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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
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ISBN 978–0–19–880528–1
Printed in Great Britain by
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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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Title: Pour moi seule

roman
Author: André Corthis
Release date: December 13, 2023 [eBook #72393]
Language: French
Original publication: Paris: Albin Michel, 1919
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK POUR MOI

SEULE ***
ANDRÉ CORTHIS
POUR MOI SEULE

ROMAN
PARIS
ALBIN MICHEL, Éditeur
22, RUE HUYGHENS, 22
DU MÊME AUTEUR
Chez FASQUELLE, Bibliothèque Charpentier.
Gemmes et Moires (poésies).

Mademoiselle Arguillès (roman).
Le Pauvre amour de doña Dalbine (roman).
Le Pardon Prématuré (roman).
EN PRÉPARATION :
L’Entraîneuse (roman).
Chez PIERRE LAFFITTE.
Petites vies dans la Tourmente
A PARAITRE :
Les Rameaux rouges (roman).

IL A ÉTÉ TIRÉ DE CET OUVRAGE
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Albin Michel 1919.
A ma chère Maman
je dédie ce livre
POUR MOI SEULE
Sur le toit de tuiles rousses que je vois de ma fenêtre, une fumée

voudrait monter, que rabat le grand vent. Elle bouillonne au sortir de
la cheminée noire comme un jet d’eau sans force ; elle se couche et
s’échevèle. En la regardant, je pense à beaucoup de choses que je
ne saurais pas bien dire. Certes, j’ai de l’instruction. A Paris, j’ai suivi
des cours. Je lis quelquefois. Et l’on m’a toujours affirmé que je fais
bien les lettres. Mais il est difficile de connaître ce que l’on éprouve
et de l’exprimer exactement.
Je voudrais cependant m’y appliquer. Les journées sont longues
et ma sœur Guicharde me décharge de tout le soin de la maison. En
ce moment (c’est aujourd’hui samedi), elle s’occupe en bas à
changer le papier bleu sur les planches du buffet. Elle est prompte
dans ses gestes, et les vaisselles déplacées font en se heurtant un
tapage qui inquiéterait bien mon mari, plus ménager que moi-même,
et qui devrait peut-être m’émouvoir.
Seule dans ma chambre, devant ce papier que je viens de
prendre, je me trouve toute sotte, comme on dit ici. Et qu’est-ce que
je vais raconter, puisqu’il ne s’est rien passé qui ne fût au dedans de
moi ? Cependant, je voudrais essayer… Ce sera bien ordinaire sans
doute, et tourné maladroitement, mais personne n’en pourra rire et le
feu seul connaîtra ces pages, quadrillées de bleu, après que mon
écriture les aura couvertes.
… Notre maison est sombre et froide avec un seul étage et de
très grands greniers. Point de jardin. Une cour seulement, par
derrière, nous sépare de la chapelle désaffectée d’un ancien
couvent ; un acacia maigre y puise un peu de vie. Ses branches
balancées touchent à nos fenêtres et s’allongent de l’autre côté
jusqu’aux petits vitraux jaunes et bleus ; ses fleurs, flétries presque
en naissant mais cependant odorantes, recouvrent au printemps
avec la même abondance notre toit aux fortes lucarnes et le toit
ovale que surmontent encore la cloche et la croix. Pas de vue de ce
côté et pas de vue sur la rue, qui est étroite. Elle s’appelle la rue des
Massacres en souvenir d’horribles choses qui s’accomplirent là
pendant les guerres de religion… Mais ce n’est pas ainsi que je dois
commencer.
Il y a cinq ans que je suis venue dans cette ville, il y en a quatre
que je suis mariée et que j’habite cette maison. Les premiers jours…
Ah ! ce n’est point encore cela. Vais-je enfin y parvenir ? Tout à
l’heure ils m’appelleront pour le souper et je n’aurai pas écrit quatre
lignes. Il me faudrait les premières phrases ; le reste sera bien
facile… Cette fois, j’ai trouvé ; voici qui est vraiment pour moi le
commencement de tout :
Je me souviendrai ma vie entière du jour où maman nous
raconta son histoire.
*
* *
Nous étions à Paris alors, quelques mois après la mort de mon

père, et nous occupions rue des Feuillantines ce petit appartement
propre et triste où j’avais toujours vécu. Un brouillard vert, traversé
d’or, flottait entre les branches des arbres lointains où commençaient
de naître les premières feuilles. Penchée à la fenêtre ouverte, je les
regardais ; je regardais le ciel, bleuâtre sous ses voiles gris étirés
déjà et prêts à se rompre, et je dis tout à coup :
— Maman, n’est-ce point cette année que nous irons à la
campagne dans votre pays ?
— Ferme la fenêtre, Alvère, dit maman. Je m’enrhume et tu vas
prendre froid.
— Mais il ne fait plus froid… c’est le printemps.
Cependant j’obéis. Guicharde, avec des ciseaux qui grinçaient,
taillait sur la table un corsage d’étoffe noire. Nous étions dans la
salle à manger où se passaient nos journées, car il n’y avait pas de
salon et nos deux chambres étaient obscures et petites. Je me
rappelle ces pauvres meubles que nous avons dû vendre, car ils ne
valaient pas ce que leur transport eût coûté, le bureau de mon père,
dans un coin, avec le papier à lettres et les livres de comptes, les six
chaises dont le cuir très usé commençait à blanchir, et la petite
étagère à côté du buffet bas où les vieux journaux étaient rangés
soigneusement, près de quelques boîtes ayant contenu des poudres
ou de la mercerie, vides, mais fort nettes, et qui pouvaient servir un
jour.
— J’aimerais bien aller dans votre petite maison, maman. J’ai
rêvé cette nuit des trois figuiers autour du bassin et du potager en
terrasse d’où l’on voit toute la plaine avec le Rhône, et les Alpes au
loin quand l’air est bien limpide, après les grandes pluies.
— Avec nos pauvres rentes, dit Guicharde, nous pourrions là-bas
vivre mieux qu’à Paris. J’ai payé les œufs quatre francs ce matin et
nous n’aurons pas de dessert à dîner parce que les châtaignes se
finissent et que les confitures ont augmenté encore.
— Hélas ! soupira maman, ce serait mieux sans doute. Oui, ce
serait mieux…
Elle secouait la tête. Une détresse profonde qui montait de son
cœur serré à son pauvre visage faisait trembler et se crisper chaque
muscle sous la peau mince et pâle. Des larmes montaient à ses
yeux toujours beaux.
— Ce serait mieux, je me le répète souvent. Mais je n’ose pas
retourner là-bas. J’ai peur de « les » revoir. « Ils » lui ont fait trop de
mal. « Ils » m’ont trop fait souffrir.
Elle parlait des parents de mon père, nous le savions. Nous
savions que la misère de notre vie était due à cette laide colère qu’ils
avaient sentie en voyant un des leurs épouser une fille pauvre et de
naissance presque ouvrière. Et, sans les avoir jamais vus, comme
nous les haïssions, ces Landargues, de Saint-Jacques, directeurs
des grandes carrières de Saint-Jacques au bord du Rhône où mon
père aurait dû faire sa fortune comme chacun des fils de cette
famille y faisait la sienne depuis plus de deux cents ans ! Cependant
nous ne redoutions point de nous trouver en leur présence.
Guicharde, rancunière et point timide, souhaitait le plaisir insolent de
les bien regarder et puis de détourner la tête en gonflant une bouche
méprisante, et moi je ne jugeais pas qu’ils valussent ce sacrifice que
nous leur faisions, de n’occuper point une maison qui nous venait
des parents de maman et dont le loyer ne nous coûterait rien.
— Vraiment, dit ma sœur, interrompant son ouvrage et
s’asseyant au bord de la table, le temps serait venu, je crois, de
prendre une décision. Pourquoi nous obstiner à rester ici et que
pourrions-nous regretter de Paris ? Nous ne voyons jamais
personne, nous ne prenons pas un plaisir, et nous mangeons très
mal, quoique dépensant pour notre nourriture beaucoup d’argent.
— Je sais, continuait de soupirer maman, je sais bien.
J’insistai à mon tour.
— Le jardin nous donnerait quelques légumes. Nous pourrions
porter des souliers de toile avec des semelles en corde, qui ne
coûtent pas bien cher. Et le bon air de Lagarde nous ferait à toutes
tant de bien !
— Oui, oui, disait maman… l’air est bon… mais les gens ne le
sont pas…
— C’est ridicule, s’exclama Guicharde, tout à fait ridicule. Ces
Landargues, en somme, ne sont pas tout le pays.
— Mais, dit maman, et jamais elle ne m’avait paru si humble et si
découragée, ce ne sont pas seulement les Landargues, c’est tout le
pays que je redoute.
— Tout le pays, répéta Guicharde, — et comme elle n’éprouvait
rien qu’avec violence, elle n’était pas en ce moment surprise, mais
stupéfaite. — Vous redoutez tout le pays !… Et pourquoi cela ?
— Parce que tu étais déjà au monde depuis plusieurs années
quand je me suis mariée, ma petite fille, et que là-bas, les gens le
savent bien.
Maman dit cela sans baisser la voix. Elle avait porté son secret
trop longtemps et maintenant elle le laissait aller devant nous,
simplement, parce que le cœur s’ouvre de lui-même comme font les
mains quand elles sont trop lasses et que toute la volonté ne peut
plus servir de rien. Elle ne parut pas gênée du silence qui suivit ses
paroles, et le petit soupir qu’elle poussa était comme de
soulagement… Je la regardais, et, dans cette seconde, me
rappelant toutes les sévérités de notre éducation, les livres
défendus, les coiffures sans fantaisie, les belles phrases
impérieuses sur l’honneur féminin, je sentais, je le crois bien, plus de
trouble encore que de désespoir et je ne pouvais plus rien
comprendre… Mais Guicharde avait dix ans de plus que moi. Elle
posa doucement ses ciseaux. On eût dit qu’elle écoutait quelque
chose, et sûrement se lamentaient autour d’elle toutes les détresses
qui s’étaient un jour levées autour de notre mère. Et puis elle se jeta
vers elle, l’enveloppa de ses deux bras, et glissant sur les genoux :
— Oh ! maman, ma pauvre maman ! gémit-elle, sur un ton de
tendresse que n’avait jamais eu sa voix un peu rude.
*
* *
Maman appuya sa tête sur l’épaule de Guicharde et se laissa

bercer ainsi. Dans le silence, j’entendais rouler une lente et lourde
voiture sur les pavés de notre rue. Un fouet claquait allégrement,
mais on devinait bien qu’il ne touchait pas aux bêtes et rythmait
seulement au-dessus de leur fatigue une chanson entraînante. La
fenêtre était demeurée ouverte. Un petit souffle faisait doucement
trembler sur la table l’étoffe que tout à l’heure taillait Guicharde.
— Vous comprenez, disait maman rêvant à mi-voix, tout
inconsciente et apaisée, quand je suis entrée à l’usine pour y tenir
certains comptes, ils étaient tous très aimables pour moi. Il y avait le
père Landargues qui vivait encore ; mais il ne s’occupait plus de
grand’chose et il n’a pas tardé à mourir. Et puis Mme Landargues qui
faisait tout marcher. Elle avait déjà les cheveux blancs, à cette
époque, et aussi étincelants que peut l’être au soleil la cime du mont
Ventoux, et la figure bien fraîche, mais pas trop bonne, avec une
bouche toute serrée et sans lèvres, et des yeux gris, très durs. Il y
avait aussi Robert, le fils aîné qui était veuf et déjà bien malade, et
puis son fils à lui, le petit François.
Elle réfléchit et calcula :
— Il doit bien avoir plus de trente-cinq ans aujourd’hui. C’est lui
qui sera l’héritier de tout.
Je m’étais rapprochée d’elle, moi aussi ; je m’appuyais
maintenant à son fauteuil et, moins effrayée, quelquefois,
doucement, j’embrassais ses cheveux. Elle continuait, lentement et
comme heureuse que nous fussions enfin ses confidentes :
— Ils étaient bien aimables pour moi au début, oui, et même ils
avaient l’air assez simple et de ne pas trop s’en croire. Ils m’ont
invitée deux fois à déjeuner… Mais après, oh ! après ! quand ils ont
vu que Georges devenait amoureux de moi…
Tout maigre et consumé que fût son visage, tout enveloppé de
misérables cheveux gris, qu’il paraissait jeune en ce moment, avec
cette flamme qui se levait soudain au fond des yeux, ces yeux de
maman, un peu gris, un peu bleus, verdâtres quelquefois, d’une
couleur indécise, hésitante, eût-on dit, et timides comme l’était ce
cher être tout entier ! qu’il paraissait jeune, ce visage, à ce tourner
ainsi vers l’amour d’autrefois !
— Alors, voilà, vous comprenez, mes petites… Moi, vous le
savez, j’étais la fille d’un menuisier, bien artiste, c’est vrai, et qui
aimait les livres, et qui savait parfaitement réparer les vieux
meubles, avec leurs pieds tordus et toutes leurs petites sculptures,
mais enfin, un ouvrier tout de même, et qui employait seulement
deux ouvriers. Et Georges, c’était M. Georges Landargues, le
second fils des Landargues, de Saint-Jacques… Alors, ses parents
à lui, n’est-ce pas, c’était bien naturel qu’ils ne soient pas très
contents… Après seulement ils auraient pu être moins méchants.
Oh ! oui… après… parce que voilà… Quand Guicharde a été sur le
point de venir au monde, nous sommes partis tous les deux pour
Paris à cause du scandale… tout le monde savait… et nous ne
pouvions plus rester au pays. Ma mère était bien en colère. Elle
m’aurait gardée cependant, je le crois, parce que… le mal, c’est
avec un Landargues que je l’avais fait, et les Landargues, dans notre
région, vous ne pouvez pas savoir ce que c’est comme
importance… Mais c’est mon père qui ne pardonnait pas… Une fille
bien élevée comme j’avais été, avec de l’instruction et toutes ces
habitudes de dame qu’on m’avait données…
— Maman, disait Guicharde quand elle se taisait, la tenant
toujours serrée comme un enfant et lui caressant la joue de ses
lèvres, ma petite maman.
— … Oh ! ma grande… si tu savais… la honte… comme ça peut
faire du mal, mal comme de se couper ou de se brûler, aussi fort…
seulement ça ne guérit pas… Alors nous sommes venus à Paris,
dans une petite chambre d’abord, presque misérable. Georges
n’avait pas voulu demander un sou à ses parents parce qu’ils lui
avaient dit sur moi et sur lui de trop vilaines choses… Il a travaillé,
mais il connaissait seulement les carrières et comme il faut
commander à trois cents ouvriers. Dans les tissus, il n’y entendait
rien, et dans la porcelaine non plus, ni dans l’ameublement. Il a
essayé de tout ça. Il ne gagnait pas grand’chose. Un hiver nous
étions trop malheureux. Il a écrit à sa mère. Elle a répondu : Si tu
renonces à tes droits sur mon héritage, que tu ne mérites pas, et si
je dois n’entendre plus jamais parler de toi, je veux bien te donner
cent mille francs… Naturellement il a renoncé à tout… Cent mille
francs… pensez donc…
— Tout de même, dit Guicharde qui était pratique.
— Ah ! il fallait voir où nous en étions… A cause de ces cent mille
francs, pendant quelques mois nous avons été bien heureux.
Georges me disait : je cherche une bonne affaire, et j’y entrerai
comme associé. Je ne sais pas bien être employé. Je n’ai pas été
dressé à ça… mais comme patron, tu vas voir… Et il a bien trouvé
l’affaire : seulement, elle était mauvaise et les cent mille francs ont
failli être perdus. On a pu en sauver la moitié ; mais nous avions eu
si peur… si peur, que nous ne voulions plus risquer rien. Nous les
avons placés en fonds d’État pour être tranquilles et votre père a
trouvé chez Marpeau cette petite place de caissier où il est resté
plus de vingt ans, jusqu’à sa mort…
Nous savions certains de ces détails, mais les plus familiers
aujourd’hui étaient pour nous comme les inconnus et nous écoutions
avec un étonnement triste et passionné cette histoire nouvelle…
Guicharde baissa la voix pour demander :
— Et alors, maman… votre mariage ?…
— Voilà, dit-elle. C’est quand mon père allait mourir. Il ne voulait
pas me revoir et j’en avais du chagrin… Georges, — il était si
doux… et un : peu craintif aussi… comme moi ! — il espérait
toujours que sa mère pardonnerait, et qu’elle autoriserait notre
mariage. Comme il avait été très bien élevé, et ne pouvait pas se
passer de ce consentement… Il me le disait et je le comprenais bien.
Mais il a fini par se rendre compte qu’elle le détestait pour la vie et
que sa colère contre lui, rien ne pouvait la faire plus grande. Alors,
un jour, après en avoir bien parlé, nous sommes partis tous les deux
pour la mairie et pour l’église sans rien dire à personne. Comme à
Paris on m’appelait déjà Madame Landargues, ça n’a rien changé ;
mais tu te rappelles bien, Guicharde ? c’est ce matin où, quand nous
sommes rentrés, nous t’avons apporté la belle poupée avec sa robe
rose, et il y avait un gâteau pour le dessert tout couvert de crème
glacée et de fruits confits.
— Mais oui, dit Guicharde, je me rappelle très bien… J’étais si
contente !… Ah ! c’était pour cela le gâteau et la poupée… On ne
sait pas comprendre quand on est petit.
Maman se redressa dans son fauteuil, et regardant par la fenêtre
le ciel et ces vilains toits gris qui commençaient de devenir bleus :
— Voilà, dit-elle encore… voilà… Vous comprenez, mes petites,
pourquoi je vous ai élevées comme j’ai fait. Deux heures tous les
matins dans une petite pension du quartier. Et je vous conduisais
moi-même, et j’allais vous chercher. Comme instruction, c’était bien
suffisant puisque je ne voulais pas que vous fassiez aucun travail qui
vous aurait éloignées de moi… Ah ! non ! j’avais trop peur… Dans
toutes ces maisons où l’on emploie des jeunes filles, dans tous ces
bureaux, c’est mon histoire qui recommence… Non !… non !… Je ne
voulais pas… J’aimais mieux que vous ne gagniez aucun argent.
J’aimais mieux notre misère et vous garder là, près de moi,
toujours… Alors, si je vous ai élevées bien sévèrement, si j’avais
peur de tout, des amies, des livres, des théâtres, de la rue, si vous
vous êtes toujours bien ennuyées, vous comprenez, maintenant, il
ne faut pas m’en vouloir…
Elle n’avait pas su nous dire de bien grands mots et elle
n’attendait pas que nous lui en disions. Mais je crois que depuis
longtemps elle éprouvait un grand besoin de ne plus nous mentir sur
elle-même, et presque vieille déjà, languissante et affaiblie, de se
remettre entre nos mains. Elle se pressait maintenant contre
Guicharde, et quelquefois contre moi, avec une tendresse touchante
et rassurée. Nous étions désormais ses confidentes et son soutien.
Et quand, ce même jour, un peu plus tard, ma sœur, dans sa
sagesse, eut décidé qu’un passé aussi lointain, suivi des années les
plus honorables, ne pouvait vraiment nous empêcher d’organiser
notre vie selon la raison et l’économie, elle approuva aussitôt,
obéissante et résignée.
*
* *
La maison de mon grand-père le menuisier était au cœur même

de la très vieille ville. D’autres maisons la pressaient ; son toit se
confondait parmi des toits inégaux. Le soir de notre arrivée, au sortir
de la petite gare, quand maman étendant le bras nous dit : c’est là !
nous ne vîmes rien d’abord au flanc de la colline qu’un
enchevêtrement de tuiles, couleur d’amandes brûlées, sur de petits
murs couleur de rouille et de miel. Le clocher carré de l’église portait,
visible à tout le ciel dans une belle couronne de fer forgé, sa plus
grosse cloche, et toutes les cheminées des maisons s’élevaient vers
lui, surmontées chacune de deux briques, inclinées et unies par leur
pointe comme sont les doigts roides des saintes en prière dans les
sculptures primitives et dans les tableaux d’autrefois.
C’était à la fin d’avril et, comme le vent soufflait, il faisait encore
froid. La nuit tomba dans le temps que nous gravissions le chemin
qui monte. Par les petites rues tournant sous des voûtes, par les
petites places qui s’empanachent d’un gros orme ou de trois
acacias, nous gagnâmes la ruelle où s’ouvre notre maison. Le vent
plus fort y coulait comme une lame et déchirait les poumons. Nos
valises liées de cordes et le gros sac de moleskine où étaient nos
provisions de route, tout alourdi de verres et de bouteilles qui
résonnaient à brinqueballer ainsi et à se heurter les uns contre les
autres, nous coupaient les doigts. Et personne ne nous attendait que
la simple maison mise en état par une servante de quinze ans que
Guicharde avait engagée par lettres adressées à la mairie deux
semaines auparavant.
Il fallut heurter trois fois, et cette fille enfin se décida à nous
ouvrir. Elle avait l’air niais et bon, la gorge déjà hardie dans un
corsage à raies roses, et de fausses pierres vertes, enchâssées de
cuivre, pendeloquaient à ses oreilles. En nous voyant, elle demeura
bêtement à rire sur le seuil sans même songer à nous débarrasser.
Mais déjà, dans les autres maisons, des rideaux se soulevaient
derrière les vitres verdâtres des petites fenêtres. Une porte
s’entr’ouvrait. Quelqu’un, d’un balcon, se penchait vers nous. Une
voix souffla :
— La femme de Georges Landargues, avec ses deux filles.
— Entrons, dit maman, entrons vite.
Et elle passa la porte, toute roide et violente de gestes, avec une
sorte de courage désespéré. Mais Guicharde, sur le seuil, demeura
derrière elle : elle fixa les fenêtres derrière lesquelles frissonnait
sournoisement une curiosité sans bienveillance et j’eus l’impression
que son dur et hardi regard faisait se détourner, derrière les rideaux
fanés, d’autres regards invisibles. Ensuite elle entra à son tour et la
petite servante referma la porte. Je dis tout bas :
— Nous sommes chez nous.
Je regardais le couloir que remplissait l’escalier de bois, les deux
portes ouvertes, à gauche sur la salle qu’enfumait une lampe coiffée
de jaune, à droite sur la cuisine où flambaient de menues branches
dans une large et noire cheminée… Déjà Guicharde relevait la
mèche de la lampe, ouvrait les placards, s’inquiétait de la façon dont
passeraient par l’escalier trop étroit nos malles que l’on devait porter
le lendemain. Maman se taisait. Il me semblait qu’elle baissait la tête
et serrait les épaules. Elle s’approcha d’une fenêtre qui devait
donner sur le jardin et regarda la nuit. Elle tremblait doucement.
Peut-être elle pensait à ces rideaux soulevés sur son arrivée, et
peut-être ce qui se chuchotait à cette heure, dans les maisons
obscures, venait jusqu’à elle.
— Je n’aurais pas dû revenir ici, dit-elle.
— Mais puisqu’il était impossible de faire autrement, remarqua
Guicharde, avec son bon sens un peu brusque.
Et elle demanda une bougie pour monter aux chambres.
Maman soupira :
— C’est vrai !
Résignée, elle s’assit devant la table où le couvert était mis. Elle
avait retiré sa jaquette noire garnie de faux astrakan, mais elle
conservait son petit chapeau de crêpe tout déformé et déplacé par le
voyage. Je le lui fis remarquer.
— Enlevez-le, maman. On dirait que vous n’êtes pas chez vous,
et que vous allez repartir.
Aussitôt elle obéit avec une tranquillité douce.
— C’est vrai, tout de même, dit-elle, que je suis chez moi… m’y
voici donc revenue, dans ma maison.
Elle me montra dans un coin une chaise de paille, très basse,
dont le simple dossier portait en relief trois abeilles sculptées dans
une couronne d’olivier.
— Tu vois, c’est là que je m’asseyais quand j’étais toute petite.
Et elle me montra encore, près de la fenêtre, une table carrée
avec des pieds en torsade qui luisaient sous la lampe :
— C’est là que j’écrivais mes devoirs. J’y ai préparé mon
certificat d’études. Après, je faisais surtout des comptes. C’est mon
oncle Jarny qui m’apprenait. Il avait été caissier à Paris dans une
grande maison de tissus.
Elle se tut, regardant de nouveau la fenêtre, et ce qu’elle voyait
maintenant, je le savais bien, était au delà des meubles et des
murs… Sa tristesse, en ce moment, me pénétra jusqu’au désespoir.
Son pauvre cœur saignait et pleurait dans mon cœur, et, doucement,
je passais ma main sur la petite main si pâle. Mais Guicharde entrait
à grands pas. Parlant des malles, elle déclara :
— Elles passeront, mais il faudra prendre garde à ne pas érafler
le mur.
Derrière elle venait la servante Adélaïde portant la soupière et
nous prîmes place pour le repas. Nous n’avions pas grand’faim. La
lampe continuait de fumer et d’éclairer mal. A travers l’odeur de sa
mèche grésillante l’odeur humide et morte des vieilles pierres et des
vieux plâtres tenus trop longtemps dans l’ombre nous devenait
sensible. La grande force du vent, se pressant contre les murs,
menaçait de faire crouler cette pauvre demeure. Dans son
grondement des lanières claquaient, qui, semblait-il, retombaient sur
nos cœurs tressaillants. Par instant, il semblait s’apaiser. Mais de
ces silences nous venait une oppression plus grande, car nous
sentions bien qu’il était toujours là, couché sur la maison,
l’enveloppant de sa force pour bondir et siffler de nouveau dès qu’il
aurait bien pris son repos effrayant. La fatigue maintenant pesait sur
nous au point que nous ne pouvions plus parler. Et cependant il

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Beyond the ancient quarrel: literature,

philosophy, and J.M. Coetzee First

Beyond the Ancient Quarrel: Literature, Philosophy, and

Biota Grow 2C gather 2C cook Loucas

Literary Cynics Borges Beckett Coetzee Arthur Rose

Psychology of Retention Theory Research and Practice

Thriving in Digital Workspaces Emerging Issues for

J M Coetzee and the Ethics of Narrative Transgression A

The philosophy of knowledge a history Volume 1

Romanticism Philosophy and Literature Michael N.

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).

Title: Pour moi seule

Author: André Corthis

Release date: December 13, 2023 [eBook #72393]

Original publication: Paris: Albin Michel, 1919

Credits: Laurent Vogel and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK POUR MOI

POUR MOI SEULE

Chez FASQUELLE, Bibliothèque Charpentier.

Gemmes et Moires (poésies).

Chez PIERRE LAFFITTE.

Petites vies dans la Tourmente

Les Rameaux rouges (roman).

10 exemplaires sur papier du Japon

25 exemplaires sur papier de Hollande

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