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OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi
BEYOND THE ANCIENT QUARREL

Beyond the Ancient

Quarrel
Literature, Philosophy, and J. M. Coetzee
Edited by
PATRICK HAYES
and
JAN WILM
1
3
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP,
United Kingdom
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford.
It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship,
and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of
Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries
© the several contributors 2017
Harry Ransom Center
The University of Texas at Austin
The moral rights of the authors have been asserted
First Edition published in 2017
Impression: 1
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the
prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted
by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics
rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the
above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the
address above
You must not circulate this work in any other form
and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press
198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Data available
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017941745
ISBN 978–0–19–880528–1
Printed in Great Britain by
Clays Ltd, St Ives plc
Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and
for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials
contained in any third party website referenced in this work.
Acknowledgements
This book emerged from a symposium held at the Research Centre at St John’s
College, Oxford, in June 2015, where initial drafts of the various chapters were
discussed in a small-group workshop format. The discussions we had on that
occasion created an absorbing dialogue between different ways of thinking about
literature, which did much to shape both the structure and contents of this book.
We wish to extend our gratitude to all those who attended for making the
symposium the lively and productive event that it was.
The John Fell Fund, the St John’s College Research Centre, and the Vereinigung
der Freunde und Förderer der Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany, provided
essential financial support that enabled the symposium to take place.
We especially wish to thank J. M. Coetzee for granting permission to quote from
his papers, held at the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin.
Thanks also to Rick Watson for all his assistance. References to the location of
specific quotations from the Coetzee Papers are provided in footnotes throughout
the book.
We are grateful to Silja Glitscher for providing editorial assistance during the
work on this volume.
Contents
List of Contributors ix
1. Ancient Quarrels, Modern Contexts: An Introduction 1

Patrick Hayes and Jan Wilm
I. UNSET T L ING BO UN D AR IE S: P HILOSOPHY ,

L I T E R AT UR E , A ND L I T E R AR Y C RI T I C I SM
2. Health and Deviance, Irony and Incarnation: Embedding and
Embodying Philosophy in Literature and Theology in
The Childhood of Jesus 17
Stephen Mulhall
3. Attuning Philosophy and Literary Criticism: A Response to In the
Heart of the Country 35
Maximilian de Gaynesford
4. Double Thoughts: Coetzee and the Philosophy of Literary Criticism 52
Andrew Dean
5. ‘Good paragraphing. Unusual content’: On the Making and
Unmaking of Novelistic Worlds 70
Julika Griem
I I . E T H I C S A N D MO R A L P H I L O S O P H Y
6. ‘A Yes without a No’: Philosophical Reason and the Ethics of
Conversion in Coetzee’s Fiction 91
Derek Attridge
7. Coetzee and Eros: A Critique of Moral Philosophy 107
Eileen John
I I I . R E A L I T Y , L A N G U A G E , A N D S U B J E C T IV I T Y
8. Coetzee’s Quest for Reality 125
Alice Crary
9. Beyond Realism: Coetzee’s Post-Secular Imagination 143
Martin Woessner
10. Coetzee’s Critique of Language 160
Peter D. McDonald
viii Contents
11. Coetzee and Psychoanalysis: From Paranoia to Aporia 180

Jean-Michel Rabaté
IV. C ONTEXTS A ND IN STITUTIO NS

12. ‘Wisselbare Woorde’: J. M. Coetzee and Postcolonial Philosophy 199
Carrol Clarkson
13. The J. M. Coetzee Archive and the Archive in J. M. Coetzee 215
Jan Wilm
Bibliography 233
Index 247
List of Contributors
Derek Attridge is the author of J. M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading: Literature in the
Event (The University of Chicago Press, 2004) and several essays on Coetzee. Among his
other books are The Singularity of Literature (Routledge, 2004) and The Work of Literature
(Oxford, 2015), and the co-edited volumes Writing South Africa: Literature, Apartheid, and
Democracy, 1970–1995 (Cambridge University Press, 1998), The Cambridge History of
South African Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2012), and Zoë Wicomb and the
Translocal: Writing Scotland and South Africa (Routledge, 2017). He is Emeritus Professor at
the University of York and a Fellow of the British Academy.
Carrol Clarkson has published widely on aesthetics, legal theory, and South African
literature and art. Her books include J. M. Coetzee: Countervoices (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009;
2nd edition 2013) and Drawing the Line: Toward an Aesthetics of Transitional Justice
(Fordham University Press, 2014). She is Professor and Chair of Modern English Literature
at the University of Amsterdam, and has a research affiliation with the Amsterdam School for
Cultural Analysis. She is an Honorary Research Associate at the University of Cape Town.
Alice Crary is Chair of Philosophy at the New School for Social Research. She writes and
publishes on issues related to moral philosophy, philosophy and literature, Wittgenstein,
J. L. Austin, feminism and philosophy, philosophy and animals, philosophy of mind/
language, and philosophy and cognitive disability. Her publications include Inside Ethics:
On the Demands of Moral Thought (Harvard University Press, 2016), Beyond Moral Judg-
ment (Harvard University Press, 2007), the edited collection Wittgenstein and the Moral Life:
Essays in Honor of Cora Diamond (MIT Press, 2007), and two co-edited collections, Reading
Cavell (Routledge, 2006) and The New Wittgenstein (Routledge, 2000).
Andrew Dean recently completed his DPhil at the University of Oxford. His thesis examined
postwar metafiction and life-writing, focusing on authors Philip Roth, Janet Frame, and
J. M. Coetzee—several chapters related to the thesis are forthcoming. He is a New Zealand
Rhodes Scholar and the author of a short popular book on the effect of the economic reform
period in New Zealand: Ruth, Roger and Me: Debts and Legacies (BWB, 2015).
Maximilian de Gaynesford is Professor of Philosophy and Head of Department at the
University of Reading. Formerly a Fellow of Lincoln College, Oxford, he is the author of
several books, including The Rift in the Lute: Attuning Poetry and Philosophy (Oxford
University Press, 2017) and I: The Meaning of the First Person Term (Oxford University
Press, 2006), and of articles on aesthetics, philosophical logic, the philosophy of mind, and
language and ethics.
Julika Griem is Professor of English Literature at Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany.
She has published on narrative theory, intermediality, the two cultures, genre theory, and
literature and space; her publications include books on Joseph Conrad, apes and monkeys as
figures of aesthetic and anthropological reflection between 1800 and 2000, and the intrinsic
logic of cities. Her current research projects are concerned with the Scottish author John
Burnside, figurations of the whole, philological economies of scale, and methodologies of
contemporary literature research. A further interest is dedicated to forms and styles of
science policy and the humanities’ contributions to academic institution building.
x List of Contributors
Patrick Hayes is Associate Professor of English Literature at Oxford University, and a
Fellow of St John’s College. His research focuses on debates about the nature and value of
literature, from the Romantic period to the present day. He is the author of J. M. Coetzee
and the Novel: Writing and Politics after Beckett (Oxford University Press, 2010) and Philip
Roth: Fiction and Power (Oxford University Press, 2014). He is currently working on a
history of life-writing in the period after 1945.
Eileen John is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Warwick. Her research
is in aesthetics, with particular interests in art’s ethical and cognitive roles and in the
relations between literature and philosophy. She co-edited Blackwell’s Philosophy of Litera-
ture anthology and is Co-Director of the Centre for Research in Philosophy, Literature and
the Arts, University of Warwick.
Peter D. McDonald is Professor of English and Related Literature at the University of
Oxford and a Fellow of St Hugh’s College. He writes on literature, the modern state, and
the freedom of expression; the history of writing systems, cultural institutions, and pub-
lishing; multilingualism, translation, and interculturality; and on the limits of literary
criticism. His main publications include British Literary Culture and Publishing Practice,
1888–1914 (Cambridge University Press, 1997), The Literature Police: Apartheid Censorship
and its Cultural Consequences (Oxford University Press, 2009), and Artefacts of Writing: Ideas
of the State and Communities of Letters from Matthew Arnold to Xu Bing (Oxford University
Press, 2017).
Stephen Mulhall is Professor of Philosophy and Tutorial Fellow at New College, University
of Oxford. His research interests include Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and Nietzsche; philoso-
phy and religion; and philosophy and the arts. His publications include The Wounded
Animal: J. M.Coetzee and the Difficulty of Reality in Literature and Philosophy (Princeton
University Press, 2009), The Self and Its Shadows: A Book of Essays on Individuality as
Negation in Philosophy and the Arts (Oxford University Press, 2013), and The Great Riddle:
Wittgenstein and Nonsense, Theology and Philosophy (Oxford University Press, 2015).
Jean-Michel Rabaté is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of
Pennsylvania. He is one of the editors of the Journal of Modern Literature, a co-founder and
senior curator of Slought Foundation, Philadelphia (slought.org), and a fellow of the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Recent publications include The Pathos of Distance
(Bloomsbury, 2016), Think, Pig ! (Fordham University Press, 2016), and Les Guerres de
Jacques Derrrida (Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 2016).
Jan Wilm is Lecturer in English Literature at Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany. He
is the author of The Slow Philosophy of J. M. Coetzee (Bloomsbury Academic, 2016) and
co-editor (with Mark Nixon) of a volume on Samuel Beckett and German Literature, Samuel
Beckett und die deutsche Literatur (Transcript, 2013). He is currently writing a book on the
aesthetics of snow and preparing a volume of essays on the German writer Michael Lentz.
He also works as a literary translator, having translated work by Maggie Nelson and Andrew
O’Hagan into German, and as a book reviewer for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and
the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, among others.
Martin Woessner is Associate Professor of History and Society at The City College of New
York’s Center for Worker Education, where he teaches courses in intellectual and cultural
history at both graduate and undergraduate level. He is the author of Heidegger in America
(Cambridge University Press, 2011). His essays and reviews have appeared in La Maleta
de Portbou, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and Raritan.
1
Ancient Quarrels, Modern Contexts
An Introduction
Patrick Hayes and Jan Wilm
From Dusklands (1974) onwards, J. M. Coetzee’s fiction has been richly allusive
to philosophical idioms and traditions, and his most recent work has staged
philosophical questions in increasingly explicit ways. The texts that feature the
character Elizabeth Costello (The Lives of Animals [1999], Elizabeth Costello [2002],
and Slow Man [2005]), the volumes of correspondence with Paul Auster (2013)
and Arabella Kurtz (2015), together with his latest novels The Childhood of Jesus
(2013) and The Schooldays of Jesus (2016), all engage in overt ways with philosoph-
ical arguments about, among other things, the nature of justice, reason, subjective
experience, the good life, and the good society. There has been some remarkable
scholarship that reflects upon Coetzee’s engagement with philosophy, from Derek
Attridge’s work on Coetzee and ethics ( J. M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading
[2004]), to Stephen Mulhall’s study of how Coetzee’s ‘modernist realism’ engages
with philosophical ideas (The Wounded Animal [2009]). But so far no study has
succeeded either in gathering together the range of questions about literature and
philosophy that Coetzee’s fiction provokes, or in examining what is really at stake in
the kinds of thinking that his oeuvre stimulates.
The closest thing to such a study is the collection of essays assembled by the
philosophers Anton Leist and Peter Singer, J. M. Coetzee and Ethics: Philosophical
Perspectives on Literature (2010). This collection brought together a range of
philosophers, mainly from the analytic tradition, to reflect on different aspects of
Coetzee’s work from the perspective of moral philosophy, with a particular focus on
animal rights. While this volume includes some extremely good work, it was
constrained by some key assumptions. Most strikingly, it tended to downplay the
extent to which Coetzee’s writing obliges us to reflect upon what Socrates was
already calling, in The Republic, the ‘ancient quarrel’ between literature and
philosophy.1 Many essays tended to speak about literature and philosophy as if
1 Plato, Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1997),
p. 1211. It suits Socrates to refer to the quarrel that he is starting between literature and philosophy as
‘ancient’, and the evidence he produces of its history is actually very slight: ‘But in case we are charged
with a certain harshness and lack of sophistication, let’s also tell poetry that there is an ancient quarrel
between it and philosophy, which is evidenced by such expressions as “the dog yelping and shrieking at
its master,” “great is the empty eloquence of fools,” “the mob of wise men that has mastered Zeus,” and
“the subtle thinkers, beggars all.” ’
2 Patrick Hayes and Jan Wilm
they were self-evidently distinct forms of discourse, both in their nature and their
functions. Moreover, the editors of the collection approached Coetzee’s work with
the implicit sense of a disciplinary hierarchy. The very subtitle of the collection,
Philosophical Perspectives on Literature, positioned literature as the passive object of
knowledge which philosophy would illuminate, or which philosophy would use as
incidental material for the purposes of a philosophical argument. These assump-
tions tended to close down the possibility that literature might itself pose questions
about the value of philosophical reasoning, or that it might offer a disparate or even
rival form of thinking in its own terms.
Perhaps because of these assumptions, Leist and Singer limited the range of
implication that Coetzee’s work carries to very specific fields of philosophical
inquiry, and to a narrow concept of utility-to-philosophy. Coetzee’s writing is
most likely to be useful, they implied, to those who are engaged in the specific
field of ethics, and especially applied ethics. One aim of the present collection is
therefore to let Coetzee’s fiction speak to a broader range of philosophical ques-
tions, and thereby represent the nature and value of his writing more adequately.
It takes the discussion of Coetzee and philosophy into new terrain by allowing his
work to resonate beyond the realm of moral philosophy—without neglecting this
key preoccupation of Coetzee’s work—into other kinds of philosophical inquiry.
It includes chapters on Coetzee’s relationship with, and impact upon, a diverse
range of philosophical subjects, including the philosophy of action, the philosophy
of language, the concept of rationality, questions about the nature of reality, and
a distinct engagement with questions about aesthetics. It also opens out onto
broader themes that intersect with philosophical inquiry, including education,
theology, psychoanalysis, and post-secularism. Broadening out from subject-
specific areas, the present collection also explores the institutional environments
that have mattered most for Coetzee’s engagement with philosophy, such as the
status of his archive, and the philosophical legacies at stake in the resistance politics
of his native South Africa.
But as well as enlarging the parameters through which Coetzee’s fiction might be
addressed, the deeper aim of this book is to examine the ways in which Coetzee
invites us to reopen longstanding questions about the boundaries between litera-
ture, literary criticism, and philosophy. It is to ask how these different forms of
discourse might be able to engage each other—though in a way that does not ignore
their considerable differences, and the often disparate kinds of thinking they
engage and demand. In short, our aim was to treat the assumptions that limited
J. M. Coetzee and Ethics very much as open questions that Coetzee’s fiction helps us
to explore. Are we sure we know what literature and philosophy actually are, how
they can be defined and delimited, both in their ‘essence’ and from a disciplinary
perspective? That is to say, are there forms of thinking that are truly specific to the
one and necessarily excluded from the other? As Karl Ameriks has pointed out,
[T]he very notion of a sharp distinction of the philosophical and the non-philosophical
is itself the result of a fairly recent phenomenon. Prior to Kant, none of the truly great
modern philosophers had lived the life of a philosophy professor—not Descartes, not
Ancient Quarrels, Modern Contexts 3

Leibniz, not Hume. Conversely, the early romantics all studied philosophy closely, and
most of them showed serious interest in an academic career in philosophy.2
Likewise, in his lectures on the cross-currents between literature and philosophy,
Philosophien der Literatur (2013), Friedrich Kittler notes that while there ‘is no
doubt that many languages on this earth have brought forth literature and that
today there exists literature in nearly all languages’, he questions whether philoso-
phy has been equally ubiquitous. Kittler historicizes the ways in which ancient
Greece gave rise to philosophy, and emphasizes that a culture of writing, poetry,
and music has played a key part in the shaping of what is called philosophy,
suggesting that there existed and continues to exist a fruitful interaction and a
cross-fertilization between these different forms of discourse.3 What, then, are the
intellectual commitments that create disciplinary boundaries between literature and
philosophy, or between philosophy and literary criticism? And what is the value of a
body of writing such as Coetzee’s that invites us to question those boundaries?
* * *
There are many reasons why Coetzee’s fiction is particularly interesting to think
about in relation to these questions. One of the most significant is the fact that, just
as none of the great philosophers prior to Kant lived the life of a professional
philosopher, neither has Coetzee exactly lived the life of a professional writer, at
least as such a life is conventionally understood. He has been a writer-cum-
academic, a ‘fictioneer’, as he has described himself, who has also published very
considerable academic monographs on the history and theory of literature. He has
co-taught seminars alongside philosophers at the University of Chicago, and has
developed longstanding friendships with leading philosophers, such as Raimond
Gaita, Robert B. Pippin, and André du Toit.
In fact Coetzee’s interdisciplinary interests are considerably more diverse than
this brief summary suggests. He graduated from the University of Cape Town
(UCT) in 1961 with honours in both English and Mathematics, and initially it was
unclear what direction he would pursue. He moved to London in December 1961,
where he wrote his Master’s thesis on the fiction of Ford Madox Ford, while
at the same time embarking upon a career as a computer programmer at
IBM. There, he used his training in mathematics to run data tests for private
clients on their new ‘mainframe’ computers; in his spare hours he ‘[e]xperiment[ed]
with computer-generated poetry’.4 His interest in mathematics would resurface
throughout his life, increasingly with regard to the philosophy of numbers. In
2 Karl Ameriks, ‘Introduction: Interpreting German Idealism’, in The Cambridge Companion to German
Idealism, ed. Karl Ameriks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 1–17; 12.
3 Friedrich Kittler, Philosophien der Literatur (Berlin: Merve Verlag, 2013), p. 10 (our translation).
4 David Attwell, J. M. Coetzee and the Life of Writing: Face to Face with Time (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2015), p. 12. See also J. C. Kannemeyer, J. M. Coetzee: A Life in Writing,
trans. Michiel Heyns (Johannesburg/Cape Town: Jonathan Ball Publishers, 2012), pp. 121–5.
Also, see Coetzee’s treatment of this in his fictionalized autobiography Youth (London: Secker &
Warburg, 2002), pp. 160–1.
The Childhood of Jesus and The Schooldays of Jesus, the character known as David (in
Childhood) and Davíd (in Schooldays) finds it first impossible to learn conventional
counting routines, and then learns to dance ‘the numbers down from where they
live among the aloof stars’; in Here and Now, his exchange of letters with Paul
Auster, Coetzee engages a critique of mathematical conventions in his own voice.5
As Alice Crary shows in her chapter in this collection, Coetzee’s early interest in
mathematics had developed by this stage into a complex reflection on arguments
about counting, learning, and the concept of a private language, that find their
classical expression in Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations.
So perhaps it was unsurprising that Coetzee didn’t last long at IBM. In Youth, a
text that is poised in an uncertain realm between fiction and autobiography (a mode
that Coetzee has elsewhere described as ‘autrebiography’), the character known as
‘John’ is appalled to discover that, far from using mathematics in the disinterested
pursuit of knowledge, he is being required by the men in grey suits to run data tests
for a nuclear weapons manufacturer.6 One symptom, perhaps, of his growing
alienation from corporate life was an increasing devotion to the fiction of Samuel
Beckett, and Coetzee’s next move was to the University of Texas at Austin, where
he would write his doctorate on Beckett’s English fiction.
This doctorate was a most unusual piece of work. It was completed in 1969, at a
time when English studies in America was still dominated by an approach known
as the New Criticism. Concerned to establish literary criticism as a respectable
discipline in its own right, the New Critics (a group that encompassed a diverse
range of intellectuals, from John Crowe Ransom to Cleanth Brooks) had stressed
the autonomy of the literary text, and strived to make literary interpretation into a
teachable art. Only the properly initiated could generate the superfine attention to
stylistic qualities such as paradox, irony, and ambiguity, and appreciate how the text
was thereby woven into an untranslatable expressive whole, that was demanded by
the professional critics. Coetzee never had any patience with this kind of literary
hermeticism. Years later, when teaching at UCT, he typed up a memorandum on
the related topic of Practical Criticism:
Practical Criticism is not a critical theory but a package designed to simplify and streamline
the preparation of large numbers of culturally semi-literate students for careers in school-
teaching. As a teaching package, it is modelled on a drastically oversimplified version of
human psychology. Designed with the limitations of the 45-minute tutorial in mind, it
fosters a skill in doing rapid explications of half-page texts with a tight semantic structure.
Since such texts are largely unrepresentative of the vast body of literature, the relevance of
Practical Criticism to literary criticism is smaller than one might be led to think.7
5J. M. Coetzee, The Schooldays of Jesus (London: Harvill Secker, 2016), p. 68.
6J. M. Coetzee, Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews, ed. David Attwell (Cambridge, MA/
London: Harvard University Press, 1992), p. 394.
7 Practical Criticism descends from the writings of I. A. Richards; while it was not identical with the
New Criticism, it was in many ways a precursor to it. The quotation is from a two-page memorandum
entitled ‘Practical Criticism at U[niversity of] C[ape] T[own]’, dated July 1977, in the J. M. Coetzee
Papers at the Harry Ransom Center, Container 113, Folder 4.
By contrast, Coetzee’s thesis was determinedly interdisciplinary. It was an attempt

to place literary interpretation on a stronger intellectual footing by integrating
criticism with statistical analysis. The method Coetzee engaged with was known
as ‘stylostatistics’, an approach pioneered by George Udny Yule and Wilhelm Fucks
to study language patterning in complex texts: Coetzee’s hope was that stylostatis-
tics could be integrated with more traditional forms of literary interpretation that
try to account for the wider meaningfulness of a text. However, with remarkable
honesty for a young man at the beginning of his career, Coetzee concluded that
stylostatistics was simply not as useful as he had hoped it would be ‘as a creative tool
of explication in single texts’. This was, he explained, due to the inability of a
method grounded in statistical analysis to account for the way in which the event of
reading is not a linear process, but involves the ‘incessant recursion’ of creating and
revising hypotheses about a text. In contrast to the inventiveness of the subjective
reader, stylostatistics ‘can only substantiate discoveries’, he concluded, and ‘never
initiate them’.8
While this was an unpromising conclusion for a doctoral thesis to have reached,
Coetzee’s distrust of seemingly obvious institutional assumptions was already
taking him in interesting directions. As it ground to a halt, Coetzee’s thesis opened
up a series of questions:
To what extent…are points of stylistic density functions of the work itself and to what
extent functions of our reading of it?…Should style be studied in its effects on the
reader, and thus in its expressive aspect, or in its objectively verifiable formal proper-
ties? If the former, where are we to draw the line beyond which criticism degenerates
into the subjective vagueness of ‘moods’ and ‘tones’? If the latter, how can we give
equal weight to properties which are perceptible to an intelligent reader and properties
which reveal themselves only under a grammatical or statistical microscope?9
Each of these questions turns on a deeper question about the nature of literature as
a form of discourse, and about the nature (and limits) of literary criticism. For
Coetzee, the question of what makes literature into literature (Is it an inherent
quality? Is it the desire of the reader or a convention of reading that frames the text
as literary?) is an entirely open one. It is equally unclear to him what literary
criticism is, or what it should be: he makes no assumptions on this front. In
Summertime (2009), the third instalment in his fictionalized autobiography,
those people thrown into relationships with the young ‘John’ tended to find him
a rather obtuse young man. But this obtuseness, which is certainly on display here
in his doctoral thesis, is not dissimilar to the obtuseness that so frustrates the parents
of young David (or Davíd) in the Jesus novels. His very inability to go along with
institutionalized roles and routines brings with it not only a certain level of
frustration and annoyance, but also a certain creative possibility.
8 J. M. Coetzee, ‘The English Fiction of Samuel Beckett: An Essay in Stylistic Analysis’, PhD thesis,
University of Texas at Austin, 1969, pp. 160–2.

9 Ibid., p. 153.
It was very much against his will that Coetzee ended up back in South Africa
teaching English at UCT, a position he held until he retired from academic life in
2001. His first job was as an assistant professor at the University of Buffalo in New
York state, then a thriving campus for literary studies, which featured such
luminaries as Robert Creeley and Leslie Fiedler on its staff. Buffalo had embraced
what Patrick Ffrench has called the ‘time of theory’, and it was here that Coetzee
was exposed to thinkers such as Michel Foucault and especially Roland Barthes—
an enduringly important influence—who moved freely between philosophical
reflection and literary analysis.10 He lost his American visa as a result of participat-
ing in a protest on campus, and arrived at UCT in 1971. At this time, along with
several other Commonwealth nations, the teaching of English literature in South
Africa was dominated by F. R. Leavis’s strongly moralistic approach to literary
criticism, which was actively hostile to more philosophical kinds of reflection on the
nature and value of literature. Leavis had insisted that the value of reading was to
increase our understanding of ‘felt life’, yet at the same time he strongly resisted any
attempt to define what that actually was, on the basis that to do so would be to fall
into the alienated form of philosophical reasoning that literature is (putatively)
there to save us from. Coetzee was uncomfortable with the inward-looking and,
he felt, intellectually lazy academic environment that this approach seemed to
permit.11 Even as UCT gradually reformed, opening itself to other ways of thinking
about literature, he tended to look elsewhere for intellectual companionship, which
he eventually found in the Committee for Social Thought (CST) at the University
of Chicago. The emphasis of this institution on thinking across disciplinary
borderlines was very congenial to Coetzee, and in the 1990s he began a long-
standing connection with the Committee, teaching courses on his own as well as
together with the philosopher Jonathan Lear. As David Attwell points out, with
Lear Coetzee ‘taught comparative literature on congenial terms—an entire semester
on autobiography, or Tolstoy, or Proust; in these examples, themes and authors
that were relevant to the writing he was pursuing at the time, especially the
autobiographies’.12 J. C. Kannemeyer notes in his biography that the seminars
organized by Coetzee and Lear tended to take the form of ‘relaxed Socratic
conversations on a common topic with students’.13
Coetzee’s visits to Chicago continued until 2003, and in the fall term of 1996 he
taught a course titled ‘Realism in the Novel’. The course encompassed readings of
Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary and Ivan Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons, alongside
Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote and James Joyce’s Ulysses. For the course,
Coetzee had prepared a lecture titled ‘Retrospect’, which he begins by referring
explicitly to the ‘ancient quarrel’ between literature and philosophy as it relates
to realism:
10 Patrick Ffrench, The Time of Theory: A History of Tel Quel 1960–1983 (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1995).

11 See Kannemeyer, J. M. Coetzee: A Life in Writing, pp. 227, 366.
12 Attwell, J. M. Coetzee and the Life of Writing, p. 212.
13 Kannemeyer, J. M. Coetzee: A Life in Writing, p. 482.

You will have noticed that both Plato and Aristotle take it as a basic assumption that
art is a matter of imitation (mimesis) of something that pre-exists. To Plato it is
inconceivable that art can bring into existence something that never existed before.
That is why Plato does not see any point to it. If you want to learn about honour and
truthfulness and bravery, study them philosophically, or at least learn about them via
people who exhibit them. Why bother to go to fictional representations of people
who exhibit them? The various critics of Don Quixote agree; if there are no real
heroes around, go to well-attested records of heroes, that is, to the historical record.
(The historical record? says Quixote?—And that’s not a representation?)14
As Coetzee continues, Don Quixote emerges even more powerfully as a counter-
weight to Plato and Aristotle:
I have been presenting Don Quixote to you not so much as an exemplary realist text…
as a book in which the philosophical question of realism is approached in a fictional
medium. In other words, fiction does not yield to philosophy by saying that philo-
sophical questions can be approached in the discourse of philosophy.15
While it is clear that Coetzee’s sympathies lie firmly with the man from La Mancha,
his academic teaching reflects the interest in thinking across disciplinary boundaries
that his fiction also pursues, albeit in different ways.
While Coetzee is of course not unique in the postwar period for combining his
activities as a writer with a career as an academic, most writers involved with the
academy have tended to offer courses in creative writing instruction rather than
courses that stray onto the terrain of literary theory and philosophy. As Andrew
Dean argues in Chapter 4, Coetzee is unusual for the extent to which he has
interweaved his interests as a writer and as a literary theorist, cross-fertilizing the
one from the other. Dean’s chapter explores Coetzee’s inaugural professorial lecture
at UCT, Truth in Autobiography (1985), which Coetzee would later pinpoint as
‘the beginning of a more broadly philosophical engagement with a situation in the
world’.16 This lecture followed the pattern of his doctoral thesis by obtusely ques-
tioning, rather than accepting and exploiting, longstanding institutionalized assump-
tions about the nature and value of literary criticism—which was, as he takes care to
observe in the lecture, precisely the form of writing he was being paid increasingly
large sums of money to do. Coetzee used the occasion of his inauguration to criticize
the assumption that literary criticism can reveal truths about literature to which
literary texts are themselves blind. What, he asks, are the blind-spots of literary
criticism? What are the forms of desire (for power? for moral superiority?) that it
must hide behind a mask of objectivity in order to survive, to keep its self-respect?
Like Coetzee’s doctoral thesis, this lecture was therefore curiously self-undermining.
But, as Dean points out, it also inaugurated Coetzee’s longstanding and increasingly
overt interest in destabilizing the boundaries of literature, literary criticism, and philosophy.
This interest would be developed in Foe (1986), a text that moves between fiction and
14 Harry Ransom Center, J. M. Coetzee Papers, Container 114, Folder 10. ‘ “Seminars taught
abroad”, materials for courses taught at University of Chicago, University at Buffalo, Harvard, and
University of Texas at Austin, 1984–2002’, ‘REAL-3. LEC’.
15 Ibid. 16 Doubling the Point, p. 394.
literary criticism, the ‘lessons’ of Elizabeth Costello (2001), which move between
fiction and philosophy, and Diary of a Bad Year (2007), where essays on moral
philosophy (among other things) are joined with fiction and autobiography.
No small part of what makes Coetzee such an interesting figure to think about in
relation to the ‘ancient quarrel’ is therefore the ambivalent way in which he situated
himself in the academy, and the attunement to philosophical debates about the
nature and value of literature that this ambivalent situation afforded. But it is by no
means the only factor. As Carrol Clarkson (Chapter 12) shows, Coetzee was very
profoundly marked by the way he was positioned as a white male in apartheid
South Africa. Clarkson draws attention to the ways in which Coetzee responded to
the Black Consciousness movement of the 1970s and early 1980s, a movement
which (as she points out) took its philosophical bearings from Frantz Fanon, and
especially Fanon’s reading of Jean-Paul Sartre. Its critique of moral universals, and
its attack on the notion of a normative human identity, were, Clarkson shows,
absorbed into the very structure of Coetzee’s early texts, especially In the Heart of
the Country (1977) and Waiting for the Barbarians (1980).
But the situation in South Africa was important in other ways too. During the
State of Emergency that was declared in the 1980s, there emerged a powerful
demand from within the white intelligentsia for writers to make themselves
morally and politically useful within the struggle against apartheid. The novelist
Nadine Gordimer took a particularly strong version of this position when she
reviewed Coetzee’s Life & Times of Michael K (1983), which she criticized for
lacking this kind of usefulness. At the time of writing Gordimer was taking
her literary bearings from the Hungarian Marxist philosopher Georg Lukács,
and the high valuation he placed on a form of storytelling that could illustrate
the development of historical progress in an allegorical way. Applying Lukács’s
Marxism to South Africa, Gordimer believed that what was needed were literary
texts that displayed the value of active and heroic black resistance to apartheid.
Judged by those standards, Coetzee’s enigmatic narrative about a man with a hare
lip who becomes a gardener, then nearly starves to death, seemed at best irrelevant.
‘No one in this novel has any sense of taking part in determining that course [of
history],’ Gordimer complained:
[N]o one is shown to believe he knows what that course should be. The sense is of the
ultimate malaise: of destruction. Not even the oppressor really believes in what he is
doing, anymore, let alone the revolutionary. This is a challengingly questionable
position for a writer to take up in South Africa, make no mistake about it. The
presentation of the truth and meaning of what white has done to black stands out
on every page, celebrating its writer’s superb, unafraid creative energy as it does;
yet it denies the energy of the will to resist evil. That this superb energy exists
with indefatigable and undefeatable persistence among the black people of South
Africa—Michael K’s people—is made evident, yes, heroically, every grinding day.
It is not present in the novel.17
17 Nadine Gordimer, “The Idea of Gardening”, Life & Times of Michael K, by J. M. Coetzee’,
review in New York Review of Books (2 Feb. 1984): pp. 3–6; 6.

It would have been possible for Coetzee to shrug off Gordimer’s review as merely a
misreading. Gordimer seems to assume that Michael K is being presented as an
exemplary hero of some kind, and she fails to register the text’s complex focaliza-
tion, which playfully disorients the genre of the exemplary life; she also misses out
on the many registers of irony and bathos that surround the protagonist. But in his
response, which came in a lecture entitled ‘The Novel Today’ (1986), Coetzee
chose to address the prevailing assumptions about literary value, which Gordimer’s
review represented most powerfully, in a way that invoked the whole history of the
‘ancient quarrel’ between literature and philosophy.
Fiercely rejecting the notion that literature should serve any cause other than the
cause of literature, in this lecture Coetzee made what he called an ‘argument about
supplementarity’. In times like the present, he claimed, the novel has only two
options: it can choose to be a useful supplement to ideas about the good, or it can
choose to occupy what he called ‘an autonomous place’, which he described as the
position of ‘rivalry’.18 Even though Coetzee was here dealing primarily with
questions about literature in its relationship with history and politics, the position
he marked as ‘supplementarity’ can be traced back to the more primary debates
about literature’s nature and value in Plato’s The Republic.
Here, as part of an attempt to distinguish literature from philosophy, Socrates
rejected what he called the ‘childish passion for poetry’, claiming that it is ‘not to be
taken seriously or treated as a serious undertaking with some kind of hold on the
truth’.19 Unlike philosophy, Socrates argued, literary representation is misleading:
it is at a third remove from the forms, a representation of a reality that is already
itself a representation, and it is therefore condemned to the realm of mere opinion,
rather than truth. He also claimed that, again unlike philosophy, poetry arouses
desire—eros—in a way that becomes tyrannical, because it is not properly regu-
lated. But as any reader of The Republic knows, Socrates’ claims are at the same time
ironically undercut by Plato. If rumours are to be believed, Plato himself started out
as a poet, and, of course, his Socratic dialogues are dramatic and narrative in
nature—indeed, Nietzsche thought of Plato as the first novelist.20 Socrates’ argu-
ments against literature are embodied in a dialogue, and The Republic is a text that
in certain ways reads like a novel. Equally, in other dialogues such as the Phaedrus
Socrates emerges as a very accomplished poet in his own right, and, as Eileen John
points out in her chapter in this collection (Chapter 7), he elsewhere makes a direct
connection between philosophical wisdom and the work of eros. It quickly becomes
apparent that even in The Republic, Socrates cannot in fact do away with the form
of discourse that has been marked out as ‘literature’. While his Philosopher Kings
must ascend from the cave, to which mere mortals are condemned, to witness the
light of truth, they must then descend back from the light into the cave, and
18 J. M. Coetzee, ‘The Novel Today’, Upstream 6, no. 1 (summer 1988): p. 2.

19 Plato, Complete Works, p. 1212.
20 For an elaboration of this point, see Hans-Georg Gadamer, ‘Plato and the Poets’, in Dialogue and
Dialectic: Eight Hermeneutical Studies on Plato, trans. Christopher Smith (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1980).
communicate the truth through representations. Philosophers, it would appear, are

thus always already in some sense poets: they must create the myths and metaphors
through which the good and the true can be narrated and understood. Socrates, it
turns out, does not therefore reject literature: he merely wishes to domesticate it.
Or, to return to the terms of Coetzee’s lecture, it might be said that Socrates wishes
to make literature into a useful supplement to philosophy: literature is a valuable
technê, as long as it is properly disciplined.
Descending from Plato is a long tradition of attempts by philosophers to follow
Socrates and make literature supplementary to philosophy. In the South Africa of
the 1980s, it was Lukács’s version of Marxism. In more recent Anglo-American
philosophy, the best-known example of this tendency is the philosopher Martha
Nussbaum. In a series of books (from Love’s Knowledge [1989] to Upheavals of
Thought: The Intelligence of the Emotions [2002]) Nussbaum has sought to demon-
strate how useful literature can be as a supplement to moral philosophy, most
especially through its capacity to put moral abstractions in touch with the particu-
larity of experience. In ‘The Novel Today’ Coetzee took up a position that can only
be described as an extreme rejection of this long tradition. He rejected the ‘novel of
supplementarity’ in the strongest possible terms as not merely a domestication but
an infantilization of literature: such a novel, he suggested, ‘operates in terms of the
procedures of history and eventuates in conclusions that are checkable by history
(as a child’s schoolwork is checked by a schoolmistress)’. By contrast, the novel of
rivalry ‘operates in terms of its own procedures and issues in its own conclusions…
evolves its own paradigms and myths, in the process (and here is the point at which
true rivalry, even enmity, enters the picture) perhaps even going so far as to show up
the mythic status of history—in other words, demythologising history’.21 Coetzee’s
audience was left in no doubt that if there is such a choice between supplementarity
or rivalry—between literature in service to philosophy, and literature in service to
itself, to its own autonomous mode of thinking—then he would choose rivalry. His
analogy for literature was the cockroach: a scavenger, a creature that keeps to itself
and does not do another’s business (unlike, say, a dog, which can be loyal and
obedient if it is properly domesticated).
Ultimately, what makes Coetzee such an interesting writer to think about
in relation to the ‘ancient quarrel’ is the extent to which his fiction registers and
explores this conflict between ‘supplementarity’ and ‘rivalry’, and the intelligence
with which he resists the blunt alternatives that he defined in this highly charged
moment.
Coetzee chose never to reprint the lecture, thereby ensuring it would become
one of his most-quoted texts. But in an essay of 1992, titled ‘Erasmus: Madness
and Rivalry’, he quietly revisited its central terms. The theologian and philoso-
pher Desiderius Erasmus, Coetzee claims, was caught between two extreme
positions: on the one hand the often-questionable dogmas of the Catholic
Church, and on the other hand what he thought of as the extreme levelling
21 ‘The Novel Today’, p. 3.

fury of Martin Luther’s Protestantism. Instead of accepting the terms of this

opposition, Coetzee suggested, Erasmus was exemplary for the subtle ways in
which he disturbed its boundaries. The key text here is Erasmus’s The Praise of
Folly, which deploys a highly unstable form of irony as part of an attempt to take
up what Coetzee rather beguilingly calls a ‘nonposition’ within the theological
debates in which Erasmus was entangled. This text offers itself, he suggests,
neither as supplementary to any of the given positions, nor as a rival alternative
to the debate itself (which would have made it simply irrelevant). The ‘power’ of
such a text, he explains, would reside not in the strength of any alternative it is
asserting, but ‘in its weakness—its jocoserious abnegation of big-phallus status,
its evasive (non)position inside/outside the play’.22
None of the contributors to this volume follow Coetzee in his pursuit of Erasmus
as a model; neither, for that matter, do they adopt his talk of abnegating a ‘big-
phallus status’ (all this being very Lacanian—and very 1980s). But in their different
ways, each of the chapters uses Coetzee’s fiction to explore the more complex
terrain he maps out here. It is this shared interest, rather than any agreed set of
answers, that justifies the title of this book: Beyond the Ancient Quarrel. To go
beyond the ancient quarrel is not to suggest that philosophy and literature are
necessarily shared enterprises, or that their dialogue is inevitably a productive one,
or that the ancient quarrel is (or should be) in any way resolved. It is instead to
suggest that it is in those moments when a literary text is least amenable to being
used as a mere supplement to a philosophical argument, where the norms and
procedures of one discourse most profoundly clash with the other, that the truly
interesting thinking begins.
* * *
It is for this reason that our collection begins with a section entitled ‘Unsettling
Boundaries: Literature, Philosophy, Literary Criticism’. The boundaries at stake in
Stephen Mulhall’s chapter are between literature, philosophy, and theology: more
specifically, the ways in which The Childhood of Jesus ironically recounts themes
from Plato’s The Republic, Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, and the story
of the Incarnation in the New Testament. Mulhall draws attention to the provo-
cation offered by Coetzee’s text, and the uncertain direction of its many ironies. The
Childhood of Jesus moves without warning, Mulhall shows, between seemingly
trivial forms of literary playfulness, and seemingly serious philosophical interven-
tions, without ever pausing to locate the terms by which it is to be understood. In
the course of his reading, Mulhall refuses to recuperate the enigmatic and dis-
orienting impact of this text into a format that is more easily digestible to normative
reasoning. As such, his chapter stands as a provocation in its own right: a mode of
literary criticism that questions many of the usual protocols that define what counts
as an interpretation. Julika Griem’s chapter (Chapter 5) pushes the unsettling of
boundaries in a different direction. Moving closer to the position Coetzee marked as
22 J. M. Coetzee, Giving Offense: Essays on Censorship (Chicago/London: The University of Chicago
Press, 1996), p. 103.

‘rivalry’, Griem draws attention to the complex textuality of The Childhood of Jesus
and The Schooldays of Jesus, especially to the many levels of metafictional playfulness
in these fictions. What if, Griem’s chapter suggests, these texts work in a way that is
radically ‘other’ to the forms of philosophical reasoning they invoke? What would it
be like to read them as if the experiences they offer of making, commenting upon,
and metafictionally unmaking an experienced ‘world’ for the reader to become
immersed in were—more than the engagement with philosophical themes—
actually the most important thing about them?
Both of these chapters raise questions about the status of literary criticism, and
what literary criticism needs to do in order to respond effectively to Coetzee. In a
chapter that explores what form of discourse might be adequate to respond to
Coetzee’s early text, In the Heart of the Country (1977), Max de Gaynesford
(Chapter 3) takes this question as his explicit theme. Distinguishing between the
procedures of philosophical analysis and literary criticism, de Gaynesford argues
that the force of Coetzee’s metafictional style, which not only portrays literary
characters, but also stages the very question of what a character is, calls for
philosophy and literary criticism to attune themselves to each other, to learn
from each other’s distinctive modes of attention. And along the way, de Gaynes-
ford’s chapter itself offers an exemplary act of such attunement.
The questions raised in this opening section about the boundaries between
literature, philosophy, and literary criticism are taken up in different ways by the
chapters that follow, which engage with specific philosophical fields and particular
contexts—initially through ethics and moral philosophy. Derek Attridge (Chapter 6)
takes Coetzee’s short story, ‘The Old Woman and the Cats’ (2013), as the starting
point for an exploration of the divergence between rational accounts of the good,
and the ways in which literary experience can expose the reader to non-rational
forms of evaluation and decision-making. Attridge shows that Coetzee does not shy
away from the unsettling implication that Socrates also feared: namely, the poten-
tial of literature to betray its readers by seducing them into harmful experiences.
While Attridge thinks of this non-rational attunement to alterity as ‘the ethical’
in itself, this is therefore a chapter that positions Coetzee’s fiction as radically at
odds with philosophy’s dream of a normative understanding of the good and the
true. In Chapter 7, Eileen John takes an example of normative moral philosophy,
Thomas Nagel’s The Possibilities of Altruism (1970), as her point of departure,
and turns the direction of Attridge’s argument around. Given the long tradition of
disparaging literature for its unruly relationship to eros, what can a moral philoso-
pher learn from the way Coetzee’s texts explore sexual desire? John’s answer to this
question is subtle. On the one hand she shows that Coetzee’s oeuvre can usefully
supplement Nagel’s account of altruism by its insistence that desire, and therefore a
philosophy of action, must form part of any normative account of the good, not
only because of its ubiquity in his work, but also because of its manifest importance
in generating moral action. But on the other hand, she shows that Coetzee’s
portrayal of desire reveals it to be too deeply interwoven with (among other things)
aggressive drives to constitute anything like a reliable guide to action. If Coetzee’s
fiction is a useful supplement to moral philosophy, the implication runs, one of
those uses is precisely to mark the limits of such philosophizing, and to attune
readers to the elements of risk within moral life.
The third section, ‘Reality, Language, and Subjectivity’, brings together a series
of reflections upon Coetzee’s relationship with more neglected fields of philosoph-
ical inquiry. It opens with two chapters on the vexed question of realism, a term
that resonates very differently in literary studies and in philosophy. In ‘Coetzee’s
Quest for Reality’ (Chapter 8), Alice Crary argues that instead of referring to the
stylistic procedures associated with the nineteenth-century ‘realist novel’, a truly
‘realist’ text might be thought of as one that, rather than conforming to familiar
genre-specifications, attempts by other means to expose readers to the real, that is,
to how things really are. Crary highlights Coetzee’s efforts to elicit what she calls
‘transformative thought’: a process that involves both delineating the progress of
individual characters in their quests for reality, and, in formal terms, inviting
readers to imaginatively participate in such quests. She highlights resonances
between these features of Coetzee’s writing and Wittgenstein’s procedures in his
Philosophical Investigations. In doing so, Crary brings out a respect in which
literature and philosophy are complementary discourses: literature can deal in the
sort of objective or universal truth that is philosophy’s touchstone, and philosoph-
ical discourse can have an essentially literary dimension. By contrast, in ‘Beyond
Realism: Coetzee’s Post-Secular Imagination’ (Chapter 9), Martin Woessner draws
attention to Coetzee’s countervailing interest in fiction as discourse that is autono-
mous from reality. ‘I think of myself as using rather than reflecting reality in my
fiction,’ Coetzee explained to the psychoanalyst Arabella Kurtz. ‘If the world of my
fictions is a recognizable world, that is because (I say to myself) it is easier to use the
world at hand than to make up a new one.’23 Instead of thinking of Coetzee as a
realist, Woessner claims, we should think of his fiction as involving a ‘yearning for
transcendence’ that invites us to participate in states that are ‘beyond realism’. He
draws attention to Coetzee’s preoccupation with a range of post-secular themes
involving the concepts of redemption, salvation, and grace. While Coetzee’s fiction
does not, Woessner maintains, embrace a theological understanding of the world,
or call for an end to secularism, it nonetheless attempts to ‘keep open a space—the
space of the imagination, we might say—that a strict secularism, like an equally
strict religious fundamentalism, threatens to shut down’. As such, Woessner’s
chapter positions Coetzee’s The Childhood of Jesus not alongside Wittgenstein,
but alongside Richard Rorty’s pragmatism, and especially Rorty’s claim that the
‘search for redemption’ lives on in our secular age in ‘novels, plays, and poems’.24
While many of the contributors to this volume follow Crary and Woessner
in at least beginning from a position of viewing literature and philosophy as
distinct categories, if only then to complicate that sense of difference, in two of
the later chapters these disciplinary categories are challenged from the very outset.
23 J. M. Coetzee and Arabella Kurtz, The Good Story: Exchanges on Truth, Fiction, and Psychotherapy
(London: Harvill Secker, 2015), p. 69.

24 Richard Rorty, ‘Philosophy as a Transitional Genre’, Philosophical Papers, iv: Philosophy as
Cultural Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 94.

Jean-Michel Rabaté (Chapter 11) explores Coetzee’s transactions with psychoanalysis,

exploring the ways in which his fiction both embraces and departs from Lacanian ways
of thinking about the subject. In his wide-ranging exploration of the literature of
psychoanalysis in relation to Coetzee’s oeuvre and the traditions and backgrounds
which resonate with his work, Rabaté draws out the relationship that Coetzee’s oeuvre
has with this tradition, emphasizing the porous boundaries between the literary
and the psychoanalytical. In ‘Coetzee’s Critique of Language’ (Chapter 10), Peter
McDonald reflects upon a largely forgotten philosophical work from the turn of
the last century: Fritz Mauthner’s Beiträge zu einer Kritik der Sprache (1901–2),
remembered in philosophical circles because of a brief, categorically negative aside in
Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922), and in literary circles for James
Joyce’s and Samuel Beckett’s brief engagements with the work. Bringing this work of
dubious philosophical standing together with Coetzee’s writings enables McDonald
to explore the dubiousness of a familiar genre of literary essay—the type of essay that
is structured around a conjunction between ‘X and Y’, where X is an intellectual of
some kind, and Y is a literary text. Such essays tend to end up treating literary text Y as
if it were simply an essay in another mode, which can be measured against the
thought of X. What is involved, McDonald asks, in crediting the fact that such texts
are in fact ‘intricately crafted literary works, not quasi-philosophical essays in disguise,
albeit ones that interfere with any generalized ideas we might have about what is
peculiarly “literary” or “philosophical”’? In answering this question, McDonald
examines the faultlines between philosophical questions and literary experience.
Concerns raised from within the philosophy of language, about how ‘Mauthnerian’
Coetzee might be said to be, are brought up against other forms of attention—
including questions of literary history and practices of close reading—that fore-
ground the specific craftedness of the literary text (in this case, Disgrace), and
which have the potential to disturb the very salience of the philosophical questions
being posed.
As these summaries must suggest, the contributors to this collection take very
different positions on the nature of the ‘ancient quarrel’ and the ways in which
Coetzee’s fiction addresses it. And yet, as Jan Wilm points out in the final chapter
in the collection, with the opening of the Coetzee archive at the Harry Ransom
Center in Austin, Texas, the question of what his oeuvre actually is, and how it
might be addressed, has now become more complex still. Wilm reads Coetzee’s
archive alongside his published work, and theorizes it as a counter-oeuvre that is
driven by dynamics similar to Coetzee’s fiction. In particular, he draws attention to
the dismantling of what constitutes centre and margin, the amalgamation of
authoritative and counter-voices, as well as the position of history in relation to
literature. In doing so, he emphasizes the powerful resistance made by Coetzee’s
oeuvre to being finalized and exhausted—which is no doubt, as far as the questions
posed by this book are concerned, a further source of Coetzee’s interest, a further
way in which his oeuvre might be said to go beyond.
PART I
UNSETTLING BOUNDARIES:
P H I L O S O P H Y , LI T E R A T U R E , A N D
LI TER A R Y C RITIC IS M
2
Health and Deviance, Irony and Incarnation
Embedding and Embodying Philosophy in Literature
and Theology in The Childhood of Jesus
Stephen Mulhall
In previous work on Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello (2003),1 I identified a distinction

between ‘embedding’ and ‘embodying’, around which Costello and her narrator
organize their thinking about realism in modernist literature.2 Costello’s preferred
term is ‘embedding’: she uses it to characterize the condition of Kafka’s ape
(fantastically embedded into twentieth-century European culture) and enacts it
in her version of Joyce’s Molly Bloom (who in Costello’s novel The House on
Eccles Street is released from her bedroom and relocated in the broader life of
Dublin in 1904); Costello suggests that such unintelligible conjunctions can
nevertheless initiate a realistic investigation if what follows is a logically and
emotionally rigorous unfolding of what that impossible embedding of one reality
into another might reveal about both (Costello calls this ‘staying awake during
the gaps when we are sleeping’).3
Costello’s narrator prefers the term ‘embodying’, at least when discussing the
discomfort created for literary realism by ideas: he (or she) tells us that realism is
premised on the idea that ideas have no autonomous existence, can exist only in
things, so when it debates them it has to invent situations in which characters can
give voice to, and thereby embody, them. In such debates, ideas are tied to the
speakers by whom they are enounced, and hence to the matrix of individual
interests out of which they act.
A realistic treatment of these ideas of ‘embedding’ and ‘embodying’ should
accordingly acknowledge their ties to the speakers who enounce them (which
would mean acknowledging the specific differences between Costello’s matrix of
individual interests and that of her narrator), and the revelatory possibilities of
impossible conjunctions (which means accepting that a character in a fiction
and the narrator of that fiction might nevertheless converse with one another, for
1 J. M. Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello: Eight Lessons (London: Secker & Warburg, 2003).
2 See chapter 11 of my The Wounded Animal: J. M. Coetzee and the Difficulty of Reality in Literature
and Philosophy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009).
3 Elizabeth Costello, p. 32.
18 Stephen Mulhall
example about realism). We might therefore think of ‘embedding’ and ‘embodying’

as inflections of each other, as close as the spellings of the words embodying
these ideas, as different as the speakers into whose actions they are embedded.
And we might consider picturing the general relation between ideas and reality in
the terms provided by these two particular ideas—namely, as one of ‘embodying’/
‘embedding’. For if ideas must be embodied in things, and yet can also be embedded
in other things (call them contexts), then they must be capable of being extracted
from any of their particular embodiments; so every embodiment of an idea is an
embedding of it, which means that no idea is fully absorbed into any of its possible
embodiments, and no embodiment is reducible to its ability to incorporate a given
(range of) ideas. This would be a realistic acknowledgement of the discomforting way
in which ideas and reality depend upon, and are independent of, each other.
In this chapter, I propose to exploit the relative (in-)dependence of these ideas
from their initial textual embodiment, and use them to begin understanding
another Coetzee text in which literary realism, and its discomfort with ideas and
their relation to reality, are under interrogation: The Childhood of Jesus (2013).4
Since philosophy is characteristically concerned with ideas, their relation with
reality, and the relative importance of the two relata, it is unsurprising that certain
philosophical texts provide important points of reference in Coetzee’s text. I shall
concentrate on two: Plato’s Republic5 (whose presence is hard to miss), and
Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations6 (whose presence is easier to overlook);
but the significance of the orientation they provide (both singly and in impossible
conjunction) is inseparable from the relation in which they stand to two other texts:
Don Quixote7 and the Bible.
THE J UST CIT Y
The city of Novilla is infused by ‘the spirit of the agora’, manifest in Platonic forms
and content. Simón has several philosophical dialogues with the city’s residents:
Ana disputes the connection between beauty, goodness, and sexual desire; Elena
argues that desire is only a source of endless dissatisfactions; and the stevedores are
devotees of philosophy classes about how ideas engender unity in the midst of
diversity—for example, how individual chairs participate in chairness, and so
amount to embodiments or realizations of the idea or form of a chair.8
Simón repeatedly resorts to this image, thereby unifying a diversity of concrete
contexts. He tells David that Ana’s reference to the bodily mechanics of sexual
intercourse really concerned the way one mind might force ideas upon another; he
then inverts the image with Elena, arguing that the mother provides the material
4 J. M. Coetzee, The Childhood of Jesus (London: Harvill Secker, 2013).

5 Plato, The Republic, trans. D. Lee (London: Penguin, 1987).
6 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, ed. P. Hacker and J. Schulte, trans. G. E. M.
Anscombe, P. Hacker, and J. Schulte, 4th edn (Oxford: Blackwell, 2009).

7 Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote, trans. Charles Jarvis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992).
8 The Childhood of Jesus, pp. 115, 30–2, 63, 119–22.
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CHAPTER XI.
CHANGE OF AIR AND SCENE.
Mr. Jessop duly arrived, and found, to his amazement, that his fish
and fruit had been forestalled; and there were other and yet greater
surprises in store for him.
He listened to Madeline’s plainly told tale, with his glass rigidly
screwed into his eye, his mouth pinched up as if he had an unusually
intricate “case” under his consideration.
He never once interrupted her, until she brought her recital to an
end, and she, in the heat and haste of her narrative, had permitted
him to know more of their poverty than he had dreamt of.
The Wynnes were as proud as they were poor; the extremity of
their straits was kept for their own exclusive experience. Mr. Jessop
gave an involuntary little gasp as he listened to the revelation about
the pawnbroker, the history of the miniature, and medals, and rings.
“By the way, I am going to redeem them the first thing to-morrow!”
said Madeline hurriedly.
“No, no, no, my dear Mrs. Wynne; such places for you are simply
out of the question. I will go,” protested Mr. Jessop, who had never
been inside such an institution in his life.
“No, certainly not; they know me quite well at Cohen’s, and you
are a stranger. I don’t mind one bit, as it will be for the last time; and
why should it be more out of the question now, than yesterday?
Does money make such a difference in a few hours?” (Money
sometimes makes a difference in a few minutes.)
On the whole, Mr. Jessop approved. The scheme was rash,
romantic, risky; but it was the only plan he could see for the present.
Mrs. Wynne must take her father in hand, and talk him over. “He
did not think she would have much trouble,” he added consolingly, as
he looked at her pretty, animated face; and he told himself that the
old fellow must have indeed a rocky heart if he could resist that. And
now for business, for action, for a council of war.
In a quarter of an hour it was all settled, so unanimous were
Madeline and Mr. Jessop.
A great doctor, whose speciality was low fever, was to be
summoned the next morning. If he consented, Mr. Jessop was to
come in the afternoon with a very, very easy brougham, and take the
invalid at once to Waterloo station, and by rail and carriage to a farm
house that he knew of, about fifty miles from London, where there
was pure air, pure milk, and every incentive to health. The baby and
Madeline were to follow the next day, after everything had been
packed up and stored with Mrs. Kane, who was now amenable to
anything, and amiable to imbecility.
The prescribed journey did take place by luxurious and easy
stages, and actually the next night Mr. Wynne passed under the red-
tiled roof of the farm in Hampshire. He was worn out by fatigue, and
slept well—slept till the crowing of the cocks and the lowing of the
cows had announced, long previously, that the day was commenced
for them. He sat in a lattice-paned sitting-room, looking into a sunny
old-fashioned garden (filled in summer with hollyhocks, sunflowers,
roses, and lavender, and many sweet-scented flowers well beloved
of bees), and felt better already, and made an excellent early dinner,
although his portly hostess declared, as she carried the dishes into
the kitchen, “that the poor sick gentleman—and ay, deary me, he do
look bad—had no more appetite than a canary!”
The sick gentleman’s wife and baby appeared on the scene in the
course of the afternoon, “a rare tall, pretty young lady she were,”
quoth the farm folk. A country girl took charge of the infant, who, as
long as he had plenty of milk in his bottle, and that bottle in his
clutch, was fairly peaceable and contented with things in general;
and was much taken with Mrs. Holt’s cap frills, with her bright tin
dishes on the kitchen shelves, and with various other new and
strange objects.
Madeline was thankful to get into the peaceful country, with its
placid green fields and budding hedges; to live in Farmer Holt’s old
red-roofed house, with the clipped yew trees in the sunny garden,
and the big pool at the foot of it overshadowed by elder trees.
Thankful to enjoy this haven of rest, away from murky London, with
its roar of hurrying existence and deafening street traffic that never
seemed to cease, night or day, in the neighbourhood of Solferino
Place.
Here the lusty crowing of rival cocks, the lowing of cows, the noise
of the churn were the only sounds that broke a silence that was as
impressive as it was refreshing. All things have an end. Madeline’s
three weeks’ leave soon came to a conclusion; and she most
reluctantly tore herself away from the farm, the evening before she
was due at Harperton. How happy she was here! Why must she go?
Laurence was better, a great deal better. He walked in the garden,
leaning on her arm at first, then in the lanes with no support but his
stick. He was more hopeful, more like his former self—he was
actually engaged in tying flies for Farmer Holt, as Madeline watched
him wistfully, with her chin on her hand. She loved the farm itself—
the farmer’s wife (kind Mrs. Holt, with a heart to match her ample
person). The sweet little chickens, and ducks, and calves, and foals,
were all delightful to Madeline, who, active as ever, had helped to
feed the former, learned to make butter, to make griddle-cakes, to
milk, and was on foot from six in the morning until nine o’clock at
night, and had recovered the look of youth and well-being which had
so long been missing from her appearance.
The farmer himself was to drive her to the station in his dog-cart,
and she and Laurence strolled down the lane together to say a few
last words ere they parted—for how long?
Laurence was hopeful now, and Madeline was tearfully
despondent. He was recovering, and felt more self-reliance every
day. He would soon, please God, be back at work.
“I don’t know what has come over me, Laurence,” said his wife, as
they came to the gate and a full stop. “I feel so low, so depressed,
something tells me that I shall not see you again for ages,” her eyes
filling with tears. “And I feel so nervous about meeting papa,” and her
lips quivered as she spoke.
“Nonsense, Maddie! you must never meet trouble half way. Your
father cannot but be pleased with you, and when you tell him about
me——”
“Oh, but I won’t, I dare not at first,” she interrupted hastily. “It all
comes back to me now. The days in that big house in Toorak, and
how I used to be afraid when I heard his voice in the entrance-hall—
his voice when he was angry. I used to run away and hide under a
bed!”
“Nevertheless you must tell him, all the same; you are not a child
now. And when you point out to him that his silence for two years
and a half left you to a certain extent your own mistress, and that
your unlucky marriage was the result of the reins being thrown on
your neck——”
“Now, Laurence!” putting her hand on his arm, “you know I won’t
listen to that; and if the worst comes to the worst, I can run away
again!”
“So you can; and I think in another fortnight I shall be fit for—for
harness. Jessop says——”
“If Mr. Jessop say anything so wicked, he and I will quarrel!”
exclaimed Madeline indignantly. “You are not to do anything for three
months; there is plenty of money left yet.”
“Yes; but, Maddie,” producing some notes, “you know you can’t
appear before your father like that,” pointing to her dress. “You will
need a couple of decent gowns; and I don’t think much of that hat.
You must take forty pounds, without any nonsense, you know.”
“No, I won’t,” pushing it away impatiently. “I don’t require it.”
“But you do, and must take it, and do as I desire you—goodness
knows it’s little enough! Promise me to spend every farthing on
yourself. You ought to be respectably dressed when you meet your
father. Where is your common sense? And naturally he will ask—
Where is the hundred pounds he gave you for new frocks?
Remember, Maddie, if he is very angry, you can always come back
to me”—kissing her. “And now that I am not so down on my luck, I
feel anxious to work for you, and the sooner the better; and the
sooner you return the better. Here is Holt,” as the farmer, driving a
slashing long-tailed colt, came quickly round the corner into view.
“He is driving that crazy four-year-old! I hope he will take care of you.
Mind you leave her there safely, farmer,” as his nimble wife climbed
up into the lofty dog-cart. “Good-bye, Maddie; be sure you write to-
morrow.” Stepping aside as they dashed through the gate, carried
forward by the impatient chestnut.
Madeline looked back, and waved her handkerchief. Yes, he was
still standing gazing after them, even when they had gone quite a
distance; finally she applied the handkerchief to her eyes.
“Now, don’t take on so, ma’am,” murmured the farmer, his eyes
fixed on the colt’s quivering ears. “We’ll take good care of him! He is
a real nice young gentleman; and as to baby, I don’t see how the
missus will ever part with him. You cheer up! Ain’t you a-going to
meet your father?”
“Yes, Mr. Holt,” she faltered; “but I may as well tell you that he has
not seen me for more than twelve years. He—I—we thought he was
dead. He does not know that I am married!”
“Oh, great gooseberries!” ejaculated her listener emphatically.
“What a taking he’ll be in!”
“No, and he is not to know just yet. I am Miss West, not Mrs.
Wynne, until I have paved the way. I’ve told your wife all about it; she
knows.”
“I don’t see what your father can have to say agin Mr. Wynne?”
said Holt stoutly. “He is a gentleman. The king himself is no more.”
“Ah, yes; but he has no money,” sighed Madeline.
“Maybe he has brains; and them does just as well. Don’t let your
father come between you—you know the Bible says, ‘As——’”
“Mr. Holt!” she exclaimed, flushing indignantly, “do you think I
would ever desert Laurence? No, not for fifty fathers. No, not if my
father came all the way from London on his knees, would I ever give
up Laurence and baby, or forget them for one single hour!”
“Nay, I’m sure you wouldn’t, excuse me, ma’am. But, you see,
your father’s very rich, and you are just wonderful pretty, and when
the old gent—meaning no offence—has you living in a kind of
palace, with servants, and carriages and ’osses, and tricked out in
dress and jewels, and every one pushing and jostling one another to
tell you what a grand and beautiful lady you be—why, maybe, then
you won’t be so keen for coming back; you know it would be only
human nature—at least,” coolly correcting himself—“woman’s natur.”
“Well, Mr. Holt,” she returned rather stiffly, “time will tell. I cannot
say more than that,” unintentionally quoting from Mrs. Kane. “I know
myself that I shall come back, and soon. Remember,” stopping when
she had jumped down, and holding his bony hand tightly in both of
hers, “remember,” she repeated, looking up into his honest rugged
face, with dim and wistful eyes, “I leave them in your charge. Don’t
let Laurence overtire himself—don’t let him walk too far. Don’t let the
baby have a halfpenny to play with again—or the toasting-fork. And,
oh, I must go! Remember, above all, that I shall soon return.”
Exit Miss West, running to take her ticket and claim her luggage;
and Farmer Holt, fearing the effect of the train, for the first time, on
his rampant colt, prudently turned his head back towards the cool
green lanes without any dangerous delay.
CHAPTER XII.
“SHE WILL DO!”
Madeline, having arrived in London, drove direct to No. 2, and

spent one more night under Mrs. Kane’s roof, where she was
received with open arms, and proudly shown a letter marked,
“Private and confidential,” and signed by the neat and respectable
signature of “Letitia Harper.”
“I answered her! Ay, my word, that I did!” cried Mrs. Kane
triumphantly. “She’ll not come poking her nose after you again. I
knew Miss West for a long time, I said, and nothing to her discredit.
She was a most excellent, reliable young lady—who kept herself to
herself: and should I mention as Miss Harper had kindly referred to
me? That wor a poser, I can tell you! Back came a letter telling me
on no account to say a word to Miss West, and enclosing a postal
order for ten shillings for my trouble! That was a rare joke! the
trouble was a pleasure. And how is Mr. Wynne? and how is the dear
baby?” continued Mrs. Kane, whose speech and affection were alike
at high tide.
It was evident to Madeline herself that she must get some new
clothes. She was not even wearing out the remains of her trousseau
—never having had one. What would her father say to her faded
cotton, and still more shabby serge? Even the eleven-and-ninepenny
hat was now passé. Knowing, as he did, too, that she had the means
to dress differently! She must spend money on her wardrobe without
delay. Accordingly, after breakfast, she sallied forth, and went to a
first-class establishment where a great sale was in its first frenzy.
Here, among a mob of well-dressed ladies, she struggled for
standing room, and waited for attendance, and saw dress after dress
on which she had set her heart snatched away and sold. After
patient endurance of heat, tempers, rudeness, and unblushing
selfishness, she secured the attention of a harassed girl, who
perhaps feeling that she was even such an one as herself, assisted
her to choose a neat covert coating, a tailor-made coat and skirt—a
model costume of crêpon, with immense sleeves and a profusion of
jet and black satin trimmings, also a black gauze evening gown—a
once-exquisite garment, but now shockingly tumbled by ruthless
hands, though it was a “Paris pattern.”
These, with a smart silk blouse, a picture hat, a cape, shoes,
handkerchiefs, veils, and gloves, swallowed up twenty-five pounds.
Then she returned with her parcels in a hansom, displayed the
contents (by request) to Mrs. Kane, and spent her evening in altering
the bodices and packing her trunk: it was not very full. It did not need
any one to come and sit on the top and press the lock together. Next
morning she was en route to Riverside, and that same evening in
Mrs. Harper’s arms!
Mrs. Harper and her daughter were delighted to see her. The
house was empty; the girls had gone home for the Easter holidays,
and they would be very cosy and comfortable. They asked many
veiled and clever questions anent her money. What had she done
with it? Surely she had not spent it all? How much was the tailor-
made? How much was the black? But she gave them no satisfactory
answer. That was her affair, and not in the bond!
Days passed, and yet no sign of Mr. West, and Mrs. Harper was
becoming a little impatient and irritable. Could he mean to disappear
for a second time? What was she to think?
Meanwhile Madeline wrote to the farm daily, posting the letters
herself. Here is one of them as a specimen:—
“My dear Laurence,
“No news yet. So glad to get your letters. I call for them
every day. It looks funny to see nothing but W. on the
envelope, but it would never do to put West, much less
Wynne. It makes me very happy to hear that you and baby
are getting on so well and are making the best of this lovely
weather. How I wish I was back with you—ten—fifty times a
day—strolling about the lanes and fields among the lambs
and primroses, instead of being cooped up here, in this hot,
dusty suburb. You must not do too much! How dare you walk
to the top of Brownwood Hill! It is just four times too far. How
could the Holts allow you to be so foolish? But I’m afraid you
don’t mind them. You ask what I am doing? I am trying hard to
make believe that I am Madeline West once more. Don’t be
shocked, my dear Laurence, but at times I succeed admirably,
especially when I sit down to an hour’s practising on the
schoolroom piano. I am getting up my music and singing
again, and working very hard, so that my father won’t be
disappointed as far as my voice is concerned. I have looked
over the new books that the girls had last half in the first class
—horrible essays and lectures and scientific articles—about
the glacial periods, and shooting stars, such as I abhor, and
you love; but I know that I ought to read up, for I am a
shameful ignoramus. I, however, enjoy rubbing up my French,
and have devoured several most delicious books by Gyp.
Miss Harper lent them to me. She said, now that I had left
school, I might read them. I asked her—just to see how she
would look—if she had any of Émile Zola’s. I had heard so
much of them. She nearly fainted, and said, ‘My dear, you
must never even mention that man’s name!’ I have learnt to
dress my hair in the new style. I’ve gone shopping with Miss
Harper. Altogether I’ve been very busy, and when I sit in my
old place at meal-times, and stare at the familiar wall-paper,
and familiar cups and saucers, and when I listen to the
Harpers’ well-known little sayings and turns of speech, when I
look out of the windows, or sit alone in the schoolroom, as I
used formerly to do in holiday times, I honestly declare that I
feel as if all about you was a dream, and that I cannot bring
myself to realize that I have ever left school at all. You see I
am naturally a very adaptable creature; I drop into a groove at
once, and accommodate myself to circumstances. For
instance, Mr. Holt said I was born to be a farmer’s wife! I have
lived here for so many, many years that I fall straight back into
my old place. Then I rouse up and go off to the post-office,
when the second post is due, and receive one of your
welcome letters; and I know that I am not dreaming, but that I
am actually married. Oh, Laurence, I sometimes look at the
Harpers and say to myself—If they knew! I wish that this
waiting was over! I wish my father would come! This delay
makes me so nervous and so jumpy. It’s like sitting in a
dentist’s drawing-room! I sincerely hope that anticipation will
prove to be the worst part of the business. Miss Harper is
coming. I hear her heavy step! No—I breathe again. Only
fancy, she asked me yesterday, with one of her old sharp
looks, whom I was always writing to? and I was fortunate to
have so many friends—such wonderful correspondents! With
a kind of sneer, then, she said, ‘I’m going out, and I may as
well post your letter,’ but I need not tell you that I declined her
amiable offer, and posted it myself. You say that baby
screams at night, and must be consigned to an outhouse, if
he continues to make night hideous. How inhuman of you,
Laurence, to write such horrid things, even in joke! Do you
think he could possibly be missing me, or is this a foolish idea
with respect to an infant of five months old? Ask Mrs. Holt to
feel his gums. Perhaps it is a tooth? And now good-bye, with
many kisses to him, and kind remembrances to the Holts.
“I am, your loving wife,
“M. W.”
Very shortly after this letter was despatched Mrs. Harper received
a telegram from the agents to say that the Ophir was expected at
Plymouth the next afternoon.
What a fuss ensued, what rushing and running and packing, and
calling for twine and luggage labels, and leather straps and
sandwiches on the part of an excited spinster, who was enchanted at
the prospect of a jaunt down to Devonshire—all expenses paid.
Once fairly off, and away from her own familiar beat, she was little
better than a child. It was not Miss Harper who looked after
Madeline, but Madeline who took care of her. At every big station
she was seized with a panic, and called out, “Porter, where are we
now? How long do we stop? Do we change? Is the luggage all
right?” Her fussy flight to the refreshment-rooms, and frantic dashes
back to the carriage—usually the wrong one—was amusing to her
fellow-travellers, but not to Madeline; and, besides this, her shrill and
constant chatter about “your father,” “I do hope the Ophir won’t be
late,” “she is a splendid steamer, 10,000-horse power,” “and I hope
they have had a good passage,” made her former pupil feel a keen
desire to say something cross, knowing that Miss Harper imagined
that she was impressing the other inmates of the carriage, but in
reality was making herself supremely ridiculous.
Madeline was thankful when they were safely housed (luggage
and all) in the best hotel in Plymouth. Miss Harper had only forgotten
her umbrella in the train, and lost a considerable share of her temper
in consequence, but a good dinner and a good night’s rest made this
all right, and she wore a smiling face as she and her charge and
many other people went down the next morning to board the newly-
arrived Orient Liner Ophir.
To a stranger it was a most bewildering scene, and Miss Harper
and Madeline stared about them helplessly; but of course the new
arrivals were readily singled out by the passengers, and Mr. West
had no hesitation whatever in promptly selecting the prettiest girl
who had come up the side as his own daughter.
It would have been a severe blow to his penetration and self-
esteem had he been wrong, but it so happened that he was right.
And now, before introducing him to Madeline, let us pause and
take a little sketch of Robert West, millionaire, who had made
considerable capital out of the fact, and taken the lead socially
during the recent voyage, from whist and deck-quoits to the usual
complimentary letter to the captain. He is a man of fifty-five, or a little
more, short, spare, dapper, with a thin face, hair between fair and
grey, quick bright hazel eyes, a carefully trimmed short beard, and
waxed moustache. There are a good many deep wrinkles about his
eyes, and when he raises his cap he no longer looks (as he does
otherwise, and at a short distance) a man of five and thirty, but his
full age, for we perceive that his head is as bald as a billiard ball.
(N.B.—His photographs are invariably taken in his hat.) He is
dressed in the most approved manner, and by the best tailor in
Melbourne; a fat little nugget hangs from his watch-chain; a
perennial smile adorns his face, although he has a singularly hard
and suspicious eye. His history and antecedents may be summed up
in a few sentences: His father, an English yeoman of a respectable
old stock, committed forgery, and was transported to Port Philip in
1823; he got a ticket-of-leave, acquired land, squatted, married in
Port Philip, now Victoria. His success was fitful, owing to drought,
scab, and the many other evils to which an Australian settler is heir.
However, he gave his son a fairly good education in England. He
desired him to make a figure as a gentleman. To this end he pinched
and struggled and scraped, and finally sent Robert down to
Melbourne with a certain sum of money, and a stern determination to
grapple with and conquer fortune. Privately Robert despised his
horny-handed old father, the ex-convict. He hated a squatter’s life—
loathed dingoes, dampers, buck-jumpers, and wool, and he soon fell
into a comfortable berth in a land-agent’s office, and being steady,
capable, hard-headed (and hard-hearted), prospered rapidly; in his
young days everything in Melbourne was of Tropical growth.
He married a veritable hot-house flower—his employer’s only
daughter—a pretty, indolent, excitable, extravagant creature, with
French blood in her veins, who carried him up a dozen rungs of the
social ladder, and brought him a fortune. Her house—in Toorak—her
splendid dresses, entertainments, and equipages were the talk and
envy of her neighbours and sex; she was in with the Government
House set, and she lived in an incessant round of gaiety, a truly
brilliant butterfly.
After six years of married life, she died of consumption; and her
widower was not inconsolable. He kept on the big house, he
frequented his club, he heaped up riches, he gambled with
selections as others do with cards; he was not behind-hand in the
great land boom which led to that saturnalia of wild speculation
which demoralized the entire community. Suburban lands were
forced up to enormous prices—a thousand times their value; people
bought properties in the morning and sold them in the afternoon at
an advance of thousands of pounds. New suburbs, new banks, new
tenements sprang up like mushrooms, under the influence of
adventurous building societies, and every one was making an
enormous fortune—on paper.
When the gigantic bubble burst, the consequences were terrible,
involving the ruin of thousands. Robert West had seen that the crash
must come, but believed that he would escape. He tempted fortune
too rashly. Just a few more thousands, and he would sell out; but his
greed was his bane. He had not time to stand from under when the
whole card house toppled over and his fortunes fell.
He was left almost penniless: the banks had collapsed, land and
estate was unsaleable. He was at his wits’ end. He seriously
contemplated suicide, but after all decided to see the thing out—that
is, his own life. He went to Sydney; he kept his head above water; he
looked about keenly for a plank of security, and providence—luck—
threw him one. Land he had taken with grumbling reluctance as part
payment of an ancient debt—land he had never been within five
hundred miles of—proved to be a portion of the celebrated Waikatoo
gold mines. He was figuratively and literally on the spot at once; his
old trade stood to him. He traded, and sold, and realized, keeping a
certain number of shares, and then turned his back on greater Britain
for ever, intending to enjoy life, and to end his days in Britain the
less. Money was his dear and respected friend; he loved it with every
fibre of his little shrivelled heart. Ambition was his ruling passion, and
rank his idol. To rank he would abase himself, and grovel in the
gutter; to rank he intends to be allied before he is much older—if not
in his own proper person, he will at least be the father-in-law of a
peer. Money for the attainment of this honour was no object; and as
his sharp, eager eyes fell on the pretty frightened face that was
looking diffidently round the many groups standing on the deck of the
steamer, he told himself, with a thrill of ecstasy, “That if that girl in the
black hat is Madeline—by Jove! she will do!”
CHAPTER XIII.
MR. WEST’S WISHES.
Standing close to Mr. West—or, rather, Mr. West had attached

himself to him—was his favourite fellow-traveller, a young and
somewhat impecunious nobleman—Lord Anthony Foster—the son of
a duke, whose pedigree was much longer than his purse, and one of
a large family. Most of this family were already established in life,
and had repaired their shattered fortunes by a prudent and wealthy
marriage; but Lord Tony, as he was called, preferred his liberty. He
was fond of sport and travelling, and was postponing the evil day (as
he considered it) which, alas! must sooner or later overtake him, for
his private fortune was small. His elder brother, the present duke,
was close-fisted, and his personal expenses, do as he would,
invariably exceeded his expectations—it is a little way they have with
many people—and although he had no extravagant tastes (so he
declared), yet he was liberal, and liked to “do things comfortably.” In
his appearance no one would suspect that the blood of a hundred
earls ran in his veins; in fact (low be it whispered), he was a rather
common-looking young man—short, square, with a turned-up nose,
wide nostrils, a wide mouth, and a faint light moustache; his
complexion was tanned to mahogany, but a pair of merry blue eyes,
and an open, good-humoured countenance made up for many
deficiencies. He was not a ladies’ man, but popular with men; not at
all clever, but ever ready to laugh at other folk’s good things, and his
own mistakes—shrewd enough, too; a capital shot, an untiring
angler, an enterprising traveller, and, according to his own account,
an unparalleled sleeper. He had no profession, no ties, no landed
estates to look after—the world was his landed estate—and he was
now returning from a long tour of inspection in Japan and Australia.
Lord Tony had met Mr. West in Sydney society, and Mr. West had
taken an immense fancy to him, and had privately arranged the date
of his own departure so as to secure the young lord as a fellow-
passenger. He had also shared his cabin. In this unaffected young
man, with a pleasant, hearty manner, and a large connection in the
peerage, he saw a link to upper circles, and a ready ladder for his
nimble and ambitious foot.
Mr. West was determined to get into society, to enjoy his money, to
be in the swim, and to make a splash! He had obtained one or two
good introductions to merchant princes, and he had cemented a fast
friendship with Lord Tony. Friendships grow quickly at sea, though
these same friendships frequently languish and fade on shore. He
had frequently and pointedly alluded to “his only child,” “his
daughter,” “his little heiress;” he had displayed with pride the
photograph of a very charming girl in her early teens; he had thrown
out hints, that if she married to please him—a nice, unaffected, well-
connected young fellow, who would give her a coronet on her
handkerchief—the money to spend and keep up her position would
be his affair.
Lord Tony’s married brothers and sisters were continually and
clamorously urging heiresses upon his notice; it was “his only
chance,” they assured him. “He must marry money.” If this pretty girl
now speaking to West, with visible trepidation and becomingly
heightened colour, was the heiress he was always swaggering about
and dragging into his conversation, Lord Tony told himself, as he
took his cigarette out of his mouth and blew away a cloud of smoke,
“that, by George! he might do worse.” And so he might. Presently he
was formally introduced to the young lady and her companion, and
Mr. West, who was metaphorically carried off his feet by Madeline’s
unexpected grace, was in a condition of rampant satisfaction. She
would go down. She would take anywhere; and actually, for a few
lofty seconds, he scorned a mere lord, and saw a wreath of
strawberry leaves resting on her pretty dark hair.
Miss Harper was not slow to read the signs of the times—to
interpret the expression of the millionaire’s growing complacency: he
found Madeline prettier than he had anticipated; he was greatly
pleased; and she immediately improved the occasion, and
murmured a few well-timed words into his ear about “dearest
Madeline’s air of distinction, her exquisitely shaped head, her
vivacity, her remarkable beauty; fitted to adorn any sphere; always a
favourite pupil; a most accomplished, popular girl;” whilst Madeline
gravely answered Lord Anthony’s blunt questions. He was the first
lord she had ever spoken to, and as far as she could judge, neither
formidable nor imposing.
After a little she found herself being led up and presented to the
captain and to several of the passengers, with a look and tone that
told even Madeline, who had a very humble opinion of herself, that
her father was exceedingly proud of her!
Oh, if he would only be kind—only be good to her! if her pretty
face, that he appeared to value so much, would but open the door of
his heart, and admit her and Laurence and his grandchild! But it
would not. Do not think it, simple Madeline; it will only admit you in
company with a peer of the realm.
After much fuss and bustle, Mr. West and his party disembarked.
Never in all her life had Madeline been so much stared at. And she
was not merely looked at curiously—as a pretty girl who had never
seen her father since she was a child—she was doubly interesting
as a great heiress, and a very marketable young person. She was
not sorry to make her escape, and was conducted down the
gangway in a kind of triumphal procession, led by her exultant
parent, her arm on his, whilst Miss Harper followed, leaning on Lord
Anthony—who was to be Mr. West’s guest at his hotel—and I have
no hesitation in affirming that this was the happiest moment of Miss
Harper’s life, if it was not that of her pupil’s (as to this latter I cannot
speak with certainty). Arm-in-arm with a lord! What would people say
at home when she went back? Her heart already beat high with
anticipation of the sensation she would produce upon the minds of
her particular circle. If one of them could only see her! But there is
always an “if.”
Mr. West was rather indisposed after his voyage. He could not
sleep, he declared; he missed the engines; and he remained at
Plymouth for a few days. So did Lord Anthony, who was in no
particular hurry. Miss Harper had reluctantly taken leave, and
returned to Harperton, endowed with a valuable present “for all her
kindness to Madeline,” quoth Mr. West, as he presented it with
considerable pomp, and this offering she graciously and modestly
accepted—yes, without the quivering of an eyelid, much less the
ghost of a blush! Perhaps, so crooked are some people’s ideas, she
had brought herself to believe that she had been kind to Madeline—
and, indeed, she had never been as hard as Miss Selina. She would
have liked to have remained at this luxurious hotel a few days longer.
Everything was done en prince. A carriage and pair, a really smart
turn-out (cockades and all), took them for a delightful drive. There
were excursions to Mount Edgecumbe, promenades on the Hoe.
Plymouth was gay, the weather was magnificent, Lord Anthony
Foster of the party—and so amusing! Miss Harper was easily
amused—sometimes. She threw out one or two hints to Mr. West to
the effect that she was excessively comfortable, that this little visit
was quite too delightful—an oasis in her existence; that mamma was
not lonely—in short, that she dreaded parting with her dearest pupil;
but nevertheless she had to go. Mr. West was ruthless, he was blunt;
he was, moreover, wonderfully keen at interpreting other people’s
motives. He perfectly understood Miss Harper. She was, no doubt,
very much at her ease; but he owed her nothing. She had been
amply paid; she had had his girl for twelve years, and could afford to
part with her young charge.
Moreover, Miss Harper did not belong to the class of people he
particularly wished to cultivate—that was sufficient—and he smilingly
sped the parting guest, after a four days’ visit. During those four days
Madeline had been installed as mistress of her father’s
establishment, and was endeavouring to accustom herself to her
new rôle. Everything was deferred to her, the ordering of dinner, the
ordering of carriages, and of various items that meant a considerable
outlay. She took up her position at once with a composure that
astonished her school-mistress. She stared at Madeline in
amazement, as she sat at the head of the table in her new black
gauze, and comported herself as though she had occupied the post
for years.
In about a week’s time, the Wests (still accompanied by Lord
Anthony) went to London, staying at the Métropole Hotel; and here
Mr. West, who was a brisk man of action, and resolved to lose not an
hour in enjoying his money and realizing his plans, set about house-
hunting, con amore, assuring delighted house agents that price was
no consideration—what he sought was size, style, and situation.
Under these favourable circumstances, he soon discovered what
he required. A superb mansion in Belgrave Square, with large suites
of reception rooms, twenty bedrooms, hot and cold water, electric
light, speaking-tubes, stabling for twelve horses, and, in short, to
quote the advertisement, “with everything desirable for a nobleman’s
or gentleman’s family.” It had just been vacated by a marquis, which
made it still more desirable to Mr. West. If not near the rose, the rose
had lived there! Indeed, to tell the happy truth, a duke resided next
door, and an ambassador round the corner. So far so good. The next
thing was to be neighbourly. Then there was the business of
furnishing—of course regardless of cost. Days and days were spent,
selecting, measuring, matching, and discussing at one of the most
fashionable upholsterers in town, and the result was most
satisfactory, most magnificent, and most expensive. There was a
dining-room hung with ancestors—Charles Surface’s, perhaps—but
certainly not Mr. West’s. A full-length portrait of his father in prison
dress would have been a startling novelty; there was an ante-room in
turquoise blue, a drawing-room in yellow and white, and a boudoir in
rose and pearl-colour brocade. Of the delights of these apartments,
of the paintings, statuary, bronzes, and Chinese curios, of the old
silver and china and ivory work, and pianos and Persian carpets, it
would take a book to catalogue.
As for Madeline, accustomed, as we know, to four Windsor chairs,
two tables, a shabby rag of Kidderminster carpet, and a horsehair
sofa with a lame leg, her brain was giddy as she endeavoured to
realize that she was to be mistress of these treasures, and to preside
over this palatial establishment. Carriages and horses found places
in stables and coach-houses; a troop of well-trained servants
populated the house. There was a stately lady housekeeper, a
French chef, a French maid for Madeline, three footmen in mulberry
and silver buttons, and a butler whom one might have mistaken for a
dean, and whose deportment and dignity were of such proportions
as to overawe all timid natures, and of very high value in his master’s
eyes.
Madeline shrank from her lady’s maid, but she was a necessity—
noblesse oblige. She did not wish the sharp-eyed Parisienne to spy
out the nakedness of the land, as far as her own wardrobe was
concerned, and was at many a shift to postpone her arrival until she
had garments more befitting her background and her father’s purse.
Indeed he had not been pleased with her gowns, “they looked
cheap,” he had remarked with a frown.
“Is that all you have, Madeline, that black thing?” he asked rather
querulously one evening, as they stood in the drawing-room awaiting
Lord Anthony, and a friend.
“Yes, papa; and it is nearly new,” she said in a tone of deprecation.
“It does very well for the present, and I must wear it out.”
“Wear out! Stuff and nonsense!” irritably. “One would think you had
a shingle loose. I really sometimes fancy, when I hear you talking of
the price of this and that, and so on, and economy, that you have
known what it is to be poor—poor as Job! Whereas, by George! you
have never known what it is to want for a single thing ever since you
were born. You have as much idea of poverty as your prize black
poodle has!”
Had she? Had she not known what it was to frequent pawnshops,
to battle with wolfish want, to experience not merely the pleasures of
a healthy appetite, but the actual pangs of painful hunger. Oh, had
she not known what it was to be poor! She gave a little half-choked
nervous laugh, and carefully avoided her father’s interrogative eyes.
“I’ll give you a cheque to-morrow,” he resumed, “and do go to
some good dressmaker, and get yourself some smart clothes. Lady
Rachel, Lord Tony’s sister, is going to call, ask her to take you to
some first-class place, and choose half a dozen gowns. I really mean
it; and put this thing,” flicking her fifty-shilling costume with a
contemptuous finger and thumb, “behind the fire. You are not like
your mother; she made the money fly. However, she was always well
turned out. I don’t want you to ruin me; but there is a medium in all
things. What is the good of a daughter who is a beauty if she won’t
set herself off?”
“Do you really think me pretty, father?” she asked, rather timidly.
“Why, of course I do! We shall have you setting the fashions and
figuring in the papers, and painted full life-size, when you have more
assurance, and know how to make the most of yourself. Remember
this,” now giving his collar a chuck, and speaking with sudden
gravity, “that when you marry”—Madeline blushed—“when you
marry, I say,” noticing this blush, “you must go into the peerage,
nothing else would suit me, never forget that. Now that you know my
views, there can be no misunderstandings later on. Never send a
commoner to ask for my consent.”
“But, father,” she ventured boldly, now raising her eyes to his, that
surveyed her like two little fiery brown beads, “supposing that I loved
a poor man, what then? How would it be then?”
“Folly!” he almost yelled. “Poor man. Poor devil! Love! rot and
nonsense, bred from reading trashy novels. Love a poor man! Do
you want to drive me mad? Never mention it, never think of it, if I am
to keep my senses.” And he began to pace about.
“But,” she answered resolutely, pressing her fan very hard into the
palm of her trembling hand, “supposing that I did? Why should I not?
—you married my mother for love.”
“Not a bit of it,” he rejoined emphatically, “I liked her, admired her;
she was very pretty, and had blue blood—foreign blood—in her
veins, but she was a good match. She had a fine fortune, she was in
the best set. Her father took me into partnership. I was a rising man
—and—er—I know all about love; I have been through the mill! Ha,
ha, it’s bad while it lasts, but it does not last! The woman I loved was
a little girl from Tasmania, without a copper. She tempted me
mightily, but I knew I might just as well cut my throat at once. No, I
married for good and sensible reasons, and one word will do as well
as ten. If you ever make a low marriage, a love match with a pauper,

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Beyond the Ancient Quarrel: Literature,

Philosophy, and J.M. Coetzee 1st

Beyond the ancient quarrel: literature, philosophy, and

Biota Grow 2C gather 2C cook Loucas

Beyond Classical Liberalism Freedom and the Good 1st

Philosophy In The American West A Geography of Thought

Beauty and Sublimity A Cognitive Aesthetics of

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Beyond speech : pornography and analytic feminist

BEYOND THE ANCIENT QUARREL

Beyond the Ancient

1. Ancient Quarrels, Modern Contexts: An Introduction 1

I. UNSET T L ING BO UN D AR IE S: P HILOSOPHY ,

11. Coetzee and Psychoanalysis: From Paranoia to Aporia 180

IV. C ONTEXTS A ND IN STITUTIO NS

Patrick Hayes and Jan Wilm

2 Patrick Hayes and Jan Wilm

Ancient Quarrels, Modern Contexts 3

4 Patrick Hayes and Jan Wilm

Ancient Quarrels, Modern Contexts 5

By contrast, Coetzee’s thesis was determinedly interdisciplinary. It was an attempt

University of Texas at Austin, 1969, pp. 160–2.

6 Patrick Hayes and Jan Wilm

University Press, 1995).

Ancient Quarrels, Modern Contexts 7

8 Patrick Hayes and Jan Wilm

review in New York Review of Books (2 Feb. 1984): pp. 3–6; 6.

Ancient Quarrels, Modern Contexts 9

18 J. M. Coetzee, ‘The Novel Today’, Upstream 6, no. 1 (summer 1988): p. 2.

10 Patrick Hayes and Jan Wilm

communicate the truth through representations. Philosophers, it would appear, are

21 ‘The Novel Today’, p. 3.

Ancient Quarrels, Modern Contexts 11

fury of Martin Luther’s Protestantism. Instead of accepting the terms of this

22 J. M. Coetzee, Giving Offense: Essays on Censorship (Chicago/London: The University of Chicago

Press, 1996), p. 103.

12 Patrick Hayes and Jan Wilm

Ancient Quarrels, Modern Contexts 13

(London: Harvill Secker, 2015), p. 69.

Cultural Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 94.

14 Patrick Hayes and Jan Wilm

Jean-Michel Rabaté (Chapter 11) explores Coetzee’s transactions with psychoanalysis,

In previous work on Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello (2003),1 I identiﬁed a distinction

example about realism). We might therefore think of ‘embedding’ and ‘embodying’

THE J UST CIT Y

4 J. M. Coetzee, The Childhood of Jesus (London: Harvill Secker, 2013).

Anscombe, P. Hacker, and J. Schulte, 4th edn (Oxford: Blackwell, 2009).

Madeline, having arrived in London, drove direct to No. 2, and

Standing close to Mr. West—or, rather, Mr. West had attached

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