Late Essays : 2006-2017

by J. M. Coetzee

  The haunting quality of The Good Soldier derives, in the end, from its author’s divided feelings about the code by which Ashburnham lives. It is a code whose tautologicality it is easy enough to expose: one does the right thing because one does the right thing; one doesn’t talk about one’s feelings because one doesn’t talk about one’s feelings. Although it ends on the most sombre of notes, The Good Soldier is not uniformly tragic in tone. On the contrary, in carrying out an exposé of the hypocrisies of the British ruling class, it has its satiric, comic moments. The mixture of tones suggests that Ford is aware that, once the code that holds together the ruling class unravels, the fibre of the whole social system might begin to unravel too; and his attachment to England – not the England of his day, certainly, but the England of his fantasy, the eighteenth-century England that he would have liked to belong to – was too strong for him to regard that prospect with unmixed pleasure.

  4. Philip Roth’s Tale of the Plague

  Between 1894 and 1952 the United States suffered a series of epidemic outbreaks of poliomyelitis. The worst of these, in 1916, claimed 6,000 lives. For another forty years polio would remain a substantial threat to public health. The development of a vaccine changed all that. By 1994 the disease had been eradicated in the United States and the rest of the western hemisphere. It survives today only in a few pockets in Africa and Asia beyond the reach of public health agencies.

  Polio has been around for millennia as a contagious viral disease. Before the twentieth century it was an endemic infection of early childhood, causing fever, headaches, and nausea, no worse. In only a tiny minority of cases did it assume full-blown form and attack the nervous system, leading to paralysis or even death.

  The mutation of polio into a serious disease can be blamed on improved standards of hygiene. The polio virus is passed on via human faeces (the virus breeds in the small intestine). A regime of hand-washing, regular baths, and clean underwear cuts down transmission. The catch is that clean habits rob communities of resistance to the virus; and when non-resistant older children and adults happen to contract the disease, it tends to take an extreme form. Thus the very measures that subdued diseases like cholera, typhus, tuberculosis, and diphtheria have rendered poliomyelitis a threat to life.

  The paradox that, while strict hygiene lessens the risk to individuals, it also weakens resistance and turns the disease lethal, was not widely grasped in the heyday of polio. In afflicted communities, eruptions of polio would trigger parallel and no less morbid eruptions of anxiety, despair, and misdirected rage.

  The psychopathology of populations under attack by diseases whose transmission is ill understood was explored by Daniel Defoe in his Journal of the Plague Year, which pretends to be the journal of a survivor of the bubonic plague that decimated London in 1665. Defoe records all the moves typical of plague communities: superstitious attention to signs and symptoms; vulnerability to rumour; the stigmatization and isolation (quarantining) of suspect families and groups; the scapegoating of the poor and the homeless; the extermination of whole classes of suddenly abhorred animals (dogs, cats, pigs); the fragmenting of the city into healthy and sick zones, with aggressive policing of boundaries; flight from the diseased centre, never mind that contagion might thereby be spread far and wide; and rampant mistrust of all by all, amounting to a general collapse of social bonds.

  Albert Camus knew Defoe’s Journal: in his novel The Plague (La Peste), written during the war years, he quotes from it and generally imitates the matter-of-fact stance of Defoe’s narrator towards the catastrophe unfolding around him. Nominally about an outbreak of bubonic plague in an Algerian city, The Plague also invites a reading as about what the French called ‘the brown plague’ of the German occupation, and more generally as about the ease with which a community can be infected by a bacillus-like ideology. It concludes with a sober warning:

  The plague bacillus neither dies nor disappears for good … it can lie dormant for years and years in furniture and linen-chests … it bides its time in bedrooms, cellars, trunks, and bookshelves; and … perhaps the day [will] come when, for the bane and the enlightenment of men, it [rouses] up its rats again and [sends] them forth to die in a happy city.1

  In a 2008 interview, Philip Roth mentioned that he had been rereading The Plague. Two years later he published Nemesis, a work of fiction set in Newark in the polio summer of 1944 (19,000 cases nationwide), thereby placing himself in a line of writers who have used the plague condition to explore the resolve of human beings and the durability of their institutions under attack by an invisible, inscrutable, and deadly force. In this respect – as Defoe, Camus, and Roth are aware – the plague condition is simply a heightened state of the condition of being mortal.

  Eugene ‘Bucky’ Cantor is a physical education instructor at a public school. Because of poor eyesight he has been exempted from the draft. He is ashamed of his good fortune, and tries to pay for it by giving the children in his charge every care and attention. In return the children adore him, particularly the boys.

  Bucky is twenty-three years old, level-headed, dutiful, and scrupulously honest. Though not an intellectual, he thinks about things. He is a Jew, but an indifferent practitioner of his religion.

  Polio breaks out in Newark and is soon sweeping through the Jewish section. Amid the general panic Bucky stays calm. Convinced that what children need in time of crisis is stability, he organizes a sports programme for the boys, and continues to run it against the doubts of the community, even when some of the boys begin to sicken and die. To set an example of human solidarity in the face of the plague, he openly shakes hands with the local simpleton, who is shunned by the boys as a carrier (‘Smell him! … He has shit all over him! … He’s the one who is carrying the polio!’). In private Bucky rails against the ‘lunatic cruelty’ of a God who kills innocent children.2

  Bucky has a girlfriend, Marcia, also a teacher, who is away helping run a summer camp in the mountains of Pennsylvania. Marcia puts pressure on Bucky to flee the infected city and join her in her haven. He resists. On the home front as much as in Normandy or the Pacific, he feels, these are extraordinary times calling for extraordinary sacrifice. Nonetheless, one day his principles inexplicably collapse. Yes, he says, he will come to her; he will abandon his boys and save himself.

  ‘How could he have done what he’d just done?’ he asks himself the moment he hangs up. He has no answer. (p. 135)

  Nemesis is an artfully constructed, suspenseful novel with a cunning twist towards the end. The twist is that Bucky Cantor himself carries the polio virus. More specifically, he is that statistically rare creature, a healthy infected carrier. The boys in Bucky’s care who sickened and died may well have been infected by him; the man whose hand he shook may be doomed. Furthermore, when Bucky flees the plague-ridden city he will be bearing the plague into an idyllic retreat where a party of innocents believed they were safe.

  The rest of the tale of Bucky is quickly told. Shortly after his arrival at the camp, polio erupts there. Bucky has himself tested and the terrible truth emerges. He succumbs to the disease. After treatment he is discharged from the hospital a cripple. Marcia still wants to marry him, but he refuses, preferring bitter isolation. Marcia speaks:

  ‘You’re always holding yourself accountable when you’re not. Either it’s terrible God who is accountable, or it’s terrible Bucky Cantor who is accountable, when in fact accountability belongs to neither. Your attitude toward God – it’s juvenile, it’s just plain silly’.

  ‘Look [says Bucky], your God is not to my liking, so don’t bring Him into the picture. He’s too mean for me. He spends too much time killing children’.

  ‘And that is nonsense too! Just because you got polio doesn’t give you the right to say ridiculous things. You have no idea what God is! No one does or can!’ (pp. 260–1)

  God is not accountable because God is above accountability, above mere human reckoning. Marcia echoes the God of the Book of Job, and the scorn exp
ressed there for the puniness of the human intellect (‘Canst thou by searching find out God?’ Job 11:7). But Roth’s novel evokes a Greek context more explicitly than it does a biblical one. The title Nemesis frames the interrogation of cosmic justice in Greek terms; and the plot pivots on the same dramatic irony as in Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex: a leader in the fight against the plague is unbeknown to himself a bringer of the plague.

  What exactly is Nemesis (or nemesis, the abstract noun)? Nemesis (the noun) exactly translates the Latin word indignatio, from which we get the English word indignation; and Indignation happens to be the title of a book Roth published in 2008 (the plot thickens), a book that, together with Everyman (2006), The Humbling (2009), and Nemesis, belongs to a subgroup of his oeuvre that Roth calls ‘Nemeses: Short Novels’.

  Indignatio and nemesis are words of complex meaning: they refer to both unbefitting (unjust) actions and feelings of (just) anger at such actions. Behind nemesis (via the verb nemo, to distribute) lies the idea of fortune, good or bad, and how fortune is dealt out in the universe. Nemesis (the goddess, the cosmic force) sees to it that those who prosper beyond what is fitting are humbled. Thus Oedipus, conqueror of the Sphinx and great king, leaves Thebes a blind beggar. Thus Bucky Cantor, admired athlete – the most lyrical pages of Nemesis celebrate his prowess as a javelin thrower – ends up a cripple behind a desk in the post office.

  Since he wittingly did no wrong, Oedipus is not a criminal. Nevertheless, his actions – parricide, incest – pollute him and pollute whatever he touches. He must leave the city. ‘No man but I can bear my evil doom,’ he says.3 Bucky has likewise committed no crime. Yet even more literally than Oedipus, he is polluted. He too accepts his guilt and, in his own manner, takes the lonely road of exile.

  At the core of the Oedipus fable, and of the archaic Greek world view enshrined in it, lies a question foreign to the modern, post-tragic imagination: How does the logic of justice work when vast universal forces intersect the trajectories of individual human lives? In particular, what is to be learned from the fate of a man who unwittingly carried out the prophecy that he would kill his father and marry his mother, a man who did not see until he was blind?

  To respond that for one man to unwittingly (‘by accident’) kill his own father and then unwittingly (‘by chance’) marry his own mother is so statistically rare a sequence of events – even rarer than bearing the plague while seeming healthy – that it can hold no general lesson, or – to put it another way – that the laws of the universe are probabilistic in nature, not to be disconfirmed by a single aberrant individual case – to respond in this way would to Sophocles seem like evading the question. Such a man lived: his name was Oedipus. He experienced such a fate. How should his fate be understood?

  Nemesis is not openly named by Sophocles, for which he doubtless had his reasons. Nevertheless, nemesis pervades Greek tragedy as a feared force presiding over human affairs, a force that redistributes fortune downward toward the middle or middling, and is in that sense mean, mean-minded: unkind, ungenerous, unrelenting. At one time all of Thebes envied Oedipus, says the chorus at the end of the play, yet look at him now! Greek tradition is full of cautionary tales of mortals who provoke the envy (nemesis) of the gods by being too beautiful or too happy or too fortunate, and are then made to suffer for it. The chorus, as an embodiment of received Theban opinion, is all too ready to package the story of Oedipus along these lines.

  There is a Greek-chorus way of reading the story of Bucky Cantor too. He was happy and healthy, he had a fulfilling job, he was in love with a beautiful girl, he had a 4-F exemption from the army; when the plague struck the city (the plague of polio, the plague of paranoia) he was not cowed but battled against it; whereupon Nemesis took aim at him; and look at him now! Moral: Don’t stand out from the crowd.

  The story of Newark’s polio summer comes to us, initially, via someone (male) from Newark’s Jewish section who takes care not to name himself, uses ‘we’ at every turn instead of ‘I’, and is generally so unobtrusive that the question of who he is barely arises. After twenty pages, as we move into the story of Bucky, even the most minimal traces of an identifiable storyteller vanish. So familiar does the narrating voice turn out to be with what goes on in Bucky’s mind that we might guess it is simply Bucky’s own I-voice transposed into the third person; or if not that then the voice of some impersonal, bodiless narrator, neither inventor of the story nor participant in it. Though this being now and again lets fall a mot juste – ‘He [began] to cry, awkwardly, inexpertly, the way men cry who ordinarily like to think of themselves as a match for anything’ (my italics) – he is certainly not the Philip Roth we know, either in style or in expressive power or in intellect. (p. 49)

  Only fleetingly is our assumption disturbed that this is Bucky’s story – both the story of Bucky and a story that Bucky in some sense authorizes. ‘Mr Cantor’ seems an oddly formal name for oneself, yet that is how Bucky is more often than not referred to. After a hundred pages, in among a list of boys who came down with polio, there occurs the puzzling phrase ‘me, Arnie Mesnikoff’. But having surfaced for a moment, ‘me, Arnie’ sinks away again, not to resurface until forty pages from the end, when he comes forward to announce himself as no less than the author – more specifically the as-told-to author – of the story we have been reading. In 1971, he explains, he encountered his ex-teacher Bucky Cantor in the street, greeted him, and eventually became a confidant close enough to now relate his history. (‘Now’ is given no date, but we infer that Bucky is deceased.)

  Thus the narratorial device that we have assumed – the mask or voice with no mind of its own and no stake in the story – is thrust aside and a stranger, Arnie Mesnikoff, reveals himself to have been present all the time as a full-blooded interpreter between Bucky Cantor and ourselves. Nemesis thus continues Roth’s long-running practice of complicating the line of transmission along which the story reaches the reader and putting in question the mediator’s angle on it. The experience of reading The Facts: A Novelist’s Autobiography (1988) or Operation Shylock (1993), to name only two examples, is dominated by uncertainty about how far the narrator is to be believed. Indeed, Operation Shylock is built on the Cretan-liar paradox of a narrator who asserts he is lying.

  In Roth’s recent fiction the question of how the story reaches us is as prominent as ever. Though neither Everyman nor Indignation is in any sense mystical, both novels turn out to be narrated from, so to speak, beyond the grave. Indignation even includes meditations, reminiscent of the Beckett of The Unnamable and How It Is, on post-mortem existence and what it is like to have to spend eternity going over and over the story of one’s life on earth.

  The revelation that Bucky has been refracted through the mind of another fictional character, someone about whose life we never learn much beyond that as a boy he was quiet and sensitive, that in 1944 he was struck down by polio, and that he later became an architect specializing in home modifications for the disabled, requires that we reconsider the whole story we have been reading. If it seems unlikely that the prickly Bucky would have confided to the younger man the details of his lovemaking with Marcia, then is Arnie making up that part? And if he is, may there not be other parts of Bucky’s story that he has left out, misinterpreted, or simply not been competent to represent?

  (Arnie puts it on record that the young Marcia had ‘tiny breasts, affixed high on her chest, and nipples that were soft, pale, and unprotuberant’. (p. 166) What does a word like ‘affixed’ say about Arnie’s sense of a woman’s body, or, more to the point, about Arnie’s sense of Bucky’s sense?)

  Arnie’s attitude toward the post-polio Bucky is at the very least ambivalent. To an extent he can respect Bucky’s single-minded devotion to his self-chosen task of punishing himself. But in the main he finds people like Bucky wrong-headed and excessive. Our lives are subject to chance, he believes; when Bucky rails against God, he is in fact railing against chance, which is stupid. A polio epidemic is ‘pointless, co
ntingent, preposterous, and tragic’; there is no ‘deeper cause’ behind it. In attributing hostile intent to a natural event, Bucky has exhibited ‘nothing more than stupid hubris, not the hubris of will or desire but the hubris of fantastical, childish religious interpretation’. (p. 265) If he, Arnie, has made his peace with what befell him, then Bucky can do the same. The calamity of the summer of 1944 ‘didn’t have to be a lifelong personal tragedy too’. (p. 269)

  Arnie’s life of Bucky culminates in a page-long summation in which Bucky’s philosophical position is pretty much trashed. Bucky was a humourless soul with no saving sense of irony, a man with an overblown sense of duty and not enough intellect. By brooding too long on the harm he had caused, he turned a quirk of chance into ‘a great crime of his own’. (p. 263) Temperamentally unable to come to terms with unmerited human suffering, he took on the guilt for that suffering and used it to punish himself endlessly.

  Though he sometimes wavers, this is in substance Arnie’s verdict on Bucky. Sympathetic to the man, he is deeply unsympathetic, even uncomprehending, toward his view of life. A modern soul, Arnie has found ways of navigating a world beyond good and evil; Bucky, he feels, should have done the same.

  Back in the 1940s, Bucky looked at what polio was doing to Newark (and what war was doing to the world), concluded that whatever force was running the show could only be malign, and vowed to resist that force, if only by refusing to bend his knee to it. It is this resistance on Bucky’s part that Arnie singles out as ‘stupid hubris’. On the same page that he writes of hubris he uses the word ‘tragic’ as if it belonged in the same semantic field as ‘pointless’, ‘contingent’, and ‘preposterous’.