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After becoming the first woman ever to receive the Nobel Prize in economics, Eilnor Ostrom expressed hope that “the recognition…is helping” to increase the number of women in her discipline. This week, scientists at Oxford echoed Ostrom’s call—and her concerns.

In a conference titled “Scientific Research—is it different for women?”, three high-flying female academics reflected on their male-governed fields. Motherhood remained a key issue for all involved:  while Professor Ottoline Leyser emphasised that childcare responsibilities should be shared, Dr Blanca Rodriguez was expressly asked how she will cope when her child goes to school. Refreshingly, Dr Peggy Frith focused on gendered differences in perspective rather than pregnancy, suggesting that women see and use career opportunities in a more pragmatic way than their male counterparts.

Scant mention of disproportionate pay and employment rates left the general impression that success in the sciences is attainable across the gender divide. But while these women’s achievements underscored the opportunities for female scientists, they also stood out against “a numbers game”: only 12 women won a scientific Nobel Prize prior to this year, compared to 523 men.

Indeed, the real proof of persistent gender inequity lies in the existence of such “empowering” conferences, and in the need for resources explicitly dedicated to supporting women in science, such as the UKRC and the WISE campaign.  Professor Leyser maintained that passion for the job will carry women through their chosen career paths. She may be right, but one wonders how many men need to be told that.

Jenny Messenger is a second-year classics student at Worcester College, Oxford. She is an editor of ORbits.

Harold Pinter has crossed from living artist to dead artist. He is no longer a figure to be mocked in a throwaway aside in Peter O’Donnell’s Modesty Blaise (1965): “Harold Pinter—Blaise thinks he’s great, Garvin thinks he’s a theatrical conman.” Nor is he to be lionised wittily as in Trevor Griffiths’s The Party (1973): “I’ve decided to dedicate the remainder of my life to subtlety, sexuality, ambivalence and malice. Anything Pinter can’t quite say, I can’t quite say better, as it were.”

Pinter—the nightmarish voice of pantomimic political violence and the master of the alarming non sequitur—was the greatest creator of subtext the English theatre has seen. In everything he achieved, speech became symbol; writing between the lines was his art, both before and after the censor’s office necessitated it.

Britain has lost its lone world-class political writer and fighter. Pinter’s theatrical career, which spanned almost 50 years, was marked by a consistent, high-intensity dissection of the wrongs in our world. His fulminations against foul regimes and injustice on whatever point of the political spectrum theatrically dismantled the power politics of our relations. His metaphors opened chilly corridors down which lunatics empowered by a version of democracy stalked, their clichés ignoring all opposition to the party line. His choices of visual and theatrical metaphors were the choices of an artist, not a conman.

Though some might say Pinter stopped being “Pinter” some time before he died, claiming that works like Celebration (2000) and Press Conference (2002) pale in comparison to The Birthday Party (1958) and The Lover (1963), Pinter’s late works are still alarmingly good. Just like his older works, they cut to the problem of language as a tool to be misused in our relationships.

In The Birthday Party, Pinter named his two intruding Furies “Goldberg” and “McCann”. These symbols of a hectoring Jewishness and Irishness invade a down-at-heel British seaside B&B on the back of the Suez fiasco of 1956. I remember watching the TV production in which Pinter played Goldberg. Barrel-chested, grizzle-haired, and gravel-voiced, he terrified some poor sod, like a Middle Eastern Basil Fawlty turned nasty: “If you want to know the truth, Webber, you’re beginning to get on my breasts.”

Celebration fillets the behaviour of the wealthy with metaphorical and linguistic precision, while retaining the surreal malignancy and alarming theatricality of Pinter’s early work. In Celebration, monsters (city bankers) presume the world belongs to them. They caper on the stage, dancing, singing, swearing, swigging fizz and making homophobic gags about the choice of dish on the menu. A gentler voice—that of a waiter, a symbol Pinter returned to over and over in his career—seeks to remonstrate, to interest us in a world in which syntax (longer sense periods with complex ideas), and linguistic concerns (history and relationships) transcend the bankers’ coarse minds and coarse language. Pinter’s point is this: man’s inhumanity is not some abstract theatrical game, but the product of the constructed political systems around us; for “political systems” read also “family”, “gender”, “education”, “work”, or “democracy”.

What does the voice of “Pinter” do that other voices do not do, or have done only in his wake? It provides actors with latitude to act. Pinter trained as an actor and bucked the premise that plays by actors are hopelessly self-centred and theatrically uneven. His characters are observed creations, neither puppets nor impersonations.

My first opportunity to act Pinter came in an audition for Betrayal (1978) in my first year at university. In this play, we watch an adulterous affair play out in reverse, first against a backdrop socio-political signifiers from the 1970s, and then against the backdrop of signifiers from the 1960s. I liked the words I had to speak. The fact that I was suborning the silly idiot who had been having an affair with my wife made it all the more exciting. I was in charge: some not-too-subtle transference of erotic power had clearly taken place between these two men. My character loathed the ninny who had been screwing his wife all these years, and yet it was a handy excuse for him to strike up his own affair with smug glee. The language gave me all I needed to rub it in. The words were incredibly restrained but horribly potent. They spoke directly of a world in which people had money or not, had power or not, cared or did not, loved or did not; a world resulting from the socio-political reality of the 1970s with its long collapse of the Labour Party leading to the Thatcherist revolution of the 1980s.

No English teacher at school had mentioned this figure to us. The only modern dramatists permitted in the classroom reading-out-loud process were Shaw (Androcles and the Lion—yawn), Barrie (The Admirable Crichton—yikes), and Beckett, whom we were advised existed but should be read and contemplated privately. Pinter dominated the theatre of the second half of the 20th century, but the vocal patterns of the work go back much further: through Beckett, through Joyce, through Wilde and Shaw (who no longer has me yawning quite so much), and ultimately to Dean Swift, a man not afraid to say when something was shit and also keen to point out that shit gets shat.

Pinter knew exactly to whom he was indebted and what tradition of language he emerged from. His early praise of Beckett—“the more he grinds my nose in the shit the more I am grateful to him”—applies now. I hope there are young writers today who will want to use the theatre to “grind [our] nose[s] in the shit”, because our public life must be challenged by the scrupulous power of the artist. Listen again, when you  next have the opportunity, to the toxic power of language misapplied, and to language made a weapon of deceit, sexual rapacity, and low inhumanity. Pinter exposed the self-centred horror of the modern political world and challenged us to question everything we took for granted. His crunching cadences and slickly filleted clichés will still frighten theatre-goers generations hence.

Jack Methven is a tutor in English Literature at Oriel College, Oxford, where he specialises in modern drama among other things.

Although he will never be short of admirers, V.S. Naipaul can probably claim the distinction of being the least liked man in English literature. Naipaul was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2001; his fiction and travel writing has helped broaden the cultural scope of the novel in English. Yet surely no figure in contemporary literature has been so reviled. Over the years, he has provoked the ire of Salman Rushdie, Derek Walcott, George Lamming, and Edward Said, mostly over political disagreements. But if the exact dimensions and contours of the personal ground covered by Sir Vidia’s shadow are unclear, we already have some idea of the harsh and bitterly inhospitable climate. Former friends and acquaintances such as Paul Theroux and Diana Athill have written at length to prove that V.S. Naipaul is not a very nice man. To stay the distance with Naipaul you clearly need to keep your distance. When the truth itself is a hatchet-job, it takes the cooler, more proportionate scrutiny of a skilled biographer to properly order our understanding of the man and his art.

To illuminate this area of darkness, Naipaul has called upon the services of the distinguished young travel writer Patrick French. Given special authorization to sift through and quote from his subject’s personal archive at the University of Oklahoma, which includes the previously unread diaries of his first wife, Pat, and the correspondence of his long-term mistress, Margaret Gooding, French has produced a stylish and comprehensive volume that has nonetheless let off the biggest stink in English letters since Andrew Motion’s biography of Philip Larkin. This is hardly French’s fault. The details must have caught even him by surprise. The World Is What It Is, bearing a title that suggests a somewhat resigned and down-at-the-heel James Bond flick, demystifies the sad story of a man who could hardly be described as a successful womaniser. With typically sober clarity, French confirms that we are dealing with a brutishly determined man. ‘Vidia had a view of the world that he would do anything to maintain, just as he would sacrifice anything or anybody that stood in the way of his central purpose, to be “the writer”.’ From his wife Pat, he derived vital encouragement and sound literary advice; from his mistress Margaret, sexual fulfilment. In return for their gifts, they were neglected and abused, and the unhappy situation only expired when Pat did, after a long and harrowing struggle with breast cancer in 1996. Just weeks after this sad demise, he married the present Lady Naipaul, Nadira Alvi, a woman with whom he finally appears to have found something approaching contentment. The book ends at this juncture, with a huge sigh of relief from French (the final, exasperated one-word sentence is ‘Enough’), which is understandable. Against the odds, French has succeeded in producing a remarkably dignified portrait of a very troubled man who somehow managed to channel his numerous resentments into genuinely great literature.

But the potentially lurid material can’t have been the only challenge facing French. Nakedly incorporating events and people from his life into his writing and perpetually toying with the confessional properties of various narrative forms, Naipaul has quietly expanded the personal frontiers of literature and made the biographer’s task all the more demanding. Strangely, Naipaul’s will-to-candour has never actually resulted in a full-length memoir; the closest he has come to that is the ‘Prologue to an Autobiography’ which takes up the first half of Finding the Centre (1983). A Writer’s People: Ways of Looking and Feeling, the latest of these attempts at memoir, brings together the best and the worst of Naipaul’s accomplishments. In this quaint oddity, ostensibly a reflection on those writers and public figures that have influenced him most, he muses that ‘a rise to achievement makes a better narrative than random decay’. This might seem a strange comment from the author of A Bend in the River and Guerrillas, novels that chart the fungal rot of newly independent post-colonial states, but it serves as an accurate description of his own trajectory. Born in Trinidad in 1932, the descendent of indentured Indian labourers, he won the island’s scholarship to study at Oxford. He then became something of a giant.

Yet A Writer’s People follows no such triumphal course. Writing sympathetically of Gandhi, Naipaul observes, ‘there was no completeness to him. He was full of bits and pieces he had picked up here and there.’ The same is true of Naipaul who, in this book, mentally traverses those times and places that have moulded his own view: the Caribbean, India, and literary London of the 1950s. The fragmentary tone is set in the opening chapter on Derek Walcott, where isolated images taken from Walcott’s first volume of poetry chink about like so much loose change without purchasing anything in the way of critical insight. But critical insight isn’t Naipaul’s goal. ‘My purpose in this book is not literary criticism or biography […] I wish only, and in a personal way, to set out the writing to which I was exposed during my career. I say writing, but I mean more specifically vision, a way of seeing and feeling.’ At the beginning of his essay on Flaubert, he gives us more of a clue as to his method by explaining how he approached book reviewing for The New Statesman. ‘I found it helped if in a review I didn’t mention the names of the characters; in that way I got nearer to a book’s essence; certain books condemned themselves. I had no further reviewing scheme.’ Reader, you will forgive me if I avail myself of a slightly more rigorous model. This dogged pursuit of ‘essence’ does not tell us much about Naipaul’s ways of seeing and feeling (about what they involve and to whom they belong) or define that frustratingly bland word ‘vision’. The result is that too often throughout the book the prose slumps into the very quality that Naipaul has spent his entire career guarding against. Although we are told what he felt at the time, how he read and what he remembers now, it is all too vaguely presented: choice morsels glimpsed through a fogged shop window.

Ungenerous readers (and there are those who might suggest that Naipaul hardly deserves any other kind) will describe A Writer’s People as the withered fruit of a creative senescence. Indeed there are times when the narrative reads as a sort of rambling, off-the-record fireside chat at the gentleman’s club: A Writer’s People is garrulous in spirit, if not always in style. The problem becomes most obvious in the now notorious chapter devoted to his former mentor Antony Powell. In the late 1950s, Powell let ‘Viddy’ loose on Grub Street, securing for him a regular job as reviewer with The New Statesman and offering him friendship and support. In the chapter, Viddy repays him by savaging the achievement of the extraordinary 12-volume novel A Dance to the Music of Time, which took Powell several decades to compose, even going so far as to suggest that their relationship wouldn’t have lasted had he read the book while his old friend was still alive. In fairness to Naipaul, it should be recognised that he pays uncharacteristically warm tribute to Powell’s generosity and writes appreciatively of his criticism. But ineptitude rather than ingratitude is the problem here, and in dispatching the life’s work of the friend who helped him to find his place among London’s literary milieu, Naipaul dilutes the signature precision of his sentences. ‘There was less and less care in the writing; everything was over-explained,’ he opines before going on to claim, ‘there was no narrative skill, perhaps no thought for narrative.’ We might not have expected a close reading, but these stern remarks require some supplementary quotations if they are to appear as anything other than invective. Powell is probably performing indignant cartwheels in the grave: it is likely that he would be more disappointed by Viddy’s sloppy want of discretion than by the opinions themselves.

But Naipaul does not entirely forsake the many virtues of his prose. He really can write about literature, even if he reads another author’s work largely to confront his own anxieties and ambitions. The essay ‘Conrad’s Darkness’ from the non-fiction miscellany, The Return of Eva Peron, is a compelling example. Here, he describes his earliest encounters with Conrad’s short stories and provides his readers with valuable insights into the development of a creative writer’s standards. In A Writer’s People, he most fully reveals himself in considering the achievements of Flaubert and the historians and poets of antiquity. Naipaul’s vivid renditions of various people and landscapes have been distinguished by the deliberate economy of his style, and at their best, his observations on literature impart a similar substance and vigour to a writer’s specific imaginative vision. Contemplating Madame Bovary and the comparative failure of Salammbo, he evokes his own proclivity for la mot juste by writing with firm lucidity and enthusiasm. Attention to detail is fine, we gather, so long as it is itself strictly controlled; this seems a balanced assessment of what has been the presiding principle of Naipaul’s own style. It has been insufficiently acknowledged that, more than almost any other writer of the last half-century, he has recorded the painful severity of literary application as well as the great rewards of such discipline. This process was movingly characterised in Finding the Centre. ‘To write was to learn. Beginning a book, I always felt I was in possession of all the facts about myself; at the end I was always surprised.’ The most convincing passages from A Writer’s People are those where one suspects Naipaul is unwittingly describing his own travails, learning more about the peculiar obligations of his craft as he analyses others’ struggles to make themselves understood or heard.

French cannot hope to compete with the guileless authenticity of these revelations, but this is not to detract from his achievement. There are elements of the creative process that Naipaul himself cannot hope to explain. After all, A Writer’s People is the story of the previously unfelt presences that indelibly shaped Naipaul’s work. Given the enormous influence that she had on his writing, Naipaul’s wife Pat might seem an obvious choice to include in A Writer’s People; and yet inclusion has never been an emotional technique available to Naipaul. His callous neglect of her was interrupted only by the occasional recognition that she was among the most astute readers of his work. French unflinchingly presents Pat’s emotional suffering, which was now and again coloured by the awareness that maybe Vidia had not earned her abject devotion, and in so doing French allows us to see that Pat was a woman of independent taste and judgement. Her ‘soft left’ opinions might not have prevented her husband from holding increasingly reactionary positions, but they were sufficiently strong to mould those positions by contrast. Margaret, on the other hand, ‘was addicted to Vidia’ and ‘liked to be dominated by him’. But she misunderstood the rival claims of his literary vocation and, in her turn, was cruelly shunted aside.

Those who feared a warts-and-all account may be surprised to discover that French’s biography is far from being all warts. Although Naipaul emerges as a capricious and often extremely unfeeling man, French’s penetrating and sympathetic assessment of his literary achievement makes us understand how Naipaul’s attraction to disappointment, taken by many as the token of a pitiless conservatism, belies a vast fund of frustrated compassion. In case we had forgotten, he points out that Naipaul’s ‘chosen subject was the powerless: those who, although in the majority in the world, had appeared in European literature only as peripheral characters, or at best as Man Friday’. French perhaps underestimates the extent to which Naipaul’s early criticisms of post-colonial societies proceeded in part from his powerful inclination towards self-betterment, which as we learn in Finding the Centre, led Naipaul to think of writing as ‘a fantasy of nobility’. This urge impels several of his protagonists, but Naipaul was also aware that this fantasy could slide into a sterile mimicry of the colonial master—a sad process that had been effectively satirised in his very first novel, The Mystic Masseur, and later in the figure of Indar from A Bend in the River. Whether or not this made Naipaul’s judgements on the post-colonial world accurate is another matter altogether. French acknowledges that there were those who were too willing to incorporate Naipaul into their own ultra-reactionary perspectives. Evelyn Waugh was one and although he privately moaned to Nancy Mitford about ‘that clever little nigger Naipaul’ winning yet another literary prize, he saw in The Middle Passage incontrovertible proof that the struggle for independence in the Caribbean and elsewhere was doomed. Discussing Naipaul’s contentious book on Islamic societies, Among the Believers, French persuasively maintains that Naipaul never really occupied the role of mandarin intellectual in which Said and others cast him. He was much too willful, too reliant on ‘close observation’ of his immediate surroundings to slot into any grand neo-colonial schemes. If anything, Naipaul’s work advances a misconceived notion of cultural authenticity, and French justly sees his recent advocacy of extremist Hindu nationalism in India as a worrying example of that.

There are those who would find in French’s book enough material for a damning indictment of Naipaul’s place as an elder statesman of contemporary prose. His misogyny, his ill-tempered dismissals of what he once called the ‘half-made societies’ of the developing world, as well as the appalling treatment meted out to people intimately connected to his work are all too plain to see. Without the undeniable fact of his achievements in fiction and travel writing, however, we would scarcely be interested in the baroque contortions of his private life. Naipaul’s more critical readers become stunned when they recognise that his elegantly organised and often very sensitive writing can harbour a vicious disregard for other people’s and other culture’s ways of looking and feeling. But a writer’s personality is never given to us unfiltered through his or her writing; indeed, artists themselves will always be taken aback by what they find in their own work. Naipaul’s most recent novels, Half a Life and Magic Seeds, represent no attenuation of his strengths, and mark the latest stage of this process of self-discovery. Over half a century since his debut, V.S. Naipaul is still standing. Most disturbing of all, he deserves to be.

Jonathan Gharraie is a DPhil student at St. Catherine’s College working on D.H. Lawrence and exile.

Doris Lessing
Alfred and Emily
Fourth Estate, 2008
274 pages
£16.99
ISBN 978-0007233459

Reaching the end of Doris Lessing’s latest—and, apparently, last—book, in which she looks back at her parents’ lives and at her life with them, readers, too, might find themselves looking back and wondering: ‘just where have I been? What exactly was that?’ It is a work that combines a novella-length fictionalised account of the lives of Lessing’s parents, the Alfred and Emily of the title, as they might have been had the war not occurred, with an account of their lives as they actually turned out, raising two children on a scrappy farm in the Rhodesian bush. This amalgam also manages to assimilate, along the way, a foreword and coda to the fiction, an authorial explanation of its basis in fact, a long extract from an encyclopaedia about London, an assortment of grainy photographs, and zigzaggings through time and space touching on everything from prehistoric paintings to African insects, to Mugabe, to the colonial diet and a list of Lessing’s childhood reading. And it works. The novel—or is it biography?—or is it history?—is held together by the unabashed singularity of Lessing’s voice: a voice that, in its flight, sheds the taxonomic shells that normally encase literary works.

The tapping of the non-literary tradition, of oral storytelling, has been a felt force in Lessing’s work since Ben in the World (2000), though its underlying currents extend back further through her career. Lessing herself has stated that it was only with the devolving of the narrative onto a storyteller’s voice that The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four, and Five came together, and storytelling weaves an important thread through the whole Canopus In Argos sequence in which that novel appears. Alfred and Emily is most striking for its intensely realised biographic vignettes, and it seems likely that they, in our age of celebrity-oriented curiosity and principled individuality, will determine its immediate reception. However, the work’s impact comes just as much from its willingness to disregard stylistic and generic proprieties as it does from autobiographical revelation. It comes from the twinning of what never actually occurred with what did occur. Alfred and Emily sees an author trying out different ways of writing, as though plucking down different books from a library’s shelves, with the urgency of the problem at hand—to find out what has happened, what is happening—making all the usual rules redundant.

Recognising these varying influences can help in an appreciation of the first (fictional) half of the book. So tangibly vivid is the autobiographical section that there is a danger the first half will fade away from the whole when it comes to be considered, that Alfred and Emily will end up being mined solely for its anecdotal riches. This risk is increased by the fact that in recent years Lessing’s fictional voice has developed a laconic briskness that can sound odd, even thin, to a reader accustomed to the stylistic and psychological curlicues of the average literary novel, with its aspiration towards ‘three-dimensional’ characters. Alfred and Emily, in contrast, relates the fictional characters’ crises, their loving, marrying, ageing, working, and dying, with a minimum of fuss, the narrative voice stringing them efficiently along the same tonal thread.

It would be a mistake, however, to dismiss the result as crude, or insubstantial. Rather, it requires a slight retuning of the fictional ear, until it can register the cumulative effect of such incidents and their sequencing, as much as the style in which they are couched. In its lack of metaphor and simile, and favouring of direct statement, Lessing’s prose has chiselled its way back to something resembling the early prose chroniclers: written narrative that seems to be standing just in front of what happened. As with much oral storytelling, incident in Alfred and Emily often seems to constitute its own analysis, through being preceded and succeeded by other incidents; character is determined as much by action, or plain transcription of speech and thought, as it is by the elaboration of appearances and inner life. This has the same impact as Lessing’s explicit authorial questioning, and the questioning undertaken by her characters: the unadorned directness challenges us to credit what substance we receive, and not to go looking for the non-existent trimmings.

This directness is just one facet of Lessing’s oddness, that accumulation of personal kinks which both marks her out as unique, and which seems to have led to much of the criticism of her work. The willingness to incorporate the writerly presence, to contravene the still-potent modernist strictures about authorial invisibility, is characteristic of a writer who also flouted the manners of the literary drawing room by writing a sci-fi sequence, much to the disgust of many (Harold Bloom: ‘I find her work for the past 15 years quite unreadable … fourth-rate science fiction.’) It is characteristic of the individual strength and distance needed to challenge convention and received truths, on everything from feminism to terrorism (Jeanette Winterson: ‘Is Doris Lessing living on Planet Zog or is it just that she is 81?’) It relates to her sense of urgency, her crediting of function over refinement (John Leonard: ‘She has written tens of thousands of pages, many of them slapdash …’) And in more subtle ways, it marks out the individuality and power of her writing, its view of the world from a perspective that has seemingly required a scaffold to be cobbled precariously out into uncharted air, so remote is it from our conditioned focus on certain kinds of surface.

Perhaps the keynote of Lessing’s artistic character is this propensity to question, to come at whatever boundaries are encountered from unusual angles, and in this respect, Alfred and Emily is a fitting culmination to her literary career. The constant note of interrogation, explicit or implicit, threads the book together. These questions appear most strikingly, at first, in the voice of the fictional Emily as she grows older; and then, through the second half of the book, in the voice of Lessing herself. ‘And now what?’; ‘And her heart ached. Why did it?’; ‘How was that possible?’; ‘Why, suddenly, did she insist on it now?’; ‘What was to blame?’; ‘What were they about?’ For all the differences between the fictional Emily and Lessing, there is an equally obvious consonance between them. Both are old women, both are storytellers—this is made out to be one of Emily’s distinguishing talents—and both are looking back from old age, evaluating what happened, trying to find out why. Increasingly, as the book goes on, blunt authorial comments bookend these questions, placing a topic in perspective by standing back from it or to one side, or changing direction altogether, or simply closing an avenue of inquiry down. ‘Fast forward, then!’; ‘Interesting, watching history being unmade’; ‘This is what a small girl sees, feels’; ‘And so, that was that.’ The urgency behind this, and the unblinking will, are both unnerving and life-affirming. As readers—and the age of individual readers will alter how this load is balanced—we have the strong sense both of time running out, and of what can be achieved in the time that is left. Lessing does not find the solution to all her questions, but that is not the point. Their unanswered return acts as a kind of human echo-location: we can move on from here, having a better idea of where we have been, where we are.

David Sergeant is reading for a DPhil in English at Lincoln College, Oxford.

J.M. Coetzee
Diary of a Bad Year
Harvill Secker, 2007
304 pages
£16.99
ISBN 978-1846551208

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While J. M. Coetzee’s themes have hardened in recent years, his forms have gained new flexibility.  Like its predecessors Elizabeth Costello and Slow Man, his latest novel, Diary of a Bad Year, toys with and occasionally explodes its genre, while focusing on central characters bearing undeniable resemblance to Coetzee himself.  These three latest works deal with the issues that have preoccupied Coetzee throughout his career as a novelist – the act of writing, belief, sympathy.  What is new in them is a melancholy scepticism towards some of the foundations of Coetzee’s art.  They form a trilogy of doubt, calling into question Coetzee’s political activism, his previous works, and most troublingly, the ethics of the novel.

Elizabeth Costello presented a series of ‘eight lessons’ involving the title character, an aging novelist with a biography not so different from Coetzee’s own.  The lessons range from a lecture in which Costello surprises her audience with a passionate defence of animal rights (a lecture Coetzee himself has delivered) to a Kafkaesque exploration of a way-station in the afterlife—all different, all unsettling, none providing an instant of certainty.  We perhaps find a kind of unity in the book’s beautiful, enigmatic coda, the ‘Letter of Elizabeth, Lady Chandos, to Francis Bacon’.  Coetzee takes on the persona of the wife of Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s crisis-stricken Lord Chandos, whose words provide a kind of epigram to the disconnected lessons: ‘I have completely lost the ability to think or speak coherently about anything.’  Coherence was precisely what the book eschewed, preferring fragmentary form and ambiguous identification, as if Lord Chandos had managed to write a novel.  Elizabeth Costello seemed to be witnessing a disenchantment with the very enterprise of novel writing, and was interpreted by some as Coetzee’s farewell to literature.
But in Coetzee’s books no answer is final, and his next offering, Slow Man, seemed at first to return to the bread-and-butter of his earlier writing.  Paul Rayment, a retired photographer disabled by a biking accident, struggles with his own physical decline while lusting after his Croatian nurse Marijana.  The plot is familiar Coetzee: a battered older man looks to a battered younger woman for a kind of salvation (think Disgrace).  Then, the novel implodes: Elizabeth Costello knocks on Paul’s door, quoting the first sentence of the novel.  From there, the narrative flies in fascinating and unexpected directions, exploring the ethics of writing another person’s story while simultaneously telling those of Paul, Marijana, and Elizabeth.  Elizabeth’s role is ambiguous: she is, at once, transcribing a story that comes to her through some unknown agency, watching the story unfold in person, and, for both good and bad, affecting its unfolding at every turn.  Ultimately, it is Coetzee himself under question: can the sympathy of a novelist be a kind of violence?

It is no surprise that Elizabeth Costello and Slow Man, as well as Diary of a Bad Year, are preoccupied with their status as novels.  A consciousness of the tradition of the novel has always been a part of Coetzee’s writing.  This has led many to associate him with the postmodernism of DeLillo and Pynchon, but Coetzee views the history and form of the novel not so much as a field for play, but as a burden to be overcome.  Life and Times of Michael K, for example, seemed to view South Africa through Kafka’s eyes, following the great modernist by depicting a weak individual in a world transfigured by an unknown, unknowable, and destructive force.  Dostoyevsky himself was the main character of The Master of Petersburg, returning to the city formerly his muse to uncover the truth about his son’s death.  Most extreme in questioning the novel was Foe (a pun on Daniel Defoe), which depicted a female counterpart to Robinson Crusoe struggling for recognition in the works of the novelist Foe.  The book indicted Crusoe’s colonialist England (an undeniable, if implicit, criticism of Coetzee’s apartheid South Africa) and the gender roles and assumptions of Defoe’s time and the present. And all in the words of a white male writer.  For all its self-consciousness, though, Foe seemed unable to be anything but a novel; it existed to tell a story.  A story of stories, but ultimately one not so different from that of Coetzee’s foe Foe.  It departed from the traditional novel primarily in extending its sympathetic power to subjects usually silent.  It did not, as does the latest trilogy of novels, fundamentally problematise this sympathy.

Sympathy is perhaps Coetzee’s greatest theme, and the form of Diary of a Bad Year could be construed as an exploration of the act of identifying with the other.  The novel presents two voices speaking and writing in three continuous threads: two of these belong to an aging narrator (who shares Coetzee’s name and past), the third to Anya, a neighbour he meets, lusts after, employs, and ultimately befriends.  ‘C’ (as he is known to Anya, and as we will call him, to avoid getting too deeply into the questions of authorship the book so bluntly poses) is writing a series of ‘Strong Opinions’ to be collected and published by a German press. They are a mixed bag: at one end of the spectrum are thoughtful meditations (‘On Zeno’, ‘On the afterlife’); at the other are angry polemics written in the shrill, moralising tone familiar from Coetzee’s political statements (‘On Tony Blair’, ‘On political life in Australia’).  In counterpoint to these opinion pieces runs the first-person narrative of their author as he meets and befriends Anya.  The first chapters of the book are limited to these two threads of C’s voice, each occupying a portion of the page, without clear dialogue between them.  They depict a man of waning potency and increasing isolation from the world around him, yet impelled by a sense of that world’s inhumanity to rage against it.

Before long, Anya also starts speaking, narrating their meeting from her own perspective.  The facts at first seem to coincide: both relate more or less the same experience of wary approach (he lusts after her, she knows it) and an unstable dance of distance and intimacy as she accepts a job typing C’s opinions. In time we learn that Anya’s boyfriend Alan is plotting to rob C electronically.  The triangle feels slightly contrived (especially the robbery motive, which borders on the sensational and is not sufficiently grounded in anything we know of Alan), and predictably comes to an ugly head when the three meet at a dinner party C throws to celebrate the book’s completion.  C’s voice falls temporarily silent and Anya is left to narrate Alan’s drunken verbal assault alone.  From this climax, the relationships, so carefully constructed, unravel.  Anya leaves Alan and the city, and C begins a ‘Second Diary’ of opinions, sadder and perhaps wiser than the first.

Over the course of the novel, Anya’s voice gradually takes over from C’s.  The ‘Second Diary’ is a response to her opinions about his opinions.  Her farewell letter forms the final part of C’s story, and her passages grow longer and her character fuller as the book progresses.  The counterpoint of the two voices is often poignant, though it is made uneasy by their lack of common ground.  The introduction of this second voice is Diary of a Bad Year’s most radical step, and to my mind, where it goes wrong.  Sympathy has always been unidirectional in Coetzee’s works—the Magistrate in Waiting for the Barbarians, for example,or David Lurie in Disgrace, both self-sufficient solitary men tested in their powers of identification by creatures, human and animal, that they cannot fully comprehend.  Indeed, Coetzee’s concern with animal rights is based on the principle that those who cannot reciprocate also demand our moral attention.  His preoccupation has been sympathy for an object we cannot fathom.

Diary of a Bad Year presents an optimistic solution to the problem of the novelist’s authority that has so weighed on Coetzee in recent years.  It seeks to abdicate this authority, to open it to another voice.  Two sympathetic voices coexist in the text, each seeking and failing to understand the other, each with wholly different concerns and motivations.  They speak about, around, and occasionally to one another, without ever attaining genuine recognition.  As if to underline this point, their stories are told in different temporal frames.  The perspectives do not coincide in reading any more than they do in the story.  In a sense, this kind of reciprocity is the logical conclusion to Coetzee’s project, a final proof of the incommensurability of subject and object.  But it also brings us back to the recurrent fear that nags all sympathy in Coetzee: is the object really worthy?

Diary of a Bad Year’s sympathy, though reciprocal, is frustratingly asymmetrical.  We hear both voices, but only one feels fully imagined.  While the narrator speaks to us with the authority of a lifetime of writing and thinking, Anya’s voice is juvenile and often annoying. When we first meet her, she does not seem to warrant any interest—either C’s or the reader’s.  The early passages in her voice suggest that she is little more than what C first perceives her as: a body for sex.  ‘When I make my silky moves,’ she writes, ‘I can feel his eyes lock onto me. That is a game between him and me.  I don’t mind.  What else is your bottom for?  Use it or lose it.’  Coetzee’s regard for his object has always made an ethical demand on the sympathy of the reader, but when the object speaks in this voice, it is hard to comply.

Coetzee’s art works by creating an ethical compulsion to sympathise out of the aesthetic urge to identify.  Without this hard-won identification (which the reader feels twice, with both the subject and the object of sympathy) the novel’s ethical import falls flat.  We need the depth of one of Coetzee’s great protagonists to follow them in assuming an ethical obligation.  Here, Coetzee has resorted to a disappointingly crude characterisation of his lead female character.  True, she does not remain so shallow.  By the end, much of her self-absorption and immaturity have fallen away, and she writes C a deeply felt letter of farewell.  Yet even this development feels trivial, a cliché we know all too well from My Fair Lady.  Galatea should have remained a statue.

C’s passages, by contrast, show the moral weight typical of Coetzee’s characters, a restless need to understand what it is to be human.  For C, the question is particularly pressing at what he knows to be the end of his life: ‘Perhaps it is the nature of death that everything about it, every last thing, should strike us as unsuitable.’  This profound attempt to extract some kind of universal truth leads C always to imagine the other:

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.

Tragedy is endemic to Coetzee’s world view; his protagonists find themselves in worlds that offer no solace, except perhaps that of the audience at a tragic drama, of catharsis from pity and fear.
 

Diary of a Bad Year seems to aim for recognition, for a mutual ethical commitment between its two voices.  Yet the attempt fails.  Sympathy is not, and perhaps cannot be, premised on reciprocity.  It must be one-sided, imaginative.  This is why the genre of the novel has served Coetzee so well.  It is premised on a reader’s sympathetic identification.  Coetzee’s concern is the process of identification that makes literature possible.  His novels thus thematize their own reading.  This may be the root of his interest in novelistic form.  As the outside world seems more and more to erode the capacity for sympathy, (a prospect, C’s opinions show, that is ultimately Coetzee’s greatest fear), Coetzee’s latest novels have come to question the ethics of identification, beginning with the novelist’s own.  Diary of a Bad Year pins its hopes on recognition, which seems to offer a more comprehensive ethical commitment.

But this transformative experience of recognition, of seeing and being seen, is not the province of the novel, which, for Coetzee at least, is inextricably tied to the subjectivity of its narrator.  The protagonists of Coetzee’s novels have always used others as mirrors in which to see themselves.  In Coetzee’s recent works, this one-sidedness has become problematic: the mirror now demands a voice as well.  Diary of a Bad Year thus proposes a solution to the complex ethics of sympathy exposed in Elizabeth Costello and Slow Man.  But the solution diminishes the unflinching scrutiny of self and world that make Coetzee’s novels so powerful.  By introducing a second subjectivity, Coetzee seems to be attempting to counterbalance the authority of the first, but ultimately only dilutes the moral claim intrinsic to a novel’s subject. It strives towards an objectivity that is foreign to Coetzee’s art of the novel.  In attempting to transcend its novelistic character, Diary of a Bad Year points us towards recognition in our own lives, but this is an ethical achievement, not an aesthetic one.

Joshua Billings studies the German reception of Greek tragedy at Merton College, Oxford.

Al Gore
An Inconvenient Truth
Rodale Books, 2006
328 pages.
ISBN 1594865671

An Inconvenient Truth
directed by Davis Guggenheim
100 mins, 2006

Debate over climate change produces plenty of excess carbon dioxide, particularly in the United States, where acceptance of the scientific consensus on global warming has been slow in coming. Then again, this is a nation that still questions the scientific consensus on evolution by natural selection. The debate came to a head this year, with the near-simultaneous release of An Inconvenient Truth, former Vice President Al Gore’s new book on climate change, and the film of the same name, chronicling Gore’s quest to break through the wall of disinformation, cynical skepticism, and indifference surrounding the newly christened ‘climate crisis.’ Our unlikely hero is armed only with his trusty, scene-stealing Apple laptop and a level of animation not seen in Gore since his gently self-mocking cameo appearances in Futurama.

Six years ago, a major motion picture about Al Gore’s globe-trotting climate change slideshow would have been a tepid Saturday Night Live sketch, not the third-highest grossing US documentary of all time. But the Al Gore writing a lean and occasionally lyrical prose in An Inconvenient Truth—a prose eschewing the purple tendencies of his earlier book, Earth in the Balance, for compact efficiency—is not the Al Gore of the 2000 election, nor the bearded mountain-man of his post-2000 years in the wilderness. This is an Al Gore inspired, an Al Gore possessed, an Al Gore haunted by his disappointment in 2000; and one determined to prevent a partisan decision of the US Supreme Court from sealing the fate of our planet.

I began reading An Inconvenient Truth on the second day of a cross-continental drive in North America, starting in the Virginia foothills of the Appalachians and ending in the shadow of the Rockies in Calgary, Alberta. Although I had just returned from Oxford—not from Vietnam, as Gore had—I felt a certain symmetry in reading of Gore’s 1971 cross-country voyage, and how it alerted him to the natural splendour and epic scope of the North American countryside. This moment of empathy is representative of a particular charm of Gore’s book, a tactic carried over very effectively to the film: the interleaving of straightforward explanations of the science of climate change with a more personal journey on Gore’s part from cub journalist to passionate environmentalist and statesman.

Although there is plenty of science to be explained, Gore’s book is ultimately visual and visceral, drawing much of its impact from the juxtaposition of short text with striking images. This is unsurprising, since the book is in some sense a crystallisation of the slideshow presentation (and hence intimately related to the movie, in which a majority of the short 100 minutes are spent showing segments from Gore’s lectures around the world). The design of the book itself is superb, with two-page spreads of an anthill-like Tokyo suburb underwriting the fact that ‘most of the increase (in population) is in cities,’ and composite maps of a nocturnal earth covered by fireflies—each a bustling metropolis of millions—driving home the point that we are become ‘a force of nature.’ If the book drags at all, it is in the occasional sections dominated by text. Not because Gore’s writing is uninspired, but because the reader has become so addicted to the rich interplay of text and image, to the delight of folding over a page to discover just how high carbon dioxide levels will be in forty five years.

The evidence marshalled by Gore for the reality and the magnitude of the climate crisis is generally unimpeachable, and has received the imprimatur of the world’s top climate scientists. He thoroughly anatomises how we know that the average temperature is increasing (while cautioning that this is a global, not a local trend), from the mundane example of Antarctic ice cores to dramatic pictures of calving glaciers and collapsing ice shelves. The latter are arresting even as static images in the book; they are terrifying in real time, a set-piece of the film. The connection between rising temperatures and increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is presented in an especially charming way. Gore shows a graph of the carbon dioxide levels and a graph of the global average temperature over thousands of years. With a wink, he nudges the audience towards the obvious connection with the story of his schoolyard chum who ‘discovered plate tectonics’ by noting that Africa and South America looked like they once ‘fit together.’ Gore is perhaps too quick to brush over the distinction between correlation and causation on this matter (a favourite talking point of climate skeptics) and should have emphasised that climate models require anthropogenic carbon dioxide increases in order to reproduce current warming trends.

Gore makes an equally compelling case that climate change is climate crisis. Besides the now famous pictures of Florida and Manhattan drowned under higher sea-levels, he presents vignettes of human misery in every imaginable extreme condition, from the biblical 2005 floods in Shangdong province, China, to the simultaneous, earth-cracking drought in nearby Anhui province. And of course there is Katrina, immortalised in a wordless spread and epitomised by a wretched body floating in flood-water, a reminder that even mighty America can be brought low by natural disaster. Gore has been criticised by some for alarmism, for exaggerating the catastrophic consequences of climate change. While the amount of land he claims for the sea falls on the high end of estimates, and the connection between extreme weather and global warming is more tenuous than other pieces of Gore’s case, this cry of scare-mongering does not hold much water. This is because of the highly nonlinear nature of the climate.

Nonlinearity really demands its own article. As Gore says in the book and movie, nonlinear is just ‘a fancy way the scientists have of saying that … changes are not all gradual.’ More concretely, it means that the input and the output of a nonlinear system are not directly proportional. Nonlinear systems are difficult to treat with the analytic techniques of classical physics and differential equations, and consequently much work in nonlinear systems is done numerically, by simulating the system under constraints provided by available data. Thus climate scientists use computer simulations to try to understand and predict the behaviour of the global climate. But nonlinear systems are often highly chaotic—sensitively dependent on initial conditions. Hence simulations must be done with exquisite care for their results to have anything but qualitative value.

Nonetheless, one thing climate simulations do reveal is the ability of the earth’s delicate balance of ecosystem, weather, ocean currents, and so forth to lurch violently and rapidly from one apparently stable state to another. As skeptics are quick to point out, there are many feedback systems in the climate. Some are positive, and drive the system out of equilibrium. The tendency of sea-ice melt to encourage further melting is a pertinent examble; ocean water stores more heat than the highly reflective sea ice, and hence acts as a ‘heater’, helping to melt the remaining ice. Other feedback systems are negative, and tend to restore the system to an equilibrium condition. Many skeptics are essentially betting that unknown feedback mechanisms are negative, and will miraculously conspire to drive our perturbed climate back into equilibrium, rather than conspiring to drive it into some new equilibrium that is perhaps not so hospitable to our current way of life. This is an incredibly irresponsible assertion. These skeptics may be ignorant of the subtleties of nonlinear systems, as in the case of many so-called ‘experts’ lacking advanced degrees in climatology or allied quantitative disciplines. Or perhaps their expertise is clouded by bravely wishful thinking and the support of those shortsighted corporations that still view the science of climate change as a danger rather than an opportunity. Gore does a real service to the public in clarifying this subtle technical point.

Having read An Inconvenient Truth before seeing the film, I was given an opportunity to pay careful attention to the movie’s subplot, which has less to do with the rise of earth’s temperatures than with the rise of Al Gore as a new hero of America’s anaemic left. As a performer and a teacher myself, I can only commend and envy Gore’s newfound ease in front of an audience: without seeming glib (he is terribly but not wearisomely earnest) Gore exudes enthusiasm for his topic, wearing the manner and the chic black suit of your favourite college professor like a second skin. Your favourite college professor is not necessarily your hippest, and Gore isn’t above the hammy joke (‘I used to be the next President of the United States’) or the academic equivalent of a Jackass stunt (launching himself into the air on a Genie lift to illustrate just how high carbon dioxide levels will be in 2050). But these quirks make Gore more rather than less endearing, and effectively prime us for sympathy when director Davis Guggenheim cuts to scenes of a determined Gore passing through airport security, or a troubled Gore painstakingly assembling Keynote slides for his next talk. In the latter shots Gore’s professorial intensity is exchanged for an almost prophetic air of burden. Miraculously, this creates actual dramatic tension in a documentary, tension that for this viewer boiled over into seething resentment during the bitter minute devoted to the 2000 election.

Viewers of An Inconvenient Truth cannot help but indulge in a game of ‘what if’, perhaps unfairly pitting the born-again Gore of 2006 against the tremendously unpopular and beleagured President of the same year. The movie only gestures indirectly at such speculations, and Gore is generally delicate in his book regarding the current administration. He does not, however, spare the brimstone in indicting the White House’s contemtible and contemptuous attitude towards the truths of science (for example, the hiring of oil-company stooge Philip Cooney as chief of staff for the White House environment office). More cutting is Gore’s evisceration of the cynical campaign to sow doubt in the minds of voters regarding climate change. To illustrate the perfidy of these latter-day sophists, Gore points to an internal memo from a coalition of special interest groups pushing global warming skepticism. This memo states as the coalition’s objective to ‘reposition global warming as theory, rather than fact.’ The crass stink of Madison Avenue wafting off the memo recalls other famously malodourous public disinformation campaigns: the sulphrous reek of Big Tobacco’s timeless cancer coverup, and the barnyard tang of the more recent Intelligent Design circus. Gore has the anger of a zealot for the charlatan science of global warming skeptics. Indeed, one of Gore’s most endearing traits, apparent in the book but obvious in the film, is his tremendous respect for scientific truth. For every moment of Gore playing the professor is a moment where he becomes a boundlessly enthusiastic prize pupil. This is in sharp, tragic contrast to the hedging of President Bush, who is happy to be undecided about evolution in the face of all those facts as long as it is politically expedient to do so.

If An Inconvenient Truth stopped here—if it were satisfied with a relentless exposition of the science of global warming and a brutally frank dissection of the flimsy political manoeuvring intended to hide this threat from the public—it would be a timely, and necessary book. But it would be a book for our time, and Gore a man of this moment, not the figure of historical import many already conjure him to be. Indeed, the book probably would not have topped the New York Times best-seller list, nor would the film have broken box office records. In fact, it all might have been rather depressing.

What elevates the book, and the movie, is the way that Gore’s personal story and the story of climate change move in carefully orchestrated counterpoint to articulate a vision of hope and a challenge for the future. If Gore indulges in fear-mongering, it is not the cheap partisan tactic that promises a war that will not end against an enemy that cannot be defined. Gore defines the enemy—and it is us. He promises a war, but it is a war against the darker aspects of human nature, the selfish, shortsighted worldview that drives us to plunder now at the expense of our neighbors and our children. Gore’s battle will be fought in the halls of Congress, and in corporate boardrooms; but also in our voting booths, at our dinner tables, on our electricity bills. An Inconvenient Truth provides the explicit marching orders in great detail, particularly the book (the final seventeen ‘green pages’ of tips justify the purchase entirely). But it is the film that calls out most clearly the moral challenge—and offers up Gore as an example.

Gore is fond of pointing out that the Chinese logogram for ‘crisis’ consists of the characters for ‘danger’ and ‘opportunity.’ Gore has certainly lived this wisdom. With An Inconvenient Truth, he has taken the danger of the climate crisis and made it an opportunity to reinvent himself as the unshakable moral center of the Democratic Party. Let us hope that we heed Al Gore on climate change: ‘This is a moral issue.’ And let us hope that we can follow his example in making an opportunity of the climate crisis: an opportunity to reinvigorate the pragmatic and democratic traditions in both America and the wider world; an opportunity to recognise that ours is a small, fragile ark in the inky vastness of space. We have every obligation to defend it. Perhaps, as I did, you will begin by reading this book, seeing this movie; then replacing an incandescent bulb with a compact fluorescent light. Perhaps we will end, together, by saving the world.

Jacob Foster is a DPhil student in mathematical physics at Balliol College, Oxford, and a PhD student in complexity science at the University of Calgary. His current interests range from the mathematical properties of complex networks to the geometry of the Big Bang.

Gabriel García Márquez
Memoria de mis putas tristes
Alfred A. Knopf, 2004
112 pages
ISBN 140004443X

The year of my ninetieth birthday I wanted to give myself a night of mad love with an adolescent virgin.

For most readers, this opening line may smack more of Henry Miller or Vladimir Nabokov than of the perfumed, sensual prose of Gabriel García Márquez; but, like the Nobel Prize winner’s previous novels, the first sentence of Memoria de mis putas tristes (literally ‘memoir of my sad whores’) engages the reader while encapsulating the central motivation of the narrative. The book—García Márquez’s first work of fiction in a decade—relates the nonagenarian narrator’s first encounter with actual love, revealing the late-blooming romantic hidden deep within himself.

The anonymous narrator, self-described as ‘ugly, timid, and anachronistic’, lives in a crumbling but beautiful aristocratic home in an unspecified city on the Caribbean coast. The solitude of old age and life-long bachelorhood dominates his existence: he lives alone, subsisting on memories of his saintly mother and the meagre pensions provided him by careers in journalism and teaching. His only activities outside his dilapidated residence are the occasional concert and a weekly column in the local newspaper. His sole accomplishment before we meet him on his ninetieth birthday, he admits, has been his prodigious sexual career. ‘I have never slept with a woman without paying her’, he boasts—no small financial feat considering that between the ages of twenty and fifty he had slept with 514 different women. His meticulous record of names and other ‘details’ was to become, literally, the eponymous Memoir of My Sad Whores. We only receive an incomplete version however, as these former encounters are eclipsed by the events of his ninetieth birthday. He reflects that 29 August represented ‘the beginning of a new life at an age when the majority of mortals are dead’.

In order to fulfill his fantasy and find the above-mentioned adolescent virgin, the narrator enlists the help of Rosa Cabarcas—a brassy madam not unlike Gone with the Wind’s Belle Watling—who is more concerned with the possibility of finding a virgin on such short notice than the anonymous protagonist’s age. ‘I don’t mind changing diapers’, he dryly remarks upon learning the only girl willing is 14 years old. Rosa eventually drugs the girl to alleviate her fears, leaving the virgin passed-out and unconscious of her imminent deflowering.

On the edge of pornography, García Márquez wrenches us back into the benignly erotic: rather than sleep with the unconscious girl, the narrator watches her attentively, overcome by her innocence and beauty. Night after night he returns to Rosa Cabarcas’s bordello to lie next to the girl he christens Delgadina, ‘little skinny girl’. Although no longer drugged, Delgadina sleeps—or pretends to sleep—through each encounter, interacting with the narrator only through body language and the occasional note left on the bathroom mirror in lipstick. Gradually the old man manufactures an ‘identity’ for the silent girl, complete with personal tastes, aspirations, and responsibilities, and subsequently falls in love for the first time. However, the protagonist is not merely a Pygmalion enamoured with the ‘perfection’ of an inanimate form. He feeds off of this perceived perfection (read: her youthful form as well as the invented ‘content’ of her life) and becomes rejuvenated himself; the mere possibilities of his relationship with Delgadina drives him, not just her aesthetic attributes. Theirs is an abstract yet fulfilling love, one that emancipates him from the ‘servitude that kept [him] subjugated since the age of thirteen’; in other words, it frees him from sex itself.

The delicacy of this deferred release adds a particular potency to García Márquez’s prose; the reader searches and waits for a climactic discharge to the bottled-up frustration of the couple’s erotic yet sexless lives. Instead the author offers only tales of the corrupted diversions the narrator had experienced in his bizarre encounters with previous ‘sad whores’. During this highly erotic period of late-life celibacy, the narrator tells us of his fi rst sexual experience at the age of twelve, when he was raped by some local prostitutes, and then recounts numerous failed and superficial love affairs: the forced sodomizing of a washerwoman and other such dysfunctional sorts of ‘love’. Only when he frees himself of the apparent necessity of sexual intercourse is he able to find true love with Delgadina. He discovers ‘that love is not a state of the soul but rather a sign of the Zodiac’, particularly revealing for a narrator born under Virgo.

Up to this point, those familiar with the source of the book’s epigraph—the Japanese Nobel Prize winner Yasunari Kawabata’s short story ‘The House of the Sleeping Beauties’—will quickly see many parallels. In ‘The House of the Sleeping Beauties’, the main character Eguchi frequents a surreal brothel where old men pay to sleep beside young, drugged virgins. As Eguchi learns to experience Eros without physical contact, he recounts past conquests and longs to return to the height of his sexual prowess. Love as discovered under the sheets next to a dormant maiden is a curse: the impossibility of release frustrates the Japanese gentleman to the point of anguish. The narrator of Memoria de mis putas tristes approximates Eguchi in a biographical sense; obviously García Márquez drew heavily on his appreciation for Kawabata during his writing process. However, the Latin American narrator finds new life rather than sorrow in his love for Delgadina. His abstinence springs not from physical inability but psychological fulfillment; sex has become marginal, merely ‘the consolation that one has when love doesn’t reach him’.

In the second half of the novel’s mere one hundred pages, García Márquez distils the timeworn progression of literary romance: initial bliss, followed by jealously, separation, and reconciliation. The narrator channels these emotions into his newspaper articles-cum-love letters, emerging as a strange sort of sex symbol within the tropical town. The depth and verity of his love for Delgadina is demonstrated when he suspects that Rosa Cabarca has ‘rented’ Delgadina to another man. Suddenly this ninety-year-old becomes a raging monster, destroying everything in sight and rebuking the girl as a whore, thereby grouping her with his previous, meaningless conquests. No one ‘grows up’ when it comes to love, or perhaps García Márquez thinks no one ought to; even at ninety the protagonist’s passions are as deeply volatile a mix of love and hate as could be found at a sixth-form social.

In the ensuing separation—during which time he licks his emotional wounds—the narrator rekindles a relationship with a previous ‘sad whore’ and they travel together, ruminating on age, sex, and love. The seasoned prostitute reprimands him for losing Delgadina, saying ‘there is no worse misfortune than to die alone…You are not going to die not having tried the marvels of screwing with love’. Galvanized, the old man returns to Delgadina to find what he describes as ‘real life, at last’. The narrator and Rosa Cabarcas become pseudo-parents to the girl, making her benefactor of both their estates.

The book closes, in stark contrast to Kawabata’s short story, with the protagonist looking to the future with anticipation—resigned to a happy death well into his hundreds. In the end, we have little choice but to identify with the narrator and surrender any reservations about abnormal forms of love or sexuality we had been harboring throughout the book. The undeniable universality of growing old—fostered within the novel by the anonymity of the protagonist—cannot but touch any reader, regardless of age. And it is dangerously difficult to avoid speculating that the author has not thrown a bit of himself into his aged character; although a presumptuous conflation, the narrator’s perspectives on old age become more poignant with García Márquez’s 76-year-old voice echoing behind the written word. However, Memoria is most successful not as a tale about growing old, but rather rejuvenation and first love, even in the strangest of circumstances.

Admittedly, to some readers it might appear that the plot of Memoria is merely a Latin American stereotype, too full of sex and humidity. García Márquez has executed another work of extreme verbal and narrative fecundity, a style made famous in novels such as One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) and Love in the Time of Cholera (1985). However, I would caution the English-language reader of García Márquez (the second most translated Spanish-language author after Cervantes) from conceiving of any part of Memoria de mis putas tristes as typifying Latin American literature as a whole. Such cliché (though often endearing) elements as fantastical sexual histories, isolated tropical towns, and decaying colonial mansions are not archetypes of Latin American writing in general but rather of García Márquez himself. For this reason, Memoria is a welcome, if inevitably minor, addition to his oeuvre, with little chance of reaching canonical status (although publishing practices in the Anglophone world may make it appear as such).

The English translation of Memoria de mis putas tristes will carry the title A Memory of My Melancholy Whores (an odd rendering of the original) and is due out in September 2005. Edith Grossman, the book’s translator, has worked extensively with the pillars of modern Latin American literature, García Márquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Nicanor Parra (her version of Vargas Llosa’s Feast of the Goat [2001] is of particular note). Hopefully her ‘melancholy whores’ can approximate the density and playfulness of García Márquez’s putas tristes.

Glen Goodman is an American MPhil student in European literature at Exeter College, Oxford. His work focuses on Latin American Literature.

J.M. Coetzee
Life and Times of Michael K
Vintage, 1998
184 pages

J.M. Coetzee
Disgrace
Vintage, 2000
220 pages

J.M. Coetzee was born in South Africa in 1940, eight years before the birth of legislated racism. The country was already ravaged by colonial struggles and the politics of hatred. But Apartheid advanced and institutionalised racial suspicion and hatred, putting race at the centre of every human interaction and every economic transaction. Black people, though a majority, could not vote, could not legally own property in 87% of the country, could not pursue certain occupations, could not marry across the colour line and, as Coetzee shows in The Life and Times of Michael K, could not even move freely within the country. The list of restrictions is endless. All manner of ‘tests’ were relied upon to determine race in ‘ambiguous cases’ because everyone had to be classified; a documented, government-certified racial identity was a prerequisite for official recognition of one’s existence. Sometimes individuals were reclassified, usually with devastating consequences. This madness finally came to an end in 1994, when black people were enfranchised. That the end of such an inhumane system could be achieved through a negotiated settlement has been hailed by many as a miracle.

The reality, however, is that we live in a world where it is much easier to legislate discrimination and economic oppression than tolerance, mutual respect and equal opportunity. South Africa is still in the (hopefully loosening) clutches of racism. Democracy is still in its infancy. It is thus no surprise that, internationally speaking, the best known author from this new country, JM Coetzee, is best known for his 1999 novel, Disgrace. The general reaction to this novel is a revealing reflection of the times.

As a community, white South Africans occupy tricky territory in the new dispensation. There is a strong, though possibly diminishing, feeling that black South Africans, led by Nelson Mandela, have worked harder towards reconciliation than their white counterparts. The perception is that they have been willing to forgive the past and support democracy whilst their white fellow citizens are either emigrating or complaining (to each other) about ‘the country going to the dogs’, a frequently heard mid-nineties expression. In that nineties climate, before the development of cross-over kwaito music, and before it became common for some white South Africans to insist on being called African, this local variety of Afro-pessimism was met by those who saw themselves as committed to the new South Africa with hostility.

Consequently, a novel like Disgrace, which depicts the ‘miracle’ through the eyes of a white, middle-aged, male professor associated with the formerly white University of Cape Town, was met with considerable interest. There is a lot in the novel that raises eyebrows. Take the following account of the central figure in Disgrace, David Lurie, during a criminal attack:

He speaks Italian, he speaks French, but Italian and French will not save him here in darkest Africa. He is helpless, an Aunt Sally, a figure from a cartoon, a missionary in cassock and topi waiting with clasped hands and upcast eyes while the savages jaw away in their own lingo preparatory to plunging him into their boiling cauldron. Mission work: what has it left behind, that huge enterprise of upliftment? Nothing that he can see.

The biographical similarities between David Lurie and JM Coetzee may be superficial, but one cannot help being curious about the extent to which Lurie’s personal views are similar to Coetzee’s. JM Coetzee’s work certainly fits him into the same mould as Lurie, a man who ‘has never been afraid to follow a thought down its winding track’. The possibility or suspicion that the character of Lurie is fashioned on Coetzee himself has obviously created problems in the way that Coetzee is received by the small reading public in the country of his birth. Once, there was a call by a group of English teachers to remove Disgrace from high school reading lists. On a personal note, I doubt if I have ever struck as many conversations with strangers as when I was carrying around the book in public. Once, a young white waitress who had just graduated from high school hovered around my table and eventually came out with it and warned me about how shocking and terrible the book is.

Lurie, a man who sees crime in South Africa through a racial lens, would be regarded as a distasteful figure in the new South Africa. Yet the hard truth is that it is people like him – white, educated intellectuals – who are the source of most representations of the new South Africa in the international sphere. And it is white writers like JM Coetzee, Nadine Gordimer, Alan Paton, Rian Malan, Antjie Krog – writers who typically would not have had first-hand experience of ‘black South Africa’ – whose voices are heard outside the country. In a racialised, wounded society, it is even more difficult than usual to separate the writer from his or her work. The fact that black South African viewpoints and portrayals of the new South Africa are rarely given a platform outside Africa cannot be ignored, and it heightens tensions surrounding what white South African artists and intellectuals, with easier access to international audiences, have to say about democratic South Africa.

In both his Booker books, The Life and Times of Michael K (first published in South Africa in 1974) and Disgrace (1999), Coetzee grapples with a society in upheaval. The central characters in both books are outcasts trying to make their own paths through what is at best an indifferent and at worst an oppresive society. Michael K is a simple Coloured¹ man trying to lead a simple but independent life in the tumult of a country seething with civil strife and simultaneously at war with its neighbours. In his quest to take his mother (and when she dies on the way, her ashes) to her birthplace, he violates influx control measures,² is caught and forced into a temporary work gang, and is later relegated to a resettlement camp from which he escapes. Because he insists on his independence, the life he has to live when he is not interrupted by the authorities and their institutions is miserable and fragile. He spends most of his time hiding in an underground burrow on the abandoned farm where his mother grew up, sometimes living on roots and insects. Eventually he cannot hold down proper food and when he is arrested on suspicion of being an ally to anti-apartheid terrorists, he baffles his captors with his ability to survive without eating:

[h]e is like a stone, a pebble that, having lain around quietly minding its own business since the dawn of time, is now suddenly picked up and tossed randomly from hand to hand. A hard little stone, barely aware of its surroundings, enveloped in itself and its interior life. He passes through these institutions… like a stone. Through the intestines of the war. An unbearing, unborn creature.

Michael K is a disturbing and sometimes pathetic character. In Disgrace, David Lurie is also reduced to a pathetic figure, but under different circumstances. A divorced white professor mourning the end of sexual desirability, he engages in weekly sojourns with a prostitute, and when that ends, he successfully pursues one of his students. She files a charge with the university, and his fiddle with her grades is discovered. A man who follows his own rules, he refuses a public admission of guilt. He takes refuge at his daughter’s small farm, where he struggles to relate fully to her black neighbour and business partner as an equal. He reminisces about those good old days when he could have bossed him around. It is the other side of the coin to the comments black South Africans sometimes make when they enter a place they could not have entered before, or say something they could have never dared to say to a white person. Lurie gradually resigns himself to the presence of the black business partner, his daughter’s homosexuality and rural lifestyle, and his loss of employment and prestige.

Then the small farm is attacked by three young black men. Lurie is assaulted and his daughter is raped. One of the myths that sustained apartheid turns out to be ‘true’ after all – once the ‘savages’ are in power, chaos reigns, and under the cover of lawlessness they exact revenge, stealing white property and raping white women. That is how crime is understood by some people in the new South Africa. Is Coetzee fuelling that sentiment and purposefully soiling the image of black-led South Africa through his portrayal of an alienated white male and his ‘bleeding heart’ daughter, who tries against all odds to live under the changed circumstances (or at least her interpretation of the changed circumstances)? Or is he arguing, benignly, that political change cannot eliminate the misery of all, as some reviewers of the book believe? In a strange turn in the plot, Lurie’s daughter’s black neighbour, Petrus, who seems to have been involved in the attack (possibly to intimidate her), asks her to be his third wife. He says she will feel safer that way. She agrees, much to her father’s mortification.

‘How humiliating,’ he says finally. ‘Such high hopes, and to end like this.’
‘Yes, I agree, it is humiliating. But perhaps that is a good point to start from again. Perhaps that is what I must learn to accept. To start at ground level. With nothing…No cards, no weapons, no property, no rights, no dignity.’
‘Like a dog.’
‘Yes, like a dog.’

The extract above was cited in a ruling party submission to the Human Rights Commission on Racism in the Media as an example of racist depictions of democratic South Africa as a place where black people are out to humiliate white people. It is not clear whether the intention was to label Coetzee himself as a racist. The sentiment expressed in the quote above is a less dramatic version of one felt by one of Michael K’s captors:

‘At least prisoners have stopped dying of unnatural causes since I took over,’ says Noel… ‘Nevertheless,’ I say, when it is my turn to speak, ‘when the shooting stops… and the enemy walk through the gates unchallenged, they will expect to find the camp commandant at his desk with a revolver in his hand and a bullet through his head. That is the gesture they will expect, despite everything.’

The artist’s work may end with the last brushstroke or the last sentence, but Coetzee, in refusing to engage in public discussions of his work, does not make his life, or the lives of his interested readers, any easier. His decision to shun the debates he provokes is usually met with suspicion.

Many would agree that Coetzee is an accomplished writer. He skilfully confronts us with the core of his characters’ anguish. He draws us unsuspecting into forbidden places. He tries to describe things as they are – no explanations, no judgements, no outrage – as he does in the following passage from Michael K:

[s]he had spent five days lying in a corridor among scores of victims of stabbings and beatings and gunshot wounds… neglected by nurses who had no time to spend cheering up an old woman when there were young men dying spectacular deaths all about.

He does not preach, he is neither superficial nor trivial, and unlike most South African artists of his time he is not engaged directly in party politics or public political debates. This may be a source of misreadings, overreadings and misunderstandings. As a white writer who has written a novel through the eyes of a racist white male, he occupies a difficult position. Appreciation of his work is often complicated by the fear of celebrating a sympathetic representation of racism. His Nobel victory was, unsurprisingly, met with hesitant admiration in his native land. He was celebrated as a great South African writer, albeit one who has recently emigrated to Australia. As a South African-born Nobel laureate, he is in the company of Albert Luthuli, Nelson Mandela, FW de Klerk, Desmond Tutu and Nadine Gordimer; individuals who, in their own way, share a love for and belief in South Africa.

A minor, silly spat between South Africa’s ruling party, the African National Congress (ANC), and the (predominantly white) main opposition party, the Democratic Alliance, arose in the days after Coetzee’s honour. The ANC was accused of displaying hypocrisy by congratulating Coetzee, in spite of having criticised his work in the past. It was at pains to point out that you can be polite to someone you do not always agree with. For others in South Africa, like Xolela Mangcu, the head of the Steve Biko Foundation, the real celebration will be when Chinua Achebe or Ngugi wa Thiong’o receive similar acknowledgement.

Gertrude B. Makhaya recently completed an MSc in Economics for Development at Oxford University and is currently on sabbatical from the Rhodes Scholarship. She is a member of slice( ) mango, an Oxford based writers’ collective.

Notes

1. In the apartheid system of racial classification there were four main groups: black, coloured, white, and Indian. Coloured people are of mixed heritage and had forged a separate community from indigenous black people, and although some have always claimed the ‘black’ identity, many still today refer to themselves as ‘coloured’.
2. He leaves his designated area without proper documentation.