The Late Style of Borges, Beckett, and

Coetzee as Postmodernist Cynics

Arya Aryan
Durham University

Arthur Rose. Literary Cynics: Borges, Beckett, Coetzee. Bloomsbury Academic,

2017. viii, 272 pp. £80 hardcover.

Drawing on works by Peter Sloterdijk and Michel Foucault who recovered ancient
cynicism, Arthur Rose in Literary Cynics: Borges, Beckett, Coetzee elucidates how
Borges, Beckett, and Coetzee consciously employ a collocation of cynicisms as theme,
style and political perspective in their late works. Using multiple examples from the late
works of the three writers, Rose argues that the works create cynical cosmopolitanism
and self-reflexivity. The role of the author becomes an aesthetic device for participating
in cosmopolitan political subjectivity. As Rose contends, what ties these writers together
is a personal investment in challenging the rhetoric of authority.

Keywords: Jorge Luis Borges / Samuel Beckett / J. M. Coetzee / literary cynics /

authorship

A
rthur Rose’s Literary Cynics: Borges, Beckett, Coetzee is an elaborate and
admirably argued monograph that calls for the recognition of a mode
of cynical cosmopolitanism in the late works of Samuel Beckett, J.M.
Coetzee, and Jorge Luis Borges. Although literary cynicism has not gone unno-
ticed in contemporary theory, there has been no full and in-depth analysis of
modern (postmodern) cynicism. Rose explains, “[a]uthority, cynic and context

Arya Aryan (arya.aryan1981@gmail.com) completed his PhD in postmodernist, feminist

and contemporary literature at Durham University under the supervision of Professor
Patricia Waugh and is currently a teaching assistant in the university’s Department of
English Studies. He is currently preparing his first monograph on the topic of authorship
since the 1950s to the present. He has published “The Author Returns” and “The Trau-
matised Shaman: The Woman Writer in the Age of Globalised Trauma” in Alluvium, a
peer reviewed journal.

Journal of Modern Literature  Vol. 42, No. 4  •  Copyright © The Trustees of Indiana University  •  DOI 10.2979/jmodelite.42.4.14
Borges, Beckett, and Coetzee as Postmodernist Cynics 193

cohere together in a practice called literary cynicism” (2). Thus, the book is of
considerable interest to those interested in these three writers’ literary practices
while also questioning the concept of authorship.
The late style of these three writers is where the decline of literary authority
and rise of cynicism coincide, leading to a demystification of literary authority.
Literary cynicism, as epitomized in the late style of these writers, means “a
self-aware manoeuvre (‘nevertheless abandons communication’) against forms of
authority both creative (‘fully in command of his [sic] medium’) and culturally
hegemonic (‘the established social order’)” (3), “a conventional operation of disbe-
lief ” (7). One could infer that by literary cynicism Rose means a total incredulity
toward any ultimate truth and value, or “the denial of any ultimate basis in values,”
as he borrows from Coetzee (7). Rose contends that as both literary authority and
cynicism are equally present in Borges, Beckett, and Coetzee—since “[l]ate style
implies an already existing literary authority for ‘great artists’” (3)—a paradox will
consequently emerge: “no other writers of the latter half of the twentieth century
were granted more literary authority on the basis of works that did more to dis-
pel the mystery of literary authority. This paradoxical use and abuse of literary
authority coheres in what I will call ‘literary cynicism’” (8).
Bold as this claim might appear, for Rose, the literary authority these writ-
ers gained from works that paradoxically dismantle the “mystery” of literary
authority is unrivalled in the second half of the twentieth century. The “irre-
solvable paradoxes” that literary cynicism inevitably encounters, like the paradox
that lies in Michael Riffattere’s notion of “fictional truth,” and the philosopher
W.V.O. Quine’s category of paradox, which the book breaks down into three
main types, are powerful arguments underpinning Rose’s exposition. He per-
fectly understands the delicacies of language games in these three writers. As
the book endeavors to show, literary cynicism as a characteristic of the late style
of these writers is a self-conscious strategy and response set up against authority,
be it creative or politically hegemonic. Rose gives fascinating insight into the
interrelations between each writer and his work by demonstrating how Borges,
Beckett, and Coetzee exploit style (as a set of rhetorical features) and form (that
encompasses the multifarious demonstration of paradox) and, in so doing, respond
to the problem of authority.
Rose, already a proven specialist in the writing of Beckett and Coetzee
as evinced in a run of published essays and articles including “‘SO LITTLE
IN DOUBT’? Revisiting The Unnamable,” “Coetzee’s Reciprocal Differends,”
“Questions of Hospitality in Coetzee’s ‘Diary of a Bad Year’” and “Echoes of
Terence: ‘Rien d’humain’ in the Friends and Neighbours of Flaubert, Beckett
and NDiaye1,” establishes his authority in the field in this first book-length
work. Drawing on works by Peter Sloterdijk and Michel Foucault who both
recover ancient cynicism, Rose, with much rigor, elucidates how his three writers
consciously employ a collocation of cynicisms as theme, style, and political per-
spective in their late works. These works begin in an autobiographical mode but
turn quickly to an exploration of political subjectivity. Building on the writing
194 Journal of Modern Literature Volume 42, Number 4

of Diogenes of Sinope who called this political subjectivity “cosmopolitanism,”

Rose contends that the late works of the three writers create cynical cosmopoli-
tanism and self-reflexivity. What ties these writers together is a shared thought-­
provoking concern with what it is like when writers put themselves into their own
work in order to challenge the rhetoric of authority. To this end, Rose focuses on
Borges’s parables, Beckett’s 1980s plays and Coetzee’s novels from the 2000s.
In five carefully written chapters, examining closely the late writing of Borges,
Beckett, and Coetzee, Rose investigates the relationship between literature and
cynicism. Chapter One, “The Currency of Cosmopolitan Fame,” introduces
the issues of money (currency), fame and cosmopolitan in Borges, Beckett, and
Coetzee. It is followed by three chapters that exemplify the issues via a profound
analysis of the techniques these writers employ in their late works. Tracing the
notion of “defacing the currency” back to Diogenes Laertius’s account of Diogenes
of Sinope, who fled to live in exile as a cosmopolitan because he defaced “the coin-
age of the city” (36), Rose argues that a similar defacement (of the author, their
fame, and their belonging to the world) appears in the three writers.
As Sloterdijk had done earlier, Rose distinguishes between ancient Greek
cynicism, as exemplified by Diogenes, and contemporary cynicism. The former
“designates … those Greek and Roman philosophers who, following a cynical life
characterized by askēsis (practice), arete (virtue) and parrhesia (frank speech), sought
to live ‘according to nature.’ A cynic, after ‘kuón’ (dog), designates a philosopher
who attacks established authority by challenging their opponent ad hominem, as
an intervention of bodies, not of arguments or minds” (9). However, contemporary
cynicism designates “a disenchantment with ideals, whether they be political, sub-
jective or aesthetic” (9). In other words, the ancient cynics contested the authority
“to which they did not belong” whereas the present mode of cynics “is understood
as ‘enlightened false consciousness,’ in which those techniques previously used by
the oppressed to ridicule their masters are turned over to the hands of those very
masters” (9). The book moves on to address T.S. Eliot’s famous essay “Tradition and
the Individual Talent” about the issue of defacing fame. As Rose further argues,
the question of fame, or rather of how fame is defaced, is raised specially in Borges’s
parable “Dialogues between the Dead” and in Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello.
In the following chapter, “Borges’s Parables,” Rose shows how the Argentine
author’s parables exemplify a certain literary cynicism regarding “the claims writ-
ers make to authority in relation to the artwork and society” (27). Cynical cosmo-
politanism and literary cynicism are linked to Borges’s sense of Americanness and
personal labyrinth—two important themes in his work—bringing into account
his writerly and historical parables. Seguing from this discussion of Borges, Rose
tackles Beckett’s use of images. Chapter Three, “Beckett’s Impromptus,” offers
a detailed analysis of Beckett’s Ohio Impromptu (1980), Catastrophe (1982) and
What Where (1983), performed in 1983 in the Harold Clurman theatre. These
plays, or to use Beckett’s own terminology “dramaticules,” are a critique of his
own self-presentation. Form and content, which Beckett calls “shape,” thus create
antinomy or a self-contradiction.
Borges, Beckett, and Coetzee as Postmodernist Cynics 195

Particularly interesting in the next chapter, “Coetzee’s Lessons,” is Rose’s

analysis of Coetzee’s condensation of words, especially his use of adjectives and
adverbs. Rose addresses Coetzee’s ambivalent concept of the author as a creator
of the work and simultaneously as a public intellectual. Rose argues that although
adverbs and adjectives can be merely descriptive and usually used to facilitate
the communication of meaning, in Coetzee’s fictional lessons they function as
obstruction. Accordingly, he examines how Coetzee deliberately turns the words
“mere” and “merely”—exemplary of Coetzee’s penchant for condensation of
words—into paradoxical concepts.
Although an illuminating study, the book is complex and challenging and
requires re-reading. Rose’s metaphoric language, rather than functioning as a
straightforward means of making concepts concrete, serves to defer meaning and
build abstractions whose sense is not always immediately digestible. The writing
is performative of the differánce it seeks to defend in these three literary figures
and inhabits a mode of composition whose deconstructive strategies honor the
complexity of their objects. Ultimately, we are left pondering the differences
between deconstructive practice and cynicism itself. Is deconstruction our most
theoretical and contemporary form of cynicism?
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