J. M. Coetzee: Samuel Beckett, the short fiction

Though, it is not a description he would
have accepted, Beckett can justly be called a philosophical
writer, one whose works can be read as a
series of sustained sceptical raids on Descartes
and the philosophy of the subject that Descartes founded.
In his suspicion of Cartesian axiomatics Beckett aligns himself
with Nietzsche and Heidegger, and with his younger
contemporary Jacques Derrida. The satiric interrogation to
which he subjects the Cartesian cogito (I am thinking,
therefore I must exist) is so close in spirit to Derrida's
programme for exposing the metaphysical assumptions
behind Western thought that we must speak, if not of
Beckett's direct influence on Derrida, then of a striking case of
sympathetic vibration.

Diary of a Bad Year - Closing

All that I will promise him, and hold his hand tight and give him a kiss on the brow, a proper kiss, just to remind him of what he is leaving behind. Good night, Senor C, I will whisper in his ear: sweet dreams, and flights of angels, and all the rest.

Diary of a Bad Year - pg. 197

My case can certainly not be unique. Among middle-class Indians, for example, there must be many who have done their schooling in English, who routinely speak English in the workplace and at home (throwing in the odd local location for colouring), who command other languages only imperfectly, yet who, as they listen to themselves speak or as they read what they have written, have the uneasy feeling that there is something false going on.

Diary of a Bad Year - pg. 193

The classic case is that of Tolstoy. No one is more alive to the real world than the young Leo Tolstoy, the Tolstoy of War and Peace. After War and Peace, if we follow the standard account, Tolstoy entered upon a long decline into didactism that culminated in he aridity of the late short fiction. Yet to the older Tolstoy the evolution must have seemed quite different. Far from declining, he must have felt, he was ridding himself of the shackles that had enslaved him to appearances, enabling him to face directly the one question that truly engaged his soul: how to live.

Diary of a Bad Year - pg. 141

A decade ago, following in the tracks of Pound and his poets, I cycled some of those same roads, in particular (several times) the road between Foix and Lavelanet past Roquefixade. What I achieved by doing so I am not sure. I am not even sure what my illustrious predecessor expected to achieve. Both of us set out on the basis that writers who were important to us (to Pound, the troubadours; to me, Pound) had actually been where we were, in flesh and blood; but neither of us seemed or seem able to demonstrate in our writing why or how that mattered.

Diary of a Bad Year - pg. 135

Brahms, Tchaikovsky, Bruckner, Mahler, Elgar, Sibelius composed within the bounds of symphonic form a music of heroic rebirth and/or transfiguration. Wagner and Strauss did much the same in forms of their own invention. Theirs is music that relies on parallels between harmonic and motival transmutation on the one hand and spiritual transfiguration on the other. Typically, the progression is through murky struggle transfiguration on the other. Typically, the progression is through murky struggle toward clarification - hence the note of triumph on which so much of the symphonic music of the period ends.

Diary of a Bad Year - pg. 124

In the orthodox, neo-liberal view, socialism collapsed and died under its own contradictions. But might we not entertain an alternative story: that socialism did not collapse but was bludgeoned to the ground, did not die but was killed?

Diary of a Bad Year - pg. 117

Liberals, in Australia as in South Africa, feel that it should be left to the market to decide who shall rise and who shall not. The role of government should be self-limited: to create conditions in which individuals can bring their aspirations, their drive, their training, and whatever other forms of intangible capital they have, to the market, which will then (here comes the moment when economic philosophy turns into religious faith) reward them more or less in proportion to their contribution (their "input").

Diary of a Bad Year - pg. 104

During the years when Cape Town was my home, I thought of it as "my" city not just because I had been born there but above all because I knew the history of the place deeply enough to see its past in palimpsest beneath its present. But to the bands of young blacks who roam its streets today looking for action, it is "their" city and I am the outsider. History has no life unless you give it a home in your consciousness; it is a load no free person can be forced to take on.

Diary of a Bad Year - pg. 45

A few days ago I heard a performance of the Sibelius fifth symphony. As the closing bars approached, I experienced exactly the large, swelling emotions that the music was written to elicit. What would it have been like, I wondered to be a Finn in the audience at the first performance of the symphony in Helsinki nearly a century ago, and feel that swell overtake one? The answer: one would have felt proud, proud that one of us could put together such sounds, proud that out of nothing we human beings can make such stuff. Contrast with that one's feelings of shame that we, our people, have made Guantanamo. Musical creation on the one hand, a machine for inflicting pain and humiliation on the other: the best and the worst that human beings are capable of.

Diary of a Bad Year - pg. 23

The masters of information have forgotten about poetry, where words may have a meaning quite different from what the lexicon says, where the metaphoric spark is always one jump ahead of the decoding function, where another, unforeseen reading is always possible.

Diary of a Bad Year - pg. 21

... the situation of the suicide bomber is not without tragic potential. Whose heart is so hardened as to feel no sympathy at all for the man who, his family having been killed in an Israeli strike, straps on the bomb-belt in full knowledge that there is no paradise of houris waiting for him, and in grief and rage goes out to destroy as many of the killers as he can? No other way than death is a marker and perhaps even a definition of the tragic.

Diary of a Bad Year - pg. 9

Why is it so hard to say anything about politics from outside politics? Why can there be no discourse about politics that is not itself political? To Aristotle the answer is that politics is built into human nature, that is, is part of our fate, as monarchy is the fate of bees. To strive for a systematic, supra-political discourse about politics is futile.

Diary of a Bad Year - Opening

One

Strong Opinions
12 September 2005 - 31 May 2006


OI. On the origins of the state

Every account of the origins of the state starts from the premise that "we" - not we the readers but some generic we so wide as to exclude no one - participate in its coming into being. But the fact is that only "we" know - ourselves and the people close to us - are born into the state; and our forebears too were born into the state as far back as we can trace. The state is always there before we are.

A portion of this book is first appeared in The New York Review of Books

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Life & Times of Michael K - Closing

And if the old man climbed out of the cart and stretched himself (things were gathering pace now) and looked at where the pump had been that the soldiers had blown up so that nothing should be left standing, and complained, saying, 'What are we going to do about water?,' he, Michael K, would produce a teaspoon from his pocket, a teaspoon and a long roll of string. He would clear the rubble from the mouth of the shaft, he would bend the handle of the teaspoon in a loop and tie the string to it, he would lower it down the shaft deep into the earth, and when he brought it upthere would be water in the bowl of the spoon; and in that way, he would say, one can live.

Life & Times of Michael K - pg. 166

At this moment, I suspect, because such is your nature, you would break into a run. So I would have to run after you, ploughing as if through water through the thick grey sand, dodging the branches, calling out: 'Your stay in the camp was merely an allegory, if you know that word. It was an allegory -- speaking at the highest level -- of how scandalously, how outrageously a meaning can take up residence in a system without becoming a term in it. Did you not notice how, whenever I tried to pin you down, you slipped away? I noticed. Do you know what thought crossed my mind when I saw you had got away without cutting the wire? "He must be a polevaulter" -- that is what I thought. Well, you may not be a polevaulter, Michaels, but you are a great escape artist, one of the great escapees: I take off my hat to you!'

Life & Times of Michael K - pg. 152

The truth is that you are going to perish in obscurity and be buried in a nameless hole in a corner of the racecourse, transport to the acres of Woltemade being out of the question nowadays, and no one is going to remember you but me, unless you yield and at last open your mouth. I appeal to you, Michaels: yield!

Life & Times of Michael K - pg. 104

How fortunate that I have no children, he thought: how fortunate that I have no desire to father. I would not know what to do with a child out here in the heart of the country, who would need milk and clothes and friends and schooling. I would fail in my duties, I would be the worst of fathers. Whereas it is not hard to live a life that consists merely of passing time. I am one of the fortunate ones who escape being called.

Life & Times of Michael K - pg. 97

Ducking through the fences, he could feel a craftman's pleasure in wire spanned so taut that it hummed when it was plucked. Nonetheless, he could not imagine himself spending his life driving stakes into the ground, erecting fences, dividing up the land. He thought of himself not as something heavy that left tracks behind it, but if anything as a speck upon the surface of an earth too deeply asleep to notice the scratch of an ant-feet, the rasp of butterfly teeth, the tumbling of dust.

Life & Times of Michael K - pg. 88

They finished cutting the field in near-darkness, leaving the baling for the next day. K was reeling with exhaustion. Sitting in the truck he closed his eyes and felt as if he were hurtling through endless empty space. Back in the hut he fell into a dead sleep. Then in the middle of the night he was woken by the crying of a baby. There were discontented murmurs from around him: everyone seemed to be awake. For what seemed hours they lay and listened as the baby somewhere in the tents went through cycles of whimpering, wailing, and shrieks that left it gasping for breath. Aching to sleep, K felt anger mount inside himself. He lay with his fists clenched against his breast, wishing the child annihilated.