The Good Story:Exchanges on Truth, Fiction and Psychotherapy by J.M. Coetzee and Arabella Kurtz (review)

A book composed of exchanges between a Nobel Prize winning author and an accomplished practitioner of psychoanalysis is bound to have appeal. Yet I found myself puzzled on my first reading. The writers seemed more engaged with their own thought processes than with each other's. Both expound lucidly on their areas of expertise, yet consensus is rare. The result struck me as less of a dialogue than a polite set of disagreements.

The fault may lie in my own expectations. I had hoped for an exploration of the areas of resonance between the practices of literature and psychoanalysis. Instead, I was more aware of the authors' differences in their assumptions, uses of language, and guiding principles.

The Good Story extends a conversation prompted by an email request from Arabella Kurtz to J.M. Coetzee in 2008 for a long-distance interview. Their correspondence resulted at that time in an essay titled "Nevertheless, my sympathies are with the Karamazovs," published in the journal Salmagundi (2010). The Good Story amplifies on this conversation, treating such questions as "true" vs. fictional self-narratives, justice in the form of the "return of the repressed" in fiction and in life, the uses and abuses of confession, and group dynamics, especially in regard to the ways that nations cope with their traumatic histories. Given such a tall order, it is hardly a surprise that many issues are left hanging.

As I mulled over this surprisingly complicated book, I indulged in a fantasy. I imagined, briefly, that the entire text, presented in the form of dialogue, was actually the product of a single mind. If I think about Coetzee's practice of memoir writing in Boyhood and Youth, where he writes about himself in the third person, and the autobiographical pieces collected in Summertime, where he presents aspects of his adult life through the eyes of fictionalized others, my fantasy may not seem so strange. Although I set this fantasy aside, I observed that each chapter of The Good Story begins with Coetzee's reflections, which gives him the upper hand in shaping the discussion. His is also the final entry, according him the last word.

If the interlocutors so frequently disagree, it is not a challenge to the reader to take sides, but rather to regard the issues under discussion from differing points of view. That said, Coetzee's voice predominates. Throughout, he argues in favor of the fiction writer's understanding of the construction of narrative (whether literary or psychoanalytic) and adopts a less optimistic stance about the prospect of self-knowledge than Kurtz.

Whereas Kurtz makes the case for the possibilities of self-discovery and personal growth through the relationship between patient and therapist and their mutual exploration of the "truth" of the patient's history, Coetzee expresses doubt about the claim of any personal narrative to represent the "truth" of an individual's life story. For Coetzee, fictions of selfhood are simply that, and they are interchangeable. What makes one better than another? If the criterion is individual happiness, then who is to say that a story that enables a person's well-being is false or wrong?

One can see the bias of the fiction writer in Coetzee's provocative comments, and indeed most of his examples are culled from fiction. He is especially suspicious of the genre of confession, which purports to reveal hidden, and sometimes shocking or shameful, secrets in the guise of honesty or sincerity. He analyzes the confession of Dostoevsky's Stavrogin in The Possessed as a case in point.

Stavrogin, a libertine who once raped a twelve-year-old girl, then stood passively by while she committed suicide, reveals his transgression to the priest Tikhon, presumably for the sake of forgiveness. Yet he shows no feeling about his actions. Not only does he not express remorse, but he also seems to have no awareness or comprehension of the suffering he inflicted...