Nobel Lecture by J. M. Coetzee - Media Player at Nobelprize.org

Nobel Lecture by J. M. Coetzee - Media Player at Nobelprize.org

The Lives of Animals

J.M. Coetzee's nobel lecture entitled "He and His Man" is a narrative in which the personas of Robinson Crusoe and Daniel DeFoe are used.  Four years prior The Lives of Animals was published using something that can be seen as similar, with the persona being Elizabeth Costello.  In Gareth Cornwell's article "He and His Man": Allegory and Catachresis in J.M. Coetzee's Nobel Lecture" he uses the term "ventriloquizing" a fitting word to describe the hybridity of Coetzee's execution.  In the article Cornwell goes on to state, "… Coetzee has told stories rather than given lectures because they enable him to say things that cannot be said in any other way, things, moreover, that remain unsayable – do not exist, cannot exist – outside of the story in which they are embedded and from which they cannot in the end be separated." (98)  This seems to be the continuing evolution of an idea that Coetzee has been playing with in previous novels- the dissolution of an exact separation between character and author- I'm reminded of the quote that Kelley, Alice, and Christine used in their Foe presentation which, "…wonders if in Foe Coetzee has not effectively silenced himself"  It seems from Foe to The Lives of Animals and into "He and HIs Man" Coetzee has hit a steady stride and found a firm signature to impart this "ventriloquizing"  You see the idea appear in Coetzee's preceding non-fiction Doubling the Point with the dismantling he directs at genres and how they intersect and are equally culpable to one another.  

One could suggest that this method of "ventriloquizing" is a way for Coetzee to escape that culpability, that by exercising through fictional characters/constructs he eludes being held responsible for what he says.  I would argue that his intention is exactly the opposite, this formula actually draws our attention more intensely toward the fallacy that fiction and non-fiction are separate fields based on their relationship to truth.  And on that premise enacts a segregation which  judges them as separate with different laws and responsibilities.  In the case of biography/autobiography we excuse the writer in the sense that the story already exist and the writer is simply there to formulate it into a coherent pattern.  Thus the writer is exempt, partially, in the eyes of the authority that qualifies itself by recognizing established "truths" and using it to police the danger of fiction's murky adherence to those "truths" i.e. the limitless potential of not having to deal in "truths"  But as post-modernism has revealed truth is not the ground to which any form of writing can claim nor stand upon.  Coetzee furthers this point by using narrative in a lecture platform.

Cornwell also points out that Coetzee's nobel lecture, "…revisits a concern that has featured in Coetzee’s writing from the beginning, but that he has returned to with renewed interest (or distress) in recent years – the way in which language inevitably gets in the way of itself – that is, the opacity and waywardness of words in their refusal transparently to represent, their refusal simply and unequivocally to perform or facilitate communication" (98)  I would agree.  I think about the impotence of language In the Heart of the Country.  Coetzee's oeuvre, up to this point, seems dedicated to this principle.  It's in this dedication that Coetzee has furthered it into the public realm, where one's voice is expected to speak of oneself, either autobiographically or in terms of engagement toward another persons work, by speaking through another, namely Elizabeth Costello as well as Robinson Crusoe.  Why?  Perhaps it is because the lines that divide autobiography/biography and fiction/history are not static but instead blurred and overlapping which makes the relationship between author and character more significant.  Coetzee says that, "…all writing is autobiography" in this sense the traditional notion of character/author becomes ostensible.  

So is Costello than in fact Coetzee?  I ask this with a specific passage in mind. Costello is addressing the audience during her first lecture when she states, "If I can think my way into the existence of a being who has never existed, then I can think my way into the existence of a bat or a chimpanzee or oyster, any being with whom I share the substrate of life."  The "being" that never existed is a literary character.  So the idea of "being", which is an important qualification in this work, can vacillate between the material and immaterial. Is that what is at work in both of these texts ("He and His Man" and The Lives of Animals)  And if so, can it inhabit both at once?  The practice of reading a narrative from a lectern would suggest it can.  But as I have gathered when it comes to Coetzee, I hesitate to use the word answer, the concept is much more resistant to closure.

Foe

    In Foe, history, as an act of narrative and remembrance, informs the relationships in the novel.  The complications of identity and communication that arise within the book do so as a result of attempting some sort of preservation of history.  These methods have severe limitations, they can not fully capture a time/moment/person as they were.  So then there are choices to be made which are both conscious and unconscious that act as a supplement to the voids which there is no history for.
     Susan's lost daughter is an example of how memory advances itself into history and becomes the thing it represents.  Susan writes to Foe about the, "...correspondence between things as they are and the pictures we have of them in our minds"(65)  The daughter is drawn out slowly through a series of recollections and through these memories evolves into a newer actuality, substantive enough that it can to serve as a resistance to the claims of a physical-psuedo daughter that seems to be a manufacturing of Foe. This marks an interesting contention that involves memory, history and the ways which they can be used.
     In a conversation between Susan Barton and Captain Smith she states, "A liveliness is lost in the writing down which must be supplied by art..."(40)  History, the sources of which are traditionally biographical/autobiographical, influences how we know things which then instructs how we come to see them.  This is history as an organic entity that exists outside of a specific design.  This is what I see being deconstructed in the novel.
     In Foe history is a fabrication.  To convey past events in a way as to be identical is not possible.  History is an act guided by choice, an art created because, "...the world expects stories..."(34)  Friday, Crusoe, Susan all experience the island in a specific time and in a specific reality. Even in memories the exactness which marks that time and reality is impossible to reattain.  This is where language remedies that absence by providing narrative.  By employing a fictive technique to represent memories or documentation we reinvent them in a way that places them farther and farther away from their origins.      
     Friday's muteness presents an interesting idea.  Since it does not exclude him from history because through memory he is able to engage in a sort of history, does Friday's memories come closer to capturing that exactness because he is not subject to language.  What is history without words?  Perhaps it is something "without interruption"(157)  existing purely on signals.  Foe suggests that, "In every story there is a silence, some sight concealed, some word unspoken...Till we have spoken the unspoken we have not come to the heart of the story."(141)