Late Essays : 2006-2017

by J. M. Coetzee

  The nut is dropped into the first tube. It opens the first box. The nut is in it.

  So tube one leads to box one, tube two to box two, tube three to box three. All is well so far. This may be an absurdly complicated way of feeding a being, an appetite, a subject, but such appears to be the way things work in the present universe, the white universe in which It finds itself. If you want a nut, you must take care to watch into which tube it is dropped, and then open the box below.

  But ah! the universe is not so simple after all. The universe is not as it may appear to be. In fact – and this is the key point, the philosophical lesson – the universe is never as it appears to be.

  A screen is introduced: It can still see the top ends of the tubes, and the bottom ends, but not the middles. Some shuffling takes place. The shuffling comes to an end, and everything is as it was before, or at least seems to be as it was before.

  A nut is dropped into the third tube. It, the creature, opens the third box. The third box is empty.

  Again a nut is dropped into the third tube. Again It opens the third box. Again it is empty.

  Within It, within Its mind or Its intelligence or perhaps even just Its brain, something is set in motion that will take many pages, many volumes to unravel, something that may involve hunger or despair or boredom or all of these, to say nothing of the deductive and inductive faculties. Instead of these pages and volumes, let us just say there is a hiatus.

  It, the creature, opens the second box. It contains a nut. It makes no sense that it should be there, but there it is: a nut, a real nut. It eats the nut. That’s better.

  A nut is dropped into the third tube. It opens the third box. It is empty. It opens the second box. It contains a nut. Aha!

  A nut is dropped into the third tube. It opens the second box. It contains a nut. It eats the nut.

  So: the universe is not as it was before. The universe has changed. Not tube three and box three but tube three and box two.

  (You think this is not life, someone says? You think this is merely some thought experiment? There are creatures to whom this is not just life but the whole of life. This white space is what they were born into. It is what their parents were born into. It is what their grandparents were born into. It is all they know. This is the niche in the universe in which they are evolved to fit. In some cases, this is the niche in which they have been genetically modified to fit. These are laboratory animals, says this someone, by which is meant animals who know no life outside the white laboratory, animals incapable of living outside the laboratory, animals to whom the laboratory, while it may look to us like white hell, is the only world they know. End of interjection. Go on.)

  Again there is an episode of something being shuffled behind the screen, which It is not allowed to watch.

  A nut is dropped into the third tube. It, the creature, opens the second box. It is empty. It opens the third box. It is empty. It opens the first box. It contains a nut. It eats the nut.

  So: no longer three and three, no longer three and two, but three and one.

  Again, shuffling.

  A nut is dropped into the third tube. The creature opens the first box. It is empty.

  So: after each shuffling, everything changes. That seems to be the rule. Three and three, then shuffling, then three and two, then shuffling, then three and one, then shuffling, then three and – what?

  It, the creature, is doing its best to understand how the universe works, the universe of nuts and how you lay your hands (your paws) on them. That is what is going on, before our eyes.

  But is that truly what is going on?

  Six.

  Something opens and then almost immediately closes again. In that split second a revelation takes place. It is trying to be understood (language creaks under the strain) how the universe works, what the laws are.

  Someone is dropping nuts into tubes, and doing so not idly (not like a bored god) but with a goal in mind: to understand how my mind works, and more specifically to understand the limits of my mind. Can I link one with one, two with two, three with three? If I can, can I link three with two, two with one, one with three? If I can, how long before I can learn instead to link three with two, two with two, one with two? And how long thereafter before the penny drops and I link each episode of invisible shuffling of tubes with a revolution in the laws by which the universe works?

  This is not a meaningless universe, that is, it is not a universe without rules. But getting to understand the rules of the universe counts for nothing, in the end. The universe is interested not in what you can understand but at what point you cease to understand. Three with three and two with two and one with two, for instance: will you be able to understand that?

  Let us call him God or Godot, the little God. How much can this God, with his nuts and tubes and boxes, find out about me, and what if anything will be left that he cannot know? The answer to the first question may not be knowable, though it does seem to depend on how tireless his interest in me may be, on whether he may not have better things to do with his time. The answer to the second question is clearer: he can never know what it is to be me.

  God thinks I spend my time waiting for him to arrive with his apparatus for testing my limits. In a sense he is right: I am in the cage in which, as far as I know, I was born. I cannot leave, there is nothing for me to do but wait. But I am not seriously waiting for God. Rather I am occupying time while I wait for him. What God does not understand is this ‘not seriously’ with which I wait for him, this ‘not seriously’ which looks like a mere adverbial, like ‘patiently’ or ‘idly’ – I am patiently waiting for God, I am idly waiting for God – not a major part of the sentence, not the subject or the predicate, just something that has casually attached itself to the sentence, like fluff.

  God believes I am a body and a mind, miraculously conjoined. With my body I eat the nut. Something happens, and the nut, either the idea of the nut or the fact of the nut in the stomach, triggers a thought: Nut good. More nut. Understand one-two-three, get more nut. It amuses God to think that is what happens, to think that the miracle (that is to say the trick) of conjunction allows him to use a nut to get the mind to work. God reflects in passing that conjoining a body with a mind was one of his more inspired ideas, his more inspired and funniest. But God is the only one who finds it funny. The creature, It, I, the laboratory animal, does not find it funny, except in a grim Beckettian way, because the creature, It, I, does not know it is a body and a mind conjoined. I think, therefore I am: that is not what It thinks. On the contrary, it thinks, I am! I am! I am!

  Go on.

  Seven.

  In the year 1937 the University of Cape Town in South Africa advertised a vacancy for a lecturer in Italian. Applicants should hold at least an honours degree in Italian, said the advertisement. The successful candidate would spend most of his time teaching Italian for beginners. Perks would include six months of sabbatical leave every three years, and a contribution toward the expense of travel, by ocean liner, to and from the old country.

  The advertisement appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, where it was seen by T. B. Rudmose-Brown, Professor of Romance Languages at Trinity College, Dublin. Rudmose-Brown promptly contacted one of the better students to have graduated from his department and suggested that he apply.

  The student in question, S. B. Beckett, by then thirty-one years old, followed Rudmose-Brown’s suggestion and sent in an application. Whether the application was seriously intended we do not know. We know that at the time S. B. Beckett had ambitions to be a writer, not a language teacher. On the other hand, what writing he did brought in no money; he was living off handouts from his brother. So it is not inconceivable that penury might have forced his hand. It is not inconceivable that, if offered the job, he might have knuckled down and made the journey to the southernmost tip of Africa, there to instruct the daughters of the merchant class in the rudiments of the Tuscan tongue and, in his spare time, loll on the beach. And who is to s
ay that among those daughters there might not have been some sweet-breathed, bronze-limbed Calypso capable of seducing an indolent Irish castaway who found it hard to say no into the colonial version of wedded bliss? And if, furthermore, the passage of the years had found the erstwhile lecturer in Italian language advanced to a professorship in Italian, perhaps even a professorship in Romance Languages (why not? – he was, after all, the author of a little book on Proust), what reason would he have had to abandon his insular paradise and set sail again for Ithaca?

  The laconic letter of application S. B. Beckett wrote in 1937 has survived in the University of Cape Town archives, together with the letter Rudmose-Brown addressed to the selection committee in support of his candidacy, and an attested copy of the testimonial he had written when Beckett graduated from Trinity College in 1932. In his letter Beckett names three referees: a doctor, a lawyer and a clergyman. He lists three publications: his book on Proust, his collection of stories (which he cites as Short Stories rather than by its proper title, More Pricks Than Kicks), and a volume of poems.

  Rudmose-Brown’s testimonial could not be more enthusiastic. He calls Beckett the best student of his year in both French and Italian. ‘He speaks and writes like a Frenchman of the highest education,’ he says. ‘As well as possessing a sound academic knowledge of the Italian, French and German languages, he has remarkable creative faculty.’ In a PS, he notes that Beckett also has ‘an adequate knowledge of Provençal, ancient and modern’.

  One of Rudmose-Brown’s colleagues at Trinity College, R. W. Tate, adds his support. ‘Very few foreigners have a practical knowledge of [Italian] as sound as [Beckett’s], or as great a mastery of its grammar and constructions.’

  Regrettably, the dice did not fall in Beckett’s favour. The lectureship went to a rival whose research interest was the dialect of Sardinia.

  Eight.

  Why does the title ‘Franz Kafka, PhD, Professor of Creative Writing, Charles University, Prague’ raise a smile to our lips, when the title ‘Saul Bellow, BA, Professor of Social Thought, University of Chicago’ does not?

  Because Kafka does not fit, we say. True, artists do not easily fit or fit in, and, when they are fitted in, fit uncomfortably. (Such a short word, fit, three letters, one syllable, yet with such unexpected reaches.) But Kafka, we feel, exhibits misfit of a higher order than other artists. Kafka is the misfit artist himself, the angel Misfit. He would fit no better behind a lectern than behind the counter of a butcher shop, or punching tickets on a tram. And what would Professor Kafka teach, anyway? How not to fit in? How to make a living as a specialist in not fitting in, as one can make a living as a specialist in not eating?

  Yet the fact is that Kafka was a perfectly competent insurance adjuster, respected by his colleagues at the Workmen’s Accident Insurance Company, 7 Poric St, Prague, where he was employed for many years. Do we perhaps underestimate Kafka – underestimate his competence, his versatility, his ability to fit in? Are we misled, perhaps, by the famous photographs of the man, with the brilliant, dark eyes that seem to bespeak piercing insight into realms invisible and to hint that their owner does not belong in this world, not wholly?

  What of Beckett? Should we smile at the thought of Samuel Barclay Beckett, BA, MA, Professor of Romance Languages, University of Cape Town?

  It helps to be lean, and Beckett was as lean as Kafka. It helps to have a piercing gaze, and Beckett had his own variety of piercing gaze. Like photographs of Kafka, photographs of Beckett show a man whose inner being shines like a cold star through the fleshly envelope. But soul can shine through flesh only if soul and flesh are one. If soul and flesh belong to distinct realms, and their conjunction is an everlasting mystery, then no photograph will ever tell the truth.

  19. Late Patrick White

  One.

  Patrick White is, on most counts, the greatest writer Australia has produced, though the sense in which Australia produced him needs at once to be qualified: he had his schooling in England, studied at Cambridge University, spent his twenties as a young man about town in London, and during the Second World War served with the British armed forces.

  What Australia did provide him with was fortune, in the form of an early inheritance – the White family were wealthy graziers – substantial enough for him to live an independent life.

  The nineteenth century was the heyday of the Great Writer. In our times the concept of greatness has fallen under suspicion, especially when attached to whiteness and maleness. But to call Patrick White a Great Writer – specifically a Great Writer in the Romantic mould – seems right, if only because he had the typically great-writerly sense of being marked out from birth for an uncommon destiny and granted a talent – not necessarily a welcome one – which it is death to hide, the talent in his case consisting in a heightened power to see through appearances to the truth behind them.

  White’s sense of being special was closely tied to his homosexuality. He did not contest the verdict of the Australia of his day that homosexuality was ‘deviant’, but took his deviance as a blessing as much as a curse: ‘I see myself not so much a homosexual as a mind possessed by the spirit of a man or woman according to the actual situations or [sic] the characters I become in my writing … Ambivalence has given me insights into human nature denied, I believe, to those who are unequivocally male or female’.1

  The award of the Nobel Prize in 1973 took many by surprise, particularly in Australia, where White was looked on as a difficult writer with a mannered, unnecessarily complex prose style. From a European perspective the award made more sense. White stood out from his anglophone contemporaries in his familiarity with European modernism (his Cambridge degree was in French and German). His language, and indeed his vision of the world, was indelibly marked by an early immersion in expressionism, both literary and pictorial. His sensibility was always strongly visual; he often remarked that he wished he could have been a painter.

  White’s art education began in London in the 1930s, at the hands of the expatriate Australian painter Roy de Maistre, through whom he met Francis Bacon. Both de Maistre and Bacon, and other artists too, went into the making of Hurtle Duffield, the artist hero of The Vivisector (1970), the novel in which, late in his career, White explores what it might be like to be a painter, the kind of painter to whom art is a way to the truth.2

  Hurtle Duffield is born into a poor working-class family, and to all intents and purposes sold by his father to a wealthy Sydney family, the Courtneys, who detect something exceptional in the boy. They are not mistaken. Hurtle Duffield, later Hurtle Courtney, later Hurtle Duffield again, is a genius of the archetypal Romantic type: a loner, driven to create by an inner demon, a maker of his own morality, prepared to sacrifice everything and everyone at the altar of his art.

  At the age of sixteen Hurtle flees the threatening advances of his stepmother, enlists in the army, and goes off to the Western Front. After the war he spends a hand-to-mouth year in Paris steeping himself in the new European art, then returns to Australia and settles on the fringes of Sydney, living in seclusion, painting. Over the years he builds up a reputation among the Sydney cognoscenti, and is able to move to a large old house in the city.

  Though rendered in the fullest detail, the life of Duffield up to this point is only a preliminary to the phase of his life that truly concerns White: the phase from his mid-fifties until his death, when all the options on offer have been explored, the pattern of his life has been established, and the true struggle can begin between himself and God. Duffield’s vision of God is a bleak one: God is the great Vivisector, who for his own inscrutable purposes flays and tortures us while we still breathe.

  The Vivisector is held together not by plot – its plot is rudimentary – but by its close focus on Duffield’s evolution as an artist and a man, by the power of White’s prose, and by a set of thematic motifs that are enunciated and then repeatedly returned to, in the process accreting meaning, much as a sketch is gradually reworked into a painting. Viv
isection is one such motif. For God turns out to be not the only vivisector. As his prostitute lover comes to realize, Duffield uses women for experimental purposes. To get at the truth inside her, she says, he is prepared to turn a woman into ‘a shambles’. Then ‘out of the shambles he paints what he calls his bloody work of art!’3

  Sex is evisceration; painting is disfigurement. Working on a self-portrait, Duffield feels as if he is slashing at the canvas, and at his own face, with a razor.

  Rhoda Courtney, Hurtle’s adoptive sister, has a deformity, a hump on her back, that evokes fascinated horror in him. From a single remembered glimpse of Rhoda naked he paints her in the posture of a priestess, and returns to the painting at intervals throughout his life to consult it and find new meaning in it. He and she end up living in the same house, held together by a force of love indistinguishable from exasperation and hatred, both suffering, as Rhoda recognizes, from something incurable that goes deeper than her deformity or Duffield’s solitariness, some special vision of the darkness at the end of the tunnel that renders them unfit for ordinary life.

  The great challenge that faces White in The Vivisector is to get the reader to believe that Duffield’s paintings are as disturbing and even overwhelming as he, White, wants them to be. To an extent he can achieve this by recording their impact on strangers, in particular the Sydney art establishment and the nouveauriche patrons who buy the paintings. But the procedure is fraught with ambivalence, since it is precisely these people who are the target of his most scathing satire. If their lives are false through and through, how can their aesthetic judgment be trusted? Finally, White can meet the challenge of making Duffield’s genius credible only by pouring his very considerable resources as a writer into translating the paintings into the medium of words. Duffield’s consuming struggle to turn his vision into marks on the canvas is rendered in prose that itself bears the marks of a struggle to convert paint into text.