Coetzee on Prose and Poetry

Here's one way the young J. M. Coetzee thought about the difference between prose and poetry (from his memoir Youth):

In poetry, the action can take place everywhere and nowhere: it does not matter whether the lonely wives of the fishermen live in Kalk Bay or Portugal or Maine. Prose, on the other hand, seems naggingly to demand a specific setting. (62-63)

He goes on to say that he cannot write about London (where he is living at the time) because he does not know it well enough yet—and thus implies that he can only write about South Africa, where he grew up.

This could be a commentary on Coetzee's own work, for at the time when Youth was published (2002), he had published eight novels, only one of which does not have "a specific setting": Waiting for the Barbarians is set in an imaginary, unnamed "Empire." Foe and The Master of Petersburg complicate the point, but neither fully contradicts it: Foe might even be the London novel that the younger Coetzee feared he could not write, while imagines a Petersburg that Coetzee the author fully inhabited, in a sense, in his extensive reading of and about Dostoevsky. — The rest of those previous novels are set in South Africa, and the three he has published since are very specific about setting (except perhaps for one or two sections of Elizabeth Costello).

Still, a statement like the above in a memoir is somewhat unstable (even if it is not as unstable as it might be if uttered by a character in a novel). A memoirist might be asserting this position as his own, but he might also be saying that the position is one he once held but now finds mistaken. A more straightforward memoirist than Coetzee would probably make explicit whether he agreed or disagreed with his younger self on this point, but Coetzee never says anything like "what a fool I was" or "I already knew that." He establishes distance from his younger self by writing about himself in the third person and the present tense, but it is not always clear whether that distance is ironic or not. (See my thoughts on this in Boyhood from 2007 here.)

Finally, though, it is worth considering the truth of the claim that prose demands a specific setting while poetry does not. One should be more precise: novels demand a specific setting while lyric poems don't. Put that bluntly, it's surely not true (Kafka, anyone?), but as a rule of thumb it seems accurate to me: lyric poetry can be very unspecific about setting in a way that most novels could never get away with being.

Foe 4

"How like a savage to master a strange instrument — to the extent that he is able without a tongue — and then be content forever to play one tune upon it!"

Here, Susan Barton in Coetzee's Foe is again writing to Daniel Foe (Defoe), this time commenting upon Friday's music: he learns to play the recorder, but all he ever plays is the same tune that he had played on a little whistle-like instrument that he had had on the island.

The image reminds me of the black master carver in Elizabeth Costello who carves the same figure of Jesus over and over again, sometimes very small, sometimes very large (even a gigantic altar piece), but without the slightest variation. Elizabeth Costello complains to her sister (a nun in Africa) that he ought to try to do something else, so as to be fully expressive as an artist, and her sister defends the carver's choice of doing the same figure over and over.

I'm not sure how to paraphrase what these two images say about Coetzee's own perspective art that "westerners" (here, Susan Barton and Elizabeth Costello) deem "primitive," but the nun's defense of such art in EC flashes back into Foe as a defense of Friday's music (a defense that is not heard in Foe, and perhaps could not be, given Friday's lack of a tongue).

"... we cannot forever play the same tune and be content. Or so at least it is with civilized people."

*

"I recall an author reflecting that after death we may find ourselves not among choirs of angels but in some quite ordinary place, as for instant a bath-house on a hot afternoon, with spiders dozing in the corners; at the time it will seem like any Sunday in the country; only later will it come home to us that we are in eternity."

This is now Susan Barton speaking to Daniel Foe; again, the image returns in another form in Elizabeth Costello, in the final "lesson" where E. C. is waiting in a purgatory-like place that is actually a lot like a small town in the hot season in a dry, tropical country.

It's also reminiscent of the last chapter of Julian Barnes's A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters, in which the afterlife is what you expected it to be.

*

"I am not a story, Mr. Foe. I may impress you as a story because I began my account of myself without preamble, slipping overboard into the water and striking out for the shore. But my life did not begin in the waves. There was a life before the water which stretched back to my desolate searchings in Brazil, thence to the years when my daughter was still with me, and so on back to the day I was born. All of which makes up a story I do not choose to tell. I choose not to tell it because to no one, not even to you, do I owe proof that I am a substantial being with a substantial history in the world. I choose rather to tell of the island, of myself and Cruso and Friday and what we three did there: for I am a free woman who asserts her freedom by telling her story according to her own desire."

I began my account of myself without preamble—and thus her account is like a story. By implication, the stories real people tell of themselves in real life always have preambles, in which the raconteur justifies the telling of this particular story at this particular time. In fiction, by contrast, stories are told without preamble and without occasion—for the sheer pleasure of storytelling?

Foe 3

"... the history you write ... must not only tell the truth about us but please its readers too. Will you not bear it in mind, however, that my life is drearily suspended till your writing is done?"

Here, Susan Barton in Coetzee's Foe is writing to Daniel Foe (Defoe), asking him how much longer it will take him to turn the story of Barton, Crusoe, and Friday as castaways into a book.

To me, in my recent re-reading of Foe, it read like an anachronistic reference to Coetzee's most recent novel, Slow Man, in which the main character, Paul Rayment, turns out to be a character in a novel by Coetzee's figure Elizabeth Costello. In Slow Man, Costello finds her own life "drearily suspended" while she waits for the "slow man" to decide what to do with his life. In Foe, it is the character who finds her life "suspended" while she waits for the novelist to finish writing her story.

"He has turned his mind from us, I told myself, as easily as if we were two of his grenadiers in Flanders, forgetting that while his grenadiers falls into an enchanted sleep whenever he absents himself, Friday and I continue to eat and drink and fret."

Foe 2

"There are times when benevolence deserts me and I use words only as the shortest way to subject him to my will."

Here, Coetzee's Susan Barton is writing to Daniel Foe (Defoe) about the mute Friday whom she has brought back from Cruso's island.

It is a less extreme version, perhaps, of the end of the long text Conrad's Kurtz writes about the problem of the natives (in Heart of Darkness): "Exterminate all the brutes!"

I was inspired to reread Heart of Darkness by C. Dale Young's comment that he re-reads it every year. But I have not gotten around to it yet. First a bunch of Coetzee.

Foe

''But seen from too remote a vantage, life begins to lose its particularity. All shipwrecks become the same shipwreck, all castaways the same castaway, sunburnt, lonely, clad in the skins of the beasts he has slain. The truth that makes your story yours alone, that sets you apart from the old mariner by the fireside spinning yarns of sea-monsters and mermaids, resides in a thousand touches which today may seem of no importance, such as: when you made your needle (the needle you store in your belt), by what means did you pierce the eye? When you sewed your hat, what did you use for thread? Touches like these will one day persuade your countrymen that it is all true, every word, there was indeed once an island in the middle of the ocean where the wind blew and the gulls cried from the cliffs and a man named Cruso paced about in his apeskin clothes, scanning the horizon for sail."

I have just reread J. M. Coetzee's Foe for the first time since I wrote my final undergraduate paper on it back in 1987, right when the novel was published. I had always remembered it as a powerful book, and in the meantime I have become a enthusiastic reader of Coetzee, but still, I was taken aback by just how powerful a book it is. I should not have been surprised to discover that JMC writes great books, but just how great they are never ceases to amaze me.

Here, the castaway Susan Barton is speaking to Robinson Cruso; she arrived as a new castaway on "his" island many years after he first landed on it with Friday (who, in this book, is mute because he had his tongue cut out).

Or rather, Susan Barton, having returned to England with Friday (Cruso died on the return voyage), has written a sketch of her experiences for one Daniel Foe, whom she has asked to write a book about her (and not about Cruso and Friday alone). In that sketch, she includes this comment she made to Cruso, who was completely uninterested in producing any sort of "version" of his story (whether oral or written), and who did not want to return to England.

The "thousand touches" of everyday life are necessary to make a story (whether the adventure story of a castaway, in this case, or the story of a disillusioned professor who loses his job because of an affair with a student, as in Coetzee's Disgrace, or the story of a young wizard at a wizarding school) into an individual story, rather than an archetypal one.

It almost reads like advice in a good workshop for beginning or intermediate writers: stop treating writing as an attempt to produce archetypes, and focus instead on the details that both ground and undermine the archetypal elements of the stories you want to tell.

Or in the language of my post on Arthur Ransome's Great Northern?, you cannot get away with writing that is just in your "favorite style"; you have to ground that style in "the simple dreadful truth" — in the physicality of the experience that renders it individual, precise, and perceptible for others who have not shared that experience (be it real or imagined).