Matthew Pianalto has been posting some interesting work on integrity lately (here and here). I've also been reading J.M. Coetzee's Summertime. On p. 63 a character in the novel says that, "Principles are the stuff of comedy. Comedy is what you get when principles bump into reality."
Pianalto's example (originally from Peter Winch, who got it from a film based on a book) of a pacifist who kills someone to prevent an even worse crime being committed shows that the result of such bumping can also be tragedy.
p.s. On p. 94 there's an exchange about vegetarianism and personal preferences or whims that echoes some thoughts found here.
Some old thoughts of mine on integrity are here.
Hi Duncan. What did you make of Summertime overall (if that makes sense)? (I read it recently as well.) I can imagine that some might think of the book as self-indulgent. I don't. I've been intrigued by the way in which Coetzee has been probing questions about authorship, identity, and belief in several recent books (Costello, Slow Man, and Summertime are the ones I've read recently, as well as Disgrace). In part, for me, thinking about some of these characters and some of the ideas put forward about self and belief has helped me to put some corrective pressure on the stuff I've been working on concerning conviction and integrity. In Costello, many questions are raised about the importance of "principles" (and the quote above might be thought to raise them, too). But if you look at Coetzee's correspondence with Kurtz, it's clear that the "comedic" view of principles wouldn't seem to be Coetzee's final word, as there are some principles (about how we treat others) that are clearly important to him.
ReplyDeleteI'll try to answer more fully when I've finished Summertime, but it doesn't seem self-indulgent at all. So far.
ReplyDeleteI look forward to talking about it (I'll have to flip through it again). I think what I meant by "some might find it self-indulgent" is that, yes, it's advertised as a novel, but as a fictional work of biographical note-taking, Coetzee can paint whatever picture of himself as he wants...and to the extent that aspects of the picture are unflattering, one might view what's going on with suspicion (say, as a kind of false humility). I'm definitely not thinking of any actual reader here, so maybe this is just a straw man (though again, I guess what I was thinking was that this sort of thing might seem self-indulgent to someone who just wants a "story" from a novel...)
ReplyDeleteI finally finished it. Although I read it a few pages here and a few pages there in the end, so I might need to read it again properly some time. Anyway, I liked it and did not find it self-indulgent. Of course it is about himself, and yet it is also fictional, so it isn't about him. The portrait it paints of him is not very flattering. In fact it seems almost self-lacerating at times. There isn't much humility, false or otherwise, that I can see, except the kind of humility you need to write a good book. (I'm thinking of the kind of lack of ego that Simone Weil talks about somewhere.) And perhaps it's a mistake to talk about the portrait that the book paints, since it offers multiple points of view. But they do produce a kind of composite picture, which might be the point. I don't know whether there is meant to be any generalizable point about personhood or objecthood there.
ReplyDeleteThe tendency toward "self-laceration" is, I think, what I imagined some might find odd (and indulgent really isn't the right word). The "is and isn't about him" point--and the question, "What is the reader to make of this?"--is similar to the way some commentators on Costello have tried to think about the relationship between Coetzee and Costello. I am intrigued by his various experiments with these various ambiguities in the author/character relationship, though like you am not sure what, or whether there is, a "generalizable point." In the Salmagundi interview Coetzee responds to a question about self-transcendence, by saying that there's a puzzle about "where" such transformation happens, skeptical of notions of a "core" self. He then says (and this is what I wanted to get to): "Why am I interested in the where rather than in the how [of self-transcendence]? Because, like many other people (I suspect), I have intimations that all may not be as it seems to be. Because, again like many people...I am bored by my self and would like to believe that cultivating--or even having--a self or selves is not the whole of life" (p. 59). This seems like it might be relevant, but I can't quite put my finger on how...
ReplyDeleteInteresting. I haven't tracked that interview down yet--I think I'll have to call on interlibrary loan. "All may not be as it seems" sounds a bit New Agey, but he might well simply mean that we shouldn't be too sure that our assumptions and beliefs are right. And any altruist ought to be OK with the idea that having/cultivating a self or selves is not the whole of life. So he might not be saying all that much here, but I agree that it could still be a key to understanding important aspects of his work. I'm reminded also of what someone said who was teaching philosophy of religion. Her students asked her whether she believed in God and she promised to tell them when the course was over, but added that it hardly mattered since she might change her mind one day. This is pretty banal, but I suspect that Coetzee might feel that certain factual details about him scarcely matter since they could have been different without this affecting anything important. Perhaps Summertime is about this important stuff, which I might call an essence except that an essence that can only be (or, at least, is) presented through multiple, different portraits is a funny kind of essence. Perhaps Costello lacks a self because she is so concerned about others, or something like that. There is something Schopenhauerian about this, but I don't know what Coetzee thinks of Schopenhauer (if anything).
ReplyDelete