There are interesting facts about him here, but I wonder how true this is:
A colleague who has worked with him for more than a decade claims to have seen him laugh just once. An acquaintance has attended several dinner parties where Coetzee has uttered not a single word.Perhaps they were dinner parties like this. And it's not hard to imagine someone who doesn't drink getting pretty quiet if everyone else is a bit drunk. The Wikipedia article gives reason to believe that the moral and political views expressed in his books are his own. I imagine he presents them as possible points of view, and possibilities worth reading about, because he believes them but recognizes that he might be wrong, or might be seeing things from just one of multiple possible and reasonable points of view. But you can never be sure when things are fictionalized. In Diary of a Bad Year
he says that at the end of Kurosawa's The Seven Samurai
the samurai offer to protect the village for a price but leave when asked to do so by the villagers. But as I remember the film, the samurai simply leave. There are different versions of the film, but accounts of the plot that I've read all agree with my memory of the ending, and to the extent that the film has a plot it would be quite changed if the samurai seriously considered taking the bandits' place. So I'm not sure what to make of this.I was going to try to say something about Coetzee on teaching and on the self, but that will have to wait for other posts.
I like what you say about how to read the thought that the positions expressed in C's books are his. Some of the links in the Wiki article (to speeches he gave about animals in '07) make it pretty clear that he has clear views about animal ethics that are at least similar to Costello's (though the short speeches have much less philosophical baggage attached). And his correspondence with Kurtz says a good deal about his view that reason is not the only faculty by which we can explore and apprehend reality.
ReplyDeleteAs for the fact that he often puts Costello in a pretty bad light--that's very similar to the kind of self-deprecation (or character deprecation) you see in Summertime. (And in Disgrace, in a slightly different way. Again, I haven't read Diary of a Bad Year, but suspect it's relevant.) The point--say, in Costello's case--isn't to undermine the argument but, perhaps, to embody the argument within a person with real idiosyncrasies and flaws. This creates an interesting tension. For example, we, the readers, have to ask ourselves not only, "what do I make of this argument?" but also, "what do I make of the person who is giving this argument?" and, "Can I still see the argument as credible despite possible distractions and flaws that are, perhaps, only aspects of Costello's character?" This might seem to be a challenge to the philosophical impulse to insist that the argument is the only thing that matters, and that to analyze it, we should lift it from the story, from the character, and look at it on its own merits. And it's not that that's completely crazy (as far as the formal analysis of arguments goes), but it is a little crazy if we see "arguments," especially in ethics, as ways of elucidating a perspective that is, in some ways, irreducibly personal. (That may seem vague, but I think I can trust that you know roughly what I mean.) That is, the argument is about animals, but it is also, in a different way, about Costello (her perspective, her history), and so the attempt to abstract away from her is going to leave something important out. (Something like, "Only Costello can bring this argument to life in the way she does, and so to leave out Costello is, in a sense, to "kill" the thing which gives the argument its particular sense...")
Yes, thanks. I don't want to ignore this comment but I don't have much to add to it. The only thing I don't quite get yet is your reference to his putting Costello in a bad light. I don't remember those parts of the book(s).
ReplyDeleteAll I mean is that she's depicted as an old and in some ways worn out person, probably just about out of gas, and thus perhaps a bit soft in the brain. "Bad light" wasn't the right phrase. But he depicts her in a way such that it might be all the more easy for someone who's just interested in "the argument" to dismiss her.
ReplyDeleteI see. So many people seem to be dismissive of her views that you must be right. Thanks for the clarification.
ReplyDeleteOne example: I find the stuff on Nagel and the claim that "I know what it is like to be a corpse" to be, at times (including when I'm in certain moods), annoying. I can see Costello's point but only if, to some extent, I tune out Nagel.
ReplyDeleteYes, she approaches Nagel from an odd angle, which might seem to be missing the point or else, possibly, to be hitting his weak spot precisely. What one makes of this is likely to depend somewhat on how weak one thinks Nagel's argument is and how insightful one finds Costello's remarks. I think Nagel must be making some kind of mistake (however much he gets right) and Costello's critique--though compressed and oblique--seems promising to me. It probably needs someone like Mulhall to bring out what is packed inside it though. I'm hoping to read what he says about it today. I'll certainly return to this some time.
ReplyDeleteHaving read Mulhall on this, I don't think I have much to add. I can't claim that he took the words out of my mouth, but I can't improve on what he has written about it. At least not yet.
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