The last novel

"(We are, it seems to remind us, always saying goodbye to our children.)"

John Self's aside in his review of JM Coetzee's The Death of Jesus captures the pervasive anxiety experienced while reading this novel better than even the most detailed plot summary, which is anyway likely to mislead the potential reader because it would highlight what, in the regular parts of his review, John calls the book's "unexplained developments, unrealistic dialogue and overcooked analogies". In fact, these features ease such anxiety as simply as any other workmanlike fiction might because judgments are set aside as one gets caught up in the drama, curious to see how it will resolve. And while this novel's drama does resolve with, as the title suggests, a definitive event, our anxiety doesn't fade, because of the title.

Coetzee may have enough control over the generic elements of novel writing for us either to overlook the unexplained, unrealistic and overcooked (or regard them as deformations of the medium) but we cannot overlook the title, which undoes all resolve.

Never has a title caused such consternation and speculation among professional reviewers. The setting of the story is convincing enough in its generic clarity but, for that very reason, everything appears out of nowhere, so everything can be read as random and hollow even as it builds a bustling world. Or, rather than appearing out of nowhere, everything appears out of literature, which for many is the same thing: this "bizarre allegorical trilogy" writes Alex Preston "never hits home, having no real-world corollary". If there is no real-world corollary, you might wonder if it's an allegory at all, or, if it is, you might wonder if it's an allegory of something other than the real world. But it's too late: "I’ve given up trying to force meaning into these novels", he declares, and is joined by Claire Lowdon, who writes "I will not be returning to these books to puzzle over them further", even if she does mention the obvious corollary, which anyway she suspects is a trick: "We try to map what we know of Jesus onto David’s story, but it doesn’t really fit. Nothing fits. There is no guide to life." It's fair enough not to puzzle on, as one could indeed spend an age speculating over the Biblical allusions and what Stuart Kelly calls the boy David's "pseudo-enigmatic utterances". Why not just enjoy the ride, as I did? After all, Lowdon admits that "the story as a whole slips along quite easily".


“I want to know why I am here”

Why not enjoy the ride? Because of the title. It is an undertow beneath the reader surfing back to shore; a tugging question that follows David's curiosity about how he came to be, which he tries to solve by asking his long-suffering guardian Simón: "How do you say aquì in other words?". He thinks an answer may arrive if another word for the Spanish for 'here' can be used. As readers, we too seek other words to understand what is going on here. James Womack is right when he says the reader sees a "story we recognise in the shadows of the story we are being told" but we can't quite make it out, and it is Womack who offers the reason why:

The trilogy is a work of speculative fiction, geared towards answering a particular question: what kind of Christ might grow from the Enlightenment?

The answer is given in the title of course: not grow at all. The world of the novel reflects a world with no place for an exception to the parched landscape of the setting in which science and reason have squeezed out speculative thought. Steven Poole gives the reason for David's alternative name:

“Jesus” is the label for a “wild creature” (as someone calls David) with a gentle contempt for the norms of civilisation; a disruptive force of ceaseless questioning that irrupts into ordinary domestic existence but not of it – as David insists.”

This too comes from literature, and not only from the New Testament. Coetzee has written elsewhere about Rilke's eighth Duino elegy in which the poet writes of 'das Offene', the open, a place outside the ordinary domestic existence in which animals live and children too until adults turn them towards conformity.

Was draußen ist, wir wissens aus des Tiers
Antlitz allein; denn schon das frühe Kind
wenden wir um und zwingens, daß es rückwärts
Gestaltung sehe, nicht das Offne, das
im Tiergesicht so tief ist. Frei von Tod.

Which Coetzee transposes as: 

What is out there, we know it from the animal’s face alone; for even the young child we turn around and compel to look back, seeing form/formation, not the open, that in animal vision is so deep. Free from death.

For animals and children, the world is experienced as a "Nirgends ohne nicht", a nowhere without no. Death is unknown and the world is "a pure space into which flowers endlessly open". While the escapism of generic fiction may tease us with a return to this state for a time, 'no' is always provided by one's inner reviewer. Rilke says it is possible that a lover draws near to the condition for a time, while those nearing death no longer see death and stare ahead, merging life with death. In a letter, he explained in other words:

Death is the side of life averted from us, unshone upon by us: we must try to achieve the greatest consciousness of our existence which is at home in both unbounded realms, inexhaustibly nourished from both. The true figure of life extends through both spheres, the blood of the mightiest circulation flows through both: there is neither a here nor a beyond, but the great unity in which the beings that surpass us, the "angels", are at home. [Translated by Greene and Norton]

If we cannot return to childhood innocence of death, it must become part of our life. And it doesn't take a critical genius to see that the family dog, Bolívar, with whom David has a special affinity, is the animal and David both the child and the one facing death. So merely asking "Why am I here?" is disruptive to the settled world of the novel, even if it is answered easily by rational discourse and science. One may then ask: why is rational discourse and science here? Given that Simón and Inés are not David's biological father and mother, no science can explain why he is here, and while theology may answer, there is no theology in this world. It's why the trilogy has a monochrome clarity and why David appears to be a contrived presence: both are exaggerations of the condition of the reader's world in which the enchantment comes from works of imaginative fiction yet whose features are as predictable and as empty as pre-Enlightenment religious rituals that, when disturbed, cause howls of rage from the faithful. Every portentous statement David makes that frustrates Simón is also what frustrates the gatekeepers of literary fiction: they promise a revelation while only increasing the disruption of the generic conditions that are specifically in place to prevent revelation of any kind.

The question posed across the trilogy may be: what revelation is possible in genre fiction? Alex Preston sees a lack of answers as part of Coetzee's "elaborate joke" at the expense of his readers while Claire Lowdon thinks he's seeking a guarantee of posterity among academics (Purgatory after an Inferno of reviews), and yet they never question the assumption that there must be a clear intention and conclusive message, even though this would compel us to turn backwards to see the form/formation of the adult world. Despite his scepticism, Simón succumbs to this assumption by searching for the final message that David is supposed to have left before he died. The message, however, is there in David's apparent naivete and curiosity; a message embodied in his outrageous, inexplicable presence in the world, entering with no past and no future. It's no coincidence that, when David dies, Bolívar goes missing.

Our anxiety then is as much to do with saying goodbye to our children as saying goodbye to the novel.


“Like Don Quixote, this is a fiction about fiction.”

What's strange about the seven reviews I've read (some are behind paywalls) is that there are only nine brief references to the single other book to be mentioned throughout the trilogy, with only John Self noticing it as the most blatant hint of The Death of Jesus' inheritance. David has peculiar reverence for Don Quixote, the only book he's ever read, from which he learned to read and which he treats "not as a made-up story but as a veritable history", including the belief that Don Quixote is a real person in the world. Simón wants him to read other books because "reading means learning about the world – the world as it really is, not as you wish it to be”. But David is not interested. It's strange that it is passed over so readily in the reviews because the differences between David and Simón embody the modern reader's internal relation to fiction, which emerges so powerfully in the anxiety of the negative reviews: Simón loves his adopted son and believes he is special, even if he can't make sense of his enigmatic utterances and despairs over his resistance to reason.

Don Quixote is generally considered to be the first novel and a satire on idealism. The famous example of the Don jousting with a giant when there is only a windmill before him is enough to sum up its relevance: when people refer to someone "tilting at windmills" it indicates that we know better, that someone is comically deluded. And yet this is a novel, so the windmill is as ideal as the giant, and any knowing superiority we feel over the Don is possible only if we have succumbed to the same condition. The enchantment of fiction is a disruptive force because it offers the possibility of the opening of a world other than the one in which we are settled, while allowing us to pat ourselves on the back for knowing better than to believe that it is real. And yet, here we are, enthusiastically devouring novels and earnestly discussing them, expecting and indeed demanding something more than brief escapism. Our enthusiasm is usually understood as nothing more than this branch of consumer culture, often mitigated with virtuous recommendations that by reading a certain novel we can learn about another country, a particular time in history, a minority identity, or a news story dominating the newspapers. Reviewing always takes the upper hand by co-opting this mitigation as criteria for judgment, and is fiercely protective of its ground.

[Coetzee's] late novels are a scholar’s dream, precisely because of their opacity, their exponential proliferation of meanings. You can go symbol-hunting; you can read him as allegory; you can read him as anti-allegory. Everything that can be argued can be counter-argued in another journal article, another critical study. It’s a guaranteed route to posterity: if your file can’t be closed, then you’ll never really die.

Claire Lowdon's disdain is pure projection of the anxiety that reading and reviewing cannot accommodate the deeper reason why we read and feel the need to discuss novels. Still, it would be fair enough if the evidence didn't suggest Coetzee is attempting to close the file not on himself so much as on 'the novel'.

Coetzee is a curious case in contemporary review culture because his novels have always attracted mainstream attention for their relevance to current affairs without quite convincing reviewers that he's a state-of-the-nation type author, able to weigh in where journalism floats by, yet without being able to stick a permanent label on his work. Many lament a falling away from the greatness they have bestowed in the past or claim they had doubts from the start, while Martin Amis says Coetzee had "no talent" in the first place (a statement about which Steven Poole is brilliantly cutting). For example, Stuart Kelly begins his review by saying he:

admired works such as Waiting For The Barbarians, Life & Times Of Michael K, and Disgrace. But here’s the rub: I admired them but I never really enjoyed them. There is a frostiness to his work, an almost deliberate opacity. They hint at being profound, but are they?

All three novels – to which Foe and Age of Iron may be added – can be counted as novels ostensibly about racism and colonialism, and Apartheid and post-Apartheid South Africa in particular, which you wouldn't necessarily expect to be heart-warming, especially if they were written from within those brutal conditions. But what comes after Disgrace suggests anyway that Kelly's rhetorical question is disingenuous. Alex Preston notes how the allusions have changed since the early work:

It’s striking that the most powerful moments in Coetzee’s great earlier books were strongly allegorical and carried deep religious undertones: the washing of the feet of the “little bird-woman” in Waiting for the Barbarians; Lurie’s prostration in Disgrace; Michael K's journey to deliver his mother’s ashes. These work because, while they are clearly symbolic acts, they also propel the narrative of novels grounded in real human emotion. Now it feels as if all of the pleasures left to the reader of a Coetzee novel are pleasures of the head, not of the heart.

While damning Coetzee's later work to his newspaper's dilettantish, middlebrow audience, these apparently heartfelt allusions to a pre-Enlightenment tradition are purely novelistic gestures, grounded in generic law; enough for a worthy if sentimental response to the injustices and conditions described, but no more than that. Such Lazarus-like resurrections of a buried tradition have disappeared since at least Elizabeth Costello not only because they are part of "the genre of the oppressor" (as Leo Robson calls it in his New Statesman overview of Coetzee's career) thereby appropriating for itself the suffering of the victims of imperialism, but also because of the genre's oppression of the world, of the nowhere without no. With his veld-dry wit, the Jesus novels are clearly very different from Don Quixote, but the teasing, allusive, ungrounded content confirms the inheritance of an immanent critique of the novel. This has a background with which Coetzee is familiar.


"As a whole, [the Jesus novels] make you wonder what novels are even for" (Tim Smith-Laing)

Walter Benjamin's great essay The Storyteller argues that the rise of the novel was the product of a decline in everyday storytelling, which always contained something useful for the listener, whether that was a moral or practical: "In every case the storyteller is a man who has counsel for his readers." Storytelling was a form of wisdom "woven into the fabric of real life" gradually removed by "the secular productive forces of history", one of which was the printing press, and what distinguishes the novel from storytelling is its dependence on the book. The novel is written by an author isolated in his room. He cannot give or receive counsel as it is no longer living speech. Benjamin says if the word 'counsel' has an old-fashioned ring, it's because "the communicability of experience is decreasing". It communicates something else instead:

To write a novel is to take to the extreme that which is incommensurable in the representation of human existence. In the midst of life's fullness, and through the representation of this fullness, the novel gives evidence of the profound perplexity of the living. [Translated by Jephcott, Eiland and unnamed others]

Benjamin even cites "the first great book of the genre" as the prime example:

Don Quixote teaches how the spiritual greatness, the boldness, the helpfulness of one of the noblest of men, Don Quixote, are completely devoid of counsel and contain not a scintilla of wisdom.

The reader of Coetzee's Jesus novels will recognise this perplexity, in themselves and the protagonists. What has replaced counsel in our time is information: "no event comes to us without already being shot through with explanations", something that these novels noticeably lack, while "half the art of storytelling to keep a story free from explanation" because it allows the reader to absorb its counsel in their own way. In The Death of Jesus, David reads Don Quixote to an audience as if it was useful like this, but the audience, like a chattering of reviewers, only ask questions, needing information and explanation.

If this suggests an opposition between storytelling-fact and novel-fantasy, leading to the hope that 'creative non-fiction' may be the modern form of regaining counsel, we must remember this too remains a book. And, anyway, Benjamin confounds such expectations by linking the decline in the communicability of experience and the rise of the novel with the decline of the idea of eternity, taking us back to Rilke's Eighth Elegy:

All great storytellers have in common the freedom with which they move up and down the rungs of their experience, as if on a ladder. A ladder extending downward to the interior of the earth and disappearing into the clouds: this is the image for a collective experience to which even the deepest shock in every individual experience – death – constitutes no impediment or barrier.

The ladder into the clouds is the sign that the story is timeless and can continue beyond its telling, whereas the novel is confined to earth and burial, which follows from its rise in the decline of faith in transcendence. The reader of the novel is confronted with the question of the meaning of life without it ever being addressed, hence "the perplexity of the living".

The novel is significant...not because it presents someone else's fate to us...but because this stranger's fate, by virtue of the flame which consumes it, yields to us the warmth which we never draw from our own fate. What draws the reader to a novel is the hope of warming his shivering life with a death he reads about.

What warmth is there from David's death? None, apparently; only unease, anxiety. What makes Coetzee unusual is that, while he has appealed as a writer of the earth, his later novels stare ahead, and from our perspective they are unsatisfactory because they reveal the inadequacy of the genre as a means of climbing into the clouds, which would explain the perplexed reception of the post-Disgrace novels, albeit directed at the author rather than the genre.

"It has been rightly said that all great works of literature establish a genre or dissolve one – that they are, in other words, special cases" writes Benjamin in his essay on In Search of Lost Time. JM Coetzee's Jesus trilogy may neither be great literature nor establish a new genre, but perhaps it does put an end to one, and is special for this reason: The Death of Jesus may be the last novel.

"The pure, ungraspable fire": JM Coetzee's Jesus novels

Elizabeth Lowry's skilled review tells you all you need to know about JM Coetzee's The Schooldays of Jesus, more or less. It recognises that the "mysterious Spanish-speaking country, this place of refugee souls" in which the two protagonists make their new lives "stands for our embodied earthly life", and that their new home city Novilla is also "the genre in which the characters find themselves, the novel itself". It's why the novel is not very enjoyable, she says; a flimsy metafictional construct allowing Coetzee to indulge in Platonic dialogues as unappealing as the bread and bean paste eaten by Novilla's inhabitants.

On the evidence of this austere, barely realised mise-en-scène, it is difficult not to feel that Coetzee, like Plato, is no longer much interested in the accidents of our quotidian human world, the shadows on the cave wall. He is after essence alone, the pure, ungraspable fire.

Having now read both this novel and The Childhood of Jesus, I share Lowry's judgment, though not as a criticism. While not being a major enthusiast for his work, I have often defended Coetzee from the reviewing consensus on his post-Disgrace novels (which, it should be emphasised, is essentially a British consensus). Except those novels are still clearly of this world, engaging with the meat industry, autobiography and relationship triangles, so the criticism seemed churlish. In both of these novels, however, defence is not so easy, as one proceeds as if over a desert gradually populating with generic CGI figures and buildings, familiar in many ways and yet obviously a construct; a science fiction landscape denuded of that genre's imaginative twists and flourishes. And because the story is thereby infected by an air of arbitrary invention, the drama becomes not one of action and consequence but overall meaning or purpose. Even if we enjoy the story on face value, which I did, the shadow of allusion projected by the titles remains, leaving one in the semi-dark. We are used to fiction being justified despite its indulgences because it can tell us what life is like "in the era of Trump" but, when the title of a novel about imaginary refugees in an imaginary dry land alludes to the founding figure of the civilisation of the book, it can only generate anxiety about clues to a hidden message.


So the crossword puzzler goes to town. There's Jesus in the titles, of course, and there's an ethereal woman whose surname is Magdalena; there's a character called Dmitri straight out of Dostoevsky and there's David reading Don Quixote, so some vowels and consonants are already in place. However, as Jack Miles points out, there is also in Simón and David's undocumented previous lives the allusion to the Myth of Er referred to in Plato's Republic in which after death "souls are reincarnated only after crossing Lethe, the River of Oblivion", so the allusions might be only the distant splashing of that river; alluding to a tradition, yes, but also the void over which that tradition stands. After all, they too are only books. Don Quixote, for instance, is known as a satire of idealism that plays on the reader's forgetfulness that the novel is the very work and presence of the ideal. In order to laugh knowingly at the knight-errant's delusions, we must delude ourselves in the same way, which is why John Barth claims it is not only the first novel but the first postmodern novel, itself evidence that the history of the novel should be regarded vertically rather than horizontally.

As Lowry pointed out, while enchantment is absent in the novels, idealism is where they're set, summarised by Joyce Carol Oates as a "quasi-socialist state in which conformity, mediocrity and anonymity are both the norm and the highest values". It is a utopia divested of the idea of another world. However, such a world is suggested when Simón reads Don Quixote to David. The boy becomes upset when he does not receive clear answers to his questions about what the story leaves out, so like a wilful, childish knight-errant he makes up nonsense phrases for himself claiming they're part of the story, before tearing through the pages and not reading the words. Simón's patience is tested:

'Why are you handling the book so roughly?’
‘Because. Because if I don’t hurry a hole will open.’
‘Open up where?’
‘Between the pages.’
‘That’s nonsense. There is no such thing as a hole between the pages.’
‘There is a hole. It’s inside the page. You don’t see it because you don’t see anything.’

Such is the lure of the written word, and it prompts the question: do we turn to novels because of an urge to descend into these holes, to access the other side of the river; that is, unable as we are to accept the world as it is, to seek a land without metaphor? If so, realism is the inverted gospel of this ideal, and the post-Disgrace reviewing consensus its choir, represented in the novels by Simón's determined acceptance of the world as it is. The Jesus novels test its patience in particular not because they are too reliant on fantasy or conceptual indulgences, but because they are too realistic, if realism means including questions about its own existence and value. They present the world in a realism as pure as a dream. Everything in a dream is present for a reason, only that reason is unclear, cloaked in the darkness of sleep, and we become aware of the darkness only when we awake. The child David is thereby the awoken insurgent in such a land, as Jesus was in his, and writing in ours.

700th post, on Coetzee and the question of philosophy and fiction

I hope the recent flurry created by Two Paths for the Novel, Zadie Smith's landmark NYRB review-essay, is a promise of more to come. More from Zadie Smith and more from the critical ferment her apparent Kehre has begun. Not, of course, that it would be anything new. As Stephen Mulhall explains in The Wounded Animal, subtitled J. M. Coetzee and the Difficulty of Reality in Literature and Philosophy - another must-read due in the early days of 2009 - the difficulty is as old as Western thought.

The formidable extract from Mulhall's book offered by Princeton UP begins with Plato's expulsion of the poets from "the just city, the philosophical republic". The rule was made because, among other things, the poets "engage and incite our emotions while bypassing our rational faculties". Of course, that's why we tend to read poets and novelists rather than philosophers. What's welcome here is that rather than arguing for or against either side of the ancient quarrel, Mulhall (a Post-Analytic philosopher at Oxford) examines the significance of Plato's use of "striking quasi-poetic imagery" and dramatic dialogues "in conveying his message of the superiority of philosophy to literature". He asks:

Is this best understood as an essentially dispensable or ornamental feature of his enterprise? Or as an adroit attempt to turn the resources of poetry against itself, addressing philosophy’s audience in the terms most likely to motivate them in their presently benighted, cave-dwelling state, but in such a way as to bring about their emergence from it, to effect a species of self-overcoming that leaves the literary definitively behind us? Or as a revealing indication that poetry is always already internal to the precincts of philosophy’s republic, incapable of being excised without depriving philosophy of resources without which it cannot achieve its goals?

The same questions, turned around, might be asked of Coetzee's recent novels. Coetzee has upset many, including those who should know better, by engaging in overt dramatising of philosophical (or, more specifically, ethical) questions. In Elizabeth Costello in particular, he seems to be moving towards Plato's relegation of reverie because the work appears to be concerned with these questions and not with providing consumers with the customary daydream of storytelling. Why then, in the most traditional literary way, have I been most moved and thrilled by Elizabeth Costello, and left relatively indifferent (though still moved and thrilled) by the earlier, more traditional novels such as Disgrace?

Mulhall's new book might help me to find a fuller and clearer answer than I am inclined to give here (that, as much as any other, critical and philosophical exigencies can and must be part of a new breed of fiction). "How far" he wonders "is Plato's deeply determining way of understanding the relations between philosophy and literature itself determined by certain ideas ... that any genuine philosopher must recognize as themselves open to philosophical question?". Again, the question can be rewritten for the writer: how far is our understanding of the mesmeric shadows flickering on the corporate publisher's cave determined by certain ideas that any genuine novelist must recognise? What Coetzee has begun seems to be continued by philosophy:

The wager motivating this study is that Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello gives us good reason, as philosophers, to open just these ideas and assumptions to question; but that she does so in ways that can properly be understood only if we understand that our primary relation to her is as a literary creation. The Lives of Animals is an attempt by a master of literature to put philosophy in question; and whatever philosophers ultimately come to think is the right way to answer the questions this text poses, they will have failed altogether to meet that challenge if they fail to take seriously the fact that the questions themselves are at once possessed of a recognizable philosophical warrant, and yet irreducibly posed by and through literature.

The anguish of farewells: The Guardian on Coetzee's Disgrace

Three years ago, the TLS ran review by Gabriel Josipovici of a new edition in English of folk tales collected by the Brothers Grimm. It concentrated on the changes made to the many editions produced by the brothers. One passage was quoted by at least three bloggers (Waggish, The Mumpsimus and me). It's worth repeating even out of context:

What happened to the Grimm Tales in the course of fifty years of "revision" was that they were transformed from tales told by speakers who were deeply convinced that they were true (whatever meaning one assigns to the term) into tales told by writers (Wilhelm Grimm, in effect) who did not believe in them and therefore added scene-setting, morality and psychology to make them both attractive and meaningful. It also gives us a hint as to why a novelist like Dickens had (and still has) the effect he had on his readers: he was one who knew "how to be a child" [according to Kierkegaard, the way an adult might read stories to children]. However, it was perhaps Kleist alone among the writers of the century who really grasped what was at issue here. His great novella, Michael Kohlhaas, takes many of the elements that go to make up the Grimm Tales and stands them on their head, bidding an anguished farewell as it does so both to community values and to the power of wishful thinking. But Kleist had no successors, and, by and large, nineteenth-century novelists and storytellers took the path of Midrash and romance, still the staple diet of readers of twentieth-century fiction, with neither writers nor readers quite believing what they are doing, but under a strange compulsion to pretend that they do.

I was reminded of the final line as I read Sam Jordison's reaction to JM Coetzee's Disgrace in his Looking Back at the Booker sequence in The Guardian, or rather some of the comments responding to his contention that the novel "isn't so much a narrative as a thesis" and that it "just isn't a good *novel*". Like a teacher at the end of term, Billy Mills writes: "I think Coetzee is a wonderful writer and has it in him to be a great essayist, but he is not, for my money, a great novelist because he seems incapable to either dispense with plot or make plot work." Steven Augustine says this "hit it right on the noggin" despite earlier claiming that "it's all about *taste*, and taste is *purely* subjective". If it's all about taste, all subjective, as Jordison agrees it is, then where is the "noggin" for anyone to hit? It doesn't stop Jordison providing criteria for judging: Scene-setting: "Coetzee provides a compelling portrait of a man"; Morality: "the suitably unpleasant seduction of one of his students"; Psychology: the author is "unwilling or unable to provide anything approaching human motivation for the females". Whatever the criteria and however subjective one's taste, the problem remains that "Coetzee fails to make it real". His readers need to believe is unfulfilled and the writer is blamed. Hence the emperor's-new-clothes tone of many of the comments; indeed, their childishness.

The solipsism-lite on display unwittingly discounts the value of the debate even as the thread seeks to guarantee it. Not only that, it questions the status of the novel under discussion without appreciating how this destablises the novel as a genre. Again, the author is blamed. If there is problem with Disgrace, it is that it bridges the gap between the stark power of his early novels with the darkly playful nature of recent years. The anguished farewell to wishful thinking is too much for some readers. The novels that follow – Elizabeth Costello (2003) and Diary of a Bad Year (2007) – do address what it means to write in the modern world; its relation to the world and what follows: our own relation to the world. I covered this in a brief review of the latter novel, proleptically rebutting Augustine's impatient reading of the novel as "a lazily postmodernish wedding of occasionally worthy essays to consistently second-rate screenwriting". He might think the reason why they're "occasionally worthy" is all about his "purely subjective" reading yet it doesn't take long to realise the erratic subject matter and quality of the essays are both necessary to the logic of the novel. Another, far subtler commenter provides a useful link in which Coetzee suggests the essays and ideas expressed in novels are there (and not in a collection essays) for a reason: "If there were a better, clearer, shorter way of saying what the fiction says, then why not scrap the fiction?". He won't scrap fiction because there something urgent to say and fiction is the only way of saying it. We won't read another like Disgrace, at least not from Coetzee. Perhaps it's no coincidence that not one of the novels since have even made the Booker shortlist. Leave that to those who know "how to be a child".

Metaphysical ache: JM Coetzee's Diary of a Bad Year

When Booker Prize judge Giles Foden brushed aside the challenge of JM Coetzee's new novel as "a piece of radical literary theory" and because "theory is not fiction", I was prepared to let this go as an overstatement based on the novel's apparent aesthetic astringency. From glancing at reviews, the impression was that the novel consisted of self-indulgent essays written by lightly-disguised Coetzee figure with a cursory and slightly pervy sub-plot about his friendship with a much younger woman. I could appreciate how this might not appeal to consumerist demands, even those pretending to Literature. Bring on Mister Pip.

However, now that I've read Diary of a Bad Year, Foden's judgement appears at best incompetent, at worst disturbingly intolerant. To say this novel is "a subversion of the whole commercial and promotional mechanism whereby books are distributed" is about as accurate as saying The Last King of Scotland is about the British constitution. Yes, the novel is aesthetically astringent – the relationships remain formal, the opinions under-developed and on each page the narrative jumps from one voice to another - but these constitute much of the novel's originality as well as providing its emotional and intellectual ballast.

Diary of a Bad Year is an exceptionally moving investigation of what it means to have singular opinions in a plural universe. The short, diverse essays at the top of each page signal a diminishment of writerly power. They might evoke a hollow echo if published alone. At least one reviewer (no longer online) sees this as a problem to the success of the book. Yet if they were more fully-developed, they would crust over what is currently an open wound. And it is the gaping wound with which Coetzee's is concerned. Success, in this sense, would be failure.

The writer character begins by making a distinction between freedom and democracy. He sees the hand-over of power to the state in liberal democracies as irreversible. Freedom is threatened for the sake of democracy. It leads to another brand of totalitarianism. As readers we can agree, disagree or remain indifferent; that goes without saying. The point is: how might our response be included in such opinions? Or rather, how might the opinion appear if it tries to include the plural? How can we reconcile democracy with freedom? Such is the task of the novelist, hence the distinction, albeit narrow, between the author JM Coetzee and the writer in this novel.

The writer asks along the way: "Why can there no discourse about politics that is not itself political?". We might wonder in turn: why can there be no novel that is not also just a novel – a work of a masterful imagination? The questions are essentially the same. To say the least, Diary of a Bad Year is as close to answering as any published this year. The writer praises Harold Pinter's trenchant Nobel acceptance speech for its brave indifference to the scorn it would attract: "there comes a time when the outrage and the shame are so great that all calculation, all prudence, is overwhelmed and one must act, that is to say, speak." The same words can be applied to the form of the novel we're reading, where calculation and prudence would have demanded fully-developed essays and a rounded relationship between writer and muse.

Instead, Coetzee imagines two people of the world – Anya and Alan – with whom he has nothing in common. You know all this from the innumerable reviews. He lusts after the body of one and perhaps for something else. Below the essays, we read his apparently private observations on the couple and how he pursued the "metaphysical ache" Anya aroused in him by getting her to type up his dictaphone ramblings. At first this undercuts the writer's seriousness with the petty concerns of bodily existence. But then Anya's voice appears below his, engaging with his ideas, setting them against her assumptions and suspicions about his person, as well as discussing her own life with Alan, a philistine, commercially-minded brute. This suggests the ache is more than prurient. You might say it is religious.

Then Alan's voice appears too. The intertwining of each separate voice, how one influences the other and how the ideas find their way in the world, encourages us to think not of the specific greatness of the novel with regard to our own readerly demands, but of the possibilities for a different kind of discourse. Not one of self-isolating opinions but something more inclusive, even if isolation (and low sales) is inevitable.

In this case, we can think of a new kind of novel; one that resists both the spirit of impotent scorn to which the isolated writer tends and the self-assured denial of prize-winning novels in which the freedom of the imagination is an unquestioned good. That someone considered fit to judge Britain's most prestigious literary prize did not notice any of this and indeed dismisses such an intrepid novel as "theory", suggests there is something very wrong at the heart of British literary culture.

Catch up

Only 48 hours without an internet connection and it's like I've been lost up the Orinoco (or the Ouse in my case). So here's a catch up:

Claire Messud makes a surprise recommendation of The Loser by the "crabby, darkly witty, furiously bleak and utterly uncompromising Thomas Bernhard". (Dispatches from Zembla also picked up on this and links to my scan of Mr Claire Messud's review from 1992). The novel, she writes:

puts us inside the head of a coldly embittered man, who aspired to be a great pianist — until he heard Glenn Gould play, and realized he could never be as good. It is, you see, about being talented, and still being a loser.

Well, if I were being picky, I'd want to emphasise that the narrator's failure is apparent only in his success as the narrator, which gives hope to all us other losers. It's the way to go. (Link via the Bernhard site, which also offers a recent review of the novel by Gould expert Kevin Bazzana).

By the way, I say it's a surprise recommendation because, from reading about Messud's novels, I wouldn't imagine them influenced in any way by Bernhard. I had hoped if more English-speaking novelists "got" his work, they would never write such novels again. Hope?, Bernhard?!

Elsewhere, Charlotte Stretch reviews Benoît Duteurtre's The Little Girl and the Cigarette, which I know nothing more about except that he comes recommended by Milan Kundera and that the novel is translated by Charlotte Mandell, a recommendation in itself. The novel is published over here by Telegram Books "bringing new writing from around the world" and by Melville House in the US.

An apparently much smaller outfit, Inkermen Press, has recently published Daniel Watt's intriguing Fragmentary Futures: Blanchot, Beckett, Coetzee. I appreciate the way this book draws in a living writer to argue "the legacy of the fragment remains as much a responsibility for modern literature as for the event of the German Romantic fragment":

The work of Coetzee demonstrates the fragment's relation to Levinasian ethics, inviting a responsiveness to the 'other': a situation that maintains the singularity of the work without reducing it to particular critical positions.

Sunday supplement

Mark of RSB says he's taking the new Malamud biography with him to North Wales. This is a very special book, so I hope he doesn't waste time enjoying the countryside. Subtitled "A Writer's Life", it uses close analysis of successive manuscripts to demonstrate, among other things, that literature was not merely an adjunct to Malamud's life - the thing that made him worthy of serious gossip, as James Atlas' biography of Bellow seemed to assume - but constitutive of his being. Malamud comes across as a mildly conservative writer. He's quoted as saying he didn't have it in him to be an "experimentalist". But Philip Davis shows how hard he worked to get the books right as he saw it: “My gift is to create what may be deeply felt" he's quoted as saying, which is the only good reason for such experiment anyway. In his last book, Dubin's Lives, this meant a book about - horror upon horror - a writer.

Being faced with this, the demand to create what may be deeply felt, has led JM Coetzee toward his literary uniqueness, and in her review of his new novel and the recent essay collection, Elizabeth Lowry expresses surprise that, in his reading of Nadine Gordimer, “[t]he gourmet's choice in metafiction grumbles at being served up too meagre a portion of realism“. But where in Coetzee's fiction is realism absent? Coetzee is this gourmet's choice of fiction, fullstop. Lowry's naive surprise reminds me of Michael Wood's words on the last line of Nabokov's novel The Real Life of Sebastian Knight:

The last sentence of the novel doesn't, as Nabokov himself may have felt, and as many binary-minded critics have certainly thought, release us into 'mere' fiction, a world that turns out to have been 'only' a book. It points precisely to the precarious but possibly continuing life of whatever has been thoroughly, painfully or ecstatically imagined.

Ah yes, the imagination - is that real?

Elsewhere, Lee Rourke wishes for more lessness in novels. I want to agree at very great length.

And I've just remembered that Nicola Barker, now on the Booker longlist for Darkmans, had a short story published in June on The Mad Hatters' Review. I had mentioned the magazine in June.

Finally, I always read “This Week's Contributors“ in the TLS (unless I'm included and then I'm too embarrassed) because it always throws up interesting information. This week's edition tells us that Tim Dee is "co-editing a new ... book of bird poetry". Well I thought this has been done before, but it's good to see sexism still being resisted...

Writing about writing, part 494

My brow was particularly furrowed when I read Scott Esposito, in providing a link to the extract from JM Coetzee's forthcoming novel, saying that he's "a little concerned that it's a book about a writer writing a book". I wondered how many crime fiction blogs worry that PD James' new one will feature a murder, or a horror fiction blog that Stephen King's latest has supernatural elements, or that ... well, supply your own third.

Even the link Scott supplies has The Literary Saloon expressing unease "about the turn the book is described as taking" (that is, the text being in part contributions to a book called "Strong Opinions" – a title, I might point out, used by Nabokov for a non-fiction miscellany). I know literary novels cannot be defined as 'metafiction' alone – a term I barely recognise as every novel refers to itself and the whole of literature at every turn, to and fro; it's just a matter of acknowledgment – but it's a good starting point.

Scott adds that Coetzee's metafiction hasn't thrilled him, which is fair enough, though for me Elizabeth Costello was, in the Paul West section, one of the most thrilling books I have ever read. Slow Man, on the other hand, in which Ms Costello appeared again, left me unmoved. Metafiction seems to be a guarantor of nothing in itself, so there's no need to be concerned over it.

Nor perhaps to be drawn by it. Yet I wonder if I'm the only reader who experiences a frisson at the prospect of book about a writer by such a fine writer as Coetzee? Why should novels consciously avoid a subject by which we're otherwise so fascinated?

See also ...

Tom McCarthy on why the art world "is the place not just where literature is understood, but also where it is creatively developed, carried forward".

Gabriel Josipovici, who might argue the new music world is also such a place, with a story - The Dark Waters - about a retired musician. The Mad Hatters' Eclectic England edition also has work by many others, including Nicola Barker, David Constantine and George Szirtes [Links temporarily removed; see comments].

Richard Crary on the early work of JM Coetzee.

Spurious on Pessoa's The Education of a Stoic.

And, last and least, I've gone on Shelfari.

The great year of reading

Spurious has often referred to his "Great Summer of Work" of a couple of years ago. This year marks the 20th anniversary of what could be called my Great Year of Reading; the year the dam of not-reading was finally breached. In 1985, the first cracks appeared. I read lots of JG Ballard. Never again. But it started something. In 1986, a trickle ran over the parched earth. 24 books. Plenty of Milan Kundera, Martin Amis, David Lodge, Philip Roth and, someone who was still well-known then, DM Thomas. In 1987 the waters broke.

It began with Isabel Allende's The House of the Spirits before reverting to type with lots of JM Coetzee, Primo Levi, Updike, Nabokov, Peter Carey, VS Naipaul, and Amis and Roth again. In June, I discovered Chomsky. In September, I read Joseph Brodsky's sublime essays Less Than One. In November, I finished Swann's Way. Can such discoveries ever be made again?

1988 was a disappointment after that; what did I expect in reading three Joyce Carol Oates novels?! But the list does include Josipovici's The Lessons of Modernism, Janouch's Conversations with Kafka and Bryan Magee's The Great Philosophers. And I re-read Less Than One.

Looking at the '87 list, I wonder about novels that have little or no resonance in memory: Maggie Gee's Light Years, Omar Rivabella's Requiem for a Woman's Soul, Irini Spanidou's God's Snake, Nadine Gordimer's A Sport of Nature, and those that I recall as excellent yet contain no remembered detail: Jayne Anne Phillip's Machine Dreams and Jane Rogers' The Ice is Singing. Perhaps, since then, everything has been a re-reading, a return in search of the truth to an enchantment whose fulfilment is apparently only a gloomy repetition of the conditions requiring its presence.

The most embarrassing part of the list is the recurrence of the name Colin Wilson. I read a lot of him that year. The Outsider of course, but also things like Maslow and the Post-Freudian Revolution and innumerable, mercenary books about crime. Today I see he is interviewed by Michael Berkeley on BBC Radio 3's Private Passions about his taste in music. Go there for some no-nonsense good cheer.

If you bought Suite Française, you may also like this

In my feed from Guardian Books, I read "Stephen Moss meets the man behind the summer's hottest novel". As one has to take note of "hot" novels, I read the piece. But you'll struggle to find out anything about the book itself. It's set in Libya and is told from the perspective of a child and has "excited the critics" (though not one is quoted). That's about it.

It has to be admitted that, on its Amazon page, Hashim Matar's In the Country of Men has a puff from JM Coetzee, but "A poignant story of a child exposed too early to the brutalities of Libyan politics" is hardly excitement is it?

Of course, all this has nothing to do with the fact that Penguin has signed him up in a six-figure deal.

In the grip of something

As I read David Lodge's Author, Author, the mystery of Henry James' imagination preoccupied me. In the novel, he writes his books with remarkable speed and fluency. So speedy, in fact, that one appears between two of Lodge's own sentences. Yet James seems to have done little else but write and move politely within polite society. Where did it all come from?

I’m now reading JM Coetzee's Slow Man. From the reviews, you will surely know the main character Paul Rayment is visited by Elizabeth Costello, the odd, austere novelist from the landmark, eponymous novel. She tells Rayment that he came to her. There wasn’t anything she could do. He came to her as one presumes characters come to novelists. Just after she arrives, she comments on his pathetic infatuation with Marijana, the day nurse. “You are in the grip of something, aren’t you?” she says.

These words are also used to describe David Lurie’s reckless pursuit of the young student Melanie in Disgrace, Coetzee's second Booker Prize winning novel. Lurie knows it is reckless but he is "in the grip of something".

What I like about Coetzee, and why each new book excites my interest, is because the grip is the subject. Where does it come from? Where does it end?

This story: Waggish reads Elizabeth Costello

Waggish has posted an authorative, challenging and welcome response to JM Coetzee’s extraordinary novel Elizabeth Costello. While this book has not struggled for attention, it’s certainly struggled to be understood and appreciated. We need more good readers like Waggish.

Unlike all of the reviews I have read, this one focuses on the "truly obnoxious" character of Elizabeth Costello herself (and, mercifully, without conflating author and character). The novel is based around several "lessons" written for fictional lectures in which, Waggish says, "[h]er arguments are irrational, trite, and mindlessly syllogistic".

I have to admit that, when I was reading the novel, this was not my opinion. But that’s because I didn’t really have one. The pleasure I got from reading the novel was the pleasure one gets following a compelling narrative. As with Bernhard’s Extinction or Concrete, one isn’t so much repelled by the narrators’ absurd opinions as seduced by the eloquence of the desperation on show. So, odd as it seems, Elizabeth Costello is in the monstrous company of Franz-Josef Murau - even if Coetzee’s prose (in James Wood’s phrase) is "precise, but blanched" compared to Bernhard’s pell-mell steam-roller.

As I say, I wasn’t detained by the characters’ opinions. I barely recall any of Costello’s or Murau’s. But I remember one particular issue that disturbed Costello; one that goes unmentioned by Waggish (and many of the reviews): her reaction to The Very Rich Hours of Count von Stauffenberg, a really-existing novel by Paul West. In Adam Mars-Jones’ words, she uses this in a lecture as "a key example of a book which increased rather than diminished the world's supply of wickedness, by entering too vividly into the depravity of Hitler's executioners".

This is probably why it is so memorable to me. There is an unsettling realisation that the story, all stories, while tempting us with consolation and hope, in fact add to the world’s misery. Waggish worries for Coetzee that Costello’s "specious arguments" will be mistakenly attributed to him. But he wrote the story, which is everything. He can’t escape that, hence perhaps this story.