Mar

18

J. M. Coetzee & J. S. Bach

Filed Under Fiction |

coetzee2.jpgAfter I wrote about my initial dismissive impression of J. M Coetzee’s Diary of a Bad Year, several readers contacted me via email and took me to task about not giving the book a proper shot, letting me know that Coetzee wouldn’t be such a simpleton to let the essayistic parts of the book stand in as his voice. Most of them posited that the voice of Senor C in “Strong Opinions” part of the book cannot be the voice of Coetzee himself, as some of the ideas are - as I’d noticed in my previous post - so transparently unimaginative.

I have given Diary of a Bad Year a more thorough read, and the readers were right: I had totally dropped the ball on how the book was operating. But an important distinction has to be made right away - the esssayistic “Strong Opinions” is a reflection of Coetzee himself, even if at times, he presents his ideas as a cursory parody of his real ideas. Many things support my claim. The rant about pedophilia and Catherine MacKinnon in “Strong Opinions” is a reprisal of Coetzee’s actual essay on pornography and MacKinnon, “The Harms of Pornography,” which was collected in Giving Offense. The themes of cruelty of torture in political regimes and the nature of the State and the helpless, Hobbesian condition of mankind expressed by Senor C in Diary of a Bad Year are Coetzee’s favorite preoccupations (Life and Times of Michael K, Waiting for the Barbarians, etc.) It would be as hasty to dismiss “Strong Opinions” as a purely fictional concoction, just as proclaiming the section as a straightforward view of the author would be. The question is: what game is Coetzee playing here, and to what ends

bach.jpg“I have an image of Bach as a man,” confides Coetzee in an interview almost two months after 9/11, “in which he is sitting next to me at the keyboard and he says: let’s try it this way.” The answer was prompted by the interviewer’s question regarding a moment remembered in Coetzee’s essay “What Is a Classic” in which the author, as a boy, listens to a passage from Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier escaping from a neighbor’s window, transfixed. The interviewer, Peter Sacks, asks Coetzee if Bach has been a formative stylistic influence on him, and Coetzee, despite his usual reticence in interviews, muses at length about Bach. In his mind’s image, according to Coetzee, Bach is the antithesis of Beethoven, who is the very picture of the Romantic genius. Unlike Beethoven, Bach genially sits down next to him at the keyboard, Coetzee says, and shows him the possibilities before mysteriously disappearing without his cognizance.

Coetzee not only elaborates on his admiration for the master in Diary of a Bad Year (he calls Bach his “spiritual father”), but mimics the polyphonal structure of Bach’s music, appropriating the composer’s contrapuntal musical lines in a literary manner. If it’s difficult to simply categorize Diary as a novel, it should not be as difficult regarding the book as a literary fugue of sorts, in which different voices, themes, and ideas become interwoven according to the author’s order and inventio.

If judged conditionally as mimetic fiction, Diary is a spectacular failure. Of course this may be an irrelevant issue, as Coetzee presents the fictive story - of Senor C’s relationship with a young woman named Anya, whom he hires as his secretary after being smitten with her derriére - couched within a presentation of a book of essays called “Strong Opinions,” the very book that Anya is typing and commenting upon. Diary is deliberately fashioned as a metafictional parlour trick: on the top half of the book’s page, the readers get the actual text of “Strong Opinions” (and later, Senor C’s more private, “softer” thoughts), and on the bottom half of the page, we receive Senor C’s and Anya’s internal thoughts running parallel to the essays, with Alan’s voice joining the chorus in the latter half of the book. Surely, Coetzee’s attempt is to puncture the mimetic semblance and the illusion of traditional fiction by closely modeling Senor C after himself. Yet the unavoidable fact is that there is a traditional story lurking beneath the smoke. Crudely put: an old man is infatuated with a young girl, her boyfriend plots to rob the old man of his estate via a computer scheme, and the young girl departs from both the old man and the boyfriend in denouement. The story is replete with the usual peaks and valleys of - God forbid! - conventional plot.

As such, it may be tempting to attack Diary on the surface level of mimetic fiction. For example, the way Anya’s thoughts are presented is not so much differentiated from how Senor C’s thoughts are relayed; the syntax and the rhythm of Anya’s internal monologue are frequently indistinguishable from Senor C’s. Given Anya’s background and the repulsion she feels toward formal elitism, it is impossible to imagine her formulate her thoughts this way -

On the contrary, I don’t have the faintest idea what Alan means. Why this obsession of his with the old man and his money… something in the whole picture offends him, as though the old man were a Spanish galleon going down on the high seas with a hold full of gold from the Indies, that would be lost for ever if he, Alan, didn’t dive in and save it.

The whiff of formal construction in the sentences, the casual metaphor comparing Senor C to a Spanish galleon going down with a “hold” full of gold - these elements belong to Senor C’s rhetorical repertoire, not Anya’s. It is all the more incredible that Anya, in confronting Senor C, accuses him with all certitude, of hiring her based on the lovely shape of her derriére, as if she is privy to his personal thoughts. But just as it becomes tempting to dismiss such infelicities as a writer’s failure, it would dawn on any close reader of Coetzee’s work that there are simply far too many of these inconsistencies for them to be indeliberate errors.

konsthall.jpgAnother thing: for the first time in Coetzee’s fictional career, the quotation marks have disappeared. Even in Coetzee’s more recent attempts to blur the demarcation between fiction and real life (i.e. Elizabeth Costello, Slow Man), the verbal reportage had alwyas been marked by quotation marks. In Diary, there are no “he said, she said” quotation marks, but an uninterrupted flow of three different voices. Or, the possibility arises, is it just a single voice of the author split into three

It becomes evident that not only Senor C, but all three “characters” in the book - C, Anya, and Alan - might be versions of Coetzee, fictionally incarnated, and it is in such a way that Diary is, simultaneously, a work of fiction and an “aleatoric” confession, as Senor C might phrase it. What one reads first as a mistake - a glaring coincidence - may have been according to Coetzee’s design all along. For example, in Senor C’s essay on intelligent design, he writes -

Why is it that the intellectual apparatus that has evolved for human beings seems to be incapable of comprehending in any degree of detail its own complexity Why do we human beings typically experience awe - a recoil of the mind, as if before an abyss - when we try to comprehend, grasp, certain things, such as the origin of space and time, the being of nothingness…

bach-fugue.jpgThe language and content of the passage, especially the pointed phrase “a recoil of the mind, as if before an abyss,” specifically allude to Kant’s aesthetic theory of the sublime in Critique of Judgement. A few pages later, in a startling moment of “coincidence,” Alan - when explaining to Anya about pornography, of all things - says that everything is a perception. “That is what Kant proved,” says Alan, “That was the Kantian revolution. We simply don’t have the access to the noumenal.” Senor C’s Kantian notions about the incomprehensible Sublime find their perfect counterpoint in Alan’s observations on the “Kantian revolution,” the inaccessibility of the noumenal. Such coincidental moments become so numerous with the accretion of the book that they cease to be coincidental in earnest. The only feasible explanation is that the three voices are riffing on each other by design, adroitly in concert, each voice aware of how the other voice is playing out, just as a contrapuntal melody in Bach’s fugue will pick up the motif from the original theme and transpose it, develop it further. They are all different manifestations of the thoughts by the same person: the author.

As mentioned at the head of the essay, many themes and preoccupations of Coetzee are revisited in Diary, as if in a grand fugue. It is as though Coetzee is attempting to weave the different elements of his work into his life: the art of life become the Art of Fugue, as Bach might have put it. Coetzee, as his Senor C alter ego, writes that it is to Bach alone that he wishes to speak, not Cervantes, not Schubert.

caillebotte.jpgWhy Bach Senor C opines that “Bach shows how in almost any musical germ, no matter how simple, there lie endless possibilities for development.” In this era in which fiction is supposed to have exhausted itself of all possibilities, here is a writer telling us that it isn’t so, reminding us of the limitless amplitude of fiction, using Bach’s music as analogue. In a very important way, Diary of a Bad Year has succeeded where his previous attempts at metafiction have failed: the author has allowed his fictional characters to channel the multivalent, different strands of his thought, whereas in Elizabeth Costello, for example, such a translation never rose above its technical construct. That said, the paradox of Diary of a Bad Year is that despite its formal innovation, it is still profoundly a traditional work of fiction, albeit in a way that Proust’s fiction is, by now, traditional. Life and fiction seem as one, two lines running parallel to each other at times, intersecting at other moments, all pointing - as Bach’s fugues do - toward endless possibilities.


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