Towards a =,evinasian Acestheticco the Tension between 'Implication and Transcendence in Selected Fiction by J.M. Coetzee by Michael John Marais submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of D.Litt. et Phil. in the Department of English, Faculty of Arts, Rand Afrikaans University Promoter: Professor Rory Ryan October 1997 Abstract This study explores the tension between politics and ethics in selected novels by J.M Coetzee. It contends that, in this writer's fiction, ethics is conceived of in Levinasian terms as a relation of responsibility for the other which is grounded in an acknowledgement of the other's radical difference to the same. The thesis examines Coetzee's self-reflexive investigation of the problem for novelistic representation posed by this conception of ethics. In order to contextualise this examination, the first chapter of the study establishes that the form and medium of the novel install a relation of correlation between same and other, and that the novel-as-genre therefore routinely forecloses on, rather than maintains a relation of difference to, alterity. Chapter One also traces the various strategies through which Coetzee's novels attempt not only to prevent the medium and form of the novel-as-genre from reducing the other to an object and thereby violating it, but also to impart a sense of that which inevitably exceeds, and so transcends, this genre's representational protocols. By means of such strategies of excession, the study contends, Coetzee's texts endeavour to inscribe a responsible relation to the other. The four remaining chapters of the thesis trace Coetzee's installation of strategies of excession, and therefore of an ethical aesthetic, in Dusklands, Life and Times of Michael K, Foe, Age of Iron and The Master of Petersburg. They also consider these novels' self-conscious articulation of the ethical implications of such strategies. Chapter Four and Chapter Five pay special attention to the inscription in Coetzee's later fiction of a debate on the possible effect on the reader of the individual text's ethical relation to the other. In this regard, the thesis argues that the ultimate purpose of Coetzee's attempt to respond responsibly to alterity in his writing is to enable the other to approach the reader in the course of the literary encounter. It thereby demonstrates that Coetzee's concern with ethics is deeply political: in attempting to contrive an ethical relation between the reader and the other, the individual text seeks to secure a mediation of the political by the ethical. Acknowledgements I would like to thank the following for their support in the completion of this project: Sue Marais for her careful reading and thoughtful comments; Rory Ryan for his criticisms and refusal to legislate; Johan Geertsema for commenting on a first draft of the second chapter; Craig MacKenzie and Haidar Eid for all their encouragement; the staff of the RAU library; Kyle Marais for the unsolicited but welcome distractions; my parents for their encouragement over the years. 1 TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction 1 Chapter 1 The Novel and the Question of Respect for the Other 15 Chapter 2 The Aesthetics of Supplementarity and Rivalry in "The Narrative of Jacobus Coetzee" 75 Chapter 3 The Tension between Implication and Transcendence in Life and Times of Michael K 131 Chapter 4 The Aesthetic of Surprise in Foe 193 Chapter 5 The Aesthetic of Love in Age of Iron and The Master of Petersburg 264 Conclusion 352 Bibliography 358 1 Introduction In an interview with David Attwell, J.M. Coetzee refers as follows to a tension between politics and ethics in his fiction: "I think you will find the contest of interpretations I have sketched here -- the political versus the ethical -- played out again and again in my novels" (Coetzee, 1992: 338; see also Attridge, 1994: 70). Much of this thesis is devoted to examining this tension and its impact on the aesthetic of Coetzee's fiction, that is, its inscription in the various novels of a singular relation to history. Since I contend that the understanding of the relation between ethics and politics which emerges from Coetzee's fiction is very similar to that of the philosopher, Emmanuel Levinas, a few preliminary remarks are necessary to clarify the latter's somewhat idiosyncratic conception of ethics. For Levinas, ethics is inextricably related to the notion of respect for alterity, and is not to be confused with conventional systems of morality which provide the norms that govern social behaviour. Such systems, according to Levinas, would form part of the order of the "same", that is, part of an order which maintains a relation with the "other" that is premised on its violent reduction (see Levinas, 1991: 26, 28, 31ff.). The relation between same and other which informs Levinas's thinking on politics and ethics may best be explained by means of the phenomenological model of intentionality (cf. Levinas, 1991: 27-29; see also Critchley, 1992: 4). 1 In terms of this model, the order of the same would consist of both the intentional acts of consciousness and the intentional objects that are constituted by these acts and, in turn, invest them with meaning. As a result of its intentional, or directional, nature, consciousness reduces the other to its object and, in so doing, it achieves a full correspondence between its representations and external 'reality'. At the most basic level, then, the relation between same and other is one of violent adequation. By contrast to this relation of power, a relation of respect for the other is one which recognises its radical difference. It is a relation in which the radical exteriority of the other is 2 not adequated with the same (see Levinas, 1991: 38-40). In such a relation, the other could therefore not be reduced to an object before intentional consciousness and, by not being an object, it would not be present (see Levinas, 1991: 27). Levinas describes the paradox of a relation that is not grounded in correlation as follows: "The relationship between separated beings does not totalize them; it is a 'unrelating relation,' which no one can encompass or thematize" (1991: 295). For this thinker, then, ethics is quite simply the event of such an 'unrelating relation' to an other which is radically exterior and, for the most part, his work may be regarded as an attempt to describe the experience of the ethical that is constituted by such a relation. Later in this thesis, I shall discuss at length the seminal notions of responsibility and ethical authority that are concomitant on such an 'unrelating relation'. Of immediate concern, though, is the problem for constative representation that is raised by an ethics that is grounded in a relation of radical difference to an absolute alterity. How can that which is not an object, and therefore not present, be represented? If ethics is premised on respect for the other, how may the other be respected in a discourse that attempts to represent its otherness? The mere attempt to describe that which is radically exterior to the same in the language and discourses of the same is bound to reduce it to an object and thereby to violate it. It is the aporia suggested by this problem to which Jacques Derrida points in his essay entitled "Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas" (1978). After Totality and Infinity (1991), Levinas's work may be regarded as an attempt to negotiate precisely this problem. Although the extent of Derrida's influence in this regard is "indeterminable", Levinas's subsequent writing is, as Simon Critchley avers, "far more conscious of the linguistic and logocentric recoils that arise when the ethical Saying is thematized within the ontological Said" (1992: 12). However, it is not my intention here to discuss the strategies through which Levinas seeks to manage the paradoxes of writing on ethics within the logocentric enclosure. My purpose is rather to establish 3 that Coetzee's conception of ethics and the ethical relation means that he confronts similar problems in his fiction. Indeed, in his most recent novel at the time of writing this thesis, The Master of Petersburg, these problems are self- reflexively announced by means of his use of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice as an analogue for the writer's attempt to respond respectfully to the other in fiction (see, for example, 1994: 5). The Orphic myth serves a similar function in Age of Iron, where it is alluded to in Mrs Curren's attempt to relate to the dead 'John' (1990: 159-160). It is surely more than an interesting coincidence that, in his reflections on the relation of literature to alterity, Maurice Blanchot uses the same mythological analogue (1982: 171 - 176). This latter philosopher, whose thought on radical difference is closely related to that of Levinas (see Libertson, 1982), interprets Orpheus's descent to the Underworld as the creative writer's desire for the other (Blanchot, 1982: 171 - 176), a desire that evinces itself not only in his/her attempt to encounter Eurydice, that is, the other, in the metaphorical night, but also in his/her need to possess, through making manifest, this absolute exteriority by returning it, in its nocturnal aspect, to the light of day. In Blanchot's own words, Orpheus's "work" does not simply "consist in assuring [the obscure point of the other night's] approach by descending into the depths. His work is to bring it back to the light of day and to give it form, shape, and reality in the day" (1982: 171). Blanchot is pessimistic about the outcome of this attempt.