#j. m. coetzee

[neuroconflictos]

J. M. Coetzee, "La Edad de Hierro".

[philosophybitmaps]

[las-microfisuras]

Todo había quedado atrás. Cuando se despertó por la mañana no se enfrentó más que al enorme bloque de un único día, cada mañana un día. Se vio como una termita abriéndose paso a través de una roca. No había nada más salvo vivir. Permaneció sentado tan quieto que no le hubiera sorprendido ver a los pájaros acercarse y posarse en su hombro.

Vida y época de Michael K, J.M. Coetzee Mondadori, 2006. Traducción de Concha Manella

[quotespile]

Of myself I was fairly sure. I was not about to lose my heart to a man about whom I knew next to nothing.

J. M. Coetzee, Summertime

[puntidifuga]

The waterskater, that is an insect and dumb, traces the name of God on the surfaces of ponds, or so the Arabians say.

J. M. Coetzee, Foe

[grandhotelabyss]

Was just reading your now nearly decade old piece on “Penitential Realism”- I dig the term, it’s probably a more useful way to look at the (still) currently prevailing vein of literary fiction than the other term one often hears (and irresponsibly throws around.)* I wonder if you’d add anything to it ten years on- how do you see your idea having held up, what would you add or subtract from it?

* Autofiction, sure but Renata Adler is autofiction if anybody is, and Speedboat is a delightfully funny book, whereas it’s that bruised, wounded confusion we’re expected to take deadly-seriously that I suppose really bugs me about so much of this stuff, especially knowing the class of person who produces it. (Not saying you can only write what you know of course, but part of why Beckett works is that he actually beheld the burning cities- but even then think of Vonnegut, who I don’t really like either)

Thanks—the reference is to an essay of mine from 10 years ago (!) trying to define the prevailing mood of then-contemporary fiction after the waning of what James Wood had called "hysterical realism."

I think the piece holds up well enough, except that some of the books, hyped at the time, are now forgotten, which fortifies me in my resolve not to read hyped-up new fiction lest I fall for another Submergence.

I like almost every book on that list less now than I did then, and I didn't like a lot of them then. I exempt Ishiguro, who possesses an ineffable genius irreducible to categories, and won't judge late DeLillo too harshly given the strength of his best work; I've always been ambivalent about Sebald, finding him gimmicky and even somewhat tacky with his "after Auschwitz" mode of goth glamor, though he is, in his way, entertaining; Coetzee was an enthusiasm I haven't been able to sustain, and I suspect I liked him as much as I did at one point less on the actual strength of his work (so dry, so spare!) than because of the types of positions his work allowed one to take in academe (i.e., burdened by conscience but still formalist and non-Marxist), which I no longer care about at all; I have no opinions about the other novels on the list nor do I even really remember them. I don't have the same ambition to survey my contemporaries the way I did then; I'm too (apologizes to the forgotten Ledgard) submerged in my own work and its dialogue with the literary dead and the unliterary present.

I will say this: I've recently mentioned Leave Society and My Year of Rest and Relaxation. These might be the two most prominent American literary novels of the last half decade. They actually found a popular or pop-cult audience and were even read across the political spectrum. They superficially seem to resemble penitential realism—they're short and benumbed and burdened with suffering—except that each is its way finally light, affirmative, wholly jailbroken, in a way that the prior books aren't, even thought the "out" in both cases is somewhat mystical (Li's psychedelia, Year girl's perceptual awakening). It occurs to me that this is also true in its heavier Dostoevskean way of Coetzee's Jesus trilogy, which concluded in the same period, and of Ishiguro's strangely luminous fable Klara and the Sun, too. An open mysticism or sense of the numinous or even religiosity seems to be coming in.

This turn to the beyond is probably a step in the right direction, but still, a lot of new books seem—I rarely finish new books—to be very "I" oriented and small. I almost want to say, "Come back, hysterical realism, all is forgiven!" Not really; the flaws Wood noted in that mode were there, especially its facetiousness in figures like Rushdie, Pynchon, and Wallace (not DeLillo).

As the polemical, almost belligerent omniscience of Major Arcana indicates, however, I believe it's time to maximize and to universalize again—to "affirm and persist" as the manifestation coaches say. Writing little "me" stories won't save us from the fact that writing is a hostile act (as Didion told us) and an arrogant one (as Vidal maintained). If we're going to presume to write at all, we might as well try to wrestle the whole world to the ground—and not in a cell, but in the open air.

[snuffalufagus]

i just fi ished binge reading the father of saint Petersburg by coetzee n tht was truly an exp i didnt set out to read it all in one night but it was def a page turner

[kultur-geek]

Un personnage pour défendre la littérature

[mechaprimaverapicnic]

Infancia. J. M. Coetzee.

Mondadori. Buenos Aires, 2003. p. 105-106.

[litsnaps]

[papaltiara]

I tried to take someone over and had to break

[anokatony]

'The Pole' by J. M. Coetzee - Beatriz and Witold

  ‘The Pole’ by J. M. Coetzee    (2023) – 167 pages   Witold is a 70 year-old man from Poland who is a concert pianist but refers to himself as simply “a man who plays the piano”. His name, Witold Walczykiewicz, “has so many w’s and z’s in it, no one on the board even tries to pronounce it. They refer to him simply as ‘the Pole’.” He travels around Europe giving concerts playing the music pieces…

[quotessentially]

From J. M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians

[dipnotski]

J. M. Coetzee – İyi Hikâye (2023)

‘İyi Hikâye’, Nobel Ödüllü yazar J. M. Coetzee ile klinik psikolog Arabella Kurtz arasında geçen, psikoterapi ve hikâye anlatma sanatı üzerine büyüleyici bir diyalog. Coetzee ve Kurtz, psikanalitik kuramları ve terapi yöntemlerini edebiyat eserleriyle yan yana getirerek psikoterapiyi, psikoterapideki gelişim idealini, toplumsal bağlamı ve kurmacayı farklı açılardan ele alıyor. Cervantes ile…

[grandhotelabyss]

Speaking of, well, everything I’ve been speaking of lately—I am in a clanging and clamoring echo chamber of synchronicity, trying to hang on to this bit of dark wisdom from Coetzee’s novel about Dostoevsky: “he knows too that as long as he tries by cunning to distinguish things that are things from things that are signs he will not be saved”—I was less than halfway through the aforementioned Art of Darkness pod’s five-plus-hour episode on Aleister Crowley when one of the hosts declaimed a text I had no idea existed. The mage, it turns out, wrote a sonnet commemorating Rodin’s Monument to Balzac, as screenshotted above, or else read it here. 

It’s a bad poem overall—as my source for the text reports, Crowley thought himself a better poet than Yeats; compare this to “Lapis Lazuli” and get back to me—though I am not so small-minded as to disrespect the attempt at a Shakespearean coinage with “ennighted,” the otherwise apparently inexistent synonym-antonym of “benighted”  (it seems to mean “endowed with obscurity”) and therefore (perhaps) a hapax legomenon. And “the stunned air shudders on the skin” is, I concede, gorgeous.

I illustrated last week’s Substack newsletter with Rodin’s nude study of Balzac, which I saw at LACMA in 2012; the newsletter jumped off from Justin Murphy’s salute to ambitious young Balzac to consider later writers—Octavia Butler, Ray Bradbury—who used vaguely magical techniques of manifestation, affirmation, and visualization, the kind now viral on YouTube and TikTok, and descended, of course, from some of Crowley’s occult practices. 

Balzac knew all about it, as he writes in his mystical novel about an androgynous angel, Séraphîta, to which synchronicity also brought me, as I report in the newsletter’s footnote. It’s the most boring novel ever written, alas, scaling Nordic fjords of sententiousness I would not have thought possible, though La Paglia pays it a lovely and lyrical tribute in Sexual Personae, assimilating it to her category of “androgyne as Apollonian angel,” calling it “the French Epipsychidion,” and noting that it was the favorite Balzac novel of—him again!—Yeats. And Balzac, as Rodin’s hand-eye rightly intuited, was not, like seraphic Shelley, himself an androgyne, but rather one possessed of “essential manhood.”

From Séraphîta, where Balzac writes, where Balzac’s eponymous and sexless seraph prophesies:

“Fruit of the laborious, progressive, continued development of natural properties and faculties vitalized anew by the divine breath of the Word, Prayer has occult activity; it is the final worship—not the material worship of images, nor the spiritual worship of formulas, but the worship of the Divine World. We say no prayers,—prayer forms within us; it is a faculty which acts of itself; it has attained a way of action which lifts it outside of forms; it links the soul to God, with whom we unite as the root of the tree unites with the soil; our veins draw life from the principle of life, and we live by the life of the universe. Prayer bestows external conviction by making us penetrate the Material World through the cohesion of all our faculties with the elementary substances; it bestows internal conviction by developing our essence and mingling it with that of the Spiritual Worlds.”

Which is to say: affirm, visualize, manifest. Or should we heed Coetzee: should we let the everyday rest in and as the everyday, a human comedy, untransfigured because all-transfigured, every inch God’s work? 

[whatdoeschronicevenmean]

“Writing under censorship, the writer may produce a text identical in all respects to the text he would have produced in a state of ideal freedom; in this sense he has indeed been unaffected by the censorship. But to say that such a writer has transcended or overcome or escaped the censorship depends on an ahistorical and simplistic notion of what writing, and indeed the institution of literature, is.… Publication in a regime of censorship is a different kind of act from publication in conditions of freedom; whether the work appears with or without the censor’s imprimatur, reading it—and, in such a society, reading in general—is a more complex, more suspicious activity.”

J. M. Coetzee, “Zbigniew Herbert and the Figure of the Censor”