柯慈小說中的書寫倫理：文學潛能與書寫責任

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(1)國立臺灣師範大學英語學系博士論. 文. Doctoral Dissertation Department of English National Taiwan Normal University. 柯慈小說中的書寫倫理：文學潛能與書寫責任. Ethics of Writing in J. M. Coetzee’s Novels: Literary Potentiality and Writerly Responsibility. 指導教授：莊. 坤. 良. Advisor: Dr. Kun-liang Chuang 研究生：楊承. 豪. 中華民國一〇五年一月 January 2016.

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(3) 摘要. 本論文探討南非小說家柯慈小說中的書寫倫理。在閱讀柯慈的作品時，大多數批評家將書寫和倫理視為二個獨立的概念，認為柯慈的作品具有倫理的面向是因為其作品討論了倫理議題。本論文批判此概念的謬誤。柯慈的書寫本身即是倫理的展現：文學無法被固化而具有重塑現實觀的潛能，而倫理挑戰我們重新思考自我與他者的關係，二者緊密結合。第一章透過閱讀《壞年頭日誌》討論文學的潛能如何去本體化。此文本特殊的結構──每頁分為三層並有三段的不同敘述同時進行──使其成為幾乎無法（以正常方式）閱讀的文本，然而此特殊的寫作結構揭露所有系統的“彷如”狀態 (the “as-if”)。第二章處理書寫責任的問題。責任應被理解成德希達所談的絕對責任。我將閱讀《聖彼得堡的文豪》和《伊莉莎白．卡斯特洛》二個文本，討論柯慈的書寫如何回應他者。第三章探討在《鐵器年代》中柯慈如何書寫無法言說和再現的受苦經驗。然而柯慈並不將受苦視為屬於他者的問題，受苦是全人類共有的經驗，受苦促使我們重新思索自我與他者的倫理關係。最後一章討論《耶穌的童年》中的記憶倫理問題。對柯慈來說，書寫本身就是見證，書寫的倫理性根植於見證歷史中被遺忘的他者和被遺忘的記憶。新的國家建立在和歷史的決裂，記憶歷史卻成為遺忘歷史。此文本促使我們思考，在處理歷史記憶時，是否能不被制式化和實證的價值標準所匡限，而能夠看到記憶最獨一的面向。. 關鍵字：關鍵字：書寫、潛能、責任、倫理、受苦、記憶.

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(5) Abstract: This dissertation investigates the ethics of writing in Coetzee’s novels. Ethics and writing are not two separate notions yoked together in the reading of Coetzee’s writing. I argue that writing and ethics coincide as both have the performative dimension and exceed the constative order. Chapter I addresses the question of how literary writing has the potentiality to deontologize and reconfigure the order of actuality through reading Diary of a Bad Year. Diary is known, or notorious for its exceptional three-tiered structure of narrative, making it impossible to read in a conventional fashion. But this exceptional narrative structure reveals the fictionality, or the modality of the “as-if” structuring all ontological order of actuality. Chapter II engages the issue of writerly responsibility. This responsibility is to be understood as absolute responsibility “before the law” in the Derridean sense, and I will look into how Coetzee’s writing responds to the other in The Master of Petersburg and Elizabeth Costello. In Chapter III, I will read Coetzee’s Age of Iron to see how Coetzee writes the unspeakable suffering that resists representation and analytical framework. Perhaps the way to read and to listen to the suffering is through the “maimed language.” But Coetzee does not see suffering as other’s question. Suffering is a question that concerns us, and he shifts the discussion from the perception of suffering as other’s question to the site of pre-subjective ontological vulnerability where it is possible to reconceive a new and ethical self-other relation. In the last chapter, I will investigate the ethics of memory in Childhood of Jesus. If the state deals with history always in the past tense (the past as another country) and produces national archive in order to close the gate to the past, Childhood raises the singular in personal memory as a way to resist the national amnesia.. Keywords: writing, potentiality, responsibility, ethics, suffering, memory.

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(7) Acknowledgements. I would like to acknowledge my gratitude to Dr. Kun-liang Chuang for his patient supervision of this dissertation. Without his intellectual inspiration of ideas and encouragement, this dissertation would have taken longer to be finished. I also have to extend my gratitude toward my committee members Dr. Frank Stevenson, Dr. Shou-cheng Lai, Dr. Sun-chieh Liang, and Dr. Wei-hung Kao for their challenging and yet inspiring questions at the defense. Their insight was instrumental in the revision of this work. Finally, I would like to thank my family. Their support and love sustained me through the seven years of Ph.D. studies. *** Chapter II has been published as “Writing as Acts of Responsibility in ‘Stavrogin’ and Elizabeth Costello” in NTU Studies in Language and Literature 33 (June 2015)..

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(9) Contents. Introduction. 1. Chapter I: The Decreation of the World: Literary Potentiality in Diary of a Bad Year 17 Totality and Closure 22 Unreadability of Diary of a Bad Year Literary Potentiality: The As-if. Chapter II: Writing as Acts of Responsibility in “Stavrogin” and Elizabeth Costello From Politics to Ethics Literary Writing: Fidelity and Betrayal Writing as Acts of Responsibility. Chapter III: The Writing of Suffering and Ethics of Vulnerability in Age of Iron. 27 31. 55 55 58 73. 95. Writing Suffering in South Africa 99 Suffering as a Political Question and the Discourse of Empowerment 105 “The Maimed Language” 118 Ethics of Vulnerability 130. Chapter IV: A Land without Memory: The Violence of Forgetting in The Childhood of Jesus The Promise of the “New” South Africa: Against Normalization The Past is not Another Country Witnessing the Singular in Personal Memory. 141 145 156 169. Conclusion. 189. Works Cited. 193.

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(11) Introduction: Writing and Ethics in Coetzee’s Writing. The writing of J. M. Coetzee has earned critical acclaim in the academic world mainly because it has reconfigured the nature of literary writing and the way we perceive the phenomenological world, and has touched on many ethical issues that demand our attention. The literary criticism of Coetzee’s works has a few characteristics: Critics have chosen to read his literary writing as literary theory,1 political allegories, or modernist and postmodernist experimental works. Very different disciplines have also claimed Coetzee’s texts for their own purposes besides literary studies: Trauma and memory studies, disability studies, film and photography, psychoanalysis, women studies, postcolonial studies, philosophy, geography, history, biopolitics, and even anthropology have enlisted Coetzee’s works to illustrate their specific concerns. These readings, to a great extent, are invested in the use (if not abuse) and efficacy of literary texts, without paying sufficient attention to the essential question of literature: Most critics simply graft Coetzee’ss works to a set of debates in different fields and fail to understand his writing on its own terms (Ogden 2). In the field of literary studies, postcolonial approach was the dominant mode of reading before the emergence of ethical criticism. 2 As for the Coetzee 1. Coetzee’s novels have been assigned in a number of literary and critical theory courses mainly due to the coupling facts that he wrote a dissertation on Beckett’s Watt by employing structuralist methods and that he has been teaching English for many years. Critics further point out that his writing features highly self-conscious appropriation of theoretical concepts while it also resists the uncritical application of critical terminology. 2 When postcolonial criticism was the dominant literary practice, much emphasis was placed on the roles history and politics played in the reading and interpretation of literary texts. Within that context, Coetzee was highly regarded as a representative postcolonial novelist, and critics have practiced political and historical reading of Coetzee’s writing, focusing particularly on the political events in South Africa, including colonization, apartheid, and post-apartheid violence. Having said this, though, I do not reduce all postcolonial readings of literary texts to political and historical interpretations. For instance, Peter Hallward’s Absolutely Postcolonial: Writing between the Singular and the Specific 1.

(12) scholarship, the ethical reorientation occurred because critics started to become aware of the provincialism of postcolonial reading, which imposes meta-narrative of historical and political consciousness on Coetzee’s novels to distill and extract the interpretation that would cater to history narrative and political cause. 3 Another reason was that the writing style and the concerns, particularly in Coetzee’s later novels, have far exceeded the scope of postcolonial criticism. The turn toward the ethical draws our attention to what Levinas called “ethical alterity,” to the irreducible otherness in the self, and more importantly to the new ethical relation between the self and the other. This ethical turn in the Coetzee scholarship was mainly inaugurated by Derek Attridge’s J. M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading. Attridge argues for the ethics in reading Coetzee’s writing: “Coetzee’s works both stage, and are, irruptions of otherness into our familiar worlds, and they pose the question: what is our responsibility toward the other?” (xii). Influenced by Attridge, critics have been paying greater attention to the ethical issues in Coetzee’s writing, mainly through Levinas’ and Derrida’s ethical thinking, such as hospitality and responsibility (The Age of Iron, Slow Man, Life & Times of Michael K.), forgiveness (Disgrace), animal rights (The Lives of Animals), the event of writing (Elizabeth Costello), violence in the wake of the September 11th attacks (Diary of a Bad Year), and the ethics of memory and the meaning of singularity (The Childhood of Jesus and The Good. attends to the singularity at the heart of literary texts. 3 By distinguishing an ethical reading from socio-historical reading, I do not mean to underestimate the discussion of historical events. Some of Coetzee’s novels have specific historical reference, while some do not, and the point is not to draw the nexus of historic-political events and their literary representation in his writing, thus reducing his writing to texts of social realism. This project will engage with historico-political events, in the sense that it will bear witness to history, to the vulnerable and silenced in history. History, but not historicism, is important. 2.

(13) Story).4 A prodigious amount of work on ethics has been generated. James Meffan and Kim L. Worthington maintain that “Coetzee himself continually resists the simple collapse of ethics into politics” (32). Kalpana R. Seshadri offers an original reading on the “silence” in Foe by using Derrida’s notion of literature’s ethical secret. Mike Marais focuses his comprehensive reading of Coetzee’s writing on the issue of hospitality by drawing upon the ethical philosophies of Levinas and Derrida, and his reading specifically concerns “alterity, responsibility, engagement,” as he writes, “Coetzee’s writing is informed by his sense of responsibility for what is not yet present in history, by the sense that it is the writer’s task to make of the text a home for the other. The text must host the other and so enable it to interrupt history” (15). Stephen Mulhall gives a multifaceted study of Elizabeth Costello by bringing into view many relevant issues, among which the philosophy of literature and our moral relations to nonhuman animals are related to the ethical discussion. J. M. Coetzee and Ethics, edited by Anton Leist and Peter Singer, is probably the most ambitious collection of essays on the ethical discussion. While the essays in this volume address different aspects of the ethical and philosophical character of Coetzee’s writing, the two editors, in their introduction, maintain that “the work of John Coetzee seems especially promising both because he stands at a transitional point between modern and postmodern literature and because of the philosophical character of his writing,” and they propose a few key terms in reading Coetzee both philosophically and ethically: the typical style of “literalness,” “ethics of social relationships,” “a phenomenological ethics of the other,” and “metaphysics of the other” (6-9). Benjamin Ogden engages with the idea of “form” in Diary of a Bad. 4. Published in 2015, The Good Story is an exchange on truth, fiction and psychoanalytic psychotherapy between Coetzee and Arabella Kurtz, a psychotherapist. 3.

(14) Year, and his argument is that Coetzee’s experiment of literary form, particularly in this novel, underscores his exposition on political forms/structures. The form, be it literary or political, can be reconfigured, but he seems to stop at this point without further elaborating its ethical significance. This ethical turn since the 1990s should not obscure the fact that the ethical has always been a focus in Coetzee’s writing.5 We can register two levels of the ethical in Coetzee’s writing—on the level of the ethical nature of his writing, and on the level of the ethical issues, such as hospitality, justice and responsibility that his work engages, although it is difficult to distinguish the two. A major problem with ethical criticism is that it remains on descriptive terms: Some critics seem to preoccupy themselves with “the ethical issues” and sidestep the exigency of investigating the ethical nature of Coetzee’s writing. As J. H. Miller points out, “the text read may make thematic statements which have ethical import, which is not at all the same thing [giving a properly ethical dimension to the act of reading]” (43). It happens not infrequently that some critics claim to identify the themes of animal care or hospitality for the refugees when reading a Coetzee novel and subsequently adopt some ethical discourses related to these issues to advance some “ethical” reading of Coetzee’s texts. Epistemologically speaking, employing some ethical discourses to read a text is not so different from a political or historical reading that an ethical reading has set out to criticize: One uses the text to explicate or evidence the ethical discourses.6 It is more often than not that we read literary criticism in 5. Despite their reception as postcolonial classics, Coetzee’s early novels are irreducible to mere postcolonial reading, which perhaps explains why they are re-visited by critics after the ethical turn. 6 Writing about the nature of deconstruction, Jonathan Culler tells us, “Critical categories are not just tools to be employed in producing sound interpretations but problems to be explored through the interaction of text and concept” (180). It is not that ethical discourses are useless, but that they are not to be taken for granted. As critics, we need to resist the instrumental propensity of theoretical and ethical discourses and retool them to read the ethical dimension, rather than the ethical issues, in 4.

(15) which we find critics employ literary works to illustrate their concerns—race, gender, class, etc. These “uses” of literature are taken for granted in that the critics overlook the ethical in Coetzee’s text. Another problem with the ethical criticism in the Coetzee scholarship is that the essential question of literature has not received sufficient attention. We need to examine how the literary bears on the ethical, how literature works to deconstruct ontological actuality before ethical possibilities can be made possible. For some critics, literature is embodied in the representation of the world, and literary works are immobile aesthetic objects with accessible meaning. In this instance, literature is used to answer a certain request or to offer a possible solution to a specific social problem. They apply philosophical discourses or “theories” to stabilize a text by imposing a predetermined meaning. As Frank Kermode writes, “To read a novel expecting the satisfactions of enclosure and the receipt of a message is what most people find enough to do; they are easier with this method because it resembles the one that works for ordinary acts of communication” (38). In this way, they “consume” a text by deriving some moral lessons that conform to our pre-conceived worldview. Reading Coetzee’s works is an experience of innocence and freedom.7 This dissertation turns away from an “ethical” reading that gets disabled in the mere explication of ethical issues and investigates how literary potentiality deconstructs. Coetzee’s writing. 7 Blanchot tells us that reading is both an experience of innocence and freedom: “Reading is ignorant. It begins with what it reads and in this way discovers the force of a beginning. It is receiving and hearing, not the power to decipher and analyze, to go beyond by developing or to go back before laying bare; it does not comprehend (strictly speaking), it attends. A marvelous innocence.” (Infinite Conversation 320). “Reading does not produce anything, does not add anything. It lets be what is. It is freedom: not the freedom that produces being or grasps it, but freedom that welcomes, consents, says yes . . .” (The Space of Literature 194). 5.

(16) ontological actuality, and how this potentiality gives rise to ethical possibilities. The ethical and the literary have something in common: Both are performative, exceeding the constative order. We register this ethical dimension of literature in Coetzee’s writing: It does not offer comfort, confirmation, or certainty; it challenges, disrupts, surprise and trembles, and even reframes the entrenched ontological worldview; it also invents and potentializes the possibility that has not been realized. I follow Jacques Derrida’s understanding of ethics as an ethical relation with the other. This is a simple claim, but with formidable consequences. Ethics is irreducible to some humanist assumption of universal good, positivist assumption of the good based on logics, moralism that stipulates some coercive codes or religious dogmatism, or legal understanding that ethics is established upon law-abiding principles. All these ideas are grounded in a code of repressive and life-denying conventional values. We should be careful not to confuse the ethical with the moral. The latter designates the empirical realm in which people are subject to legal jurisdiction and biopolitical rule, while the former refers to the place where people suspend old ties with dogmatism and rethink the moral values that have structured human existence, such as the self-other relation, community, forgiveness, and so on. In this sense, the force of Coetzee’s writing is felt not on descriptive or normative moral terms—for instance, how the political system should be reconstituted, how the Black citizens should be treated more equally, or how the law should be changed to allow the minority groups in society to voice their concerns. Ethics, as reconceived by Levinas and Derrida, is irreducible to subject-centered moral decrees that would eventually petrify ethical thinking as 6.

(17) dogmatism. Ethics is about the radical opening of the philosophical foreclosures anchored in logocentrism or metaphysics of presence, to borrow two familiar terms from Derrida, so that the welcome of the other is not only possible, but the absolute responsibility for us. Ethics is about responsibility, about the way we respond to the call of the other. Literature works on this level of ethics, opening the ontological stability to more ethical possibilities. Here, I also follow Derrida’s understanding of the literary, which is impossible in the sense that it is irreducible to the institutional edifice of literature. The literary event is inaugural and exceptional, and it trembles and traumatizes the ontological order of actuality as it disrupts and invents. Literature does not serve as a moral manual or guideline to change the world. It acts upon the world in the sense that it challenges our entrenched thinking and received moral opinions so that we may respond to the demand of the other in the society. The intervention of literature can reconfigure the ontological actuality through radical openings for the coming of the other. Writing is inaugural, as it works to deconstruct ontological actuality to occasion ethical relation with the other, while the ethical is figured in Coetzee’s resistance to the institutional demand on literature and in his commitment to the responsibility for the other in his writing. The point of departure for this dissertation is a focus on “ethics in writing,” on the coincidence between literary potentiality and ethical responsibility that have been treated insufficiently by critics. By “ethics in writing,” I resist “J. M. Coetzee’s writing and ethics,” which seems to imply an antecedent division between writing’s potentiality and ethical consideration, and an “ethical reading” of Coetzee’s works, which gives the 7.

(18) mistaken idea of employing a reading strategy that is called “ethical reading” in approaching Coetzee’s writing. My argument is that writing and ethics coincide because writing’s potentiality to reconfigure ontological actuality converges with the possibility of reconceiving the self-other relation in ethics. For me, it is imperative to bring together the question of literature and ethics in Coetzee’s writing, as the poetics of literary singularity is bound up with the force to inaugurate ethical transformations. The literary event in Coetzee’s writing—giving rise to “innovation, invention, violation, and inauguration” (Hallward 335)—comes in new forms and vatical narrative voice. The act of writing disrupts the grounds of fixed moral and cultural assumptions and inaugurates the welcome of the unknown other. Literature’s potentiality is bound up with its ethical responsibility. Coetzee’s writing at the limit challenges us to think how the literary bears on the ethical, how writing can be seen as a space of hospitality, and how it is possible to reconceive self-other relation. The question of literature—not what literature is, but what literature does—remains at the heart of this dissertation. I situate literary writing in the order of presence without being made fully present in that order, or as Stefan Helgesson puts it, “History . . . determines writing, but it is the task of writing to exceed that determination, to differ, to imagine something other than what the historical present already has articulated for them” (18). Writing has the potentiality to shake, deframe, and derealize the ontological construction of actuality, and thus it is very much about the experience of the shakenness of all foundations, certainties, and principles upon which ontology relies heavily for its stability. Texts are writer’s creative responses to socio-historical contexts, and Coetzee’s writing is embodied 8.

(19) in his ethical responses to the absolute demand coming from the other in the context of history without being appropriated by it, and without being conditioned by the ideological, nationalistic or religious discourses. Along the way of the research, Coetzee’s texts will be the basis, while literary theories will help to clarify, rather than codify, my investigation of the ethical in Coetzee’s writing. In the following, I will look into the question of literature, and then I will provide a plan for the main chapters.. The Question of Literature Literature is autonomous, and it has its potentiality in the order of actuality. However, starting from Plato, literature has been excluded from the “republic” of reason and presence, into the realm of mysticism. We have also witnessed, on the contrary, the attempt to house literature within academic institutions, to bring literature into the social arena by turning it into another social discourse and using it as a pedagogical instrument to promote nationalist cause. One instance of defending the value and use of literature at a time when the call to prove the pragmatic value of various disciplines is urgent is found in Rita Felski’s manifesto Uses of Literature (2008),8 which promotes the idea of bridging the gap between “scholarly reading” and “lay reading.” Resisting this pragmatism, postmodern and other approaches would turn literature into pure means of linguistic play, or linguistic idealism. For instance, the value of “linguistic idealism” lies at the heart of Richard Gaskin’s Language, Truth, and Literature: A Defense of Literary Humanism.. 8. Felski argues for “an expanded understanding of ‘use’” “to engage the worldly aspects of literature in a way that is respectful rather than reductive, dialogical rather than high-handed” (7). However, as Nicholas Royle tells us, “Felski offers very little critical reflection on the utilitarian, humanist and anthropocentric conceptions of ‘use’ that inform and structure her account” (Veering 96-97). 9.

(20) A worse scenario is seen in which literary writing is turned into ironies or cynicism. On the other end of the spectrum, critics, like Peter Lamarque, have attempted a systematic study of literary writing to defy the claims that literature does not fit the criteria of rigorous study. Lamarque calls our attention to the categories of “authors,” “practice,” “fiction” and “truth,” and “value” to approach the study of literature in his The Philosophy of Literature (2009). More sympathetic efforts have been to acknowledge the possibilities opened by literature, but still situated it outside the realm of presence and reason, viewing literature as irreducible to the logocentric order. Critics who value and yet are suspicious about these possibilities, however, would question how long these possibilities can sustain in our daily life, and how real and how effective these possibilities can be in the movement of resisting logocentricism. These approaches cast literature as either purely fictional, in the pure outside, in the transcendental model, or in an institutional mode, as if literature were some tangible aesthetic object available for political or pedagogical manipulation, or as if it could be treated as something of irrelevance. We need another way of thinking literature. Derrida proclaims that we need to “think a writing without presence and without absence, without history, without cause, without archia, without telos, a writing that absolutely upsets all dialectics, all theology, all teleology, all ontology” (Margins of Philosophy 67). Although Derrida was writing more in the spirit of philosophical thinking, this notion of writing “without presence and absence” can describe a new mode of literary writing that displaces itself in the institution of literature. A writing that “upsets all dialectics, all theology, all teleology, all ontology” cannot be confined within any institutional edifice. It causes the 10.

(21) disruption of any boundaries and irruption of alterity into the ontological system. The literary turn is singular in the sense that its relation to meaning and interpretation is suspended. Writing is about the event of saying, about the event of invention. Derrida writes again: In writing we witness an imperative “to give space for singular events, to invent something new in the form of acts of writing which no longer consists in a theoretical knowledge, in new constative statements, to give oneself to a poetico-literary performativity at least analogous to that of promises, orders, or acts of constitution or legislation which do not only change language, or which, in changing language, change more than language” (“The Strange Institution” 55). Instead of giving literature an identity, which is an act of epistemological violence that reduces it to a state of being, of self-presence and representation, we should perceive writing as a force, 9 an event that will potentialize the ontological ordering of the present We need to read literature in the realm of presence without reducing it to its ontological properties or institutional elements. The workings of literary writing are felt most intensely in the order of presence, but literary writing is not a thing that can be made fully present in presence, so we should refrain from asking the ontological and epistemological question of “what is literature,” which is apparently an invalid question in the sense that literature is not, that literature is irreducible to some ontological properties. Literature resides in the threshold between the inside 9. The notion of literary writing that informs this dissertation is that it is a force, an event to come. Writing does not remain static; nor does it attempt to stabilize meaning. In Veering: A Theory of Literature, Nicholas Royle employs the idea of “veering” to understand the “force or play of forces” in literary writing (5). Writing veers, turns, twists and makes detours. As veering entails an “event of difference” (4) that “call[s] into question the very notion and possibility of a state, of stability or stabilization” (7), a new way of thinking about literary writing “goes beyond any traditional enclosure of ‘literature’ and that cannot be confined or reduced to any kind of ‘mere theory,’ ‘linguisticism’ or ‘word play’” (5). As Royle suggests, the “veering” in literature generates “a sense of the swerving, whirling, flickering, proliferating affects and possibilities” (28). 11.

(22) and the outside, the possible and the impossible, the commensurate and the incommensurate, between what the world is and what it could have been, as Derrida puts it, “This is perhaps what gives tension to the writing: dispersing, dividing, decentering, delegating (legare) and simultaneously gathering, collecting but also choosing, electing, selecting, thus again dividing, privileging (legere)” (Without Alibi xx). Literature is the site of this limit experience, rendering the distinction between the inside and the outside, the possible and impossible indistinguishable. By saying literature is the site of the limit experience, I mean text resides in the constellation between the irresistible demand from the other and the institutional, social, political, and historical forces and effects. The literary event does not occur in an evanescent or transitory fashion; nor does it exist in a pure “elsewhere” or “outside.” Literature looks for an “elsewhere” that inheres in the ontological grounds of possibility. The literary event is excess, overflowing the confines of the presence. Writing is marked by the productive ambivalence and aporia inaugurated by the literary “as-if” (there will be more discussion of the “as-if” in Chapter I), and we should not attempt to bring the incommensurability and the exorbitance of literature into the metaphysics of presence and house it in the state apparatuses. In this sense, writing is both possible and impossible in this aporetic complexity—not only to write the present and the reality, but to write unrealized possibility, to write the present that is to come, that is open to the coming of the other. Writing is a sustained effort in deontologizing the order of actuality, to make the order of actuality open to the coming of the other.. 12.

(23) Chapter Outline In Chapter One, I will address the fundamental question of form and opening. In “Realism,” the first lesson in Elizabeth Costello, Costello says, “There is first of all the problem of the opening, namely, how to get us from where we are, which is, as yet, nowhere, to the far bank” (1; italics added). Opening is a central question in Coetzee’s writing. Writing has the potentiality to render the ontological order of actuality open, and I attempt to show that Coetzee’s writing performs “opening” beyond a closed and conventionalized form and a coherent and unified narrative. I will investigate the text Diary of a Bad Year. Some critics refrain from naming it a novel due to its exceptional three-tiered layout on each page, and this unusual topographical structure upsets the conventional form of narrative and the readerly expectation of a stable meaning. The multi-layered narrative structure and the polyvocality of narrative voice expose the fictionality of ontological system. The possibility to approach the text through multiple beginnings and the detour along the narrative progression testify to the working of the modality of the “as-if”: While ontological system attempts to hide its historicity and contingency, Coetzee in this text exposes them. I will read this “unreadable” text as a critical and ethical engagement with ontology. Diary manifests itself not only as an act of resistance against authority and ontological order of actuality but, more importantly, as an act of potentializing ontology. If writing writes the singularities and differences, it bears the potentiality of opening the ontological order of actuality for intervention and reinvention. In the first chapter, I explore Coetzee’s move beyond form, and in the second chapter I will look into his writerly responsibility toward the other. “Writing as acts 13.

(24) of responsibility” does not suggest writing should participate in the socio-political realm to give voice to the cause of social movements against oppression. Rather, in Coetzee’s writing, the literary event comes as a performative act that disrupts the grounds of fixed moral, cultural and political assumptions in order to respond to the other. In Coetzee’s novels, if responsibility means anything other than the parochial understanding of duties and obligations, it is the promise to and welcome of the other. I will investigate the literary event in Coetzee’s writing by referring to Jacques Derrida’s notion of literature as a “duty of irresponsibility, of refusing to reply for one’s thought or writing to constituted powers” (“This Strange Institution” 38). Absolute responsibility is irreducible to moralism and reason. Through Coetzee’s (re)invention of the writer-figures of Dostoevsky in The Master of Petersburg and Elizabeth Costello in the eponymous novel Elizabeth Costello, we see how writers have to betray the law in order to be responsible for and respond to the call of the other. Chapter III is devoted to the ethics of writing suffering in Age of Iron. In a world of what Levinas calls “useless suffering,” Coetzee’s writing is committed to the unspeakable suffering of those denied their voice and presence. However, Coetzee’s commitment distinguishes itself from the movement of committed writing in South Africa. What the committed writing is committed to is an archetype of black people suffering violence and injustice under the regime of apartheid. This committed writing serves the cause of black resistance, and Coetzee feels petrified in seeing writing reduced to the service of a political cause. For Coetzee, suffering cannot be treated as a political question; if it were, the victims would be subjected to biopolitical rule. Age of Iron is a novel about suffering and 14.

(25) powerless, and in this novel Coetzee writes suffering with an ethical concern: Suffering cannot be comprehended through the “science of victims,” and he shifts the question of suffering from a political concern to the state of ontological vulnerability in which each self is unadorned with any protection or privileges. Perhaps, it is possible to rethink the self-other relation only in this state of existential vulnerability. In this chapter, I will look into how Coetzee’s writing of suffering plays a dissonant tune with the South African committed writing’s hegemonic reaction toward the apartheid violence, how suffering refrains from being reduced to a political question and resolved through the liberalist solution of empowerment, how suffering cries out for its own expression through the “maimed language” in defiance of the view that extreme suffering cannot be represented, how Age of Iron performs a novelistic occasion to explore inter-human ethics in the relations formed between Mrs. Curren and the alterity figures, and how the life grounded in ontological vulnerability is more open than the life that biopolitical rule allows. Chapter IV engages with memory and forgetting in Coetzee’s writing. The question that I attempt to investigate in The Childhood of Jesus is how we can attend to the singular in memory that resists nationalist amnesia. This novel portrays an anomalous utopian state in which everyone, having washed themselves clean of the past, begins anew, with a new name, a new identity, and even a new birth date. Without naming post-apartheid South Africa, the issues of political forgetting and the singular in personal memory that are raised in the novel are highly relevant to the post-apartheid South African society. In my reading, this novel bears witness to the perpetuation of the violence of historical forgetting in 15.

(26) post-apartheid South Africa. South Africa established the Truth and Reconciliation Commission to deal with the legacies of violence and trauma, yet the teleological historiographical principle of closure structuring the TRC attempted to close the chapter of apartheid regime. The TRC’s remembrance of the past, ironically, amounted to national forgetting, and we see continuity in the structure of history between the apartheid regime and the post-apartheid democratic government: both capitalized on the forgetting and silencing of certain others. In the face of political forgetting, to attend to the singular of personal memory is to redeem memory from historical wreckages. The nationalist narrative of the “normalized” state is constantly shaken by the irruption of unwanted singular and elliptical memories into its sanctified space of history writing.. 16.

(27) The Decreation of the World: Literary Potentiality in Diary of a Bad Year. And if we human beings made it, can we not unmake it and remake it in a kindlier form? —Diary. Diary of a Bad Year is divided into “Strong Opinions” and “Soft Opinions.” In the first piece of “Strong Opinions” with the title “On the Origins of the State,” JC writes that the problem with any form of political system, from the medieval kingdom to contemporary democracy, is that “the form” is “accomplished” and “not open to discussion” (8). During the times when the king ruled by divine rights, people had no influence over the form and formation of the political system; even in the contemporary democratic system in which people seem to enjoy the freedom to express their opinions through the ballots and the right to alter the political system if necessary, what they have indeed is a pseudo-choice: They merely choose either A or B, or neither in elections or referendums. This closure of the political system derives from the presupposed adequation and completion of ontology that is founded on discursive coherence and stability. It is an enclosed space with a rigidified hierarchical division of class, tightly regulated distributions of power, and a clear demarcation between the inside and the outside, meaning and nonsense, the knowable and the unknowable, self and other. The latter entities of this series tend to be either appropriated or dissolved to secure the system’s. 17.

(28) firmness and stability, as Derrida informs us, “For ontology, meaning is founded on acts of exclusion and repression” (Limited Inc 149). But Derrida also alerts us, “A stability is not an immutability; it is by definition always destabilizable” (ibid 151). Logically speaking, when the need of closure arises, it entails that non-closure precedes the occurrence of closure, and that the possibility of (re)opening ensues. To account for the stability of ontology is thus to look into how that stability is made possible in certain context, that is, how the discourses and relations of power in the social arena have contributed to the ontological stability. If ontology grounds itself on the mastery of the limit so that it is able to decide who or what to be allowed in the order of presence, then the question that concerns us is to think the possibility of (re)opening the system through reading the traces, and here writing comes into play. Writing attends to the traces excluded and repressed in the ontological act of stabilizing meaning. In this sense, writing is inexhaustible as it does not look for the adequation of meaning. The need of closure in any ontological system and the possibility of its opening by the literary event underlie the pivotal question of this chapter: What potentiality does literary writing have to stage interventions in the order of actuality and to reconfigure the form of the system? As I pointed out in “Introduction,” the question of literature is not determined by the logic of instrumental reason and does not reside in the quest of the ontological status of literature or its pedagogical value. In reading Coetzee, we see how literature is inscribed in the modality of the “as-if” that exposes the fictionality (or performative construction) of all ontological order of actuality (I would say Diary of a Bad Year and Foe are two outstanding examples to illustrate this point),. 18.

(29) and as such the question of literature is tied to the irreducible potentiality of literary writing to intervene in and reconfigure the ontological order of actuality although Coetzee is also aware of the constant threat coming from the institutional attempt to subdue literary potentiality and to stabilize the dynamic movement of writing by giving literature a name, an identity, and a status.1 Writing is not purely a performance of linguistic games, or a matter of representation. Writing is opened to the process of (re)inscription; to be more precise, it is about the question of trace, of what cannot appear in the order of presence, of how one experiences that which one cannot experience. This deconstructive dimension is closely linked to the possibility of the literary event to tremble and displace the order of actuality. The fundamental question is, then, invested in the “complicity” between literature and the ontological order, as both are grounded in the modality of the “as-if.” While literary writing preserves this force of the fictional, politics forgets its own constitutive fictionality by erasing this epistemological creativity and contingency. As politics attempts to rein in literary writing by emphasizing the latter’s mimetic representation, writing resists this attempt by exposing the opening in ontology and gap between what is and what could have been. This resistance gives rise to the possibility of deontologizing the totality of the present. Attridge characterizes Coetzee’s writing as refusing to adhere to the normal expectations of readers: “One consistent aspect of Coetzee’s technique as a. 1. Gerald Gaylard writes that teaching and writing about Coetzee offers the potential to “counter” four closures: Firstly, literature and its reception in South Africa is not immune from “a certain Anglo-empiricist materialism and instrumentalism.” The second closure is “the sociopolitical overdetermination of South African society, culture, and literature,” and this closure is inevitably linked to “the struggle heritage of the apartheid years,” which forms the third closure. The last one is “the great rationalization” ushered in by globalization (Gaylard 112-113). 19.

(30) novelist is to deny the reader any ethical guidance from an authoritative voice or valorizing metalanguage. We are left to make the difficult judgments ourselves” (Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading 7). In reading Coetzee, we are exposed to the literary potentiality manifested in literature’s status of ambivalence and undecidability, paradoxes and aporias, as the meaning is never fixed.2 In this sense, writing is both reassuring and disquieting: It offers meaning and destabilizes that meaning at the same time. Put in other words, it offers the meaning that it destabilizes. While Coetzee writes in the literary tradition, his writing is full of revisions of canonical texts, gaps, fragmentations, silences, and paradoxes, and his unique writing styles and rhetorical devices demand another reading that resists the ontological efforts to impose logocentric stability of meaning. Diary of a Bad Year is an “unreadable” text that upsets any readerly expectation of stable meaning. This text consists of two main parts: “Strong Opinions” and “Soft Opinions,” while the three-tiered structure on most pages contains the “opinions” written by JC for a German publisher, Anya’s narrative (Anya is JC’s enamored typewriter), and JC’s personal narrative. The diverse narrative voices in these three bands compete and at times compromise with one another. This text’s exceptional three-tiered structure, topographically, makes it an almost impossible text to read: Its meaning is elusive, and its categorical status undecidable; read in different ways, it will generate diverse interpretations; the multiple narrative voices that parallel, crisscross, intersect, and interface disrupt any expectation of authority in narrative voice. This text resists reading in a 2. There are many instances in Coetzee’s writing that suggest this productive ambivalence. In Waiting for the Barbarians, “[T]hey form an allegory. They can be read in many orders. Further each slip can be read in many ways” (112), and in Michael K, “[Y]our stay in the camp was an allegory . . . of how scandalously, how outrageously a meaning can take up residence in a system without becoming a term in it” (166). 20.

(31) coherent rhythm: Reading vertically or horizontally always leaves one unsatisfied, as Marco Roth calls Diary “a novel that can be read three different ways, none of them wholly satisfying. You can’t read any one part without becoming aware that you’re ignoring the others. If you tried to read them all at once, you’d go nuts.” This “disturbing” text has sparked diverse critical responses. Rebecca L. Walkowitz reads Diary along with Woof’s Three Guineas and defines Diary as a work of “transnational fiction” (244) and “comparison literature” (245), by which she means “a genre of contemporary fiction that uses narrative structures of comparison to generate new paradigms of transnational collectivity” (245). Eric Paul Melja sees the borderlines separating the narratives as “thresholds” (96). H. Porter Abbott argues that this text demands “cognitive re-orientation” (192), and Paul Patton proclaims that the decision to take a certain course in reading at one time is “genuinely undecidable” (54). Johan Geertsema maintains that the text “constitutes an attempt to move towards a position beyond politics, to an impossible, ironic position” (71). Stuart J. Murray makes the observation that Diary is a “polyphonic text” and that this text calls for “a style of thought that could interrupt traditional and institutionalized bioethics discourse and help us to think ethics otherwise, in a more human and humane idiom” (324). David Attwell draws our attention to the “experience of fictionality” the text attempts to give (J. M. Coetzee and the Life of Writing 211). The essential idea that structures these readings is the undecidability of Diary, as exemplified in the disidentification of the subject, the loss of authority, the instability of generic categorization, and the polyvocality of narrative voice. Ambivalence is the condition of the text: Everything is iterable and undecidable at the same time. No claim of certainty and stability is. 21.

(32) possible; no assertion of full knowledge is assured. In my reading, I see Diary as an “unreadable” text, and I will read this impossible text as a critical and ethical engagement with ontology. I register Coetzee’s attempt to look for opening in all ontology through the potentiality in the literary event. Diary manifests itself not only as an act of resistance against authority but, more importantly, as an act of potentializing ontology. When ontology closes, it turns into a system of totality and totalitarianism. It becomes inhospitable and causes homelessness for the others in the system. If writing writes the singularities and differences that overflow the ontological structure, it bears the potentiality of opening the ontological order of actuality for intervention and reinvention. Diary, as an aporetic text that is incomplete and excessive of closure, is irreducible to mimesis and representation, and it exposes the limit of the order of presence. This text defies the conventional analytical strategies to dissect and analyze a text. As a literary event that shakes the ontological order of actuality, this text’s unreadability, non-adequation and aporia cause trauma in the ontological order.. Totality and Closure In Totality and Infinity, Levinas writes, “Western philosophy has most often been an ontology: a reduction of the other to the same” (43). As he puts it in another way, ontology is the “identification of the same” (42). Ontology forms totality that turns into totalitarianism because “[o]ntology as first philosophy is a philosophy of power” (46). Western philosophy constitutes a history of violence: Ontology is never a given, and it exercises violence in either exiling or appropriating. 22.

(33) the other to fortify its citadel of the realm of the same. Ontology has become a totalizing thinking, or a thinking of totality, by creating a few transcendent abstractions like Being, Unity, Truth, the Good, Reason and Subject to structure the system of thinking, and the dominant principle underlying ontology is “egology” (44): It promotes the image of the self, of the same, and the other either conforms or gets chased away. Peggy Kamuf describes the eternal return to the self and the same this way: “[F]or whatever poses sameness to itself, returns to itself, and claims sovereignty over its selfsame self as over its own homogeneous, undifferentiated domain” (“To Follow” 92). The problem with Western thinking is that the same imposes its will, and the other loses its identity. Levinas criticizes Heidegger’s distinction between Being and being, and his ultimate privileging of Being over beings (45). At the heart of Heidegger’s thinking is a solipsistic self-identity of Dasein. “Heideggerian ontology, which subordinates the relationship with the Other to the relationship with Being in general, remains under obedience to the anonymous, and leads inevitably to another power, to imperialist domination, to tyranny” (47). Ontology, which amounts to the transcendence of Being, presents itself as a totalizing horizon and comprehends the other in a way that subjects alterity to the order of the same. Ontology, as a philosophy of totality, has founded the disciplines of sociology, psychology and physiology, which Levinas is critical of because they are unwilling to acknowledge the “beyond,” the radical heterogeneirty of the other by remaining “deaf to exteriority” (291). Heidegger’s quest for the meaning of being misses something fundamental: It always looks for itself, its mirror image, and it eventually “goes home.” This thinking of the One, of the Same forms a climate of an “ontological or. 23.

(34) transcendental oppression” (Derrida, Writing and Difference 83). Ontology closes itself against any possibility of the beyond and the Infinite, and this closure of Being can be understood in both temporal and spatial sense (Critchley, The Ethics of Deconstruction 61). Spatially, closure is maintained by setting clear limits or drawing well-defined boundaries so that we might have the “enclosure of an area” (61). Temporal closure occurs when one imposes teleology. The passage of time is conceived in terms of linear historical succession without disruption. Ontology exists by “the mastery of the limit” (74) both spatially and temporally; it immunizes itself against the passage of time and the claim of exteriority. It also constructs “a conceptual-ideological apparatus” (Zabala and Harder 7) to totalize the self-other relation. In this sense, ontological closure “is no longer simply a technical term designating a finite totality, but rather the terminological name for a problematic that describes the relations between logocentrism and its other” (Critchley 70). Thus, ontology denies the exigency of self-other relation and the possibility of the beyond, and the self is a self of autonomy and alienation. Heidegger is concerned with “the explanation of the relation between being and beings,” and yet Levinas “seeks for the possibility of disclosing the relation to the Other” (Poleschchuk 24). Levinas resists this ontological thinking that actually stifles thinking itself and denies the ethical inter-subjective relationship, and he also refuses to acknowledge the Heideggerian affirmation of Being’s primacy over existents. For Levinas, Being does not totalize, as he maintains, “Being is exteriority,” (291) that is, “[T]he very exercise of its being consists in exteriority” (290). In Levinas’ thinking, we see his departure from the “climate” of Heideggerian. 24.

(35) ontological thinking toward an eschatological opening and toward the Infinite. Within this thinking at the limits, exteriority is not thought in a dialectical formula to form a closed system. The eschatological opening unthinks the institutionalized mode of thinking, inviting us to think the unknown and the unthinkable before responsible decisions and actions can be conceived. While ontology characterizes any relation to the other that is eventually reduced to egology, ethics begins by calling into question the order of the same and the spontaneity of the I (Levinas, Totality 143). Injustice occurs when ontology closes, when the “institution of boundaries” is enacted (Diary 106), when politics is reduced to “the art of the possible” (Diary 125), and when moral principles are compromised as the reality principle of practical political maneuverings. The critical task for thinking is to look for what Levinas names the “beyond” and “infinity,” or what Derrida calls “irreducible opening.” For Derrida, deconstruction is concerned with the problem of the “irreducible opening” of the metaphysics of presence by “intervene[ing] in the determination of a context from its very inception, and from an injunction, a law, a responsibility that transcends this or that determination of a given context” (Limited Inc 152). This “irreducible opening” constitutes the invitation to think the impossible, the otherwise than Being, the trace that is not represented in the order of presence, and the asymmetrical self-other relation. Levinas writes, “the not-able-to-comprehend-the-Infinite-by-thought is, in some way,. a. positive. relation. with. this. not-able-to-comprehend-the-Infinite-by-thought. thought. would. .. signify. .. .. precisely. The this. condition-or non-condition—of thought” (Of God 65). Indeed, this opening keeps thinking possible; it is where thinking and ethics begin, not where they petrify.. 25.

(36) In Diary, the section of “strong” opinions forms a unity in itself, and we might even say it forms a section of totality of itself, giving shape to the ontological bounds of rational analysis and commentary. These opinions and commentaries are “hard” and “complete” within themselves. The content is a perceptive diagnosis of politics, a powerful critique of “what is wrong with today’s world” (21), and the logic and language used to articulate the “strong” opinions remain faithful to the principles of reason and coherence. The style is a straightforward presentation that resembles the philosophical proposition of truth and knowledge. Simon Critchley writes of the commentary that “[it] is the search for the minimal consensus concerning the intelligibility of texts” (24). To read these “Strong” opinions, the reader should master the language, the cultural discourse and the rhetorical strategies to achieve “intelligibility.” There is no room for ambivalence, and the reader with access to these opinions will automatically have access to the community based on the “intelligibility.” JC writes in a confident manner, and the issues that he touches on are largely political in nature: the state, political system, terrorism, the law, biopolitical rule, war and intelligence, asylum and immigrants, etc. He exhibits his erudite intellectual thinking, but these opinions remain at a metaphysical level, devoid of “an intuitive feel” (18). They are well-thought and well-crafted expressions of knowledge, with a “know-it-all tone” (70), as JC cites from well-known sources to support his argument, such as Thomas Hobbs and Zeno, making everything convincing, certain and knowable. The separate pieces of the opinion impress the reader with an ethos of authority: The narrative space of the strong opinions allows no other voices other than that of JC; it allows for no possibility of affective. 26.

(37) exposure. These strong opinions assume the form of philosophical propositions, as if the enclosed and totalized space of these strong opinions were impervious to the personal narratives running along with them. In the well-secluded narrative space of the opinions, Anya seems to be excluded altogether. She types the transcript for JC, yet she gets no sense of meaning from what she types. She participates in the production of opinions by being excluded from them. Simon Critchely writes about “clotural reading” in his discussion of deconstruction’s trembling of ontology in The Ethics of Deconstruction. “Clotural reading” is characterized by two moments: the first designates “commentary,” while the second is the “moment of alterity” that “opens up within the text which allows it to deliver itself up to a wholly other reading” (89). In Diary, Coetzee invites us to unread the text—to read against the aim of “intelligibility” and “consensus.” The jealously guarded authority of the strong opinions evaporates as they are constantly revised, parodied, and even made of fun by Anya. As JC also admits himself, writing has other meaning that is “quite different from what the lexicon says, where the metaphoric spark is always one jump ahead of the decoding function, where another, unforeseen reading is always possible” (23). This “wholly other reading” constitutes an act of unreading that reads the ellipses and the traces in an ethical response to the call of the other. Unreadability is the possibility of opening and reinvention, and in the following section I will explore the possibility emanating from the unreading of this impossible text.. Unreadability of Diary of a Bad Year Diary of a Bad Year is an unreadable text. To say it is unreadable, however,. 27.

(38) does not mean to see it as a failed work, or to treat it in a purely negative way. To read Diary as an unreadable text is to recognize it as a text that is irreducible to the philosophical mode of questioning. The negative is the enabling condition in which something affirmative is sought in reading this impossible text. The positive force in the unreadibility of Diary manifests in the suspension of the norms of reading; it demands an impossible reading, another (an other) way of reading other than the onto-epistemological imposition of meaning. In the encounter with Diary, one has the right to read it, but one is simultaneously denied the authority to read and to conclude with a pre-given and determinable meaning. When we encounter a text, we tend to determine its identity and unity by ensuring its boundaries and limits (Derrida, “Before the Law” 183, 184). All possible readings are grounded in the categorical and imperative mode of reading that would treat a text as verification or justification of the ontological Said. Such a reading, in the form of commentary, is a norm-guided reading and follows the “deterministic” law (Diary 97) because it coincides the beginning with the end and proves the preconceived proposition: The act of reading is conditioned by the production of acceptable and legitimate interpretations. Such possible readings adhere to the readable within the textual boundaries and the authority of the author-subject with the dream of an adequate and exhaustive interpretation. To read in a pre-given way is to finish reading and enclose the text within ontological boundaries. Yet, we are denied the comfort of such assurance of meaning in the encounter with Diary, a text that can be described as “infinitely open, cryptic and parodic” (Derrida, Spurs 137). An ethical reading would be a reading “before” the law, before. 28.

(39) a certain ontology turns into an enterprise of monopoly and totalizes the order of actuality. In writing, we find rhetorics, paradoxes, and the undecidable that resist interpretive exhaustion and tremble the edifice of ontology. The singularity of Diary “cannot be assimilated into any overarching explanatory conceptual schema” (Critchley, “Derrida: The Reader” 2) and involves the unreadable: Topographically, its three-tiered structure frustrates any attempt to read in a conventional and coherent way; the crisscrossing of the three narrative voices upsets the reader in identifying the authority in the narrative; the confusion between the genres of fiction, “strong” and “soft” opinions, diaries, and reflections causes the difficulty of categorization; the paralleling of the soft and strong opinions results in the constant. parodying. and. even. revision. of. the. strong. opinions.. The. unreadable—topographically, narratively, and generically—witnesses the force of the disruptive and strange logic of différance, the deferral of meaning. The unreadable attends to the experience of the impossible, to the traces of those denied presence in the ontological order of actuality. The unreadable reads what remains to be read. Paradoxically, the unreadability of Diary inaugurates its reading. As Derrida writes, “[u]nreadibility does not arrest reading, does not leave it paralyzed in the face of opaque surface: rather, it starts reading and writing and translation moving again” (“Living On” 116). The primary task for us in the encounter with an unreadable text like Diary is how not to read it, that is, how to do justice to a text full of aporias by refraining from applying presuppositions and universally applicable meaning onto it. Paul Patton describes Diary as “a paradoxical book” in many ways, “a book containing many paradoxes and aporias” (“Coetzee’s Opinions” 53). To do justice to this. 29.

(40) unreadable text is not to resolve the textual inconsistency and aporias dialectically; instead, as Derrida alerts us, the experience of aporia “gives or promises the thinking of the path, provokes the thinking of the very possibility of what still remains unthinkable or unthought, indeed, impossible” (Memories for Paul de Man 132). Each time, an aporetic text calls for an unconditional reading that intervenes in the determinations that structure the act of reading in each given context. Diary demands the reader to expose him- or herself to the force of the text, to the excess of the literary event that frustrates any act of reading that attempts to achieve consensus in commentary. In this sense the (non)reading is never proper reading and remains a reading to come. In Diary, the reading to come begins at the place where narrative stumbles, through the trajectory that transgresses narrative unity and coherence, and never arrives at telos. This act of unreading Diary undecides the meaning through the disruption and suspension of established norms, programs, conventions and moral codes. As Nicholas Royle explains, “To encounter the unreadable is not to bring reading to an end, but rather to acknowledge the demand that reading cannot stop, that reading begins again, that reading always and necessarily belongs to another time” (161). One way to unread Diary is to attend to the moment “before the law,” before the institutionalization of authority and ontology, in which the modality of the “as-if” undecides meaning, and this moment “before the law” would give promise and bear the potentiality to displace the reified worldview. The literary “as-if” envisions a world “not beyond the world, but neither is it the world itself” (Blanchot, The Work of Fire 328). Diary, as a text that engages with the world yet without the world, is tied to the ontological order of actuality, and it bears the. 30.

(41) potentiality to loosen the structures that reify the world. It is a text that thinks both the same and difference: how the same is prevented from forming totality in itself by the presence of the other. In a world in which “the social apparatus has become so hardened that what lies before them as a means of possible fulfillment presents itself as radically impossible,” a non-reading of Diary could constitute an ethical promise to reconfigure the world, to envision a world in which “things could have been different” (Adorno. qtd. in De, La Durantaye, Leland. 6). Literary Potentiality: The “As-If” Coetzee describes literary potentiality as the possibility “to rediscover fiction’s capacity to reconfigure the rules of discourse, to find a position outside current power relations from which to speak” (Doubling the Point 9), which comes close to Derrida’s idea that “[T]he work, the opus, does not belong to the field[;] it is the transformer of the field” (“Before the Law” 215). Coetzee’s description of literary potentiality, in the first place, confirms writing’s critical engagement with the order of actuality, in defiance of the view that literary writing is fundamentally escapist and fictionalist, detached from the world itself. In the second place, it affirms the ethical promise of writing to deontologize, and thus potentialize the ontological order of actuality in the welcome of the other and others who are denied their presence in the order of presence. While social discourse has been dominated mainly by the two powerful and dominant discourses of history and politics in their construction of a hegemonic order of actuality, Coetzee reserves the possibility of change for literary writing.3 3. The historical and political discourses put emphasis on the referential and mimetic aspect of language, upon which the articulation of meaning depends, and the stability of the production of meaning has empowered them to construct a hegemonic worldview. Yet, the hegemony of the 31.

(42) Literary potentiality is seen in “the fold of undecidability that allows all the values to be inverted” and to be reinvented (Derrida, Given Time 54). Potentiality names the force of the unrealized and the experience of the impossible. As conceived by Giorgio Agamben,4 potentiality is synonymous with impotentiality, that is, the potentiality not to. The relation between potentiality and impotentiality is not one of dialectical synthesization: Impotentiality is not the negative counterpart or the absence of potentiality. Instead, impotentiality is potentiality in the form of active withdrawal from the act; it is “potential to not-do, potential not to pass into actuality” (Agamben, Potentialities 180). Agamben further explains: “To be potential means: to be on one’s own lack, to be in relation to one’s own incapacity” (ibid 182). Potentiality is potentiality as such—Potentiality preserves itself in its own impotentiality, not to be appropriated by and actualized in the order of the same. In Agamben’s thinking, potentiality gives rise to “decreation”: “something that brings the contingent—‘what could have been but was not’—into view” (De la Durantaye 23). Agamben renders the division between what is and what could have been indifferent: “The creation that is not fulfilled is neither a re-creation nor an eternal repetition; it is, rather, a decreation in which what happened and what did not happen are returned to their originary unity in the mind of God, while what could have not been but was becomes indistinguishable from what could have. worldview is threatened by the literary discourse, embedded in which is the force of ambivalence. Daniel Just writes, “literary language is forever suspended between the referential and the figural” (1), and we can well imagine that while the referential is the source of the stability of meaning, the figural disrupts that stability. 4 I am aware of the differences between Agamben’s overall project that engages sovereignty and Homo Sacer and Derrida’s deconstruction project, and I attempt no reconciliation of the two thinkers’ differences. In their respective discussion of im/potentiality (Agamben) and the impossible (Derrida), I register the idea of something that is irreducible to the ontological order: Derrida names it the trace, while Agamben calls it the remnant. 32.

(43) been but was not” (Potentialities 270). To decreate does not mean to destroy, to nullify what has been created; to decreate is to restore events to their originary potentiality, to their contingency. The contingent refers to the modality in which a being can both be and not be (ibid 261), freed from teleology and the logic of causality. It is as if everything were possible: ontology, politics, and history are crisscrossed with other ontology (ontological worldview is not absolute, unique, irreplaceable), other politics (political realism is an illusion), and other histories (objectivity and linearity in history narrative are a myth). In this sense, things could have been different, events could have turned out differently, and the ontological order of actuality could have been structured in a different way. To decreate the world means that “the actual world is led back to its right not to be; all possible worlds are led back to their right to existence” (ibid 271). To be or not to be, that is the question: existence verges on contingency, and beings are “in relation to their own non-Being” (Agamben, Potentialities 182). The possibility is reserved for that which is not realized to be realized, as Van der Heiden states in plain language, “[W]hat is, can also not be, and what is not, can also be” (21). Thus, when we think of potentiality, we also think of impotentiality; when we talk about knowledge, vision, ontology and totality, we should also include ignorance, darkness, exteriority and infinity in the discussion. Literary potentiality names the “potentiality-of-being-otherwise” (van der Heiden 21). Against the will of ontology to stabilize, we see a constant rethinking, realignment, and recalibration of the subject, border, and self-other relation as writing both recedes from and exceeds the ontological worldview and speaks to the incommensurable, the fortuitous, and the undecidable. Through literary intervention, we find that. 33.

(44) ontology is founded on its deconstruction, thus open to the possibility of re-inscription. The exceptional three-tier layout and the juxtaposition of the diverse narrative voices on any single page in Diary give us much to think the possibility of re-ordering the paradigm. This unique writing technique is not new, as Eric Paul Meljac informs us that both Gabriel Josipovici’s 1974 short story “Mobius the Stripper” and Coetzee’s Diary “employ horizontal bars to separate different veins of narrative” (92). The juxtaposition of multiple narrative voices in one single page is not simply an antidote to monologism in terms of an articulation of the Bakhtinian polyvocality of narrative voices. We have to go beyond the simple interpretation of dialogism. More urgently, this exceptional structure addresses the questions of form, authority, boundary and ontological paradigm. The “horizontal lines” that separate the different narratives act as “thresholds” (Meljac 96), that is, the space of both connection and separation that differentiate the different narratives and yet invite permeability among them. The threshold designates the impossibility of marking a stable territory, leading to the result that the strong opinions are always tempered with by the soft opinions and personal narratives. For instance, it is hardly possible to resist the temptation to read across the border, to read JC’s hard opinion along with Anya’s reflections marked by intuitive touch. When JC ruminates in abstraction on Al Qaida, guiding system, terrorism, or democracy, Anya says, “I try to tell him to give it[politics] up. . . . He could write about cricket, for example” (26) because she knows that “[t]he kind of writing you do doesn’t work with politics” (35). While JC drives for the pure political reasoning, Anya’s reflection keeps haunting his metaphysical rumination with the message that politics is not. 34.