Beckett's Worldly Inheritors

Author(s): Duncan McColl Chesney

Source: Journal of Irish Studies, Vol. 29 (2014), pp. 32-41
Published by: IASIL-JAPAN
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/24367809
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Beckett's Worldly Inheritors

Duncan McColl Chesney

Scholars (Harrington, Morin) have by now well documented tactics whereby Beckett
de-Irishized his prose in the switch to French around 1940. This was not so much a
renunciation of Ireland (although there was certainly an element of that) as an
aesthetic strategy of abstraction that enabled Beckett's curious, ambiguous scope -
simultaneously universal and particular, symbolic and literal. The achievement has
been tremendously influential in world letters in the post-war period, and despite the
minimalizing de-Irishization, it can certainly still be understood as another example of
'Ireland in the World', one among many examples of that famous Irish type, the self
exiled but all-too-Irish artist. In my larger work I am engaged in tracing Beckett's
influence in a number of important more recent writers, but in this essay I propose to
explore the Beckettian inheritance of J.M. Coetzee, one of the preeminent
Anglophone prose stylists writing today. While not obviously Irish, this influence
attests, like so many others, to the ongoing, multi-faceted, and rich contribution of
Irish culture to the world.

In an interview with David Attwell some ten years before his Nobel
canonization, J. M. Coetzee noted, 'Beckett has meant a great deal to me in my own
writing - that must be obvious. He is a clear influence on my prose'.1 This seems to
be true, but how, and how specifically on Life & Times of Michael K (winner of the
Booker Prize for 1983), arguably Coetzee's first really accomplished novel? As is well
known, Coetzee engaged in post-graduate academic work in Texas (in computational
stylistics, no less) to find the secret of Beckett's prose, and through his stylistic analyses
learned something about the quality of Beckett's language. Among other things, what
the young researcher discovered upon his initial encounter with Watt was an
incredible mastery of language, evidence of'someone whose sensitivity to the nuances
of weight, coloration, provenance, and history of individual words was superior to
mine'.2 It is clear that attaining a similar mastery has subsequently been the goal of
Coetzee in his novels, as has (albeit in a way somewhat different from that exemplified
by Beckett's middle-to-late prose) the famous minimal style, economy of expression,
and general stylistic sparseness. Another key aspect of this style is a systematic
abstraction away from an immediate social and historical situation while nonetheless
retaining a vital relevance to that originating context (which is shared in a sense with
Coetzee's other main precursor, Kafka). For Beckett, this led to the famous

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 33

'universality' of his vision in critical interpretations ranging from humanist,

existentialist, and religious, to nihilist and deconstructionist (to mention just a few).
For Coetzee, particularly around the time of Michael K, the abstractification',3 as well
as an 'anti-illusionist' (Doubling the Point, p. 27) narrative self-reflexivity more on
display in, say, Foe, but ever present, led to accusations of political retreat, formalist
aestheticism recusal from moral engagement, and so forth.4 While wary of the
extremes of Beckett's self-reflexivity (of narrative, of genre, of the subject), Coetzee
nonetheless certainly inherited from his precursor an unceasing scrutiny of the
'authenticity and authority of the speaking subject'.5
The young Coetzee was particularly taken with Watt and subsequently with the
major French prose works of the middle period, the trilogy and the stories (Molloy
above all). In these we see the development of the spare style, the focus on misfit
characters, the dispossessed, and on impoverishment that, if you will, incriminates the
system itself, though the represented social system is reduced to a handful of
policemen, a few cyclists, and scattered and very brief encounters with others,
collective or individual. But Coetzee, in Michael K as generally, has narrated his tales
in the third person, not the first so characteristic of Beckett at this period, and
certainly Coetzee never abandons plausible narrative elements like plot, character,
scene, and so forth, though he minimizes them.
What gets left behind in those middle period narratives is the philosophical
comedy; the ludicrous rationalizations, the desperate urge for control, irrational
reason as stylistic principle, and the comedy of futile attempts at reason and control
against the backdrop of authoritarian menace or approaching despair: both laugh out
loud stuff, and deep, black cosmic humor cashed out in those brilliant, balanced
sentences, the perfect cadences and comic substitutions; in short, 'that unbroken
concern with rationality, that string of leading men savagely or crazily pushing reason
beyond its limits' as Coetzee himself describes it.6 We might add the old Cartesian
dualist problematics and the unshakeable and baleful consequences of embodiment
(though this is the reason Coetzee was dissatisfied at the time of the Attwell interviews
in 1992 with Beckett's later prose which he describes as 'disembodied', and spoken in
'post-mortem voices' (Doubling the Point, p.23); indeed the baleful consequences of
embodiment and decay have become increasingly the focus of Coetzee's own work as
he grows older). What Coetzee celebrates above all in Beckett though is what he calls
the sensuous delight in reading Beckett's works, a delight not reducible to the comedy
and which does not mitigate the darkness of the vision expressed in the texts.7

I want to argue here that Beckens general example for Coetzee, as for others
truly sensitive to his accomplishment, is an uncompromising commitment to
addressing the darkest aspects of contemporary life while staying true to the most
demanding formal claims of late modern aesthetics. As Seam us Heaney once put it,

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34

Beckett's work is evidence that art can rise to the occasion' - war, genocide, terror:
real blood and tears - can stand for it, stand up to it, and stand its ground against it'
in the hopes of redressIt may be only a partial appreciation, but Coetzee's Beckett is
the late-Modernist, minimal prose-poet of the catastrophe, always humorous in his
black way, but never anything but deadly serious in his aesthetic intent and intended
effect. While this is certainly not everyone's Beckett, as a review of the bewilderingly
extensive contemporary Beckett criticism will attest,9 it is Coetzee's Beckett. In an
essay on Beckett's short fiction, Coetzee writes, 'Beckett was an artist possessed of a
vision of fife without consolation or dignity or promise of grace, in the face of which
our only duty - inexplicable and futile of attainment, but a duty nonetheless - is not
to lie to ourselves. It was a vision to which he gave expression in language of a virile
strength and intellectual subdety that marks him as one of the great prose stylists of
the twentieth century'.10 To my mind this description applies equally well to Coetzee's
own accomplishment as a worthy response to the late-Modernist ethico-aesthetic task
delineated by Beckett.
As a way of narrowing down a rather large topic, I will focus here on Life &
Times of Michael Kn one of Coetzee's most accomplished and successful novels. If the
protagonist's name and disorientation in a world of inscrutable bureaucracy, violence,
and menace owes more to Kafka,12 the minimal prose style, the obtrusive
consequences of bodily degradation through hunger and mishap, the occasional
humor, and the somewhat crazed middle-section first person narrative of an unnamed
Medical Officer owe a great deal to Beckett. Indeed the novel can be seen as the most
effective fusion of Coetzee's dual literary inheritance.13
The Medical Officer's narrative is replete with Beckettian resonance and
reference. One passage (pp. 155-57) is particularly revealing: the Medical Officer is
frustrated with the failed rehabilitation/interrogation of Michael K (every aspect of
whose story is misunderstood by the authorities, including his name). At this point
Michael has just 'escaped'. The Medical Officer speaks to his superior, the head of the
hospital-cum-camp: "'Michaels [sic] should never have come to this camp," I went
on. "It was a mistake. In fact his life was a mistake from beginning to end. It's a cruel
thing to say, but I will say it: he is someone who should never have been born into a
world like this'" (p. 155).14 Here we see Michael the misfit whose very being indicts
the injustice and wrong of the world, like so many of Beckett's protagonists. The
Medical Officer then takes a walk, supposedly to look for evidence of Michael's flight.

In half an hour I was back where I started, a little surprised at how small a
camp can seem from the outside that is, to those who dwell within, an entire
universe. ... An old man passed me riding a bicycle that creaked with every
stroke of the pedals. He raised a hand in greeting. It occurred to me that if I
followed after him, proceeding down that avenue in a straight line, I could be

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 35

at the beach by two o'clock. Was there any reason, I asked myself, why order
and discipline should not crumble today rather than tomorrow or next
month or next year? (p. 156)

Then speculating half-seriously on which course of action would serve the greater
happiness (if not Good), he concludes, 'For what reason were we waging the war,
after all, but to augment the sum of happiness in the universe? Or was I
misremembering, was that another war I was thinking of?' (p. 157). The officer
returns to his post, but later is led to the following thought: 'Then as I sat at the
nurse's table in the evening, with nothing to do and the ward in darkness and the
south-easter beginning to stir outside and the concussion case breathing away quiedy,
it came to me with great force that I was wasting my life, that I was wasting it by
living from day to day in a state of waiting, that I had in effect given myself up as a
prisoner to this war' (p. 157). The misfit, the cyclist, the misremembering, the waiting
. . . this is a veritable overview of Beckett's concerns from the period of Molloy (1951)
and Godot (1953). Although these particular references are superficial, and, extracted
like this, seem a little too knowing, they actually link to much deeper connections.
There is a great deal of time and effort spent in the novel on/by the protagonist
dealing with a bicycle-wheelbarrow-vehicle wherewith he attempts to transport his
mother away from Cape Town back to her childhood farm. This is not exacdy Moran
and son seeking Molloy, or Molloy himself seeking his mother and losing himself
along the way, but involves the themes of body-machine, mother and return (to
womb/room/home), abortive journey, and the always surprising durability in/and
frailty of the human body, that imperfect machine. Likewise, Michael K, though
much more active and mobile than Didi and Gogo, is most basically a figure trying to
wait out a war, as is, more explicidy, the Medical Officer. Michael K, as has been
noted, is in fact more a Kafka-esque figure (in Deleuze and Guattari's reading of
Kafka) of becoming-animal/becoming-molecular along a line of flight from an
unlivable, undesirable life and times, including the war, which is less a war than a
semi-permanent state of exception.15 And since the Michael K sections of the novel
are narrated in third person (as in Kafka's works), while the Medical Officer's narrative
is a sort of hysterical-journal first person narration (more like Beckett's middle works),
the book apparently separates these two strands of influence more than is actually the
case. In fact, by providing two different types of narrative about a single protagonist,
Coetzee can accomplish Beckettian ends - the undermining of authoritative truth in
narration, the obfuscation through over-description and mis-description of the
protagonist, and so forth - by non-Beckettian means. Which is to say that the book is
no slavish copy of Beckett or overly-derivative, weak extension of the master's style
and themes, but a strong and effective clinamen or swerve away from the precursor (in
Harold Blooms admittedly problematic terms).

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36

On the subject of Kafka, Coetzee states in an interview with David Attwell,

'What . . . engages me still in Kafka is an intensity, a pressure of writing that . . .
pushes at the limits of language' (.Doubling the Point, p. 198). He goes on to mention
Kafka's 'intuition of an alternative time,' the details of which are the subject of
Coetzee's extended critical piece from 1981 on Kafka's story 'Der Bau'/'The Burrow'
collected in the same volume as the Attwell interview ('Time, Tense, and Aspect in
Kafka's "The Burrow'"). So, an intensity of writing, the limits of language and its
possible outside, a concern with temporality - both quotidian time and crisis time -
and the intermixing of, or breakdown of the distinction between, the two: these are
the qualities of Kafka's example in which Coetzee confesses an on-going interest. In
the interview Coetzee, in a more Beckettian vein, declines or foreswears authorial
comment on, control of, or essential insight into his own work, in this instance Life &
Times of Michael K (pp.205-6), but we might well ask, what, besides a certain
'pressure of writing' and a peculiar sense of temporality (identifiable quite specifically
in stylistic facts of verb usage) is remarkable and exemplary in Kafka's writing?
'Kafkaesque' is generally taken to connote expressionist or surreal distortion of
space, of time, of physical and other relations. It is often associated, of course, with
nightmarish bureaucracy, and is characterized by 'the father figure who is both
overpowering and dirty, the hollow rationality of the narrator, the juridical structures
imposed on life, the dream logic of the plot, and last but not least, the flow of the
story perpetually at odds with the hopes and expectations of the hero'.16 Helplessness,
guilt, and confusion are key feelings, and we see them, in Life & Times of Michael K
But this is all fairly superficial. What do Kafka's works do that is so important and
extraordinary? For one thing, as noted by Adorno, they destabilize a traditional or
comfortable relationship between reader and text. Kafka's 'texts are designed not to
sustain a constant distance between themselves and their victim but rather to agitate
his own feelings to a point where he fears that the narrative will shoot towards him
like a locomotive in a three-dimensional fdm'.17 Kafka achieves this disturbing
proximity, though, at the same time as he prevents reader identification with any
particular character in his works. It is moods and situations, feelings and anxieties that
are uncannily close to the reader rather than a character we can understand and be, so
to speak. Character, as a key site of ideological and emotional identification and the
very touchstone of the novelistic tradition of psychological realism, is revealed by
Kafka, and even more so later by Beckett, as indeed a dead end for the form as it
'mirrors' and addresses the increasingly distorted world of the bureaucratized,
rationalized, disturbing modern city. Despite the different time and space, a sort of
rejection of character is often the case with Coetzee's fictions as well. There is an
opacity to many of his characters like Michael K,18 or even a consciously constructed
unpalatability to the more autobiographical figures if that is what Elizabeth Costello
and David Lurie are (to say nothing of the cold yet desirous JCs of the Scenes from

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 37

Provincial Life / Summertime series) that forbids identification or even sympathy,

and thus thwarts a certain affective connection (or, as Gayatri Spivak argues,19
demands a narrative counter-focalization). Yet at the same time Coetzee's works do
nothing if not reach out and grab you, give you the sense that something far more
important than diversion or entertainment is afoot in the processing of his spare prose
and entering into his fictional worlds.
In his great Kafka essay, Adorno also notes the cunning involved in Kafka's
seeming humility, his pathetic figures lost from the very start of their tales. 'The only
chance, in Kafka's eyes, however feeble and minute, of preventing the world from
being all-triumphant, was to concede it victory from the beginning' (Prisms, p.269).
(Or in Canetti's words, we are dealing here with 'the freedom of the weak person who
seeks salvation in defeat'.20) Kafka thus renounces the bourgeois notion of dignity in a
non-violent resistance that has this effect: to reveal the violence and injustice of the
world in its naked power. To many contemporary readers of Michael K (notably
Nadine Gordimer) this was precisely the failure or limitation of Coetzee with respect
to his own times. There is a time for 'hero[es] of resistance against or rather,
withdrawal from or evasion of - accepted ideas of the heroic' (as Coetzee puts it in
Doubling the Point, p.206) and there is a time to stand up and fight (or have your
fictional characters do so)! Well, regardless of Coetzee's personal political
commitments and beliefs, or rather complexities and reservations, he clearly has a very
different notion of what literature does or can do in drftiger Zeit (that is, times of
moral destitution; does an obvious enemy mean an obvious resistance strategy?
Perhaps. But what does this mean for art?).21 The aesthetics of Lukacsian critical
realism, despite its obvious merits in writers like Thomas Mann or Nadine Gordimer
herself, is no more Coetzee's way than it was Kafka's.
We face a prima facie contradiction here: Coetzee's works seem, like Kafka's, to
undermine aesthetic distance and hit us with a particular force, and yet they do not
lead us forcefully to anything in particular. Is it true of Coetzee's works that, as
Blanchot wrote of Kafka's (and which we could easily extend, mutatis mutandis, to
Beckett's): 'they send us back endlessly to a truth outside of literature, while we begin
to betray that truth as soon as it draws us away from literature, with which, however,
it cannot be confused'?221 am not sure. I think Coetzee's works more obviously than
those of his great precursors (Kafka and Beckett, if not Dostoevsky) have an extra
literary aim, ethical not political - which of course was also political given the climate
of his times. But perhaps this downplays the whole self-reflective and writerly element
of these works of Coetzee, a man, after all, obsessed with language and style, as with
formal experimentation. In any case, what is most true of Kafka, according to
Blanchot, is certainly true for Beckett, and for Coetzee as well: 'Art is primarily
consciousness of unhappiness, not its compensation. Kafka's rigor, his fidelity to the
work's demand, [is] fidelity to the demands of grief.. .'.23

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38

To return to Beckett, and having mentioned above only a comparatively slight

example of thematic overlap and stylistic resonance in Michael K, I want to zoom out
again to state more generally - even polemically - what I think Coetzee owes to
Beckett, or rather what model I think is proposed by Coetzee, in the wake of Beckett's
accomplishment, for contemporary writing. Coetzee's is a project of Serious Fiction (a
description of which I am developing in much greater detail in my current book
project with that working title). 'Seriousness,' writes Coetzee in an article on
Catherine MacKinnon and the 'Harms of Pornography, 'is, for a certain kind of
artist, an imperative uniting the aesthetic and the ethical'.24 The aesthetic means the
most rigorous devotion to formal construction and style words in dialogue with
the most advanced contemporary arts: in Beckett, the early move away from Joyce
and Joycean prose towards the ever-more-minimal style consonant with developments
in the sister arts of painting, sculpture, and music in the 50s and 60s. The ethical
means a responsibility to the world of suffering, in Beckett's case, the second world
war, the bomb, the revelation of the Final Solution, and so forth: the on-going
catastrophe of the modernization of war and terror. But because the artwork is
seriously caught in the semi-autonomous world of the aesthetic, its serious address of
the ethical cannot be simply political, thematic, propagandistic, or what have you.
This commitment is mediated through the most advanced aesthetic techniques. My
description of serious fiction begins to sound quite familiar: it is basically Theodor
Adornos conception of the modern artwork, and here is my more polemical point.
Just as Beckett, despite his comic mode, was entirely devoted to this serious task, and
for this reason is best understood as a minimalizing late modernist with a
fundamentally negative view of the social function of art, so Coetzee takes up this
model of artistic engagement despite his occasional exploration of post-modern self
reflectiveness and his more compelling, recent blurring of the boundaries of novelistic
discourse, for example in the Elizabeth Costello works and the Diary of a Bad Year.1
While politically significant art must encode 'correct consciousness' (which Adorno
defines as 'the most progressive consciousness of [social and other] antagonisms on
the horizon of their possible reconciliation',)26 for the serious artist this consciousness
is, to repeat, always artistically mediated, never straightforwardly political. As Adorno
puts it at one point: 'The Same, which artworks mean as their What, becomes,
through hoiv they mean it, an Other'.27 On the other hand, pure detachment from
society and engagement in formal concerns is not sufficient for the true artwork. The
work must engage the world in the first instance in autonomous, formal concerns,
but these concerns themselves have a negative and mimetic relation to the
contemporary world as well. For 'artworks exercise a practical effect, if they do so at
all, not by haranguing but by the scarcely apprehensible transformation of
consciousness' (Aesthetic Theory, p.243), by staging contradictions in the hopes of an
'irruption of objectivity into subjective consciousness' (p.245) and opening on to a

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 39

Utopian hope of their reconciliation. 'That whereby the truth content of art-works
points beyond their aesthetic complexion, which it does only by virtue of that
aesthetic complexion, assures it its social significance' (p.248).
My sense is that the contemporary cultural dominant, the post-modern, is
definable precisely by a turn away from this negative critical force of the artwork,
accentuating other aspects of the modernist work: self-reflexivity, pastiche, play,
paradox, and the like. Modernist and late-modernist works - and this alone is what I
mean by insisting on calling them that - engage in the ludic, the aesthetic, and, what
- the auto-affective - but always with an eye to the extra-literary world, a world for
Adorno, for Beckett, and for Coetzee characterized primarily (though of course not
exclusively) by suffering, injustice, and wrong. The work which denies this or ignores
it is . . . well I won't say no art at all, but simply: not serious.
Beckett is certainly a model of this seriousness again, an ethico-aesthetical
quality not incompatible with comedy, humor, even delight of a circumscribed
variety. Is this an Irish seriousness? Perhaps not. ... I don't really know. But Samuel
Beckett was certainly a hero of its aesthetic realization, if I may put it like that. May
his example continue to influence writers around the world.

National Taiwan University

NOTES
1 Interview with David Attwell collected in J. M. Coetzee, Doubling the Point: Essays
Interviews, ed. by David Attwell (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), p.25.
2 Qtd. in Derek Attridge, 'Sex, Comedy and Influence: Coetzee's Beckett', in J.M. Coetzee i
Context and Theory, ed. by Elleke Boehmer, Robert Eagleston and Katy Iddiols (Londo
Continuum, 2006), p.76.
3 The term is borrowed from Pascale Casanova, Samuel Beckett: Anatomy of a Literar
Revolution, trans, by Gregory Elliott (London: Verso, 2007).
4 I refer to two famous contemporary critiques of Coetzee's novel: Nadine Gordimer, 'The
of Gardening: Life & Times of Michael Kby}. M. Coetzee' in Critical Essays on J. M. Coetzee,
by Sue Kossew (New York: G. K. Hall, 1998), pp. 139-44; Benita Parry, 'Speech and Silenc
the Fictions of J. M. Coetzee', in Writing South Africa: Literature, Apartheid and Democra
1970-1995, ed. by Derek Attridge and Rosemary Jolly (Cambridge: Cambridge University Pr
1998), pp. 149-65.
5 In David Attwell's words, Doubling the Point, p. 17.
6 Doubling the Point, p.26.
7 Derek Attridge himself in the article cited above stresses rare episodes of comedy, particular
with respect to sex, as a way of tracing the on-going affinity with Beckett.
8 I cite Seamus Heaney's Nobel Address, 'Crediting Poetry', in Open Ground: Selected Po
1966-1996 (New York: FSG, 1998), p.423; and I refer as well to The Redress of Poetry (New Yor
FSG, 1995), p. 159.
9 I make my case against much of this recent Beckett criticism in my book Silence Nowhen: L
Modernism, Minimalism, and Silence in the Work of Samuel Beckett (New York: Peter Lang, 201
10 J.M. Coetzee, Inner Workings: Literary Essays 2000-2005 (New York: Penguin, 200
pp. 172-73.

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40

11 J. M. Coetzee, Life & Times of Michael K (New York: Penguin, 1983).

12 In fact, the project originates in reference to Kleists Michael Kohlhaas, as the 'grey notebook'
at the Harry Ransom Center of the University ofTexas at Austin makes clear (container 33 file 5),
but this notion of heroism and revenge is very soon left behind by Coetzee in the more Kafkaesque
dystopian fantasy that develops.
13 The Master of Petersburg (1994) is a more explicit homage to Coetzee's third main precursor
and master, Dostoevsky.
14 The paragraph continues with a reference to the central administration, the seat of the state
power, as 'The Castle' (155), an obvious reference to Kafka. For a reading of the novel with
respect to the Agambenian figures of the camp, the state of exception, and bare life, see Duncan
McColl Chesney, 'Towards an Ethics of Silence: Michael K.' Criticism 49-3 (Summer 2007): 307
325.
15 I refer to the controversial Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari, Kafka. Pour une littrature
mineure (Paris: Minuit, 1975). For a serious critical reaction to this reading, see for example
Stanley Corngold, Lambent Traces: Franz Kafka (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004),
pp.142-157.
16 Reiner Stach, Kafka: The Decisive Years, trans. Shelley Frisch (Princeton: Princeton UP,
2005), p.115.
17 Theodor W. Adorno, Prisms, trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber (Cambridge: MIT, 1981),
p.246 my emphasis.
18 One can add Vercueil from Age of Iron does Mrs. Curren fit into the 'unpalatable'
(feminized) indirect self-representation mode? The problematic extreme of the type is the silent
figures like the barbarian girl in Waiting for the Barbarians or Friday in Foe, about whom there has
been much controversy and debate. See for example Parry 1998.
19 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, 'Ethics and Politics in Tagore, Coetzee, and Certain Scenes of
Teaching' in An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 2012), p.324.
20 Elias Canetti, Kafka's Other Trial: The Letters to Felice (New York: Schocken, 1988), p.86.
21 The reference is to Hlderlin's 'Brod und Wein' via Heidegger's famous essay 'Wozu
Dichter?' in Martin Heidegger Holzwege (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1950),
pp.248-320.
22 Maurice Blanchot, The Work of Fire, trans. Charlotte Mandell (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 1995), p.2. 'Peut-tre est-ce l'tranget de livres comme Le Procs ou Le Chteau de nous
renvoyer sans cesse une vrit extra-littraire, alors que nous commenons trahir cette vrit ,
ds qu'elle nous attire hors de la littrature avec laquelle elle ne peut pourtant pas se confondre.'
Maurice Blanchot, La part du feu (Paris: Gallimard-nrf, 1949), pp.9-10.
23 Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press, 1989), p.75. 'L'art est d'abord la conscience du malheur, non pas sa
compensation. La rigueur de Kafka, sa fidlit l'exigence de l'uvre, sa fidlit l'exigence du
malheur lui ont pargn ce paradis des fictions o se complaisent tant d'artistes faibles que la vie a
dus.' Maurice Blanchot, De Kafka Kafka (Paris: Gallimard-folio, 1981), p. 119.
24 J.M. Coetzee, Giving Offense: Essays on Censorship (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1996), p.73. I am still working on elaborating the notion of'seriousness', which was of course a
key moral-aesthetic term for Matthew Arnold, for example in 'The Study of Poetry' and, as noted
there, dates as far back as the famous claim by Aristode in Poetics, chapter 9, that the superiority of
poetry over history consists in the former's possessing a higher truth and a higher seriousness than
the latter (dio kai philosophteron kai spoudaioteron poisis historias estiri). Coetzee would doubtless
not see himself in an Arnoldian tradition, and I don't mean by the term 'serious' to put him there,
except insofar as something of Arnold's conception of the social role of 'poetry' can be retained,
mutatis mutandis, in a post-humanist as much as post-Christian world, a secular and beschdigt
world 'after Auschwitz' (to again place things in an Adornian frame). Accounting more

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 41

substantially for this is what I must leave for another time and place. See Matthew Arnold, 'The
Study of Poetry' (1880) http://www.poetryfoundation.org/learning/essay/2378l6 Posted
October 13, 2009, p.4. (Accessed March 25, 2014.)
25 J.M. Coetzee, The Lives of Animals (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999); Elizabeth
Costello: Eight Lessons (London: Vintage, 2003); Diary of a Bad Year (New York: Penguin, 2008).
26 Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, ed. and trans, by Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1997), p. 191.
27 Quoted by Hauke Brunkhorst in 'Irreconcilable Modernity: Adorno's Aesthetic
Experimentalism and the Transgression Theorem', in The Actuality of Adorno: Critical Essays on
Adomo and the Postmodern, ed. by Max Pensky (Albany: State University of New York Press,
1997), p.52.

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