Stranger Shores: Essays 1986-1999

by J. M. Coetzee

  By not invoking any idealist justification of ‘value in itself’ or trying to isolate some quality, some essence of the classic, held in common by works that survive the process of testing, I hope I have allowed the terms Bach, the classic to emerge with a value of their own, even if that value is only in the first place professional and in the second place social. Whether at the age of fifteen I understood what I was getting into is beside the point: Bach is some kind of touchstone because he has passed the scrutiny of hundreds of thousands of intelligences before me, by hundreds of thousands of fellow human beings.

  What does it mean in living terms to say that the classic is what survives? How does such a conception of the classic manifest itself in people’s lives?

  For the most serious answer to this question, we cannot do better than turn to the great poet of the classic of our own times, the Pole Zbigniew Herbert. To Herbert the opposite of the classic is not the Romantic but the barbarian; furthermore, classic versus barbarian is not so much an opposition as a confrontation. Herbert writes from the historical perspective of Poland, a country with an embattled Western culture caught between intermittently barbarous neighbours. It is not the possession of some essential quality that, in Herbert’s eyes, makes it possible for the classic to withstand the assault of barbarism. Rather, what survives the worst of barbarism, surviving because generations of people cannot afford to let go of it and therefore hold on to it at all costs – that is the classic.

  So we arrive at a certain paradox. The classic defines itself by surviving. Therefore the interrogation of the classic, no matter how hostile, is part of the history of the classic, inevitable and even to be welcomed. For as long as the classic needs to be protected from attack, it can never prove itself classic.

  One might even venture further along this road to say that the function of criticism is defined by the classic: criticism is that which is duty-bound to interrogate the classic. Thus the fear that the classic will not survive the de-centring acts of criticism may be turned on its head: rather than being the foe of the classic, criticism, and indeed criticism of the most sceptical kind, may be what the classic uses to define itself and ensure its survival. Criticism may in that sense be one of the instruments of the cunning of history.

  2 Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe

  LIKE ODYSSEUS EMBARKED for Ithaca, like Quixote mounted on Rocinante, Robinson Crusoe with his parrot and umbrella has become a figure in the collective consciousness of the West, transcending the book which – in its multitude of editions, translations, imitations and adaptations (‘Robinsonades’) – celebrates his adventures. Having pretended once to belong to history, he finds himself in the sphere of myth.

  His pretended history – The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York, Mariner: Written by Himself – appeared on the market in 1719 and sold well. Four months later it was followed by a second instalment, The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, and a year later by Serious Reflections During the Life and Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe: with His Vision of the Angelic World. Though the second volume managed to travel some distance on the coattails of the first, it is nowadays the Strange Surprising Adventures to which we refer when we speak of Robinson Crusoe.

  In his Serious Reflections, the author of the earlier volumes finds it necessary to defend himself against charges that his life-story is made up, that it is simply a romance, that he is not even a real person. ‘I Robinson Crusoe’, he writes in his preface, ‘do affirm that the story, though allegorical, is also historical . . . Further, that there is a man alive, and well known too, the actions of whose life are the just subject of these three volumes, and to whom all or most part of the story most directly alludes . . . and to this I set my name.’ And with a bravado worthy of Cervantes he signs his name: Robinson Crusoe.

  When the writer of these words says that ‘Robinson Crusoe’ is a living person, what, beyond maintaining the by now tired autobiographical charade, might he mean? The most obvious interpretation, at least among sympathetically inclined contemporaries, particularly those brought up in the nonconformist religious tradition, would be that Crusoe is Everyman, that every man is an island, and every life, seen in an allegorical light, a life of isolation under the scrutiny of God.

  But the preface seems to hint as well at a personal and even confessional level of meaning. ‘I can affirm that I enjoy much more solitude in the middle of the greatest collection of mankind in the world, I mean, at London, while I am writing this, than ever I could say I enjoyed in eight and twenty years confinement to a desolate island.’ The castaway returned in late life to the country of his birth seems at this moment to merge with the sixty-year-old Londoner, Daniel Defoe, from whose head he was born.

  ‘Not one person in ten,’ wrote Edgar Allan Poe, ‘nay, not one person in five hundred, has, during the perusal of “Robinson Crusoe”. the most remote conception that any particle of genius, or even of common talent, has been employed in its creation! Men do not look upon it in the light of a literary performance. Defoe has none of their thoughts – Robinson all.’1 It is a tribute to an author, one supposes, though of a rather backhanded kind, that he should be eclipsed by one of his creations. Literary realism, at least of a certain kind, likes to hide its literary nature and Defoe is often advanced as a pioneer realist – as, along with Fielding and Richardson, the inventor of the realist novel in England. But if Defoe is a realist, it is hard to see what his realism has to do with that of Fielding, which is a matter of bringing together high and low genres, high and low speech, high and low manners and social types; or with that of Richardson, which is a matter of asserting bourgeois habits and standards, of appropriating in prose narrative the enthralments of romance without the supernatural machinery, the intensities of high drama without the verse.

  Defoe is even less like those great European novelists of the next century, the novelists of the realist school, to whom the term realism would have some doctrinal meaning. Madame Bovary does not pretend to be the utterances or the handiwork of Emma Bovary, housewife of Tostes. The nineteenth-century realist novel flourished on the basis of a web of tacit contracts between writer and reader about how ‘the real’ might be represented. For Defoe no such contracts exist – not only because in the milieu in which he worked the idea of representing everyday life with no didactic intent would have seemed strange and suspect, but because he himself was too much a loner at heart (and here the contrast with Fielding could not be more marked) to put faith in tacit contracts.

  Properly speaking, Defoe is a realist only in that he is an empiricist, and empiricism is one of the tenets of the realist novel. Defoe is in fact something simpler: an impersonator, a ventriloquist, even a forger (his Journal of the Plague Year is as close to a forgery of an historical document as one can get without beginning to play with ink and old paper). The kind of ‘novel’ he is writing (he did not, of course, use the term) is a more or less literal imitation of the kind of recital his hero or heroine would have given had he or she really existed. It is fake autobiography heavily influenced by the genres of the deathbed confession and the spiritual autobiography.

  In the case of Robinson Crusoe one can see Defoe trying – with incomplete success – to bend the story of his adventurer hero to fit a scriptural pattern of disobedience, punishment, repentance and deliverance. In the first pages Crusoe is counselled by his father to devote himself to the family business, to be content with ‘sliding gently through the world’ in a state of modest prosperity. Instead he goes to sea, is enslaved, escapes, becomes a planter in Brazil, ventures into slave-trading himself, suffers shipwreck and spends half a lifetime as a castaway, overcomes cannibals and pirates, and ends up as not only the founder of a colony but a plantation owner far wealthier (to say nothing of more famous) than he would have been had he listened to his father and stayed at home.

  The same might be said, mutatis mutandis, of other heroes and heroines of Defoe’s fake autobiographies: Moll Fl
anders, Colonel Jack, Roxana. None, choosing to slide gently through the world, would have had a life-story worth telling. The disobedience that Crusoe claims as his original sin is in fact a precondition of the interest of his story. No one wants to read about docile sons.

  Robinson Crusoe was Defoe’s first attempt at a long prose fiction. It is not his best book: Moll Flanders is more consistent in its execution; Roxana, though uneven, rises to greater heights. Robinson Crusoe suffers as a result of hasty composition and lack of revision. Its moral is confused. The last quarter of the book, as well as Crusoe’s early adventures, could have been carried off by any capable writer.

  Furthermore, though the treatment of the emotions shows flashes of power – for instance when waves of depression or loneliness overtake Crusoe – Defoe is still too close to the analysis of the soul and its movements perfected in Christian therapeutics to be properly modern. He does not – at least in this first attempt at book-length fiction – look forward to a later realism that will reveal inner life in unconscious gesture, or in moments of speech or action whose meaning is unguessed at by its subject.

  Nevertheless, the core of Robinson Crusoe – Crusoe alone on the island – is Defoe at his best. In representing the distress of the castaway, the method of bald empirical description works wonderfully: ‘As for my comrades, I never saw them afterwards, nor any sign of them, except three of their hats, one cap, and two shoes that were not fellows.’ And when Crusoe has to solve the hundreds of little practical problems involved in getting the contents of the ship ashore, or in making a clay cooking pot, one can feel the writing move into higher gear, a more intense level of engagement. For page after page – for the first time in the history of fiction – we see a minute, ordered description of how things are done. It is a matter of pure writerly attentiveness, pure submission to the exigencies of a world which, through being submitted to in a state so close to spiritual absorption, becomes transfigured, real. Defoe is a great writer, one of the purest writers we have. This, I think, Poe recognised, and Virginia Woolf, and others among Defoe’s large and unlikely seeming band of admirers.

  Crusoe does not, of course, abandon ‘his’ island when, along with Friday, he is rescued. He leaves it peopled with mutineers and castaways; though he returns to England, he cannily retains a foothold in the colony he has thus founded. Robinson Crusoe is unabashed propaganda for the extension of British mercantile power in the New World and the establishment of new British colonies. As for the native peoples of the Americas and the obstacle they represent, all one need say is that Defoe chooses to represent them as cannibals. The treatment Crusoe metes out to them is accordingly savage.

  An exception is, of course, made for Friday, the cannibal Crusoe chooses to save: ‘I made him know his name should be Friday . . . I likewise taught him to say Master, and then let him know, that was to be my name.’ Friday becomes inseparable from Crusoe, in more than one sense his shadow. Now and then he is allowed to play Sancho Panza to Crusoe’s Quixote, and to express common-sense opinions about, for instance, the more baffling features of the Christian faith. For the rest, he is seen through Crusoe’s eyes alone, and treated with self-congratulatory paternalism.

  In his lack of autonomy, Friday is not unique. All secondary characters in Defoe’s I-centred fictions tend to be ciphers. But Friday’s self-evident goodness of heart does prompt Crusoe to reflect on the relevance of Christian doctrine to the Americas, and hence on the rationale that Western colonialism offered for its activities there: the spreading of the gospel. What, Crusoe muses, if mankind had been twice and separately created – in the Old World and the New – and what if in the New World there were no history of rebellion against God? What if Friday and his countryfolk are unfallen creatures, in no need of redemption?

  The same question had, of course, been raised by the more enlightened of the Spanish clergy from the first days of conquest. Making his Amerindians cannibals and thus beyond the pale of humanity allows Defoe to obscure the question rather than answer it.

  Yet conceding a double creation, and thus conceding the irrelevance of a gospel of redemption to the New World, would not necessarily be to the advantage of its peoples. In anthropological guise as the theory of polygenesis, we should not forget, separate creations became a basis for ranking humankind into higher and lower races, and thus for scientific racism.

  ‘Defoe is like one of those brave, obscure, and useful soldiers who, with empty belly and burdened shoulders, go through their duties with their feet in the mud, pocket blows, receive the whole day long the fire of the enemy . . . and die sergeants . . . [He] had the kind of mind suitable to such a hard service, solid, exact, entirely destitute of refinement, enthusiasm, agreeableness. His imagination was that of a man of business, not of an artist.’2 So wrote Hippolyte Taine in his influential History of English Literature. One can see what Taine meant, and indeed for each charge there there can be found some justification. Yet as a whole the verdict could not be more wrong. If there is something of the dogged infantryman about Defoe, that is only because he made his living from writing, paid by the page, outside the regime of patronage. He is indeed not an artist, or at least not the kind of artist Taine had in mind, but then he would not have wanted to be thought of as one. He is indeed, as Taine says, a businessman; but a businessman trading in words and ideas, with a businessman’s clear sense of what each word or idea weighs, how much it is worth. As a thinker he may not be original, but his mind is acute and curious about life in all its aspects. The careers he followed were various, productive and interesting. Nothing he set down on paper is less than intelligent; the subjects he was led to in the novels of his old age – crime, conquest, ambition, loneliness – are as lively today as they were three centuries ago.

  3 Samuel Richardson, Clarissa

  I Beauty

  THERE HAS BEEN a deal of critical debate about Samuel Richardson’s novel Clarissa in the past decade, much of it fuelled by concern about rape. Clarissa is read as a novel about violability and violation, about the rights of the self to self-determination.

  I will be approaching Clarissa from a different angle. For years I had the rather idle ambition to write an adaptation of Clarissa for film, either as a two-hour feature film or, more realistically, as a four- or five-hour television series. An idle ambition in the sense that I did not put pen to paper or even resolve in my mind the general question of how to bring to life an action that consists so much of people sitting and writing letters to one another.

  I was therefore vexed when I learned that an adaptation had been screened on the BBC. I made it my business to see this version, and disliked it, principally because it lacked any grandeur of conception. In my view there is still room for an adaptation that will do justice to Richardson’s book.

  One failing of the BBC film is that it casts in the title role an actress who is decidedly plain, decidedly homely: a pleasant, decent, quiet, middle-class girl who could pass for seventeen, the age Richardson’s Clarissa is supposed to be. As she plays the role, this actress never really gets beyond being the suffering, quietly dignified victim of Lovelace’s manipulations and eventual outrages.

  I have no doubt that the people who made the film thought carefully about this piece of casting, and that the muted way in which the part is played represents a deliberate reading of the book, perhaps a typical late-twentieth-century reading, in which Clarissa is unexceptional because she stands for any and every victim of patriarchal power.

  I would prefer a quite different casting of the female lead, to match a quite different interpretation of her fate. I would give the role to an actress who is not merely more attractive but of, as Lovelace puts it, ‘soul-harrowing beauty’.1

  The word beautiful is slipping into disuse today in relation to women, replaced mainly by attractive and its intensifier very attractive. Beautiful seems to be more and more reserved for women who have made it into their forties without losing their looks.

  Beautiful and attra
ctive are not synonyms. Beauty has a range of meanings extending into the realms of aesthetics and even of Platonic metaphysics. Beauty is not specific to living beings; attractiveness is. Applied to human beings, beautiful may in psychological contexts carry overtones of a certain narcissism or self-enclosedness which may be attractive, even sexually exciting, but is not generated by the beautiful being’s sexual biology.

  In casting Clarissa, I would guess that the BBC team made their choice on a range between attractive and mildly attractive. To make Clarissa soul-harrowingly beautiful was not, I suspect, an option they seriously entertained.

  Beauty is an absolute, in the sense that it is not relative to the spectatorial subject or the subject’s desire. In fact it overwhelms efforts to treat it relatively. Whether or not an absolute beauty can be made to manifest itself in the 1990s, in film, on the streets, or anywhere else, is an open question and an interesting one. About the 1740s, when Richardson was writing, we can be altogether firmer. In the 1740s the idea of beauty was not dead or even dying (whether Richardson would have thought one was fortunate to be born beautiful is another matter).

  On the question of Clarissa’s looks depends Lovelace’s ambition and his master plan with regard to her. There is an influential reading of Lovelace which makes him the representative of the values of a class on the wane, a Restoration aristocrat full of resentment against the rising landowning gentry represented by the Harlowes, with their ambitions to buy their way into the aristocracy. Lovelace’s courtship, abduction and, finally, rape of Clarissa, in this reading, are animated by a wish to teach an upstart family a lesson.