Late Essays : 2006-2017

by J. M. Coetzee

  About the Book

  Stranger Shores, a collection of J.M. Coetzee’s essays from 1986 to 1999, was followed by Inner Workings, which contained those from 2000 to 2005. Late Essays gathers together Coetzee’s literary essays since 2006.

  The subjects covered range from Daniel Defoe in the early eighteenth century to Coetzee’s contemporary Philip Roth. Coetzee has had a longstanding interest in German literature and here he engages with the work of Goethe, Hölderlin, Kleist and Walser. There are four fascinating essays on fellow Nobel laureate Samuel Beckett and he looks at the work of three Australian writers: Patrick White, Les Murray and Gerald Murnane. There are essays too on Tolstoy’s great novella The Death of Ivan Ilyich, on Flaubert’s masterpiece Madame Bovary, and on the Argentine modernist Antonio Di Benedetto.

  J.M. Coetzee, a great novelist himself, is a wise and insightful guide to these works of international literature that span three centuries.

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  Title Page

  1. Daniel Defoe, Roxana

  2. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter

  3. Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier

  4. Philip Roth’s Tale of the Plague

  5. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther

  6. Translating Hölderlin

  7. Heinrich von Kleist: Two Stories

  8. Robert Walser, The Assistant

  9. Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary

  10. Irène Némirovsky, Jewish Writer

  11. Juan Ramón Jiménez, Platero and I

  12. Antonio Di Benedetto, Zama

  13. Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilyich

  14. On Zbigniew Herbert

  15. The Young Samuel Beckett

  16. Samuel Beckett, Watt

  17. Samuel Beckett, Molloy

  18. Eight Ways of Looking at Samuel Beckett

  19. Late Patrick White

  20. Patrick White, The Solid Mandala

  21. The Poetry of Les Murray

  22. Reading Gerald Murnane

  23. The Diary of Hendrik Witbooi

  Notes and References

  Acknowledgments

  Also by J.M. Coetzee

  Copyright Notice

  1. Daniel Defoe, Roxana

  Daniel Defoe was born in 1660 into a family of Dissenters, that is to say, fringe Protestants of Calvinist orientation. Universities being closed by law to Dissenters as to Roman Catholics, he was educated at a Dissenting academy on the outskirts of London. This was not a bad thing. English universities were at a low point in their history, whereas academies like the one he attended were open to new currents in philosophy and natural science. They taught not the classical curriculum of grammar and rhetoric but practical subjects like history and geography, and trained students to write in their native English.

  On graduating Defoe looked forward to a career in commerce; but his restless, sometimes headstrong involvement in national affairs, complicated by his minority status as a Dissident, made life as a businessman hard to realize. Though he prudently retreated from the radically egalitarian views of his early years, his standpoint remained, broadly speaking, progressive, particularly on relations between the sexes. As a journalist and political commentator he decried arranged marriages and agitated for reform of the marriage laws. Being married to someone you do not love, he wrote, was like the variety of capital punishment practised in ancient Rome in which the homicide was bound to the corpse of his victim and left to die of slow putrefaction. He advocated education for women according to a modern curriculum that would equip them to manage their own affairs. His own marriage was notably happy.

  Because he wrote freely (promiscuously, his critics said) on every subject under the sun, and with (apparently) careless haste, Defoe has been accorded a peculiar position in the history of literature: as an unwitting, accidental pioneer of the novel of realism. Here is the French critic Hippolyte Taine, writing in 1863:

  [Defoe’s] imagination is that of a man of business rather than an artist, packed with facts, almost crammed full with them. He presents them as they come to him, without arrangement or style, as if conversing, not trying to achieve effects or compose a proper sentence, employing technical terms and vulgar turns of phrase, repeating himself if need be, saying the same thing two or three times.

  To Taine, Defoe seems simply to be exposing the contents of his mind without the intervening agency of art. Because the resulting jumble is much like the jumble of everyday life, we take it to be in some vague sense ‘real’ or ‘true’.

  It is in [avoiding the appearance of fiction] that his talent lies. In this way his imperfections serve his interest. His oversights, his repetitions, his prolixity contribute to the illusion: we cannot claim that such and such a detail, so petty, so dull, could be invented – an inventor would have left it out, it is too tedious to have been put in on purpose. Art makes choices, embellishes, engages our interest; art could not possibly have piled up this load of dull, vulgar particulars; therefore it must be the truth.1

  Taine’s verdict on Defoe is a harsh one, yet in essence it persists to the present day. As a writer Defoe did not know what he was doing, therefore could have had no idea of the importance of what he was doing. Instead, following intuitions that, in retrospect, we concede may have flowed from a certain inborn genius, he gave us, under a series of disguises, a representation of the mind of his age, or rather, the mind of an important social actor: the inquisitive, acquisitive man or woman of the ascendant Protestant middle class.

  One of the things about Defoe that irritated the people around him was his self-confidence. There was nothing he believed he could not do. In an age that did not lack for men of high intellect (Isaac Newton was a contemporary), Defoe was a supreme exemplar of a different kind of intelligence: of practical intelligence, of knowing or working out how to do things. Here follows a partial list of things he did during his seventy years on earth.

  He conducted, at various times and with varying degrees of success, trading operations in wines and spirits; in riding-horses; in linen textiles; in woollen textiles and hosiery; in commercial seed; in tobacco and lumber; in cheese, honey, and shellfish. He engaged in the financing of commercial fishing and ran a factory that made bricks and roofing tiles. He ploughed money into two failed projects: raising civet cats for the perfume trade; and building a diving bell to search for sunken treasure on the seabed. He was twice declared bankrupt and imprisoned.

  In a parallel career in journalism he edited a journal of opinion, the Review, which he brought out three times a week from 1704 until 1713. Specializing in foreign affairs and economic forecasting, it was unmatched in its day for the acuity and intelligence of its reporting, for all of which Defoe himself was responsible. Republished in full for the benefit of scholars in 1938, it runs to twenty-two fat volumes.

  In 1703 Defoe was prosecuted and found guilty of what would today be called hate speech, on the basis of a pamphlet he wrote in which, impersonating a fanatical Church of England preacher, he argued that the best way of dealing with troublesome Dissenters was to crucify them. He spent five months in prison, followed by public exposure on the pillory.

  He was employed by successive government administrations as what we would today call an intelligence officer but in his day was called a spy. In the course of his duties he crossed the length and breadth of the country sounding out popular opinion and reporting his findings to his bosses in London. He used this experience to set up a nationwide network of informers run from Whitehall.

  His close knowledge of national affairs provided the basis of a three-volume work he published after he had left state employment and was making a living as a professional w
riter (a profession which, if he did not invent it, he certainly pioneered). A Tour through the Whole Island of Great Britain is at the same time a guidebook for travellers, an analysis of the state of British society, and an account of Britain’s economic prospects, the most authoritative such survey of its day.

  Then, beginning in 1719, when he was nearing the age of sixty, Defoe wrote and published in rapid succession a series of books that pretended to be the life stories of adventurers and criminals, as narrated by themselves – books which did much to define the shape and style of the modern novel. The first of these fictions, The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York, Mariner: Written by Himself, gripped the public imagination and was a great commercial success.

  The last of Defoe’s string of book-length fictions was Roxana: The Fortunate Mistress, published in 1724. Roxana bears all the marks of hasty production. It is repetitive (it could safely be cut by a third); it seems not to have been revised at all (there are two versions of the heroine’s landing at Harwich after the storm-tossed voyage from the Continent); and the passages in which she expresses her remorse for a life of sin read suspiciously like late insertions intended for the censor’s eye.

  Roxana (a pseudonym: it is implied that she has a ‘real’ name but we never learn it) is a beautiful and intelligent woman who trades on her looks (on which the passage of time seems to have little effect – she uses no cosmetics, yet at the age of fifty men still find her alluring) to win for herself what she most deeply craves: material independence. In the course of an eventful erotic life she has two marriages and one quasi-marriage as well as two significant affairs, one in France, one in England. Regarding the English affair she is tight-lipped, leaving us to infer that the lover in question must have been the reigning monarch. (This is of course a writer’s trick: if this were a made-up story, we are supposed to reason, the author would not have drawn a veil over so juicy an episode, therefore the story cannot be made up, it must be ‘true’.)

  Apart from her first husband, whom she marries early and who abandons her with no money and five young children to feed, the men in Roxana’s life are deeply attached to her, even in thrall to her. To prove his devotion, her aristocratic French lover breaks off relations with his other mistresses; all her lovers lavish money and jewels on her.

  Given how central Roxana’s sexual allure is to the action of the book, it is surprising how little we discover about her erotic psychology. Is sexual pleasure important to her or does she use sex simply as a means to an end? She is silent on the question. Are we to presume that she has little sexual feeling; or does she lack the kind of narcissism that would enable her to enjoy seeing herself as the object of another’s desire; or does her silence simply mean that she is too modest to broach the subject?

  What Roxana’s silence certainly does not mean is that Defoe, her creator, is too prudent or prudish to explore the workings of sexual desire. One has only to think of the extended erotic game he describes between Roxana, her second (pseudo) husband, and her maidservant Amy, a game in which the two women excite each other and goad each other on until copulation ensues.

  This episode initiates an inquiry into the psychology of seduction – more specifically the psychology of being seduced – that is pursued in patches across the book. The key word here is ‘irresistible’. After succumbing to her French lover for the first time, Roxana stills her unease by telling herself that the seduction was ‘irresistible’ and that a just God would not punish us for ‘that which it was not possible for us to avoid’. In the case of the king, she again claims that she was not responsible: he laid siege to her ‘in such an irresistible manner that … there was no withstanding it’.2

  As with the earlier Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders (1722), Roxana has at least the appearance of a confession, a contrite recounting of the story of an ill-spent past. It is thus to be expected that Roxana should present her various affairs as moral lapses rather than as personal triumphs. Her plea is that though she did not want to succumb she had to succumb because her seducer was irresistible; further, that one cannot be blamed for yielding to an irresistible force.

  But the truth is that sexual seduction is always resistible: it is precisely its being resistible that distinguishes it from rape. One can be forced to do what one does not want to do but one cannot be persuaded to do it – not if one really does not want to do it. This is in essence the answer that Aristotle offers to the question of why we sometimes act against our own better interests: when we do so, he says, it is because we do not know what is good for us in such a way that we fully inhabit that knowledge. (That is why, according to Aristotle, mere adherence to a moral code does not qualify one as a good person.)3

  Roxana does not pretend that the virtue whose loss she intermittently laments is something she deeply and sincerely believes in. On the contrary, she is happy to remain in a divided, ambivalent state in which she wants to resist seduction but equally wants her resistance to be swept away. She is well aware of this division or ambivalence within herself, and exploits it to evade blame. Thus she says to Amy, of one of her suitors: ‘I believe I shall yield to him, if he should importune me … but I should be glad he would not do it at all, but leave me as I am.’ (p. 74) Implicitly she recognizes that she finds being seduced more interesting (more engaging, more thrilling, more erotic, more seductive in prospect) than giving herself in a direct, unambiguous way; that the prelude to the sexual act can be more desirable, more erotically fulfilling, than the act itself. Seduction, the thought of seduction, the approach of seduction, the imagined experience of seduction, turns out to be profoundly seductive, even irresistible.

  Sin and its devious machinations are a staple of Protestant moral psychology, one of the many fields of which Defoe had a close knowledge. He was certainly familiar with the most common excuse that people give for why they have fallen into sin: they were blinded by passion (‘irresistible’ passion), they say, which is beyond the reach of reason, since its basis is in our animal selves. Defoe was also aware of the crack in this argument, namely that, since we do not invariably give in to our passions, there must be some voice within us telling us when to give in and when not to give in, which seductions we should find irresistible and which we should find resistible. That voice belongs to ourselves, not to our animal being.

  It is easy enough to dismiss as self-serving Roxana’s resort to psychology to excuse her lapses from virtue (‘something in me made me do it’). What is less easy to brush aside is the economic argument she puts forward in her defence, namely that a woman abandoned and left destitute by her husband has either to find male protectors or to prostitute herself; that the England of her day offers no other options.

  No doubt Roxana overstates her case. One can imagine an alternative story in which an accomplished young woman like herself has the good fortune to be taken into the home of a wealthy merchant and asked to tutor the children of the family in French. But, through the story he actually invents, Defoe is concerned to plead for an easing of the divorce laws that make it impossible for an abandoned wife to remarry, and more generally to put the case for legal equality between the partners in a marriage. He is also eager to advocate a form of education for girls that will enable them to make an independent living. This joint case is made with a great deal of force. It comes to a head in the blazing attack that Roxana launches on the institution of marriage when the amiable Dutch merchant with whom she has already slept has the temerity to ask for her hand. By marrying him, she says, she will lose her liberty, her estate and her autonomy, and become a servant for the rest of her days. ‘Though I could give up my virtue … yet I would not give up my money’. (p. 186)

  Money plays a key role in all of Defoe’s fictions, nowhere more so than in Roxana. What Roxana admires most in a man is a good head for money; what she looks for in a husband is trustworthiness in financial matters. Respect for such quintessentially bourgeois qualities may seem odd in a woman w
hose highest dream is to be a grand courtesan. But beneath the glamorous exterior Roxana is a prudent, even avaricious hoarder. She spends money freely, but each expenditure is an investment calculated to bring in a future return. For the rest, the many ‘gifts’ she receives from men are locked away in an iron chest. Her lovers have no idea of the scale of her growing fortune. It is her greatest secret.

  Moving from country to country as she is forced by circumstance to do, Roxana faces the problem of how to shift her assets. Travelling with quantities of jewellery and silver plate is too risky to contemplate, yet as a woman she has neither the competence nor the contacts to convert her valuables into safer and more easily transferable bills. What recommends the Dutch merchant to her, and eventually qualifies him as a marriage partner, is the deftness with which he handles the financial instruments of the new, mercantile age. Once she is settled in London, she takes lessons in financial management, making the crucial economic move from hoarding treasure to getting her capital to grow.

  Although Roxana suffers from being too long and repetitive, in the last fifth of the book the flagging drama comes to life. Through an unlikely coincidence, the eldest child from Roxana’s first marriage tracks down the mother who abandoned her years ago. Her sudden appearance on the scene, a veritable return of the repressed, throws Roxana into a terrible quandary. The child has discovered her secret past as a courtesan. If that becomes public knowledge, her happy marriage to the Dutchman will be wrecked. But even worse, the child is demanding that Roxana recognize her as her daughter, confess to the wrong she has done her, make reparation, and become the mother she has refused to be. It is a demand Roxana will not meet: she will not ruin her life for the sake of a stranger who is clearly unbalanced. It is also a demand Roxana cannot meet: as we begin to comprehend, there is a fundamental coldness in her emotional make-up which a lifetime of selfish calculation has only served to intensify, a lack of heart that makes her incapable of giving herself.