Winchester, 2004

Dear Elena,

Thank you for the great compliment of asking me for my thoughts on the article you are writing, The Philosophers, The Poets and The Animals: Desire in the Recent Fiction of J.M. Coetzee. I liked it. My criticism is this: just as you suggest that J.M. Coetzee fails to draw out fully the conclusions that his fiction implies, does not go down far enough into the depths of the matters that he raises (especially regarding the “ancient quarrel” between philosophy and literature), I felt that in your own study, there is perhaps some significant idea that your work perhaps edges towards, but shies away from in the end.

Let me begin at the end. Your Figure 2b tells us that “desire in the recent fiction of J.M. Coetzee” might be some complicated term that intertwines the possibility of shame and grace. Your three place schema, Shame, Desire, Grace, and your discussion of the question of animality in Coetzee’s recent fiction, somehow reminded me of Derrida’s analysis of the demonic as the confusion of the boundaries between three orders of being, the Animal, the Human and the Divine. Derrida introduces the idea at the beginning of “The Gift of Death” where he is talking about Jan Patocka’s fifth “Heretical Essay in the Philosophy of History”. I thought about the parallel rather a lot, and I will try to explain why I think it is important.

In that essay Patocka describes how the orgiastic or demonic was first incorporated and then repressed by Platonism and Christianity, respectively. Patocka sees Europe as having a special place in history (as more or less being history - the idea comes up also in his, “Plato and Europe”), and he argues in this essay that this is a consequence of the new sense of responsibility that developed only in Europe with this illumined and conscious turning away from the orgiastic or demonic; and that the special destiny of Europe can only be fulfilled with a more complete rejection of the demonic than what was managed by Platonism and Christianity, a more thorough thematisation of what a person, an I, is. Thus, when asking himself the question of why European civilisation might be in decline (the title of the fifth essay is “Is Technological Civilization Decadent, and Why?”), he does not question the wisdom of Europe’s founding spiritual principle – by his lights – the watchfulness against the demonic; rather, he suggests that what is in order is more of the same, certainly no let up against the demonic.

Now, to get back to Coetzee, we might joke around and say that Coetzee, while criticising Plato, hasn’t completely rid himself of his own Platonism. Rather, Platonism has been - perhaps unconsciously - incorporated in his work. For, on your reading, Disgrace is a novel about the ascent of love, a radically Platonic idea, though of course it was also taken up by Augustinian Christianity. One could, if one wanted, read the ascent in a way that conforms perfectly to a Platonic-Christian model: Lurie’s love for his student, a particular beautiful individual awakes generous feelings (“In the whole wretched business there was something generous that was doing its best to flower.” p.89), but is too intermingled with uncontrollable erotic or sinful sexual desire to bring the man to the Good by itself, (as seen testified by the interruption of Lurie’s apology on p.173, one of the most opaque scenes in the book, by desire, “With careful ceremony he gets to his knees and touches his forehead to the floor. Is that enough? He thinks. Will that do? If not, what more? He meets the mother’s eyes, then the daughter’s, and again the current leaps, the current of desire.”); it is only when Lurie comes into contact with other beings, i.e. the dogs, which elicit compassion but not desire that Lurie learns of pure, heavenly love, or Charity. It is interesting to compare this ascent with Dante’s, as, in fact you do.

However, Coetzee’s treatment of animality confounds this reading: humans, I believe he argues, are not of a different order of being from that of the animals; sexuality, which we happen to share with the animals, is not a worse thing than reason, which we happen not to. Lurie’s compassion for the dogs extends to him understanding that his sexuality, his desire for the girl, is essentially like that of the dog, and the same for the notes of “immortal longing” that we find in the greatest of poetry. Thus Coetzee’s desire, as you understand it, with its mixture of animality, human compassion and grace, is a demonic thing, by Derrida’s definition, rejecting the notion of orders of being with fixed boundaries between them.

Drawing on Kant and Wittgenstein you explicate a Coetzeean argument against “Aristotle’s fixed order of creation which puts man, the rational and therefore moral animal above the unfree and amoral animals”. But you do not say if you believe these arguments yourself. (Likewise, you say that, “Costello’s eight lessons are consciously the lessons of a poet for the fellow citizens of the republic”, but you say, “It is beyond the scope of these reflections to say whether or not her case is successful”; you do not say if you think that the poets might have given Plato something to worry about.) So I put this question to you: with whom, out of Patocka and Coetzee, would your sympathies lie – with the continuation of the European project, as the Czech philosopher understands it, with even more determined resistance of the animal, or with Coetzee’s acceptance of the animal, what we might call, for the sake of making a parallel, an African project? This is a confrontation which, I thought, you might have touched on, and I am interested to know what you really think.

Maybe my mentioning an “African project” wasn’t just for the sake of symmetry. Because if we think of the religions of pre-Christian Africa, they are very good examples of what the orgiastic or demonic might conjure up for someone like Patocka. To speak in very general terms - in order to mask my ignorance - these religions often involved totemic worship of animals, and communication with them, that is, either reversing an order of being which put humans above animals, or blurring the boundaries between them, by granting the possibility of communication across the animal-human divide. Religious ceremony often involved music and dancing in order to lose awareness of oneself (note that Nietzsche puts forward music and dance as the best examples of Dionysiac, orgiastic, arts in “The Birth of Tragedy”) so that ancestral spirits could enter mediums and allow for communication with the spirit world (the blurring of the boundary between the human and the divine).

Now that I have mentioned Nietzsche, let me just talk about how in the Birth of Tragedy, as you probably know, the more interesting opposition is not between Dionysus and Apollo but between Dionysus and Socrates. Nietzsche talks of the confrontation between the Socratic optimism which imagined a world perfectible by reason and knowledge, and the older, earthlier resignation towards suffering in the world, which found comfort in the orgiastic arts. Another example of Socratic optimism, though I can’t remember if Nietzsche uses it, is the idea that no man willingly and wittingly does evil. That is, that if a man has his reasoning fully awakened, he will be in control of himself (think, “reason, the charioteer”) and only ever do good things. What comes with that sort of view is a deep mistrust of any state in which humans forget about reason and “go out of their minds”, go into a state of passivity when they loosen the reins on their own will, such as in a trance.

The sort of African religiosity that I talked about was, as we know, viewed with horror by Christian missionaries. Conforming to the Patockan pattern – the double European heritage of Platonism and Christianity - they attempted to replace these practices with a religion which did not involve “degradation” of the human, or ecstatic transports, and so guarded the integrity of the responsible, reasonable subject that they took to be the part of man that mirrors God. Well, if your sympathies are with Coetzee, you might see that project as utterly wrong-headed. For if the good in man is not in reason, but in something else that we might happen to share with the animals, this is no way to improve anybody. And if your sympathies are with Coetzee on this, I have another question for you: how will you know what to do?

I talked about Socratic optimism: if you believe in reason, you need not worry that you will not know what to do, for you believe that you can work it out for yourself. That is optimistic, because it makes the Good understandable to man, and takes away the worry that man might need to be guided by forces impenetrable to the light of his understanding. If, however, you say that we must embrace the animal or the orgiastic, don’t a hundred horrifying images enter your head, of what people are capable when they lose control, when they stop thinking about what they are doing? (And when they do it in the name of God, mad fundamentalists and witch-burners.) If you say, the only way that you can act for the good, is to give yourself up, as in a trance, to an inhuman state beyond your understanding, what makes you trust that, as Joseph Conrad put it, the darkness will not take you? I can imagine how a very deep pessimism could come over one with losing faith in reason – for one could have removed the last fence before an abyss of darkness. You said when you sent me your article that a strange melancholy came over you when you finished the last words of your essay, and that you hoped it would soon pass. That is what I’d say it was, the fear of the abyss. Are you feeling any better now?

I look forward to hearing your answers. But for the sake of it, I’ll tell you in advance what my answer would be: faith. If you really believe that this is where goodness is, not in reason, not in something that is comprehensible to you, then you should also have enough trust to give yourself up to it. That would be an optimism, but not one that could ever be argued for or justified: I trust because I trust.

..............

Thank you for also sending me the Prologue for your new book. It made me want to read more – so I guess that means that as a prologue it works! I was wondering if you had recently read, or had in mind when you wrote it, Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, Chapter XIII, because your line of thought seemed to me like some sort of refraction or transposition of verses 11-12, quoting from the Authorised version:

When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.
For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then I shall know even as I am known.

Your childish thoughts sound rather Platonic to me (the opposition between the limited sensory understanding and what one knows of ideas, with reason), and, from what you have said, your book will be about a sort of “growing out of Platonism”. “Know thyself!”, you say rather ironically. Anyway, the parallel is more clear if you compare your words with the Vulgate:

Videmus nunc per speculum in aenigmate.

And the final verse, I believe from what you have told me about one of the stories in your book, is quite relevant:

And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity.

In your article you do not treat charity directly, though of course you do discuss desire and erotic love (or, I should say, Coetzee’s treatment of it). Again, I take up the idea of the demonic and I see you as reading Coetzee as saying that eros and agape are not so separable as Christianity would have wanted to think (and I take this to be a point you are making about Dante’s love for Beatrice). If you believe that pure, selfless love cannot be known apart from the experience of passionate desire – and its destructive wake - you face again the fear of an abyss. Love is blind: how will you know when love comes to you if you are giving yourself up to “something generous”, something gracious, and not to destruction and shame? Instinct, perhaps, some small belief that when it comes down to it a good feeling can be told from a bad, that you will be guided well, that the rightness of your impulses will be known to you.

I am curious about what you think of the “shall know even as I am known”. I’m posting you back the book on Coetzee that you lent me, “Doubling the Point”. Thank you, I didn’t get a chance to read it all, but what I did read I found very interesting. I read the essay that you especially recommended, on “Confession and Double Thought”. Like Coetzee, I know you like to pick up on the seeming endlessness of self revelation or confession, and, from what you have told me, it will be one of the themes of your book (“know thyself!”), and in your article you make a nice comparison with the sort of scepticism about self-knowledge and post-modern scepticism about the endlessness of possible interpretations of texts. In one of the interviews, Coetzee says that he believes that in his fiction he breaks out of this scepticism by erecting the standard of the body and the fact that it feels pain. Is that a solution you have any time for?

I think Coetzee, with his contorted, incorporated Platonism says in one of the interviews somewhere that, like every chained prisoner, he dreams of slipping the chains and turning towards the light. But, you know it’s funny because in Elizabeth Costello and elsewhere he has such a master argument for not doing so. Not so much an argument as a stark and frightening image of a potentially demonic and malign power that reaches us via reason itself. I take the argument to come from scepticism about self knowledge: that we cannot know our own motives well enough to be able to trust ourselves that what we take to be good reasons for actions are not sinister rationalisations for what really we should not be doing. Reason is a marvellous tool for self deception, and furthermore, putting faith in reason has all the trappings of any other sort of superstition. I think that in the “Heart of Darkness” Conrad captured these worries, even if the book as a whole does not admit to it:

“The conquest of the earth… is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much. What redeems it is the idea only. An idea at the back of it; not a sentimental pretence but an idea; and unselfish belief in the idea – something you can set up, and bow down before, and offer a sacrifice to…”

And violent imperial conquest would not be the only example of an “idea” leading us astray (or helping us lead ourselves astray). We also have Elizabeth Costello’s point about the exploitation of animals, not to mention environmental destruction in the name of “development” and “progress”, neo-imperialist conquest in the name of “democracy” and “freedom”.

To do something in the name of Ideas is very Platonic, and concern about this way of being guided is of course not new. It is as old as Christianity at least, and it is exactly this point that Paul is raising in I Corinthians, as I mentioned above. In a way, Platonism, for its faith in human reason, and Christianity, for its denunciation of the “wisdom of the world”, are quite unhappy bedfellows. There is a great tension in the “twin heritage” of Patocka’s Europe. Perhaps a fertile one, perhaps a destructive one. Thinking about the work that you sent me, in particular, how your writing in your Prologue echoes Paul’s letter, I see your thought as now positioned on one side of the chasm between the two traditions. Knowing you, it is probably not somewhere you intended to be. I would say, consider it - it may not be such a bad place to be. It is a question of trusting your silent guide. You probably will not understand where you are going. Such are leaps of faith. Well, this letter is no place to start preaching to you. I wish you best of luck with the publishers, I send you all my encouragement, and let me know when you are back in the UK. I look forward to seeing you again.

All the best,

Yours,

Joanna S.

Bibliography

J.M. Coetzee, Doubling the Point: essays and interviews, edited by David Attwell (Cambridge: Harvard University Press).

J.M. Coetzee, Disgrace (London: Secker & Warburg).

J.M. Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello: Eight Lessons (London: Secker & Warburg).

Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (London: Penguin Books).

Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death, trans. David Willis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press).

Soren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, trans. Alastair Hannay (Middlesex: Penguin Books).

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music, trans. Shaun Whiteside (London: Penguin).

Jan Patocka, Heretical Essays in the History of Philosophy, trans. Erazim Koháka (Chicago: Open Court).

Jan Patocka, Plato and Europe, trans. Petr Lom (Stanford: Stanford University Press).