Questions of Hospitality in Coetzee’s Diary of a Bad Year

Abstract

Writing is not free expression. There is true sense in which writing is dialogic: matter of awakening countervoices in oneself and embarking upon speech with them. --J. M. Coetzee (Doubling Point 65) Questions, concepts, ideas: all these must be given home, community, before they begin to make sense. History, writes novelist in J. M. Coetzee's Diary of Bad Year, no life unless you can give it home in your consciousness, it is load no free person can be forced to take (104).This essay will examine how Coetzee's novel gives shelter to philosophical questions of hospitality raised in novelist's Strong Opinions and Second Diary by dramatizing hospitality they receive from their first readers: Anya typist and Alan her partner. Jacques Derrida's seminar series on hospitality was given in 1995- 1996. In it, he consolidated an ethic of hospitality which characterized pattern of thinking apparent in his work from as early as 1964 essay Violence and Metaphysics. Introducing topic of philosophical questioning, Derrida writes that style of founds ... of decision. ... in which has not yet found language it has decided to seek (Writing 98). This results in a of about possibility of question. ... Within it, today, is sheltered and encapsulated an unbreachable dignity. The questions brought about by possibility of an origin, and therefore an end, to philosophy, in other words, gives hospitality, through of its speakers, philosophers, to its antithesis, idea that ideas may be articulated in discourses that, while philosophical, are not themselves generic philosophy. Moreover it demonstrates that texts themselves are sites of this hospitality, that texts can be called on to offer shelter to ideas, whether formulated within genre of ideas or not. So Derrida goes on to recognize history of this awareness in field of philosophy, and, as such, in discourse field has created or founded realized tradition of remaining question (Writing 99). That meta-idea may be articulated happens as direct result of meta-discursive tradition of discourse, tradition hospitable to ideas that permanence of ideas. In other words, formulation of philosophical carries with it need for an act of mental hospitality. The must be given dwelling, shelter, and a community so that it might find language to formulate itself, discourse in which Derrida relies on words evoking images and ideas of hospitality. Derrida's two hospitality seminars, collected in Of were titled Question d'etranger venue de l'etranger and Pas d'hospitalite: no hospitality, step of hospitality (75). Critical to of hospitality are questions raised by foreigner in and about their place, and entrance of foreigner into place of hospitality. Pas, meaning both negation and step, suggests that with step that carries guest or visitor or foreigner over threshold into territory of host, there is transgression that, simultaneous to any courtesy offered, invades integrity of host's dominance of his or her home. The Platonic Ideal of which Derrida refers to as the Law of Hospitality, would be an unconditional welcome of visitor (to give new arrival all of one's home and oneself, to give him or her one's own, our own, without asking name, or compensation, or fulfilment of even smallest condition) (77) before any process of identification, anticipation, or determination has conditioned hospitality offered with expectations, rights, duties, limits and powers. The laws of implemented to regulate giving and receiving of kindness shown by hosts for guests or visitors, taint or pervert ideal by articulating conditions under which relationship functions. …