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

Beyond the Ancient

Quarrel
Literature, Philosophy, and J. M. Coetzee
Edited by
PATRICK HAYES
and
JAN WILM
1
3
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP,
United Kingdom
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford.
It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship,
and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of
Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries
© the several contributors 2017
Harry Ransom Center
The University of Texas at Austin
The moral rights of the authors have been asserted
First Edition published in 2017
Impression: 1
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the
prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted
by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics
rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the
above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the
address above
You must not circulate this work in any other form
and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press
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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.
Embedding and Embodying Philosophy 19
substance of a child whilst the father merely provides the idea, thereby presenting
sexual intercourse as one concrete realization of reality’s participation in ideas.9 And
against the stevedores, he argues that without ideas there would be no universe
because there would be no being.10 By this, he primarily means no unified world of
distinguishable existent things; but since his preferred example of an idea is that of
justice, he also invokes the internal relation of ideas and ideals—models for how a
currently unsatisfactory world might be made otherwise, brought closer to its
distinctive telos, and so to itself. But invoking justice, understood as an aspiration
to realize a world in which honest toil brings due reward, points us more specifically
towards Plato’s Republic and its initiating definition of justice as a matter of giving a
man his due.
And Novilla’s way of life does indeed appear to embody the ideally just city that
Socrates builds out of his conversational exchanges with Adeimantus and Glaucon.
Its inhabitants happily endorse the Republic’s advocacy of radical sexual equality
(asked whether she has a man in her life, Elena says that she has both male and
female friends and doesn’t distinguish between them and the loosening of parent–
child bonds; Elena carefully distinguishes biological from emotional parenting,
arguing that the latter matters most and that both men and women are equipped
to provide it, thereby implying that Socrates’ envisaged separation of children from
their biological parents is a perfectly reasonable proposal).11 More generally,
Novilla’s inhabitants have established a regime in which human desires are firmly
under the control of reason—a world from which storms of passion (whether about
sex or about food) have been exiled.
This is what most disturbs Simón, who yearns for sexual intimacy and for a more
varied, spicy diet, ideally involving the consumption of juicy animal flesh. But if
he rejects the strictures of this Platonic Utopia, why does he resort so persistently
to one of the central metaphysical doctrines underpinning it? Coetzeean realism
requires us to relate these ideas to their embodying contexts—which in this case are
conversations with inhabitants of Novilla, in which Simón’s primary concern is not
to declare and defend his real beliefs but to further his own interests in the face of
his interlocutors’ hostility or incomprehension by deploying their own ideas against
them. With the stevedores, he wants to liberate himself from burdensome manual
labour; with Elena, he is defending his decision to hand over David to Inés; and
with David, he is attempting to mask Ana’s shaming exposure of his sexual designs
on her by re-characterizing them in terms that the child will have to master if he is
ever to become properly native to Novilla. In other words, the contextual embodi-
ments of these Platonic ideas as Simón enounces them turn them to profoundly
un-Platonic—even sophistical—purposes.
It’s also worth asking just how Platonic the Utopia embodied by Novilla really is.
Although Plato and Socrates both advocate reason’s mastery over desire, Novilla’s
repression of bodily satisfactions goes far beyond that required by either. Does
Coetzee’s portrayal of Novilla as an embodiment of Platonic ideals do Plato an
9 Ibid., pp. 34, 104. 10 Ibid., p. 115. 11 Ibid., pp. 55, 104.
20 Stephen Mulhall
injustice, offering caricature rather than satire (what one might call—remembering
David’s delight in watching a television cartoon involving an animal character he
calls ‘Plato’ rather than Pluto—a Mickey Mouse version of philosophy’s founder)?
If so, then the un-Platonic uses to which Simón puts Novilla’s belief system offer no
critical purchase on the real Plato.
There is, however, a point in the Republic at which social (and so psychic)
arrangements of the kind enforced in Novilla are explicitly articulated, only to be
apparently rejected in favour of a more sophisticated level of human self-
cultivation. This is at the beginning of book II, after Thrasymachus’ departure,
but before the full complexity of the internal economy of Socrates’ just city—and,
in particular, its need for a guardian class from whom the philosopher-kings will
ultimately evolve—has been articulated. We might call this a gap during which
most of Plato’s readers fall asleep.
When Socrates asks how human society arises, his answer invokes mutual need
(the fact that humans are not individually self-sufficient) and differences of apti-
tude, which generate a mode of communal life divided into five classes: producers,
merchants, sailors, retail traders, and manual labourers. Such a society requires a
bare minimum of clothing, equally simple food (such as barley-meal, beans, nuts,
and vegetables), and basic forms of shelter and furnishing; its citizens lead a peaceful
and healthy existence, living until a ripe old age, and bequeath the same form of life
to their children. But Glaucon immediately calls this a community of pigs, lacking
all ordinary comforts: Socrates calls them, rather, the luxuries of civilization. He
reiterates that this society is the true one for human beings, ‘like a man in health’,
whereas Glaucon’s civilized society is ‘one in a fever’; but he acknowledges that
studying the latter might be justified because in that new context it might be easier
to discover ‘how justice and injustice are bred in a community’.12
This passage implies that what most view as Socrates’ ideal city (the Utopia
elaborated upon in the rest of the dialogue) is in fact his vision of a diseased
condition of society and its citizens. The truly Socratic Utopia is to be found in the
first half of book II: because it is internally articulated, it is a possible matrix of
justice, insofar as justice is—as Socrates and Adeimantus note—a matter of the
proper relationship between its elements; but because that articulation is so simple
and transparent, because it is inherently stable and transmissible between gener-
ations, justice is not a complicated challenge but something self-evident to all. The
issue becomes bewildering only when this society’s internal complexity expands to
engender and satisfy desires that go beyond life’s necessaries—a world of artists, of
those concerned with domestic consumption (especially women’s dress and make-
up), and of hunters, fishermen, swineherds, and cattle-herders.
So, Coetzee’s depiction of Novilla might really be an accurate portrayal of
the Utopia that Plato and Socrates advocate, and Simón might really be a critic
of philosophy’s founding ideal. Except for one thing—the distinguishing form of
Platonic philosophical prose: irony. Novilla’s inhabitants are utterly devoid of
12 Plato, Republic, pp. 368–73.

irony, apparently lacking any conception of it: as Simón puts it, they ‘do not see any
doubleness in this world, any difference between the ways things seem and the way
things are’.13 This is why Alvaro has such trouble with the idea of possible worlds,
saying that the real world is the only world, why the idea of justice as an ideal in
relation to which the actual world might be found wanting is opaque to the
stevedores, and why that opacity leaves them sceptical of the reality of change
and so of history.14 But Plato’s Socrates is a master of irony, which operates in the
space between seeming and being, appearance and reality—the very gap that Plato’s
theory of ideas opens up and exploits to lead us out of the cave of illusion and up
towards a genuine understanding of reality.
Accordingly, Socrates’ opening distinction between a healthy society and a
feverish one may in fact be an ironic parody of contemporary Greek theories of
the simple life, designed to support Glaucon’s conjunction of such simplicity
with non-human animal life. After all, Novilla’s philosophy—however apparently
Platonic in content—is employed by its residents to reaffirm their current arrange-
ments: the theory of reality as dependent upon its participation in ideas is used not
to reveal a gap between imperfect actuality and ideal reality that we might close, but
rather to identify the actual with the ideal, and so to disavow any real distinction
between seeming and being. Genuine philosophizing as the Republic understands
it, the kind exemplified in the conversational construction of that understanding, is
only called for by the circumstances of civilized luxury that also call for art; for this
enlargement of our circle of desires requires guardians to protect society from external
threats, and it is from them alone that (when properly educated) philosopher-kings
can emerge.
Coetzee is, of course, himself a master of irony, so he could plausibly be
imagined not only to stay awake during such moments of Socratic irony, but to
identify himself with them—or at least to invent literary equivalents. But, then
again, this anti-Utopia tends towards the vegetarian—its well-balanced diet is
almost entirely devoid of flesh and fish. So when the creator of Elizabeth Costello
invites us to identify with Simón’s preference for salt and spice over bean-paste, and
even with his lust for the juicy flesh of his fellow-animals, is that just one more
ironic exploitation of the doubleness of things?
CHILD A ND ELDER
When Coetzee embeds into Novilla’s embodiment of Platonism two new arrivals
who find its form of life profoundly alien, the friction thereby engendered discloses
issues of a kind in which Wittgenstein’s later philosophy is particularly interested.
One of his most famous remarks is ‘what has to be accepted, the given, is—one
might say—forms of life’.15 He means that forms of life cannot be given, and so
cannot stand in need of, rational justifications of the kind philosophy traditionally
13 The Childhood of Jesus, p. 64. 14 Ibid., pp. 42, 115, 115–17.

15 Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, ‘Philosophy of Psychology: A Fragment’, p. 345.
22 Stephen Mulhall
aspires to provide (and of which the Republic is an exemplary instance); and since
forms of life are plural, both various and in principle capable of being otherwise,
differences between the forms of life inhabited by different individuals cannot be
rationally adjudicated. Wittgenstein’s texts are littered with imaginary tribes whose
ways of speaking and living diverge radically from our own, in order to show both
that our ways of speaking and living are not fixed, and that none can claim to make
better sense of things sub specie aeternitatis than others. So he imagines one tribe
which responds with compassion to those whose pain derives from visible injuries,
and with disdain to those who claim to suffer pain with no such source;16 another
which charges for piles of wood according to the surface area it occupies rather than its
volume;17 or people who contemplate selling cheese by weight despite its tendency
to vary randomly in size.18
Simón’s initial experiences in Novilla have a strikingly similar aspect and affect.
He quickly discovers that the inhabitants think that hospitality to strangers means
allowing them to build a shelter in your yard when there is room in your house; that
watching a game of football should be free (unless a cake is needed to award to the
victors of the championship); that sexual intercourse is of no particular emotional
significance, and the biological differences between men and women have no
complex implications for their social relationships; that using technology to make
work practices more efficient is not a good thing; that libraries should be exclusively
stocked with non-fiction of some practical use, just as further education should
focus on practical skills; and that rats are not vermin (since they are the most
obvious source of meat to eat, and they play a helpful role in the stevedore’s food-
storage practices), but pigs may be (since they eat their own excrement).19 In other
words, at every level at which this culture makes sense of the human condition in
the wider world, the Novillan form of life is bewilderingly different to Simón’s own,
drawing distinctions where no significant difference can be discerned and ignoring
distinctions that are obviously important, and so appears to lack coherence,
rationality, and humanity. Ultimately, however, Simón is forced to acknowledge
that it makes perfect sense to those inhabiting it, that from their point of view the
distinctions he wishes to draw or to ignore are as bewildering as theirs are to him,
and that there is no available perspective from which to adjudicate between them.
But the relation to Wittgenstein’s thought is even more specific: Simón and
David embody a variation on a figure that runs throughout the Philosophical
Investigations—that of the child, or rather that of the child and its elder, the adult
who is responsible for his education, for inducting the child into his human
community and its ways. Wittgenstein adopts this focus from the passage of
Augustine’s Confessions with which he begins his text, in which a child acquires
speech by observing his elders’ ways of articulating their desires (and so without
their explicit aid, perhaps even despite their neglect). Wittgenstein’s child follows a
16 See Ludwig Wittgenstein, Zettel, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1981), p. 380.
17 See Ludwig Wittgenstein, Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1981), p. 149.
18 Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, p. 142.
19 Ibid., pp. 24, 169, 151, 120–1, 36, 112, 170.
different trajectory, in which his education involves the explicit attention, or at least
the implied friendly or enabling presence, of an adult: and, as I note the major
stations of that journey, I will register the corresponding episodes in Coetzee’s
narrative of Simón and David.
Wittgenstein’s child is sent to buy apples (Simón is particularly driven to find
fruit for David, their first success being the discovery of a shop that sells oranges,
although apples recur later when mathematics is at issue between them).20
He becomes involved in a game of building something with stones (Simón and
David have to build their first night’s shelter from sheets of roofing); at this point,
Wittgenstein also invokes images of a toolbox and the cab of a locomotive (which
recur in Coetzee’s narrative when Simón mends the toilet and when David watches
television at Daga’s), before examining how we play games of chess and football
(David plays the former with Alvaro, and both watches and plays the latter).21 Then
comes the most extended Wittgensteinian treatment of a child’s education: inves-
tigating how one learns to follow a simple mathematical rule; in so doing, he
branches off into discussions of what is involved in reading, and ends with a long
investigation of the idea of a private language, and throughout the adult teacher
confronts what commentators call a deviant pupil—one whose responses to ordin-
ary teaching practices diverge in a variety of ways from normality, each of which
hinders his induction into their culture by putting into question what counts as the
right next step in applying the rule, thereby placing pressure on the teacher’s
authority (his claim to represent that culture in his claim to know what the right
next step is, and what might be justified or effective responses to his pupil’s deviance).
In all these ways, David seems to be a literary embodiment of Wittgenstein’s
deviant pupil.
After all, Simón’s difficulties in teaching David about numbers begin with
David’s difficulties in grasping how to generate a seamless sequence of rightly
related numbers—or, as Simón presents it, with recognizing that there are only
gaps between them, not cracks.22 Whereas numbers are differentiated by their
places in a sequence which thereby establishes properly spaced gaps between
them, David encounters cracks between numbers into which he and they might
at any point fall: given one number, it is an open question for David which comes
next, or indeed whether any come next, or whether the sequence in fact falls
apart, revealing its essential illusoriness. This is essentially an extreme variant on
the difficulty encountered by Wittgenstein’s deviant pupil: having apparently
mastered the sequence that is generated by adding two, this pupil continues the
sequence beyond ‘1000’ with ‘1004, 1008, 1012’; and when his error is pointed
out, he responds by saying, ‘But I am going on in the same way!’ In other words,
Wittgenstein says:
[T]his person finds it natural, once given our explanations, to understand our order
as we would understand the order ‘Add 2 up to 1000, 4 up to 2000, 6 up to 3000,
and so on’.
20 Ibid., pp. 34, 248. 21 Ibid., pp. 7, 127, 183, 43. 22 Ibid., p. 176.
24 Stephen Mulhall
This case would have similarities to that in which it comes naturally to a person to
react to the gesture of pointing with the hand by looking in the direction from fingertip
to wrist, rather than from wrist to fingertip.23
This may seem to restrict the pupil’s deviance in a manner David would reject,
since Wittgenstein’s pupil retains the assumption that numbers have a sequence,
differing with us only about which it is; but if his deviant sequence is, on a certain
interpretation of our explanations and examples, in conformity with them, then
any sequence of numbers (even ones as chaotic as those David recites, in which the
very idea of a sequence is put under pressure) could, on some interpretation, count
as the application of a rule, and so the deviant pupil appears to dramatize a sceptical
anxiety about the very idea of numbers as coming in sequences.
The literature on Wittgenstein’s treatment of rule-following commonly assumes
that the problem raised by this deviant pupil is what, if anything, determines that
1002 is the correct answer when one is asked to add 2 to 1000, and that
Wittgenstein’s solution is to invoke the community—so what makes a given step
the right one to take is its conformity with the way that the community is inclined
to go on. Since there is no pertinent standard of correctness external to our form of
life, the distinction between correctly and incorrectly applying it must be a matter
of how the community draws it, and teaching it is a matter of bringing the pupil
into conformity with that communal practice. This is why private rules are
impossible, which is why Wittgenstein’s discussion of rule-following throws up
the question of a private language and provides the central basis for dismissing it. It
is also why Wittgenstein is led to one of his most famous images for the givenness of
forms of life:
‘How am I able to follow a rule?’—If this is not a question about causes, then it is about
the justification for my acting in this way in complying with the rule.
Once I have exhausted the justifications, I have reached bedrock, and my spade is
turned. Then I am inclined to say: ‘This is simply what I do.’24
As Stanley Cavell has pointed out, such communitarian readings of Wittgenstein
on rule-following imply an ethics and a politics of teaching: bringing a pupil into a
rule-following community is essentially a matter of enforcing conformity—as if,
having had my pedagogical spade turned, I am licensed to say to my pupil: ‘You
simply must do whatever I am inclined to do.’25 The implied alternative is explicit
in one of Wittgenstein’s earlier drafts of the Investigations, when he says: ‘[I]f a
child does not respond to the suggestive gesture [to the teacher’s indications of
how to go on], it is separated from the others and treated as a lunatic.’26 Cavell
argues that communitarian readings of Wittgenstein realize just such a spirit; we
23 Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, p. 185. 24 Ibid., p. 217.

25 See chapter 2 of Stanley Cavell, Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome (Chicago: The University
of Chicago Press, 1990).
26 Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Blue and Brown Books: Preliminary Studies for the ‘Philosophical
Investigations’ (New York: Harper & Row, 1958), p. 93.

might say that they take this remark of Wittgenstein’s literally, failing to hear its
Swiftian tones, its irony.
For Wittgenstein’s remark about bedrock does not characterize the pedagogical
situation in Swiftian terms: what his teacher envisages saying to his pupil is not that
he must do as he does, but rather, ‘this is what I do, this is how I and we do things:
will you take me as exemplary, as an example you are willing to follow?’ And, of
course, Wittgenstein’s teacher doesn’t actually say this to his pupil: he acknow-
ledges an inclination to do so, but what they would convey is already manifest in his
stance towards his pupil—in his willingness to provide whatever justifications he
can, but to acknowledge when they run out by resorting to showing rather than
telling (certainly not to telling off or separating off his pupil)—that is, to presenting
himself and his actions as no more but no less than an embodiment of the sense his
community finds itself able to make of these things we call numbers, in the hope
that his pupil will be attracted to it.
This non-coercive or democratic model of teaching is not only truer to
Wittgenstein’s remarks about reaching bedrock; it is more closely attuned to the
primary point of his introducing the deviant pupil. For in section 185, Wittgen-
stein expresses no sceptical anxiety about whether 1002 really is what results from
adding 2 to 1000; rather, he points out that, even in the domain of pure
mathematical reason, explanations and justifications may run out, may fail to
convey understanding; hence, when they succeed, that is not because what is
being conveyed is written into reality by Platonic forms, or accessible through
pure recollection by all rational beings (as Socrates aims to demonstrate with the
slave-boy in the Meno), but rather because teacher and pupil share a repertoire of
natural reactions. Put otherwise, the normative is embedded in, and so dependent
on, the natural—on human nature, on what comes naturally to us at a particular
moment in human history (which may be measurable in years or in millennia);
so deviance is a manifestation of differences that are no more but no less than
natural, hence neither arbitrary nor necessary (just as our natural mode of
walking is neither the only possible one, nor something randomly contrived).
And this really should alter our understanding of the authority that adults bear
as pedagogues—as individuals who aspire to induct the young into their form
of life.
Coetzee’s narrative of mathematical pedagogy enforces the difference between
these two models of teaching by assigning each to a different character, but it uses
that Wittgensteinian distinction to distinctly un-Wittgensteinian effect. The coer-
cive Swiftian model is embodied in Señor Leon, the school teacher, who reacts to
David’s numerical deviance by attempting to impose his community’s view, flatly
asserting that he can be the only authority in the classroom27 and separating David
out for exile to the remedial school at Punto Arenas. By contrast, having first
reacted in a similar way, Simón undergoes a transformation. It begins when he
acknowledges that his explanations are not passing David by, but are rather being
27 The Childhood of Jesus, p. 225.

26 Stephen Mulhall
absorbed and rejected, and this leads him to ask why: more specifically, it leads to
his initial suspicion that David is something more than a very clever child,
something for which at this moment he lacks a word.28 And the transformation
ends when, in conversation with Eugenio, Simón finds himself motivating David’s
deviance from the inside, seeing the world through his eyes. In that world,
mathematical rules work only if each individual takes responsibility for the step
from one number to the next (hence, avoids sloughing off that responsibility
by invoking either metaphysical numerical necessities, à la Plato, or communal
impositions, à la Swift), and only if we repress the even more enigmatic or
miraculous step that each such step presupposes—the step from zero to one: that
is, the step into the conceptual system of numbers and so into a mathematical
understanding of the world, and more generally the step from nowhere to some-
where, the step into orientation by conceptual systems of thought. Simón confesses
to finding this view not only intelligible but potentially revelatory, about numbers
and the reality to which they apply: he even wonders whether ‘there [is] anyone on
earth to whom numbers are more real’ than they are to David.29
Much of this matches Wittgenstein’s sense of the plurality, non-necessity, and
naturalness of human forms of speaking, thinking, and living; but it is arrived at
through a crucial, and apparently un-Wittgensteinian, intermediary encounter
between Simón and David, one that is provoked when David makes the seamless
move from deviant rule-following to the use of a private language—nonsense
syllables that he claims mean something to him. Simón’s confident counter-
enunciation of the Wittgensteinian commonplace that a private language is a
nonsensical idea because any genuine language must be communal is shaken by
David’s dismissive gesture, and his command that he look at him as he speaks his
‘nonsense’:
He looks into the boy’s eyes. For the briefest of moments he sees something there.
He has no name for it. It is like—that is what occurs to him in the moment. Like a
fish that wriggles loose as you try to grasp it. But not like a fish—no, like like a fish.
Or like like like a fish. On and on. Then the moment is over, and he is simply
standing in silence, staring.
‘Did you see?’ says the boy.
‘I don’t know. Stop for a minute, I am feeling dizzy.’
‘I can see what you are thinking!’ says the boy with a triumphant smile.
‘No you can’t.’
‘You think I can do magic.’
‘Not at all. You have no idea what I am thinking.’30
The something that Simón sees is, presumably, the meaning of David’s nonsense:
so his image of a fish escaping one’s grasp is an attempt to grasp what David’s
private words mean to him; and that implies that, even when the meaning of words
is his alone, David (and not just Simón) thinks of it as elusive, ungraspable. But
28 Ibid., pp. 150–1. 29 Ibid., pp. 248–9. 30 The Childhood of Jesus, pp. 186–7.
Simón no sooner grasps this than it wriggles loose: David’s meaning isn’t like a fish,
it’s like like a fish; and that way of grasping it is no sooner essayed than the meaning
once more escapes, becoming only like like like a fish, and so endlessly on. Does this
mean that meaning (whether private or public) lies essentially beyond our grasp, or
does it rather indicate that meaning is graspable only as lying beyond our grasp—
that meaning manifests itself to us precisely as ungraspable, which means only
when we try (and fail) to grasp it, so that eluding our grasp is the way in which it
manifests itself to us, the only way in which it can appear as it really is? Elusiveness
is not, after all, absence, but rather a mode of presence; more precisely, it presents
itself in or as the gap between appearing and being—between likeness and identity,
and more generally between representations and the reality they aspire to represent.
It is not just that David’s meaning is only like a fish; it is also that what Simón
means by saying that David’s meaning is like a fish is merely a similitude of what he
really means.
No wonder Simón responds so brusquely to David’s claim that he sees what
Simón is thinking: if what Simón thinks is so elusive to him, how can it be
immediately manifest to David? But is David’s claim that Simón thinks that he,
David, can do magic really not at all what Simón was thinking? Or does it in fact
exactly capture what he was thinking, even if figuratively? If so, then either David is
genuinely extraordinary, or Simón’s perception of meaning as inherently elusive
does not authorize his public assertion that David is necessarily incapable of gaining
access to what Simón thinks and means. Isn’t the idea of mind-reading as magic a
perfectly serviceable way for a child to characterize the fact that the meanings he
divines in others and in himself are elusive?
Any proper evaluation of this invocation of the magical would have to reckon
with the concept’s pivotal recurrence late in the narrative, when David blinds
himself by igniting magnesium powder whilst reciting a magic spell that is sup-
posed to render him invisible.31 Relevant issues would include the fact that Señor
Daga (David’s ‘bad father’) provides the tools and script for the trick, that the
performance does render him invisible (to himself, and to everyone else dazzled by
it), but that in this respect his deeds outrun his eminently public incantatory word
(since it is not his utterance of ‘Abracadabra’ but the subsequent eruption of light
reflected in a mirror that does the trick). Without going any further, however, we
can say that if this Coetzeean portrayal of the privacy and publicity of meaning is
not essentially un-Wittgensteinian, then we would have to tell a far from common
story about Wittgenstein’s conception of those notions—one attentive to the ways
in which fantasies of privacy (and of publicity) shadow their realities, and so can
shield us from acknowledging our common subjection to both (by putting our
unknownness to others and our knownness by them beyond our control, outwith
our individual responsibilities).32
31 The Childhood of Jesus, pp. 265–7.

32 I confront these issues in more detail in my Wittgenstein’s Private Language (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2007).
28 Stephen Mulhall
B E N EN G E L I’S CA VE
Although Coetzee’s embedding of a twinned embodiment of Wittgenstein into his

Platonic polis plainly creates friction between these two philosophical registers, they
harmonize with respect to their relation to history. The inhabitants of Novilla lack a
history, having been washed clean of their previous lives, and both Plato and
Wittgenstein fit neatly into such a landscape: the former because the Republic
conjures its ideal city out of words, and thereby inaugurates philosophy as a subject
whose history lies before it; the latter because (as Cavell puts it)33 whereas some
philosophers write according to the myth of having read everything essential in the
history of their subject, Wittgenstein writes according to the myth of having read
essentially nothing—as if philosophy exists only insofar as it endlessly brings itself
back into existence in the present, from whatever materials happen to provoke the
philosopher’s bewilderment and consequent desire for re-orientation. And when
literature in the form of the novel finally appears in Novilla, its embodiment has a
similar relation to the history of its enterprise; for the book that Simón finds buried
in Novilla’s local library is An Illustrated Children’s Don Quixote—an abridged
version of a novel with as good a claim as any to have inaugurated the history of the
novel as a literary genre.
Simón is delighted to have discovered an enjoyable comedy in which no one is
drowned or killed, hoping that David will find it sufficiently attractive to learn to
read. But David’s response to Don Quixote’s fight with the windmills quickly
disabuses him:
‘David,’ he says, ‘Don Quixote is an unusual book. To the lady in the library who lent it
to us it looks like a simple book for children, but in truth it isn’t simple at all. It
presents the world to us through two pairs of eyes, Don Quixote’s eyes and Sancho’s
eyes. To Don Quixote, it is a giant he is fighting. To Sancho, it is a windmill. Most of
us—not you, perhaps, but most of us nevertheless—will agree with Sancho that it is a
windmill. That includes the artist who drew a picture of a windmill. But it also
includes the man who wrote the book. . . . A man named Benengeli.’34
David’s agreement with Don Quixote is rendered more comprehensible by one
respect in which this adaptation differs from the original: whereas the original
narrator describes the region as filled with windmills before recording the Don’s
remarks to Sancho identifying them as giants,35 the version Simón reads to David
begins by incorporating the Don’s view into the narration (‘Don Quixote and his
friend Sancho . . . had not ridden far when they beheld, standing by the roadside, a
towering giant with no fewer than four arms ending in four huge fists . . . ’),36 so
that Sancho’s quizzical subsequent claim to see a windmill contests that initial
assertion, and hence appears as a peculiar view of his own that his master is forced to
account for by invoking the work of the sorcerer Maladuta. Simón’s agreement
33 Stanley Cavell, This New Yet Unapproachable America (Albuquerque Living Batch Press, 1989),
p. 19.
34 The Childhood of Jesus, p. 154. 35 Cervantes, Don Quixote, p. 59.
36 The Childhood of Jesus, p. 152.
with Sancho seems right to us because we are familiar with the original version, in
which the narrative voice embodies Sancho’s way of seeing from the outset and so
stacks the deck against the Don, whose alternative perspective then has to be
accounted for (by an attribution of madness). But David’s reading of the Novillan
version is authorized by that text: he is following exactly the same reading protocols
as we are, so Simón’s claim that the text’s author sides with Sancho misreads text
and author alike.
But the Novillan version appears to differ from the original in another respect.
We all know that Miguel de Cervantes is the author of the real Don Quixote; but
Simón asserts in passing that its author (or at least, the author of the Novillan
adaptation) is called Benengeli. On the other hand, in the chapter immediately after
that concerning the windmills, Cervantes’s text breaks off, thereby enacting a break
that its narrator ascribes to the manuscript his text transcribes: and he tells us that it
is only because he is lucky enough to find the remainder of that manuscript in a
bundle of old papers about to be sold to a mercer by a young boy at the Toledo
exchange, and to have its Arabic script transcribed into Spanish by a morisco, that he
can recommence his narration. And according to this Spanish-speaking Moor, the
author of that manuscript is ‘Cid Hamet Ben Engeli, Arabian historiographer’.37
So when Simón tells us that the author of (the Novillan version of) Don Quixote
is Benengeli, he is saying almost exactly what the narrator of the original says about
its author; but whereas most of us would agree that this is an exercise in irony on
Cervantes’s part, Simón seems to take its narrator’s claim at face value, as the literal
truth. And yet, Simón’s identification with Sancho depends upon his detecting
irony in the adaptation’s narrative internalization of the Don’s voice, which implies
that he is sensitive to the phenomenon. So, does his identifying Benengeli as the
tale’s author simply indicate that he has fallen asleep during a gap in Cervantes’
narrative, failing to hear the irony that fills or bridges it?
It seems to me rather to show that one can identify some given claim or register
of a text as ironic only if one is willing to regard some other claim or register as
literal; something must stand fast in the text upon which irony might operate, but
what stands fast and what constitutes the creation of ironic distance—call it a gap
between appearance and reality—is ultimately a matter for the individual reader.
Part I, chapter 8 can be read as portraying real windmills that a madman sees as
giants, or as portraying real giants that a bewitched man sees as windmills, but
either determination requires investing in a reality with which fantasy can be
contrasted. Similarly, Part I, chapter 9 can be read either as revealing that Don
Quixote is a transcription into Spanish of an Arab historiographer’s putatively
documentary account of the adventures of a Spanish nobleman, or as suggesting
this for ironic purposes; but even if we prefer the former reading, it would be
possible to interpret Benengeli’s tale either as presenting an ironic portrait of the
Don (Simón’s reading) or of Sancho (David’s reading). And counting hands will
not legitimate one over the other—not the hand of the illustrator (whose windmill
37 Cervantes, Don Quixote, p. 68.

30 Stephen Mulhall
may be taken to inhabit a character’s fantasy), and not even the hand of the author
(since not only the nature of the gesture which that hand is making, but whose
hand it is, are themselves open to both ironic and literal interpretations).
The fact that the only other episode of Don Quixote discussed by Simón and
David concerns Montesinos’s Cave underscores the Platonic resonance of this
dramatization of the destabilizing power of irony;38 the disagreement it provokes
between Simón and David (over David’s freedom to regard the shadows that the
Don encounters in the cave as real rather than illusory) simply confirms the extent
to which—once introduced—an ironic relation to reality escapes the control of any
who claim to master it, even a master of irony such as Socrates. But it also relates
Coetzee’s invocation of Cervantes to his invocation of Wittgenstein. For transpos-
ing David’s education by Simón from mathematics to literature whilst maintaining
David’s role as a putatively deviant pupil implies that what shows up in philosophy
as the ineluctable possibility of going on otherwise with numbers shows up in
literature as the ineluctable possibility of going on otherwise with words—more
specifically with novels and the authority of their authors with respect to their
created worlds. David’s and Simón’s pedagogical encounters show that, at each step
in the narrative of Don Quixote, a reader can invoke ironic distance from a literal
reading, and thereby transfigure the fictional world he takes himself to be inhabit-
ing; and there is nothing outside the encounter of reader with text to determine
which step is the right one.
A novel that can claim to originate the form of the novel is thus bound to be as
soaked in irony as Simón’s body is soaked in his past;39 after all, its motivating
premise is to ironize the genre of chivalric romance by embodying it in Don
Quixote, who is then embedded in a picaresque world—a world whose anti-
heroic, plebeian, and materialistic emphases allow it to stake a claim to realism
that turns upon convincing us of the unrealistic nature of romance. Once the
impossible embedding of genres needed to achieve this is effected, however, its
irony escapes authorial control: for its portrait of its protagonist shows how easily
reality can conform to his romantic interpretation of it—first as his friends offer
reinterpretations of reality that are consistent with his chivalric one in order to
moderate the ill-effects of his ‘madness’, and then (in Part II) as the world as a
whole, having read the first part of the book, reconstructs reality for their own
amusement in such a way that Don Quixote finds himself living in a world that
fully answers to his dreams of it. Moreover, chivalric romance did not eschew all
claims to make and maintain contact with reality as it really is: it had its own ways
of doing so, ways that involved depicting archetypes or ideal forms of a distinctly
Platonic nature, and so differed from those of the picaresque or of other subsequent
literary genres (each of whom made the case for its own way of casting that relation
with reality by castigating those of its predecessors) without losing the right to call
its aspirations realistic. The dynamic between Don Quixote and Sancho thus
embodies in literary form that between David and Simón, which is itself a literary
38 The Childhood of Jesus, p. 162. 39 Ibid., p. 143.

embedding of one (Wittgensteinian) conception of what realism might look like

in philosophy within another, contrary (Platonic) one. If ironic recounting is to
literature what deviant counting is to philosophy, then the gaps which so worry
David must always already inhabit both realms from their outset: no wonder he
propels himself so willingly into the hole that leads to Montesinos’s Cave.
FILLING A G AP IN TH E G OO D B OOK
For an author so persistently attracted to impossible embeddings of one reality into

another, the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation—of God made human, of
divinity becoming finite—must amount to the purest possible embodiment of
such a strategy, and one patently inspired by exactly the realistic impulse Coetzee
finds in his literary and philosophical exemplars: that of acknowledging material
actuality to the fullest possible extent (in this case by rendering it identical with the
ideal, with Truth, Being, and Goodness in their all-encompassing, Trinitarian self-
identity). This was more than enough to render Christianity foolish to the Greeks,
those exemplary philosophers—imagine Plato watching his doctrine of participa-
tion transform itself into dogmas of consubstantiation and transubstantiation. But
how might it be rendered in literature, and in particular a mode of literature that
claims to share Christianity’s realist impulse?
In a review on the New Republic website,40 Jason Farago reports that Coetzee
prefaced a reading from this not-yet published novel at the University of Cape
Town with the following remark:
I had hoped that the book would appear with a blank cover and a blank title page, so
that only after the last page had been read would the reader meet the title, namely The
Childhood of Jesus. But in the publishing industry as it is at present, that is not allowed.
Imagine a literary utopia in which such a hope or fantasy was realized, and so in
which the book attains its ideal condition: how might it have affected our reading
of it? In one sense, it would have changed nothing: not a word, paragraph, or
chapter break—nothing in what one might call the body of the work—would
differ between the two versions of Coetzee’s book. In another sense, everything
would have been different, because our initial reading would have been entirely
innocent of an idea that, when introduced, places the whole text in a different
light, one which would otherwise have conditioned our relation to every word of
it from the outset.
These apparently opposed reactions, as well as the fact that Coetzee’s hope can
even be articulated, show that there is always a gap between a book and its title (a
necessity this book registers in the fact that Novilla’s sole copy of [An Illustrated
Children’s] Don Quixote has its spine, where its title usually resides, torn off).
40 Jason Farago, ‘J. M. Coetzee’s Stunning New Novel Shows What Happens When a Nobel
Winner Gets Really Weird’, New Republic, 14 Sept. 2013, https://newrepublic.com/article/114658/

jm-coetzees-childhood-jesus-reviewed-jason-farago, accessed 30 Nov. 2016.
32 Stephen Mulhall
Hence, a question can always be raised about how to read their relation, and in
particular whether it is right to assume that the title embodies what less explicitly
animates the text as a whole, the spirit that informs it, or the idea in which it
participates, and typically precedes the text it names precisely because it can
therefore provide useful guidance for the potential reader. By withholding his
title until the end, Coetzee at once retains and problematizes this familiar baptismal
aspect of authorial authority. For if the idea encapsulated in the title really does
inform the text, a retrospective title should be an essentially supplementary and
even superfluous piece of literary apparatus, since we ought to have been able to
identify the relevant idea from the text alone. Suppose, however, that we actually
encounter it with a sense of shock or surprise. We might take it as a pleasing,
although admittedly unusual, version of a traditional literary trope—that of the
twist ending, in which the underlying meaning of a text is disclosed only at its end.
Or we might wonder whether that title really does properly name this text—
perhaps because the text aspires to but fails to earn that title, perhaps because the
idea it embodies gets no purchase on that text at all.
The relevance of Christ and Christianity to Coetzee’s text is certainly not
obvious. To begin with, whereas philosophy is explicitly woven into the existence
of this fictional city’s inhabitants and implicitly informs the relationship of its most
recent immigrants, and even literature survives in a vestigial manner, religion is
entirely absent from the Novillan form of life: there are no traces of religious
buildings or symbols, or of the patterns of behaviour, speech, and thought they
might support. Goaded by the title, we can at least try to read Simón’s precipitous
embedding of David into Inés’s life as a version of the Annunciation, the ‘family’s’
flight from Novilla to Estrellita as a version of the flight from Herod to Egypt, and
the pedagogical torments endured by Simón and David as a version of the twelve-
year-old Jesus’s dialogues with the elders in the Temple: but all of these analogies
are strained in ways that other analogical relations (with Plato and Wittgenstein, for
example) are not, presupposing transpositions and deviations so stringent as to call
their legitimacy into question. Can we really imagine arriving at them without the
title’s minatory imperative?
On the other hand, Christianity, or more specifically its Good Book, is perva-
sively present in another mode: Simón’s speech and thought—through which
every event in the narrative is presented (however freely and indirectly)—is soaked
not only in irony and history, but in scripture. ‘One cannot live on bread alone’;
‘Behold this singular worker, in whom we are well pleased !’; ‘Instead of waiting to be
transfigured, why not try to be like a child again?’; ‘You will have nowhere to lay
your head’; ‘I slept while I should have watched’; ‘If you search you will be sure to
find him’; ‘[H]e would like us to see him as he really is.’41 This feature of Coetzee’s
text reminds me of Stanley Cavell’s remark that ‘the reason a reader like Santa-
yana claimed to find everything in Shakespeare but religion was that religion is
Shakespeare’s pervasive, hence invisible, business’.42
41 Ibid., pp. 49, 143, 187, 242, 246, 275 (emphasis in the original).
42 Stanley Cavell, Disowning Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 218.
This suggests that (this piece of) literature is in competition with the Bible, and
so with the Christian religion; more specifically, insofar as Simón’s in-formation by
scripture is part of what he brings with him to Novilla (an aspect of the past that
resists being washed away), it suggests that literature is here declaring itself religion’s
successor—as if its place in Novilla could only be opened and taken by a founding
literary text, one recounting the Passion of Don Quixote. It also coheres with the
fact that Coetzee’s deferred title refers specifically to Jesus’s childhood, a phase of
his life about which the New Testament is notoriously silent and only the
Apocrypha speak. For if Coetzee’s text is intended to fill (at least part of ) that
gap, and so to embed itself within the wider context of the New (and so what the
New entitles the Old) Testament, one would precisely expect it to have attuned
itself throughout to the linguistic medium of the older and larger textual body it
means to complete and so encompass.
Nevertheless, an invisible pervasiveness is hard to distinguish from a persistent
absence; Santayana’s response to Shakespeare is at least as tenable as Cavell’s. But
this might actually reinforce the relation of Coetzee’s text to Christianity; for the
idea that something that is everywhere present might present itself as essentially
absent is one way of characterizing God’s creative relation to the whole universe. If
one comes to regard the whole of reality as God’s creation, there is a sense in which
everything changes, insofar as every element of that reality now stands in relation to
God; but given that God brings that universe into being ex nihilo, his creative
relation to every existent thing cannot be a mode of intra-worldly causal power, and
so cannot show up as an additional feature of the system of nature it sustains, from
which it follows that there is equally a sense in which nothing about reality changes
(science, for instance, can simply go on its way). To relate everything whatever to
God is simultaneously to change nothing and everything; and one way of represent-
ing that insight in literary terms is surely to employ a title whose disclosure simul-
taneously alters nothing and everything in the text it names, and in our relation to
it as readers.
But the doctrine of the Incarnation tells us that the Creator God embedded
himself in his Creation; so a literary confrontation with that doctrine would have to
include such a point of divine embedding. And one might retrospectively identify
one such uniquely pivotal point in Coetzee’s text—when Simón looks into David’s
eyes as he speaks a putatively private language. For what Simón sees, or rather no
sooner sees than it wriggles from his grasp, is like (or like like or like like like) a fish:
and, of course, a fish is not only an ancient symbol of Christ and of Christianity,
but a symbol which simultaneously exemplifies the incarnation of divinity into a
material particular and disavows its exemplarity (being no more than a symbol, and
so not only generically inadequate to that which it symbolizes but in this particular
case absolutely inadequate to it, since what it aspires to symbolize is the impossible
reality of God-made-man).
In the ideal version of Coetzee’s text, then, the retrospective disclosure of its title
would invite us to view it in two apparently opposite ways simultaneously: as
relating in its every particular to something essentially external to it (because that
something essentially exceeds representation), and as containing one particular in
34 Stephen Mulhall
which that something is at once and impossibly embodied and embedded

(say, incarnated). Of course, the text we have is not its ideal version: this text has
a dust-jacket, a spine, and a normally located title page, so our attempt to imagine
ourselves as inhabitants of a world in which this text lacked that apparatus was
always doomed to failure. We cannot transfigure ourselves into readers whose
relation to this text was innocent of in-formation by its title; we have always already
been exiled from that literary paradise. But that will come as no news to those
whose faith in the Good News of the Gospel always incorporates the idea of our
having unaccountably but undeniably fallen from innocence.
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
LIST OF P L A T E S, &c.
Page
1. Map of the Empire of Marocco to face the title
2. View of the Atlas as seen from the Terraces at Mogodor 10
3. View of the Plains of Akkurmute and Jibbel Heddid 46
4. View of Mogodor 47
5. View of the Port and Entrance of ditto 48
6. View of the City of Marocco and Atlas Mountains 57
7. Camelion 99
8. Locust 103
9. Buskah 109
10. El Efah 110
11. Euphorbium Plant 134
12. Feshook ditto 136
13. Dibben Feshook 136
14. Map, shewing the track of the Caravans across Sahara 282
C O N T E N T S.
CHAPTER I.
Page.
Geographical Divisions of the Empire of Marocco 1
CHAPTER II.
Rivers, Mountains, and Climate of Marocco 4
CHAPTER III.
Description of the different Provinces — their Soil, Culture, and Produce 13
CHAPTER IV.
Population of the Empire of Marocco. — Account of its Sea-ports, Cities,
and Inland Towns 25
CHAPTER V.
Zoology 74
CHAPTER VI.
Metallic, Mineral, and Vegetable Productions 126
CHAPTER VII.
Description of the Inhabitants of West Barbary — their Dress — Religious
Ceremonies and Opinions — their Character — Manners and Customs
— Diseases — Funerals — Etiquette of the Court — Sources of
Revenue 140
CHAPTER VIII.
Some Account of a peculiar species of Plague, which depopulated West
Barbary in 1799, and 1800, and to the effects of which the Author was
an eye-witness 171
CHAPTER IX.
Some Observations on the Mohammedan Religion 196
CHAPTER X.
Languages of Africa — Various Dialects of the Arabic Language —
Difference between the Berebber and Shelluh Languages — Specimen
of the Mandinga — Comparison of the Shelluh Language with that of
Siwah, and also with that of the Canary Islands, and Similitude of
Customs 209
CHAPTER XI.
General Commerce of Marocco — Annual Exports and Imports of the Port
of Mogodor — Importance and Advantages of a Trade with the Empire
of Marocco — Cause of its Decline — Present State of our Relations
with the Barbary Powers 234
CHAPTER XII.
Shipwrecks on the Western Coast of Africa about Wedinoon and Sahara
— State of the British and other Captives whilst in possession of the
Saharawans, or roving Arabs of the Desert — Suggestion of the Author
for the Alleviation of their Sufferings — Mode of their Redemption 269
CHAPTER XIII.
Commercial Relations of the Empire of Marocco with Timbuctoo, and other
Districts of Soudan — Route of the Caravans to and from Soudan — Of
the City of Timbuctoo — The productive Gold Mines in its Vicinage — Of
the navigable Intercourse between Jinnie and Timbuctoo; and from the
latter to Cairo in Egypt: the whole being collected from the most
authentic and corroborating testimonies of the Guides of the Caravans,
Itinerant Merchants of Soudan, and other creditable sources of
Intelligence 282
APPENDIX p. 315
GLOSSARY p. 326
AN AC CO UNT
OF
THE EMPIRE OF MAROCCO,

&c. &c.
CHAPTER I.
Geographical Divisions of the Empire of Marocco.
T he empire of Marocco,[7] including Tafilelt,[8] is bounded on the

north by the Mediterranean sea; on the east by Tlemsen,[9] the
Desert of Angad, Sejin Messa,[10] and Bled-el-jerrêde;[11] on the
south by Sahara (or the Great Desert); and on the west by the
Atlantic Ocean. It may be divided into four grand divisions.
1st, The northern division, which contains the provinces of Erreef,
[12] El Garb, Benihassen, Temsena, Shawia, Tedla, and the district of
Fas;[13] these are inhabited by Arabs of various tribes, living in tents,

whose original stock inhabit Sahara; to which may be added the
various tribes of Berebbers, inhabiting the mountains of Atlas,[14]
and the intermedial plains, of which the chief clans or Kabyles are
the Girwan, Ait Imure, Zian,[15] Gibbellah, and Zimurh-Shelluh.
The principal towns of this division are, Fas (old and new city,
called by the Arabs Fas Jeddede and Fas el Balie), Mekinas, or
Mequinas, Tetuan, Tangier, Arzilla, El Araiche, Sla, or Salée, Rabat,
Al Kassar, Fedalla, Dar-el-beida, and the Sanctuary of Muley Dris
Zerone, where the Mohammedan religion was first planted in West
Barbary.
2d, The central division; which contains the provinces of Dukella
or Duquella, Abda, Shedma, Haha, and the district of Marocco.[16]
The chief towns being Marocco, Fruga, Azamore, Mazagan, Tet, Al
Waladia, Asfie, or Saffee, Sueerah, or Mogodor.[17]
3d, The southern division; containing the provinces of Draha and
Suse; which latter is inhabited by many powerful tribes or Kabyles,
the chief of which are Howara, Emsekina, Exima, Idautenan, Idaultit,
Ait-Atter, Wedinoon, Kitiwa, Ait-Bamaran, Messa, and Shtuka; of
these Howara, Wedinoon, and half of Ait-Bamaran are Arabs; the
others are Shelluhs. The principal towns of this division are Terodant,
Agadeer,[18] or Santa Cruz, Inoon, or Noon, Ifran, or Ufran, Akka,
Tatta, Messa, and Dar-Delemie.
4th, The eastern division, which lies to the east of the Atlas, and is
called Tafilelt; it was formerly a separate kingdom. A river of the
same name passes through this territory, on the banks of which the
present Emperor’s father, Sidi Mohammed ben Abdallah, built a
magnificent palace. There are many other adjacent buildings and
houses inhabited by sherreefs, or Mohammedan princes of the
present dynasty, with their respective establishments.[19]
FOOTNOTES:
[7]Marakusha in the original Arabic; and called by the
Spaniards Marruecos.
[8]Commonly called Tafilet.
[9]In many maps called Tremecin.
[10]Commonly called Sigelmessa.
[11]Commonly called Biledulgerid.
[12]It is through this province that the chain of mountains called
the Lesser Atlas passes, viz. from Tangier to Bona, in the
Kingdom of Algiers.
[13]Commonly called Fez.
[14]The Atlas mountains are called in Arabic Jibbel Attils, i.e.
the mountains of snow; hence, probably, the word Atlas.
[15]Zian is a warlike tribe; it lately opposed an imperial army of
upwards of thirty thousand men. This Kabyle is defended from
attacks by rugged and almost inaccessible passes.
[16]By the negligence of authors Marocco has been called
Morocco, as Mohammed or Muhammed has been transformed to
Mahommed, and Mohammedan to Mahommedan.
[17]Sueerah is the proper name; Europeans have called it
Mogodor, from a saint who was buried a mile from the town,
called Sidy Mogodool, which last word, from oral tradition, has
been corrupted to Mogador, and sometimes to Mogadore.
[18]Agadeer is the Arabian name, Guertguessem the ancient
African name, and Santa Cruz is the Portugueze appellation.
[19]The modern Arabs divide Northern Africa into three grand
divisions: the first extends from the Equator to the Nile el Abeede,
or river of Nigritia, and is called Soudan, which is an African word
indicative of black, the inhabitants being of that colour: the second
extends from the river of Soudan to Bled-el-jerrêde, and is
denominated Sahara, from the aridity and flatness of the land: the
third division comprises Bled-el-jerrêde, the maritime states of
Barbary, Egypt, and Abyssinia. Some authors have affirmed that
Bled-el-jerrêde signifies the Country of Dates; others, that it
signifies the Country of Locusts; dates certainly abound there; but
the name does not imply dates. Jerâad is the Arabic for locusts;
but it is a different word from Jerrêde, which signifies dry.
CHAPTER II.
Rivers, Mountains, and Climate of Marocco.
T he following are the principal rivers in the empire of Marocco:

The Muluwia, which separates the empire from Angad and
Tlemsen, rises at the foot of the Atlas, and, passing through the
desert of Angad, discharges itself into the Mediterranean about thirty
miles S.E. of Mellilla. This is a deep and impetuous stream,
impassable in (Liali) the period between the 20th of December and
30th of January inclusive, or the forty shortest days, as computed by
the old style; in summer it is not only fordable, but often quite dry,
and is called from that circumstance El Bahar billa ma, or, a sea
without water.
El Kose, or Luccos, at El Araiche, so called from its arched
windings, El Kose signifying in the Arabic of the western Arabs an
arch. Ships of 100 or 150 tons may enter this river at high water; it
abounds in the fish called shebbel: it is never fordable, but ferries are
constantly crossing with horses, camels, passengers and their
baggage, &c.
The Baht rises in the Atlas, and partly loses itself in the swamps
and lakes of the province of El Garb; the other branch probably falls
into the river Seboo.
The Seboo is the largest river in West Barbary; it rises in a piece
of water situated in the midst of a forest, near the foot of Atlas,
eastward of the cities of Fas and Mequinas, and winding through the
plains, passes within six miles of Fas. Another stream, proceeding
from the south of Fas, passes through the city, and discharges itself
into this river: this stream is of so much value to the Fasees, from
supplying the town with water, that it is called (Wed el Juhor) the
river of pearls. Some auxiliary streams proceeding from the territory
of Tezza fall into the Seboo in Liali (the period before mentioned).
This river is impassable except in boats, or on rafts. At Meheduma,
or Mamora, where it enters the ocean, it is a large, deep, and
navigable stream; but the port being evacuated, foreign commerce is
annihilated, and little shipping has been admitted since the
Portugueze quitted the place. This river abounds more than any
other in that rich and delicate fish called shebbel. If there were any
encouragement to industry in this country, corn might be conveyed
up the Seboo to Fas at a very low charge, whereas it is now
transported to that populous city on camels, the expense of the hire
of which often exceeds the original cost of the grain.
The Bu Regreg.—This river rises in one of the mountains of Atlas,
and proceeding through the woods and valleys of the territory of Fas,
traverses the plains of the province of Beni Hassen, and discharges
itself into the ocean between the towns of Salée and Rabat, the
former being on the northern, the latter on the southern bank: here
some of the Emperor’s sloops of war, which are denominated by his
subjects frigates, are laid up for the winter. This river is never
fordable, but ferries are constantly passing to and fro.
The Morbeya also rises in the Atlas mountains, and dividing the
territory of Fas from the province of Tedla, passes through a part of
Shawia, and afterwards separates that province and Temsena from
Duquella; dividing that part of the empire west of Atlas into two
divisions. There was a bridge over this river at a short distance from
the pass called Bulawan, built by Muley Bel Hassen, a prince of the
Mareen family; at this pass the river is crossed on rafts of rushes and
reeds, and on others consisting of inflated goat skins. Westward of
this pass, the river meanders through the plains, and enters the
ocean at the port of Azamor. The Morbeya abounds in the fish called
shebbel, the season for which is in the spring. This river not being at
any time fordable, horses and travellers, together with their baggage,
are transported across by ferries.
The Tensift.[20]—This river rises in the Atlas, east of Marocco, and
passing about five miles north of that city, it proceeds through the
territory of Marocco, Rahamena, and nearly divides the two maritime
provinces of Shedma and Abda, discharging itself into the ocean
about sixteen miles south of the town of Saffy. This river receives in
its course some tributary streams issuing from Atlas, the principal of
which is the Wed Niffis, which, flowing from the south, enters it, after
taking a northerly course through the plains of Marocco or
Sheshawa. The Tensift is an impetuous stream during the Liali, but in
summer it is fordable in several places; and at the ferry near the
mouth of the river, at low water, reaches as high as the stirrups. In
many places it is extremely deep, and dangerous to cross without a
guide; about six miles from Marocco, a bridge crosses it, which was
erected by Muley El Mansor; it is very strong but flat, with many
arches. One of the Kings of Marocco attempted to destroy this
bridge, to prevent the passage of an hostile army, but the cement
was so hard that men with pick-axes were employed several days
before they could sever the stones; and they had not time to effect
its destruction, before the army passed. The shebbel of the Tensift is
much esteemed, as is also the water, which is extremely salubrious,
and aids considerably the powers of digestion, which, from the
intense heat of the climate, are often weakened and relaxed. This
river is supposed to be the Phut of Ptolemy; on the northern bank,
where it falls into the ocean, is to be perceived the ruins of an
ancient town, probably the Asama of that Geographer.
There is a small stream two miles south of Mogodor, from whence
that town is supplied with water; and about twelve or fourteen miles
more to the south, we reach
The River Tidsi, which discharges itself into the ocean a few miles
south of Tegrewelt, or Cape Ossem, where the ancient city of Tidsi
formerly stood. Passing to the south in the plains at the foot of that
branch of Atlas which forms Afarnie, or the lofty Cape de Geer,[21]
we meet
The River Benitamer, which, with the before mentioned branch of
Atlas, divides the provinces of Haha and Suse.
Farther to the south is another river called
Wed Tamaract; and about sixteen or seventeen miles south of
that place, and about six south of Agadeer, or Santa Cruz,[22] the
majestic
River Suse discharges itself into the ocean. This fine river rises at
Ras-el-Wed, at the foot of Atlas, about thirty miles from the city of
Terodant. The (fulahs) cultivators of land, and the gardeners of Suse
have drained off this river so much in its passage through the plains
of Howara and Exima, that it is fordable at its mouth at low water in
the summer, so that camels and other animals are enabled to cross
it with burthens on their backs: at its mouth is a bar of sand which at
low water almost separates it from the ocean. The banks of this river
are inundated in winter, but in summer are variegated with Indian
corn, wheat, barley, pasture lands, beautiful gardens, and productive
orchards. Either this river, or that of Messa, must have been the Una
of Ptolomy, which is placed in lat. 28° 30′ N. We may presume that
the Suse was anciently navigable as far as Terodant, as there are
still in the walls of the castle of that city immense large iron rings,
such as we see in maritime towns in Europe, for the purpose of
mooring ships.
Draha.—The river of this name flows from the north-east of Atlas
to the south, and passing through the province of Draha, it
disappears in the absorbing sands of Sahara. A great part of the
country through which it passes being a saline earth, its waters have
a brackish taste, like most of the rivers proceeding from Atlas, which
take their course eastward. It is small in summer, but impetuous and
impassable in winter, or at least during Liali. It is not improbable that
this river formerly continued its course westward, discharging itself
into the ocean at Wednoon, and called by the ancients Darodus; but
it often happens in Africa, particularly on the confines of any desert
country, that the course of rivers is not only changed by the
moveable hills of dry sand, but sometimes absorbed altogether, as is
now the case with the Draha, after its entrance into the Desert.
River of Messa, called Wed Messa, flows from Atlas; it is, as
before observed, a separate stream from the river Suse, and is
drained off by the (fulah) cultivators or farmers during its passage. It
was navigated by the Portugueze before they abandoned this place
for the New World. Leo Africanus has committed another error
(which has been copied by modern writers,[23] in calling the river of
Messa the river Suse,[24] which I ascertained to be quite a different
stream when I was at Messa, and thirty miles distant from the former,
though they both flow from E. to W. A bar of sand separates this river
entirely at low water from the ocean, but at flood tide it is not
fordable. Between the mouth of the river Messa and that of Suse, is
a road-stead called Tomée; the country is inhabited by the Woled
Abbusebah Arabs, who informed me, when I went there, during the
interregnum, with the (Khalif) Vice-regent Mohammed ben Delemy,
by order of the (Sherreef) Prince, that British and other vessels often
took in water there: it is called by the Arabs (Sebah biure) the place
of seven wells, of which wells three only remain, and these we found
to contain excellent water. After inspecting the place, and the nature
of the road-stead, we returned to the Vice-regent’s castle in Shtuka.
Concerning this remarkable sea-port it would be inexpedient at
present to disclose more.
River Akassa.—This river is navigable to Noon, above which it
becomes a small stream, fordable in various places; it has been
called by some Wed Noon, i.e. the river of Noon, but the proper
name is Wed Akassa; the word Wedinoon is applied to the adjacent
territory.
The Mountains of West and South Barbary are the Atlas and its
various branches, which receive different names, according to the
provinces in which they are situated. The greater Atlas, or main
chain of these mountains, extends from (Jibbel d’Zatute) Ape’s Hill to
Shtuka and Ait Bamaran, in Lower Suse, passing about thirty miles
eastward of the city of Marocco, where they are immensely high, and
covered with snow throughout the year. On a clear day, this part of
the Atlas appears at Mogodor, a distance of about a hundred and
forty miles, in the form of a saddle; and is visible at sea, several
leagues off the coast. These mountains are extremely fertile in many
places, and produce excellent fruits; having the advantage of various
climates, according to the ascent towards the snow, which,
contrasted with the verdure beneath, has a singular and picturesque
effect.
Plate 2.
Drawn by J. G. Jackson. Engraved J. C. Stadler.
A Distant View of the Atlas Mountains East of the

City of Marocco as they appear from Mogodor on a clear
morning before the rising Sun taken from the Terras of the British
Vice Consuls House.
1 Mosque of Seedy Usif. 3 Genoese Consuls Tower.
2 Atlas Mountains, distant 140 Miles. 4 Sand Hills.
London Published June 4. 1811. by W. & G. Nicholl Pall Mall.
In many places the mountains are uninhabited, and form immense

chasms, as if they had been rent asunder by some convulsion of
nature; this is the case throughout the ridge that intersects the plains
which separate Marocco from Terodant. In this part is a narrow pass,
called Bebawan, having a chain of mountains on one side,
ascending almost perpendicularly; and on the other side, a precipice
as steep as Dover Cliff, but more than ten times the heighth. When
the army which I accompanied to Marocco crossed this defile, they
were obliged to pass rank and file, the cavalry dismounted: two
mules missed their step, and were precipitated into the abyss: the
path was not more than fifteen inches wide, cut out of a rock of
marble, in some parts extremely smooth and slippery, in others
rugged.
In the branches of the Atlas east of Marocco, are mines of copper;
and those which pass through the province of Suse produce,
besides copper, iron, lead, silver, sulphur, and salt-petre: there are
also mines of gold, mixed with antimony and lead ore. The
inhabitants of the upper region of Atlas, together with their herds
(which would otherwise perish in the snow), live four months of the
year in excavations in the mountains; viz. from November to
February, inclusive.
The climate of Marocco is healthy and invigorating; from March to
September the atmosphere is scarcely ever charged with clouds;
and even in the rainy season, viz. from September till March, there is
seldom a day wherein the sun is not seen at some interval. The heat
is cooled by sea-breezes during the former period; in the interior,
however, the heat is intense. The rainy season, which begins about
October, ends in March; but if it continue longer, it is generally
accompanied with contagious fevers. The trade winds (which begin
to blow about March, and continue till September or October) are
sometimes so violent, as to effect the nerves and limbs of the natives
who inhabit the coast. The inhabitants are robust; and some live to a
great age. The Shelluhs, or inhabitants of the mountains of Atlas,
south of Marocco, are, however, a meagre people, which proceeds,
in a great measure, from their abstemious diet, seldom indulging in
animal food, and living for the most part on barley gruel, bread, and
honey: the Arabs, the Moors, and the Berebbers, on the contrary,
live in a hospitable manner, and eat more nutritious food, though
they prefer the farinaceous kind.
FOOTNOTES:
[20]This river is vulgarly called Wed Marakosh, or the river of
Marocco, because it passes through the district of that name; but
the proper name is Wed Tensift, or the river Tensift; and this is the
name given it by Leo Africanus (Book IX.), the only author who
has hitherto spelt the word correctly; he has however committed a
considerable error in affirming that it discharges itself into the
ocean at Saffy.
[21]A Shelluh name, expressive of a quick wind, because there
is always wind at this Cape; but ships should be extremely careful
not to approach it, in going down the coast; not but that the water
is very deep, as the Cape rises almost perpendicularly from the
ocean, but because the land is so extremely high that those ships
which approach within a league of it, are almost always becalmed
on the south side of it, and are in consequence three days in
getting down to Agadeer, whilst other vessels which keep more to
the west, reach that port in a few hours. This Cape is a western
branch of the Atlas.
[22]Leo Africanus, who undoubtedly has given us the best
description of Africa, commits an error, however, in describing this
river. “The great river of Sus, flowing out of the mountains of
Atlas, that separate the two provinces of Hea and Sus (Haha and
Suse) in sunder, runneth southward among the said mountains,
stretching unto the fields of the foresaid region, and from thence
tending westward unto a place called Guartguessen,[a] where it
dischargeth itself into the main ocean.” See 9th book of Leo
Africanus. The Cape de Geer was formerly the separation of the
provinces of Haha and Suse, but now the river of Tamaract may
be called the boundary, which is fifteen miles to the northward of
the mouth of the river Suse; and Guartguessen, or Agadeer, or
Santa Cruz, is six miles north of the river Suse. Had I not resided
three years at Santa Cruz, in sight of the river Suse, which I have
repeatedly forded in various parts, I should not have presumed to
dispute Leo’s assertion.
[a]The ancient name of Agadeer or Santa Cruz
in Leo’s time.
[23]Vide Brooks’s Gazeteer, 12th edition, title Messa.
[24]Through the three small towns of Messa runneth a certain
great river called Sus. Vide Leo Africanus, 2d book, title Town of
Messa.
CHAPTER III.
Description of the different Provinces, their Soil, Culture, and Produce.
In describing the soil and produce of this extensive empire, we will

proceed through the various provinces, beginning with the northern,
called
ERREEF, or RIF.
This province extending along the shore of the Mediterranean sea,

produces corn and cattle in abundance; that part of it contiguous to
Tetuan produces the most delicious oranges in the world; also figs,
grapes, melons, apricots, plums, strawberries, apples, pears,
pomgranates, citrons, lemons, limes, and the refreshing fruit of the
opuntia, or prickly pear, called by the Arabs (Kermuse Ensarrah)
Christian fig. This fruit was probably first brought into the country
from the Canary Islands, as it abounds in Suse, and is called by the
Shelluhs of South Atlas, (Takanarite) the Canary fruit. A ridge of
mountains passes from Tangier, along this province to the eastward,
as far as Bona, in Algiers; these mountains are called Jibbel Erreef
by the natives, and the Lesser Atlas by Europeans.
EL GARB.
The next province is called El Garb[25] (g guttural.) It is of the same

nature with that already described; from the port of El Araiche,
eastward, as far as the foot of Atlas, is a fine champaign country,
extremely abundant in wheat and barley: here are the extensive
plains of Emsharrah Rumellah, famous for the camp of Muley
Ismael, great grandfather of the present Emperor Soliman, where he
retained his army of Bukarrie Blacks to the amount of one hundred
thousand horse. This army possessed the finest horses in the
empire. The remains of the habitations are still discernible. There is
a forest eastward of El Araiche of considerable extent, consisting
chiefly of oak, with some cork, and other valuable large trees; more
to the southward and eastward, we discover a forest of cork only, the
trees of which are as large as full grown oaks. From Mequinas to
Muley Idris Zerone, the renowned sanctuary at the foot of Atlas, east
of the city of Mequinas, the country is flat, with gentle hills
occasionally, and inhabited by the tribe of Ait Imure, a Kabyle which
dwells in straggling tents, and a warlike tribe of Berebbers. The
Emperor Seedy Mohammed, father to the reigning Emperor Soliman,
used to denominate the Ait Imure the English of Barbary.[26]
THE DISTRICT OF FAS, AND PROVINCE OF BENIHASSEN.
The country between Fas and Mequinas, and from thence to Salée,
is of the same description as the foregoing; a rich champaign,
abounding prodigiously in corn, and inhabited altogether by Arabs,
with the exception, however, of the Zimur’h Shelluh, another Kabyle
of Berebbers. In short, the whole northern[27] division of this empire
is an uninterrupted corn field; a rich black, and sometimes red soil,
without stones or clay, with scarcely any wood upon it (the forests
before mentioned, and the olive plantations and gardens about the
cities of Fas and Mequinas excepted), but incalculably productive.
The inhabitants do not use dung, but reap the corn high from the
ground, and burn the stubble, the ashes of which serve as manure.
During this period of the year, viz. August, enormous clouds of
smoke are seen mounting the declivities of hills and mountains,
penetrating without resistance the woods, and leaving nothing
behind but black ashes and cinders: these fires heat the atmosphere
considerably, as they continue burning during two months. In sowing,
the husbandmen throw the grain on the ground, and afterwards
plough it in. Oats they make no use of: beans, peas, caravances,
and Indian corn, are cultivated occasionally in lands adjacent to
rivers: the fruits are similar to those before described, and are in
great abundance, oranges being sold at a ducket or a dollar a
thousand, at Tetuan, Salée, and some other places; grapes, melons,
and figs of various kinds, and other fruits, are proportionally
abundant. Cotton of a superior quality is grown in the environs of
Salée and Rabat, also hemp. The tobacco called Mequinasi, so
much esteemed for making snuff, is the produce of the province of
Benihassen, as well as the country adjacent to the city of Mequinas.
PROVINCES OF TEMSENA, SHAWIA, DUQUELLA, ABDA, SHEDMA; AND THE

DISTRICT OF MAROCCO.
These are most productive in corn; the crop of one year would be
sufficient for the consumption of the whole empire, provided all the
ground capable of producing wheat and barley were to be sown.
These fine provinces abound in horses and horned cattle; their flocks
are numerous, and the horses of Abda are of the most select breed
in the country. The cavalry of Temsena is the best appointed of the
empire, excepting the black troops of the Emperor, called Abeed
Seedy Bukarrie.
Two falls of rain in Abda are sufficient to bring to maturity a good
crop of wheat; nor does the soil require more. The water-melons of
Duquella are of a prodigious size, and indeed everything thrives in
this prolific province: horses, horned cattle, the flocks, nay even the
dogs and cats, all appear in good condition. The inhabitants are, for
the most part, a laborious and trading people, and great speculators:
they grow tobacco for the markets of Soudan and Timbuctoo. Nearly
midway between Saffee and Marocco is a large salt lake, from which
many camels are daily loaded with salt for the interior.
The province of Shedma produces wheat and barley; its fruits are
not so rich as those of the north, or of Suse; it abounds however in
cattle. Of goats it furnishes annually an incalculable number, the
skins of which form a principal article of exportation from the port of
Mogodor; and such is the animosity and opposition often among the
merchants there, that they have sometimes given as much for the
skin, as the animal itself was sold for. Honey, wax, and tobacco are
produced in this province, the two former in great abundance; also
gum arabic, called by the Arabs Alk Tolh, but of an inferior quality to
that of the Marocco district.
PROVINCE OF HAHA.
Haha is a country of great extent, interspersed with mountains and
valleys, hills and dales, and inhabited by twelve Kabyles of Shelluhs.
This is the first province, from the shores of the Mediterranean, in
which villages and walled habitations are met with, scattered through
the country; the before mentioned provinces (with the exception of
the sea-port towns and the cities of Fas, Mequinas, Marocco, and
Muley Idris Zerone) being altogether inhabited by Arabs living in
tents. The houses of Haha are built of stone, each having a tower,
and are erected on elevated situations, forming a pleasing view to
the traveller. Here we find forests of the argan tree, which produces
olives, from the kernel of which the Shelluhs express an oil,[28] much
superior to butter for frying fish; it is also employed economically for
lamps, a pint of it burning nearly as long as double the quantity of
olive or sallad oil. Wax, gum-sandrac and arabic, almonds, bitter and
sweet, and oil of olives, are the productions of this picturesque
province, besides grapes, water-melons, citrons, pomgranates,
oranges, lemons, limes, pears, apricots, and other fruits. Barley is
more abundant than wheat. The Shelluhs of Haha are
physiognomically distinguishable (by a person who has resided any
time among them) from the Arabs of the plains, from the Moors of
the towns, and from the Berebbers of North Atlas, and even from the
Shelluhs of Suse, though in their language, manners, and mode of
living they resemble the latter. The mountains of Haha produce the
famous wood called Arar, which is proof against rot or the worm.
Some beams of this wood taken down from the roof of my dwelling-
house at Agadeer, which had been up fifty years, were found
perfectly sound, and free from decay.
PROVINCE OF SUSE.
We now come to Suse, the most extensive, and, excepting grain, the
richest province of the empire. The olive, the almond, the date, the
orange, the grape, and all the other fruits produced in the northern
provinces abound here, particularly about the city of Terodant (the
capital of Suse, formerly a kingdom), Ras-el-Wed, and in the
mountains of Edautenan.[29] The grapes of Edautenan are
exquisitely rich. Indigo grows wild in all the low lands, and is of a
vivid blue; but the natives do not perfectly understand the
preparation of it for the purpose of dying.
Suse contains many warlike tribes, among which are Howara,
Woled Abbusebah, and Ait Bamaran; these are Arabs;— Shtuka,
Elala, Edaultit, Ait Atter, Kitiwa, Msegina, and Idautenan, who are
Shelluhs.
There is not, perhaps, a finer climate in the world than that of
Suse, generally, if we except the disagreable season of the hot
winds. It is said, however, and it is a phenomenon, that at Akka rain
never falls; it is extremely hot there in the months of June, July, and
August; about the beginning of September the (Shume) hot wind
from Sahara blows with violence during three, seven, fourteen, or
twenty-one days.[30] One year, however, whilst I resided at
(Agadeer) Santa Cruz, it blew twenty-eight days; but this was an
extraordinary instance.[31] The heat is so extreme during the
prevalence of the Shume, that it is not possible to walk out; the
ground burns the feet; and the terraced roofs of the houses are
frequently peeled off by the parching heat of the wind, which
resembles that which proceeds from the mouth of an oven: at this
time clothes are oppressive. These violent winds introduce the rainy
season.
The (Lukseb) sugar-cane grows spontaneously about Terodant.
Cotton, indigo, gum, and various kinds of medicinal herbs are
produced here. The stick liquorice is so abundant that it is called (Ark
Suse) the root of Suse. The olive plantations in different parts of
Suse are extensive, and extremely productive; about Ras-el-Wed
and Terodant a traveller may proceed two days through these
plantations, which form an uninterrupted shade impenetrable to the
rays of the sun; the same may be said of the plantations of the
almond, which also abound in this province. Of corn they sow
sufficient only for their own annual consumption; and although the
whole country might be made one continued vineyard, yet they plant
but few vines; for wine being prohibited, they require no more grapes
than they can consume themselves, or dispose of in the natural
state. The Jews, however, make a little wine and brandy from the

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Beyond the ancient quarrel: literature,

philosophy, and J.M. Coetzee First

Beyond the Ancient Quarrel: Literature, Philosophy, and

Iris Murdoch and the Ancient Quarrel Lyra Ekström

The Longman Standard History of Ancient Philosophy

Ancient Rome and Victorian Masculinity First Edition

Laughter, Humor, and Comedy in Ancient Philosophy

Vice in Ancient Philosophy Karen Margrethe Nielsen

Virtue and law in Plato and beyond First Edition Julia

Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy, Volume LVI Caston

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).

Embedding and Embodying Philosophy 19

12 Plato, Republic, pp. 368–73.

Embedding and Embodying Philosophy 21

13 The Childhood of Jesus, p. 64. 14 Ibid., pp. 42, 115, 115–17.

Embedding and Embodying Philosophy 23

23 Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, p. 185. 24 Ibid., p. 217.

Investigations’ (New York: Harper & Row, 1958), p. 93.

Embedding and Embodying Philosophy 25

27 The Childhood of Jesus, p. 225.

Embedding and Embodying Philosophy 27

31 The Childhood of Jesus, pp. 265–7.

Although Coetzee’s embedding of a twinned embodiment of Wittgenstein into his

Embedding and Embodying Philosophy 29

37 Cervantes, Don Quixote, p. 68.

38 The Childhood of Jesus, p. 162. 39 Ibid., p. 143.