Waiting for the Barbarians

     What do ruins teach us?  They show us how far we have advanced but they also remind us how little has changed.  The laws of nature exact and infringe upon that which was in the past as evenly as they do on that which currently exist.  The laws of civilization/society however, are the result of a subjective value that acts upon our judgments as to right and wrong.  They are founded than on approximate grounds.   Foundations which are shifting, unstable and unreliable.

     In Waiting for the Barbarians  Coetzee is working even more deeply in his signature opaqueness.  Regardless, the perplexing and vague alignments and shifts spell themselves out against a incredibly, almost invisible, simplicity.

     The ruins that the magistrate uncovers are a source of relativism that is a larger theme throughout the book.  They stand as the tangible result of satisfying basic human needs, needs that super cede culture or class but are paradoxically vulnerable to it.  Though the collective mass of the structures is, "…visible even from the town walls."(p. 16) the excavation heightens their delicacy making them dissolve, "…to nothing as soon as it was touched…"(p. 16) The idea of safety, hunger, companionship precede the broad and austere descriptions that Coetzee uses to define and contrast that which is within the Empire and that which is without.  The distinctions based on steel and technology never drown out the relationship of human to earth, of our inflexible connection to a primordial longing, that if traced far enough back or forward leads to an extinction.  This imminency is then actively resisted by an arrogance ruled by relativistic though pattern constructed solely on logic, reason and principle.  All of which are artificial products of "civilized" perceptions.   As we watch the magistrate travel, both externally and internally, between these two separate spheres that extinction is spelled out:

The children never doubt that the great old trees in whose shade they play will stand

                forever…What has made it impossible for us to live in time like fish in water…like

                children?  It is the fault of the Empire!  Empire has created the time of history.  Empire

                has located its existence not in the smooth recurrent spinning time of the cycle of the

                seasons but in the jagged time of rise and fall…Empire dooms itself to live in history

                and plot against history. One thought alone preoccupies …Empire: how not to end,

                how not to die, how to prolong its era. (p. 154)

The full circle the magistrate eventually traverses essentially leaves us off where we began.  It is like the tree or the ruins that the desert swallowed.  They are engulfed not to be destroyed but to be harbored so when they resurface once again they act as a reminder and harbinger, a measure of far and little in the same proximity.  It is also like the Empire, which is cursed by the very subjectivity it composed that will renew itself continuously as well.  

     What is engendered by nature will always be a product of violence and tranquility that is beyond the ownership of any people/society.  These things subvert and undermine notions of value but that does not make them either better or worst than anything else.  They simply just exist.  So the relativist train of thought, though inevitable, is inevitably insolvent because, "The space about us here is merely space , no meaner or grander than the space above the shacks and tenements and temples and offices of the capital.  Space is space, life is life, everywhere the same." (P 18)             

           

Aschenputtel

http://stenzel.ucdavis.edu/180/anthology/aschenputtel.html

In the Heart of the Country

I want to focus on the concept of language and its consequences as presented in the novel.  Coetzee undresses these issues through a remodeling of a conventional form of story-telling (The fairy tale) to document the severity of what language can create especially when in opposition to that which can exist without the use of language and stand outside of it, which in this book I saw as desire.  The contest of desire vs. language presents an interesting dynamic.  It reminds us that one (language) is a development of our own manufacture and the other (desire) is an intrinsic, organic  element of our biological make-up that is beyond our ability to produce or even completely understand.  This contention results in a mythification, a pre-destination of sorts that serves as a guide to correct living.  Furthermore it demands a specific skill-set (the ability to speak correctly with this framework)) that inevitably divides and thus creates a class of those who can and those who can't.         

In this work I see elements of the fairy tale  being sift through a deconstructionist sieve and then played out (hence the repeating sciences). The idea of sexism that haunts this book is not a pre-meditated attempt by the author via choice or personal belief but instead is manifested by its implicit presence within the textual environment of language.  To be exact these sexist qualities are not just the result of the fairy-tale repertoire but of a entire canon.  One could view Magda's failures and delusions as a consequence of her adherence to such texts or the social customs/constructions they create.  This book looks at the bitter result from waiting on something Magda has been taught to wait for so that she can then be defined, made whole and absolute.  That arrival will never come because much like the arid homeland there is no fertility therefore no possibility only a measurable withdrawal into darker interpretations of her textual surroundings.  These recesses which Coetzee maps out through Magda's fascination with bugs and insects show the interior depths that are perpetuated by the words and ideas we accept as valid through the medium of language.  Throughout the novel Magda emphasizes her failure to communicate or bond with anyone.  On pg. 101there comes a vivid moment when she expresses this fact to Anna, "I only wanted to talk, I have never learned to talk to another person.  It has always been that the word has come down to me and I have passed t on.  I have never known words of true exchange…The words i give you you cannot give back.  They are words without value." This brings up another interesting concept that Coetzee works throughout the narrative, language/words as a sort of currency.  Exchange, value, coin are all terms that arrive in Magda's reflections upon speaking.  Magda's disconnect represents the dichotomy of primal and mechanics.   Magda exists purely on desire, her expressions are rendered through physical acts and anything beyond that limitation, when within the context of a textual conflict, is no longer within her ability to control or maintain.  Looking at a passage on pg. 43, "…perhaps my rage at my father is simply rage at the violations of the old language, the correct language, that take place when he exchanges kisses and the pronouns of intimacy with a girl who yesterday scrubbed he floors and today ought to be cleaning the windows."  Her ideas of love, that were been born of desire but then absorbed through language make her enemy/weakness less clearly defined to the point that she turns on herself "…when I could find no enemy outside…I made an enemy out of myself…"  So this amalgam of language and desire amasses and as it does takes us away from a fundamental process of humanity and begets a segregated system that impoverishes those (Magda) that risk occupying the outer lands, that in this novel is represented as the desert and the veld with its harsh exteriors populated by a small but vehement wildlife.  Lastly, the redrawing of the same scene using multiple frames and perspectives illustrates the mutable nature of fairy-tales, how they can become embedded not just within the innocuous area of fables but can invade our more highly praised jurisdictions of literature (i.e. the canonic realm) and how they can withstand and evolve with time.  Regardless of their origin they can come to fit themselves within any contemporary timeframe or circumstance because our ability to discern language's extraction of meaning has not (collectively) sharpened and the consequence is they (meaning, social convention/construction) can be seen or suggested as natural.  The fairly-tales', or to be more exact the Cinderella fable, most famous elements surface throughout In the Heart of the Country.  The dead mother, the step-mom, pumpkins, the extended family (Hendrik ad Klein-Anna), and the power struggles all arrive centered around the contest between desire and language,  "…and words again begin to falter. Words are coin.  Words alienate.  Language is no medium for desire.  Desire is rapture, not exchange.  It is only by alienating the desired that language masters it…The frenzy of desire in the medium of words yields the mania of the catalogue.  I struggle with the proverbs of hell." (pg. 26)  Again the line of post-colonial and postmodern is obscured by the enigmatic sculpturing of narrative purpose but either way the novel engineers an assertive method in re-considering what surrounds us.

Debate

I think Chomsky and Foucault presents some interesting points as to power, institutions, class and the possibility of change and the course that such change would/could take as dictated by human nature.  Some of the philosophies/theories that are addressed in this debate surfaced in my reading of Dusklands and hopefully others will find some connection(s) within their own readings and the topics that are discussed and find it as interesting as I do.

The Chomsky-Foucault Debate [excerpt, part 2/2]

The Chomsky-Foucault Debate [excerpt, part 1/2]

Dusklands

In Dusklands the subject of power and its possession/inheritance is given an intriguing treatment.  The book has a deft maneuvering of positions and motives that revolve around this caustic issue.  My focus is mainly on The Narrative of Jacobus Coetzee though this erratic relationship plays out in the Vietnam Project as well.  But in the Narrative the relationship exist and transpires between two, more distinctly spelled out, people/cultures.  One the (seemingly) dominant and assertive and the other (seemingly) docile and conquered.  In this context the dynamic that comes to play out is not the one that is classically rendered nor suspected.  The journey that Jacobus undertakes is premised on his ability to travel wherever he deems appropriate, in fact the hubris he demonstrates in taking upon himself to name portions of the landscape and other geological features makes evident the degree of subjugation that exist and further more endorses this thinking while happening on a level that is seen/felt as natural.  Interestingly enough it is this exact conventional wisdom that allows the dramatic shift of power.  Coetzee weaves throughout the narrative Jacobus's explicit musings upon civilization(s) and within these surfaces an inherent taxonomy.  On pg. 80 he talks heroically about himself, "We cannot count the wild.  The wild is one because it is boundless.  We can count fig-trees, we can count sheep because the orchard and the farm are bounded.  The essence of orchard tree and farm sheep is number.  I have presided over the becoming number of ten thousand creatures...I am a hunter...a hero of enumeration."  This arrogance Jacobus posits as duty.  This non-consideration of the other is a demonstration of the colonizers brutality afforded by their position of power. There is another line from that same page that I find  interesting, "He who does not understand number does not understand death."  The sentiment has a very fixed quality, one which centers around death with a very western perspective.  With this rational Jacobus travels deeper into the interior, falls sick and here the dependency switches and as do the roles, aside from one (Klawer), whose eventual erosion climaxes in a brutal beating and mutiny.  As power is shifted into another sphere we see the newly empowered demonstrate their own form of ferocity.  The treatment that is wielded both on the natives and Jacobus is what made this book so complex.  Where one behavior is expected, that of Jacobus, the exhibition of the other, that being the natives conduct, reduces the notions we commonly hold of indigenous/colonized cultures. An idea that forwards purity, innocence, benevolence and equitability upon certain (pre-colonial) cultures that is not aways accurate.  It relates to the discussion we had in class in regards to Shohat/Trinh and the problems associated in post-colonial studies, namely the romanticizing of historical representation.  Coetzee brings a stronger, more rounded and I feel more qualified detailing, in a historiographical sense, of these elements.  In the afterword on pg. 113 Coetzee writes, "Stolen animals would be barbarously treated.  With the Eskimo the Bushmen shared the repugnant belief that animals have ben placed on this earth ...to gratify his most perverse appetites...The haunch of a stolen ox would be hacked off and eaten before the beast's agonized eyes."  We see the sadistic natures of all the involved parties.  These tendencies than act to resist the possibility that there exist an exactly peaceable and just civilization, that concept becomes a notion which will never be fully realized because human nature regardless of where we emanate has instinctual workings that override our products of reason.  The question it seems, or what I have gathered from this reading and is one of the many that I feel Coetzee is posing in each of these novellas, is that the person/culture, wherever and whoever, that holds the power will exhibit and carry out actions influenced by that benefit where as the other/powerless will naturally demonstrate behavior consistent with their milieu.  That there exist no race or culture which stand as pre-ordained in terms of power but rather the factors of environment and opportunity decides who stands where.

Introductions, intentions, and salutations

This blog intends to create a larger and hopefully deeper inspection of J.M. Coetzee's works through reflection and correspondence.  As a Graduate student at CSUN I have a critical responsibility toward every work I encounter and that obligation is strengthened by a faithful communication not only between my fellow students but anyone and everyone who is interested in visiting and investigating the inexhaustible potential that great works of literature provide.  Beyond its intention, this blog is dedicated, wholly, to learning without pretentiousness, exclusivity or judgement.  It's singular goal is to be a forum comprised of honest efforts that contribute to the generation of greater ideas.