Bleak, bleak, bleak!

In ‘As a Woman Grows Older’, the second story in J.M. Coetzee’s very funny 2023 book The Pole and Other Stories, Elizabeth Costello complains to her son John:

When I told friends I was rereading Coetzee’s novels for a review of his new book, their responses fell into two categories. The first was a variation of ‘bleak!’, and the second was ‘I once thought about writing a PhD on him’ – another version of bleak. Only those in the second category admitted they sometimes found Coetzee ‘funny’, and even then, only some of them did. When I typed ‘bleak’ and ‘J. M. Coetzee’ into my search bar, the results confirmed the diagnosis: ‘Frighteningly bleak,’ says the New Statesman; his works ‘mirror the bleakness of the human condition’ – the New York Times. In The Guardian, Coetzee’s vision explores ‘the human condition with a bleak, dispassionate sympathy’. ‘I do have some difficulty with the bleak emotional weather of his autobiographical works,’ says the London Review of Books. Furthermore: ‘bleak’ (Salon); ‘bleak’ (British Council); ‘bleak’ (Prospect Magazine).

A decade ago, the Wikipedia page for John Maxwell Coetzee contained the following text:

Bleak. But is it true? Tracing the source of this quotation turns out to be like trying to catch a plastic bag in the wind. It’s quoted without citation in a New Statesman article from 1999, and also in J. C. Kannemeyer’s great biography, J. M. Coetzee: A Life in Writing. Kannemeyer’s source is a 2009 collection of articles by the South African journalist Rian Malan, but short of ordering an out-of-print copy of the book from a South African bookstore online, I can’t read the article, so can’t attest to the accuracy of the quote, or the context from which it’s drawn. Neither, presumably, could the Wikipedia editors of 2014, who, after all, cited the source second-hand.

In 2016, Malan’s observations were edited on the Wikipedia page, and an addendum included a response from Coetzee himself:

This is funny, but funny at Coetzee’s expense. I can confirm that this quotation is taken out of context, with the effect of casting Coetzee as a bit sore about having been made fun of. The source of this quote is Kannemeyer’s A Life in Writing, and it comes from a frank, if chilly, email interview Coetzee once gave to Nizwa magazine, which he prefaced with this warning: ‘I have followed the principle that as much thought and effort should go into formulating the answer as went into formulating the question.’ The journalist’s questions include those as probing as ‘Why do you write?’ (‘This is not a question I ask myself.’), and ‘Are you satisfied with your success or isolation?’ (‘I am not isolated. I suspect I have become more successful – that is to say, better known – than I deserve to be.’) In a footnote, Kannemeyer quotes the scholar Susan Dunn’s observation that what Malan identifies as reclusiveness might be ‘no more than a dislike for journalists.’

You see where I’m going with this. Cultural consensus is made by collective readings and misreadings that build a common memory and serve a common purpose. What is the purpose of portraying J.M. Coetzee – the work, the persona – as sexless, ascetic, assiduous, and grave? Why do we want to think that Coetzee takes everything a bit too seriously? And who leads the charge of this kind of cultural consensus?

I don’t remember other Wikipedia entries from 2014. I imagine I thought this one was funny, and – I can admit it – I was obsessed with Coetzee at the time, a fact that now strikes me as odd. Since his thirties, Coetzee (now 84) has written novels about verbose, cranky, physically decrepit geriatrics with Classical educations. The magistrate in Waiting for the Barbarians undresses before his half-blind concubine: ‘baring my thin shanks, my slack genitals, my paunch, my flabby old man’s breasts, the turkey-skin of my throat’. Mrs Curran in Age of Iron looks down at her body – ‘the ends of my hair, falling over my face, touched the water; my legs, mottled, blue-veined, stuck out like sticks before me. An old woman, sick and ugly, clawing on to what she has left’. Señor C in Diary of a Bad Year, imagining himself in the eyes of a self-possessed young female neighbour – ‘a crumpled old fellow in the corner who at first glance might have been a tramp off the street’. Bleak! Meanwhile I was a girl of slender means enjoying what scant pleasures were available to her. I had much to live for! Why did I select Coetzee’s novels as the objects of my worship? It’s possible I was attracted to the weight of his worldview at a time when I worried I might float away. Yet there were, and are, qualities beyond Coetzee’s moral gravity to get excited about: his thrilling postmodern sensibility; the precision and grace of his sentences; and his practice of elevating degradation to an ecstatic object worthy of artistic scrutiny.

At readings I attended, Coetzee performed his work with droll comic timing and a poncy, ‘favourite son’ affect. Everybody laughed; possibly with the exaggerated relief that comes when the buttoned-up energy at literary events is released, but still: laughter! When fans accosted him, Coetzee was polite; he smiled, sometimes he was even witnessed laughing! I once approached him at a conference to announce, grandly, that his novels had inspired me to ‘become a writer’. The man smiled widely, his eyes twinkled, and he said: ‘Thank you.’ ‘That’s ok!’ said I, and clomped off in my chunky heels to the vegetarian hors d’oeuvres. This cringy thing I did is the closest I’ve ever come to ‘fandom’, and it embarrasses me to reveal it here. Only to say: what more could anyone ask of ‘one of the most critically acclaimed and decorated authors in the English language’? (Wikipedia again.) What do we want from him? Who and what is served by the textual construction of ‘J.M. Coetzee’ as a chaste man of morals who has never once laughed? In any case, I don’t know John Maxwell Coetzee and am not qualified to talk about his character! I’m interested in Coetzee’s authorial persona to the extent that ‘he’ operates as a paratext to the novels, influencing the public reception of the work.

The Pole and Other Stories contains six stories in total: four are Elizabeth Costello stories, and one, ‘The Dog’, could plausibly have been authored by the fictive author ‘Costello’. A recurring character in Coetzee’s oeuvre, Elizabeth Costello is an Australian novelist whose rise to acclaim rests on her 1969 novel The House on Eccles Street, a feminist re-vision of Joyce’s Molly Bloom. The scholar Laura Wright has described Coetzee’s creation of Elizabeth Costello as an ‘act of dialogic drag that engages humour, satire, and parody to reveal the performative nature of gender, literary production, and authorship itself’. Costello is often read as an alter-ego for Coetzee, as Nathan Zuckerman was for Philip Roth, though these alter-egos move towards different ends: Zuckerman provides a fictive frame within which to explore ambivalent masculinity, whereas Costello transcends the sexed constraints that bind the white male author in postfeminism. This relationship between authors (or authors as we imagine them) and their characters is an exciting space for readers to project their fantasies into, yet insights produced there are nonetheless an effect and continuation of the fictive text: authors are themselves texts constructed in the interpretation and appraisal of their works, and texts construct us while we construct them. Elizabeth Costello allows Coetzee a means by which to critique the desires and constraints imposed on his own social position. She’s also close to Coetzee’s social position, she’s a familiar object, and as such she is a clear target for light raillery. Coetzee’s ironic gaze is frequently set on the lower-genteel characters who most resemble him – or who resemble the implied author, the person assumed to have written his books – rather than on the ruling political classes. Coetzee is best when he’s exploring the conflicted morals of older white men and their female proxies: the erudite, the frigid, the haplessly sincere. Not bad people, not usually accused of causing any particular harm (David Lurie is an exception), but out of touch: people who are obsessed with ordinary people’s suffering, yet impatient with people’s ordinary passions. Elizabeth Costello again in ‘As a Woman Grows Older’: ‘It is not just the sweep of history that I deplore, it is the detail – bad manners, bad grammar, loudness!’

In ‘The Glass Abattoir’, we read a diary entry written by Elizabeth Costello after attending a lecture on Descartes. The lecturer has just described Descartes dissecting a live rabbit to study the circulatory system, and Costello can’t bear the savagery of it. She barges out of the lecture hall, and falls to her knees.

Her reaction is absurd, hilarious, beautiful! It crystallises the comedy of full moral commitment. The rabbit’s operation is described in dreadful detail: ‘Descartes opened the rabbit’s chest with a scalpel, snipping off the ribs one by one and removing them to expose the beating heart’, and Costello’s impotent protest speaks to two interrelated critiques of Western modernity. The first is that dualism, the cleaving of body from mind, passion from reason, creates a subject-object relationship that rationalises the domination and exclusion of entities understood through the prism of the body (i.e. women and slaves). The other is that the laboratory for ‘progress’ within the liberal idiom very often involves various violent ‘founding acts’ of modernity, which include (depending on the analysis) transatlantic slavery, colonial genocide, ecocide, the enclosures, the nomos of the camp, the nation-state, perverse medical experiments, men’s control of women’s sexuality, et cetera. People determined to confront and challenge this kind of global suffering usually do so with rigorous feeling, but usually (and hopefully) they are able to do other things in their lives as well. To commit to the bit as Costello does is to live with a heart as exposed as the little rabbit’s as it’s butchered alive. Coetzee has written in Doubling the Point that he is himself overwhelmed, his ‘thinking […] thrown into confusion and helplessness, by the fact of suffering in the world, and not only human suffering.’ Costello sends her son John the diary entry, along with a pile of other papers she’s worried her cleaner will throw out when she dies. As he reads this troubling anecdote, John writes his corrections in the margins: rabbits enter a state of shock when they’re attacked, actually, and they don’t feel any pain at all. What a gift – to be absolved by the rational position (itself a commitment of belief)!

Both John and Elizabeth are wrong, or at least wrong-headed. They represent two poles of a dialogical binary: on the one hand is the sensitive moral artist who is (somewhat ludicrously) haunted by the three-hundred-and-seventy-eight-year-old ghost of a rabbit; on the other is the academic physicist, a man of reason, and, what’s more, a son who must bear his mother’s eccentricities in her old age – a mother who like all mothers, as Marguerite Duras once wrote, ‘remain the strangest, craziest people we’ve ever met’. In the same story (the strongest and funniest in the collection, I think), Costello tells John of her plan to create a glass abattoir in the middle of a city so that people would be forced to face the suffering of the animals they eat. But what about all the blood? ‘It will attract flies,’ he says. ‘No local authority will tolerate rivers of blood in their city.’ ‘There won’t be rivers of blood,’ says Elizabeth. ‘It will just be a demonstration abattoir. A handful of killings per day.’ Here, the comedy of morals again exposes the lie that merely witnessing suffering will bring it to an end, and that private commitment is any more ‘useful’ than praying to God about an antique rabbit. And yet Coetzee doesn’t entirely dismiss Costello’s convictions – he shares with her a commitment to vegetarianism (though he does, in Elizabeth Costello, put her to the test when she tendentiously argues for a link between Nazi death camps and the abattoir; and other characters in the novel complain about being put out by her dietary choices). In other words, he mocks her while granting her the right to be moved by the convictions she can’t control or rationalise.

She tells John again about watching a documentary about the chicken industry, and all the tiny chicken souls destroyed on a conveyer belt:

In these stories, Elizabeth Costello sorts through her papers in preparation for the next life. She is losing control of her mind, and she tells John that she’s struggling to finish her compositions: ‘The mechanism that I used to rely on to take me to the next step no longer seems to work.’ Perhaps this is an explanation for the bitsy quality of the collection; that the work is getting smaller because the focus required is no longer possible.

I am not alone in wondering if this collection contains a message from Coetzee, or ‘Coetzee’, that this might be his last book, and that the author who is ‘thrown into confusion and helplessness’ by ‘the fact of suffering in the world’ hopes, like Costello, that he has been able to honour the millions of metaphorical little slaughtered birds with his attention to their suffering. Quite bleak! And I admit that it made me very sad to imagine the future without any strange new books to look forward to by that strange South African man. Don’t ever die, I thought. I’m not ready!

‘The Pole’ is the long opening story of the collection, long enough at 148 pages (double-spaced, wide-margined) to be published in other territories as a novella. The Elizabeth Costello stories that succeed it aren’t exactly stylistically connected to ‘The Pole’, but share some concerns, namely the limits of rational self-knowledge and the mysterious dance of body and mind, nature and intellect. What animates desire and what structures our ability to pursue or fulfil it? ‘The Pole’ is the story of an ambiguous love affair between Beatriz, an elegant ‘society lady’ in her late forties, and Witold, an elderly concert pianist whose ‘historically authentic’ Chopin interpretations ‘may point to a certain aridity’ of temperament. Beatriz serves on the board of the Concert Circle, the group that invites Witold to Barcelona to perform for a small and underwhelmed audience, and it is Beatriz who is saddled with taking the Pole out for the obligatory meal afterwards. Sparks do not fly. Yet weeks later, Witold declares to Beatriz by email that he’s returning to Catalonia to teach some workshops; and moreover, he’s coming back to Spain for her, Beatriz. Beatriz wonders what this means. Is going to a place for a person like going into a bakery ‘for bread’? This is how Beatriz is with Witold: not all that charmed, but still, for reasons she fails to understand, willing to leave the door slightly ajar for a gentle push-and-pull to develop. Witold is struck by a clownish bout of eros, Beatriz by ambivalence and curiosity. And then, Witold behaves foolishly by inviting Beatriz to ‘come to Brazil with [him]’. Beatriz performs the outrage appropriate to her station. She is, after all, a ‘civilized person’! ‘They are what they are’, says the narrator: ‘grown-ups, civilized people.’ When Beatriz discusses her aversion to the proposed Brazil affair with her husband (a man who has his own affairs), she says, ‘Don’t you find this a strange conversation for the two of us to be having – a civilized married couple?’

Eventually, Beatriz comes up with a plan for the ‘civilised’ kind of affair she can manage without becoming other to herself: one with clear temporal and geographic boundaries. She orchestrates a vacation at her family holiday house near Mallorca, where Witold is going be for a Chopin festival (and where Chopin lived with George Sand the winter he finished his preludes). Beatriz lies to her husband about the schedule. She puts the Pole in separate living quarters on the property and hides their intimacies as much as she can from the housekeeper, Loreto. At night, Witold creeps into her bedroom and the two of them copulate in the dark. I use the word ‘copulate’ because the other available terms would be incorrect. ‘As a lover the man is capable but not quite capable enough,’ says the narrator, and, ‘The last thing she wants is a corpse in her bed.’ Beatriz does not physically desire the man, and the sex is barely endurable. Once the act is complete, she boots him out of bed, and by morning, she’s taciturn with him once more. Truly civilized! For his part, Witold projects onto Beatriz archetypes that nourish the narcissistic whims of a particular male fantasy: for him, Beatriz combines qualities of Dante’s Beatrice Portinari – unassailable, unrequited, modest, and beloved – and George Sand, who, despite the exquisite accomplishment of her life, was remembered for a long time as Chopin’s muse and nurse-maid.

Sex in Coetzee is a force of comic humiliation. In Youth (2002), the young computer programmer with literary aspirations – a concentrated embodiment of the author – finds romantic life disappointing. He begrudgingly sleeps with a girl he’s been seeing the night before she returns home to Austria. When she returns from the bathroom, the artist as a cold fish ‘pretends to be asleep’:

Later, he observes that as a lover ‘his record is undistinguished, and he knows it’. The sex itself is impoverished. ‘[W]hat he provides is, he suspects, relatively meagre; and what he gets in return is meagre too.’ He consoles himself with the belief that the right woman will some day come along and open up the stores of passion that reside in his, an artist’s, soul.

In Summertime, a character called Julia reflects on her brief affair with the now-deceased author ‘John Coetzee’. She tells John’s biographer that ‘the fact is, John wasn’t made for love’. Indeed, she says, ‘he had no sexual presence whatsoever’. Despite the fact that she thinks he ‘looked out of place, like a bird, one of those flightless birds’, she has an affair with him. As friends and interlocutors they get along well, but the sexual aspect is performed merely ‘adequately, competently’. During one of their trysts, John brings along a cassette player, and as they get into bed, he plays Schubert’s string quartet. He proceeds to ‘keep time’ with it. (I have listened to this piece of music, and can attest it is in no way sexy.) Naturally, Julia finds this ridiculous and refuses to participate. John hisses at her, mid-fuck: ‘Empty your mind!’ and ‘Feel through the music!’ Afterwards Julia asks why he has done this strange thing, and he responds that if she’d allowed the music to flow through her, she might have ‘experienced glimmerings of something quite unusual: what it had felt like to make love in post-Bonaparte Austria’.

Julia might not have been the woman to awaken the hidden passions of young-ish John (the problem is clearly not on the woman’s side of things), but she does attempt to understand him, even if her idiom for penetrating his depths is constrained by the language of psychotherapy. She suspects that in his effort to live up to his ‘principles’, John sublimates his aggression, ambivalence, and eroticism into his writing, which, she says, is cruel writing, particularly his first novel Dusklands (I agree with Julia: I’ve come to refer to Dusklands as ‘the evil one’). Julia believes that in order to become a writer, John ‘decided he was going to block cruel and violent impulses in every arena of his life – including his love life, I might say – and channel them into his writing, which as a consequence was going to become a sort of unending cathartic exercise’. He eats bean paste instead of meat, performs physical labour instead of leisure, and lives in a scrappy little cottage with his elderly father, rather than with a woman. By compartmentalising rather than integrating his passions, John is destined to remain psychically incomplete, and moreover, a wimp. By contrast, Julia understands herself to be integrated, a person who accepts and can therefore control the force of her personality, and is present in the real world. Between them in their ‘erotic entanglement’, Julia is the pragmatist, and John the idealist. ‘Principles are the stuff of comedy,’ she says to him. ‘Comedy is what you get when principles bump into reality.’

As she explains to John’s biographer:

This ‘Dutch comedy’ is pointedly figured in Age of Iron, where the principles of an old dying woman, Mrs Curran – white, a former professor of Classics, both critic and beneficiary of apartheid – bump up against the reality: it’s the mid-80s, and South African state death squads are murdering opponents of Apartheid, many of them children, one of them the child of her housekeeper. Mrs Curran is against the ‘them’, the reigning white minority. ‘Your days are numbered,’ she whispers at the politicians on television. When she witnesses the murdered body of her housekeeper’s child, she is harrowed: it’s ‘the worst thing she has ever witnessed’. But witnessing it reveals to her something she doesn’t want to know: that she’s benefited too much from the system that has killed the child to be welcome in the struggle against it. It’s only then that she understands she has lived a doll’s life: false, immaculate, and miniscule. She thinks of self-immolating in protest of it all. Principled suicide is often presented as a legitimate, if perhaps feeble, political act in Coetzee’s novels. (In Diary of a Bad Year, Señor C says, alert to the tragi-comedy of ideals, that ‘an Australian who committed suicide in response to the actions of the Howard government would risk seeming comical’). Yet no-one in the novels goes through with it: it’s a thought exercise that exhausts itself before it has a chance to enter the field of action.

The drama of principles bumping into reality is where the camp element of Coetzee lives – not camp in style so much as in focus: his characters often suffer from, in Sontag’s words, ‘a seriousness that fails’. Elizabeth Costello’s worldview could be reduced to the epithet ‘unremittingly bleak’, but her bleakness is that of a deflated clown. The humour in Coetzee’s work, often running along such lines, is so attuned to the winter landscape of the soul that it seems parodic, pathetic. Mrs Curran in Age of Iron drives around in her beat-up old car with Mr Vercueil, the enigmatic itinerant man who lives in her garage and with whom she strikes up a companionship, and a can of petrol at her feet. When she can’t bring herself to complete the grand act, Mr Vercueil attempts to screw her courage to the sticking place:

Mrs Curran drives on. ‘I thought you wanted to do it,’ Mr Vercueil says. Mrs Curran responds, impotently: ‘You don’t understand.’ An example of very grim comedy? A seriousness that seriously fails? Either way, Mrs Curran’s moral contradictions run so deep that even her efforts to resolve them with self-annihilation are faulty. It’s important that Mrs Curran is a retired professor of Classics: her recourse to the situation she finds herself in, which is that history is outliving her usefulness, occurs in the language of her education, and it’s a language that can only temper, comfort, and confine her.

Coetzee applies considerable pressure to his ‘civilised’ characters to compel their ideals – of personal impermeability, of political purism, or of the autonomy of high culture – to wither and crack. After the affair with Witold, Beatriz is surprised to realise he, that ‘Absurd man!’, has affected her. She tells herself it was just a fling, but it’s clear something real and inexplicable has occurred. She exercises restraint and moves on: she deletes Witold’s emails without reading them. Time passes, and Witold’s daughter gets in touch with news of her father’s death. She tells Beatriz there is a box with her name on it in Witold’s apartment in Warsaw. Stirred again by an unconscious force, Beatriz surprises herself by travelling to Warsaw to find it. A real estate agent lets her into the flat, which has been half-packed into boxes, and eventually she finds a folder containing a poetry manuscript for her, in Polish, written by Witold. Beatriz decides to stay the night at the flat, even though there’s no proper bedding or heating, only Witold’s ghost for company. Well: ‘If the man suffered for her – indeed, pined for her – does she not owe it to him to suffer a little in return?’

Empty, ruined houses are some of the most striking and memorable images in Coetzee’s novels. There is Mrs Curran’s house, emptied and dirtied by corrupt police officers looking for hidden munitions, Michael K’s mother’s smashed-up stairway nook, and the looted, damaged houses of Lucy and of David in Disgrace. There is the magistrate’s apartment in Waiting for the Barbarians, taken over by his seniors from the central empire office, and emptied of his personal effects, including his collection from a local archaeological site. After Magda of In the Heart of the Country kills her colonist father and buries his corpse in a porcupine’s cavern, she and the farm-hand Hendrik dismember the farmhouse, and, when Hendrik and his wife abandon the property, the house is swallowed up by the encroaching wilderness. And there’s Foe’s empty house in London, where Susan Barton and Friday squat like fugitives. So many of Coetzee’s characters camp out in homes like these. Houses are, of course, rich symbolic terrain. Like people, they’re composed of a demarcated facade and interior; like people, there are, behind the visible, knowable parts, spooky, spider-filled crevices. Houses are simultaneously sturdy and fragile; they contain a person’s world, and then one day, they are gone.

These ruined houses demonstrate something of Coetzee’s ascetic distrust of grand narratives. Houses hide family secrets (there is an emphatically locked door in the colonial house of In the Heart of the Country), and they hide the grubby economics of life: sex, illness, love and strife. They embody normative fantasies of ordinariness, fantasies that can only be supported by other invented structures. Houses point to how apparently ontological foundations – ‘belonging’, being ‘at home’, indeed civilisation itself and the ‘civilized’ people it produces – can become alien, ruined, or haunted when a crisis reveals the flimsy materials of their construction. Without an audience, a living memory to connect the objects with their functions – a role Beatriz plays for Witold the night she stays over at the empty flat – a flat is just a tomb, a privacy closet filled with boxes of garbage that will eventually recede into the earth (except the plastics; plastics are forever). Without a narrative of itself, or rather the narrative assigned to it by the entities that comprehend it, a house becomes a mere crevice or a windy cave, just as a civilization becomes legible as a barbarian invading army when its story of itself comes undone.

Another of Coetzee’s demystifying motifs is his use of numbers. ‘The Pole’ is comprised of numbered sections. These suggest the numbered bars on sheet music (Witold is a musician after all), but they also work to remind the reader of the text as an artefact, and a narrative as something that is ‘produced’ rather than revealed. The story begins with a metafictional interlude. The first four numbered sections of the story are written in third-person, with a speaker appraising the story’s fictive author’s trouble conceiving the story at hand. As it gets going, the narrator’s voice disappears, and is overtaken by that of the fictive author.

Could this metafictional habit be another reason the word ‘bleak’ sticks to Coetzee’s work, ‘like a little mongrel that trails behind, yapping, won’t be shaken off’? As with Coetzee’s empty and damaged houses, those fragile domestications of historical contingency, the work of calling attention to the conditions of (narrative or architectural) production can cause discomfort to the reader. In Elizabeth Costello, the narrator intervenes here and there to explain the narratological function of certain lines, such as: ‘The blue costume, the greasy hair, are details, signs of a moderate realism. Supply the particulars, allow the significations to emerge of themselves.’ In Slow Man, Costello shows up at her character Paul Rayment’s place and starts meddling in his affairs. Metafiction usually asks its reader to bring to the text the critical tools of deep literacy: to struggle with the text; to be alert to the text’s constructedness; and to be responsible for their part in its creation. This means appreciating a text not as a secretion from the soul of an autonomous author, but as a living entity put together by myriad authors (readers and writers alike), whose meaning becomes suspended in a larger web of dynamic signification. Like a Wikipedia page, like cultural consensus, everyone and no-one is running the show.

The numbers in ‘The Pole’ bring this story into conversation with Coetzee’s critique of counting, which he’s been building since his first novel Dusklands, in which counting is presented as a primary mechanism of colonial domination. ‘We cannot count the wild. The wild is one because it is boundless,’ writes Jacobus Coetzee in the ‘diary’ of his genocidal one-man crusade into the interior of South Africa:

The logic of this ‘civilising’ practice is spatial objectification: of counting by enclosing and commodifying. In the Heart of the Country is Coetzee’s only other numbered novel. Paragraphs there are numbered like stanzas in a poem or sections in a piece of legislation. Its first-person narrator Magda reflects that should she have been a man: ‘I would not have grown up so sour,’ she says. ‘I would have spent my days in the sun doing whatever it is that men do, digging holes, building fences, counting sheep.’ In Age of Iron, Mrs Curran says:

And then there is the (more cryptic) concern with counting that occupies the Jesus novels, though there Coetzee abstracts and mystifies numbers, a gesture I read as his redeeming objects from the ruins of a declining empire, trying to find in them other logics, other ways of feeling and relating. Take for instance the brief exchange between Simón and David, man and child:

Nothing is innate, Coetzee seems to be saying over and over. Not narrative, not realism, not reason – not even the seemingly intuitive act of counting. Predicated on the unconscious repetition of forms, counting is one form of domination (ask any accountant!), and domination is iterative rather than natural.

Reading The Pole and Other Stories I kept wondering how Descartes might help me understand the tensions that sustain Coetzee’s novels. The split personality Julia identifies in Summertime allows the unintegrated author to write transgressively, but it means he’s a bore in his personal life. The young John in Youth wants to find a way to uncover his passionate soul through love, the way he imagines an artist does, but instead he is cold and sometimes rude to the women he pursues. Elizabeth Costello thinks constantly of the most maligned and forgotten souls, yet all she seems to do is argue with people and be bothered by their noisiness. The philosophical and artistic heights of Western civilisation are contaminated by the suffering they help rationalise; as the magistrate says in Waiting for the Barbarians: ‘All my life I have believed in civilized behaviour; on this occasion, however, I cannot deny it, the memory leaves me sick with myself.’ Though he would like to be romantically pure, Witold falls in love with Beatriz’s soul because her fleshly form is attractive to him. And Beatriz betrays her breeding by being affected by a mysterious force of attraction she doesn’t respect, at least not consciously. Each of Coetzee’s novels, including those I have not mentioned in this essay, involves an ideal as well as the comedy (or the tragedy – yet another set of binaries that fold neatly into one another) of its impossible manifestation, its failure to live up to itself. Coetzee has built a body of work that shows how the forms of restraint invoke the unrestrainable.

We could think of Coetzee as a modified cynic of Diogenes’ school. Through a quasi-monastic rejection of worldliness, cynicism proposes an un- or counter-civilised life as an experiential critique of oppressive social norms. Living like an animal, maybe, like a dog (cynic means dog, or dog-like, in ancient Greek). The last story in the collection, ‘The Dog’, is about a woman who cycles past a house every day where a large, aggressive dog runs up and down the fence, barking savagely. The woman is terrified that the fence will one day give way, and she thinks that her fear, the pheromones that come off her, in turn excite the dog’s aggression. One day, the woman decides to knock on the door of the house and ask the owners if she can meet the dog, so that he won’t be so threatened when she comes cycling past. The owners are insulted and turn her away. The woman works herself up to face the source of her fear, and she lets the dog have it: ‘she faces the dog and speaks, using human words. “Curse you to hell!” she says. Then she mounts her bicycle and sets off up the hill.’ The End.

The civilised woman has cracked up, and the animal reigns supreme. It’s very funny, though somewhat bleak: the Coetzeean parody shows the rational, kindly, civilised human being failing to achieve her will; principles bump into reality without a satisfying resolution (at least not for the human). I have long wondered if there is a moral envy attached to the notion that Coetzee’s work is dour, rather than a sometimes comic invocation radically to reappraise our relationship to systems of ideology. His work, and what it suggests, is something like vegetarianism (of which Coetzee is a defender): seems rather annoying to implement, is possibly suspicious, yet – whether or not you approve of it – is ultimately a sound position resulting from a consistent moral outlook. Coetzee’s cynicism is not that of the modern cynic, who in Ronan McDonald’s words has ‘proleptically dispensed with the possibility of disappointment’, but rather that of an ancient Cynic, who lowers himself down to the earth like an animal, or a flower growing from some hollow in a broken dwelling at the end of the world.