Seven Ways of Looking at John Maxwell Coetzee

I. There Is Always a Previous Text

The title of this paper is not mine, of course. Indeed, John Coetzee is the author of a text entitled “Eight Ways of Looking at Samuel Beckett,” but this very title is not his more than “Seven Ways . . .” is mine. Many years before he wrote it, Wallace Stevens wrote a poem entitled “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.” And perhaps, and probably before Stevens, who knows?

Many memories of Stevens’s poem inhabit Coetzee’s “Eight Ways . . . ,” many traces of which, I confess, will be present in my paper. For imitating the model of this somehow imitative method, I too will try to suggest seven propositions on Coetzee for us—for me at least—to get a clearer picture. A clearer picture of what? Well, of his work, I guess, but also of the relationship I have maintained with it for over ten years—and, through it, with its author, strangely present here.

But more generally, I will aim to say a few words about the nature of the difficult task which consists in reading the authors who matter to us.

This is how I received this text when I heard Coetzee read it in Tokyo for the centenary of Beckett’s birth: a kind of systematic model, as rigorous as it was strange, as relevant as it was disconcerting, as dispersed as it was deeply coherent.

Thirteen, then eight, then seven ways . . . Let us remark, and believe, that there is probably no critical gesture that does not build upon another, sometimes to contradict it (which is of course not my intention here), but mostly to nuance it, or even just to differentiate itself.

For all sorts of reasons, Coetzee feels close to Beckett, so close even that on reading what he writes one would almost feel that he actually shares with Beckett some of the most important themes of his work. Of the eight ways of considering Beckett’s work, it would hardly be overstating the case to say that nearly all of them have been borrowed from Beckett: the question of dualism; the (no less philosophical) question of the animal; the (still philosophical) concern about consciousness, its existence, its condition; the obsession with whiteness; some sort of hesitation as to the academic condition, etc.

To this common—possibly common—inspiration, one should add certain striking stylistic features. Here is an extract of the fourth way: “You must go on. I can’t go on. Go on. Try again. Fail again” (“Eight Ways” 21) (note that the seventh way ends with the same “Go on”). Or the beginning of the fifth way: “Try again. A being, a creature, a consciousness wakes (call it that)” (“Eight Ways” 24). How could we help hearing the first lines of Beckett’s Worstward Ho: “All of old. Nothing else ever. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better” (Nohow On 89). Let’s call them borrowings. Or quotations. But these quotations have been rigorously diverted. And this diversion is so important that it will be the subject matter of one of my other six propositions.

In any event, Coetzee takes evident pleasure in multiplying connections, common features, in forcing them, even inventing them. Inventing them indeed, for this is the primary function of the method I claimed I meant to adhere to: imitation.

For to invent is, of course, to imitate (or, if you prefer: to imitate, is, of course, to invent). If the word mimesis is sometimes translated as imitation, it is also sometimes translated as configuration. Ricœur, who suggested this translation, sometimes even speaks of emplotment. It seems to me that each of these words may apply to Coetzee’s reading of Beckett, and possibly also to my reading of Coetzee, since reading is an imitation exercise. That is, creation. Narrative invention. Elizabeth Costello, Elizabeth the novelist, says: “I am a writer. . . . I do imitations, as Aristotle would have said” (Costello 194). In fact, my only point will consist in supporting this first proposition by considering some of Coetzee’s texts which I think...