Late Essays : 2006-2017

by J. M. Coetzee

  Since Arnie does not go ahead to reflect on ancient (elevated) versus modern (debased) conceptions of the tragic – from what we know of him we might suspect that he would not see the point – we may guess that it is the ironical author himself who is dropping these telling Greek terms into Arnie’s discourse, and not without purpose. That purpose, one might guess further, might be to arm the hapless Bucky against his spokesman, to suggest that there may be a way of reading Bucky’s resistance other than the dismissive way Arnie offers. Such a reading – briefly, so as not to build upon the lightest of authorial hints a mountain of interpretation – might commence with the emending of Arnie’s characterization of polio epidemics – and by extension other destructive acts of God – as ‘pointless, contingent, preposterous, and tragic’ to ‘pointless, contingent, preposterous, yet nevertheless tragic’.

  God may indeed be incomprehensible, as Marcia says. Nonetheless, someone who tries to grasp God’s mysterious designs at least takes humanity, and the reach of human understanding, seriously; whereas someone who treats the divine mystery as just another name for chance does not. What Arnie is unwilling to see – or at least unwilling to respect – is first the force of Bucky’s Why? (‘this maniac of the why’, he calls him) and then the nature of Bucky’s No!, which, pig-headed, self-defeating, and absurd though it may be, nevertheless keeps an ideal of human dignity alive in the face of fate, Nemesis, the gods, God. (p. 265)

  The unkindest – and meanest – cut of all comes when Arnie disparages Bucky’s transgression itself, the wellspring of all his woe. Just as God cannot be a great criminal masterminding the woes of humankind (because God is just another name for Chance), so carrying the polio virus cannot be a great crime, just a matter of ill luck. Ill luck does not call for remorse on a grand, heroic scale: best to pick yourself up and get on with your life. In wanting to be regarded as a great criminal, Bucky merely reveals himself as a belated imitator of the great-criminal pretenders of the nineteenth century, desperate for attention and ready to do anything, even commit the vilest of crimes, to get it (Dostoevsky dissected the great-criminal type in the person of Stavrogin in The Possessed).

  In Nemesis we witness plenty of deplorable behaviour on the part of a plague- and panic-stricken populace, not excluding ethnic scapegoating. The Newark of Nemesis turns out to be a no less fertile breeding ground for anti-Semitism than the cities of Roth’s dystopian fantasy The Plot Against America (2004), set in the same time period. But in his narrative of the plague year of 1944 Roth’s concern is less with how communities behave in times of crisis than with questions of fate and freedom.

  It seems to be a rule of tragedy that only in retrospect can you see the logic that led to your fall. Only after Nemesis has struck can you work out what provoked her. In each of the four Nemeses novels there occurs a slip or fall from which it turns out the hero cannot recover. Nemesis has done her work; life will never be the same again. In The Humbling a famous actor inexplicably loses his power to hold an audience; this loss is followed by a failure of male sexual power. In Everyman the protagonist, looking forward to a comfortable retirement, feels his life-horizons shrink to nothing as without warning he falls into all-consuming dread. In Indignation the young hero’s modest-seeming resolution to have sexual intercourse at least once before he dies leads by an inscrutable logic to his expulsion from college and his death in Korea, still, in a Clintonian sense, a virgin. His father’s prophecy is fulfilled: ‘The tiniest misstep can have tragic consequences’.4

  In Nemesis the action pivots on what seems a tiny misstep that in retrospect turns out to be a fatal fall. It occurs at the instant when Bucky gives in to his girlfriend’s pleas and agrees to quit Newark. Intuition warns him that he is betraying himself, acting against his higher interests. He is on some kind of moral brink; yet he does nothing to save himself from falling.

  Bucky thus provides a textbook example of weakness or failure of the will, which as a moral/psychological phenomenon has attracted the attention of philosophers since Socrates. How is it possible that we can knowingly act against our own interests? Are we indeed, as we like to think of ourselves, rational agents; or are the decisions we arrive at dictated by more primitive forces, on whose behalf reason merely provides rationalizations? To Bucky the instant when he made his decision – the instant when he fell – remains opaque. The Bucky with whom Arnie does not sympathize is haunted by a suspicion that when he said ‘Yes, I will flee the city’, the voice that spoke was not that of his daytime self but of some Other within him.

  Compared with works of such high ambition as Sabbath’s Theater (1995) or American Pastoral (1997), the four Nemeses novels are lesser additions to the Roth canon. Nemesis itself is not really large enough in conception – in the inherent capacities of the characters it deploys, in the action it gives them to play out – to do more than scratch the surface of the great questions it raises. Despite its length (280 pages) it has the feel of a novella.

  There is a further sense in which the four Nemeses novels are minor. Their overall mood is subdued, regret-filled, melancholy: they are composed, as it were, in a minor key. One can read them with admiration for their craft, their intelligence, their seriousness; but nowhere does one feel that the creative flame is burning at white heat, or the author being stretched by his material.

  If the intensity of the Roth of old, the ‘major’ Roth, has died down, has anything new come in its place?

  Toward the end of his life on earth, ‘he’, the protagonist of Everyman, visits the graveyard where his parents lie buried and strikes up a conversation with a gravedigger, a man who takes a solid, professional pride in his work. From him ‘he’ elicits a full, clear, and concise account of how a good grave is dug. (Among the subsidiary pleasures Roth provides are the expert little how-to essays embedded in the novels: how to make a good glove, how to dress a butcher’s display window.) This is the man, ‘he’ reflects, who when the time comes will dig his grave, see to it that his coffin is well seated, and, once the mourners have dispersed, fill in the earth over him. He bids farewell to the gravedigger – his gravedigger – in a curiously lightened mood: ‘I want to thank you … You couldn’t have made things more concrete. It’s a good education for an older person’.5

  This modest but beautifully composed little ten-page episode does indeed provide a good education, and not just for older persons: how to dig a grave, how to write, how to face death, all in one.

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

  In the spring of 1771 Werther (no first name), a young man of good education and comfortable means, arrives in the small German town of Wahlheim. He is there to attend to family business (an inheritance) but also to escape an unhappy love affair. To his friend Wilhelm back home he writes long letters telling of the joys of living close to nature as well as of his meeting with a local belle, Charlotte (Lotte), who shares his tastes in literature.

  Unfortunately for Werther, Lotte is betrothed to Albert, an up-and-coming young bureaucrat. Albert and Lotte treat Werther with the utmost friendliness, but he finds the frustration of his undeclared love for Lotte increasingly hard to bear. He quits Wahlheim to take up a diplomatic post in a principality some distance away. Here he suffers a humiliating snub when, as a person of middle-class origin, he is asked to leave a reception for the diplomatic corps. He resigns, and for months drifts around before fatalistically returning to Wahlheim.

  Lotte and Albert are now married; there is no hope for Werther. His letters to Wilhelm break off, and an unnamed editor appears on the scene, undertaking to put together a record of Werther’s last days from his diaries and private papers. For, it emerges, having decided that there is no way out, Werther has borrowed Albert’s duelling pistols and, after a last, stormy meeting with Lotte, shot himself.

  Die Leiden des jungen Werthers, known in English as The Sufferings of Young Werther or The Sorrows of Young Werther, appeared in 1774. Goethe sent a synopsis to a friend:


  I present a young person gifted with deep, pure feeling and true penetration, who loses himself in rapturous dreams, buries himself in speculation, until at last, ruined by unhappy passions that supervene, in particular an unfulfilled love, puts a bullet in his head.1

  This synopsis is notable for the distance Goethe seems to be putting between himself and a hero whose story was in important respects his own. He too had gloomily asked himself whether a self-defeating compulsion did not underlie his practice of falling in love with unattainable women; he too had contemplated suicide, though he had lacked the courage to do the deed. The crucial difference between himself and Werther was that he could call on his art to diagnose and expel the malaise that afflicted him, whereas Werther could only suffer it. As Thomas Mann put it, Werther is ‘the young Goethe himself, minus the creative gift’.2

  Two energies go into the making of Werther: the confessional, which gives the book its tragic emotional force, and the political. Passionate and idealistic, Werther is representative of the best of a new generation of Germans sensitive to the stirrings of history, impatient to see the renewal of a torpid social order. An unhappy love affair may precipitate his suicide, but the deeper cause is the failure of German society to offer young people like him anything but what Goethe would later call ‘dull, spiritless citizen life’.3

  The Sorrows of Young Werther was avidly read; its youthful author was lionized. A spate of unauthorized editions and translations followed (authors in Goethe’s day had little protection against piracy). The gossip press soon uncovered who the characters in the book ‘really’ were: Lotte was Charlotte Kestner, née Buff, daughter of a bailiff in the town of Wetzlar; Albert was Johann Kestner; and of course Werther was Goethe himself.

  Kestner was justifiably peeved at what he regarded as a betrayal of their friendship. Goethe shamefacedly pleaded that his book was ‘an innocent mixture of truth and lies’; but Kestner continued to grumble that his wife had never been on such close terms with their visitor as was claimed, nor was he as cold a fish as Goethe made him out to be.4

  If Goethe was now surrounded by a buzz of scandal in which art was hopelessly confused with life, he had only himself to blame. He had meant to maintain an ironic distance between himself as author and Werther as character; but for most readers the irony was too subtle. As a text ostensibly assembled from writings the dead man had left behind, Werther lacks a guiding authorial voice. Readers naturally identified with the point of view of Werther himself, the sole narrator until the late appearance of his ‘editor’ (Wilhelm’s responses to Werther’s letters are not reproduced). The excesses of Werther’s language, the discrepancies between his idealized view of Lotte and Lotte’s often coquettish behaviour, were passed over by all but the most attentive readers. Werther was read not only as a roman-à-clef about Goethe and the Kestners, but as an endorsement of Romantic suicide.

  In the fourth of his Roman Elegies, written 1788–9, in a suppressed draft, Goethe gives thanks that he has escaped from the endless interrogation – Was there really such a person as Werther? Was it all true? Where did Lotte live? ‘How often I have cursed those stupid pages / that exposed my youthful suffering to the masses,’ he writes. ‘Even if Werther had been my brother and I had killed him, / it could not be worse than this: being vengefully pursued by his sad ghost’.5

  The image of Werther as a twin or brother who has died or been killed and returns to haunt him recurs in a poem entitled ‘To Werther’, written when Goethe was near the end of his life. Between Goethe and his Werther self there was a complex, lifelong relationship that swung back and forth. In some accounts, Werther is the self he had to split off and abandon in order to live (Goethe spoke of the ‘pathological state’ out of which the book emerged); in others, Werther is the passionate side of himself that he sacrificed, to his own cost. He was haunted not only by Werther but by the story of Werther he had sent into the world, which called out to be rewritten or more fully written. He spoke at various times of writing another Werther and of writing a prequel to Werther; but it would seem he could not find his way back into Werther’s world. Even the revisions he did to the book in 1787, masterly though they are, were done from the outside, and are not at one with the original inspiration.6

  The history of Werther and his Lotte comes to an end with Werther’s death on Christmas Day, 1772. But the story of Goethe and his model Charlotte Buff had yet a while to run. In 1816 Charlotte, then a widow of sixty-three, visited Goethe’s home town of Weimar and contacted him. After their meeting she wrote to her son: ‘I have made the acquaintance of an old man, who, if I had not known it was Goethe, and even then, made no very pleasing impression on me.’ Coming across this sour remark, Thomas Mann made a note: ‘I believe this anecdote could form the basis … of a novel’.7

  In 1939 Mann published Lotte in Weimar, in which he dramatizes the 1816 encounter, bringing together the couple who, inextricably confused as they are in the national imagination with their fictional avatars, belong by now to the realm of myth. Goethe is as ungracious as can be (‘Why could not the old woman have spared me this?’). Reluctantly he invites Charlotte and her daughter to his grand home, then pays more attention to the daughter than to her. Observing that she suffers from a nervous tremor, he shuts his eyes fastidiously. For her part, Charlotte recalls why she turned Goethe down in the old days: because he seemed ‘inhuman, without purpose or poise’.8

  In this novel about the transfiguring powers of art, Goethe the artist – or the human shell in which the artist resides – takes second place behind his model Frau Charlotte Kestner, who in Weimar can at last become who she truly is: Germany’s sweetheart, the beautiful, dark-eyed heroine of Werther. Rumours of her presence cause a sensation. Fans camp outside her hotel hoping to catch a glimpse of her. She revels in her celebrity.

  Having resolved to kill himself, Werther writes a farewell note to be handed to Lotte after his death. But then he cannot resist calling in person one last time.

  Lotte is not thrilled to see the distracted young man. At a loss for how to deal with him, she produces a manuscript he has lent her and asks him to read to her. Werther proceeds to read aloud from his translation of The Works of Ossian, renderings into rhythmical English prose by James Macpherson, a young Scottish schoolmaster, of fragments of what he claimed to be epic poetry sung by the bard Ossian in the third century FH, passed down orally from one generation to the next of Gaelic-speaking Scots.

  The poetry moves Lotte to tears, in which Werther joins. Their hands touch; they embrace; he tries to kiss her. She tears herself free. ‘This is the last time, Werther! You will not see me again,’ she cries, and hurries from the room.9

  Werther’s declamation from Ossian is no small affair: for page after page ancient bards raise their voices in lament over lost heroes. The taste for Ossian is a feature of early Romantic sensibility easy to mock. The fact is, however, that until well into the nineteenth century the poems were widely accepted as a great epic of northern European civilization. ‘The Homer of the North’, Madame de Staël called Ossian.10

  The recovery of the Ossian epic in Scotland became a spur to the recovery – or invention – of other founding national epics: Beowulf in England, the Kalevala in Finland, the Nibelungenlied in Germany, the Chanson de Roland in France, the Song of the Host of Igor in Russia.

  Macpherson was not a great poet (pace William Hazlitt, who set him alongside Dante and Shakespeare) nor even a dedicated one: his Ossian project concluded, Macpherson quit the Highlands for London, where he was feted, then took ship to Pensacola in the new British colony of West Florida, where he spent two years on the staff of the governor. Returning to England, he entered politics; he died a wealthy man.

  As an historian of ancient times Macpherson was unreliable: much of his archaic Scotland was cribbed from Tacitus on the Gauls and Germans. His barbaric warriors behave like eighteenth-century gentlemen of sensibility, tempering pride of arms with generosity to fallen foes. Nonetheless, he was an
innovator of genius. The wild popularity of his Ossian signalled the rise of a new, assertive nationalism in which each European people would demand not only its national independence but its national language and national literature and unique national past too.

  Macpherson’s most perceptive reader was Walter Scott. The Ossian poems were certainly not what they were claimed to be, namely the words of a blind bard from the third century, said Scott, yet Scotland might be proud that in modern times it had brought forth ‘a bard, capable … of giving a new tone to poetry throughout all Europe’.11

  Macpherson’s signal achievement was to detect, ahead of anyone else, that the public was ripe not just for tales of clashing broadswords and keening women, but also – and more interestingly – for a new poetic speech that would sound convincingly like the way bards and heroes might have spoken in an archaic, if not mythical, British past. Brushed aside is John Dryden’s ideal of making an ancient author ‘speak such English as he would himself have spoken, if he had been born in England, and in this present age’, that is, of rendering the classics in discreetly modern speech.12 On the contrary, Macpherson’s English carries echoes, sometimes lofty, more often merely quaint, of a barbaric foreign original conveyed to us by a strenuous labour of translation.

  In Britain the Ossian poems were tainted by controversy over their authenticity. Were there indeed Highlanders who could recall and recite these ancient lays, or had Macpherson made them up? Macpherson did not help his case by seeming reluctant to produce his Gaelic originals.

  In Europe the question of authenticity had no purchase. Translated into German in 1767, Ossian had a huge impact, inspiring an outpouring of bardic imitations. The young Goethe was so smitten that he taught himself Gaelic in order to translate directly into German the specimens of Scottish Gaelic he found in The Works of Ossian. The early Schiller is full of Ossianic echoes; Hölderlin committed pages of Ossian to memory.