characteristic of the novel that generally gets taken for granted. Furthermore, when the novel returns to the beginning of the scene to tell it again, it exposes our expectations for narrative time—that it will steadily progress forward chronologically, unless we receive an indication that, for example, a flashback has taken place (something that does not happen with Magda’s retellings).

The reader is also made to recognize which aspects of the text contributed to the first version’s credibility, because it is in contrast to these that we are able to identify the adjustments in subsequent versions. Interestingly, those details that most conclusively mark alterations in Magda’s narration are physical ones. It is possible, for example, that

Magda makes both of the following utterances to Hendrik: “Why do you hate me so?” and “You do nothing but shout at me, you never talk to me, you hate me” (106), the first of which is cited in the second account of the rape, while the second is included in the third. These details are not mutually exclusive. However, the fact that the act takes place on the floor in the first two versions, but on the bed in the second two, suggests rather forcefully that distinct stories are being recounted to us. For the reader, tracing the development of each account to note how it is different from or similar to the others, the text seems to suggest that these details concerning the physical choreography of the rape are those that matter in constructing a credible narrative.

However, by highlighting its ability to change such details abruptly and without explanation, the text demonstrates that these words (bed, floor), despite the referential specificity they try to claim by signaling a concrete location, are no more substantial than the words Magda utters to Hendrik, which, when altered, do not necessarily indicate the narration of distinct scenarios. Or, to put it differently, the change suggests that the physical details of the scene matter just as much as the dialogue, but that the materiality they evince is not that of a tangible floor or bed that we could encounter in the extratextual world. Rather, these details possess a textual materiality: they are what the text is composed of, in the same way that, I have suggested, narrative time or fictionality are materials that form the narrative. In the Heart of the Country is narrated in 266 short segments that, despite the fact that they are numbered, nevertheless offer a relatively continuous story: this coexistence of fragmentation and continuity constitutes another material aspect of the text.

By revealing the constructedness of the novel, Magda’s various accounts of

Hendrik’s sexual violence expose these elements as components of the text’s materiality.

My contention is that the representation of violence is invested with the capacity to reveal textual materiality in this way in order to address the fact that acts of violence in the extratextual world are seen as revealing the immediate materiality of the physical body, as, for example, in Scarry’s argument.

III. Chapters

The issue of representing the immediacy of real acts of violence against the body is a prominent one in Coetzee’s oeuvre, and, as I show in Chapter 1, critics typically respond to his novels by evaluating his treatment of this immediacy. This critical response stems from Coetzee’s situation within the turbulent political scene of South

Africa. In that context, we will see, intellectuals widely consider that the horrors of apartheid are best addressed by more transparent reflections of South Africa’s harsh historical reality—a social realist view of literature that is consciously identified with the theoretical writings of Georg Lukács. Insisting on formalist representations of brutality rather than realist depictions of historical violence, Coetzee’s fiction deviates from this

Lukácsian model, exhibiting instead an alliance with the views of a different Frankfurt

School Marxist—Theodor Adorno. For Adorno, what facilitates a work’s representation of the political world out of which it emerges is not its fictional documentation of that historical context, but rather the acknowledgement of its essential mediation through artistic form. Coetzee’s novels, through their use of multi-layered narratives and shifts in narrative perspective, insist on their constructedness in a way that makes their constitutive mediatedness immediately evident. Thus, I argue, Coetzee’s fiction does

13 engage with the extratextual political world, but it does so in order to demonstrate the impossibility of presenting anything but a mediated account of human suffering.

In Chapter 2, I show how this tension between realist and more formally experimental representations of violence comes to the fore in Bret Easton Ellis’s

American Psycho . Reading closely the novel’s critical reception, I demonstrate that, in their accounts of the text, critics emphasize either the realism or formalism of its depictions of violence, in order to substantiate their rejection or support (respectively) of the text. In contrast to what we see in Coetzee’s fiction, scenes of violence are ruthlessly portrayed in American Psycho , with a precise attention to detail that includes a clear identification of agent and victim—a realist strategy allied with the Lukácsian view I mention above. However, American Psycho inconsistently engages this strategy, at times using formalist techniques of representation as well, with the result that critics respond to the text with very disparate reactions. In his most recent novel, Lunar Park , Ellis seems to resolve this problem of muddled style by employing his characteristically realist descriptions in order to challenge the credibility of such narrative strategies. Lunar Park is a fictional autobiography that claims to tell the story of Ellis’s life after the publication of American Psycho . As such, it actively thematizes the conflation of realism and formalism, and so replaces the stylistic inconsistency of the earlier novel with an overt commitment to the construction of metafiction as reality . I suggest that, by investigating the text’s ability to produce reality, Lunar Park dramatizes what Judith Butler has identified as the performative function of discourse. Because this dramatization takes place within a fictional frame, what Ellis highlights is the capacity of discourse to

14 perform acts not in the extratextual world, but rather within the realm of the text. The novel is thus ascribed its own reality, and, accordingly, its own materiality.

Chapter 3 explores these issues of realism and materiality through the fiction of

Dennis Cooper. In my close readings of Cooper’s novels, I underscore how his fiction combines the detailed transcription of violence that we find in American Psycho with the self-reflexivity that Coetzee’s oeuvre manifests. Although his prose meticulously describes the materiality of the violated body, what Cooper’s work achieves is the presentation of the materiality proper to text. In Cooper’s case, this materiality is comprised of a narrative structure and referential system that he describes as

“dismembered.” I argue that this textual materiality is revealed not by its gory content, but rather by Cooper’s production of narrative rupture—a formal violence that allows him to represent textually the dismemberment thematized in his novels’ content.

Following Walter Benjamin’s “Critique of Violence,” I suggest that Cooper effects a pure violence against the mimetic conventions of the novel form—a violence, that is, that neither preserves previous formal standards nor creates new ones, but rather deposes narrative convention by revealing the processes that govern it. This violence is entirely textual, but is incited by the representation of physical violence, and thus demonstrates how the portrayal of abuse to the material body necessitates a recognition of text as material.

Chapter 4 departs from the lurid violence of the previous chapters to investigate how textual violence might work in the fiction of Samuel Beckett. In this chapter, I take up Alain Badiou’s argument that, after The Unnamable , Beckett found himself at a literary impasse that required a new understanding of literature and a new approach to

15 writing. I synthesize this contention of Badiou’s with Coetzee’s suggestion that

Beckett’s later fictions (those that follow The Unnamable ) have become disembodied— that, in place of the earlier novels’ fascination with the body, the later texts offer the

“post-mortem voices” of a body disappeared. What Beckett demonstrates with such an evolution is his increasing awareness of the body’s absence in the mediated world of fiction—and his intensifying belief that this absence is the constitutive principle of literature. Reading Beckett’s novel Company as an experiment in René Descartes’s method of cognitive foundationalism, I point out Beckett’s difficulty at eschewing the body from the original scene of his fiction. This recalls Butler’s reading of Descartes’s

Meditations , where she underscores the continual reappearance of the discourse of the body, even where Descartes most vehemently insists on the mind’s priority over the body. Responding to the inevitable emergence of the body where it necessarily cannot emerge—in text, that is—Beckett’s late fiction argues that, although the material body can never be actually present in literature, fiction inevitably aims at its materialization in order to construct its own relation to the extratextual world. This textual materialization is achieved by employing precisely those techniques that Coetzee characterizes as

“disembodied”—the exploration of narrative voice, fragmentary prose, and spare character and plot development.

This exploration of the question of bodily presence is enhanced by the dissertation’s turn to a discussion of cinema—the medium which requires the presence of the material body for its production, but in turn can only deliver the body unsubstantially, as projection. Although the materials of cinema are certainly distinct from those of literature, “materiality” here maintains its definition as that out of which an artwork is

16 composed. Furthermore, as with its literary counterpart, the filmic representation of violence brings the issue of the medium’s materiality to the fore. However, because cinema depends upon the real world for its creation (there must be a world of material objects for the camera to record), cinema appears to complicate the hypothesis I have been positing so far—that the mediation of art obfuscates the immediacy of the human body, and that violent artworks emphasize this obfuscation, rather than diminishing it (as,

I have suggested, some critics prefer to argue). In Chapter 5, examining Jean-Luc

Godard’s Weekend (1967), I suggest that Godard’s film rebuts a conception of cinema that would ascribe reality to the objects captured by the camera. I posit that, in contrast to how it is often interpreted, it is the famous on-screen slaughter of a live pig that most proves this point in Weekend . Reading the scene according to Godard’s well-known adage that “it’s not blood, it’s red,” I suggest that, rather than adding to the film’s reality quotient, this scene of violence paradoxically demonstrates that the only material reality projected in Weekend is a cinematic one.

The chapter then considers Gaspar Noé’s I Stand Alone (1998), a film that explores Godard’s proposition by constructing a scene of human murder that echoes

Godard’s pig slaughter. Here, Noé’s film recalls Gilles Deleuze’s conception of artistic violence—one that stresses “the violence of a sensation (and not of a representation)”

(Deleuze, Francis Bacon xxix)—and, consequently, stresses the violence of the artwork itself, rather than the violated object the artwork aims to represent. Noé’s film particularly accomplishes this through the analogy it conspicuously draws between the murdered girl and the pig in Weekend . Attributing the brutal scene to the protagonist’s imagination, Noé offers competing conclusions for the film, thereby demonstrating that

17 the violence depicted in the film can be undone. What is not retractable, however, is the violence that has been done to the illusion of cinematic immediacy. Therefore, Noé affirms Godard’s argument that blood onscreen is not the trace of violence to real bodies, but rather a component of the medium’s construction. Moreover, this affirmation constitutes an act of cinematic violence.

IV. Violence and Close Reading

Returning to the “MySpace Suicide Hoax,” we recall that the cruelty of the message Megan received from “Josh” has not been the primary topic at issue in the case; rather, the widespread outrage her suicide has provoked focuses largely on the message’s inauthenticity, and is principally directed against Lori Drew. Although, as I mentioned at the outset of this introduction, this suggests that the mediated quality of the message has not gone altogether unacknowledged, it is still evident that the identification of the message as a constructed work has been rather unproblematically received. For example, when the news media interpret Megan’s suicide as the direct result of Josh’s message, they are suggesting that, because those masquerading as Josh hid the fictional quality of his message, Megan was, understandably, duped into believing it. This interpretation paradoxically posits the suicide as both an immediate and a mimetic act: it suggests that

Megan responded directly to Josh’s words by actualizing the suicide that his message invited her to execute (“the world would be a better place without you in it”). In such an account, mimesis and immediacy become equivalent; Megan’s actions are seen to mimic the text she read, simply because she believed it to be a transparent reflection of Josh’s emotions.

My point is that uncritical reading—reading that fails to acknowledge the mediated status of its object—always has consequences that matter. This is manifest in

Megan’s reading of her MySpace message, in the narrative The New Yorker assigns to her story, and in the e-mail released in the Duke lacrosse scandal (a case that was cited by the prosecuting attorney for the county where Megan lived (Collins 41)). And it is true regardless of any relation to violence that a text may or may not have. However, representations of violence intensify these consequences, raising their stakes by implicating the material body. What the examples I have presented in this introduction suggest, as do the texts and films I will examine in the chapters that follow, is that, as a popular culture, we do not know how to interpret the representations of violence that we are encountering all the time, and that this is because we do not know how to interpret representations, period. Moreover, even if, as we claim, we do know how to interpret textual mediation in the sphere of academia, we seem curiously to lose that knowledge when we encounter representations of violence. Calling attention to the pervasive coincidence of violent content and self-conscious form in representation, this dissertation observes an intensifying anxiety about the relationship between mediation and violence.

I suggest that this anxiety cannot be addressed until it is understood that the only violence a mediated work can present is a violence of and against its own artistic material, and, furthermore, that this violence does matter.

CHAPTER 1

The Mediated Body of J. M. Coetzee’s Fiction

“History is what hurts” -Fredric Jameson

I. Introduction: The Body is the Standard

In an interview with literary critic David Attwell, J. M. Coetzee addresses the recurrence of the theme of embodiment in his fiction:

If I look back over my own fiction, I see a simple (simple-minded?) standard erected. That standard is the body. Whatever else, the body is not ‘that which is not,’ and the proof that it is is the pain it feels. The body with its pain becomes a counter to the endless trials of doubt. (One can get away with such crudeness in fiction; one can’t in philosophy, I’m sure.) (Coetzee, Doubling the Point 248)

In this passage, Coetzee characterizes the role of the body in his fiction in two ways: first, the body is the “simple…standard” of his fictional texts, and second, the body is that which, through the experience of pain, counters “the endless trials of doubt.” Thus the work of fiction is tied inextricably to the process of opposing doubt, and Coetzee identifies the body as that tie which binds the two together. However, exactly what the relationship between fiction and the eradication of doubt might be, and exactly how the body mediates that relationship, remain unclear in the passage above, despite the simplicity Coetzee claims for the ideas he communicates. In particular, the difficulty of this passage seems attributable to the opacity of the term “standard.” Because, speaking generally, a standard is that which assures value for a given symbolic system, we can understand that “the body with its pain” must work in Coetzee’s fiction by guaranteeing

19 20 the text’s value in relation to that system of reference—the economy of fiction. In the same way that, for example, the gold standard would be employed to ensure belief in circulated currency, so must the body, as the standard of Coetzee’s fiction, produce belief in the stories circulated there. Therefore, insofar as its suffering is able to demonstrate its materiality, “the body with its pain becomes a counter to the endless trials of doubt”: the body, as a standard whose materiality is proven by pain, guarantees the value of the system of fiction-writing by eradicating the doubt that surrounds it. Fiction, then, must be the enterprise of removing doubt, of establishing credibility, and the body is the

“simple” means by which this credibility is assured.

The problem is that the term “standard” does not only refer to that which confers value upon a sign system; among other things, it is itself also a sign (most obviously, for example, where it signifies “flag”), and thus the belief it produces is entirely contingent upon its own valuation: having no intrinsic value, gold is a representation of some concept of real value, and the same is true for the body in fiction, which has no actual embodiedness, and thus can only be a representation of some real, non-fictional, non- textual body. Its status as standard means that the body claims to guarantee credibility at the same time that it represents the guaranteeing of that credibility: a tenuous position, if not an altogether impossible one. It is because of this impossibility that Coetzee is able to define the body only negatively: “the body is not ‘that which is not,” so that the body is posited here by means of a negation of negativity. The body is also presented as requiring “proof”; here, “the pain it feels” is evidence of the body’s existence, so that the body only exists insofar as it does not not exist, and this non-nonexistence is proven by its experience of pain.

More simply, what Coetzee’s definition of the body seems to be seeking is evidence of the materiality of the body, in order to establish the credibility of his fiction.

As Coetzee argues here, it is the sensation of pain that promises such materiality: this would explain the ubiquity of acts of violence in Coetzee’s fiction. The problem with this logic—which is the problem motivating this chapter in its entirety—is that, in

Coetzee’s novels, the body is necessarily always presented textually, so that whatever immediacy is obtained by subjecting the body to pain—that is, whatever immediacy is obtained by violence—is also always mediated. Coetzee’s novels do not attempt to circumvent this mutual implication of mediation and immediacy; rather, they instrumentalize violence in order to construct a credible materiality for his fiction that is predicated upon its inherent mediation.

For some critics, as we will see, this notion of credible materiality has everything to do with the presence or absence of history in Coetzee’s fiction—an issue that Coetzee, as a South African writer intervening in the turbulent atmosphere of apartheid-era politics and literature, is acutely attuned to. Eventually, though, it appears that the question of history in Coetzee’s work is ultimately not a question of what happens in the extratextual world, but rather is a question of how reality gets represented in Coetzee’s novels—that is, it is a problem of realism. Thus when Coetzee declares that the body’s pain is that which counters doubt, he is saying that the realism of his novels is at least in part assured by the violence represented within them, that the reality of his fiction acquires its credibility as a result of the immediacy of bodily pain performed therein. Finally, then, violence in Coetzee’s fiction functions to enact the dialectic of mediation and immediacy that makes “the body with its pain”—the standard of his fiction—into both the signifier

22 and the referent of its own materiality, and in turn to produce a literary reality that is at once textual and material.

II. The Critical Novelist

Seeking a set of tools appropriate to the task of reading his fiction, scholars of

Coetzee’s novels frequently take their cues from the abundant body of criticism he has also authored. The regularity of such reference to Coetzee’s own critical work must be understood as a testament to the challenges—neither easily ignored nor confidently confronted—inherent in his fictional writing. The vastly intertextual nature of Coetzee’s novels, their often undecipherable use of allegory, their subtle irony, and the obliqueness of their references to the politics of South Africa constitute only some of the difficulties posed by Coetzee’s fiction. Therefore, given that his novels do not provide transparent interpretations of the singular stories they present, Coetzee’s nonfiction writing, which necessarily attempts to interpret and evaluate his own and other writers’ fiction, seems to promise critics a solid ground from which to censure or laud an oeuvre whose commitment to ambivalence over conclusiveness makes the field of scholarly argument always an unsteady one.

But this promise of stability, of course, is never fulfilled. In particular, the discussion that continues to surround a short piece entitled “The Novel Today,” delivered as a lecture by Coetzee in Cape Town in 1987 (Attridge 14), and published in 1988, is evidence of the way in which Coetzee’s criticism exacerbates the problem of interpreting his novels. The debate concerning Coetzee’s relationship to the reality of South African politics—a discussion which preoccupied the body of criticism on Coetzee during the apartheid years, and with which current criticism still regularly engages—frequently

23 comes to hinge on that article, which rather infamously pronounces that the novel must choose between exactly two ways of situating itself with respect to history: supplementarity and rivalry. Locating contemporary South Africa within “times of intense ideological pressure,” and identifying that, under such pressure, “the space in which the novel and history normally coexist like two cows on the same pasture, each minding its own business, is squeezed almost to nothing” (“The Novel Today” 3),

Coetzee’s essay argues for the specificity of the novel as a form altogether distinct from history.

Although interpretations of what such distinctness would entail, or what the term

“history” means for Coetzee, differ in the various critical accounts of this essay, this very general description of its content seems shared by all of them, so that Coetzee’s commitment to the novel’s rivalry of history becomes the foundational concept for reading and interpreting his fiction. But the numerous scholarly readings of this essay have seemed to pass over the first words of Coetzee’s lecture, which must cast at least some shade on the illumination presumed to be derived from this work of criticism:

“speaking as a novelist” (“The Novel Today” 2). Given that the novelist here presents himself as such, it should become impossible to assume that Coetzee pretends to offer an objectively critical account of the work of the novel. In fact, Coetzee himself is well- aware of the impossibility of his offering any such objective account; he remarks in an interview with Attwell that, speaking of an author’s interpretation of his own writing, “I might even venture: the author’s position is the weakest of all. Neither can he claim the critic’s saving distance—that would be a simple lie—nor can he pretend to be what he was when he wrote—that is, when he was not himself” ( Doubling the Point 206). And

24 certainly, the most productive scholarship on his writing has tended to acknowledge this fact—that Coetzee’s interviews or nonfiction writing do not contain the key to decoding his fiction; on the contrary, Coetzee’s readers make their most significant observations when they acknowledge the way in which the author’s criticism renders such decoding only more difficult, more impossible. Most notably, Attwell confronts “The Problem of

History in the Fiction of J. M. Coetzee” (1990) by means of an examination of Coetzee’s critical writings, beginning with his graduate dissertation on Samuel Beckett and continuing through “The Novel Today,” in order to demonstrate exactly this point—that the critic Coetzee’s relationship to historical reality is as much a problem as the novelist

Coetzee’s relationship to it, and that, furthermore, the two are problematic in the same way. That is to say that both Coetzee’s critical texts and his novels are in the first and last analysis unsettled grapplings with the concept and the practice of textually representing reality, and this unsettlement is evident even in his representation of himself; in “The Novel Today,” we can see it in his announcement that he is “speaking as a novelist,” even as he explicitly explores the questions at the heart of discourse on literature with a rather undisguised critical agenda in hand.

Therefore, I have begun by underlining the impossibility of resolving Coetzee’s fiction through his nonfiction because I find that it is precisely in those moments where reconciliation “between Coetzee’s programmatic statements and his fiction” (Attwell

590) is least feasible, that scholarship on Coetzee can be most productive, most capable of teasing out what his work does , rather than what he means to say, or what Coetzee as a

South African author should be saying. If this point does not seem banal, it should, since this is a concept that is now so accepted in literary theory as to be implicit: Coetzee’s

25 nonfiction and fictional writings are, before anything else, textual works, and not pieces of a puzzle that we put together in order to obtain a completed image of Coetzee the author. Nor does Coetzee the author function as a figure that would provide answers to the questions posed by his texts. However, when critics employ Coetzee’s criticism as a tool for examining his literature, they too often disregard how the novels might work in the absence of their author, and thus they too often make assessments based entirely on his “programmatic statements” about literature. Thus an article entitled “Torture and the

Novel: J. M. Coetzee’s ‘Waiting for the Barbarians’” takes as its starting point an article written by Coetzee in The New York Times Book Review , and frames its discussion in statements like “Coetzee objects to realistic depiction of torture in fiction because he thinks that…” (Gallagher 1988, 277). The problem is not that the programmatic statements should not be read; the problem is rather that they are afforded too much authority, and the results are regrettable: Waiting for the Barbarians comes to represent a working example of Coetzee’s Book Review article, and from that exemplarity emerges the argument that Coetzee’s novel “can at least approximate a moral and linguistic center” (285), a contention severely at odds with what is actually accomplished by his fiction, where the identification or approximation of such a point of centrality is scrupulously evaded. Thus the easily cited Barthesian theoretical approach that censures scholarly work wherein “the explanation of a work is always sought in the man or woman who produced it, as if it were always in the end, through the more or less transparent allegory of the fiction, the voice of a single person, the author ‘confiding’ in us” (1466), is not so readily practiced in the critical discourse on Coetzee. The author, in

26 a sense, is too much alive, and the consequence, as Barthes recognized, is the reader’s stillbirth.

Moreover, even when the authority of Coetzee’s criticism is challenged, it tends to be challenged in opposition to his fiction, which in turn becomes the more authoritative body. Thus when Coetzee is charged with “continu[ing] to inhabit the unresolved landscape of the deformations brought about by the continuing hold of an aesthetics of liberalism in South Africa,” “notwithstanding his location within a postmodernist tradition of fiction-making” (Parker 1996, 101), the critic condemns

Coetzee’s inhabitation of an “unresolved landscape” from a basic assumption that the field of criticism must be resolved, that it must offer a resolute truth that the

“postmodernist tradition of fiction-making” is exempt from. If we cannot find a scholarly practice that would refuse to solve the problem of literary interpretation through an author’s critical work, and which would refuse to distinguish absolutely between fiction- making and criticism (which, when contrasted to fiction-making, takes on the status of truth-making), Coetzee’s work simply cannot be read.

This is a claim to be made for all writing, but its pronouncement is imperative in the analysis of Coetzee’s work, because of the way in which his writing at every turn both questions and declares its status as such. Coetzee voices a fundamental wariness before the truth-content even (and especially) of nonfiction in his statement that “in South

Africa the colonisation of the novel by the discourse of history is proceeding with alarming rapidity” (“The Novel Today” 3), and this problem of the unqualified privilege of history over fiction has its analog in criticism on Coetzee. That is, just as the novel’s subordination to the assumed truth of history alarms the author, equally alarming is the

27 apparent colonization of Coetzee’s fiction by critical discourse that is taken to disclose the meaning of his novels. The fact that this privileged critical discourse is authored by

Coetzee himself should not make a difference—or perhaps Coetzee’s continually demonstrated mistrust of representation means precisely that his authorship does make a difference, and, to borrow his own phrase, that “the difference is everything.” By this I mean that Coetzee’s criticism cannot be afforded a greater truth-value than his fiction, because all of his work must be understood to cohere around one and only one point: its commitment to the interrogation of reality as a category unmediated by discourse. In this way every sentence he authors can be read with the increased pitch signaled by a question mark, regardless of whether that sentence is discovered between the covers of a novel, read on the smeared page of a newspaper, or heard from the lips of the author himself.

That the lecture Coetzee delivered upon accepting his Nobel Prize in 2003 is the narration of a fictional account of another fiction (Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe , which the publication of Foe had already refictionalized in 1987) is but one example of his dedication to a single but perpetually reconstructed revelation: that of text as a composite of representations stratified en abîme . Thus Coetzee’s own authorship serves to argue all the more forcefully that authorship is a concept that threatens works of literature, a concept whose very threat makes its discarding impossible, necessitating instead that we watch it warily at all times.

III. The Necessity of History

Although this characterization of Coetzee’s project will benefit from further analysis of “The Novel Today,” it is first necessary, I think, to elucidate what we will hope to accomplish by means of that discussion. As we will see shortly, both the

28 comprehension and the evaluation of Coetzee’s work depend heavily upon the relationship between his texts and the reality they are supposed to represent.

Furthermore, as I have tried to indicate above, when I say “texts” here, I mean not only

Coetzee’s novels but also his nonfiction, because the relationship of Coetzee’s criticism to reality begs the same kind of interrogation as the realism of his fiction. It is this awesome (omni)presence of the uncertainty of Coetzee’s relationship to reality that makes realism the central problem in his work. This is almost always acknowledged by his readers, but the situation gets immeasurably more uncertain once the term “history” is added to all this, as it frequently is. What I would like to begin by doing in this chapter, then, is to clarify these key concepts as they are used by Coetzee, in order to make what is finally a very modest suggestion: that we take care in our readings of Coetzee not to elide “history” with “reality,” or “history” with “realism.” If we do not maintain the distinction between these signifiers, we will first of all be misreading and misinterpreting

Coetzee according to his own terms , and we will therefore miss the one thread that is meticulously and perhaps even passionately woven into all of his texts, which is the thesis that the only accessible reality is one that is thoroughly mediated by representation

(historical, literary, or otherwise), so that reality itself becomes the revelation of mediation, the making-immediately-obvious of representation, the immediacy of mediation. We are still a long way from understanding what this argument means and how it works in Coetzee’s writing, but its preliminary articulation should aid somewhat as we pick our way through Coetzee’s analysis of history and the novel’s relationship to it.

In order to get to that crucial argument, we must investigate the claim that

“history” is often taken to stand in for the terms that Coetzee himself uses, like, most especially, “reality.” Certainly “history” recurs throughout the body of Coetzee’s work, and remains an important figure in his criticism and novels, but readers run into difficulty when attempting to ascertain the role this word plays. This is doubtless because “history” is generally present in Coetzee’s writing as a figure that gets problematized, rather than clarified: it is a mode of representation conditioned by its own discursiveness, and not a past reality that is or can be transparently represented. Coetzee’s first novel, Dusklands , offers an early demonstration of his demand that the narrativity that is essential to history be recognized and called into question. The first part of Dusklands is dated 1972-73 and begins with Eugene Dawn’s explanation of his job, which is to write the Vietnam Project, a report on the American military’s strategies of “psychological warfare” in Vietnam.

Thus we are immediately set in a definite historical situation. The specificity of that setting seems to become less urgent when the narrative turns to Dawn’s kidnapping his own son, whom he eventually murders after being located by the police; however, when

Dawn is placed in a mental institution after the murder, his psychiatrists speculate that his violent act was a result of his exposure to the Vietnam War. With this speculation, the historical charge of the narrative forcefully reemerges.

Perhaps most important in our analysis of history’s role in the first part of

Dusklands is the mediated nature of that historicity. First of all, Eugene Dawn is not a soldier in combat in Vietnam, but effectively a writer, one who is making a report, and thus he functions as a mediator in the narrative of history. Furthermore, the information

Dawn reports is not obtained immediately by him—rather, what he reports he has learned

30 primarily through photographs and theoretical texts on his subject, suggesting that the knowledge he mediates through his writing is itself already mediated through visual and literary representation. Finally, the supervisor to whom Dawn reports is a man named

Coetzee: in this way the novel directly addresses its own status as such by naming its author—and thus, we might say, the novel acknowledges its own mediation. The effect of this self-reflexivity is at least twofold: on the one hand, because the first-person narration puts us on Dawn’s side in his confrontation with Coetzee, casting the latter in a negative light, Dawn’s authority is enhanced, while the authority of the character Coetzee

(inevitably elided with the author Coetzee) is diminished. On the other hand, the text suggests that because Eugene Dawn is in a position of subservience to his supervisor, we might understand that any and all actions taken by Dawn, even as a first-person narrator, are commissioned by Coetzee, so that the latter is in a position to authorize Dawn’s entire narrative—that is, to author it. The consequence of this reading is the contamination of the integrity of any reality that the novel would posit as independent of the extratextual world, since the existence of the narrative ultimately depends upon the existence of

Coetzee, its author.

Either way, what it signals is the interdependence of the novel and the author, an interdependence to which the text’s particular historicity—that is, the actual historical situation being represented (the Vietnam War)—is secondary. Eugene Dawn himself hints at this when, dismissing his therapists’ interpretation of his murder as a consequence of his work on Vietnam, he declares, “I have high hopes of finding whose fault I am” (49). What follows this pronouncement is the disappearance of Dawn from the novel altogether, and a jump of over two hundred years backward in time, where we

31 are given “The Narrative of Jacobus Coetzee,” the mostly fictional account of a real expedition through South Africa by a supposed ancestor of J. M. Coetzee’s. Is Eugene

Dawn Jacobus Coetzee’s fault? This is never addressed. In fact, this part of the novel complicates not only Dawn’s story, and not only the role of the Vietnam War in that story, but complicates Part 2 as well, by presenting the same story three times—first as

Jacobus Coetzee’s extended narrative, then as an introduction written by Dr. S. J. Coetzee in Afrikaans (1951), and finally as Jacobus Coetzee’s official deposition of 1760. And the translator of all of these is identified as the son of Dr. S. J. Coetzee (55), named J. M.

Coetzee (51), who is thus made into both a fictional author of a true story and an actual author of a fictionalized history. Therefore, although the scholarly format (preface, text, afterword, appendix) and reference to actual historical figures in Part 2 lead Dusklands further into history, Coetzee does not offer the one “true” account of Africa’s exploration, but rather presents several versions of it, all of which pass through at least one round of mediation—if they are authentic, it is the translator who is the mediator; if inauthentic, it is the novelist. 1 Thus Dusklands ’s employment of history highlights the way in which history depends for its reality on the way it is told (that is, on its discursiveness). For this reason, Coetzee’s novel can be said to elucidate both the vast extent to which the novel is produced by its historicity (the story of Dusklands exists because South Africa was, in fact, violently colonized by Coetzee’s ancestors), and the vast extent to which history is produced by narrative (in Jacobus Coetzee’s 1760 account of the exploration of South

1 Just as different accounts of Jacobus Coetzee’s expeditions exist within Dusklands , different accounts of the authenticity of the narratives included by Coetzee in the novel exist as well. Attwell’s research appears to be the most accurate; he states that, although Jacobus Coetzee was a real person, none of the versions of his exploits is entirely authentic. According to Attwell, “Coetzee tampers substantially” even with the “Deposition of Jacobus Coetzee” included as the Appendix to the narrative. That Deposition, which had been accepted in earlier readings of the novel as a genuine historical document, does exist; however, it is substantially modified upon its insertion into Dusklands (Attwell, J. M. Coetzee 44-46).

Africa—both as it is printed in Dusklands , and in its official version, according to David

Attwell’s record of its alterations—no violence is recorded; thus the story of the violence of this expedition exists only because Coetzee wrote it).

I have briefly addressed Dusklands here in order to illustrate the interdependence of the novel and history for Coetzee. In a sense, this means that history is an essential component of Coetzee’s fiction; however, it does not mean that it is a privileged component. In fact, history becomes essential in Dusklands precisely because of the text’s commitment to emphasizing the interdependence of the novel and history, thereby denying privilege to the latter. We can hear how the conviction Coetzee will present over a decade later in “The Novel Today”—that the novel must rival, and not supplement history—is whispered everywhere in Dusklands , even and especially where the novel deals most directly with history.

But many of Coetzee’s critics still refuse to accept this denial of history’s privilege. Notably, David Attwell correctly reads Coetzee’s statement that “history is nothing but a certain kind of story that people agree to tell each other” (“The Novel

Today,” cited in Attwell 587) as an insistence on the discursiveness of history, but then goes on to interpret this emphasis on discursiveness as reflecting “the conviction that since no discourse has unmediated access to history, any utterance, but the novel in particular, can claim a qualified freedom from it” (Attwell, 1990 588). Given that

Coetzee finds it “elementary and rather obvious” to state that “history is not reality,” it is difficult to understand why Attwell insists that the novel’s “qualified freedom” from history is guaranteed by the impossibility of accessing it immediately. Coetzee’s assertion that “history is a kind of discourse” (587) should eliminate such a conception of

33 history as an object that would itself need to be mediated by discourse—that is, Coetzee categorizes history as a mediator, not the mediated, which means that Attwell has gotten it backwards. Thus as I have suggested above with Dusklands , and as “The Novel

Today” states clearly, Coetzee’s texts work to assert that history is a form of mediation, and the novel’s freedom from it emerges not from the impossibility of grasping history directly, but rather from its equal status as a form of mediation. By contrast, when

Attwell insists that history exists as something inaccessible except through mediation, he necessarily and regrettably makes of history a Platonic ideal that resides protected in an unapproachable state of immediacy. As Brian Macaskill suggests, Attwell’s reading here

“abnegate[s] the possibilities of seriously considering Coetzee’s expressive practice as a rival to the discourse of history, favoring instead an analysis determined to uncover a deep-structure discourse of history from which Coetzee’s narrative expression is supposed transformationally to derive” (Macaskill 451). And such an abnegation neither duly credits nor correctly comprehends Coetzee’s construction of his texts as rivals to history; as I pointed out with respect to Dusklands , Coetzee does not ignore or deny history in his fiction-writing, but rather refuses any conception of history that denies that it consists, just as literary writing does, of forms of “narrative expression.” For this reason, Attwell is in fact entirely accurate when he claims that, in “The Novel Today,”

“Coetzee’s argument is as messily involved in historical contingency as the discourses he accuses of trying to circumvent their discursive character in order to leap into the Real”

(Attwell 588). What he misses, however, is that Coetzee’s messy involvement does not attempt to “circumvent” his novels’ “historical contingency”; instead, Coetzee insists emphatically on that contingency, as the historical premises of Dusklands reveal, in order

34 to insist further that such contingency still does not place history (hierarchically or

(chrono)logically) before the discursiveness it is itself contingent upon.

An inevitable question emerges: why does Attwell, who is extremely attuned to the subtleties of Coetzee’s essay, insist on reclaiming a non-discursive place for history in the work of an author so resolutely dedicated to rejecting it? Attwell addresses the question himself:

The recognition that meaning in a novel resides in a configuration of elements that are not the same as the elements of real life, a recognition that would be reasonably commonplace were it not being carried through…to a point where it appears uncompromising, has cost Coetzee a great deal in terms of his relationship with other writers in South Africa and with readers whose form of politicization demands a realist documentation of life lived under oppression. (Attwell, 1990 582)

According to Attwell, the relentless employment of “a configuration of elements” in

Coetzee’s fiction that do not mirror “the elements of real life” is taken by the novelist’s

South African readership to represent an irresponsibility toward the politics of oppression that prevails in his home country. Thus Attwell’s “The Problem of History,” like

Coetzee’s “The Novel Today,” is at least in part an attempt to respond to those critics who dismiss Coetzee’s fiction on the basis of its resistance to the realist forms that dominated South African fiction during the apartheid era. 2 Attwell argues in his introduction to Doubling the Point that “although Coetzee might well be described as working within the culture of postmodernism, he certainly does not do so in the spirit of abandonment that seems to typify much of what goes under the name” ( DP 3). This emphasis on Coetzee’s lack of such a “spirit of abandonment” suggests the stakes of

Attwell’s argument for Coetzee’s belief in history are high: if Coetzee writes nonrealist

2 For more on the context surrounding and preceding Coetzee’s “The Novel Today,” see the chapter entitled “Contexts” in Attwell’s J. M. Coetzee: South Africa and the Politics of Writing , especially pages 15-16, where Attwell summarizes the Black Consciousness and People’s Culture campaigns that highly influenced the cultural politics of apartheid-era South Africa, and pages 26-32, where he tracks the evolution in historiographic practices among South African intellectuals.

35 fiction but believes in history, his work maintains a progressive potential, and thus is more acceptable to a liberal audience (and more in accordance with the political stance articulated by Coetzee himself in his nonfiction work). However, to project onto Coetzee a belief in the existence of a non-discursive historical reality, when he is in fact very frankly asserting the opposite, seems perhaps too free a reading of Coetzee’s words, even if Coetzee is generally ambivalent about the status of reality, and even if it is a free reading employed for generous ends.

Rather than arguing that Coetzee might unconsciously produce or believe in history, it seems far more tenable (and more interesting) to note that what is most often enacted in his fiction are the revelation and exaggeration of his diverse strategies of representation. Given that these strategies are so rigorously exposed, the question present in all of Coetzee’s texts is the relationship of those texts to reality: to put it as simply as possible, does Coetzee write realist fiction? Addressing this question will naturally involve some discussion of the way in which Coetzee’s novels invoke history, but the question that underlies and ultimately overrides that discussion has to do, as I have hinted above, with the problem of mediation. When Attwell feels compelled to look for historical readings of Coetzee in order to protect the novelist from those who would deny his political engagement, it becomes clear that what Coetzee’s critics want is some evidence of a belief in the immediacy of real events, some proof that his fiction does not

(as they suspect it does) demean the experience of those who actually suffer the violence, poverty, and prejudice that defined apartheid in South Africa. Although, for Attwell,

“what is ordinarily and conventionally called history” is “the datum of individual and collective experience” (588), this emphasis on the experiential is not present in “history”

36 as Coetzee explicitly or effectively defines it. We can see that in Attwell “history” means something like “political reality,” or “the reality of suffering,” or even just “reality,” so that Attwell comes to demonstrate a commitment to locating in Coetzee what appears to be a Jamesonian distinction between “History” (a discourse, “simply one more code among others”; Jameson 100) and History (the “absent cause” “apprehended only through its effects, and never directly as some reified force”; 102). In fact Attwell himself reveals his argument’s debt to Fredric Jameson’s The Political Unconscious when he suggests that “Coetzee does not share the seeming abandonment of deconstruction’s il n’y a pas de hors texte ,” but rather that Coetzee’s “claim is closer to the Jamesonian idea that history is not available for direct representation” (Attwell, J. M.

Coetzee 17). Without getting into an evaluation of Jameson’s argument in general, we should acknowledge Coetzee’s antagonism toward that position in order finally to put

Attwell’s reading of historicity in Coetzee to bed. As Jameson famously writes, “history is not a text, not a narrative, master or otherwise, but…an absent cause,…inaccessible to us except in textual form” (35); for Coetzee, history is textual form and, more egregiously contradicting Jameson, history is only one textual form among others (such as the novel).

Thus while Jameson declares that history must “forestall its thematization or reification as…one master code among many others” (102), Coetzee positions himself directly against that thesis with the following statement: “in our culture, history will, with varying degrees of forcefulness, try to claim primacy, claim to be a master-form of discourse, just as, inevitably, people like myself will defend themselves by saying that history is nothing but a certain kind of story that people agree to tell each other” (“The Novel Today” 4).

Given that, the task that lies before us now is to understand what “kind of story” it is that Coetzee himself tells through his novels, and exactly how and why those stories must rival historical ones. In this way we will be able to comprehend the role of history in Coetzee as yet another example (one example among others) of the problem of the mediatedness of the experience of reality, in order to ask how that mediation functions to produce, refute, or complicate the problem of the immediacy of reality, especially as it materializes in the suffering of the human body.

IV. The Novel Today

“The Novel Today” is significant here because it elucidates the importance of the mediatedness of reality for Coetzee—not only because the article implicitly articulates this point through its emphasis on the discursiveness of history as well as literature, but more significantly, as we will see later on, because it enacts that very representational stratification through statements that are perhaps quite clear individually, but which do not exactly line up, but rather pile up, when taken together. Summarizing Coetzee’s essay will soon reveal that, although each of the various “programmatic statements” made in that piece is asserted very lucidly, in fact those individual lines of logic come at each other aslant, and do not add up to an articulation of what history, the novel, and reality are, even though they state conclusively what those three categories are not .

And “The Novel Today” is significant because it marks Coetzee’s bold attempt to debunk the conception (which finds itself at the heart of debates over the politics of South

African literature) that the novel must be historical, that it must directly capture and address the historical situation from which it emerges. As I have mentioned above,

Coetzee describes the ideologically charged time of apartheid as one wherein “the space

38 in which the novel and history normally coexist like two cows on the same pasture, each minding its own business, is squeezed almost to nothing” (“The Novel Today” 3). In such a time, with peaceful coexistence among two equal forms of discourse rendered impossible by political pressures, Coetzee declares, the novel is forced to choose either to supplement or to rival history. “The Novel Today,” of course, vigorously advocates the latter option, arguing that the novel is not simply allegorical history, or history aestheticized to become more comprehensible or more sensible. To understand the novel thus as a form of history would be to make it supplementary to history, and this supplementarity marks the position Coetzee seeks to undermine. Thus Coetzee writes,

In the position I am calling into question, then, the novelistic text becomes a kind of historical text, an historical text with a truth-value that requires a fairly sophisticated mode of interpretation, but one that compensates for its dubious truth-status by performing certain functions that orthodox history has difficulty with. For example, orthodox history does not have the means to give the kind of dense realisation of the texture of life that the novel, or certain kinds of novel, do so well. And history does not have the formal means to explore, except clumsily and ‘from the outside’, the individual experience of historical time, particularly the time of historical crisis. (2)

What Coetzee highlights here is the way in which the novel form is both undercut and preserved when “truth-value” is ascribed to the historical text: on one hand, the novel falls short of history because its requirement of “a fairly sophisticated mode of interpretation” necessarily makes suspicious any “truth-status” it might claim. On the other hand, when history is seen as the mode for conveying truth, the novel becomes capable of “performing certain functions” that are beyond the reach of history, which is clumsy and remains on “the outside.” For an illustration of this kind of subordinate but indispensable role, one needs only to think of the servant Hendrik in Coetzee’s In the

Heart of the Country , doing the foul work that his masters, in their refinement, would distance themselves from. As Magda, the daughter of the farm’s owner, relates: “We

39 heave and strain, wipe ourselves in our different ways with squares of store-bought toilet paper, mark of gentility, recompose our clothing….Then it becomes Hendrik’s charge to…empty it in a hole dug far away from the house….Where exactly the bucket is emptied I do not know” ( IHC 32). Implicitly (and then explicitly), Coetzee draws from such a paradigm of servitude in “The Novel Today,” likening the supplementary relationship between history and the novel to the master/servant relationship, as the former, the master—the “master-form of discourse” (“The Novel Today” 4)—constitutes itself “from the outside” of “certain functions,” while its subject, its supplement, the novel, employs its skilled hands to do the dirty work “far away from the house” that the dominant form cannot do on its own. Understood in this supplementary manner, the novel is fit to offer the “dense realization of the texture of life” that history distances itself from, but is unfit to perform the more truthful, more valued, less subjective and thus more hygienic work of presenting reality transparently.

This analogy posits history as the privileged, genteel, and thus cleaner term of the colonizer/colonized pair, inserting Coetzee’s analysis into a tradition of what Geoffrey

Bennington refers to as the “metaphorics of dirt and baseness in Left discussions of history” (“Demanding History” 18). However, as Bennington points out, those discussions mark history as the base term, suggesting that aesthetic forms guard their idealized purity by distancing themselves from the dirty work of history. Clearly, for

Coetzee, idealism works the other way, with history touted as the ideal precisely because of its claim to the real, so that history dominates by flaunting not its timelessness but rather its necessary attention to temporality. Taken with Bennington’s analysis of the metaphorics of the dirty, Coetzee’s argument can be read to suggest that history secures

40 its domination by hyping its humbler origins (despite his gentility, Magda’s father works hard, and his disciplined labor might be said to earn him the respect that his birthright guarantees); thus the novel’s submission to history is not threatened by the latter’s humility, but in fact is secured by it.

Bennington also suggests, in response to Terry Eagleton’s comparison of a given literary tradition to a “grazing cow,” “eternally replete but constantly absorptive,” that what must also be taken into account in such a comparison is “that a body not only absorbs but excretes” (19). For this reason, Coetzee’s conception of history appears to complete Bennington’s desired reading of it: for the novelist, history is a grazing cow in

Eagleton’s sense, but, as Hendrik’s work in In the Heart of the Country testifies, Coetzee will not allow it to forget that it shits as well as eats. If history is rivaled, Coetzee seems to say, it will become a body that “both secures and compromises its unity and integrity” as such (Bennington 19). Bennington’s essay hints that such securing and compromising is the only movement that can answer to “demanding history,” to Jameson’s imperative

“always historicize!” (“DH” 20).

Similarly, Gayatri Spivak has noted that “the language of philosophy professes to be ‘clean,’” arguing that it is “far less often grasped” that “that cleanliness is constituted by varieties of befoulment” (“Speculations on Reading Marx” 47); we must therefore understand Magda’s and her father’s purity as themselves constituted by befoulment—of themselves, through excretion, and of Hendrik, as he disposes of the excrement. Thus wherever the novel consents to be history’s “handmaiden” (“The Novel Today” 5), it validates history’s claim to purity; as a supplement, fiction befouls itself that history might appear clean, effectively evacuating history of its materiality (and thus, perhaps, of

41 its historicity), and rendering its own materiality—and the materiality of the novel form is distinct from that of history, Coetzee declares—indiscernible beneath the stench of the other cow. As long as it reeks thus of history, argues Coetzee, the novel can always only champion the fatter cow.

In this way, history secures a space for the novel on the pasture, just as Hendrik’s place on the farm is secure because the “certain functions” he performs are essential.

However, that space grows tighter as one cow grows fatter, and the hungry novel, conceiving of itself as supplementary, yields terrain to “the appropriating appetite of the discourse of history.” Coetzee identifies himself in “The Novel Today” as speaking “as a member of a tribe threatened with colonisation” (by which “tribe” he means novelists), and he overburdens that already weighty metaphor when he posits that “in South Africa the colonisation of the novel by the discourse of history is proceeding with alarming rapidity” (3). Rather than permitting such colonization, Coetzee argues, the novel must rival the appropriation of history, and it must do so first and foremost not by acknowledging what it might add to history, but rather by acknowledging itself as separate from history. Thus, although stories may be read in terms of the historical conditions from which they emerge (he names class conflict and male domination as examples of such conditions), “there is always a difference” between the story and the history it might be said to represent. And, as I have mentioned already, Coetzee is vehement in his declaration that “the difference is everything” (4).

It must be made clear that I am discussing “The Novel Today” not to rehearse the familiar scholarly strategy of examining Coetzee through his own criticism, but more significantly to point out how Coetzee actively complicates such an approach even as the

42 existence of his criticism alongside of his perplexing fiction seems to necessitate it.

These complications stem both from the syntax and the content of his writing. The long passage from “The Novel Today” that I have quoted above begins with the phrase “in the position I am calling into question, then,” making it clear that what Coetzee is about to enumerate are tenets of the stance he opposes. However, this clarity is obscured in the sentences that follow, as Coetzee rehearses those tenets of the adversarial position in a way that does not highlight his opposition to them, but rather lets them stand unassailed, confusing his readers, if not altogether misleading our understanding of his central argument. In this way, the truth behind his argument is effectively undermined; however, because Coetzee is arguing precisely that all assumptions of truth must be undermined, the destabilization of his argument in fact comes to function as an effective illustration of the argument itself.

Furthermore, Coetzee’s emphasis on the discursive nature of history, his challenge to any commitment to the “primacy” or “truth-value” of history, would seem to suggest a deep-seated mistrust of truth, and thus a fundamental disbelief in the category of reality. (Recall that it is just such a disbelief in reality that Coetzee’s critics interpret as a threatening disregard for real victims of apartheid’s violence.) Yet Coetzee’s essay appears to be as ambivalent about the rejection of reality as it is disapproving of the affirmation of history as master discourse: “The categories of history are not privileged….They do not reside in reality; they are a certain construction put upon reality” (“The Novel Today” 4). From such a statement we recognize that, although he is consistent in his objection to the notion—widely accepted in contemporary South Africa, he asserts—that history corresponds to reality, Coetzee does not advocate the position

43 that would counter this notion, either. He does not say that reality itself is a fiction, that history does not exist as truth because truth itself does not exist. Rather, his position is that “the categories of history” are “ put upon reality,” so that the category of reality is, however obliquely, affirmed, and, further (and more obliquely), it is affirmed as precisely that pasture upon which the rival cows of history and the novel graze. In this way, each cow becomes characterizable as a “certain construction put upon reality”—that is, each becomes a form through which reality is digested. But at the same time, each cow ultimately blocks direct access to reality, as its body literally shields the grass underneath from view, necessarily obstructing access to the pasture that lies beneath it.

V. The Realist Position

Translating this simultaneous facilitation and obstruction of access to reality into a vocabulary that will be most useful for our purposes here, we might say that the novel and history are both actively embroiled in the work of mediation. Processing and manifesting reality, the novel and history mediate it through their respective forms, even as these forms themselves conceal the reality that substantiates them. Therefore, all we can see of reality, according to Coetzee, all we have immediate access to, are the forms

(historical or literary) into which reality materializes. Having thus far worked chiefly to demonstrate Coetzee’s belief in that mediation as the work of history and fiction equally,

I would like now to consider exactly how Coetzee’s writing works to mediate reality.

As Brian Macaskill suggests in his “Charting J. M. Coetzee’s Middle Voice,”

Coetzee neither actively posits nor actively denies reality in his writing. This results in a destabilization of the distinction between fiction and nonfiction, so that “Coetzee’s writing tantalizingly violates borders between narrative illusion and the discursive codes

44 of linguistics, literary theory, and metacriticism” (Macaskill 446). It is Macaskill’s thesis that this violation of conventions is performed in Coetzee’s writing by his use of the middle voice, a grammatical feature of verbs that Coetzee discusses in his short essay “A

Note on Writing.” In languages such as Ancient Greek and Sanskrit, Coetzee points out, the “middle” is a voice just as the active and passive are voices, but the morphological absence of the middle voice in modern languages makes its identification more difficult than identifying a verb as active or passive. Macaskill takes up the example of the verb

“to translate” (451-52): in “she translates the book” the verb is, of course, in the active voice, whereas in the sentence “the book is translated by her,” the verb is in the passive voice. In the middle voice, however, the action being articulated is neither actively performed nor passively received by the subject, but rather it is reflexive. It reflects back upon the subject, as in Macaskill’s example: “the book translates easily.”

Coetzee suggests that, although it is invisible, the middle voice can still be detected “in some senses of modern verbs if one is alert to the threefold opposition active-middle-passive” (Coetzee, DP 94). The significance of this attention to the possibility of the middle voice begins to manifest itself as Coetzee, elucidating an argument that Barthes puts forth in his “To Write: An Intransitive Verb?,” identifies the verb “to write” as possessing just such a potential for middle-voice usage. Coetzee explains, “To write (active) is to carry out the action without reference to the self…To write (middle) is to carry out the action (or better, to do-writing) with reference to the self” (94). Thus the distinction between these two voices has to do not so much with the agency of the subject, as with the way in which the subject asserts that agency. Coetzee cites Barthes: “‘today to write is to make oneself the center of la parole ; it is to effect

45 writing in being affected oneself; it is to leave the writer…inside the writing…as the agent of action’” (94). Therefore, when Coetzee contrasts the active sentence “I am writing a note” to the middle “I am writing a note,” he is suggesting that, although morphologically identical, the two sentences present different conceptions of the relationship between the subject and its action, and thus between the subject and its object. In the former, “a note” is the object directly acted upon by “I,” constructing “a subject [that is] prior to, independent of, and untouched by the verb” (95). On the other hand, the middle voice sentence effects a permeability among subject-verb-object, so that the action of writing affects its subject as much as it acts upon the object. Though the subject acts, this action does something to the subject as well: the subject becomes a writer in the same way that the note becomes written.

Macaskill points out that this permeability results in a kind of reflexivity, and he argues that this reflexive quality of middle voice utterances should be seen as a grammatical manifestation of the reflexivity of Coetzee’s writing as a whole.

Illustrations of this are easy to find: although Coetzee does not explicitly discuss his own writing in the short piece on the middle voice, the fact that the sentence he chooses to analyze in “A Note on Writing” is “I am writing a note,” suggests immediately his own affinity for the reflexivity of the middle voice. It is crucial that we acknowledge this affinity as not merely stylistic, but above all as political. Macaskill asserts, “Coetzee’s act of ‘doing-writing’ in the middle voice cogently represents a crucial—critical— response to the materialist historiography that still dominates the articulation of cultural politics in South Africa” (Macaskill 447). “A Note on Writing” presents itself as such a response to South African cultural analysis, but the way in which Coetzee positions that

46 response is characteristically oblique—characteristically of Coetzee, and of the middle voice as well. Coetzee is careful in his essay to indicate that he is “not suggesting anything about value” in comparing the middle and active voices, but this is not to say that his analysis does not have ramifications outside the elucidation of technical grammatical points. Rather, Coetzee suggests—so deftly that his argument is really only an insinuation—that he is giving voice to the middle voice in order to “speak a word of caution about constructions that we often run across in literary criticism in South Africa, particularly at the level of reviewing.” Thus Coetzee advocates the reflexivity embedded in the middle voice (rather than the authoritative subjectivity that characterizes the active) in order to address the authority that criticism and reviewing claim for themselves, and the way in which they claim it. And relatedly, Coetzee is also addressing what that body of critical work on fiction emerging from South Africa so often focuses on: the fiction’s relationship to its historical situation. Certainly Macaskill reads “A Note on Writing” that way, using that essay as an occasion to argue that “Coetzee’s practice does not

‘omit,’ abandon, or conceal history” (Macaskill 467), and Attwell’s article on history in

Coetzee, though it does not reference “A Note on Writing,” seems to endorse such analysis as well: “I wish to draw attention to the congruence between Coetzee’s linguistic interests and his skepticism about the forms of political affiliation that are sometimes demanded of him in South Africa today” (Attwell, 1990 611). “A Note on Writing” signals this congruence between linguistic experimentation and political “skepticism,” quietly refuting the apparent disinterest of linguistic forms by gesturing toward the ideologies that murmur inside them. When Coetzee refers to the kind of subject embedded in active-voice verbs, the notion of priority that his “prior to”—with both its

47 temporal and its evaluative resonances—raises, as well as the concept of independence

(as opposed to dependence, or supplementarity ) that he invokes, should remind us of our discussion of “The Novel Today,” and the position that history is granted on the pasture it shares with the novel. With that essay in mind, “A Note on Writing” seems to make the same argument, but this time in the middle voice; rather than the openly confrontational refusal to “consent to be anyone’s handmaiden” (“The Novel Today” 5), we have “a word of caution” arising from the “interesting exercise” ( DP 95) of grammatical analysis.

From this measured voice of caution we can begin to see that, despite their departure from the standard forms of social realism expected of the South African novelist, the forms employed in Coetzee’s writing are not uninterested in the politics that surrounds them, but rather are deeply conscious of their environment at all times.

It is perhaps for this reason that, in addition to noting the reflexivity characteristic of the middle voice, Macaskill also reads it as “that ‘category of thought’ Aristotle refers to as…positionality.” That category seems to refer to the writer’s positioning of him or herself in relation to his or her text, as I have indicated in the above discussion of the agency of the middle voice subject, as well as the writer’s positioning of the text in relation to his or her own position in the world, so that, in Macaskill’s words, Coetzee’s writing comes to “provid[e] a compellingly important encounter with the time and place of its birth” (447). The task before us now is to try to unravel exactly how this encounter is constructed in Coetzee’s fiction, and what exactly such an encounter entails. It appears that, by stressing that it is an encounter with time and place , Macaskill is referring to the material conditions of the production of Coetzee’s texts, to the reality from which those texts emerge. Earlier, I cited Attwell’s statement that Coetzee’s commitment to

48 structuring his novels around elements that, on the level of form as well as of content,

“are not the same as the elements of real life… has cost Coetzee a great deal in terms of his relationship with other writers in South Africa and with readers whose form of politicization demands a realist documentation of life lived under oppression” (Attwell,

1990 582). It is this problem of the relationship between “real life” and Coetzee’s fictional worlds that Macaskill’s notion of positionality, with its emphasis on spatiality and temporality, attempts to address.

Therefore, if Macaskill reads “A Note on Writing” judiciously (and I believe he does), then the middle voice in Coetzee offers just such a positionality for fiction’s rendering of reality. Furthermore, it makes sense that this would be the case, since the middle voice is entirely and necessarily preoccupied with the problem of positing action in such a way as to facilitate a subject/object relationship that is distinct from the default active-voice relationship of domination or, we might say, im position. And, given the ambivalent reception of Coetzee’s work during “times of intense ideological pressure,” and especially given that this ambivalence hinges on the extent of Coetzee’s attention to contemporary politics, we should understand that the particular subject and object

Coetzee is seeking to position through his writing are the novelist and the world he or she experiences—that is, fiction and the material world or, more fundamentally, literature and reality.

To put the problem in Georg Lukács’s terms, realism is here in the balance. “For a Marxist theory of literature,” argues Lukács, the issue of literature’s “reference to objective reality” is a central one, and it is certainly a Marxist theory of literature that

49 many of Coetzee’s critics, with their appeals to historicity, claim to advocate. 3 Lukács continues, “if literature is a particular form by means of which objective reality is reflected, then it becomes of crucial importance for it to grasp that reality as it truly is”

(Lukács, Aesthetics and Politics 33). Disregarding the enormity of the “if” on which that sentence is founded (Coetzee himself does not seem to question that initial assumption, nor do most of his critics), we are still left with two other, no less enormous, issues to struggle with: first, what the “particularity” of the literary form is; and second, how to identify “reality as it truly is.” Discussion of these two issues can only begin with a disclaimer, since this examination will not lead us to any kind of resolution of those central problems. However, what will aid our hopeless analysis is a comprehension of the relationship between those two problems. If we can recognize the particularity of literary forms as a result of the impossibility of grasping reality as it truly is (and not the other way around, as Lukács implies is true of the formalism that characterizes modernism), then we will have understood the basic—perhaps the only—tenet that unites

Coetzee’s fiction.

Coetzee himself engages with Lukács’s conception of realism, and his opposition to the anti-formalism that defines that conception is not surprising. After all, Coetzee is easily identified as participating in the kind of formal manipulation that Lukács locates in modernist and Expressionist writers, and such formalism is, for Lukács, a severe violation of the realist project. Modernists and Expressionists, according to Lukács, fail to do the work realism necessitates because they fail to represent in their writing “the real factors that relate their experiences to the hidden social forces that produce them.”

3 Menàn Du Plessis makes this point rather explicitly in her attempt to move “Towards a True Materialism” from the irresponsible, purely nominal Marxism that she locates in Coetzee’s antagonists.

Instead, they produce writing whose focus is on “their own artistic style,” which Lukács defines as a “spontaneous expression of their immediate experience” ( AP 37), rather than of the totality that is the experience of reality. Coetzee, of course, dismisses this late-

Lukácsian claim as “conditioned by more than a little moralistic prejudice.” But what is more significant than his particular stance on Lukács is the reason why Coetzee feels the need to express such resistance: “the general position Lukács takes on what he calls realism as against modernist decadence carries a great deal of power, political and moral, in South Africa today: one’s first duty as a writer is to represent social and historical processes; drawing the procedures of representation into question is time-wasting; and so forth” ( DP 202). Coetzee is right to claim that for Lukács, as for the social realists who dominated the literary critical scene during South Africa’s apartheid era, the “decadence” of modernism is rooted in its experimentation with form, though he is perhaps hasty in summarizing Lukács’s position as one that opposes the interrogation of representational practice because it is “time-wasting.” More accurately, the problem with such formalism, as Lukács asserts it, is that, although it still aims to represent reality, to produce a

“particular form” for the reflection of the experience of reality, it does not aim to “grasp that reality as it truly is,” but rather as it is immediately experienced (that is, without mediation) by the writer. For Lukács, such attention to the faithful rendering of the writer’s own immediate experience means that modernist novels “emotionally and intellectually…remain frozen in their own immediacy; they fail to pierce the surface to discover the underlying essence” ( AP 36-37), and thus they fail both to comprehend and to capture reality (the reality of social forces of production) as it exists independently of the writer’s consciousness. For Lukács, modernist formalism does not serve to draw “the

51 procedures of representation into question,” but rather to offer, without such questioning

(that is, “immediately”), an account of the way in which the writer experiences the world.

VI. Realism, Historicity, Mediation

Such is the conception of realism and its accompanying rejection of formalism that Coetzee identifies as carrying “a great deal of power, political and moral, in South

Africa.” In a review of Waiting for the Barbarians , Menàn Du Plessis considers this notion of realism as it is applied to Coetzee’s fiction. She begins by examining a passage from that novel and rehearses the antagonistic reading of it that she finds typical of the

South African “middle class ‘Marxist’” (125). Identifying “the first person singular and the present tense of the narrative” as “the features that stand out” in Coetzee’s prose, Du

Plessis writes that “taken together, these manage to effect a sense of immediacy….This means that the narrating ego is characterized by an absence of the inward-eating, self- distanced consciousness of the Romantic hero” (Du Plessis 118). This reading (which Du

Plessis’s review goes on to contradict, positing that Coetzee’s fiction does, in fact, offer a

Marxian critique of society) levels against Coetzee the same criticisms Lukács articulated against the modernism of his contemporaries, whose concern with form, he argues, reflects an absence of the kind of consciousness characteristic of a “true realist” like

Thomas Mann. In Lukács’s account of Mann’s writing, therefore, we have perhaps the most illuminating description of the work that realism should do. Responding to a question he poses to himself, “why does [Mann] choose not to clamber on to the bandwagon of modernism?,” Lukács writes the following:

Precisely because he is a true realist , a term which in this case signifies primarily that, as a creative artist, he knows exactly who Christian Buddenbrook, who Tonio Kröger and who Hans Castorp, Settembrini and Naphta are. He does not have to know it in the abstract way that a social scientist would know it....He knows it after the manner of a creative realist: he knows how thoughts and feelings grow out of the life of society and

how experiences and emotions are parts of the total complex of reality. As a realist he assigns these parts to their rightful place within the total life context.” ( AP 36)

In this passage, what is of special interest is not the contrast but rather the similarity between this championing of realism, and the value ascribed to realism by the very champions of modernism that Lukács is arguing against. Discussing realism with

Coetzee, Attwell notes, “the position on modernism of which you are suspicious is the

Lukácsian one which carries an endorsement of realism; but there is also the position developed by Adorno, which treats modernism as a historically appropriate and critical tradition” ( DP 210). Attwell is of course correct in pointing out that Adorno’s position on the historicity and value of modernist writing is in direct contrast to Lukács’s, but his words here imply that Adorno does not himself endorse realism—a hasty summary, I think, of a very significant point, and therefore one that requires some precision. If we consider Lukács’s account of Mann’s writing alongside of Adorno’s characterization of

Franz Kafka’s work, it should become clear that Lukács and Adorno (and, loosely metonymically, the social realists and the modernists) seem to agree rather resoundingly on the value of realism in literary work: “In Kafka its disenchanting touch is his ‘that’s the way it is.’ He reports what actually happens, though without any illusion concerning the subject, which, possessing the greatest degree of self-awareness—of its nullity— throws itself on the junk pile” (Adorno, “Notes on Kafka” 233).

Where the Lukácsian and Adornian positions differ, therefore, is not on the merits of realism as a literary technique (Adorno also endorses literature that shows “the way it is”), but rather on the way in which realism is performed. In particular, the distinction between these positions hinges upon the different status each theorist affords to literature in relation to reality: thus we are returned to our earlier discussion of “The Novel Today,”

53 where that same relationship is evaluated by Coetzee. Lukács’s definition of Mann’s realism stresses the novelist’s ability to capture “how thoughts and feelings grow out of the life of society”; in this way the reality of society is portrayed as something that can be directly accessed through the intellectual and affective processes that stem organically from it. Although Lukács opposes representations of a writer’s immediate experience, his articulation of Mann’s realist project as an organic extension of historical and social structures effectively assumes that “the life of society” is able be comprehended immediately. Furthermore, he also does not consider that Mann’s textual expression of these intellectual and affective processes is itself a process of mediation by literary forms.

The fact that he thus ignores the category of mediation (twice) suggests that Lukács does not conceive of literature as Coetzee does—as a form that is dependent on the pasture of reality for its nourishment, but at the same time as a form that is itself discrete, not rooted in reality, decisively not an outgrowth of “the total complex of reality” itself.

Adorno, on the other hand, traces the “self-awareness” that defines Kafka’s realism to the subject’s “nullity,” its ultimate impoverishment. Kafka’s writing becomes central to Adorno’s conception of realism because of this seemingly limitless reduction of the subject, which it performs not only by representing subjects that are literally impoverished, but also by means of the impoverishment of the prose itself. Refusing the

Lukácsian realism that would, to recall Coetzee’s words, supplement a given image of society, that would enlarge it until reality is indistinguishable from the expressions assumed to emerge directly from it, and that would thus conceal the mediation inherent in its expressions, Adorno’s realism, as embodied in Kafka’s work, endorses literature that manages to rival complete and comprehensible conceptions of reality (the Lukácsian

“total complex of reality,” which, Lukács maintains in his study of The Meaning of

Contemporary Realism , Kafka’s work does not make manifest) by means of a kind of passive resistance, in the form of willing starvation. Here “A Hunger Artist” figures prominently, especially as the artist reveals his humiliating secret at the end of the story—that he was able to fast so extremely not because he could transcend the human need for food, but simply because he “couldn’t find the food [he] liked” (277). For

Adorno, Kafka’s literature as a whole operates in the same way. It is not that Kafka’s fiction claims to exist in isolation from the material world—rather, it is painfully conscious of its dependence on reality—but it cannot find a reality that it would like to digest. Thus it starves and shrinks, proving that it is not reality (since reality does not diminish, even as the body of the hunger artist does) at the same time that it demonstrates that its relationship to reality determines its very form.

As the allusion to Kafka’s work in its title might suggest, Coetzee’s Life and

Times of Michael K similarly employs impoverishment as a realist technique. Michael

K’s narrative, which takes place in South Africa in a time of civil war, is a story constructed almost entirely out of episodes of imprisonment, escape, and near-starvation.

As an account of survival eked out of perpetual poverty, confinement, and famine, the novel thematizes the ingenuity required of Michael for his subsistence, detailing the various forms his life assumes to that end. The novel manipulates its form in the same way, with the first and last parts of the text told from Michael’s point of view in the third person, while the second part is narrated in the first person by a prison doctor observing

Michael, including sections from the doctor’s journal, and a letter he writes to Michael.

In this way Coetzee’s novel endorses Bertolt Brecht’s conception of realism, which is founded upon a belief in the necessity of change among literary forms, and thus is also founded upon its opposition to Lukács: “Methods become exhausted, stimuli no longer work. New problems appear and demand new methods. Reality changes; in order to represent it, modes of representation must also change” (Brecht, AP 82). Coetzee’s enactment of this Brechtian (and Adornian) realism, whereby transformations in “modes of representation” must adjust to account for reality’s transformations (formalism as realism), becomes especially clear in the reading of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe that underlies Life and Times of Michael K .4 Narrating the isolation of Michael’s life as a cultivator on an abandoned farm, Coetzee explains that K “lived by the rising and setting of the sun, in a pocket outside time.” In this way, Coetzee paints not only Michael’s seclusion, but also his intimate relationship to the forces of nature. K’s existence

“outside time” indicates his freedom from the constructions of the society he has left behind; indeed, “Cape Town and the war and the passage to the farm slipped further and further into forgetfulness” (60). As Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels have pointed out,

“Robinson Crusoe’s experiences are a favourite theme with political economists” (Marx and Engels, The Marx-Engels Reader 324) because they are seen to represent exactly the kind of unmediated labor, outside of society, that Michael’s work exemplifies. Just as, for K, “there were times…when a fit of exultation would pass through him at the thought that he, alone and unknown, was making this deserted farm bloom” (59), so Defoe’s protagonist “knows that his labour, whatever its form, is but the activity of one and the same Robinson” ( M-E 324). However, in Coetzee’s novel, Michael’s term as sole

4 This is also true of the more obvious allusions to Robinson Crusoe in Coetzee’s novel Foe , as I will discuss later.

56 proprietor of his garden is soon terminated, when the son of the farm’s owner returns to the land, and Michael must pretend (briefly, since he runs away shortly after the heir’s appearance) to be an employed caretaker. Interestingly, the link to the Crusoe story is made more explicit in just the moment when it is abolished: K thinks, “I let myself believe that this was one of those islands without an owner. Now I am learning the truth.

Now I am learning my lesson” (61). The lesson here seems to be that, although in the

Defoe novel “all the relations between Robinson and the objects that form this wealth of his own creation, are here so simple and clear as to be intelligible without exertion” ( M-E

325), for Michael K, the late-twentieth-century subject of South African apartheid, the simplicity and clarity of this immediate relationship between the worker and the products of his labor are no longer imaginable, as these “islands without an owner” no longer exist.

From such a lesson, which locates in Michael K the illustration of a historical development from Defoe to Coetzee, an argument for the historicity of Coetzee’s text might be made. However, such an argument, which is founded upon articulations of what is “no longer” true, abridges the situation too deftly, and thus is susceptible to the kind of objection Timothy Bewes summarizes in his account of the “far too simple”

“‘Fall of Man’ scenario,” readily “dismissed as essentialist and idealist,” “in which an immediate order of things, an integrated existence set in the remote past…is projected in contrast to a present-day, hopelessly mediated and insubstantial world” (Bewes 10).

Keeping such an objection in mind, it becomes necessary to consider that such an

“immediate order of things” might never have existed independently of mediation, that what has changed from the world of Robinson Crusoe to that of Michael K is not that the

57 immediacy K desires in his cultivation has become impossible in the contemporary period, but rather that the forms of mediation are different. And, accordingly, in a more careful reading of Marx and Engels’s analysis of Crusoe’s situation, the mediated nature of the character’s independent state begins to manifest itself. To begin with, Robinson

“commences, like a true-born Briton, to keep a set of books” ( M-E 325) on the island, suggesting first of all that his castaway status has stripped him of neither his national identity nor of the authority that such identification has over his behavior, and, secondly, that even in such isolation his relationship to his labor remains regulated temporally as well as linguistically (by “a watch, ledger, and pen and ink”). Furthermore, although

Robinson, like Michael K, knows that all labor performed on the island is his alone, Marx and Engels explain that he also knows, “consequently, that it consists of nothing but different modes of human labour” (325, my emphasis), so that although Robinson owns his own labor, that labor only exists insofar as it manifests itself through various modes— that is, insofar as it is mediated by form . Even before the farm’s owner appears in

Coetzee’s novel, then, it must be clear that the “immediate order of things,” the

“integrated existence” of “those islands without an owner” itself never existed, because it is (in both novels) always already mediated: for K, mediation is inescapable because the land he farms—however intimate his cultivation might seem—belongs to someone else, so that the products of his labor on the farm are never directly his; for Robinson, even his apparently self-owned labor is forced to assume different forms, to mediate itself through form, as Crusoe is compelled by “necessity itself…to apportion his time accurately between his different kinds of work.” In this sense, Crusoe and K might be understood not as originary man and fallen man, respectively, but rather as “one and the same

Robinson,” however conditioned into “different modes of human labour” ( M-E 324) by different necessities.

Given this analysis, and adding to it Jameson’s definition of “History” as “the experience of necessity” (Jameson 102), a conception of history does begin to materialize in Coetzee’s text, but it is not related to the theory of realism that stems from a belief in

Lukács’s historical “total complex of reality” that the novel would supplement. Rather,

Coetzee’s text achieves its historicity by operating according to the necessity conditioned by two of its key features: first, its being set in contemporary South Africa, and second, its status as a rewriting of Defoe’s (or Kafka’s) text. This dual historicity—at once political and textual—indicates that the conception of history present in Coetzee’s novels has everything to do with a mediated relation to past and present states of reality, which are themselves only conceivable insofar as they are mediated. Thus Coetzee’s narration of history is the narration of the mediation inherent in the histories he recounts, as, for example, he inscribes a history of the novel form (Defoe, Kafka) within a story of South

African civil war ( Michael K ). In this way the historicity of Coetzee’s literature is the revelation of the novel’s status as a tradition formed by the confluence of political reality and (equally political) discursively constructed standards of value. To simplify perhaps too much, Coetzee’s novels are representations of what goes on in the world, based on how those goings-on have already been represented, and which representations of those goings-on Coetzee decides to address. What Macaskill calls Coetzee’s “doing-writing” becomes a kind of narrative labor in the same way that Crusoe’s or K’s farming is labor; just as Marx and Engels suggest that cultivation necessitates “different modes of human

59 labour,” so too does the fact that “reality changes” necessitate “modes of representation” that change “in order to represent it” (Brecht, AP 82).

Therefore, interpreting Michael K according to Marx and Engels’s reading of the

Crusoe story not only counters Michael’s nostalgia for a world where, it is implied, immediacy would have been possible, but also, and crucially, speaks to the troubled relationship between realism and literary formalism. As we have seen earlier, Lukács charges modernist writers with remaining “frozen in their own immediacy,” producing only empty, failed work because, devoted to representing reality as it immediately appears to them, they “fail to pierce the surface to discover the underlying essence; i.e. the real factors that relate their experiences to the hidden social forces that produce them”

(AP 36-37). By contrast, Lukács writes, politically relevant and revolutionary work would not content itself with such superficial and immediate representations, but rather would perform a “deeper probing of the real world,” “abandoning and transcending the limits of immediacy” ( AP 37), in order to represent accurately the relationship between the particular impressions of a certain subject position, and the general truth of humanity at a given historical moment.

Thus, for Lukács, the immediacy to be criticized in formally experimental work is defined as an inability “to penetrate the laws governing objective reality and to uncover the deeper, hidden, mediated, not immediately perceptible network of relationships that go to make up society” ( AP 38). However, if we are to comprehend the realism that constitutes Coetzee’s work, we must recognize that it presents the reader with a conception of immediacy that is radically distinct from that which Lukács imputes to modernist writers. The immediate character of Coetzee’s fiction is dependent upon its

60 formalism, meaning that the production of immediacy in his texts is dependent upon their mediation through literary form. This relationship between immediacy and mediation is explored by Adorno in his Hegel: Three Studies . There, he writes that “taking as one’s point of departure the pure immediacy of the ‘this thing here’…does not get one beyond the contingency of the individual person who simply exists, does not get beyond solipsism” (63). Here, Adorno would seem to concur with Lukàcs, as this solipsistic representation of experience seems to be what Lukács is denouncing when he criticizes writers whose sole aim is to crystallize immediate perception on the page. However, for

Adorno, this is not the immediacy that formalist realism strives to enact. Rather, the conspicuous mediation performed by formalism achieves its immediacy in the very conspicuousness of its enactment: exposing the mediation inherent in its representations of “objective reality,” literature that works to reveal its textuality constructs the immediacy of its processes of mediation. In terms of Coetzee’s work, the immediacy that his realism generates in Life and Times of Michael K does not present contemporary

South Africa as any South African (including Coetzee) would have immediately experienced it (that would be the solipsistic contingency of the “this thing here” to which

Adorno refers, and which Lukács condemns). Rather, as even the title page, with its allusion to Kafka’s work, makes clear, the novel announces its mediation through its reference to textual reality, the reality that Coetzee is mired in a literary tradition that he cannot claim either to abandon or transcend. Thus what is immediate is not Coetzee’s or even K’s direct experience of the world, but rather the mediatedness of writing, the mediatedness of living in a society whose past representations can neither be escaped nor denied.

The central objection that Brecht articulates to Lukács’s realism emphasizes the necessity of taking account of such mediation, and in particular of how the forms of such mediation change over time:

Even the realistic mode of writing, of which literature provides many very different examples, bears the stamp of the way it was employed, when and by which class, down to its smallest details. With the people struggling and changing reality before our eyes, we must not cling to ‘tried’ rules of narrative, venerable literary models, eternal aesthetic laws. We must not derive realism as such from particular existing works, but we shall use every means…to render reality to men in a form they can master. We shall take care not to describe one particular, historical form of novel of a particular epoch as realistic— say that of Balzac or Tolstoy…. ( AP 81)

Brecht thus underscores the problem of a realism that does not adapt itself to changes in reality, but which rather insists upon a mode that, although perhaps once historically appropriate, cannot be assumed to continue to apply as time progresses. In this way,

Brecht turns Lukács’s own critique against him, explaining that, by clinging to “eternal aesthetic laws,” Lukács in fact identifies himself as a formalist. And such conservative formalism, argues Brecht, produces literature that does not represent a present state of reality, or even a past state, but which rather serves only to imitate antiquated modes of representation.

VII. Representing Representation and Realizing Reality

Menàn Du Plessis finds just such a conservatism reflected in criticism that reproaches Coetzee’s fiction for its formal experimentation, stressing, as does Brecht, the imitative quality of realism that depends for its expression on tried forms:

It seems to me that what people like [the “middle class ‘Marxist’”] really want is a literature that imitates recognizably sound Marxian writing, preferably social realism. The point is that Coetzee does not pretend to write for anyone other than the educated middle-class reader. He does make demands on this reader, however, and the challenges he issues can be shattering. It distresses me a little to have to realize that the bourgeois Marxist simply cannot afford the devastating self-criticism that an applied reading of Coetzee’s work provides. It is for this reason that the campus Left has to reject him, however effetely. (125)

Here, Du Plessis follows Brecht’s realist program, arguing that the kinds of “demands”

Coetzee makes on his readers are perhaps most “shattering” when his rejection of formally imitative writing is made most obvious—that is, when, instead of invisibly imitating the world, he ostentatiously performs imitation of such imitation. This is perhaps nowhere clearer than in his novel Foe, an explicit adaptation of Defoe’s

Robinson Crusoe , which is the narrative of the protagonist Susan Barton’s narration of the story of her shipwreck to author “Mr Foe,” whom she hopes will, in turn, transform the narrative into a novel. Thus Barton’s story is conveyed by Coetzee through a series of mediations, visually enacted by the many sets of quotation marks that much of the novel is embedded in. And, as Mr. Foe tells Barton, within the story of the shipwreck, life on the island, and the rescue, is buried the story of Barton’s life before the island adventure. But ultimately, Barton tells Foe, what is most important is the most unrecoverable story, that of the loss of Friday’s tongue: “many stories can be told of

Friday’s tongue, but the true story is buried within Friday, who is mute. The true story will not be heard till by art we have found a means of giving voice to Friday” ( Foe 118).

Thus “the true story” is the one that will have to be the most constructed, the most mediated, because the only person who has immediate access to the story is the one who cannot tell it.

By privileging the immediacy of Friday’s story at the same time that access to that immediacy is denied, Foe argues for the inevitability of mediation in literary representation. Nevertheless, this necessary mediatedness does not require an accompanying obstruction of immediacy, but rather a different conception of immediacy.

By contrast to what Adorno called the “pure immediacy of the ‘this thing here’” that

63 defines the conventional techniques of realism, the immediacy enacted in Foe accounts for mediation, because it is precisely the work of mediation that is being made immediate. Recalling Adorno’s citation of Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of

Religion —“immediacy is itself essentially mediated” ( Hegel 57)—what I am suggesting here is that, in Coetzee, this bold Hegelian claim is taken to its next logical (dialectical) step, so that we have in Coetzee’s fiction something like the immediacy of the “this mediation here.” In his analysis of reification as a phenomenon that exposes a profound postmodern anxiety before (inescapable) structures of mediation, Bewes addresses

Adorno’s argument for immediacy’s mediatedness, adding that “only in its mediation, in fact, does the mediated achieve immediacy” (Bewes 164). Thus while he reiterates the

Adornian conception of immediacy’s dependence on mediation, Bewes here makes the point that the mediated, by virtue of its very mediation, is also immediate, effectively presenting the necessary antithesis to Adorno’s thesis in Hegel: Three Studies (or, better, the antithesis to Adorno’s antithesis, since Adorno’s Hegel is itself a resolutely negative text): mediation is itself essentially immediate. This can be understood as a rehearsal of the counterpositioning that is essential to and constitutive of dialectical thought, but it is imperative that the stakes of such a rehearsal be recognized. For a novelist writing in a highly charged political context like Coetzee’s, it is not readily accepted that the immediacy narrated by a text would be that of its mediation; as I have mentioned,

Coetzee himself articulates in “The Novel Today” that the “intense ideological pressure” of the contemporary South African situation tends toward the novel’s subjugation by “the appropriate appetite” (3) of discourses (history in particular) that “claim primacy” (4), that claim immediacy, that deny their mediatedness. It is because of the staunch

64 reluctance to accept the kind of immediacy that Coetzee posits—the immediacy of mediation—that what Bewes dubs the hierarchy of these two terms must be challenged.

In Foe , the strata of mediation that compose Susan Barton’s story compel the reader to consider the impossibility of ever reaching past those mediations to a reality that would be immediate. Still, the novel presupposes such a level of reality all the time, through Barton’s insistence that Friday’s lack of a physical tongue—which signifies a lack of tongue in the metaphorical sense—guarantees him a relationship to the world around him that is not mediated by speech, and so is immediate. This belief in the primacy of Friday’s body, its immediacy, persists and intensifies as the novel progresses, until at the end of Foe Coetzee offers a short conclusion that finds Susan Barton underwater as she is at the novel’s start, but this time unenveloped by the quotation marks that initially encase her narrative. Now, swimming in Coetzee’s prose, here as beautiful and transparent as the water it describes, Barton finds herself at “a place where bodies are their own signs,” and she identifies this place as “the home of Friday” (157). Here, then, is the novel’s moment of immediacy, its liberation from the heaps of narrative that weighed Barton down in an obsessed desire to tell the story of her shipwreck. Here is the shipwreck itself, Coetzee seems to say.

In this reading, which is the one Coetzee’s elegant writing seduces the reader into,

Adorno’s reminder of the Hegelian notion that immediacy is mediated must resonate powerfully, as the sensation of immediacy is, obviously, mediated by the author’s words.

However, as I was suggesting a moment ago, this caution of Adorno’s is not enough here: what is necessary to do justice to his dialectical thinking (not to mention to the complexity of Coetzee’s text) is the recognition of the opposite of the concept of the

65 mediatedness of immediacy—that is, Coetzee’s making-immediate of that mediation.

Having piled narration upon narration for the duration of Foe , Coetzee seems to whittle those mediations away at the end of his novel, apparently offering now only the pure signification of the body, of Friday. But Gayatri Spivak is right in her assessment that this ending presents only the “ wish to invade the margin” (Spivak, A Critique of

Postcolonial Reason 193, my emphasis), and not an invasion thereof, because what

Coetzee reiterates here—subtly—is that extent to which processes of signification will not be evaded, be they as ostentatious as Barton’s narration to future narrator Mr. Foe, or as invisible as the transparency of the waters that make Friday’s home. No matter how clear, water is itself a medium, Foe argues: it is when Barton tries to speak to Friday underwater that she realizes that “this is not a place of words,” since “each syllable…is caught and filled with water and diffused” (157), but it is not a place where signification is done away with altogether. Barton is unable to mediate her speech through language in this scene, but that inability is actually mediated by the water that catches, fills, and distorts her syllables. Thus Coetzee writes that this place is one “where bodies are their own signs” (Coetzee 157), where, although signification has become nonverbal, the physical immediacy of the body can itself be understood as a form of mediation.

Therefore, although Spivak maintains that “Friday’s body is not its own sign,” I would suggest that such a statement reads too much into (or out of) Coetzee’s text; that Friday’s body would be its own sign does not endanger its status as what Spivak rightly calls “the arbitrary name of the withheld limit” (193). For this reason, although the “slow stream” exhaled from Friday does not communicate linguistically, and in fact moves even

“without breath,” it manages to be conveyed “out upon” Barton, washing the cliffs of and shores of the island” (157) through the medium of the water’s very immediacy.

As Spivak writes, “the seaweeds” in this submerged image “seem to sigh—if only there were no texts” (193), serving to reiterate, of course, the novel’s textuality. Thus the quest for immediacy that Barton undertakes at the end of Foe results in a lesson in mediation’s inescapability. This lesson is reproduced throughout Coetzee’s work, with the most obvious expression to be found in his novel Elizabeth Costello , which is divided not into parts or chapters, but, in fact, into “Lessons.” These are delivered by the novel’s eponymous protagonist, and generally concern the status of fiction and the role of the author. Elizabeth Costello begins with a reflexive identification of “the problem of the opening,” and this reflexivity continues as the text interrogates the role of realism, ethics, and aesthetics in literature, finally terminating in an effort to produce a statement of belief whose authenticity remains dubious even as the effort to produce it grows all the more genuine. As a novel about a novelist’s interrogation of novel-writing, Elizabeth

Costello foregrounds its mediation as conspicuously as did Foe ; however, whereas Foe focuses chiefly on how reality is reflected in its literary representations, Elizabeth

Costello addresses the question of realism by examining reality “itself” in addition to the representation thereof. Six of the book’s eight lessons were delivered orally by Coetzee before the novel’s publication, presented either as lectures or as readings (Attridge 192-

95), thus obfuscating the distinctness of written and spoken language. The lecture format in particular performs this obfuscation; in these cases, Coetzee would begin speaking without any indication that he was narrating a fictional story, and would continue “with no break in the fictional tissue,” enacting the fundamental “uncertainty of genre”

(Attridge 193) that pervades Coetzee’s work. Recounting his experience in attendance of one such lecture, delivered at Princeton University in 1997, Derek Attridge remarks that

“what made the event in which we were participating all the more disquieting was our gradual realization that it was being mirrored, in a distorted representation, in the fiction itself” (193). Although Attridge does not directly cite it here, his reference to the

“distorted representation” of Coetzee’s act of mirroring seems to allude directly to the text of another of Elizabeth Costello’s lessons, delivered by Coetzee as a lecture entitled

“What is Realism?” in 1996, and by Costello as a lecture with the same title in a chapter called “Realism.” Positing an original definition of mimesis as a direct rendering of reality through text—“We used to believe that when the text said, ‘On the table stood a glass of water,’ there was indeed a table, and a glass of water on it, and we had only to look in the word-mirror of the text to see them”—Costello argues that neither the reader nor the writer of contemporary fiction can assume such transparency in representation:

“the word mirror is broken, irreparably it seems”; “about what is really going on in the lecture hall [in Kafka’s “Report to an Academy”] your guess is as good as mine”; “the dictionary…has become just one code book among many” (Coetzee, EC 19).

What is interesting in Attridge’s (conscious or accidental) allusion to the distortion inherent in Costello’s figure of the cracked word-mirror is that what is

“disquieting” in his experience of Coetzee’s lecture is not that the mirror’s fracture obstructs the reflection of reality, but rather that Coetzee’s speech is too good a mirror, that it reflects too transparently what is going on: “the central character was revealed to be a novelist from the Southern Hemisphere who had been asked to give a lecture at an

American college, and who had chosen to speak on the human treatment of animals”

(Attridge 193)—an exact description of Coetzee’s own situation, whose talk that day was entitled “The Philosophers and the Animals.” Thus the audience was first surprised to hear Coetzee reading a story rather than delivering a critical speech about the reality of animal suffering, and then surprised again as the uneasiness prompted by the unfamiliarity of the lecture’s form was overtaken by the uneasiness induced by the familiarity of its content.

Attridge’s anecdote suggests that, presented in conspicuously mediated form, immediate reality becomes disquieting, uncanny, so that what Coetzee’s Princeton lecture enacts is the fundamental impossibility of a direct imitation of reality through the mediation of words. As Sigmund Freud writes in his familiar paper on “The Uncanny”:

The uncanny as it is depicted in literature , in stories and imaginative productions, merits in truth a separate discussion….[T]he realm of phantasy depends for its effect on the fact that its content is submitted to reality-testing. The somewhat paradoxical result is that in the first place a great deal that is not uncanny in fiction would be so if it happened in real life …. (Freud 950)

In a sense, the uncanniness of Coetzee’s lecture enacts just what Costello’s figure of the word-mirror describes: the lecturer’s words present to the audience its mirror image, but what the audience sees, in addition to its own reflection, is the apparatus of reflection itself as betrayed by the crack in the mirror—that is, the audience sees the process of representation, and thus is compelled to practice on real life the “reality-testing” that, as

Freud suggests, defines the realm of “phantasy,” which in this passage refers to all forms of representation recognized as such, and particularly to literature. Although such a revelation of the act of representation as enacted in Coetzee’s lecture can certainly be classified as among those “metafictional proclivities” that Attridge labels characteristic of postmodernism (2), it also—and this is crucial—exceeds the category of metafiction; not simply the representation of a representation, Coetzee’s lecture is also the realizing of

69 reality , as the act of delivering the lecture about Costello’s lecture in fact performs the fictional lecture—makes that lecture real. For this reason, Coetzee’s lecturing en abîme is not merely a meditation on representation, an underlining of mediation, but is also a meditation on reality, and, given Attridge’s account of the disquieting effect of the lecture, a perceptible destabilization of the category of reality. Thus when Du Plessis calls the challenges Coetzee makes to his reader “shattering,” she is not simply affirming that Coetzee’s texts are difficult to read and interpret, but is suggesting also that his work shatters the way in which his readers conventionally take in the textual representation of reality, and thus renders impossible an uninterrupted image of the reality they experience:

“the word-mirror is broken, irreparably it seems.”

In Coetzee’s most recent novel, Slow Man , Elizabeth Costello returns, but this time her status in the novel is further complicated because she is not the story’s main character, but instead a fairy godmother-like side character who meddles in the life of the protagonist, Paul Rayment, convincing him to perform various strange and ultimately inconsequential acts for rather indefensible reasons. Thus where, in the novel that bears her name, Elizabeth Costello confuses the book’s representational schema by functioning conspicuously as both an authoring subject (we read the lectures she delivers) and the novel’s authored object (we are guided through her story by a narrative voice that is not hers), in Slow Man Costello retains both of those roles, as she is still a writer and still an object of the narrative, but this doubled function is no longer her chief contribution to the novel (we do not read her writing, and the novel does not occupy itself principally with her). Rather, in Slow Man , Elizabeth Costello functions frequently (and mysteriously) to guide much of the novel’s plot herself, acting, in Paul’s words, as “an intermediary”

(125) between him and the outside world. After Paul has sex with an attractive blind woman, intercourse which Costello has not only encouraged but also orchestrated, under the necessary condition that Paul impair his own vision for the act by means of an elaborate blindfolding apparatus, Paul begins to question the identity of the woman

Costello has set him up with. In response to Paul’s doubts, the narrative articulates a question that might be said to underlie all of Coetzee’s fiction, precisely the kind of question that leads some critics to the conclusion that Coetzee is not invested enough in historical reality: “Does it matter who the woman really was; does it matter if he has been duped?” (117). Perhaps what matters, this question posits, is not what actually happens, but whatever version of it Paul decides to delude himself with; that is to say, perhaps the materiality of reality has nothing to do with the event itself, and instead everything to do with how the event is read. And for Paul, reading the event has in turn everything to do with how it is written—by Elizabeth Costello.

Unsurprisingly, this recapitulation of a familiar Derridean refrain (“ il n’y pas de hors-texte ”) infuriates the character who would rather see himself as the agent of real actions—that is, the lover of a beautiful, tragically blind, and significantly younger woman—than the impotent object of a story crafted by a “liar and fabulator” (117), the pestering old “Costello woman.” Paul, it should be noted, is a photographer who “tends to trust pictures more than he trusts words. Not because pictures cannot lie but because, once they leave the darkroom” (of his blindfold?), “they are fixed, immutable.”

Therefore, he protests Costello’s interventions in his life, protests the possibility of his having been duped by stories, which “seem to change shape all the time” (64): “‘You treat me like a puppet,’ he complains. ‘You treat everyone like a puppet. You make up

71 stories and bully us into playing them out for you’” (117). Here Paul identifies in

Elizabeth Costello’s mediation the same move that Attridge’s analysis of Coetzee’s lecture/reading makes evident: the novelist has written the story first, and has subsequently orchestrated its enactment without the witting participation of its performers. In this case, realism does not mean representing reality in narrative, but rather manifesting narrative in reality, and, as a result, both narrative and reality are to be believed in, which means also, of course, that neither can be believed in. The fact that, in

Slow Man , the “reality” (in this case, Paul’s sex with the blind woman) that is produced first in “story” (in Elizabeth Costello’s mind) is itself a purely textual one (it is still

“only” actualized in the world of Coetzee’s novel), exposes the extent of Coetzee’s commitment to destabilizing any assumptions about the function of the novel and the role of the writer: gliding inexplicably in and out of Paul’s life, with no apparent story of her own, Costello seems to serve a purely mediating function here, the visible puppeteer choreographing the interactions between her puppets, as well as her audience and the show.

In one sense, this is just another reiteration of the way in which the work of mediation is always visible in Coetzee—the puppets recognize their master, the puppeteer is displayed to the audience in full view. What Slow Man adds, however, is yet one more layer of mediation, as the puppeteer is conspicuously a puppet as well: Elizabeth Costello has no apparent story of her own as far as Slow Man is concerned, but a small step apparently hors texte puts the reader in front of another text, Elizabeth Costello , published only two years earlier. Thus the two novels begin to form their own reality, a universe parallel to the reader’s, as Costello seems to exist independent of our reading of

72 her. For example, she might have been doing something we know nothing about in the time between the two novels; Slow Man itself encourages such speculation, as Costello’s periodic absences from the narrative compel Paul to wonder what life she leads when she is not with him. Of course this form of realism in the novel, which functions by conferring on text a life of its own, is not a new practice; the realism of the 19 th century novel was in a bold way exemplified and influenced by Honoré de Balzac’s La Comédie humaine , whose nearly 100 finished novels and novellas present the actions of a series of repeated characters, constructing a reality that is understood as altogether distinct from, but entirely reflective of, the reality of its readers. 5 What Coetzee adds to this precedent is his intercourse between those two realities. It might well be argued, for example, that in Slow Man Costello assumes the role that an anonymous third-person narrator performs in Elizabeth Costello , a role that Coetzee himself would by default have assumed in his live performances of these lectures. In Elizabeth Costello , particularly in the first section of the novel, the narrator highlights the process of narration in passages such as the following:

It is not a good idea to interrupt the narrative too often, since storytelling works by lulling the reader or listener into a dreamlike state in which the time and space of the real world fade away, superseded by the time and space of the fiction. Breaking into the dream draws attention to the constructedness of the story, and plays havoc with the realist illusion. ( EC 16)

Here, the narrator “draws attention to the constructedness of the story” not only because he is “breaking into it,” but especially because his interruption is actually the utterance of the interruption itself. Delivered live, as I mention above, these words would be

5 Given this parallel to Coetzee’s fiction, it is particularly interesting to consider that Balzac’s novels are categorized not only as realist novels, but as historical novels as well. Also noteworthy is Lukács’s endorsement of this categorization; in his estimation, Balzac’s “great achievement” is his “portrayal of the present as history ,” by means of which “he creates a higher and hitherto unknown type of realistic novel” (Lukács, The Historical Novel 81-83).

73 attributed to Coetzee himself as mediator, or “intermediary”; published in Elizabeth

Costello they may be Coetzee’s words or those of a different, unnamed intermediary (a third-person narrator entirely in keeping with the conventions of the realist novel). In

Slow Man , such a third-person narrator does guide the story, but this is not done with the same explicit attention to narrativity as we see in Elizabeth Costello . Rather, that narrativity is achieved in Paul Rayment’s story by the mediation of Costello, who manipulates the course of his life (and thus of Coetzee’s novel), continually “breaking into the dream” of Slow Man by harshly testing its “realist illusion” with her unexplained disappearances and reappearances, her impossible intimate knowledge about all the novel’s characters. Thus, although in this later novel storytelling does work by means of the “lulling” that allows “the time and space of the real world [to] fade away, superseded by the time and space of the fiction,” the realist illusion is still threatened by Costello’s unrealistic behavior, and furthermore (most importantly), the fact that Slow Man inextricably links itself to the earlier novel thrusts it not into its own “time and space,” but rather the time and space of its fictionality , the time and space of Coetzee’s world of fiction—i.e., the “real world.”

VIII. Embodiment, Reduction, Limitation

Given that reality is presented in Slow Man by means of the very act that identifies the text as a work of fiction, we can say that it is the mediation of the literary enterprise that produces an immediate experience of reality in Coetzee’s text. However, as I have stated earlier, it is precisely this argument for the immediacy of the mediated— which is evident everywhere in Coetzee’s work—that provokes critical opposition to his novels. It is as a consequence of such objections that “The Novel Today” must argue

74 vehemently for the legitimacy of the novel form, against the conviction (held by those who conceive of history not as one form of discourse, but as the “master-form of discourse”) that it is possible to access reality in a way that is not mediated. Considered in the context of the violence and oppression that marked the South African situation from which it emerged, “The Novel Today” seems to suggest that the discursive nature of history is denied in such “times of intense ideological pressure” in order that the immediacy of experience—especially the experience of bodily suffering—be sanctified.

By contrast, insisting on immediacy as the product of mediation, on the revelation of mediation as itself immediate, Coetzee’s fiction contradicts such an effort to safeguard a conception of reality that would be unmediated.

In Foe , such safeguarding of an unmediated relationship to reality is performed by

Susan Barton’s insistence on narrative of the loss of Friday’s tongue as the “true story,” so that the loss itself becomes the novel’s true referent, what Spivak calls the “secret that may not be a secret but cannot be unlocked” ( CPR 190). What makes the loss of Friday’s tongue so significant in Coetzee’s text is the fact that the loss itself cannot be narrated, cannot be mediated, because the unspeakable act (the cutting out of Friday’s tongue) is the physical act of silencing, of making speech impossible. By means of Friday’s muteness, then, Coetzee advances two important positions: first, he affirms the immediacy of bodily experience (only Friday knows the story of the loss of his tongue), and, second, he negates the possibility of representing that experience (the experience that would be spoken is the experience of losing speech).

Spivak suggests, invoking Derrida, that “that arbitrary name—Friday—may be

‘the name of the possibility…of keeping a secret that is visible inside [ à l’intérieure ] but

75 not outside [ à l’extérieure ]’” (191). The reader of Foe learns as the text progresses that there is a secret to be known—that is, the “true story” behind Friday’s loss of his tongue.

Thus the work of mediation puts us “inside,” where the secret is made visible. However, what is revealed is only the existence of the secret, so that what is made immediate is only the “ possibility ” of knowing the truth of Friday’s bodily experience. Of course this is a possibility that Foe never realizes, nor is it ever realized in Coetzee’s fiction, even though most of his novels privilege bodily experience in this way, making the body what

Coetzee calls their standard. It is for this reason that “the body is not ‘that which is not’” for the novelist; in Spivak’s terms, we can see that there is a secret—the secrecy is visible—but we cannot know its content. This visible invisibility of the body, whereby immediate experience is located in the body, but only the mediation of the text is revealed, pervades Coetzee’s oeuvre in its entirety, from the differences exhibited in each of the multiple retellings of Magda’s rape in In the Heart of the Country , to Coetzee’s pained pronouncement in “The Novel Today” that “I speak…a fragile metalanguage with very little body” (3), to Paul’s bitterly humorous christening of his amputated leg ( le jambon ) in Slow Man . By simultaneously referencing and evading the body in this way,

Coetzee’s novels illuminate the limitation that governs all writing about the body, a limitation that remains hidden in texts whose transparent realism denies their status as text: that the body can be signaled in literature, can even be made sensible, but cannot be delivered.

This evasion of the narration of bodily experience as immediate becomes only more pronounced when violence enters Coetzee’s fiction, as it often does. Violent acts are performed in Coetzee’s texts, but they are represented in a way that underscores their

76 status as representation, rather than concealing it in order to make the violent experience appear immediate to the reader. In this way violence in Coetzee’s fiction enacts not a

Lukácsian brand of realism, but rather the realism that, as I suggested earlier, emerges from the revelation of mediation. Waiting for the Barbarians , for example, begins with the capture and subsequent torture of prisoners in an imperial frontier camp, but does not speak the torture that takes place there. Instead, it pursues the story of a Magistrate in the camp, who neither actively participates in nor actively condemns the abuse that takes place in his camp. Nor does he actively describe the process of torture, noting its violence without direct knowledge of how it transpires, and narrating it obliquely as well:

“I sit in my rooms with the windows shut, in the stifling warmth of a windless evening, trying to read, straining my ears to hear or not to hear sounds of violence” (22). This dilemma of the Magistrate’s—“to hear or not to hear”—intensifies after his uncertain witnessing when he adopts a young barbarian woman who has experienced her own torture and witnessed her father’s; the Magistrate tries to persuade her to recount the details of her abuse, determining that “until the marks on this girl’s body are deciphered and understood [he] cannot let go of her” (31). Eventually, realizing that she will never translate for him what he conceives of as the language of bodily pain, the protagonist delivers the girl home to her people in an expedition that eventually leads to his own demise. That demise, professional and psychological as well as physical (the Magistrate himself is tortured), becomes the chief tragedy of the novel, but still the Magistrate’s abuse is not narrated “actively”:

…my torturers were not interested in degrees of pain. They were interested only in demonstrating to me what it meant to live in a body, as a body, a body which can entertain notions of justice only as long as it is whole and well, which very soon forgets them when its head is gripped and a pipe is pushed down its gullet and pints of salt water are poured into it till it coughs and retches and flails and voids itself. They did not come

to force the story out of me of what I had said to the barbarians and what the barbarians had said to me. (115)

Now, in a sense, bodily suffering has been translated to communicate what it represents: the torturers’ interests are explained, the body’s intellectual reaction to violence (the silencing of the intellect) is narrated, and even the method of torture is detailed.

However, the language of pain itself is still omitted, as the experience of being tortured is not described, nor are the sensations of suffering that would follow such violence.

Moreover, the torture is not enacted actively in a grammatical sense, either; the

Magistrate does not say “they gripped my head and pushed a pipe down my gullet.” But the abuse is not articulated in a voice that is exactly passive, either, since the narrator also does not say “my head was gripped and a pipe was pushed down my gullet.” Although it is clear in the passage who is doing the torturing and who is being tortured, the narration of the scene evacuates it of agency in a way that, as we have seen, is characteristic of

Coetzee’s employment of the middle voice. “Demonstrating…what it meant to live in a body,” the perpetrators in this passage appear not as the agents of violence against their victim, who is acted against, made the object of their violent subjectivity; rather, they provide the opportunity for the body’s reflexive experience of itself, since the object learns what it means to live in a body “ as a body .” “ Its head is gripped,” where the antecedent of “its” is “a body,” which therefore means equally “the body’s body is gripped.” Ultimately, the body learns to live in itself through an act of absolute reflexivity, which is, finally, expressed grammatically through the middle voice: it “voids itself,” annihilates itself, nullifies itself.

Here, rejecting an active- or passive-voice narration of violence, refusing a

“realistic depiction of torture” (Gallagher 277), Coetzee is able to find, as Susan Van

Zanten Gallagher writes, “a middle course between trivializing and glamorizing the figure responsible for inflicting pain” (278): a middle course enabled by the reflexivity of the middle voice as identified above. 6 As I have tried to suggest, Coetzee’s realism can only work from this kind of reflexivity, where the text, precisely at the moment where it is discussing the demonstration of what it means to live in a body, realizes that it does not, in fact, live in a body, that all it possesses are the “high-sounding words” that the tortured Magistrate has “no chance to throw” (115) at his torturers. As the Magistrate says earlier, in one of his attempts to imagine the experience of torture undergone by

“his” barbarian girl, “always I find in myself this moment of shrinking from the details that went on in here” (80).

Certainly Waiting for the Barbarians is always shrinking from these details of bodily suffering. However, if we are to understand what is produced by this evasion of detail, the Magistrate’s words must be read more carefully: the fiction is not the moment of shrinking away from violent details, but rather it is the work of finding in itself that moment of shrinking from details, of identifying its own incapacity to grasp such details, an incapacity conditioned by the text’s necessary mediatedness, so that the text recognizes its failure to produce an immediacy other than the immediacy of its mediation—and it recognizes this immediately . Thus, although the Magistrate comes to understand through his torture that its only goal is the forced experience of the body, what Coetzee’s text understands through the Magistrate’s torture is that it cannot experience the body; the body is the end of the act of torture, but the body is the limit of

6 Although astute in its observation that Coetzee finds a middle course in Waiting for the Barbarians because “he does not ignore the obscene acts performed by his government…, yet neither does he produce representational depictions of these acts,” Gallagher’s article unfortunately goes on to argue that Coetzee thus “insists on his own authority” (282), an observation fundamentally at odds with the position of deferred authority that is characteristic of the middle voice.

79 the representation of torture. In fact, in Coetzee’s work, the body is the limit of representation in general: the body is its “simple standard.”

In an article that adeptly addresses the suffering animal body in Coetzee, Louis

Tremaine makes recourse to a conversation between Coetzee and Attwell where the novelist foregrounds the role of the body in his work, as I cite at the outset of this chapter: “If I look back over my own fiction, I see a simple...standard erected. That standard is the body. Whatever else, the body is not ‘that which is not,’ and the proof that it is is the pain it feels…” (as cited in Tremaine 598). From here, Tremaine goes on to argue that, for Coetzee,

Suffering is a direct function of—is enabled by—our embodiedness. A great deal of the human suffering that Coetzee portrays in his writing is produced in the realm of the political, but it is possible to produce that suffering only because we exist and are vulnerable as ‘body-souls,’ because of our existential condition of embodiedness. Magda says, ‘I live, I suffer, I am here’ ([ In the Heart of the Country ] 3). It is irreducible.

I should begin by saying that I do not think Tremaine has misread Coetzee here; certainly the irreducibility of embodiedness is a conclusion that follows logically from

Coetzee’s statement that the simple standard of his fiction is the body. Furthermore, the passage Tremaine cites (“If I look back…”) comes directly after a discussion of Foe , where Coetzee has just said, “Friday is mute, but Friday does not disappear, because

Friday is body” (DP 248), apparently further affirming the irreducibility of the body, and especially the non-linguistic body. But we would have come a very long way to achieve very little if this characterization by Coetzee of his own writing were to be taken as the standard for our analysis of him. What is perhaps most notable about Coetzee’s affirmation of Friday’s bodily existence here is that it appears in response to a question that Attwell has posed, which Coetzee reformulates in the following manner: “is representation to be so robbed of power by the endlessly skeptical processes of

80 textualization that those represented in/by the text—the feminine subject, the colonial subject—are to have no power either?” Coetzee remarks that, “for Susan Barton, the question takes care of itself,” because, although she is represented in/by Foe , “the book is not Foe’s, it is hers .” However, he continues, “Friday is the true test” ( DP 248); the question of whether or not Friday is robbed of power is more difficult to resolve, because his muteness means that Friday can only be the object of representation. Therefore, what this question of power suggests is that, although Friday “does not disappear” because he

“is body,” Friday’s embodiment owes its existence to representation , to the fact that

Friday (“the colonial subject”) is “represented in/by the text.”

Thus when Tremaine cites Coetzee’s statement that his fiction erects the body as its standard, what he misses by moving from that standard to a pronouncement of the body’s irreducibility is the fact that this standard is itself a mediated form. What this means is that the body is infinitely reducible (and expandable) according to its representation in each of Coetzee’s novels. It is for this reason that I began this chapter with a discussion of the term standard as both that which guarantees value in a given symbolic system, and as a symbol itself, invested with value determined by the very system it supports. Thus at the same time that the body confers truth-value on Coetzee’s fiction by authorizing its relation to reality, the body is also only a signifier of that relation. Thus the body in Coetzee’s texts does signal reality in order to authenticate that which it represents (this is, I think, where Tremaine locates its irreducibility), but even so the body in fiction never ceases to be itself a representation (assuring its fundamental reducibility). We have seen this already in Life and Times of Michael K : K’s body is, indeed, the standard by which he lives (and by which the novel progresses), since it is K’s

81 physical needs that determine his actions, construct his reality, and thus constitute his narrative. But what Coetzee demonstrates in that novel is that K’s narrative survival is conditioned by his continuing to diminish (once the hunger artist ceases to diminish—by dying—the story expires): we should thus contend that K’s body is actually defined by its reducibility according to the narrative that produces it, formed by what Adorno calls its nullity in the structure of representation. In Waiting for the Barbarians , we have seen, the Magistrate learns through his torture what it means to live in a body as that body

“voids itself”; the body is actually posited by its evacuation.

With this conception of the body as infinitely reducible, diminished under the weight of the mediations that are stacked upon and flatten it, we are confronted with a problem that we have addressed before, through Lukács’s insistence that realist literature should not content itself with the superficial expression of immediate experience, with

“the pure immediacy of the ‘this thing here’” that Adorno denounces. Lukács himself argues that the realist author “creates a new immediacy, one that is artistically mediated”

(AP 39), and it is this “new” experience of the immediate that Coetzee’s question about the power afforded representation, especially as it applies to Friday, seems to address.

The category of an “artistically mediated” immediacy signifies that there are two categories of immediate experience being addressed—that of the body, and that of literature—and they are not or may not be the same. The reason why I am undertaking to address this problem by means of representations of violence is that the “or” of the previous sentence becomes immeasurably more significant once the integrity of bodies is at stake. As I have tried to show throughout this chapter, the commitment either to exposing Coetzee as politically uncommitted or endorsing Coetzee as an ethically and

82 historically conscious writer demonstrates the extent to which experiments in representation can no longer be taken as harmless “metafictional proclivities” (Attridge

2) in settings of political turmoil. Shortly after the comment to Attwell that I have just discussed, Coetzee remarks “ entirely parenthetically” (and Tremaine notes this):

(Let me add…that I, as a person, as a personality, am overwhelmed, that my thinking is thrown into confusion and helplessness, by the fact of suffering in the world, and not only human suffering. These fictions of mine are paltry, ludicrous defenses against that being-overwhelmed, and, to me, transparently so.) ( DP 248)

I am not citing this passage in order to argue for Coetzee’s awareness of and sorrow for

“the fact of suffering in the world”: in the first place it would be absurd to doubt it, and in the second place it should not be Coetzee’s own articulation of that empathy that convinces us of it. I want instead to offer an illustration of Coetzee’s ambivalent relationship to the concept of bodily immediacy, which also has everything to do with his relationship to the concept of literary immediacy. To begin with, the passage very deliberately does not frame bodily immediacy as a concept, as I have just done; rather, it refers to the “ fact of suffering,” so that the body’s pain is preserved as unmediated by conceptualizing. However, Coetzee does not present himself as embodied in the same way: he is “a person,” “a personality,” not a body—and thus the sensation of “being- overwhelmed,” although perhaps meant to signal a kind of affective immediacy that

“paltry, ludicrous” discourse (“these fictions of mine”) cannot pretend to achieve, is at best the unmediated affect of a mediated (bodiless) subject (“a personality”). And furthermore, it is Coetzee’s “thinking ” (not his body) that is “thrown into confusion and helplessness,” so that the unmediatedness by which suffering is characterized through its status as “fact” is not conferred upon Coetzee himself, even though this parenthetical addition seems intended to offer a sense of what the “real” Coetzee thinks about the

83 standard of the body. If the “proof that [the body] is is the pain it feels,” and Coetzee, as a privileged, non-suffering subject, does not feel pain, then there is no proof that he is .

That is, unless Coetzee’s “thinking” is posited as a metonym for Coetzee as a physical being, in which case thinking is able to stand in for the body, so that the mediation of the mind has been made interchangeable with the immediacy of the body.

This is a huge “unless,” one that, if affirmed, would mean that there are not, in fact, two immediacies, but rather that the immediacy of the body and of representation are one and the same. Coetzee is not ready to affirm it, nor am I: it is another return to the inexhaustible question of the body as standard; it is, finally, the question around which the problem of violence in literature turns. I have argued that the end of Foe offers a kind of literary immediacy, where quotation marks are dropped and we enter a space that is “not a place of words,” and I have noted also how curious it is that this immediacy would be achieved entirely through words, would constitute “the home of Friday,” who utters none. In the conversation with Attwell that I have just been discussing, Coetzee expresses a consciousness of the immediate effect of Foe ’s conclusion: “The last pages of

Foe have a certain power. They close the text by force, so to speak” ( DP 248). Recalling that those last pages ostensibly commit themselves to an affirmation of Friday’s embodiment, the rhetoric of “power” and “force” here, which is also the rhetoric of violence (in German they would even be the same word, Gewalt ), stakes a claim for the bodily effects of representation that, although it resolves nothing, articulates the principal question posed everywhere in Coetzee’s work.

VIX. Violence, Parenthetically

In Boyhood: Scenes from Provincial Life , the first volume of his memoirs,

Coetzee tells of the book press housed in the storeroom of his Aunt Annie’s flat. The storeroom is “the only room in Aunt Annie’s house that he likes” (117), and the book press “is the best thing in the storeroom” (118). He describes the game that he and his younger brother would play: “He persuades his brother to lay his arms in the bed of the press; then he turns the great screw until his arms are pinned and he cannot escape. After which they change places and his brother does the same to him” (118-19). Thus the link between literature and violence is set up for Coetzee from a young age, but so is an instinctive reluctance to equate the two completely, to make the agent of literature and the agent of violence one and the same: “One or two more turns, he thinks, and the bones will be crushed. What is it that makes them forbear, both of them?” (119).

As we should expect by now, Boyhood does not offer the reason for that forbearance, does not explain what keeps the Coetzee brothers from transforming the machine of mass mediation into a machine of individual immediacy, of torture—a machine that would teach the body what it means to live as a body. Perhaps that forbearance suggests that such a transformation cannot take place? But what is most fascinating about the scene in Aunt Annie’s storeroom is that it is interrupted by another brief anecdote before it returns to the story of the book press and Coetzee’s great- grandfather, Balthazar du Biel, whose book Aunt Annie printed there. The interruption seems to function just as “ entirely parenthetically” as Coetzee’s pronouncement of his

“being-overwhelmed” by “the fact of suffering” in his interview with Attwell, but here

Coetzee notably does not call attention to the story’s parenthetical status, so that the three-paragraph narration begins without transition, proceeding simply with: “During

85 their first months in Worcester they were invited to one of the farms that supplied fruit to

Standard Canners.” Coetzee continues the narration:

While the grown-ups drank tea, he and his brother roamed around the farmyard. There they came upon a mealie-grinding machine. He persuaded his brother to put his hand down the funnel where the mealie-pits were thrown in; then he turned the handle. For an instant, before he stopped, he could feel the fine bones of the fingers being crushed. His brother stood with his hand trapped in the machine, ashen with pain, a puzzled, inquiring look on his face.

The next paragraph details the trip to the hospital, the amputation of half of his brother’s middle finger, and the fact that his six-year-old brother “did not complain.” The final paragraph explains that Coetzee “has never apologized to his brother, nor has he ever been reproached with what he did” (119).

In this montage of memory, the link between the possibility of doing violence by turning the book press’s “great screw” “one or two more turns” and the violence actualized by turning the grinding machine’s handle is obvious. But what should concern us here is the difference between the two scenes, a difference that the text glosses over by moving quickly from one story to the next and back to the first with no clarifying transition. Why is the forbearance exhibited at the book press absent at the mealie- grinding machine? Is it that the process of producing literature is fundamentally unable to perform an immediate act of violence, an act that a machine directly related to human necessity (the necessity of food, for example, as symbolized by the mealie-grinder) is able to perform? That is to say, is literature, unlike food, not an enterprise of life and death? Certainly many critics (in particular those who would concur with Jameson’s statement that history is the experience of necessity) would endorse that reading.

However, it is not that the book press cannot perform violence—in fact it seems capable of producing much more bodily harm than the mealie-grinding machine—it is that neither

Coetzee brother can bring himself to use the machine in that way. Is mediation, then, an inherently ethical enterprise? Intuitively, this claim resonates naïvely, and furthermore such a declaration of the ethical superiority of mediation to immediacy does not do much for an argument that would wish to challenge the hierarchy of the two, and to stress their mutual implication.

Why, then, does the operator of the book press forbear? Why does the operator of the mealie-grinder not forbear? What is the relationship between the production of violence and the production of representation? The only response the text offers, which is the response Coetzee’s texts are always offering, is that it does not know. The story of the younger Coetzee’s amputated finger ends with the following sentence: “Nevertheless, the memory lies like a weight upon him, the memory of the soft resistance of flesh and bone, and then the grinding” (119). The mediation of the mind (here, memory) weighs heavily upon the subject, reducing, diminishing him, but always toward the end of preserving the body as its (double) standard—that which constructs a text’s credibility, and that which is entirely constructed by the text. And then the grinding, which immediately concludes the story of the crushed finger, but which also produces it, immediately enacting its own mediation.

CHAPTER 2

Textuality and Materiality I:

American Psycho and the Politics of Representation

“I’m not sure, but he reminded me of someone.” “Yeah, he went as Patrick Bateman. He was the guy in the Armani suit. Very creepy….” “It’s weird you said Patrick Bateman,” she said. “Why?” “Because I thought he looked a little like Christian Bale.” -Bret Easton Ellis

I. Introduction

As I have indicated in the preceding pages, Coetzee’s novels present scenes of violence in ways that evade or manipulate the literary model widely endorsed within the

South African literary context. That model, we have seen, is generally identified with the realist doctrine articulated by Lukács in the 1930s: “if literature is a particular form by means of which objective reality is reflected, then it becomes of crucial importance for it to grasp that reality as it truly is” ( AP 33). Lukács’s statement, an assertion of the realist project that is ultimately as opaque as it is bold, serves a double function: it both defines what literature is (the particular form assumed by the reflection of objective reality), and prescribes what literature should do (grasp the true essence of objective reality). Because both the definition and the prescription depend upon some concept of “objective reality,” and because, as the latter half of Lukács’s articulation implies, such a concept is not readily grasped, I suggested in Chapter 1 that the “particular form by means of which objective reality is reflected” might be best understood as conditioned by the effort to

87 88 grasp objective reality “as it truly is.” That is, given that Lukács’s statement identifies objective reality as something that might not be easily comprehended, we might say that it is precisely the difficulty of acquiring a true comprehension of reality that makes its apprehension in form the central problem of literature. Thus the forms that the reflection of reality assumes can only be, as Lukács himself suggests, “particular,” and those forms must be adequate to the task of grasping the reality they aim to reflect.

Given Lukács’s opposition to modernism and expressionism (on the grounds that these literary styles sacrifice a full historical understanding of the world they represent in order to capture the fleeting impressions of immediate consciousness), my reading of his literary realism as a problem of form may appear to be a perversion of an argument that inveighs rather resoundingly against formalism. However, it is significant that Lukács does not position himself against the concept of literary form per se (after all, his analyses of literary texts are, above all else, analyses of the varied forms literature takes), but rather that he aims to locate those particular forms that fulfill the realist project that he identifies at the heart of the literary enterprise. 1 As Coetzee’s own writing about fiction makes clear, the question of the particular forms literature assumes asserts itself most loudly “in times of intense ideological pressure” (Coetzee, “The Novel Today” 3).

This is to say that when “objective reality” is put under such pressure, the forms by which literature reflects that reality receive (and, Coetzee seems to say, should receive) more rigorous scrutiny.

1 As I noted in Chapter 1, Brecht characterizes Lukács as overly committed to the endorsement of a given form of realist literature. According to Brecht, by “cling[ing] to ‘tried’ rules of narrative, venerable literary models, eternal aesthetic laws,” Lukács “derive[s] realism as such from particular existing works,…describ[ing] one particular, historical form of novel of a particular epoch as realistic” (AP 81). Thus, Brecht explains, it is in his very objections to formal experimentation that Lukács identifies himself as a formalist.

In simpler but perhaps more loaded terms, what is invoked in both Coetzee’s and

Lukács’s articulations of the relationship between fiction and reality is the distinction between the content of literature and its form—between that which is reflected in literature, and the way in which it is reflected. What is of particular interest to the present study is the role such a distinction assumes in violent literature. Accordingly, this chapter, like the previous one, is rooted in the observation that when literature depicts scenes of violence (i.e., when its content is violent), it necessarily situates itself within the field of “intense ideological pressure” that I mention above. It is for this reason that critical readings of violent literature tend to underscore the relationship between the text’s form and content, so that, if they endorse or denounce works of violent fiction, such evaluations tend to hinge on the degree to which the form of a given violent text is adequate to its content. The heated critical reception of Bret Easton Ellis’s American

Psycho illustrates this lucidly, as that novel was both condemned and praised for its deviation from a realist narrative tradition that, as its proponents characterize it, echoes the Lukácsian perspective I have emphasized in the previous chapter and will continue to examine here. This chapter considers how Ellis’s text constructs the relationship between its form and content, and, following Lukács’s suggestion that “objective reality” requires reflection through particular literary forms, it considers the way in which the relation of form and content in American Psycho ends up approximating, resembling, or distancing itself from reality.

In taking up Ellis’s novel, this chapter turns to the study of narrative techniques that offer more straightforward accounts of violence than those that were evident in

Coetzee’s formal manipulation. In place of the evasive strategies of middle voice

90 description and multilayered narrative that, we have seen, Coetzee employs as a conscious response to the dominant doctrine of socialist realism, in American Psycho we will find that violence is luridly described, with a clear identification of its agent and victim, and with a ruthlessly precise attention to detail. Given this, the question that arises is whether this mode of representation is more capable of conveying the real horrors of bodily suffering than Coetzee’s critics believed his purportedly formalist portrayals of violence to be. I have argued that, for Coetzee, violence in fiction becomes immediate when the structures of its inevitable mediation (that is, its forms ) are foregrounded; in this chapter, which examines a text whose mediation is not so ostentatiously emphasized, we will seek to discover what kind of immediacy, if any,

Ellis’s novel can claim for its portrayals of extreme violence. After a brief revisiting of questions of formalism in Coetzee’s work, the chapter will turn to American Psycho as a way of setting up the problem of the politics of realist representations of violence. We will see that for Ellis’s critics—as was the case with Coetzee’s—this problem ultimately hinges on the extent to which and the way in which textual representation is able to account for the materiality of physical suffering. American Psycho will come to serve as a negative example of such an attempt to account for materiality, because it seems to engage both realist and formalist strategies inconsistently, and consequently falls short of practicing a mode of representation that could adequately address the politics of bodily abuse.

II. The Abstract, the Concrete, and the Middle: Coetzee’s Disgrace

In order to demonstrate how the modes of representing violence in Ellis’s novel are distinct from what we have seen so far, I would like to begin by recapitulating the

91 conception of realism that Lukács opposes to modernism, and by briefly revisiting

Coetzee’s work as a response to it. For Lukács, I have suggested, the process of grasping objective reality in a literary work is entirely dependent upon that work’s relation to the

“total life context” out of which it emerges, and which it aims to reflect. The expression of the totality of that context, Lukács writes, is contingent upon the knowledge of the author (as a “creative realist”) of “how thoughts and feelings grow out of the life of society” ( AP 36). The same endorsement of creative realism is expressed in much of

Lukács’s literary criticism of the 1930s, including “Narrate or Describe?,” The Historical

Novel , and The Meaning of Contemporary Realism , and it is chiefly by examining a binary set of terms outlined in the last of those texts that I will address Lukács’s theory of realism here. In The Meaning of Contemporary Realism , Lukács discusses how the total life context is represented in “extreme situations,” like decisions which “alte[r] the direction” of the protagonist’s life. 2 In order to represent such situations, writes Lukács, realist literature “must demonstrate both the concrete and abstract potentialities of human beings” ( MCR 23), and must be grounded in the tension between these two categories of potentiality. Lukács defines the former as “concerned with the dialectic between the individual’s subjectivity and objective reality”—a concern whose “literary presentation…thus implies a description of actual persons inhabiting a palpable, identifiable world” (24). Abstract potentiality, on the other hand, is defined as belonging

“wholly to the realm of subjectivity” (23-24). The realist literature endorsed by Lukács is

2 We can readily characterize acts of violence as among these situations, since such acts generally alter the direction of the lives of both victim and perpetrator. Lukács’s discussion of the murder in Alberto Moravia’s The Indifferent Ones , which immediately follows his mention of “extreme situations,” lends easy support to this claim. Furthermore, it is hardly a stretch to state that violence is often taken as the “extreme” situation par excellence ; we can see this clearly in the overwhelming attention to violent texts in Alain-Philippe Durand’s and Naomi Mandel’s recent anthology Novels of the Contemporary Extreme , to take only one example.

92 thus one that operates according to an equilibrium between such a totalizing subjectivity, and an account of how an “actual” individual’s subjectivity interacts with the

“identifiable” world it inhabits. As he puts it in “Narrate or Describe?,” “without the revelation of important traits and without an interaction of the characters with world events, objects, the forces of nature and social institutions, even the most extraordinary adventures would be empty and meaningless” (“ND” 124). Here, Lukács explains that meaning in literature emerges not simply from plot (“extraordinary adventures”), but rather from accounts of the “ interaction ” between characters and the world that surrounds them—an interaction presented through details that do not bear an arbitrary relation to the action of the novel (this would be “description”), but instead have a direct and organic relation to the whole of the text (as, for Lukács, the practice of “narration” demands).

By contrast to this narrative realist style that expresses the relationship between abstract and concrete potentiality, writes Lukács, modernist literature limits itself only to the expression of abstract potentiality, to “exalting man’s subjectivity.” For Lukács, such exaltation can only occur “at the expense of the objective reality of his environment”

(MCR 24). To return to the language of Chapter 1, and the rhetoric of the South African literary scene, it is the appropriate treatment of history that allows fiction to avoid an expense of this kind. As I have emphasized many times already, Coetzee’s mistrust of all discursive modes (including history) leads him to construct novels that actively evade the production of any identifiable historical narratives. This is especially true anywhere where bodies are subjected to acts of violence in his texts, as we saw particularly in our readings of Dusklands , In the Heart of the Country , and Waiting for the Barbarians . But

Coetzee’s violent novel Disgrace has been conspicuously absent from this study so far,

93 largely because its initially cautious critical reception was due not, for once, to the perceived abstraction of its historical themes, but rather to what seems like the pessimism of a narrative that is, perhaps in contrast to most of Coetzee’s earlier novels, very obviously historically conscious and politically motivated. Disgrace illustrates the aggressive volatility of post-apartheid race relations in its narration of an attack against the protagonist, David Lurie, who is beaten and set on fire, and his daughter Lucy, who is gang-raped. The attackers are all black South Africans, and it is this fact, as Derek

Attridge points out, “combined with the generally negative light in which black characters are presented” that “has angered readers” of the novel (Attridge, “Age of

Bronze, State of Grace” 103). That is, it is not, this time, that Coetzee has too obliquely, too formalistically addressed the historical situation of his novels (in Lukács’s terms, it is not that the expression of abstract potentiality overshadows concrete potentiality in

Disgrace ); rather, the problem is now that Coetzee’s critique of society is not a generous one—and, in particular, that it is ungenerous to the wrong racial sector.

It is not my aim here to address whether or not this interpretation of Disgrace is similarly ungenerous to the novel’s author; I mention Coetzee’s work here simply to recapitulate the argument about his realism that I have set forth in the previous pages, in order to facilitate a reading of how realism functions in Ellis’s American Psycho . Thus what interests me about Disgrace is the way in which its realist style was taken for granted by a readership that previously criticized Coetzee for the formal experimentation that marks his representation of political narratives, especially violent political narratives.

Certainly, the violent climax of Disgrace is given a much more straightforward depiction than that of the more experimental In the Heart of the Country , where Magda offers

94 several different accounts of her own rape, such that the trauma of her violation is emphasized to vastly varying degrees in each account. In Disgrace , the violence narrated seems to have a more stable referent—that is, Lurie’s assault is illustrated in terms that make his victimization clear, that identify who attacks whom and how. Furthermore, as

Attridge seems to suggest, the plausibility of the violence in Disgrace serves to argue for the novel’s realism: “if we were to use some measure of ‘realism’ to judge the novel, there is nothing implausible about the scene of rural crime that Coetzee introduces”

(104). Thus we can see the productive Lukácsian tension between concrete and abstract potentiality at work in Disgrace : it appears to offer the “palpable, identifiable world” of the former through its plausibility, while at the same time exhibiting abstract potentiality through the narrative’s fidelity to Lurie’s “realm of subjectivity.” Therefore, unlike the works of Coetzee that I considered in Chapter 1, Disgrace might easily be seen to fulfill

Lukács’s requirements for a work of realism.

However, read more closely, that novel’s crime scene shows itself to be constructed according to just that style of deferred agency that, as we saw in Chapter 1, is characteristic of Coetzee’s use of the middle voice—that grammatical form which, I have argued, allows Coetzee to sidestep the realist model (with its attendant emphasis on the integrity of history) that Lukács advocates. This deferral of agency is effected first of all by Coetzee’s third-person narration; although the entire story is told from David Lurie’s point of view, presenting only those details that Lurie could “plausibly” know, Coetzee produces a measure of distance from the protagonist that, if it does not completely preclude identification with him, at least hampers that identification to a significant degree. Moreover, although such a technique might be said to put the audience in a

95 position of bearing witness to the scene, what is interesting in the description of Lurie’s attack is the extent to which its view of the action is obstructed by the narration. Coetzee writes of Lurie, “he tries to shoulder his way out, gets past the man, then falls heavily.

Some kind of trip: they must practise it in soccer” (Coetzee, Disgrace 96). Here the reader is presented with Lurie’s heavy fall, but the execution of the fall is not described; we learn after Lurie falls that he has been tripped, and we are led to assume that the trip is a soccer move. We are not told which attacker trips Lurie, and this refusal on Coetzee’s part to ascribe the agency of active-voice narration to the assailant (or the victimization of passive-voice narration to Lurie), combined with the reference to sport, renders obtuse the power struggle that should be evident in the attackers’ break-in. In fact, there is no verb in “some kind of trip,” so that, grammatically, Lurie is not tripped, nor does anyone trip him: Lurie falls, the men (must) play soccer.

The scene continues to be narrated according to the logic of the middle voice, obscuring the domination assumed in subject-object relations: “As he lies sprawled he is splashed from head to foot with liquid.” Again (although it is easy enough to infer), we are not told who is doing the splashing. Lurie realizes, because “he recognizes the smell,” that he has been doused with “methylated spirits,” and he is set on fire thus: “the scrape of a match, and at once he is bathed in cool blue flame.” The flame is not directly attributed to the attackers, and the abstraction of the violence goes even further than this: the fire is produced narratively by the sound of a match being ignited (“the scrape”), and we know Lurie is on fire because “his hair crackles,” and then because “a flame dances soundlessly on the back of his hand” (96). In each case it is an auditory cue that signals the violence taking place, enhancing the aestheticization of that violence which the use of

96 metaphor (“bathed,” “dances”) produces. In Lurie’s assault, therefore, we are presented not with the “interaction of character and environment” that, for Lukács, constitutes the concrete potentiality that rescues literature from the threat of pure abstraction; rather,

Lurie’s condition “as a solitary being” seems absolutely “identified with reality itself”

(MCR 24), since we are offered only his perception of the action—a perception that, in rendering invisible the attackers, removes them from the crime scene, and thus abstracts the external world from Lurie’s inner life.

I have already suggested in the previous chapter how Coetzee’s middle voice, in eschewing the relations of domination that are inscribed within both active- and passive- voice narration, allows the violence of his novels to be represented in ways that signal the realities of the extratextual world, without allowing the reader to forget that any account of that world is discursively produced, and must be understood as such—that is, I have suggested that Coetzee’s texts work to expose the abstraction of the world and its bodies that is inherent in all writing. Given this strategy of Coetzee’s, whereby the narration of violence would claim to make immediate “only” the mediation of the writing process

(rather than claiming to represent for the reader the visceral immediacy of bodily abuse), it is my aim now to consider it alongside a very different strategy for representing violence, one that (at least ostensibly) eschews abstraction, flagrantly prioritizing at every turn an extratextual world of things and especially of bodies that gets presented to the reader as though it were immediate.

III. Lukácsian Realism and Formal Inconsistency

In a certain sense, this prioritizing of the material world outside of the text is an eminently Lukácsian move. After all, although Lukács emphatically articulates the

97 political function of literature as a means of grasping objective reality, the conception of realist fiction (as he articulates it in his aesthetic criticism of the 1930s) is firmly founded upon a belief in the priority of the material world out of which a text is produced—a priority that, it is important to note, functions temporally, with the text necessarily emerging from an already existing reality that determines it. Characterizing it as “based on the Aristotelean concept of man as zoon politikon ,” Lukács describes “the literature of realism” as “entitled to develop a new typology for each new phase in the evolution of a society” ( MCR 30-31). Thus he affirms the political significance of literary realism, but he understands that political significance as derived entirely from the typologizing of phases of social evolution—that is, as derived from an essentially political reality which it is literature’s aim to classify and comprehend.

The critical reception of Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho presents an interesting case for examining this conception of the political function of literature, especially as it is understood temporally. The heated debates concerning the legitimacy of Ellis’s detailed descriptions of violence (and especially violence against women), emphasize, as Lukács does, the politics of fiction, but they characterize the novel’s political work in ways that diversely stress its temporality. As we will see, some readings of Ellis’s novel locate its political work in its relationship to the historical reality that it plainly represents (this would align with the Lukácsian model whereby literature imitates and describes a political reality that precedes it 3), while others highlight the possibility

3 For Lukács, it is a matter of great importance that literature should follow the events it recounts. He stresses that, when it emphasizes contemporaneity, literature falls into the category of description rather than the much favored narration; this is why the “observer” is not a reliable figure for the transmission of a story: “the observer, necessarily a contemporary to what he observes, loses himself in a whirlwind of details of apparently equal significance, for life has not done its selecting thru the text of practice” (ND 128). More explicitly, he writes, “description contemporizes everything. Narration recounts the past. One

98 that the novel’s violence lends itself to easy imitation in the real world, which means that they underscore the potential for the novel to have a political impact in the future. The question that such different conceptions of the novel force us to ask, then, concerns the role of the material in the work of fiction: is the novel merely a textual representation of material reality, or does it also authorize the reality it represents? Alternatively, does the novel actually produce a material reality of its own? Or finally, as I am more inclined to argue, should the novel’s textuality itself be conceptualized as material? If so, what would such a concept of textual materiality entail?

Examining the critical response to American Psycho , it soon becomes clear that such questions can only be addressed through a consideration of the novel’s form, and, specifically, the extent to which that form can be construed as realist. Overwhelmingly, it is the issue of the novel’s representation of violence that brings the problem of realism to the fore. Just as, with Coetzee’s novels, the question of their realism (measured against their formalism) was seen to determine the degree of their political engagement, so too is the realism of Ellis’s text interpreted as a gauge of their politics. However, for

Coetzee, it was his formalism that implied his political disengagement, while in Ellis’s case, it is the realist depiction of violence that is considered tantamount to political irresponsibility, or even immorality. Given this, we should be becoming familiar with the idea that violence in literature highlights the question of its form, especially by posing it as a political problem.

describes what one sees, and the spatial ‘present’ confers a temporal ‘present’ on men and objects. But it is an illusory present, not the present of immediate action of the drama. The best modern narrative has been able to infuse the dramatic element into the novel by transferring events into the past” (130).

What particularly complicates this problem in American Psycho , as its critical reception makes clear, is the way in which the novel seems equally to invite readings that highlight its realism, and readings that highlight its formalism. Although critics generally voice their allegiance either to one school or the other (with the former camp denouncing the novel, and the latter praising it), what is most interesting is that both views find substantial support in the text. In order to consider the implications of the text’s apparently equal commitment to realism and to formal experimentation, I will first run through the logic of each argument, both in the terms I have been employing so far, and in the terms utilized by Ellis’s critics themselves.

To begin with, because we have already contemplated the degree to which

Disgrace might be evaluated as a novel that transparently employs the techniques of realism, it will be illuminating to consider briefly the style of Ellis’s novel in relation to what we have already seen in Coetzee’s. The contrast between Coetzee’s violence in the middle voice—where bodies are assaulted, but the language of abuser and abused is scrupulously avoided—and Ellis’s use of active-voice violence, which readily establishes

Patrick Bateman as the dominating subject of American Psycho , can be rather easily identified. The following passage, which details Bateman’s assault on the homeless man named Al whom he has just brought to tears (“‘You reek ,’ I tell him. ‘You reek of…shit ,’” AP 130), offers a (by no means unusual) illustration of the way in which

Ellis’s first-person narrator employs a graphic, detailed style to assert a relentless agency over not only the human object of his violence, but over the narration itself:

I reach out and touch his face gently once more with compassion and whisper, ‘Do you know what a fucking loser you are?’ He starts nodding helplessly and I pull out a long, thin knife with a serrated edge and, being very careful not to kill him, push maybe half an inch of the blade into his right eye, flicking the handle up, instantly popping the retina. (Ellis, American Psycho 131)

100

Whereas in Disgrace Lurie’s victimization is abstracted, presented outside of the context of the relationship of domination that produced it, here no such abstraction occurs.

Certainly the roles of violator and violated are established explicitly in Ellis’s text, and those roles remain in place as the scene continues and Bateman stabs Al repeatedly without encountering substantial resistance, and eventually slits his other eye open as well. Before stomping on the homeless man’s dog, Bateman finally concludes, “Still kneeling, I throw a quarter in his face, which is slick and shiny with blood, both sockets hollowed out and filled with gore, what’s left of his eyes literally oozing over his screaming lips in thick, webby strands. Calmly, I whisper, ‘There’s a quarter. Go buy some gum , you crazy fucking nigger ’” (132). In this way Bateman completes his abasement of the dying victim with hostile gestures of economic and racial domination.

Bateman’s status as perpetrator is constructed so obviously in this scene and throughout the novel that it is almost not worth mentioning. Even if we read this first murder recounted in American Psycho as an illustration of the way in which Bateman’s identity is constituted by means of opposition to a victimized other (which is not difficult to do; clearly the “heady, ravenous, pumped up” exhilaration that Bateman feels after the assault is dependent upon the existence of a victim whose position as such identifies

Bateman as murderer, and furthermore Bateman’s vampirish assimilation of Al is made obvious in his decision “to go somewhere Al would go” after the murder (131))—even if we do determine that Bateman is dependent upon Al in this way, the fact remains that Al is dead at Patrick’s hands, that Patrick has assumed the ultimate power (the power of annihilation) over Al’s life. What is more interesting about this scene than the relation of domination it portrays, then, is the way in which the text works actively to ensure that

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Bateman’s authority—over Al, but more importantly over the text itself—remains absolute. The circumvention of agency that, we have seen, is characteristic of Coetzee’s employment of the middle voice is in Ellis’s novel countered by a barrage of active-voice formulations, a relentless charge of images and information delivered without abstraction, stripped of metaphor, relieved of any doubt that we are experiencing Patrick Bateman’s world—in the way that Bateman himself chooses to present that experience to us.

This last point is owed to the ubiquity of modifiers in Ellis’s text—of adverbs in particular, which reiterate the text’s emphasis on Bateman’s actions. In the passage I have cited, we are told how Bateman touches his victim’s face (“gently”), how the homeless man nods (“helplessly”), we know just what the knife looks like (“long, thin…with a serrated edge”), we are told how quickly the retina pops (“instantly”). We know what Al’s face looks like when the quarter is thrown at it (“slick and shiny”), that his eye sockets have “filled with gore,” we know what is “literally” happening to his eyes

(they are “oozing over” his lips, which we know are “screaming”), and we are told how

Patrick whispers his final insult (“calmly”). In this way, through its unyielding regulation of the details of the act of violence, the text commands the reader to submit entirely to its own account of the murder, and to the discursive mode in which that account is presented. And this is true throughout American Psycho—not just in the many murder scenes it describes, but in its depiction of virtually everything Patrick experiences: clothing, business cards, pop music, night clubs, Christmas parties, etc. That discursive mode is composed not only of an excess of adjectives and adverbs, but also of long lists of actions transcribed at a fast-paced tempo whose rhythm comes to have a hypnotic effect. And equally significantly, as the imperative “go buy some gum , you crazy

102 fucking nigger ” demonstrates, the text’s rhythm is also produced by the use of italics that functions—always anxiously, and often, though not in all cases, humorously—to convey the intensities within the speech pattern employed by Patrick and those in his social circle.

This fastidious control over the details of narration suggests the absolute nature of

Patrick’s influence over his story and its recounting. Through the information Bateman delivers, and the way in which he delivers it, the reader is quickly schooled in the narrator’s way of taking in the world around him. In this sense, we could say, Ellis’s text betrays a very strong commitment to the wholly subjective narrative technique by which

Lukács defines abstract potentiality. On the other hand, however, the novel is impressively determined by its fixed attention to details that might quite judiciously be ascribed to an expression of concrete potentiality, since Ellis conspicuously foregrounds the text’s situation within the real-world setting of 1980s Manhattan. This spatiotemporal location is affirmed over and over again, by Bateman’s frequent reference to actual restaurants and clubs in New York, the meticulous discussion of the work of ‘80s pop music icons, and the descriptions of clothing that list the names of real designers, and which studiously identify the trends of ‘80s fashion. Bateman’s obsessive inclusion of such a detailed account of his own actions, possessions, and those of the people around him, makes every line of his narrative an attempt either to assimilate himself to or distinguish himself from the world in which he is situated. For this reason, in contrast to what we saw in Disgrace , American Psycho can be read in terms of its fidelity to the

Lukácsian formula for realist fiction of “extreme situations”; that is, Ellis’s novel overwhelmingly betrays the tension between abstract and concrete potentiality (between

103 the narrator’s subjectivity and the reality in which he is situated) by which Lukács’s realism is defined.

But those critics who evaluate Ellis’s novel in terms that evoke such a model tend to find American Psycho inadequate to it. In his frequently cited review of the novel for

The New York Times , Christopher Lehmann-Haupt measures the realism of Ellis’s book according to standards that are strikingly Lukácsian, though the critic does not name

Lukács in his review. This is clearest when Lehmann-Haupt identifies the novel’s lack of realism in its lack of a coherent and meaningful structure: “the trouble with ‘American

Psycho’ is, of course, that you can’t create a meaningless world out of meaninglessness”; thus the project falls flat because its attempt to expose the superficiality of Manhattan life in the Reagan era lacks a “moral framework.” For Lehmann-Haupt, this means that the content of Patrick Bateman’s story is not adequately supported by its form; the meaninglessness that Ellis would ascribe to Bateman’s life does not “cohere,” because it lacks a context of meaning. By highlighting the necessity of such a coherent context, arguing that Ellis’s novel does “violence to an organic idea of art,” Lehmann-Haupt’s critique of American Psycho echoes Lukács’s theory of realism, according to which realist literature must represent the “total complex of reality” as its characters inhabit it

(AP 36). That is, for the realist novel to avoid being “empty and meaningless,” as Lukács cautions in “Narrate or Describe?,” it must not simply portray the reality from which plot and character emerge, but rather must narrate the “interaction of the characters with world events, objects, the forces of nature and social institutions” (“ND” 124).

Furthermore, Lehmann-Haupt argues that those very details that, I have suggested above, can be seen to establish in Ellis’s text the concrete half of Lukács’s dual

104 potentiality, are rather “devices that transform [the narrative] into a lifeless abstraction,” which thus deny the world of Bateman’s narration any realist potential. To borrow

Lukács’s terms, Ellis thus “reduce[s] detail to the level of mere particularity,” ignoring the injunction that “in realistic literature each descriptive detail is both individual and typical ” ( MCR 43). 4 Therefore, while Bateman’s world reflects the palpability and identifiability by which Lukács defines concrete potentiality, what Lehmann-Haupt suggests is that Ellis’s narration degrades that concreteness to further “abstraction,” leaving it “lifeless.” In Lehmann-Haupt’s view, then, Ellis’s text can be understood to perform that “striving after maximum objective ‘accuracy’” by which Lukács characterizes the latter practice of “Narrate or Describe?,” and which he denounces as

“harbour[ing] a serious danger for the novel, besides being “artistically…superfluous”

(“ND” 136). It is by engaging in pure description, and thus ignoring the interaction between Bateman and the world he inhabits, that Ellis is said to conflate the superficiality of the murderer’s life with that of the world. In so doing, Ellis effects the fundamental

“confusion of form and content” that is, for Lehmann-Haupt, the novel’s “true offense,” the reason for its failure; ultimately, “for that offense and no other does one have cause to excoriate ‘American Psycho.’”

Carla Freccero identifies Lehmann-Haupt’s view of American Psycho as an instance of the “aesthetic critique” that defines one school of response to the novel, which fixes on and denounces “the absence of a metaphorical surface/depth model in Ellis’s

4 Thus although Ellis, with his meticulous mastery of the minutiae of his protagonist’s life and the context in which he resides, may seem to follow Lukács’s requirement that realist literature know its characters intimately, in the way that Thomas Mann “knows exactly who Christian Buddenbrook, who Tonio Kröger and who Hans Castorp, Settembrini and Naphta are” (AP 36), Lehmann-Haupt’s reading suggests that the information Ellis presents reflects only individual attributes—not “individual and typical” ones—from which the text emerges. Lehmann-Haupt writes that “for all the viscera and gore he spills, this Wall Street monster is not a flesh-and-blood character, nor is it a realistic world that his demented narrative creates.”

105 character portrayal” (Freccero 50)—a school to which Norman Mailer’s review of the novel also belongs. Elizabeth Young points out the realist logic behind Mailer’s review:

“Mailer went on to strike a blow for that old ghost, the classic realist novel: ‘Since we are going to have a monstrous book with a monstrous thesis, the author must rise to the challenge by having a murderer with enough inner life for us to apprehend him’” (Young,

“The beast in the jungle, the figure in the carpet” 86). Furthermore, as Freccero points out, Mailer “defends the concept but not the execution of the book” (51), reiterating the significance of the relationship between form and content in the assessment of a text’s realist value (and also pointing out the extent to which, in the case of Ellis’s novel, such an assessment rests on a formal evaluation of Patrick Bateman’s character).

Interestingly, it is on the grounds of precisely this relationship between form and content that those who praise American Psycho do so. Whereas Lehmann-Haupt

“excoriates” the novel based on its deviation from the principle that “for meaninglessness to cohere, it needs a context of meaning,” and Mailer requires a greater degree of “inner life” for the serial murderer, Ellis’s advocates argue that the novel contextualizes its own meaninglessness in various ways, and that the text ironically, but also substantially, coheres around that contextualization. For these critics, therefore, Bateman’s lack of inner life serves as the very axis along which, in Mailer’s words, the novel’s monstrosity can be apprehended. Accordingly, Young writes that although “much of the frustration felt by critics as they tried to grapple with the book’s apparent context stemmed from a vague sense of Patrick’s insubstantiality as a ‘character,’” fundamentally the reason why

“it was impossible to get to grips with him” is that “he wasn’t really there” (“The beast”

118). Therefore, Patrick’s insubstantiality is itself read as substantial: Ellis does not give

106 him enough “inner life” because he has no inner life, and the text is a tedious list of superficial details because that is how Bateman understands his world. The classic realist argument wherein abstract potentiality must exist in tension with concrete reality is countered with what Young identifies as a “postmodern” argument, one which sanctions the self-conscious conflation of abstract and concrete potentiality. 5

However, despite Young’s well-developed argument, it is not quite accurate to ascribe to American Psycho the same scrupulous rejection of the Lukácsian paradigm that, for example, I have highlighted in Coetzee’s oeuvre. Certainly the overload of sensory information that Ellis offers does work to defamiliarize the “classic realist novel,” effectively parodying the conventions of that form through a hyperbolic employment of its techniques. As I pointed out in the scene of Al’s murder, the establishment of Bateman as the unambiguous agent in the novel can be read as similarly excessive, so that, appearing to conform to the conventions of active/passive voice narration, the novel in fact destabilizes such conventions through its ostentatious appropriation of them. Young is right to assert that when the “narrative continues, at times, to collapse into near-meaningless fragments, a blur of obsessions and possessions,” this contributes to “the endless circularity of text and an incessant re -creation within text”

(108). However, the trouble with this reading is that the novel is not consistent in these efforts at formal destabilization; as Young notes, the narrative’s collapse occurs only “at times,” which means that American Psycho only occasionally achieves that textual

5 To this end, Young writes, “ American Psycho is a sophisticated postmodern text. All the theoretical constituents of postmodern culture are there—the commodity fixation, the focus on image, codes and style, the proliferation of surfaces and the deindividualization of neo-fogey characters who ‘play’ with the past” (121). Thus those formal features that seemed to Lehmann-Haupt and Mailer too thin to compose a substantial context around which the novel could cohere, are, according to Young’s identification of the novel’s postmodern play, quite purposefully constructed so thinly in order to reflect and to produce the superficiality and deindividualization that make up the novel’s content.

107 circularity that would allow it to be read as a text that rigorously challenges the “old ghost” of classic realist convention that I highlighted a moment ago.

Young also indicates that on “numerous occasions…one can either accept

Patrick’s version of events or choose an alternative, and quite ordinary explanation”

(108), and she does an impressive job of tracking those occasions where narrative alternatives manifest themselves. Young explains that, in the chapter entitled “Chase,

Manhattan,” “Patrick goes completely berserk,” and the novel “seems to enter into a parodic version of a cop-killer thriller” (144). During this scene, “Patrick leaves a message confessing to ‘thirty, forty, a hundred murders,’” and it is the absurdity of this confession, which “Ellis compounds…by making Patrick both a serial-killer and a mass murderer,” that leads Young to argue that “this chapter must be the final nail in the coffin of Patrick’s credibility” (115). However, as a consequence, this chapter must also be the final nail in the coffin of the novel’s serious challenge to realist form, because that challenge, as I began this section by arguing, was issued in large part by the narrative’s submission to Bateman’s voice—a dominating voice that, in its monotonous, deadpan hyperbole, managed to be entirely credible. By eventually identifying itself so firmly as something to be disbelieved, the narrative undermines the control Bateman had so firmly established by the first scene of murder (when he stabs Al). 6 Of course, this is not to say

6 This comes to a head at the novel’s ambiguous conclusion, where it is unclear whether Bateman has “actually” committed those murders he has recounted in such detail throughout the text. In a meeting with his secretary toward the end of the novel, Patrick finally articulates what has been unanimously identified by critics as the novel’s meaning: “surface, surface, surface was all that anyone found meaning in” (375). Bateman continues a few pages later: “there is no catharsis. I gain no deeper knowledge about myself, no new understanding can be extracted from my telling. There has been no reason for me to tell you any of this. This confession has meant nothing ” (377). Having spent the duration of the novel establishing a mode of narration that enacts this meaninglessness—that is, a superficial and tedious form of detailed prose that allows the content of the novel (the lack of content in 80s Manhattan) to manifest itself—Ellis now chooses to ascribe to Bateman the inner life that he has so far been denied, albeit an inner life that reflects only upon its own emptiness.

108 that the absurdity of “Chase, Manhattan” finally identifies American Psycho as a realist novel, either; rather, this chapter demonstrates the extent to which the text falls short of either a formalist or realist interpretation, despite the ample evidence it seems to present in support of each position.

IV. Citation without Representation?

Nevertheless, though American Psycho may not issue the challenge to formal convention that would crush it completely, Young is right to note that the novel does incite a provocative interrogation of that old ghost of classic realism. This is largely due to the text’s ability to be taken seriously according to both the formalist standards of critics like Young and Mandel, and those realist standards of readers like Lehmann-Haupt and Mailer. But what is perhaps most interesting about the text’s interpretive pliability is that it engages another school of criticism, one that, by sidelining the “aesthetic critique” of the formalist/realist debates, fixes its attention instead on the political implications of

American Psycho . This critique—the feminist response to the novel, especially as initiated by the National Organization of Women—was, as Freccero notes, “a straightforward call for censorship in the interests of protecting the public” (Freccero 49).

In a January 1991 resolution, NOW argues that “the publication of American Psycho is socially irresponsible and legitimizes inhuman and savage violence masquerading as sexuality” (cited in Freccero, 50). By asserting that Ellis’s novel “legitimizes” the violence it depicts, NOW invests the novel with an actively political function, and thus identifies textual representation with political representation. Such an identification recalls the attention Gayatri Spivak gives to the conflation of representational modes in her essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” There, Spivak points out how the “two senses of

109 representation” (which are underscored in German by the use of two different words— vertreten and darstellen —to signify each sense) get “run together” in theoretical discourse: “representation as ‘speaking for’, as in politics, and representation as in ‘representation’, as in art or philosophy” (Spivak 70).

By positing literary representation as tantamount to political representation,

NOW’s denunciation of the novel effaces the distinction Spivak carefully draws. When literary representation is invested with the same legitimizing power as political representation, as it is in the NOW statement, this must mean that the acts that literature represents are construed as analogous to acts that get represented politically (i.e., to acts that take place in the real world). In a sense this echoes the Lukácsian literary model, which is based entirely on the notion that literature inherits its political value from the essentially political nature of the world it represents; literature is political because the world that necessarily precedes it is political. 7 However, what the case of American

Psycho reveals is the way in which violence in literature disrupts the paradigm that places political reality exclusively before literary representation, and, in so doing, disrupts the distinction between political and artistic distinction that Spivak highlights. Although

Lukácsian realism certainly works under the assumption that literature can and will have

7 As I explained in Chapter 1, this is the reasoning that dominates the South African literary scene—the argument that endorses historical reality as the standard against which literary value is measured. In both Coetzee’s case and in the case of American Psycho , the acts of violence that are represented are assumed to exist in the real world, and it is because of their material existence (which necessarily precedes the text) that the text is able to be written at all; the actual existence of violence makes possible its textual representation. The comparison of Coetzee’s and Ellis’s work does, however, reveal a notable difference: whereas (with the notable exception of Disgrace ) Coetzee is censured for presenting political violence in a way that seems to stress his work’s textuality over the reality it addresses, Ellis is censured for presenting violence against women too realistically, and, going further, for presenting violence against women at all. That is, while Coetzee’s critics stress the prescriptive aspect of Lukács’s formulation that literature must reflect objective reality, feminist critics of American Psycho base their condemnation on a descriptive reading of it: literature reflects objective reality, which means that the violence contained within the novel must be understood as real, and Ellis’s representation of it is, in fact, a legitimizing of the real violence from which it is derived.

110 political effects, the NOW statement goes further by suggesting that Ellis’s novel legitimizes that which it verbalizes, thus performing an act of political representation at the same time that it performs a literary one, and finally investing literary representation with a political reality of its own. In this way, the feminist response adds a present-tense political function to Lukács’s conception of literature.

Furthermore, what is particularly interesting in this argument is the way in which

Ellis himself participates in and even perpetuates it. Although his opinion on the moral legitimacy of his book is of course opposed to that of his NOW critics, Ellis’s defense of his work depends upon a set of assumptions about the representational function of literature that is identical to NOW’s. Asked in an interview with Rolling Stone magazine about the research conducted for American Psycho , Ellis responds, “I did so much research on this book. I read criminology textbooks…I read about murders that no one’s ever heard of that are just completely appalling—what serial killers can and do inflict on their victims. I think it might have been an aesthetic choice of mine to up the ante a little bit in the book, but not by much” (Robert Love interview). Given its situation in this interview, which is framed as his long-awaited defense of his novel, Ellis’s insistence on his research appears to be a way of vouching for the text’s truth-value. This effort at legitimization becomes clearer when, discussing the serial murders in Gainesville,

Florida, Ellis comments (somewhat contradictorily, given his previous comment), “a lot of that stuff is even creepier and more horrible than what Patrick Bateman does in this book,” as though the greater brutality of the real-life violence renders permissible the violence contained within the text.

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Through such statements, Ellis demonstrates an implicit allegiance to the

Lukácsian realist model, according to which it is the responsibility of literature to grasp honestly and comprehensively the objective reality that precedes it. However, as he continues, he articulates a conception of realism that also highlights, as does the NOW statement, the political representation that literature performs in the very moment that it performs the artistic representation of violence: “There is a level of human savagery and cruelty [in the Gainesville murders] that is undeniable. If we can’t reflect it in our culture, if we’re intolerant of it…[d]oes it mean that we don’t want to see it in art because there’s so much of it in real life?...Do we want evil diminished in art because we don’t always get that in our everyday life?” Here, Ellis’s assessment of the undeniability of real-world savagery and cruelty suggests that, in writing American Psycho , he abided by an artistic imperative to represent the evil that is inevitable “in our everyday life.” He thus makes the point that literature gives voice to real-life violence, and thereby he conflates literary representation with political representation in precisely the same way that NOW does.

What this makes evident is that the conflation of political and artistic representation endows realist literature with the capacity to perform political acts at the same time that it represents them. What is at stake in this is the material status of what is represented in literature, and, accordingly, the status of the representation itself (i.e., that representation’s relationship to reality). Critiquing NOW’s argument against American

Psycho , Freccero points out that the organization’s direct reference to the novel’s scenes of violence might be said to reinforce the violence it seeks to oppose. 8 Although she does

8 Freccero offers the example provided by NOW’s “hotline phone message,” which “included a recording—in a woman’s voice—of one of the passages of rape and dismemberment” (Freccero 50).

112 recognize that this kind of citation is used strategically by NOW, in an attempt to subvert the structure of domination that NOW identifies behind Psycho ’s violent passages,

Freccero also indicates that NOW “refus[es] the possibility that, just as its own gesture of citation is not to be construed as a misogynistic act of violence, so too perhaps the passage [from American Psycho ] quoted [by NOW] may bear a complicated—and willfully citational—relation to the violence it depicts” (50). Here, Freccero invokes

Judith Butler’s concept of citationality, which calls attention to the way in which the

“discursive practice [that] enacts or produces that which it names”—that is, the performative speech act—is conditioned: “to what extent does discourse gain the authority to bring about what it names through citing the conventions of authority?” (BM

13). Freccero seems to be asking the opposite question (which Butler herself also addresses, with significant results 9): to what extent is discourse able to undo the authority of the conventions it cites by recognizing those citations as such—by “willfully” citing them? By asking this question, Freccero rejects the position (which, she correctly indicates, is the one endorsed by NOW) that “representation is construed as advocacy, and figuration is construed as performativity” (50); returning to Spivak’s terms, she positions herself against an argument that relies upon a collapse of the distinction between artistic and political representation ( darstellen and vertreten ).

Freccero’s essay thus highlights the crucial problem posed by American Psycho and all its realist detail: is it possible for representation not to mean advocacy, and for figuration not to mean performativity? And, if these things are possible, what forms must

9 Butler interprets Luce Irigaray’s reading of Plato’s Timaeus by arguing that Irigaray’s imitation of the Platonic rhetoric “is citation, not as enslavement or simple reiteration of the original, but as an insubordination that appears to take place within the very terms of the original, and which calls into question the power of origination that Plato appears to claim for himself ” ( BM 45).

113 violent content assume in order to distinguish textual representation from advocacy and performativity? NOW argues that Ellis’s publisher must learn that “violence against women in any form is no longer socially acceptable” (cited in Freccero, 50, my emphasis); if this were the case, as Freccero rightly indicates, NOW would be forced to denounce its own citations of American Psycho . We must therefore assume that there are, in fact, representational forms that facilitate the citation of violence against women without performing those acts of violence themselves. In opposition to NOW, but similarly to Young, Freccero locates those forms within Ellis’s novel. She argues that, because it lacks a “psychologizing narrative” that would explain Patrick Bateman’s acts of violence, American Psycho ruptures a novelistic convention whereby the text’s significatory value is substantiated by the logic of historicity. Therefore, by presenting

Bateman as de-psychologized (or a-psychologized), the narrative refuses to account historically for his violence. In so doing, Freccero argues, it denies the priority of history

(and, consequently, of a historical reality that would precede the text), which results in a rather revolutionary emphasis on the present-ness of its work.

However, this argument, though logically sound, is only partially true. Ellis’s novel does make an effort to destabilize the conventional Lukácsian paradigm advocated by Lehmann-Haupt and Mailer, which depends upon a tension between abstract and concrete potentiality, between a full exploration of the protagonist’s inner life and a comprehension of the historical situation in which he lives. However, the novel eventually gives up on its challenge to that model, conspicuously exposing the narrator’s unreliability, and rather explicitly thematizing the superficiality that it had earlier so effectively enacted. If, as Freccero posits, American Psycho defies performative

114 citationality by refusing to psychologize Bateman, then the most frequently cited passages of the novel (like, for example, Bateman’s declaration that “I am simply not there.…Myself is fabricated, an aberration,” 377), which can only be understood as psychologizing Bateman’s lack of psychology, profoundly undermine the radical defiance of conventions that Freccero ascribes to the novel.

V. Neither Pure Violence nor Pure Art

Thus we are returned to our earlier questions: does the representation of violence necessarily perform or advocate that which it represents, and, if not, what forms does it take on to avoid such performance and advocacy? In responding to these questions, it will be useful to consider what it would mean if representation did equal performance.

That is, if literary representations of violence were understood to perform the violence that they represent, how would they be said to perform it?

To begin with, Gloria Steinem’s response to the novel ascribes such a performative role to it, one that seems to take the concept of literary performativity fairly literally. Ellis sums up her position during his Rolling Stone interview: “I saw Gloria

Steinem on Larry King , and she was saying, ‘I hope Mr. Ellis realizes that when this book comes out and women are killed and tortured in the same fashion as is described in

American Psycho , I hope he understands he must take responsibility for this.’” Thus

Steinem asserts that not only does the novel reproduce textually acts of violence that, as argued by Bruce and NOW, are not socially acceptable in any form, but it also inspires its own reproduction in the real world. That is, it does not simply cite unacceptable acts of violence, but it also posits itself as something to be cited . In this case, literature would not only perform a present act of political representation, but would also posit its own

115 futurity by authorizing the imitation of the acts it depicts. Here, the fictional world is conflated with extratextual reality by Steinem’s denunciation, just as it is in NOW’s statement and in Ellis’s own defense. Steinem’s argument demonstrates that all of these are founded on the logic behind performative speech—that, as Butler writes, discourse has “the authority to bring about what it names.” But if, as Butler suggests, such authority is gained by “citing the conventions of authority,” then we must recognize that the only possible source of that authority in Steinem’s account of American Psycho is a literary text, which effectively means not only that realist literature cites the real world, but that realist literature determines reality.

On a very basic level, Steinem’s argument can be easily refuted simply by noting that any real-world enactment of the violence contained in American Psycho would necessitate someone to perform it; that is, it would be impossible for the novel itself to effect the violence it represents as literally as Steinem asserts it can. Interestingly, however, the position Steinem takes against the novel is one that Ellis himself takes very seriously in his most recent work, Lunar Park , in which a writer named Bret Easton Ellis is confronted with a series of murders that are executed in precisely the same way in which some scenes of murder in his most famous novel, American Psycho , are committed. In fact, Lunar Park takes seriously many of the issues I have been discussing in this chapter, suggesting that Ellis’s writing has been radically influenced by the criticism American Psycho incited. It is evident from the opening lines of Lunar Park that this influence will become the novel’s major theme: “‘You do an awfully good impression of yourself.’ This is the first line of Lunar Park and in its brevity and simplicity it was supposed to be a return to form, an echo, of the opening line from my

116 debut novel, Less Than Zero ” ( LP 3). Here, Ellis conspicuously introduces the question of form, and identifies the chief formal objective of his text as a recapitulation of the

“brevity and simplicity” seen in Less Than Zero . However, the syntax of this sentence elides the “echo” of Less Than Zero with the “return to form,” so that it is the act of echoing, and not the echoed “brevity and simplicity,” that seems to constitute such a return; thus the metafictional impulse undermines Ellis’s explicit claim that brief, simple prose is his formal goal. Perhaps this is why Ellis remarks that the opening line “ was supposed to be ” a return to form, suggesting that his ostensible formal objectives have failed, and that, instead of the “stripped-down minimalism” (4) of his early writing style, what he accomplishes here is an inauguration of the metafictional quality that will dominate Lunar Park . Rather than establishing the text as a recuperation of formal simplicity, therefore, Ellis insists on its formal complexity—or, using the terms we have applied to our discussion of American Psycho , he insists on its formalism.

Like Lunar Park , American Psycho begins with a citation: “abandon all hope ye who enter here.” This line embodies the confusion between representation and reality that Ellis constructs and exploits throughout that novel, not only because it cites Dante’s text, but also because the quotation is said to be “scrawled in blood red lettering on the side of the Chemical Bank near the corner of Eleventh and First” ( AP 3). Thus literary representation is projected onto the real world of a Manhattan street corner, but, of course, that “real world” is itself a textual representation of an actual location. Lunar

Park goes at least one step further by citing Less Than Zero where American Psycho had cited The Divine Comedy , and not only because, in the more recent novel, Ellis is citing his own work. Lunar Park does project the literary quotation onto the real world, like

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American Psycho , but I say that it goes further because it also identifies that quotation as literature (as opposed to graffiti). Lunar Park thus explicitly deals with its intertextuality, informing the reader that, as we saw in American Psycho , this novel will directly signal a specific reality that is recognizable to the reader, but that, unlike the earlier text, that specific reality will be the reality of literary representation. We might say that, where in

American Psycho we have remarked a conflation of realist and formalist modes, in Lunar

Park Ellis has done away with such ambiguity, replacing it with an overt commitment to the construction of metafiction as reality : thus the extratextual referent of Lunar Park is identified as American Psycho and its critical controversy, which is to say that the more recent text’s extratextual referent is the real existence of the earlier text. The conflation of realism and formalism is thus thematized in Lunar Park , incorporated into the new novel in a conscientious and organic way that, as its contrasting critical interpretations have revealed to us, American Psycho lacked.

Explicit metafictionality is the means by which Lunar Park rehearses the theories of realist representation that emerged in those critical responses to American Psycho . As the events in and around the life of the protagonist of Lunar Park come to mirror the violent scenarios he authored in American Psycho , Ellis is forced to wonder whether, as

Steinem suggests in her Larry King Live interview, his fiction is actually able to materialize itself in real life. Perhaps unexpectedly, Lunar Park considers this relationship between representation and reality specifically through an investigation of the theme of the supernatural. Not only does the character Ellis learn of a series of murders committed in exactly the manner in which Bateman kills his victims in American

Psycho , but Ellis is also confronted with a series of mystical and horrifying events in his

118 own home, such as paint peeling inexplicably off the exterior of the house, ashy footprints embedded in the carpet inside, and the terrifying animation of the Terby, a toy belonging to his daughter. The novel’s supernatural incidents seem to be posed to its author-protagonist, and to the reader, as a test of what Barthes has called the “reality effect”—the extent to which a literary representation convincingly reflects the reality of the extratextual world. If we choose not to believe, for example, that the Terby comes to life, makes noises, slams doors, and kills a mouse, then we are also choosing not to believe that the story told by narrator Ellis is true; we are insisting on the fictional nature of the novel, and the lack of credibility of its author. However, because we know that the narrator of Lunar Park is a real person, one who claims to have authored a text that we know does exist ( American Psycho ), a text that does correspond to the description the narrator gives of it, it is impossible to characterize Lunar Park as purely fictional. Thus the novel enacts precisely that process of citation that I discussed earlier in Butlerian terms; its truth-value is contingent upon some authoritative source that precedes it.

But what Ellis performs with Lunar Park is not a simple validation of supernatural narrative based on citational authority. It is rather an underlining of the inevitability of such citational practices, an underlining that not only emphasizes the way in which a text earns its credibility, but which also aims to assess the limits of the work of citation. I say that such limits are established in Lunar Park because, despite the argument I have presented about for the credibility of Ellis’s supernatural narrative, the fact remains that the reader never quite overcomes his or her skepticism of the paranormal events Ellis observes. In fact, Ellis himself never quite believes them.

Suggesting that the Terby has killed the family cat, he writes, “the ground was soaked

119 with blood, and viscera that the Terby had slashed from the cat’s belly were sprayed across the daisied hedge” (206). However, though this description seems to attribute the cat’s death to the Terby rather directly, Ellis quickly follows up that statement with a transcription of his own process of doubt:

The writer promised me this was not something I had dreamt. But I could not imagine how the Terby had captured the cat. I could not imagine the doll doing this. The Terby was simply a prop from a horror movie. But there was a part of the writer that wanted the Terby to have killed the cat. (207)

Here, Ellis admits that, according to standards of realistic activity, it is not possible to imagine that his daughter’s doll has killed a cat. However, finding himself faced with the

Terby and the dead cat, he must choose between believing that the doll has killed it, or disbelieving that which he sees. As he assesses it, “if I believed that the doll was responsible, the ground I stood on would shift into a world made of quicksand” (207).

For the reader, the matter is still more complex, since the ground on which he or she stands can only shift into quicksand: if we decide to believe that the Terby has killed the cat, then Ellis is a reliable narrator, and what he describes to us is true; however, if

Ellis is a reliable narrator, then a doll has come to life and has killed a cat—an event that, because it is supernatural, cannot be believed. Thus we as readers, if we affirm the story’s credibility, find ourselves ascribing truth-value to a story that, we must admit, can only exist as representation, despite the persuasive claim to reality it makes with its autobiographical gesture.

On the other hand, if, by believing in the story Ellis recounts, we deny the novel’s autobiographical gesture, we are in a sense also denying the novel’s affirmation of the existence of the real Ellis, his real novel American Psycho , and our experience of reading it as well as Lunar Park . This is likely what Ellis identifies as the “part of the writer that

120 wanted the Terby to have killed the cat,” in order to preserve that which we know to be real—the text, and the fact that we are reading it.

Ultimately, this also has everything to do with the material status of texts and that which “happens” within them, and it is this question of materiality that Steinem is interrogating when she demands that Ellis take responsibility for the copycat murders that she is confident American Psycho will inspire. The problem of materiality no doubt applies to all novels, but the problem asserts itself much more urgently where violent fiction is concerned, because, if texts are understood to possess the power to reproduce their contents in the real world, then violent texts puts real lives at stake. Lunar Park demonstrates the urgency produced by violence in a lucid way: though Ellis is certainly concerned that paint is rapidly peeling off of the outside of his house for no rationally discernible reason, it is the viscera of the dead cat that are able to move him past confusion to action, because the Terby clearly poses a threat to the physical welfare of his family.

Thus Lunar Park dramatizes the argument that Steinem makes—that realist literature is able to perform (on its own authority) that which it names. I argued earlier that American Psycho is able to claim some measure of fidelity both to formally experimental literature, and to the conventions of classic realist form; it is for this reason that the question of the novel’s performativity is a particularly slippery one, as Ellis acknowledges in his recent work. Although we may readily acknowledge that it is impossible on a practical level for characters literally to come alive and reproduce their narratives in the real world, Lunar Park suggests that literature is not just a citation of reality, but also a source of citation itself. It is for this reason that so many critical

121 accounts of American Psycho invoke its relation to reality, and moreover suggest that the novel does perform some kind of political act in the real world. What exactly that work is, however, we have not adequately determined.

Laura Tanner classifies this relationship between reality and text as a tension between “material” and “fiction,” and she aptly highlights the problem American Psycho poses as a text that commits itself to both (and neither) of these modes:

Although the contents of American Psycho are extremely disturbing, even more disturbing is the narrative’s ability to draw attention away from the representational process it enacts. In announcing itself both as material and as fiction, the narrative manages to obscure the space that lies between the two, a crucial space that we might designate representation . Ellis’s narrative, despite his claims to the contrary, is neither pure violence nor pure art. (Tanner 114)

This obscured space between material and fiction, I have suggested already, is the site at which the political and artistic senses of “representation” are, as Spivak says, “run together.” Because violent literature necessarily invokes bodily materiality but also necessarily maintains its discursive status, Tanner’s stress on the importance of recognizing (rather than drawing attention away from) the tension between materiality and discourse in violent literature is crucial. As we saw in Chapter 1, it is this tension that turns Coetzee toward a middle-voice narration that works rigorously to expose its own mediation, a strategy that diverges from the social realist model, but nonetheless one that, I have tried to argue, demonstrates a very deep engagement with the problem of bringing together the two spheres Tanner identifies here—that is, the problem of portraying violent material in fiction.

Coetzee’s response to this problem is, as his critics note, a formalist one that depends upon the foregrounding of his novels’ textuality, but, I suggested, this does not mean that the materiality of the extratextual body is sidelined altogether. Discussing the

122 performative role of discourse in determining the body’s sexed materiality, Butler cautions, “this is not to say that the materiality of bodies is simply and only a linguistic effect which is reducible to a set of signifiers. Such a distinction overlooks the materiality of the signifier itself ” (30, my emphasis). What Butler articulates here (and this is, I believe, what Coetzee’s texts demonstrate as well) is a method of understanding the signifier’s materiality that denies neither bodily materiality nor discursive performativity. Such a conception of linguistic materiality (and, more central to our discussion than to Butler’s, of literary materiality) also allows for the distinction between artistic representation and political representation to be recognized, forestalling the situation Freccero describes, where “representation is construed as advocacy, and figuration is construed as performativity” (50), while nevertheless admitting some relation between violence in the real world (the violence with which political representation is concerned) and textual violence (the violence with which artistic representation is concerned).

Of course, this is meaningless unless we consider what exactly “the materiality of the signifier itself” might entail. To consider this is also to ask what is materialized in the signifier, what the signifier performs—that is, what the performative function of the signifier must be. Butler writes,

To claim that discourse is formative is not to claim that it originates, causes, or exhaustively composes that which it concedes; rather, it is to claim that there is no reference to a pure body which is not at the same time a further formation of that body. In this sense, the linguistic capacity to refer to sexed bodies is not denied, but the very meaning of ‘referentiality’ is altered. In philosophical terms, the constative claim is always to some degree performative. (10-11)

Discourse, then, does not act by directly originating, causing or exhaustively composing what it names; that is to say, it does not act in the literal way that Steinem proposes,

123 whereby the inscription of a violent episode directly produces the instantiation of that episode in real life. Rather, Butler suggests, the process of referentiality assumes a different valence when the discursive formation of the body is considered, one that accounts for the fact that any constative formulation takes on a performative function.

Thus we have come a long way from the realism Lukács advocates; rather than investigating the particular forms by means of which literature grasps a preexisting objective reality, we are now investigating how literature produces its own reality. It is for this reason that Butler indicates that “the very meaning of ‘referentiality’ is altered.”

Whereas Lukácsian referentiality depended on a conception of literature as related to the objective reality that exists before it (this might be a way of understanding what Lukács means by “history”), the referential system that Butler conceives of here concerns itself with the effects of language—with what it produces. This is what Tanner’s argument, with its attention to the way in which the reader is, in her estimation, forced to submit to the violence of the narration, is organized around. As Butler writes,

The body posited as prior to the sign, is always posited or signified as prior . This signification produces as an effect of its own procedure the very body that it nevertheless and simultaneously claims to discover as that which precedes its own action. If the body signified as prior to signification is an effect of signification, then the mimetic or representational status of language, which claims that signs follow bodies as their necessary mirrors, is not mimetic at all. On the contrary, it is productive, constitutive, one might even argue performative , in as much as this signifying act delimits and contours the body that it then claims to find prior to any and all signification. (30)

Thus, considering the temporality of the referential system, Butler’s conception of discursive materiality concerns not what precedes the sign, but rather what comes after the sign—that which the sign precedes, that which the sign produces—which, she asserts, is that which we identify belatedly as the original referent. Language does not merely describe a material world prior to itself; it also performs that world. The critical response

124 to American Psycho has demonstrated this by inciting an evaluation of the priority attributed to the referent within the mimetic paradigm. Of course, this is not to say that literature performs the legitimizing function that both Ellis and NOW ascribe to it; what literature performs is not the authorization of a preexisting reality, but rather the production of a reality that is itself material , but which necessitates a conception of materiality that accounts for what is still literature’s representational function. Given that rather undeniable function, it seems that Butler’s suggestion that “the representational status of language…is not mimetic at all” is an overstatement of the argument, at least in the case of violent literature. What the example of American Psycho demonstrates, by its controversial location within both the realist and the formalist camps (and thus within neither camp) is that violent literature resides in a space where aesthetic and political representation are necessarily collapsed, a space where what Tanner calls “pure art” and

“pure violence” are not distinguishable, and where they may form an alloy that we can identify as the materiality of literature.

VI. Pure Violence and the Textual Body: Performativity and Afformativity

Pointing out that American Psycho “is especially valuable as a site where the relation between violence and representation can be addressed” (Mandel 9), Naomi

Mandel seems to reiterate Tanner’s concern with the purity of violence and of art in

Ellis’s novel. But unlike Tanner, who finds the lack of distinction between those two categories to be a dangerous consequence of the novel, Mandel finds great merit in what she sees as the text’s productive interrogation of literature’s relationship to violent material: “Born in violence, formed by text, reforming the real by de-forming it,

American Psycho ’s critique of violence offers violence as critique” (18). Mandel’s

125 articulation that the novel is “born in violence” and “formed by text” reveals an engagement with the problem of content and form that I began this chapter by highlighting, and it is clear that, for Mandel, the form of Ellis’s text and the violent content it represents are in a mutually constitutive relationship; the novel stages a productive confrontation between discourse and the material world. Furthermore, by identifying the consequences of this confrontation as “reform,” Mandel suggests that the novel improves upon the forms it employs and the world it represents. I have argued already that the inconsistency of American Psycho ’s formal manipulation makes it difficult to affirm categorically the potential for positive reform that Mandel ascribes to it. However, Mandel’s work is not a simple reiteration of the formalist argument advanced by Young; it is not only concerned with the novel’s textuality, but also, like

Tanner’s argument, with its relationship to reality. Thus Mandel examines the way in which Ellis’s text implicates both the reality that conditions literature and the way in which literature conditions itself (in Butler’s terms, we might call this a concern for literature’s citationality—both in terms of that which literature cites, and the way in which literature invests itself with the authority to be cited). Such an acknowledgment of the equal importance of the materiality of the body and the “materiality of the signifier itself” in violent literature is what the rest of this chapter—and this project as a whole—is founded upon.

It is because of the tension between these two kinds of materiality that, referring to Walter Benjamin’s 1921 “Critique of Violence,” Mandel writes that “violence consistently eludes the critical gaze.” Certainly, given the wide range of critical responses to American Psycho (and their tendency to contradict each other), this elusive

126 quality of violence is confirmed by Ellis’s novel. It is interesting, however, that Mandel chooses to cite Benjamin here, since the argument she ascribes to him, that violence

“relocat[es] itself in the means for the attainment of certain ends” (10), presents only one aspect of the complexity of violence that Benjamin identifies in his “Critique.” While that essay does posit that certain forms of violence tend to function in the teleological manner Mandel outlines, the aim of Benjamin’s text is ultimately to identify a form of violence that does not work according to the end-oriented prescriptions of the law, but which instead presents the revolutionary potential to overthrow the laws of a state absolutely.

In seeking such a violent form, Benjamin first distinguishes between two types of violence that do not offer this revolutionary potential: law-preserving violence, which is violence used by the state for the protection of its own authority, and lawmaking violence, which is violence used to replace existing forms of state with new ones. For

Benjamin, “a gaze directed only at what is close at hand can at most perceive a dialectical rising and falling in the lawmaking and law-preserving forms of violence” (251), and, it seems, it is this near-sighted gaze that Mandel is referring to when she cites Benjamin’s description of violence as means to an end. Benjamin’s mention of near-sightedness, on the other hand, implies that his “Critique” is an attempt to gaze beyond what is close at hand, to uncover a violence whose function would be a permanent unsettling of the authoritative institution, a violence that consists of “pure means,” without consideration of a definite end. This violence would not be guaranteed by the law, would not be characterized as lawmaking or law-preserving, but instead would “depose” the law,

127 threatening the law absolutely, embodying its destruction. 10 Benjamin refers to this violence of revolutionary potential as “pure immediate violence” (252).

Beatrice Hanssen notes that the term “violence” has been “stretched beyond its former clearly demarcated boundaries, meaning ‘the use of physical force,’” in order to

“include[e] such phenomenologically elusive categories as psychological, symbolic, structural, epistemic, hermeneutical, and aesthetic violence” ( Critique of Violence 9). It seems that Benjamin’s pure violence, which is not defined as contingent upon “the use of physical force,” must reflect a phenomenological elusiveness of the kind Hanssen describes here. Given this, if we are to consider such a concept of violence when we are dealing with literature like American Psycho , which is categorized as violent precisely because of its representations of “the use of physical force,” we must ask how

Benjamin’s concept of violence is able to account for physical abuse to the body. If violent literature collapses the space between “material” and “pure art” (Tanner 114), as

Tanner claims is the case for American Psycho , what kind of materiality might be claimed for Benjamin’s pure immediate violence? It seems that, “by radically rethinking a longstanding philosophico-political tradition according to which violence was to be conceived of as instrumental in nature” (Hanssen 18), Benjamin is said to leave behind the conception of violence that would signify “the use of physical force” as a means toward the end of preserving or making the law. Does such a move into critique imply a move away from the material consequences of physical force? As Hanssen writes,

“Benjamin’s essay emphatically did not celebrate a monolithic, ‘substantialist’ force or

10 The German word Benjamin uses for law is Recht —as opposed to Gesetz , both of which are translated “law” in English. While the latter typically refers to specific statutory law, the former also signifies the set of principles by which the law is governed and defined (“ Recht ” can also be translated “right”). This should elucidate the revolutionary scope of the “violence” to law that Benjamin outlines in his “Critique.”

128 violence that could serve as a dynamic, energic arche or foundation, but rather proposed an apology for a pure , unalloyed mode of revolutionary violence, which was to set an end to all mythic force. In so doing, he introduced a cultural praxis of violence” (18). If

Benjamin’s “Critique” leaves behind a “substantialist” conception of violence, does this mean that his violence lacks substance, that it also leaves behind questions of materiality?

Gewalt , the German word for “violence” that Benjamin employs in his essay, particularly stages this question of the substance or materiality of pure violence. Gewalt does refer to violence against the body, but it also denotes “power” and “force”—words that engage more abstract forms of violence, and therefore do not of necessity implicate the physical body. The fact that Benjamin’s “violence” contains this range of valences makes the “Critique” especially germane to a study of literary violence, since, as both

Coetzee and Ellis actively demonstrate, the abuse of bodies is certainly implicated in violent literature, but the materiality of that abuse is hard to identify in text. It seems that with Benjamin we are returned to Butler’s analysis of the matter of the body, searching for a “ pure , unalloyed mode of revolutionary violence” that yet does not betray the afflicted body. In his essay “Afformative, Strike,” Werner Hamacher takes up

Benjamin’s concept of pure violence as that which deposes law, elucidating deposing as

“an event, but not an event whose content or object could be positively determined.” It is this lack of an object for Benjamin’s pure violence, this concept of deposing as “not directed toward anything determinate,” that sets it apart from definitions of violence as physical abuse against a body. For this reason, Hamacher writes that “deposing could not be the means to an end, yet it would be nothing but means. It would be violence, and pure violence, but therefore entirely non-violent” (Hamacher 113).

129

Given that the novels we have examined so far are organized around scenes where violence is directed toward something determinate (the body), it is difficult to study them in terms of the non-violent violence of Benjamin’s “Critique.” However, the close relationship between Benjamin’s essay on violence and his work on language makes such a study extremely fruitful, especially as we try to determine what happens to materiality when the physical world and artistic production are collapsed, as Tanner finds them in

American Psycho . Hamacher’s reading of the “Critique of Violence” is of particular interest in this regard, as it posits the inextricability of Benjamin’s theories of violence and language from one another. Hamacher demonstrates this by conceptualizing a category he calls the “afformative,” which, he argues, signifies the kind of language that can serve as a figure of pure means. Hamacher’s afformative is posited in contrast to the category of the Austinian performative (out of which, of course, Butler’s performative emerges), whereby speech is able to perform acts merely by being spoken. Hamacher writes, “afformatives are not a subcategory of performatives. Rather, afformative, or pure, violence is a ‘condition’ for any instrumental, performative violence and, at the same time, a condition which suspends its fulfillment in principle.” Therefore

“afformations allow something to happen without making it happen” (Hamacher, 125), embodying the notion of pure means, of mediality that makes action possible, but which itself is never charged with the performance of action. The afformative, which saliently recalls the term “affect” and thus preserves a strong aesthetic resonance within itself, assumes the function of pure violence.

As we will note more emphatically in the next chapter, the link between

Benjamin’s political writing on violence and his linguistic and aesthetic criticism is

130 facilitated in large part by the figure of the law. This is to say that violence in literature, like violence in the political sphere, is determined by its relation to those conventions or laws that traditionally govern it. However, this is not posited simply as an analogical relationship; the question of literary violence is not meant to be addressed by merely imposing the juridical logic of Benjamin’s “Critique of Violence” on works of literature.

Rather, what will be made clear is that, for Benjamin, although the concept of language and the concept of law are distinct from one another, they each depend for their existence upon the other.

Given this, it should not be surprising to hear in Hamacher’s afformative, which bridges Benjamin’s political and aesthetic writings, echoes of the discursive category of the performative that we have encountered in our examination of Butler’s Bodies That

Matter . Because for Butler, as we have seen, “to claim that discourse is formative is not to claim that it originates, causes, or exhaustively composes that which it concedes” (10), her notion of performativity seems very close to Hamacher’s category, where afformations do not directly make something happen, but nonetheless do “ allow something to happen.” However, because Butler’s conception of performativity asserts that the “forming, crafting, bearing, circulation, signification of [the] sexed body…will be a set of actions mobilized by the law, the citational accumulation and dissimulation of the law that produces material effects” (10), it becomes clear that performativity necessitates the law’s intervention, and thus cannot accomplish the radical deposing of the law that Hamacher’s afformative effects. It is because of its dependence upon the intervention of the law that, Butler argues, the materiality of the body is not fixed; the

“regulatory schemas”—advanced by the law—“that produce intelligible morphological

131 possibilities…are not timeless structures, but historically revisable criteria of intelligibility which produce and vanquish bodies that matter” (14).

But in the realm of literature, of course, we take for granted that bodies are produced and vanquished according to “historically revisable criteria of intelligibility,” because bodies in literature cannot but be produced and vanquished linguistically.

Therefore, whereas Butler must argue against the apparent fixity of real-world bodies in order to establish their origins in discourse, the discursive status of the literary body requires no argument. What is necessary, rather, is a conception of the materiality that bodies assume in literature, as well as a conception of what “the law” might signify with respect to literary works. Butler’s argument about the extratextual body is that it comes to matter and have meaning through the authoritative iteration and reiteration of its signifiers; does it therefore follow that, in literature, the iterability of signifiers produces a textual body that is also seen to matter substantively? How does its substantiality differ from that of the body that exists in the real world? And what are the laws that are taken to govern it? It is these questions in particular that the next chapter will attempt to address, through an examination of the work of Dennis Cooper.

CHAPTER 3

Textuality and Materiality II:

Dennis Cooper’s Endless Mimesis

“…there is a sphere of human agreement that is nonviolent to the extent that it is wholly inaccessible to violence: the proper sphere of ‘understanding,’ language.” -Walter Benjamin

I. Opposing the Textual and the Material

By presenting violence in graphic detail that emphasizes the disgust and horror of the scenes it narrates, the work of Dennis Cooper offers a particularly compelling field in which to consider the problems of textual materiality and embodiment that confront us after our examination of American Psycho . Like Ellis’s novel, Cooper’s fiction features grisly scenes of violence directed against objectified bodies, recounted flatly with precise attention to their bloody and reeking details. However, despite this gruesomeness,

Cooper does not attribute his work’s lack of widespread popularity to the brutality his texts depict: “Honestly,” he remarks, “I think my work’s inability to communicate with a lot of people has more to do with its politics than with its contents” (Glück 252). Given that Ellis’s novel depicts acts of violence no less vividly than Cooper’s work does, and yet continues to enjoy a vast readership and active fan base, 1 it seems that Cooper might be correct in stating that it is not the violent content of his texts that turns readers away.

By identifying the “politics” of his work as the reason for its limited reception, Cooper

1 The dozens of entries for “Patrick Bateman” found on websites like Facebook.com and Friendster.com offer a sense of American Psycho ’s enduring popularity.

132 133 distinguishes a political element of his fiction from its physically violent content—a distinction that serves to reinforce the question of what is at stake when violence is represented in fiction. With Ellis’s novel, we saw that politics is automatically implicated when the question of representing violence arises—that the representation of violence through literary form is also, equally, and indistinguishably the political representation of violence. In the passage cited above, Cooper acknowledges the inextricability of his fiction from politics, but he does so in order to extricate the issue of violence from the political question. This chapter will argue that, in fact, it is not possible to separate the political force of Cooper’s narratives from the violent scenes they obsessively offer up. The salient images and themes represented in Cooper’s fiction recur too consistently in his oeuvre for us to maintain, even at the author’s urging, that the politics of his texts has nothing to do with their content. However, his distinction between these two terms is a productive one, because it underscores the political valence that “representation” always carries, regardless of whether or not its content is explicitly framed as political.

The distinction between politics and content is also productive because it demands that we ask what politics is for Cooper, and how he sees it manifest in his fiction, if not in its content. When Cooper remarks, “I don’t mean that my work is making a political statement” (Glück 252), he reinforces the idea that the politics of his work exists independent of its content—that is, independent of a statement or opinion that would be contained within it. He goes on to say, “I just mean that my writing is guided by my worldview, which I define as anarchist.” In this declaration, it is not the concept of anarchy as such that concerns us, but rather the way in which the author himself 134 elucidates that “worldview.” For Cooper, anarchism refers to a general aversion to recognized ideological positions. Cooper thus identifies his politics as a struggle against established systems of truth-production, saying, “I just don’t believe in the idea that there is a system already in place that is capable of locating the truth…I think if I were able to believe in God or socialism or the narrative or whatever, my work might have a better relationship with the average person who likes to read novels” (252). In Cooper’s view, then, this average reader proceeds in accordance with identifiable religious, political, or literary “systems”—that is, according to conventional forms of government, belief, art,

“or whatever.” Having already opposed the politics of his texts to their content, Cooper now elides “politics” with “form,” and effectively posits a reworking of the form/content binary frequently applied in artistic analysis.

Certainly Cooper is right to suggest that the form of his novels obfuscates their communicability; however, their dependence on graphic descriptions of sexual abuse and bodily mutilation must be understood to affect his work’s “ability to communicate” at least somewhat. In fact, the work’s negative relationship to established forms is doubtless produced to some extent by the violence of the novels’ content. What is required, therefore, is a doubled conceptualization of “violence” as both formal rupture and physical abuse.

Cooper’s attention to the politics of form necessarily guides a literary study of violence in his work to the examination of those specific forms he employs to represent the violation of bodily integrity, and, moreover, to an evaluation of their political significance. As was the case with Coetzee’s and Ellis’s work, in Cooper’s novels these questions are also bound tightly to the problem of realist representation. As Elizabeth 135

Young characterizes it in “Death in Disneyland: The Work of Dennis Cooper,” the issue of realism in general, of representing the concrete extratextual world, is one “that has obsessed postmodern theorists. Faced with a seamlessly hyperreal society,” Young writes, “theorists have struggled to articulate a ‘real’ that escapes representation” (Young

62-63). It is this representational aspect of writing that, according to Young, postmodern theory finds inadequate to the “hyperreal society” out of which all writing now emerges.

Young therefore sees Cooper as managing to escape the representation standard, so that, as she suggests, Cooper produces “what Roland Barthes termed ‘a text of bliss’”—a reference “to Jacques Lacan’s contention that bliss ‘cannot be spoken except between the lines’” (Young, “Death in Disneyland” 47). What constitutes “bliss” is not particularly relevant to our discussion, but what is crucial in Young’s analysis is her argument that

Cooper’s novels enact a circumvention of realist representation, that their focus is not on real-world objects captured in text (these would be “the lines”), but rather on the fiction itself (the artistic world that is created “between the lines”). This is to say that, for

Young, Cooper’s writing is not a verbal mirroring of a stable world outside of the text, but rather a textual form that, because of its non-mimetic quality, avoids representation’s excessive privileging of reality.

James Annesley is generally in agreement with Young’s assessment of the

“blissful abstract freedom” that allows Cooper to bring sublimity and banality together in his work. However, he is concerned not with what is spoken between the lines of text, but with what the lines of text themselves speak—with what the text represents or refers to. He argues that Young’s “emphasis on the text’s shimmering skin…fails to grasp the bloody realities that puncture the textual skin and protrude through it” (Annesley 74). 136

Thus what is interesting to him in Cooper’s representation of violence is the way in which it “expose[s] the material experiences lying underneath” the fiction’s textuality. It is for this reason, stressing the materiality of the violent experiences Cooper narrates, that

Annesley posits that “in the end [Cooper] refuses to allow violence to be abstracted” (74).

Annesley’s argument therefore conflicts with Young’s on the question of referentiality in Cooper, and, specifically, the problem of identifying materiality in the referential system. For Annesley, the referent—that real object that gets referred to by the signifier—is the matter out of and after which the text is composed. Annesley therefore locates Cooper’s innovation in his exposure of the violated body as unabstracted matter. For Young, on the other hand, it seems to be the sign (the signifier and the concept to which it refers—the signified) that is paramount, and the material world is expelled from the issue. Consequently, Young lauds Cooper’s subversion of the primacy of concrete experiences that, according to a realist paradigm, would underlie his fiction; what underlies Cooper’s fiction instead, she seems to argue, is the relation between concepts and words (the Saussurean signified and signifier, to be sure), and not words and things.

Moreover, and not unrelatedly, a fundamental difference between Young’s and

Annesley’s arguments can be located in the disparate importance they ascribe to the form and content of Cooper’s work. Young’s emphasis on Cooper’s “textual disjunctions,” which are produced by, among other things, “constantly changing narrators and tenses”

(56), demonstrates how her reading of Cooper’s work is primarily concerned with its form. Annesley’s reading, on the other hand, by highlighting that “beneath the glassy fictions of abstract violence lies a clear context, a world of bodies, a world of material 137 realities” (75), stresses the violent content of Cooper’s texts. What is lacking, it seems, is an argument that would bring these kinds of readings together, to suggest that the preoccupation with form that Young locates in Cooper is precisely that which allows

Cooper’s fiction to produce the materiality that, as Annesley rightly argues, Cooper’s novels actively pursue. This chapter aims to offer just such an argument. It therefore considers the way in which Cooper’s fiction does, as Young suggests, innovate the realist model that we considered at greater length in chapter 2, offering a compelling “future for fiction…in a wholly mediatized world” (63). It then turns to a discussion of the violence that comprises the content of so much of Cooper’s oeuvre, hoping to account for the materiality Annesley ascribes to Cooper’s fiction.

However, we will find, through a recapitulation of Benjamin’s work on violence, that the materiality of Cooper’s writing does not consist in its fidelity to a material reality that exists outside of the text. Rather, what is material in his novels is textuality itself;

Cooper deals not with the materiality of the abused body “beneath” the narrative, and not, as Young seems to suggest, with a linguistic world wholly divorced from materiality, but rather with what Judith Butler has called “the materiality of the signifier.” For Butler, we will recall, this entirely textual materiality is the precondition of any attempt to produce a concept of non-linguistic, extratextual matter: “to posit by way of language a materiality outside of language is still to posit that materiality, and the materiality so posited will retain that positing as its constitutive condition” ( BM 30).

Considered in the context of literary study, Butler’s point is an obvious one: it should not need to be said that Cooper’s writing about the body can only ever produce the body by means of language. But the obvious statement brings us to our two points of 138 interest in this chapter: first, how Cooper’s work acknowledges this fact formally; and, second, how its active acknowledgement of matter’s inaccessibility to language facilitates the construction of a materiality within the novels that is proper to them as works of literature . We will see that, in Cooper, this literary materiality has everything to do with the way in which the text seems to adhere to a realist mode that privileges extratextual reality over the text that merely imitates it, but ultimately subverts that mode in order to emphasize the text’s own distinct reality.

Although this refutation of an argument like Annesley’s might sound similar to

Young’s argument, a Butlerian take on Cooper’s materiality would be, in fact, quite different from Young’s. Young writes that the “years of postmodernism and all the endlessly circulating codes and signs and signifiers” that produce “a sense of the body being the last frontier, an actuality that no amount of theory can disperse” are the

“background” against which Cooper works (“Death in Disneyland” 45). The observation is a useful one, but Young does not offer a direct statement as to Cooper’s position on this perceived finality and actuality of the body. What she does emphasize is the concept of death in Cooper’s work, presenting what she classifies as a deManian argument for

“Death” as the “ultimate ‘transcendental signifier’” (51). But while death is certainly an important theme in Cooper’s works, this focus on death (particularly on death as a concept, and an ultimately transcendent one at that) seems to eliminate the problem of the body’s material actuality from the field of inquiry. By arguing that “Death” is “now more than the distinguished thing, [that] it denotes the impossible in a world of endlessly deferred meaning” (51), Young seems to emphasize the infinitude of textuality at the expense of literature’s reference to the external world. While this is doubtless the way in 139 which many of Cooper’s characters conceptualize death, it does not explain the meticulous attention Cooper’s narratives pay to the concrete, finite characteristics of the physical human body. Young’s rather thematic discussion of death elucidates the purely conceptual status she affords to the events of the text more generally, and such an understanding of textuality does not, I think, sufficiently address Cooper’s fiction. Thus to suggest, as Young does, that Cooper’s textuality takes place “between the lines” is to suggest that the content of his texts (in the case of our discussion, the murder and sexual abuse they detail) finds its way more or less arbitrarily into the fiction—the violence, by this logic, is inconsequential, immaterial. But in Cooper’s work, violence plays too large a role not to be consequential; as Annesley points out, even though Cooper’s work does offer “abstract images of bodily violence stripped of context, referent, and meaning,” these “impressions are countered…by moments that reinscribe the materiality of the experiences described” (73). Annesley’s focus on the materiality of the real body is not enough to account entirely for Cooper’s treatment of violence (since it does not account for the formal experimentation evident throughout Cooper’s oeuvre); however, it is an essential component of such an account. Violence in Cooper is the occasion for the formalist and materialist viewpoints offered respectively by Young and Annesley to coincide and coalesce. It is for this reason that I continue to invoke Butler’s model of textuality: the notion of a signifier with its own materiality brings the purely literary argument and the extratextual materialist argument together.

Having noted already that Cooper identifies his project as a political one, we may push the Butlerian approach to his fiction further. As Butler writes, “what one takes to be a political signifier” (and there should be no doubt that, for Cooper, and for critical 140 readers like those we encountered in the chapter on Ellis, the brutalized body is the political signifier par excellence ), “is itself the sedimentation of prior signifiers, the effect of their reworking, such that a signifier is political to the extent that it implicitly cites the prior instances of itself.” Thus the political signifier is a textual manifestation of the way in which “prior instances” of signification have functioned in the world . “‘The new,’”

Butler writes, “is itself only established through recourse to those embedded conventions, past conventions, that have conventionally been invested with the political power to signify the future” ( BM 220). The materiality of the signifier, therefore, can only be established through the mutual determination of language and the world in which it exists—through their coexistence, and, crucially, their coexistence as equals, with neither the text nor the extratextual body claiming priority.

II. Constructing Mimesis

Annesley’s reading, however, offers a realist interpretation of Cooper’s fiction that does emphasize the extratextual body. That interpretation holds that Cooper’s work captures the physical materiality of the body through an allegiance to a conventional model of realism—one which prioritizes objective reality, and accordingly establishes a credible textual world by offering what appears to be a comprehensive documentation of objective reality. By locating “bloody realities” beneath the “textual skin” of Cooper’s fiction, Annesley demonstrates his conservation of a realist structure that depends upon the traditional conception of mimesis—the Platonic notion wherein representational forms stand in for the real-world referents that they cover up.

For Plato, of course, this meant that literature presented a degraded imitation of reality, one step below the physical instantiations of divine concepts, and another step 141 below the sacred concepts themselves. Applying Saussurean terminology to the Platonic model, Rosalind Coward and John Ellis elucidate mimesis as a system in which “the signifier and signified…are treated as equivalents.” Founded on this equivalence, the mimetic paradigm, as Coward and Ellis explain it, operates according to the assumption that “writing is a mere transcription of the real,” and they assert that “the business of realist writing is, according to its philosophy, to be the equivalent of reality, to imitate it”

(Coward and Ellis 595). They note that this equivalence is achieved by a “repression of production” (Coward and Ellis 595), so that the means by which the signifier produces the signified is repressed, and words appear tied directly and organically to a non- linguistic world of objects. Thus they underscore how a mimetic conception of language stresses the transparency of the referential structure. In this way, Coward and Ellis account for the illusory power of mimesis that Plato so mistrusted. This leads them to the crucial point that, in this repressed production, the referent of the sign system is conspicuously absent.

This is the mimetic standard of referentiality that Annesley’s analysis of Cooper seems to highlight, and, as we would expect, such a standard bears significantly on

Cooper’s descriptions of violence in particular. Annesley’s argument, by insisting on

Cooper’s attention to the material body, seems to suggest that the graphic detail of

Cooper’s writing serves to recuperate the referent that Plato finds so suspiciously absent in written discourse. Although, as I have suggested, Annesley’s perspective does not offer a complete evaluation of violence in Cooper, his view is certainly bolstered by the salience of the violent content of the “George Miles cycle” (the set of five consecutively written novels that thematize to varying degrees Cooper’s deceased lover of the same 142 name). Cooper’s texts vividly detail acts of sexual mutilation and murder, and a preoccupation with disfigurement manifests itself from the beginning of Closer , the first novel in Cooper’s quintology. In that book’s opening chapter, entitled “John: The

Beginner,” the eponymous character becomes involved with a “punk kid” who begs John to hurt him: “Fuck me up and I’ll never forget you. I really fucking love violence”

(Closer 10). John is an aspiring artist who dubs his work “a Dorian Gray kind of thing,” since, just as the portrait in Oscar Wilde’s novel manifests Dorian’s inner depravity,

John’s drawings expose his subjects’ “dark underside” (5). The punk’s demand for violence makes John think, “if my drawings could talk I’d bet they’d say something like that” (10-11), and the artist readily complies and begins to bite the punk, positing a relationship between art and violence that pervades the novel.

Marvin Taylor addresses the problem of representation posed by such a comparison between acts of violence and artworks by framing his discussion of Closer within John’s allusion to The Picture of Dorian Gray . Taylor recalls that it is “the picture of Dorian Gray, and not Dorian Gray’s body, [that] takes on signs of his corruption. The representation (the painting) does not have an equivalent relationship to the body (Dorian

Gray)” (Taylor 178-79). From here Taylor goes on to read John’s abuse of the punk as indicative of the “dichotomy between bodies and representations” that is “implicit in the notion of portraiture” (179). It is this dichotomy that, for Taylor, explains Cooper’s allusion to Wilde’s novel. 2 The suggestion here is that the distinction between representation and body in Closer , like that between Dorian’s image and his body, enacts

2 In her Fiction in the Age of Photography , Nancy Armstrong appears to support the reading of Wilde’s text that Taylor employs, highlighting how the dissonance Taylor signals between body and representation demonstrates Wilde’s essential departure from realism: “[Wilde] has Dorian’s portrait undergo the kind of disfiguration that would afflict the young man’s body, were this a work of realism” (Armstrong 160). 143 a subversion of the realist paradigm, illustrating a fundamental discomfort with realism at the heart of both Cooper’s and Wilde’s novels.

Cooper thus highlights the distinction between representations of bodies and the body itself, and in so doing he brings the problem of mimesis—the means by which language attempts to efface such distinctions—ostentatiously to the fore. As in the earlier chapters, we are still considering the question of how violent fiction determines its relationship to violence in the real world; however, Cooper’s fiction is leading us to focus specifically on the way in which the referential system works. Closer does not exhibit the Lukácsian conception of realism as an attempt to represent reality as an organic, historical whole (in fact, Closer makes no active attempt to account for its historical specificity, or even its spatiotemporal location); instead, Cooper’s work demands that we consider the way in which words come to refer to things. A rather unremarkable example of the kind of graphic narration that pervades Cooper’s oeuvre, the following sentence demonstrates how that imitation of reality is produced linguistically in Closer : “He rolled

George onto his stomach then climbed on top, tried to get his cock hard, couldn’t, thought he could stuff it up George with his fingers but that didn’t work so he rolled George back over and fucked his mouth” ( Closer 8). The element of “transcription” that Coward and

Ellis identify as characteristic of realist prose is evident here in Cooper’s casually documentary style, effected by an easy use of profanity (“cock,” “fucked”), a paucity of adjectives (“hard” is the only one), and an abundance of verbs (there are eight in the indicative).

This transcriptive effect of Cooper’s prose might seem to offer a clear lesson in the conventions of realist writing, especially as it is lucidly articulated by Nancy 144

Armstrong: realism endows the object (and not its image) with truth “by constituting an object behind the visible surface, a foundation in the object prior to its reproduction”

(Armstrong 162). However, as Taylor proposes in his discussion of Closer , the critique

John receives of his artwork—that it “straddl[es] a line between confusion and hard- edged realism” (cited in Taylor, 179)—is also that boundary straddled by Cooper himself in his self-conscious use of realist convention. Certainly “hard-edged realism” accurately describes both Cooper’s colloquial language, and his text’s unrelenting commitment to narrating flatly the details of even the most vulgar scenes, as demonstrated above. And

“confusion”—specifically, confusion between an object and its representation—is thematized extensively in Closer . This confusion is manifest in John’s conviction that his portraits reveal more reality than the people they represent, and it pervades the rest of the stories that make up the novel as well. 3 In its refusal to prioritize his characters’ reality over their own representations of it, Cooper’s fiction works actively against the construction of referents that would be endowed with chronological and ontological priority over the text that produces them. What is most significant about such a denial of priority, which results in a blurring of reality and representation, is that Cooper does not accomplish it by avoiding the transcriptive mimetic style that generally produces realism; rather, he uses that very style to subvert the realist paradigm and its attendant

3 For example, “David: Inside Out” illustrates the confusion between representation and reality as it cuts rapidly between the protagonist’s narration of his elaborately imagined performances as a famous rock singer, and his actual life as the son of a biologist whose “house is full of these posters of nude boys and girls, all of whom have a chunk of flesh cut from their bodies (I hope they’re just paintings)” (28-29). The same confusion is manifest in the chapters of the novel devoted to George Miles’s story, as George psychologically transports himself to Disneyland while older men have sex with, mutilate, and eventually try to murder him. Furthermore, by the end of the George Miles cycle, it is clear that George himself is an example ( the example, even) of Cooper’s preoccupation with the “confusion” between reality and representation: Period , the last novel in the cycle, seems to posit George as the origin of the texts, and yet can only deliver him in a form that is either utterly disappointing (that of a severely disabled character showing little trace of the physical beauty that once defined him), or inauthentic (George look-alikes whose beauty is said to exceed that of the “real” George). 145 prioritization of reality. We might say that he does perform the processes of representation that Annesley assigns to him, but that he does so precisely in order to disavow them.

Taylor suggests that the confusion seen in John’s artwork, self-consciously reminiscent of the confused relationship between objects and their representations that

Dorian Gray’s portrait exemplifies, is due to the problem of “creating literature in a world where representations are irreconcilable with their referents” (Taylor 176). Such a statement is true, as long as we are careful to note that it must not apply merely to a unique moment of “literature and aesthetics at a crisis” (175), as Taylor suggests it does, but instead to a Western conception of representation that has remained rather continuous since antiquity. After all, Plato advances this thesis in Book X of the Republic , convincing Glaucon that writers are “imitators of phantoms of virtue” (not of virtue itself), who “don’t lay hold of the truth” (Plato 283, my emphasis). He thus characterizes writing as necessarily separate from the world of truth. And the notion of mimesis as a practice predicated upon the disjunction between words and what they stand for is the one that continues into the present day; this is evident in Coward and Ellis’s reading of mimesis as the constructed equivalence of signifiers and their signifieds. Moreover, this conception, in its stress on the constructive element of mimesis, implies that the equivalence of signifier and signified is by no means essential to the linguistic enterprise.

It thus sidelines the question of the referent altogether, highlighting the longevity of the

Platonic view that mimetic writing exists to represent the phantoms of a true world that itself cannot be represented. 146

Given this continuity in theories of representation, we can see that the subversion of the mimetic paradigm that Taylor points to in Closer is not performed by Cooper’s acknowledgement of the incommensurability of text and reality. Rather, it is effected by the way in which his realist style calls attention to its mimetic work by transcribing the most unseemly scenes of sexual violence in great detail, and also by his commitment to the exploration of the theme of representation itself. This intense study of realism (which

Cooper both practices and conceptualizes) finally eschews the category of reality altogether. Instead of submitting themselves to the Platonic hierarchy that prioritizes extratextual reality over textual representation, Cooper’s texts highlight the absolute absence of such extratextuality—in particular, of the physical body—in literature, and thus posit representation itself as the text’s only form of embodiment.

III. The Language of Man and the Language of Pure Violence

Even as it appears to cite the mimetic structure of realism, then, Cooper’s work ultimately overturns the assumption on which realism is founded: that representation is preceded and authorized by reality. Cooper showcases the attempt to imitate reality through representation, and thus disrupts the very principle on which mimesis is founded: the requirement that mimetic representation does not appear constructed, but rather assumes an illusory transparency. By emphasizing the capacity of language to produce such a transparency, therefore, Cooper’s mimetic process reveals what Butler refers to as

“embedded conventions,” showing them to be the mechanisms by which “past conventions” “have conventionally been invested with the political power to signify the future” ( BM 220). 147

As our discussion of Walter Benjamin’s “Critique of Violence” in the previous chapter illuminated, the political power Butler underscores here (particularly as it involves “signifying the future”—or, in Benjamin’s words, making or preserving laws) is violence; indeed the equivalence is manifest in the word Gewalt itself, which signifies both “violence” and “power.” Because, as I will argue, Benjamin posits his concept of pure violence in a necessary relation to language, I am invoking his “Critique of

Violence” in order to identify a way to discuss instances of violence that, because they are literary, are indissociable from structures of linguistic mediation. We will recall that pure violence is defined by Benjamin as that which unsettles, or deposes, political authority absolutely, without either making new laws or preserving an existing structure of law. Having just examined Cooper’s studied attention to the mimetic process, I will begin by suggesting that if the concept of pure violence is, in fact, manifest in Cooper’s work, it is to be located in relation to the conventions of realism, and specifically realism’s dependence on the Platonic mimetic paradigm.

As I mentioned at the outset of this chapter, Cooper defines his work’s politics as a resistance to the established intellectual forms with which an “average reader” approaches a text. In this way, his “anarchist” writing resonates strongly with the deposing function of Benjamin’s pure violence (even though Benjamin’s politics would not be classified as traditionally anarchist). Like the generalized opposition to recognized forms that constitutes Cooper’s anarchy, the deposing function of Benjamin’s pure violence (as elucidated by Werner Hamacher) is not directed against anything determinate, but rather is aimed at “anything that has the character of a positing, an institution, a representation, or a programme” (Hamacher 113), and it effects an evasion 148 or destruction of the state through its negative relationship to established forms of law.

We should keep in mind that Benjamin and Cooper deal with two very different kinds of

“form,” and it is not my aim here to glibly elide the former’s discussion of an entirely juridico-political system of law in the “Critique of Violence,” with the forms of law that

Cooper aims to resist in his writing—namely, ideologically determined systems of truth- production. Rather than erasing the distinction between these two kinds of authority

(juridical law and cultural institution), I mean to highlight it, as it is of paramount importance in our discussion of violence in literature. As we have seen with Coetzee and

Ellis, the moment of violence in literature is always a moment where the political reveals its necessary connection to cultural forms. This connection is precisely the object of our study of violent representation. Through a reading of Benjamin that demonstrates how

“law” is rooted in language, we will see that linguistic representation is, in turn, dependent on the concept of law, and therefore entirely implicated in the argument of the

“Critique of Violence.”

Keeping in mind Cooper’s statement that his “work’s inability to communicate with a lot of people has more to do with its politics than with its contents,” the reading of

Benjamin that I am proposing will enable us to recognize that violence to recognized laws is not, as Cooper would have it, separate from the violent content of his novels, but rather (reciprocally) dependent on it. Cooper’s fiction can thus be characterized as a tense struggle to bring together textuality and the material world outside of the text—a struggle that Young’s and Annesley’s readings of Cooper, in their opposition, lucidly enact—without resolving them into yet another structure of law. What this means is that, as I have suggested, Cooper’s fiction recognizes the materiality of the bodies violated 149 therein not by subordinating the text to the materiality of those bodies assumed to exist in the concrete extratextual world, and not by disregarding such physicality in favor of a wholly abstract textuality, but rather by engaging with and foregrounding the materiality of the signifier.

However, despite their manifestation of this Butlerian concept of materiality,

Cooper’s texts do not offer examples of the performativity that Butler highlights.

Characteristic of Butler’s performative are the “regulatory schemas” advanced by the law

“that produce intelligible morphological possibilities” ( BM 14). Cooper, as we have seen, refuses to adhere to any “system already in place that is capable of locating the truth” (Glück 252), and his entire project is thus dedicated to exposing the kind of performative regulation according to which, Butler argues, the body that is produced by language comes to be seen as essential and constant. Instead of submitting to the regulatory demands of the performative, Cooper’s texts reveal those demands in order to display their own constructedness, their own contingency. They therefore produce a subversion of conventional form that is characteristic of the afformative as defined by

Hamacher.

Specifically, the conventions that Cooper’s work manipulates are those proper to language. In order to determine how that manipulation relates to violence as Benjamin explains it, we can also turn to Benjamin’s writings on language. In his essay “On

Language as Such and on the Language of Man,” Benjamin presents a conception of language that evaluates the relationship between linguistic form and content in order to articulate the role that mimesis plays. In that paper, Benjamin stresses the mediating function of language, just as, in the “Critique of Violence,” pure violence is defined 150 according to its mediating function. In the language essay, Benjamin posits the question of mediation using an essentially religious argument, tracing “the mediateness of all communication, of the word as means” ( SW1 72) to the Fall of man. 4 It is not that

Benjamin considers the Fall to be the origin of language, since the essay maintains, even before it begins to consider the Fall, that “there is no event or thing in either animate or inanimate nature that does not in some way partake of language,” such that “we cannot imagine a total absence of language in anything” (63). For Benjamin, what the Fall marks is a change in the character of language (from “language as such” to “the language of man”), such that language is no longer the “communication of the concrete.” Rather than communicating directly the objects of the external world, the Fall inaugurates an

“exchange” of “the immediacy of name” for what Benjamin terms a “new immediacy.”

However, language after the Fall is characterized by its utterly mediated quality; it exists in “the abyss of the mediateness of all communication, of the word as means.”

Therefore, the new immediacy of post-Fall language must exist precisely in this mediateness, in the status of language as “mere sign” (71). Thus while Benjamin asserts that “ there is no such thing as a content of language …in the name-language of man” (66, original emphasis), he seems to suggest that post-Fall language (that is, the language of

“mere sign” that replaces the name-language of man) must exchange “the communication of the concrete,” in which an extratextual referent is articulated immediately through its

4 It will be noted that I am leaving the validity of “the Fall” as a determinate and determining historical event unchallenged here. It seems unnecessary either to challenge or support the religious concept upon which Benjamin founds his linguistic theory; for our purposes, what remains significant is his characterization of “the language of man,” which Benjamin elucidates by means of a contrast to a preexisting state of “language as such.” It is not of particular importance for this discussion whether or not such a state existed; what matters is the theory of language that the articulation of such a state is able to facilitate. 151 name, for the mediation of the sign system. For Benjamin, this constructed reconciliation of the form of language and its content “marks the mythic origin of law” (72).

This constructed relationship between word and concrete object that Benjamin observes in post-Fall language seems to reflect the same conception of the mimetic process that, we have seen, Coward and Ellis posit. According to Benjamin’s linguistic theory, Alexander García Düttmann explains, “language is dispersed and transformed into a system of arbitrary signs. ‘To name’ now signifies ‘to add a name to a thing’”

(Düttmann 36), where “now” is contrasted to the epoch where language existed “as such,” and where, as a consequence, naming presupposed no such arbitrary addition.

This process of addition that naming “now” requires (and, in particular, the arbitrariness that is ascribed to it) resonates with the Saussurean terminology of signifier and signified invoked by Coward and Ellis—an arbitrariness that is opposed to the pure, organic tie that binds the concrete world to its names in the realm of Benjamin’s “language as such.”

Furthermore, Coward and Ellis’s suggestion that the means of production of such a unity are repressed in mimetic language seems to echo Benjamin’s articulation of the linguistic origin of law as “mythic”; we might say that, as it tries to claim for itself the authority of what Benjamin calls the “concrete,” language assumes that illusion of transparency whereby signifier and signified are taken to be equivalent.

By tying mythic law to language, Benjamin makes it possible—and even necessary—to consider his work on language together with his “Critique of Violence.”

The latter, theorizing the law from an explicitly juridical standpoint, does not ostensibly engage in a linguistic argument; however, because “On Language” explicitly identifies

“the mythic origin of law” in the language of man, we must note that the questions of law 152 and language are indeed bound tightly together. Furthermore, this close relationship is reiterated, albeit less directly, in the discussion of myth in the “Critique of Violence.”

Contemplating the myth of Niobe in the “Critique,” 5 Benjamin decides that the narrative reveals how “the function of violence in lawmaking is twofold”; it not only produces law, but also “specifically establishes as law not an end unalloyed by violence but one necessarily and intimately bound to it” (248). Thus the violence of lawmaking does not stop after the construction of the law; it also necessarily continues to exist within the constructed law itself.

In “On Language as Such and On the Language of Man,” Benjamin also considers the constructedness of the law—this time in the figure of the Tree of Knowledge: after the Fall, writes Benjamin, the immediacy of name is abandoned, and the result is that “the question as to good and evil” is degraded to “empty prattle.” That is, no pure categorization of good and evil exists after the Fall of man; rather, the designation of good and evil becomes an arbitrary law—it is constructed circumstantially, in the same way that Niobe’s punishment retroactively establishes a law—rather than an instantiation of an originary and absolute law. Thus in the postlapsarian state, Benjamin writes, “the

Tree of Knowledge stood in the garden of Good and Evil not in order to dispense information on good and evil, but as an emblem of judgment over the questioner.” It is here that Benjamin locates “the mythic origin of law” ( SW1 72), and, moreover, it is here

5 For Benjamin, the legend of Niobe offers a paradigmatic example of the kind of violence found in myth, which he categorizes as violence compelled by anger—that is, violence that exists as a manifestation of anger and not “as a means to a preconceived end.” Here Benjamin finds a violence that appears immediate, in the sense that he finds it to serve a “nonmediate function,” since Apollo and Artemis slay Niobe’s children not because Niobe has violated an established law, but because they are angered by her boasting to their mother, Leto. At the same time, however, because Apollo’s and Artemis’s punishment of Niobe effectively constructs a law, Benjamin remarks that such violence does, in fact, serve a lawmaking function, despite its appearance as an immediate manifestation of anger with no “preconceived end.” In Benjamin’s words, it is a violence that “establishes a law far more than it punishes the infringement of a law that already exists” ( SW1 248). 153 that the law’s necessary relation to power is revealed: Benjamin writes that the mythic gods’ punishment of Niobe not only produces law, but also determines that “at this very moment of lawmaking,” the law becomes “necessarily and intimately bound to

[violence], under the title of power” ( SW1 248). What is made evident here, Benjamin writes, is that “lawmaking is powermaking, assumption of power” ( SW1 248), so that myth—whether ostensibly concerned with lawmaking or language-making, and this is crucial for our study—is always about power, and power (as the German word Gewalt itself suggests) is always about violence. Given that myth finds its origin in language, then, language and law are tied to each other by their shared origins in power and violence.

In the “On Language” essay, Benjamin laments this language artificially constructed by violent means, adopting a nostalgic tone in his description of the lost pure language of communication. However, as Beatrice Hanssen notes, Benjamin’s evaluation of the transition from language as such to the language of man takes on a more positive resonance in his later work. Hanssen particularly contrasts Benjamin’s attitude toward language and naming in the early “On Language as Such” essay (1916) with the spirit in which his “Doctrine of the Similar” and “On the Mimetic Faculty” (1933) were written, the former displaying a nostalgia for the purity of a language forever lost to the corruption of post-Fall mediation, 6 while the latter essays display an acquiescence to language’s mediation that is no longer so despairing (Hanssen, “Language and Mimesis in Walter Benjamin’s Work” 65-66). Just as in the “Critique of Violence,” where pure

6 Hanssen summarizes the nostalgic position as follows: “Just as creation inspired through pure language, so the fall occurred in language, affecting its purity as well as the language-spirit. Now removed from its root origin, the power of the name hardly survived in the mundane everydayness characterizing the merely finite human word …” (Hanssen, “Language and Mimesis” 61). 154 violence achieves its revolutionary potential through its status as pure means, as mediality without any relation to law as its end (that is, without any end at all), so the purely mediating function of language may be endowed with a similar revolutionary potential with regard to linguistic convention. Certainly this is the potential Hamacher assigns to the category of the afformative, the linguistic form that deposes the law through endless mediation—through mediality that moves toward no end at all. This is not to say that language does not lead to meaning, or that violence never leads to ends; as

Hamacher writes, “Benjamin does not deny that language is both sign and address, nor that any violence may serve as means to ends; but the instrumentality of language and of violence cannot even be thought, let alone critically analysed, unless irreducible mediality is thought as its absolute condition” (127).

Reading the “Critique of Violence” together with “On Language as Such and On the Language of Man,” therefore, we can conceptualize pure violence as that which would depose the law that the forced unity of linguistic form and content (or signifier and referent) mythically constructs. In order for language to effect a pure violence of form, it must posit itself as pure means, which would denote a kind of infinite working out of form and content, without resolution of the two into the mythical construction of law.

However, even though I am considering the deposing capacity of violence according to its implications for literary form, I would like to maintain that the violence considered in

Benjamin’s “Critique” must not be seen merely as a metaphorical category, a way of figuring or accounting for formal manipulation in works of literature. That is, turning back to Cooper, I am insisting on the brutality that constitutes the content of his literature as much as I am highlighting his literature’s attention to form, in order to argue that it is 155 by practicing violence in form and content equally that Cooper is able to depose literary convention in a way that allows his novels to manifest the kind of materiality that is proper to them as texts .

IV. Entirely Violent Violence

Cooper’s work can only accomplish this, of course, without resolving the tension between form and content, since such a resolution would only reproduce that “mythic origin of law” that the afformative deposes. Such an unresolved tension is achieved in his texts through a radical foregrounding of their textuality. One way in which this works in Closer is through the novel’s presentation of many views on the question of art’s relationship to reality, and its ultimate refusal to endorse explicitly any of the positions it offers. Perhaps most significantly, the allusion to Dorian Gray is made in a draft of a speech that John never delivers, so that whatever argument might be advanced through that allusion is finally undermined. At the last minute, John scraps that original speech and says only, “my portraits speak for themselves” ( Closer 6). He thus ascribes to artwork the ability to “speak,” bestowing upon art a status independent of the world it is supposed to represent. This independence works to guarantee art’s status as both representation and that which is represented, and it works to frustrate any attempt to find meaning in the artwork. Furthermore, the allusion to Wilde, even if John did not discard it, enacts the same frustration: to begin with, the description of art happens only by means of another description of art—that is, the characterization of John’s art is produced only by means of reference to a novel, which, as a work of fiction, offers little in the way of concrete interpretation. Moreover, the fact that the novel referenced is The Picture of

Dorian Gray complicates this still further, because what Wilde’s novel performs is not 156 just a subversion of realism, but also a subversion of realism by means of an artwork . It is not just that Dorian’s body is not real in the realist tradition elucidated by Armstrong, but also that the representation (Dorian’s portrait) is shown to be more real than its bodily referent (Dorian himself).

This resolve to steep his texts further and further in levels of representation is evident in all of Cooper’s work, but perhaps nowhere more obviously than in The Sluts .

That novel deviates sharply from the conventional prose style that dominates both the

George Miles cycle (with the exception of Period , the last novel in the quintology), and the novel that follows the cycle, My Loose Thread . The Sluts is comprised entirely of text from the website of a fictional gay male escort service, and consists of surveys in which users review their escorts, an ad section that includes chatting among users, a message board, and an “Email/Fax” section. Its form thus marks a flagrant departure from the realist narration we have observed in Closer . However, the novel’s claim to be a compilation of material cut-and-pasted from the website—an illusion of authenticity that is sustained for the duration of the text—preserves that adherence to the transcriptive promise of mimesis that, I have argued, works at guaranteeing the documentation of reality, even as Cooper’s texts insist firmly on their status as representational forms without reference to an identifiable extratextual world.

As with Closer , and all of Cooper’s work, The Sluts accomplishes that insistence on its textuality, perhaps paradoxically, by means of its representation of the body. The first review in the novel presents an escort named Brad, and, like all the reviews, includes a list of his general physical attributes (height, weight, hair color, eye color), as well as more intimate information (penis size, whether or not he is circumcised, whether or not 157 he kisses his clients, whether he is “top, bottom, [or] versatile”). Thus, from the very beginning, Brad is presented in physical and sexual terms. However, although Cooper foregrounds Brad’s bodily existence, with these corporeal features serving to identify and define him as a character, that identity is soon called into question as reviews of Brad accumulate. To begin with, the first reviewer is hesitant to offer Brad’s measurements with certainty, and thus follows many of his answers with question marks (“5’11”?,”

“150 lbs.?,” “6 inches?” ( The Sluts 1-2)). The reviewers that follow also frequently insert question marks into their responses, and eventually the answers range diversely enough that users of the website begin to wonder whether the reviews refer to the same Brad.

And this diversity of physical information in turn allows clients of the escort service to wonder whether the escort they hired might not be Brad working under a pseudonym.

Thus we begin to see name entries like “Brad aka Steve” (17), “Kevin aka Brad” (21), and “Brad?” (38). Brad, it seems, has ceased to be a name that must refer to a given real individual, or even a given deindividualized body—at times it seems that “Brad” could only refer to an instantiation of certain fairly non-specific attributes (male escort, psychologically unstable, located in Southern California, about eighteen years old). We are thus reminded of Benjamin’s argument that the name does not of necessity refer to any concrete object in the language of man; rather, the name is an abstract entity, arbitrarily joined to an object according to a mythic law that would conceal the name’s arbitrariness. Cooper’s writing deposes that mythic law by exposing the arbitrary nature of the relationship between the name and its object. Furthermore, he does so by actually relying on the name’s authenticity: he constructs a narrative whose progression depends 158 on an initial assumption that “Brad” will represent a given individual with concrete physical attributes.

Although pure violence is, according to Hamacher, “entirely non-violent,” The

Sluts points out how uncomfortably such a characterization sits with the scenes of brutality that fill a Cooper text. In that novel, after all, it is Brad’s apparent masochism and his purported relationship with the abusive Brian (whose “all time fantasy is to murder a boy during the sex act” (16)) that sustains the site users’ interest. Once violence is introduced in the clients’ narration of their experiences with Brad, it becomes important to affirm or disavow the truth of the narratives posted on the site, and the revelation of Brad’s identity (if any Brad exists at all) takes on a new urgency. In this way, The Sluts seems to advise that a studied attention be paid to the violence that pervades and motivates the whole text. As one user comments on the site’s message board:

let’s just admit that we don’t want to fuck Brad, we want to kill him. There are hundreds of Brads out there ready to be fucked. We’re obsessed with Brad and Brian because the murder thing gives us a boner….Brad’s probably a real person, but the Brad we’re all obsessed with is a fantasy. Let’s admit it and talk openly about our deep dark secret. I’ll be happy to start. My secret fantasy is to rape, torture, and kill Nick Carter of the Backstreet Boys....He’s my Brad. Who’s yours? (111)

Here, the user urges others intrigued by the Brad narrative to “admit” that Brad’s identity is of little consequence to them, revealing the arbitrary importance of Brad himself. The signifier’s original referent, he argues, has become utterly insignificant. But signification has not been expelled altogether; rather, the significance of whatever “Brad” might have initially referred to has been supplanted by a new meaning: a “deep dark secret,” which is the violence that the name “Brad” now promises. 159

Given this exhortation that we acknowledge the importance of violence in the narrative, we must also “admit” that if we consider pure violence formally, without also considering the violence that is depicted in the content of Cooper’s work, we will have ignored Annesley’s response to Young’s formalist reading, we will not have addressed the problem of the materiality of such violence. Given that, as I have argued, Cooper’s fiction strives to underline the absence of an extratextual referent in his narratives, we must ask what the materiality of Cooper’s violence could possibly be, if not, to use

Armstrong’s phrase, “a real object behind the visible surface” of the representation. In order that such an inquiry be pursued, the status of the violent content of Cooper’s work needs to be afforded the same kind of attention we have been paying so far to the violence of its apparently realist forms.

In Closer , as in The Picture of Dorian Gray , the terms of the traditional mimetic relationship are shifted; however, whereas in Wilde’s novel the respective status of object and its representation are inverted, in Cooper’s text, the two seem to be conflated. At first, both the body and the abuse done to it are defined equally as representation, as they are described by means of artistic rhetoric. As though performing an experiment of line and color, John bites the punk “in a regular pattern,” producing wounds that are “a really crass pink except the ones farther up, which had turned kind of violet.” John goes on to whip the punk, and here the violence is further aestheticized: “each lash left a red ribbon.

He tried to aim, but the ribbons still came out too lopsided, so he had to make the whole area red. He was filling it in…” (11). At the same time that the punk is utterly dehumanized, his abuse rendered metaphoric (the word “ribbons” accomplishes this particularly) and his pain completely disregarded by John and by the narration, he seems 160 to take on a significant double function with respect to John’s artistic production. On one hand, he is described as though he were canvas and paint, or clay to be shaped and transformed—the material used by the artist, which determines the formal features of the artwork: “[John] pushed the punk’s legs apart and adjusted them like an old TV antenna until the ass was roughly the shape of a box.” On the other hand, he is the object of the artwork—he is that which it represents, its referent: “a bleeding punk kid was…horrific and ridiculous and sort of moving too” (11).

Thus in this scene of violence, the body, rather than being opposed to representation, becomes its own representation. What this means is that John’s violence signals the absolute materialization of bodily representation in text, since the body is not only represented, but is even transformed into representation: the punk’s body is not merely the referent of John’s artwork; it is the artwork. In this way, by functioning both as a representation of the object and the object itself, the punk’s body becomes material through John’s act of violence: it becomes the material of art. The fact that this materialization takes place within another representation (the novel) serves to emphasize further the body’s status as artistic material, and this has the effect of further disconnecting it from any real-world referent it might be said to imitate: the punk is only art, only text, even as Cooper’s prose continues to provide a realist transcription of the scene. Here, therefore, the mimetic paradigm discussed earlier, wherein signifier and signified are equivalent, is upheld by Cooper’s transcriptive prose, but the scene’s emphasis on artistic materiality—rather than the materiality of a physical extratextual referent—highlights the textuality of the punk’s body and the violence to it, thus highlighting the absence of any real-world object that the text would represent. In this 161 literary staging of violence as art, therefore, we can see what Benjamin calls the necessary abandonment of “immediacy in the communication of the concrete” ( SW1 72), since the concrete object (the body) is conspicuously missing in Cooper’s linguistic expression. What remains, then, is to locate the “new immediacy” (71) that Benjamin ascribes to the language of man, and to determine its relationship to the immediacy by which pure violence is defined.

John’s violence in Closer also underlines the dual nature of materiality: it operates on the level of content, at the same time that it possesses a formal component. The abused punk is, first of all, the material content of John’s artwork, since he is the object that is being represented. And, second, the punk also becomes material in a formal sense, because his body provides the colors and shapes that constitute the form of the artwork.

This is not to suggest that Cooper is here running form and content together in an attempt to conceal the artwork’s means of production. As discussed earlier, Coward and Ellis argue that an emphasis on representation as a product (as opposed to a process of production) constitutes the hallmark of mimetic representation: such an emphasis on the mimetic product would signal a representation that aims at the fulfillment of ends. This kind of teleological representation matches Benjamin’s characterization of the law, and this is not what the coalescence of form and content in Closer accomplishes. Rather than pretending to recuperate the concrete, extratextual object of representation, Cooper’s collapse of form and content in John’s artistic violence is a conspicuous one, performed in order to demonstrate just how dangerous (or, to use Benjamin’s word, “pernicious”

(SW1 252)) such a mythical recuperation of the concrete object in text would be. When the materiality of form and content coincide in Cooper, what we get is not the original 162 object of representation, but rather, as Plato predicted, “phantoms”: having left the punk to briefly pursue George Miles (who arguably represents the concrete object that the entire quintology is a doomed attempt to recuperate), John follows “a trail of blood” to see “the punk’s silhouette shivering in the light coming through a glass window.” This silhouette is able to act as a body does—it “tensed, turned, broke off a chunk of glass”

(Closer 12)—but we must recognize that the confluence of material form and content effected by John’s violent art has not produced a more embodied description of the punk.

Instead, it has bestowed bodily function upon a silhouette, a shadow like those projected onto the walls of Plato’s cave, like those mere signs in Benjamin’s abyss of mediation. It has made the utter absence of the body in text into material—it has made the signifier itself (and its attendant lack of real-world referent) material.

IV. Looking Closer: Frisk

This expulsion of the material body in exchange for the materiality of text is not only seen in Closer , but in fact structures Cooper’s entire oeuvre. In this section, I offer a more substantial reading of a text by Cooper than I have furnished so far, attempting to present an interpretation that crystallizes the theoretical issues I have been discussing.

Frisk , the second novel of the George Miles cycle, begins with the following: “He lies naked on a bed with his wrists bound, legs splayed, ankles secured to the corners. Striped sheet, tangled blanket” (3). In these sentences, the realist style we have seen in Closer is inaugurated in the details Cooper offers, as this opening scene is depicted with a clarity that promises a fictional world easily accessed by the reader (especially visually), a world whose straightforwardly mimetic style seems to guarantee its reference to a stable extratextual object. However, as we would expect, this illusion of transparently realist 163 representation is complicated as the clearly rendered image is revealed as such in the next sentence, with the words “in the first shot.” This phrase informs the reader that, even as the reality of the boy on the bed materializes, that reality is mediated by the instruments and techniques of photography, so that what the reader sees is not a boy tied to a bed, but rather a picture of a boy tied to a bed. Furthermore, the reference to images, because it raises the question of mediation by alluding explicitly to the photographic medium, causes another level of mediation to manifest itself—this time, the mediation of language, because the reader is compelled to recognize that he or she is not only looking at an image of a boy on a bed, rather than the boy himself, but also that he or she is not actually looking at the image, either. Rather, the reader experiences the production of that mediating image through the mediation of words.

Four more shots are described in this brief opening section of the novel. In the fourth, we are told that the boy is facedown, and that his “ass sports a squarish blotch, resembling ones that hide hard-core sexual acts, but more sloppily drawn” (4). From the close-up angle of the fifth shot, we discover that “the blotch is actually the mouth of a shallow cave, like the sort ocean waves carve in cliffs” (4). Because the literary montage moves from the mediation of the “squarish blotch” (which, because it only resembles the censor’s mark, sloppily drawn, is itself a mediated form of a mediation) to what, we assume, is “actually” the photographed subject’s anus itself, it might be argued that this opening sequence demonstrates Cooper’s commitment to producing a realistic, credible textual world that which the novelist aims to reveal in a detailed and total way.

However, despite Cooper’s “actually,” which promises immediate knowledge of the mediated image, it becomes clear that the narrator is not “actually” telling us what we 164 are looking at. Although details like the smoothness of the boy’s skin (“the uneven frame of ass skin is impeccably smooth”) place the reader in the position of the observer, with a clear and apparently unobstructed view of the object of the text’s gaze, the fact that “the blotch is actually the mouth of a shallow cave, like the sort ocean waves carve in cliffs” only represents the blotch metaphorically; it does not “actually” name the blotch. And although it appears to be the anus, Cooper’s oblique description constructs something other than the boy’s asshole, and this “something other” seems hinted at by the reference to “hard-core sexual acts.” In addition to this suggestion of sex acts (which, notably, are not named), we realize that “squarish” is an unusual shape for the anus, and it is also unusual that it would be so visibly exposed. It should be in the narrator’s account of the fifth shot—the close-up—that Cooper’s realist narration elucidates the ambiguity of this medium shot, producing a textual reality accessible to the reader, telling us what we are

“actually” looking at, but instead we get an elusive (and allusive, insofar as it is Platonic) cave metaphor, with words like “carve” and “chopped-up” only suggesting the violence potentially performed by the “hard-core sexual acts” referred to earlier.

Cooper closes the five-shot introductory montage with the following: “at its [the cave’s] center’s a pit, or a small tunnel entrance, too out-of-focus to actually explore with one’s eyes, but too mysterious not to want to try” (4). Thus the core of the image—the center of the cave—is a pit, not an answer to the question of what we are reading about, not an explication of what the image actually depicts, but rather an empty space, which, if it is “a small tunnel entrance,” leads somewhere else, somewhere “too out-of-focus to actually explore with one’s eyes.” What is inside the cave will not be known, what is 165 seen in the image or described in the passage representing the image will not be identified, and yet it is “too mysterious not to want to try.”

The implication here seems to be that the rest of Frisk will constitute the attempt to probe the out-of-focus mystery of this opening shot, that the novel will try to present what cannot be “actually explore[d] with one’s eyes.” The text thus defines its project as the construction of a reality that is not immediately accessible in the image—that is, the making-immediate of its object by means of the literary medium. The novel’s conclusion offers another set of five shots of a naked teenaged boy tied to a bed, echoing and elucidating the introductory montage. In the fourth shot of the final sequence, where previously we have seen that “the boy’s ass sports a squarish blotch,” we are now told that “his asscrack is covered with something that vaguely resembles a wound when you squint” (128): thus the reader is finally informed, directly, that the blotch of the first sequence was meant to symbolize a wound. But Cooper’s revelation of the blotch as wound does not, in fact, deliver us transparently to the thing itself, but rather further emphasizes its opacity, since, in these last shots, what we are offered is something that

“vaguely resembles a wound.” And it is in the fifth shot, described in the novel’s final paragraph, that Cooper rejects once and for all the possibility that the text could offer anything but the representation of representation: here he amplifies the wound’s purely linguistic status by setting the word “wound” between quotation marks, making immediately visible what Benjamin identifies as the abstract character of communication after the Fall. At the end of Frisk , as in the beginning, we are told what the “wound”

“actually” is, but now this “actually” is revealed to be the actuality of representation: “a 166 glop of paint, ink, makeup, tape, cotton, tissue, and papier-mâché sculpted to suggest the inside of a human body” (128).

Just as in Closer , where the punk emerges not as a bodily object but rather as a silhouette, a representation of the text’s necessary inability to offer the abused body, so in

Frisk the text confesses its inability to produce a “real” bodily referent for the photographic image: the mutilated anus is a fake. What makes this exposure of representation as such particularly compelling is what has transpired in between these opening and closing montages, because it is in the intervening chapters that compose the bulk of Frisk that Cooper narrates acts of ruthless violence in gruesome detail. One of the final chapters of the novel is a letter from the novel’s first-person narrator, named

Dennis, to a childhood friend of his, Julian. In the letter, Dennis reminds Julian of the fantasy they shared as teenagers, of killing a boy during a sexual act, and Dennis explains that he has made that fantasy a reality through a series of murders performed at his current residence in a windmill in Amsterdam. Dennis recounts his first murder as beyond his control: “I picked up an empty beer bottle without even thinking and hit the guy over the head. I don’t know why.” This admission of ignorance as to his own motivation suggests that his status as agent of the murder does not interfere with the objectivity cultivated throughout the novel by Dennis the narrator (or by Dennis Cooper the novelist). This documentary attitude that, we have seen, is the hallmark of mimetic prose, continues as the violence of the scene escalates and ends in the victim’s death.

Surprised by his own calmness, Dennis surmises, “I guess I’d fantasized killing a boy for so long that all the truth did was fill in details” (92). 167

This “filling in details” suggests that Dennis’s letter functions in the novel to make good on what it initially identified as its goal: to discern that which is “too out-of- focus to actually explore with one’s eyes, but too mysterious not to want to try” (4).

After describing several more murders, the letter ends with Dennis’s invitation to Julian to come participate in the violence. “I’m telling you, Julian,” Dennis writes, “this is some kind of ultimate truth. Come on, do it” (107). When Julian arrives in Amsterdam, he demands that Dennis “confess” that he’s “no John Wayne Gacy” (123), to which

Dennis replies simply, “Correct.” And with that word the bloody contents of his letter— of the novel as a whole—are transformed into mere inky fiction.

This revelation of the letter’s fictionality is of course echoed in the identification of the opening “blotch” as a wound in the sequence that concludes the novel, where the

“wound” is finally identified as “actually a glop of paint” (128). In a sense, Frisk does present the “ultimate truth” that Dennis promises to Julian, but it is ultimately the truth of its own lie, the documentation of its own fiction, which is delivered. And what is peculiar about this disclosure, performed through Dennis’s paradoxical confession that he has not killed anyone and through the demonstration of the snuff photo’s constructedness, is that it should be altogether unnecessary, as it is a truth the reader knows even before beginning the text: Cooper’s novel is a work of fiction.

Even more peculiar is the fact that it is the seemingly objective narration of brutal violence that brings the novel to this banal conclusion. Cooper’s unrelentingly vivid realism promises its reader an unmediated access to the violence it depicts, as Dennis describes how he “ground the broken bottle” into the face of his victim, “really twisting and shoving it in,” sparing no detail as he recounts that his “cock slid out” and his victim 168

“shit all over his legs and the bed on his way to the floor” (91). But when Dennis eventually denies the letter’s truth, the immediacy that his depictions of violence seemed to produce is corrupted, as the invisibility of mediation—the product of a carefully constructed realist style—comes into view. This is what I mean when I say that the textuality of the novel becomes material, in the sense of Butler’s material signifier: “some kind of ultimate truth,” as Dennis asserts, is fully illuminated, but that truth is the fact of the novel’s constructedness, its lack of concrete referent—not the referent itself.

V. A New Immediacy Past the Trail of Blood

What this means is that Cooper’s language, though condemned abysmally, as

Benjamin would say, to mediation, has managed to achieve a “new immediacy,” which, significantly, Benjamin identifies as “the magic of judgment” ( SW1 71-72). Benjamin’s firm situation in the German philosophical tradition makes it difficult to ignore the loud

Kantian overtones of the term “judgment,” so that Benjamin’s new immediacy should be understood to have something to do with Kant’s Critique of “those judgings that are called aesthetic, which concern the beautiful and the sublime in nature and in art” (Kant

57). Those judgings concern that “power…which in the order of our faculties of cognition constitutes an intermediary between understanding and reason” (Kant 56, my emphasis). For Benjamin, the intermediary faculty of judgment is the manifestation of an

“immediacy in the communication of abstraction” (72); it is that immediacy—the immediacy of the abstract—which, I am arguing, is delivered at the end of Frisk and in

Cooper’s work more generally. As Hanssen notes, Benjamin’s “On Language” essay records how

the Fall initiated an idolatrous practice of mimesis (here: inauthentic similarity), the spectacle of parody, in which fallen, mediate language imitated original immediacy. Abstraction now ruled in logical and philosophical propositions no less than in the 169

judgments and sentences dispensed in the name of the secular…. (“Language and Mimesis” 61-62)

Hanssen points out that the early essays’ negative valorization of mediate language’s imitation of original mediacy is replaced by a more positive outlook in Benjamin’s later work, where Benjamin “developed a redemptive concept of imitation” (68) that he based on humans’ natural tendency toward mimetic behavior. Thus although Benjamin still recognizes the abstraction essential to mimesis, that abstraction has itself taken on a new value, what Benjamin calls a “new immediacy,” according to which what is made immediate is not the object itself, or the name as organically bound to the object, but rather the name as object itself. 7 To this end, Hanssen writes the following, citing

Benjamin’s Arcades Project : “as ‘the object of mimesis,’ the name simultaneously brought together its bearer’s past and future, as it both ‘preserves, but also marks out in advance’ ‘the habitus of lived life’” (“Language and Mimesis” 69).

Hanssen’s underscoring of the temporal work of the name—as that which brings together “past and future”—recalls the problem of temporality raised by the realism of

American Psycho . That problem, which highlighted the political stakes raised by Ellis’s novel, is addressed here by Benjamin’s “redemptive” imitative name, which, as Hanssen suggests, might be understood to reflect upon that which the name produces in the future, as well as the preexisting world that the name describes. It is particularly significant that both what is performed and what is described by the name remain on the level of abstraction. Thus the language of man must replace the immediacy of naming in original language (language as such) with an immediacy that Benjamin identifies as proper to the

7 Hanssen also notes that Benjamin’s redemptive mimetic concept is “similar to Adorno’s equally complex conception of a beneficial mimesis” (68), which I addressed in Chapter 1, especially with reference to Adorno’s “Notes on Kafka.” 170 necessarily mediated language of man. Like the immediacy that pure violence achieves in deposing the law, this is an immediacy that exists as means, as “nothing but means,” in

Hamacher’s words, and therefore without relation to an end. It is for this reason that

Benjamin’s new immediacy must be located in the communication of abstraction—not the state of the abstract, but rather the process of becoming abstracted.

In Frisk , we can see this process in the final identification of the “blotch” as an artistic construction produced by ink, paint, and other art supplies. In Closer , we can see it in the punk’s transformation into silhouette. Not only is the punk no longer presented as if he stood in for a real body existing prior to the text, but his abstraction is also made immediately manifest. Thus the immediacy of Cooper’s text is to be found in its capacity for transformation, and it is the violence performed in its content and form that is able to facilitate such metamorphosis: John’s brutality alters the punk bodily, and the manipulation of mimetic convention in Cooper’s prose effects its pure violence, transforming the physicality of the “bleeding punk kid” into an abstraction, a shadow that acknowledges its lack of a referential source, and thus deposes realist law by exposing and disavowing the law’s end-oriented desire for an object.

But this absolutely does not mean that Cooper’s violent content is narrated only in order to facilitate a violence of form, to articulate the author’s anarchist worldview. In that case, the violence of the texts we have examined would still be of a representational kind, though the object of those representations would no longer be concrete, real-world referents; now the violent scenes would be representing something like anarchy, or formalism, or even non-representationality itself. Cooper’s work avoids such a thematization of the violence of form, which would shift the object of representation but 171 would conserve its structure, by constructing a violence in form and content that reiterate each other, that refer to each other, that produce each other. Thus it is not just that

Cooper narrates violent acts in order to engender pure violence against realist form, but also that he effects pure violence against realist form in order to narrate violent acts. As

John in Closer demonstrates when he starts “filling…in” the red lines of lashing that he leaves on the punk’s backside, that formal violence necessitates violence of content for its articulation—the formal figure of violence must be filled in with violent content. By infinitely mirroring itself thus in form and content, Cooper’s violence becomes, as

Benjamin suggests, its own end, and, in the infinitude of this self-referentiality, it is endless, it exists as pure means.

In Closer , as we saw earlier, such a representation of violence results in the revelation of the mimetic system’s production of an exaggerated signification that admits no extratextual referent; the punk becomes an artwork, a silhouette, an abstraction—and this is the (purely representational) materiality the text has to offer. As I have pointed out before, Annesley objects to Young’s reading of Cooper’s fiction primarily on the basis that Young’s attention to form does not address the materiality of the violence contained therein. Annesley maintains that, although Cooper “offer[s] abstract images of bodily violence stripped of context, referent, and meaning,” he also opposes such abstraction with “moments that reinscribe the materiality of the experiences described” (Annesley

73). But what Cooper’s fiction reveals above all is that materiality and abstraction are not mutually exclusive terms, and that, furthermore, it is the abstraction inherent in linguistic representation—in signification, through the highlighting of the signifier itself—that is made material in his work. 172

Although Annesley’s emphasis on the violent content of Cooper’s work is doubtless an important response to those who would read the text only in terms of its form, it is this latter point—Cooper’s very keen awareness of the lack of concrete, physical bodies in text, and his conscientious underscoring of that lack—that Annesley’s reading seems to pass over. What is particularly interesting in Annesley’s interpretation is that, although its ostensible project is to show that “beneath the glassy fictions of abstract violence lies…a world of bodies, a world of material realities” (75), his argument also utilizes the figure of the body in ways that ultimately obscure its “material reality,” and thus appear to align the body with abstraction rather than materiality. Referring to the

“shimmering skin” (74) of Cooper’s text, Annesley grants a bodily status even to that formal structure that, he wants to argue, conceals the “material experiences lying underneath” it. His assertion that “Cooper’s violent descriptions are, in the end, moments that nail his fluid abstract images onto a material framework” (74) performs a similar conflation of the abstract and the material, even as he strives to distinguish the two: if

“fluid abstract images” can be nailed down, they must themselves possess some measure of materiality. Furthermore, by figuring the materiality produced by violence as a

“framework,” Annesley undercuts his own argument for the role of the material body by likening it to the inanimate object of a frame. Ultimately, however, what this reading accomplishes (in spite of Annesley’s explicit agenda) is an accurate account of the work that Closer performs, since Annesley’s image objectifies the material body by presenting it as something framed, an artwork , just as the punk’s body becomes John’s artistic product through its subjection to violence. Given this, we cannot accept Annesley’s effort to recuperate the materiality of violence through the materiality of the physical 173 world presented in Cooper’s work. Rather, we should settle on a conception of materiality that can accomodate the inevitable textuality of Cooper’s work, for its irreducible status as artwork: we can now identify the “fluid abstract images” or the

“shimmering skin” Annesley refers to not as that which covers over the material world the text conceals, but rather as the text’s own unique material reality.

For Benjamin, as for Butler, such a material reality in no way excludes language; in fact, the materiality of art is always related to language, regardless of the artwork’s verbal content:

There is a language of sculpture, of painting, of poetry. Just as the language of poetry is partly, if not solely, founded on the name language of man, it is very conceivable that the language of sculpture or painting is founded on certain kinds of thing-languages, that in them we find a translation of the language of things into an infinitely higher language, which may still be of the same sphere. We are concerned here with nameless, nonacoustic languages, languages issuing from matter; here we should recall the material community of things in their communication. ( SW1 73)

Recalling Benjamin’s own concept of the “new immediacy” whose potential resides in the language of man (the immediacy that exists “in the communicability of abstraction,” which is defined as “judgment”), we can see that this passage underlines in all forms of art a similar inextricability from mediation. This highlighting of the essential mediatedness of art is accomplished here by the figure of language, and more specifically by the figure of translation as the movement between languages. For Benjamin, of course, this movement is never the end-oriented substitution of one word for another, not

“the sterile equation of two dead languages,” but is rather the work “charged with the special mission of watching over the maturing process of the original language and the birth pangs of its own” (“The Task of the Translator,” SW1 256). The translator’s task is thus one of cultivating becoming—becoming mature, becoming born—rather than one of equation; the translator must not set up a system whereby the signified of one language 174 finds its corresponding signifier in another; instead, he or she must “watch over” what

Benjamin is careful to call a “process”—a shift from one expressive structure to another.

What this passage emphasizes, moreover, is the material character of mediation by language, so that matter is understood as having its own languages, as issuing languages itself. Thus the materiality of the fictional body can be understood not as a prioritized, substantive form that language seeks belatedly to represent; rather, materiality itself is understood as communication. It is not the experience of the real-world body (as

Annesley defines it), but rather the means by which an artwork communicates, moves toward (verbal) language by means of (“nameless, nonacoustic”) language. This is the

“notion of matter” that Butler also proposes—not matter “as site or surface, but as a process of materialization ” ( BM 9, original emphasis). Although “we may seek recourse to matter” (as Annesley does) “in order to ground or to verify a set of injuries or violations,” we will find that “ matter itself is founded through a set of violations , ones which are unwittingly repeated in the contemporary invocation” ( BM 29, original emphasis). For Cooper, of course, the repetition is altogether witting, part of a project of violence that claims its materiality through ostentatious displays of its violation.

VI. Dismantling the Grandfather’s Clock

Cooper emphasizes that his aim in writing the George Miles cycle was to represent formally the violence and mutilation that make up the content of his writing: “I wanted the structure of that sequence to involve a novel gradually dismembering itself, or being dismembered” ( Enter at Your Own Risk 249). In his brief but highly suggestive

“Notes on Frisk ,” William S. Burroughs sees that novel as enacting just such a formal dismemberment. For Burroughs, Cooper’s novel puts forth the consequences of the 175 desire “to take [the male body] apart, like a boy dismantling a clock, looking for what makes it talk, eat, move, fuck” (Burroughs 80)—a desire that pervades Cooper’s oeuvre in general and Frisk in particular. Burroughs stages his “Notes” as an argument between himself and John Wheeler (“a big physicist and very technical” (80)), comparing

Wheeler’s scientific methods to Cooper’s representations of bodily mutilation. In this comparison, what Burroughs produces first of all is an apt characterization of the exactitude of Cooper’s writing, and it is his identification of the precision of Cooper’s realism that leads Burroughs to liken him to the “very technical” scientist. Having cited a passage from Frisk , Burroughs comments, “The reader can smell and see it. Doesn’t matter whether he shares any of the sexual inclinations; as transcription of experience, this passage is superb” (81). This emphasis on “transcription” reminds us of Coward and

Ellis’s definition of realism, and also serves to strengthen the analogy between Cooper and Wheeler; for Burroughs, the author and the scientist are both observers who record their observations as accurately as possible. However, Burroughs suggests that only

Cooper, whose “dismantling” conspicuously reveals the violence of such observations is able to make manifest what is pernicious in such a desire to know reality. That is,

Cooper’s work exposes the danger of seeking knowledge of an object intimately, and of representing that knowledge as reality: this is the danger of forcing an identity between representation and its object, and, in particular, of masking the distinction between form and content in order to mask the representation’s status as such.

Therefore, Burroughs argues, what Cooper’s explorations reveal is not an intimate, total truth located at the interior of the male body that his novels relentlessly incise and probe, but rather “the alarming principle of uncertainty: by dismembering or 176 measuring anything, you alter its grandfather’s clock all over the fake Persian carpet”

(82). When it aims at the lucid comprehension of reality, we could say, such dismembering alters those very mechanisms by which reality is measured and produced.

The “grandfather’s clock” must be understood to symbolize—like Platonic mimesis— those inherited standards by which the world is still gauged. Burroughs suggests, therefore, that Cooper’s narrative and thematic violence show those standards to be alterable. Furthermore, the Persian carpet that would dignify such a monument of standardization is revealed as a fake: what his tampering with realist tradition accomplishes is the exposure of imitation as such.

I have suggested earlier that Cooper’s ostentatious imitation of mimesis produces a narrative form that deposes those conventions that it invokes. I have also argued that this deposing is related to what Cooper calls his anarchist worldview; through such a resistance to any established literary form, Cooper’s fiction is able to produce a form adequate to the rank and disgusting acts that compose much of its content. Burroughs seems to argue that Cooper tampers with the mimetic system in order to demonstrate how grave the consequences of a transparent imitation of gruesome violence would be; thus, for Burroughs, Cooper demonstrates that “neither the dismembered universe nor the dismembered body function.” Therefore, even though the orgiastic violence of Cooper’s literature would appear to affirm Aleister Crowley’s famous declaration that “do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law,” Burroughs contends that Cooper’s work ultimately demonstrates that “‘do what you want’ is the hole in the Law” (82). That is,

Cooper’s materialization of violence in text is precisely not the law; it is the process of deposing the law. 177

By producing a materiality that is entirely textual, Cooper’s fiction posits that its violence can only be the pure violence of the “entirely non-violent.” This must be the case, since the textual exception to novelistic convention that Cooper’s work instantiates—“the hole in the Law”—is an infinite tension, an unmeasurable force. It is the endless subversion of representation that refers to itself, that insists on its own priority. It is finally, Burroughs suggests, “a black hole where no physical laws apply”

(82).