Traversing the Australian Coetzee

Traversing the Australian Coetzee, Jonathan Dunk Literary Networks, Wollongong 9.7.15. Coetzee/White Paper Firstly in this paper I’ll respond to a colloquium held upon and in honour of John Maxwell Coetzee in Adelaide last November, secondly I’ll reflect, and hypothesize a little more broadly on Coetzee’s place within and without Australian literature, and thirdly I’ll propose another – modest, and precise - way of conceptualizing Coetzee within an Australian literary network. Traverses: J.M. Coetzee in the World (11-13.11.14) was a colloquium held in Adelaide in November of last year. The event was organized by the J.M Coetzee Centre for Creative Practice at the University of Adelaide, the Hawke Research Institute, University of South Australia, the University of Western Sydney, The University of Paris 8, the Institut Universitaire de France, the Harry Ransom Center in the University of Texas at Austin, and the Australian Research Council, and this otherwise tedious catalogue of institutions succinctly constellates the international boundaries of Coetzee studies. Coetzee’s forty-year career as a novelist, critic, and scholar has engaged a wide array of problems and disciplines, and congruently event attracted a genuinely global crop of literary scholars and philosophers. However, and naturally, the event was not merely, or purely, , a scholarly exercise. Reflecting on the conference for The Guardian Claire Heaney, a graduate student from the Queen’s University Belfast writes that the event was also “A self-conscious act of nation-building, or nation-branding, (seeking) to both claim and champion Coetzee as a national cultural artifact.” An Australian attempt to champion or brand Coetzee is at once natural, obvious, and absurd. First things firstly, upon assuming Australian citizenship in 2006 the author declared his intent “to accept the historical past of the new country as one’s own”, and from Elisabeth Costello in 2003 the author’s novels involve and engage Australian history and culture. Diary of a Bad Year, for instance, published in 2007, piercingly criticizes the Howard government’s policies towards refugees, indigenous history, and the ‘War on Terror’. Coetzee’s mature authorial alter-egos, J.C. and Elizabeth Costello have either migrated to, or originate from, Australian soil, and as a critic Coetzee has written articles about Australian writers Gerald Murnane and Patrick White for The New York Review of Books. In a number of direct, concrete ways then, Coetzee is an Australian author, and may be spoken of unproblematically as such. The obvious aspect of course, consists in Coetzee’s status as “inarguably the most celebrated and decorated living English-language author” a ubiquitous legend, attributed to Richard Poplak, and echoed by everyone and his dog within a mile radius of Coetzee’s google footprint. Last year everyone and his dog included a jubilant Professor Warren Bebbington , Vice Chancellor of the University of Adelaide who used the phrase introducing a reading by the author, which that institution promptly, uploaded to Youtube under the heading ‘Our Nobel Laureate J.M. Coetzee gives a special reading’. While the idea of measuring celebration strikes one as comical, Coetzee, with a Nobel Prize, two Booker prizes, the Prix Femina Etranger etc etc, constitutes a concentration of cultural capital irresistible to any self-respecting institution, educational or national. The absurdity of such an enterprise, however, stems from the fact that the author’s work, as much as the trajectory of his career – South Africa, London, Texas, Buffalo, South Africa, Australia – challenges, ironizes, and subverts cultural and discursive attempts to tether literature to history, politics, or place in any transparent, direct, or unproblematic way. In terms of scholarship the longstanding amical debates about whether, how, and what Coetzee’s novels allegorize between, say, Derek Attridge and David Atwell, among others, evince the complexity of this issue. From the works themselves one can draw legion examples of the dialectic between fiction and history. The medical officer’s absurd dream of chasing Michael K across the veldt heavily laden with interpretation, is a frequently cited example. As is the knowingly Kafkaesque penultimate lesson of Elizabeth Costello, in which the panel, the law, demands meaning, belief, allegory from a recalcitrant Costello who stands upon, as it were, the fictive principle. One of the most lyrical passages in that lesson, and the novel, evokes the full-throated singing of the frogs of the Dulgannong river, as the nearest Costello will approach to belief. As Melinda Harvey as observed, there is of course no such river, and more the point, the anecdote contradicts Costello’s earlier recollection of a suburban, Australian, childhood. To distend just a little further, the doubleness, the Janus like relation to place, and to historical discourse in Coetzee’s fiction is microcosmed by his choice of epigraph to the novel cum memoir cum autrebiography Youth published in 2002. This couplet from Goethe “Wer den Dichter will verstehen/ muss in Dichter’s Lande gehen” or rendered rather lamely into English, ‘Who would the poet understand/ walk you must in the poet’s land’, this sentiment both anchors literary meaning and interpretation to context, and unsettlingly asserts that literary discourse is only ever its own place. This tendency often though not invariably problematizes and complicates attempts to construe discrete allegorical readings of South African contexts and problems, and does so doubly, for Australian ones. Critics who have attempted to isolate and explicate the precise shape of Australia in Coetzee’s pertinent novels have arrived at diffuse and contradictory results. Elleke Boehmer posits that Australia in Coetzee figures a turn toward the real, or towards a distinctly Australian form of realism – she mentions Tim Winton – a tradition of realism comparable to that with which Coetzee so spectacularly broke in his first novel Dusklands. Boehmer also, however, considers the possibility that that turn is itself a parody, or forgery of that realism. Conversely Melinda Harvey argues that for Coetzee Australia constitutes an escape from, and repudiation of the claims of place. Her argument reads his emigration as a form of Tolstoyan ‘sloughing off’ of impediments to better approach the infinity at which Shatov debates Stavrogin over ‘the old verities’. At last year’s conference Derek Attridge suggested that The Childhood of Jesus with its hollow, Kafkaesque characters, might constitute Coetzee’s first truly Australian or ‘Adelaidean’ novel. Now it well may do, and Jennifer Rutherford credibly posited a critique of Australian refugee policy in the precarity and rootlessness of that novel. But taken together, in proximity with the height of Coetzee’s international career, one acquires, and last year I acquired, a historically discomforting impression that in this context ‘Australian’ becomes synonymous with emptiness and absence. Heaney further writes that the behavior of particularly Australian academics at the conference bespoke an “underlying (and wholly unjustified) sense of cultural inadequacy” which, she thinks, speaks to “the deep wounds that persist in postcolonial societies”. It wouldn’t be useful here to mention specific names, but there were various implications that Coetzee’s decision to move here (Australia) and there (Adelaide), was proof that the continent is not entirely bereft of culture. Further, it was informally asserted at one point that the colloquium was the first conference devoted to a single Australian author, and Henry Lawson’s precarious living conditions were described as though indicative of Australian parochialism rather than alcoholism, and that deplorable Australian governmental policies were demonstrative of local moral inferiorities, rather than the broad fact that the left is currently embattled across the Anglo-sphere. In the conference’s final panel Nicholas Jose read a lyrical meditation on Coetzee in Adelaide called ‘A Local Footnote’, which he was kind enough to send me. Jose describes the descent of a ‘Great Writer’ upon an ‘apparently uninspiring environment’ who shows that “it” meaning writing “can be done” even in such a place. The essay’s coda remarks that Coetzee’s Albatross like migration has changed “everything” for “us”, and conjures locals who will “finger the name on his books with wonder”. Now, I’d like to carefully place several caveats at this point: the conference’s purpose was explicitly biographical, and deliberately hagiographic, it is logical and proper that such an event should emphasize the international contexts of an international career. Secondly, while the impression I describe was noted by others than myself and Claire Heaney, particularly the graduate students present, so perhaps this is as much a matter of generational culture, despite that I certainly don’t think there was any intention to elide or imply the absence of Australian literary culture. Indeed many of the academics I refer to have worked on Australian writers. Nonetheless, this is not a desirable state of affairs. There must surely be a way for Australian literature to adapt to the presence of another ‘Great Writer’ without abasing itself, without the curiously nullifying scorched earth effect which seems to attend that phenomenon in this country. I allude here to the New Critics dismissal of earlier and other writers like Eleanor Dark and Christina Stead in favour of Patrick White our first ‘Great Writer’ figure. This leads us to a consideration, of one of Coetzee’s many literary influences, which might comprise part of a more moderate, equitable approach. Jose hints at it referring to the influence of one of Coetzee’s “old teachers” referring to Robert Guy Howarth, formerly of the University of Sydney, founding editor of Southerly, who taught Coetzee at the University of Capetown in the early 1960s. Howarth taught Coetzee ‘imaginative writing’, and Australian literature, including Kenneth Slessor, A.D. Hope, Judith Wright, and Patrick White. Coetzee acknowledges the influence of White, and particularly of Voss in his 1993 essay ‘Homage’, although he refers to the protagonist of that novel as Heinrich, rather than Johan Ulrich, perhaps alluding to the eighteenth century classicist and poet who Tomas Tabbert believes inspired White’s choice of name. As a number of critics, lately Elleke Boehmer and Maria Lopez have noted, Voss is mentioned along with Herzog by Saul Bellow in The Vietnam Project. However I think there’s a significant dialogic relationship between Voss and the second section of Dusklands, ‘The Narrative of Jacobus Coetzee. Briefly, some similiarities: Both novels are modernist rewritings of, and engagements with historical narratives of colonial exploration. Both novels concern explorer figures who, to various degrees of lucidity, conceive their vocation philosophically, as an exercise of the will. Both of these explorers are afflicted by a form of Cartesian megalomania, and lust for a radical immensity of power over, and autonomy from, the physical, animal world. Both novels prominently feature episodes of sickness, and explore the conditions and obligations of hospice and succor that these episodes invite. They both dramatise the establishment and breakdown of a master/slave relationship between a white coloniser, and an indigenous servant Both narratives dramatise and conceptualise the violence of the colonial frontier within Judaeo-Christian symbolic structures. Both novels criticize and subvert the tropes of Romantic landscape writing as structures complicit with colonial discourse, and both, finally, engage, criticize, and call into question the foundational myths of their respective colonial societies. I’ll now give a brief, and necessarily gestural answer to the large ‘so what’ that that list of correspondences invites. While I agree with Christopher Conti that the negative readings of Voss performed by critics like Simon During and Michael Wilding are significantly informed by inattentive reading there is substance to the charge that the Judaeo-Christian mythic structure which culminates in Voss’ sacrificial murder by Jackie seems to have little grounding in Indigenous life or culture, it is very much Voss’ death. In his feverish revery Coetzee’s explorer Jacobus longs for precisely such a death: “I might have enjoyed it, I might have entered into the spirit of the thing, given myself to the ritual, become the sacrifice, and died with a feeling of having belonged to a satisfying aesthetic whole”(p88). When a sacrificial structure does occur in Coetzee’s text it is far from organic, it does not arise from underpinning myth as in Voss arguably, but rather when Jacobus returns with a Griqua commando to brutally revenge himself upon the Khoi village which deservedly humiliates him, he imposes a Christian iconography upon an encounter which resists it at every turn. Before executing his former servants Jacobus delivers to them a “sermon” remarking that he has “always thought myself an evangelist and endeavored to bring to the heathen the gospel of the sparrow”(108). Jacobus names the village midden-heap his “Golgotha”(109) literally effacing the Indigenous use and concept of place with his European meaning. Christ’s tetelestai is echoed in this scene, but again, not organically “Is he finished?’ said Scheffer. “He is finished, master”. Coetzee shows this scriptural allusion as a ventriloquism, an act of discursive violence. The only scriptural resonance which might be said to occur organically is the separation of blood from water in the victim of Jacobus’ final murder, one of the text’s many viscerally disturbing descriptions of colonial brutality. So, while Voss can be read as arguing that European residence in and connection to this country is founded upon the sacrifice of white men, with the deaths of Voss and Palfreyman which may echo the spearing of Arthur Phillip, Coetzee’s text emphasizes the real sacrificial victim of colonialism, and also eloquently evinces the connection between discursive and physical violence. In this dialogue, this network, or line of influence we can observe the modernist novel improving and clarifying its representation of colonialism. I’d like to end by returning briefly to my earlier question about Coetzee’s place in Australian literature. Coetzee’s family of influences is a large one, and I don’t want to overstate the importance of White’s influence, but if any evidence was needed, this connection demonstrates the same principle that Coetzee alludes to when he tells David Attwell in Doubling The Point: “It is as much possible to center the universe on the town of Prince Albert in the Cape Province as on Prague… Being an out-of-work gardener in Africa in the late twentieth century is no less, but also no more, central a fate than being a clerk in Hapsburg Central Europe” (199) 1