The Ethics of Reading J. M. Coetzee

Abstract

The presentation scene itself we skip. It is not a good idea to interrupt the narrative too often, since storytelling works by lulling the reader or listener into a dreamlike state in which the time and space of the real world fade away, superseded by the time and space of the fiction. Breaking into the dream draws attention to the constructedness of the story, and plays havoc with the realist illusion. However, unless certain scenes are skipped over, we will be here all afternoon. The skips are not part of the text, they are part of the performance. J. M. Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello Introduction Moral and aesthetic theorists have long relied on examples from literature. Indeed, an ongoing conversation between a cluster of contemporary philosophers and writers seems to indicate a modern lifting of the millennia-old ban, sanctioned by Plato, on the inclusion of poets in the just republic. Relatively recent endeavors in philosophy and literature alike would seem to suggest that the two traditions have finally initiated a process of reconciliation. As philosophers, though, we call for further support for this claim, as well as further clarification on how this reconciliation might be achieved. Hence the importance of tracking the moves of a new circle of writers who transition between the two strands of this dialogue--from philosophy to literature, and then back again. Work in both fields illustrates the point: Stephen Mulhall's The Wounded Animal (2009) discusses both J. M. Coetzee's and (the fictional) Elizabeth Costello's projects, describing them as manifestations of long-standing modernistic reflection on the conditions of literary formal realism; Coetzee's The Childhood of Jesus (2013) neatly returns to the ancient philosophical dispute over the existence of universals. The intrinsic value of the dialogical form itself--a formal device Plato seems less willing to do without--has been further reassessed and rendered more nuanced in recent philosophical work that uses dialogue as a means of resuming the interrupted conversation. In his response to Coetzee's lectures in The Lives of Animals, for example, Peter Singer produces a philosophical dialogue, held between a philosopher called Peter and his daughter Naomi, while Paola Cavalieri uses dialogue to discuss animal rights and to refute a form of moral perfectionism according to which moral status depends on the extent to which a being possesses certain hierarchically ordered perfections (e.g., consciousness, rationality, conceptual-linguistic abilities). Cavalieri uses dialogue both to reveal and challenge the way in which nonhuman animals, supposedly lacking these relevant perfections and thus characterized neither as moral agents nor moral subjects, are excluded from the moral realm altogether. What, then, is fueling this conversation? This essay will try to answer this question by entering the dialogue, and it will do so on different fronts. I begin by tracing the main steps of an approach to reading Coetzee developed by Derek Attridge in J. M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading. As the title suggests, Attridge argues at length that there is a strong ethical core at the heart of the aesthetics of Coetzee's novels. Following Attridge's lead, and engaging heavily with Jonathan Lear's essay on Diary of a Bad Year, I focus my analysis on the alleged ethical motives behind Coetzee's experimental upending of canonical literary conventions in Diary. In particular, I explore the motives behind Coetzee's departure from standard novelistic form in this text and his use of the split page. I then closely consider Stephen Mulhall's main thesis on the ethical import of Coetzee's work, which I compare with an alternative explanatory model developed by Terry Eagleton. A provisional last word is then handed to Coetzee himself. Entering the age-old conversation from multiple angles, I aim to consider the implications of this reassessment for the practice of philosophical writing more generally. …