Notes on The Childhood of Jesus, 2

 

‘You and Fidel seem to get on well together,’ he remarks to the boy once they are alone.

‘He is my best friend.’

‘So Fidel feels goodwill towards you, does he?’

‘Lots of goodwill.’

‘How about you? Do you feel goodwill too?’

The boy nods vigorously.

‘Anything else besides?’

The boy gives him a puzzled look. ‘No.’

So there he has it, out of the mouths of babes and sucklings.

So there he has it, Coetzee, spouting Biblical truth near the closing of Chapter 7 of The Childhood of Jesus. The reference was to Matthew 21:16.

and said to Him, "Do You hear what these [children] are saying?" And Jesus said to them, "Yes. Have you never read, 'Out of the mouth of babes and nursing infants You have perfected praise'?"

And Psalms 8:2.

Out of the mouth of babes and nursing infants You have ordained strength, Because of Your enemies, That You may silence the enemy and the avenger.

The phrase soon entered the currency of idiom and had come to mean the wisdom of young children, or children who are wise beyond their years.

The passage continued and closed the chapter in a ponderous turn. Coetzee's philosophical spirit soared.

So there he has it, out of the mouths of babes and sucklings. From goodwill come friendship and happiness, come companionable picnics in the parklands or companionable afternoons strolling in the forest. 

The word companionable – unusual, repeated – jogged my memory of college reading years, when I relished commentaries on stories and poems in a textbook on literature. I knew the word companionable streams was a phrase used in a poem by Keats because the import of the word companionable was emphasized in a close reading that accompanied the poem.

A few clicks in Google and it turned out I was wrong. It was by Yeats.

This was from "The Wild Swans at Coole" by Yeats:

I have looked upon those brilliant creatures,
And now my heart is sore.
All's changed since I, hearing at twilight,
The first time on this shore,
The bell-beat of their wings above my head,
Trod with a lighter tread.

Unwearied still, lover by lover,
They paddle in the cold
Companionable streams or climb the air;
Their hearts have not grown old;
Passion or conquest, wander where they will,
Attend upon them still.

The poet was revisiting a forest and lake where swans were frolicking. It was a regular sightseeing event, going for almost two decades now. At this particular visit, one could almost hear an audible sigh of melancholy as the poet gazed at the flock of 59 swans. There was marked contrast between the vitality of the swans and the world-weariness of the poet.

Coetzee, on the other hand, had Simón reflecting on missing human connections in a Spanish speaking refugee camp-like community. He was continually ignored by the people in the community who seemingly lacked for passion and energy. His attempts at flirting were unreciprocated.

So there he has it, out of the mouths of babes and sucklings. From goodwill come friendship and happiness, come companionable picnics in the parklands or companionable afternoons strolling in the forest. Whereas from love, or at least from longing in its more urgent manifestations, come frustration and doubt and heartsore. It is as simple as that.

... Is he insisting on the primacy of the personal (desire, love) over the universal (goodwill, benevolence)? And why is he continually asking himself questions instead of just living, like everyone else? Is it all part of a far too tardy transition from the old and comfortable (the personal) to the new and unsettling (the universal)? Is the round of self-interrogation nothing but a phase in the growth of each new arrival, a phase that people like Álvaro and Ana and Elena have by now successfully passed through? If so, how much longer before he will emerge as a new, perfected man?  

Soreness of heart amid companionable surroundings. What are the odds? 

The playful wild swans were absent in Coetzee's formulation of longing and impatience and frustration. If anything, the contrast was between the friendship of the two innocent boys and Simón's longing for an adult connection, for companionship. Simón thought he still had some way to go to renew his older self. Whereas the boys, in their innocence and carefreeness, were already perfected in their wisdom. 

 

Notes on The Childhood of Jesus

 

A writer deliberately wanted to be inscrutable on the page, and it was the fault of the reader not to see the thicket for the bush. In the beginning were words, and the words were with the novelist, and the words were inscrutable to the reader. 

The title of the book was a devil trick of the novelist. The first few chapters were not indicative of any hallowed subject. The nature of the divine did not knock on the page. It was not simply granted for the atheistic reader. But why invoke the son of God into the discourse if this was not a superhero's tale?

David, the precocious boy in the book, was a Chess whiz. He easily beat an old man in a blitz chess. The man would surrender and say, 'I'll think twice before taking you on again ... You've got a real devil in you.' Can you make it any more obvious, Sir?

There definitely was something different about the boy's disposition. He doesn't like chess even if he is very talented in it. He doesn't flinch when a physical threat of violence was made right in front of him. He doesn't like violence. There was something of a pacifist, if not divine, in his comportment. But the Coetzee school of writing still resisted the equivalence of his childhood with that of sweet Jesus.

* * *

A novel is not a vaccine that could trigger an immune response to the reader. But there are certain writers who have a way with stringing words together that could trigger mass delusion on the part of the thirsty flock. An extreme case, at the end of the spectrum, was the Coelho school of writing. This was a writing characterized by an imposition of hack ideas and quack medicine about finding alignment in the universe for the circumstances to constellate into your own Personal Legend.

Another extreme case, at the other side of the spectrum, was another instance of "placebo effect", a novel variant. This was the Coetzee school of writing. This writing was not sociable, hardly helpful, full of ludic misdirections. It was not the sub-meter accurate GPS device truth-seekers yearn for. 

'What did she mean? Do you really want to push something inside her?'

'It was only a manner of speaking. She meant that I was trying to force my ideas on her. And she was right. One should not try to force ideas upon people.'

It was quite a leap: the forcing of ideas on someone (or in a novel) was satanized as sexual assault. I may be taking the dialogue out of context. In this novel, it was quite impossible to force meaning out of words when it was the meaninglessness of life itself that seemed to emerge like a castle of sand.

On page 42, a running joke on rats to prove a point that we were not reading a gospel.

'It seems to me,' he continues, 'that a growing child needs more variety, more nourishment. One cannot live on bread alone. It is not a universal food. You don't know where I can buy meat, do you ... ?

Álvaro scratches his head. 'Not around here, not around the docklands. There are people who catch rats, I have heard tell. There is no shortage of rats. But for that you will need a trap, and I don't know offhand where you would lay your hands on a good rat trap. You would probably have to make it yourself. You could use wire, with some kind of trip mechanism.'

'Rats?'

'Yes. Haven't you seen them? Whenever there are ships there are rats.'

'But who eats rats? Do you eat rats?'

'No, I wouldn't dream of it. But you asked where you could get meat, and that is all I can suggest.'

He stares long into Álvaro's eyes. He can see no sign that he is joking. Or if it is a joke, it is a very deep joke.'

A trap with a trip mechanism for catching rats? Why belabor the talk of rats when the suggestion was absurd in the first place? And this coming from a vegan author of The Lives of Animals. 

And: "One cannot leave on bread alone". We know what you're trying to do there, Mr Coetzee.

Later on, a villainous character was introduced, a new worker in the docks.

The next day a stranger makes his appearance at the docks. He is small and wiry; his skin is burned a deep walnut shade; his eyes are deep set, his nose hooked like a hawk's beak. He wears faded jeans streaked with machine oil, and scarred leather boots.

The amount of words Coetzee heaped upon the character, Señor Daga, indicated that this guy was up to no good. Here at least was a novelistic trope we could rely on.

Come pay time, all workers lined up to receive their pay. Señor Daga received money from the paymaster.

'What's this?' says Daga.

'Your pay for the days you have worked,' says Álvaro.

Daga picks up the coins and with a quick, contemptuous movement flings them back in the paymaster's face.

'What's that for?' says Álvaro.

'Rat's wage.'

'That's the rate. That's what you earned. That's what we all earn. Do you want to say we are all rats?'

Later there was fight between Señor Daga and Álvaro. Daga wounded the latter with a knife before mounting the paymaster's bicycle and skirting away.

The boy David would ask his guardian: 'Why is he called Señor Daga?'

Simón the guardian would reply: I don't know if Daga is his real name. It doesn't matter. Names don't matter. If he wants to call himself Daga, then let him.'

Throughout this part I was laughing. Names do matter, especially in the Coetzee school of writing. In Tagalog, the word daga, with the accent in the second syllable, actually means a rat. A rat's wage for a rat. Tit for tat.

* * *

So much for the first seven chapters of this first book in the Jesus trilogy. In spite of the flashes of humor, there was no reprieve for the reader. The opaqueness of its presentation, borrowing from the Kafka school of narrative, was jarring. So far, the experience (as perceived by this reader) was antithetical to the communion of reader and writer as perceived by Martin Amis.

The relationship between the writer and the reader is a mysterious one, and rather unexamined in my view. At its simplest, it’s a matter of straightforward transmission: I am telling a story. But it goes much deeper than that, until reader and writer become identical, almost indivisible. One mustn’t, of course, baby the reader, but one must be very considerate of them. The frame of this novel is a direct dialogue with the reader.

Contrary to what were emphasized above, the novelist in question (Coetzee) was very inconsiderate of the reader. To hell with the reader. And isn't it concerning that reader and writer could become one and the same, like one is being possessed by the other? That's a disenchanting thought. It's like forcing ideas on the reader.

Notes on Summertime

Summertime: Scenes from Provincial Life by J.M. Coetzee (Harvill Secker, 2009)



Cover page: This is the 8th novel by Coetzee that I've read. It completes the trilogy of memoir-like anti-novels that started with Boyhood and Youth.

p. 20: According to one resource person interviewed about Coetzee the persona or character in the book, the notebook entries that bookended (sandwiched) the novel are written by Coetzee "himself".

Coetzee wrote them himself. They are memos to himself, written in 1999 or 2000, when he was thinking of adapting those particular entries for a book. [original in italics]

The fragmentary nature of the entire book, made up of diary entries and interviews, was at least indirectly acknowledged.

p. 13: The notebook entries continue:

If Jesus had stooped to play politics he might have become a key man in Roman Judaea, a big operator. It was because he was indifferent to politics, and made his indifference clear, that he was liquidated. How to live one's life outside politics, and one's death too: that was the example he set for his followers.

Odd to find himself contemplating Jesus as a guide. But where should he search for a better one?

Caution: Avoid pushing his interest in Jesus too far and turning this into a conversion narrative. [original in italics]

This prompts me on what cycle of Coetzee novels to read next. In fact, I placed an order for The Childhood of Jesus, along with Chekhov's Sakhalin Island, in April 2019. A book claims notice from the post office arrived at J's apartment for her to claim and pick up the parcel. She lost the notice.

(Rant: About government post office policy sending notices for books instead of directly delivering to the address. Government requires book receivers to pay further tax money before handing over the parcel. Government is taxing literature and knowledge. Hence, it taxes the future.)

How live one's life and death outside politics? It appears as if Coetzee's project for the Coetzee character/persona was set up early on. However much he (the persona) avoided the politics of South Africa, it haunts him and finds him. It is in the air one breathes. He (the actual novelist) manages to escape to another continent.

pp. 33-34: An attempt at dry comedy. The interviews (the sandwiched portions) are laced with comedy so dry they make the paper crisp.

As for the experience itself – I mean the experience of infidelity, which is what the experience was, predominantly, for me – it was stranger that I expected, and then over before I could get accustomed to the strangeness. Yet it was exciting, no doubt about that, from start to finish. My heart did not stop hammering. Not something I will forget, ever. Going back to Henry James, there are plenty of betrayals in James, but I recall nothing about the sense of excitement, of heightened self-awareness, during the act itself – the act of betrayal, I mean. Which suggests to me that, though James liked to present himself as a great betrayer, he had never actually done the deed itself, bodily.

From start to finish, even the literary allusions sizzle and crackle with asexual analysis.

 p. 42: At opportune times, the prose swerves toward language matters, weighing words in abrupt asides.

His English – the father's – was perfectly passable, as I said, but it was clearly not his mother tongue. When he brought out an idiom, like No doubt about that, he did so with a little flourish, as if expecting to be applauded.

I asked him what he did. (Did: such an inane word; but he knew what I meant.) He told me he was a bookkeeper ...

Reminds me of somebody who keeps saying as far as ... is concerned. Always with a flick of a hand.

As if every problem and misunderstanding and miscommunication in the world, every war, conflict, terror plot, diplomatic protest, can be attributed to poor use of language.

Later (p. 96): "In the afterworld there are no language problems. It's like Eden all over again."

p. 44: Storytelling, the interviewee insists, is "nothing more than a matter of perspective". Unoriginal. Rashomon showed the way. What was original was how the fragments encompass various prose forms or artifacts to produce scenes from the life of a single (i.e., unmarried) white man in South Africa during turbulent times.

Perhaps a true novelist will never be able to write an unqualified (non-fictional) autobiography, only an autobiographical novel, or a semi-autobiographical one, let alone a memoir. Autofiction is his default register. This ungraspable life, so to speak, can only be dealt with indirectly, experience by experience. Fiction is the closest thing to an autobiography. Was it Borges who said that?

pp. 61-62: About the enduring value of books, the novelist hides behind his philosophical dialogues, tongue in cheek mode. The Coetzee persona had the temerity to proclaim, "A book should be an axe to chop open the frozen sea inside us. What else should it be?" Unattributed.

pp. 87-89, p. 91: The seams are showing. Is it all an exercise to demonstrate the editing process of novel-writing? That the writer's manner of editing the prose dictates how a text takes form, and how
he responds to the form reveals the form itself. Is this fragmentary novel an ode to found text or gradual self-immolation? It appears to be a well-curated edifice of discrete instants, moments in the life of an artist type.

p. 145, 151: More direct proclamations about the race problem but always coming out of nowhere, sudden gestures, sudden asides. "Out of place in the loud, angry place this country has become." He can't help himself from zooming in and out, from specific and local, to broad and national.

p. 160: Again, too much about the asexuality of the Coetzee character:

So Manuel brough Mr Coetzee to our flat, and I could see at once he was no god. He was in his early thirties, I estimated, badly dressed, with badly cut hair and a bear when he shouldn't have worn a beard, his beard was too thin. Also he struck me as once, I can't say why, as célibataire. I mean not just unmarried but also not suited to marriage, like a man who has spent his life in the priesthood and lost his manhood and become incompetent with women. Also his comportment was not good (I am telling you my first impression). He seemed ill at ease, itching to get away. He had not learned to hide his feelings, which is the first step toward civilized manners.

The novelist takes great pains in developing an almost-neuter, subhuman, sub-sexual organism. The loss of fecundity, the state of infertility. The existence of this full-bodied animal in an arid and drab landscape – unable to escape from the dreary tentacles of politics and history – is almost a double-edged political commentary itself in the age of apartheid.

p. 163: Imagine the character Coetzee's response to a mother of his young impressionable female student when the mother asks about his teaching philosophy.

'What I call my philosophy of teaching is in fact a philosophy of learning. It comes out of Plato, modified. Before true learning can occur, I believe, there must be in the student's heart a certain yearning for the truth, a certain fire. The true student burns to know. In the teacher she recognizes, or apprehends, the one who has come closer than herself to the truth. So much does she desire the truth embodied in the teacher that she is prepared to burn her old self up to attain it. For his part, the teacher recognizes and encourages the fire in the student, and responds to it by burning with an intenser light. Thus together the two of them rise to a higher realm. So to speak.' 

Obviously, the mother was unimpressed. Her assessment of the teacher's philosophy was comic fire.

Summertime is ostensibly a novel about one John Coetzee and the characters he interacted with during his adulthood. His, and their, misadventures. But J.M. Coetzee is too subtle for surfaces and depths. It is a slice of life of a country, John Coetzee's country, which unfortunately happens to be not fictional.

The novel was creative in juxtaposing various excerpts, dealing with apartheid both centrally and obliquely. But it was evident that the approach becomes more tentative and self-conscious as the interviews drag on. It keeps on saying how Coetzee's subject matter and themes in his novels need to be distanced from the real instances of his own life.

p. 215: "It would be very, very naive to conclude that because the theme was present in his writing it had to be present in his life."

We get it. True life was different from fictional treatment.

The novelist, moreover, never lets up the chance for some of his characters to pillory the character of Coetzee the character/persona. I should say, both the character and the written works of the Coetzee persona. Consider the final words of the last interviewee, a literary critic

In general I would say that his work lacks ambition. The control of the elements is too tight. Nowhere do you get a feeling of a writing deforming his medium in order to say what has never been said before, which is to me the mark of great writing. Too cool, too neat, I would say. Too easy. Too lacking in passion. That's all.

Coetzee makes it easy to quibble about the harsh judgement of the critic interviewed here. The sweeping, all-knowing assessment. The generic tirade and overstatement. The critic was as unoriginal as the Coetzee persona in the book. Saying unsaid things may not be the only yardstick of great writing. In this novel, the novelist may not have said unsaid things; in fact it said a lot of already said things – the frozen sea inside us, hello. But the medium was as deformed and deconstructed as it could be. This made the already said things as if unsaid, or as if said for the first time.

As to Coetzee's apparent hostility to his own created self, the solution Borges provided killed the irony:

It would be an exaggeration to affirm that our relationship is hostile; I live, I let myself live, so that Borges can plot his literature and that literature justifies me. 

Coetzee's lecture novel

Elizabeth Costello by J. M. Coetzee (Viking Penguin, 2003)


The lecture as a species of the novel? And this academic invasion works? I've read two novels of this kind. One was Elizabeth Costello by J. M. Coetzee, constructed out of its novelist character's lectures which were, in large part, transcribed verbatim in the text. Some sections of the lectures were paraphrased, other "extraneous" writings or events in the book were merely glossed over, dismissed with a stylistic flourish. Here's the omniscient narrator, right before Elizabeth Costello's delivering a lecture on the subject of realism.

   The presentation scene itself we skip. 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. However, unless certain scenes are skipped over we will be here all afternoon. The skips are not part of the text, they are part of the performance.

This was from the first lecture, entitled "What is Realism?" It already pointed to the lecture novel as a form of performance. The omission of supposedly insufferable parts was the rule ("There is a scene in the restaurant, mainly dialogue, which we will skip.") Skip, skip, skip. The reader was delivered from unnecessary scenes. He should be thankful for this consideration on the part of the narrator. And Costello, for her forthright behavior, despite her unstable and opinionated nature. And Coetzee, for keeping everything to the interesting minimum.

Let us invert the sense. How about the novel as a species of academic lecture? Or is it the same thing as the first? Let's skip to the second lecture, where Costello was aboard a cruise ship giving a talk about "The Novel in Africa". After her lecture, she had a debate with someone with whom she had a bit of a "history". They were arguing about the "living voice" in the African novel, its oral nature. Her position: the novel was not a performance.

The novel was never intended to be the script of a performance. From the beginning the novel had made a virtue of not depending on being performed. You can't have both live performance and cheap, handy distribution. It's the one or the other.

I'm not sure what she'll think of audiobooks. But skipping ahead to the third lecture, a two-part talk on "The Lives of Animals", the novelist Costello was up to some provocative argumentation. (This double lecture first appeared as a self-contained book, with commentaries from four scholars, in 1999. A few years ago I read an edition that was without the commentaries.) In her argument against animal cruelty (and also: in Coetzee's argument against animal cruelty, via fiction), Costello brought in a metaphoric leap of condemnation.

   Let me say it openly: we are surrounded by an enterprise of degradation, cruelty and killing which rivals anything that the Third Reich was capable of, indeed dwarfs it, in that ours is an enterprise without end, self-regenerating, bringing rabbits, rats, poultry, live-stock ceaselessly into the world for the purpose of killing them.

Despite the hardened position, the speech had room for self-deprecation. She basically spoke her mind because such "philosophical language", which at the same time was literary language, was "available" to her. And so she resorted to it:

But the fact is, if you had wanted someone to come here and discriminate for you between mortal and immortal souls, or between rights and duties, you would have called in a philosopher, not a person whose sole claim to your attention is to have written stories about made-up people.

The last few words defined the surface work of a novelist, Costello's and Coetzee's. Perhaps the greatest qualities of Coetzee as a writer, and that of his alter-ego, are two-fold: sympathy and compassion. The first is prerequisite to the second. Costello later spoke of the deeper, human, role the novelist could embody.

[T]here is no limit to the extent to which we can think ourselves into the being of another. There are no bounds to the sympathetic imagination. If you want proof, consider the following. Some years ago I wrote a book called The House on Eccles Street. To write that book I had to think my way into the existence of Marion Bloom. Either I succeeded or I did not. If I did not, I cannot imagine why you invited me here today. In any event, the point is, Marion Bloom never existed. Marion Bloom was a figment of James Joyce's imagination. If I can think my way into the existence of a being who has never existed, then I can think my way into the existence of a bat or a chimpanzee or an oyster, any being with whom I share the substrate of life.   

Skirting around (and yes, skipping) the main argument of Costello here, the fact is, The House on Eccles Street never existed. "Costello's Marion Bloom" never existed. It was a figment of Costello's imagination just as Costello herself was in Coetzee's. Creating the persona of Costello in this novel of lectures probably arose, in part, from the novelist's need to put distance between his radical views and that of his protagonist. He was always cross-examining the controversial contents of his character's speech, through Costello's detractors and devil's advocates, even if he obviously shared and believed in them. By his creation he produced and structured a layer of inquiry wherein the novelist adopted the very fictional methods of his character, and so demonstrated the capacity of fiction to augment the imagination and enlarge the spirit.

Costello, as character, was both likeable and unlikeable. Mostly she was unlikeable. But her intelligent and realistic representation was more than enough for her vitality of ideas and sympathetic imagination to leap off the page. To skip from fictional design and enter the reader's universe of ideas.

The second lecture novel I read after Coetzee's was Never Any End to Paris by Enrique Vila-Matas. In it, the character was delivering a lecture on the subject of irony. Pure fun. Maybe I'll write something on it.