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 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

BEYOND THE ANCIENT QUARREL

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

Beyond the Ancient

Quarrel
Literature, Philosophy, and J. M. Coetzee

Edited by
PATRICK HAYES
and
JAN WILM

1
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

3
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP,
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The University of Texas at Austin
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First Edition published in 2017
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 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

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.
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

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
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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
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

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.
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/10/2017, SPi

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.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 6/11/2017, SPi

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.” ’
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 6/11/2017, SPi

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
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 6/11/2017, SPi

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.
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 6/11/2017, SPi

4 Patrick Hayes and Jan Wilm

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.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 6/11/2017, SPi

Ancient Quarrels, Modern Contexts 5

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.
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 6/11/2017, SPi

6 Patrick Hayes and Jan Wilm

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.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 6/11/2017, SPi

Ancient Quarrels, Modern Contexts 7

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.
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 6/11/2017, SPi

8 Patrick Hayes and Jan Wilm

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.

 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 6/11/2017, SPi

Ancient Quarrels, Modern Contexts 9

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).
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
The Project Gutenberg eBook of The stroller
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States
and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no
restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it
under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this
ebook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the
United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where
you are located before using this eBook.

Title: The stroller

Author: Margaret St. Clair

Illustrator: Leo Morey

Release date: July 9, 2022 [eBook #68484]

Language: English

Original publication: United States: Standard Magazines, Inc, 1947

Credits: Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed

Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE

STROLLER ***
THE STROLLER
 By MARGARET ST. CLAIR

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from

Thrilling Wonder Stories, August 1947.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
All sorts of things come in on a space freighter. Even in the old days
grocers were always finding twenty-foot pythons curled cozily inside
bunches of bananas from South America; and what sort of undesired
stowaways do you suppose you get when you have a cargo of
tongarus from south Venus, agatized Fyella corymbs from the district
around Aphrodition, hand-painted lumigraphs on goor fiber made in
Marsport prefecture, and golden rhnx jewelry from the canal
centers?
George Saunders, supercargo of the S.S. Trito, gave his wife a warm
kiss on the cheek.
"For Pete's sake," he hissed into her ear, "act like you're glad to see
me, can't you? The Old Man's watching us."
Marta Saunders hesitated a moment and then threw her plump body
into her husband's arms.
"Oooh, Georgie!" she squealed. "You sweet old thing! It's so
wonderful to see you again!"
"That's enough," George rumbled warningly. He was swaying a little
from the impact. "Don't want to overdo it. Let's get out of here."
They started over to the parking area of the spaceport, where their
'copter was.
"What's the matter?" Marta demanded as soon as they were out of
earshot of the ship. "What do you care what the captain thinks about
us?"
"Listen, Marta, the old fool's been riding me ever since we left
Aphrodition. Says I'm the most incompetent supercargo he's ever
had. Just before we docked today, he said he thought he'd take it up
with the union. If he does, you know what'll happen. Pynx said the
last time that if he got one more complaint about me he'd take the
case to the executive board. I'd lose my license, sure."
"Oh." Marta seemed unwillingly impressed. She got an atomizer out
of her handcase and began spraying quick-drying cosmi-lac over the
skin of her face and neck. "But what happened?" she asked an
instant later when the cosmetic had set. "Why's he so down on you?"
For a moment the fine-etched lines of irritation and petulance faded
from George Saunders' face, to be replaced by an expression of
honest perplexity.
"Marta, I—wait, here's the 'copter. I'll tell you about it after we get in.
And for the love of heaven, don't drop any pop bottles out of the
window the way you did the last time I was in port. Having the air
police after us would be the last straw, as far as my nerves are
concerned."
He slid into the driver's seat. Marta got two bottles of pop out of the
refrigerator, shoved straws into their necks, pulled a shelf out of the
paneling to hold one bottle at a convenient level under George's
nose, and began drinking out of the other herself.
"Well?" she asked after a couple of swallows.
George drank from his bottle before replying.
"It's the darnedest thing. I remember beginning to load number two
and three holds at Aphrodition, and I remember telling the longshore
leaderman to have the hatch covers put on again when the holds
were filled, but there're six or eight hours in there during the loading I
don't remember a single thing about. They're totally gone.
"Well, the way the ship handled at the take-off from Aphrodition, the
Old Man thought there must be something wrong, and when we
were out in space he went in for a look. Wow! I can see, sort of, why
he's sore. Those holds look like somebody'd stirred the things in 'em
up with a big stick. About a third of the cargo's ruined. The tongarus
have leaked all over those blasted lumigraphs, and—Well, the
insurance company is going to raise blue murder, and the owners
won't like it one little bit."
George licked his thin lips.
"What I want to know," he burst out, "is what happened to me? I
must have told the longshoremen to load the holds like that, but—
When we were two days out of Venus, I asked Sparks (he's had a
pre-medical course, and he's saving up the tuition for medical
school) to look me over. He gave me all the tests, dozens of them,
and finally told me there wasn't a thing wrong with me mentally or
physically except that I needed more rest. Rest, bushwah! I've been
sleeping ten hours a night, and I wake up tireder than when I went to
bed."
Marta studied him.
"You do look sort of tired," she observed. "Maybe you need some
vitor-ray treatments."
George ignored this comment.
"Of course, the Old Man's not such a bad guy," he said. "He never
said anything about that time I missed the ship at Marsport."
"You mean that time you were so drunk on soma? One of the times."
George gave an irritated shrug.
"Never mind that," he snapped. "I mentioned it because I asked him
to have dinner with us on Thursday, the day before we sail, and I
want you to have a real old-fashioned home-cooked meal for him.
Maybe I can soften him up. Have something nice for him. None of
this complete meal stuff out of the freezer—have something good.
Out of cans."
"You mean like my canned crab and mushroom casserole?"
"Um-hum. Have that. And what's that dessert you make with the
canned peaches and the soma? pêche flambée, or something. He
might like that."

George set the 'copter down neatly on the roof of their apartment
house.
"Remember," he said, "I've got to make a good impression on him.
Flatter him as much as you can, but use your head about it. And if
you get any kind of a chance to tell him about how reliable I usually
am, do it."
The days moved on toward Thursday. George continued to complain
of fatigue, and on Tuesday night Marta woke up shrieking with a
vague and horrible nightmare, but it was attributed to indigestion;
after a dose of antiacid, she went back to sleep. On Wednesday she
had her hallucination.
She was putting a bunch of old digests and tabloids away in the
closet in the living room when she came across the jacket George
had used four or five years ago when he went grotch hunting.
"George!" she called. "Oh, George! Can I throw your old gray jacket
away? It's full of moth holes."
"What are you yelling at me for?" George asked irritably from behind
her. He had been sitting in his study, which was only about five feet
distant from the closet, drinking soma. "I'm right here."
Marta came out of the closet and stared at him. One hand went to
her heart. The pallor of her heavy, sagging face showed through her
thick face lacquer as a muddy gray.
"Wha—I saw you go into the kitchen!" she said. "You were wearing
your brown suit. I was looking right at you, and you walked the length
of the living room and went into the kitchen and closed the door
behind you. That's why I yelled at you. You were wearing your brown
suit. You've got the blue one on now. You were wearing your brown
suit!"
"Shut up!" George said passionately. "Are you trying to drive me
crazy? I've been sitting right here all the time. What do you mean,
you saw me walk into the kitchen? You couldn't have. I've been
sitting right here all the time."
"But I saw you! You were wearing your brown suit."
"You imagined it!" her husband shrieked at her. "It's your imagination.
You shut up. What are you trying to do, get me so nervous the Old
Man will think I'm ready for the loony bin? You imagined it!"
Marta looked at him. She had to lick her lips twice before she could
answer.
"Yes. Yes, of course. That must be it. I imagined it."
George spent the rest of the day drinking soma and holding his
hands up before his eyes to see if they had stopped shaking. Marta
got a five-suit deck of cards out of the closet and played solitaire.
None of her games came out, but she was too distraught to realize
that she had left two of the cards inside their box.

Surprisingly, both George and Marta slept well. They awakened far
more cheerful than they had been the night before. Even their pre-
breakfast snapping at each other lacked its usual note of bitter
sincerity. When Marta left the apartment and started out to do her
shopping, she was humming under her breath.
The canned crab was easy enough to locate, but she had to go to
three stores before she could find the peaches and the mushrooms.
She ran them to earth at last in a little grocery on a side street. Just
as she was leaving it, her eye caught the flash of a red label on a low
shelf near the door and she triumphantly dug out two cans of tomato
soup.
"See what I got!" she said, showing her prize to George when she
got back home. "I guess I'm lucky or something. It's awfully hard to
find."
"Gosh!" George shut off the video to give her his full attention.
"That's wonderful. I happen to know the Old Man's crazy about it. His
mother used to have it all the time. I wouldn't be a bit surprised if it
makes him change his mind completely about going to the union.
Marta, you're a smart girl."
Marta spent the rest of the day at the beauty shop, getting her hair
re-garnished with galoons and her face set. She wanted to make the
best possible impression on the captain. Around five-thirty she
began getting dinner—it doesn't take long to open cans—and an
hour or so later the Old Man (his name was Kauss) was chiming at
the door.
Kauss was definitely stiff at first. He greeted Saunders with resentful
formality and gave Marta the merest flash of a smile before his face
grew hard again. When the fragrant steam from the tureen of tomato
soup Marta was bringing in blew toward him, he relaxed somewhat,
and the salad of canned string beans, onions, lettuce and
mayonnaise softened him still more. By the time he had finished two
big helpings of Marta's crab casserole, it began to look like the job
was saved. He offered George a cigar and began telling him a long
story about what the little Martian hostess at the Silver Weetarete
had said to him.
Marta went out in the kitchen to fix the pêche flambée. She cut
sponge cake into neat rounds, spread disks of hard-frozen banana
ice cream over them, and crowned the structure on each dessert
plate with half of an enormous canned clingstone peach. From a
bottle she poured soma carefully over each of the peaches, set a bit
of paper to burning by pressing it against the element in the atomic
range, and then used the paper to ignite the soma on the peaches.
"George!" she called in the direction of the dining apse. "Oh, George,
honey, help me with the plates!"
She heard him come in. She turned at his step, ready to pick up the
plates, one in each hand, and give them to him.
He was wearing his brown suit.
But—he was wearing the green one today, wasn't he, because it was
the best suit he had and he wanted to impress the captain. His green
—his green—
George's face slipped down toward the fourth button on his coat. It
wavered, solidified, flowed back into place, and then slopped down
over his lapels once more. Suddenly it solidified into a sort of
tentacle. It came falteringly toward Marta, half-blind, but purposive.
Marta tried to scream. Her throat was too constricted by terror to let
out more than a mere thread of sound, but it had carrying power.
George and Kauss, out in the dining apse, heard it.
They came running in. Kauss was quick-witted. He picked up one of
the plates with the soma burning on it and hurled it straight at the
thing that was wearing George's clothes.
There was an explosion, so loud that the plexiglass in the windows
bulged outward for a moment, and then a bright, instant column of
flame. Then nothing. George's brown suit lay collapsed and empty
on the floor.
 There was an explosion so loud the plexiglass windows bulged
outward for a moment.

"It was wearing your suit, George," Marta said hysterically. She was
leaning back against the wall, looking faint and sick. "George, it was
wearing your suit. Oh, what was it, what was it, anyway?"
Kauss was looking at the debris on the floor. A peculiar expression,
half satisfaction, half private insight, hovered around the corners of
his lips.
"It was a Mocker, I think," he answered.
"A Mocker? What—?"
"Um-hum. You still find a few of them in the wilder parts of Venus.
They're parasitic—ah—entities, that feed on the life force, as well as
the flesh, of human beings. No doubt this one came aboard the ship
at Aphrodition, in that consignment of Fyella corymbs. They're
invisible most of the time, so of course we didn't suspect it."
"But how did it get here?" George demanded. "Why did it pick on
Marta as a victim?"
"Well, you see the usual way a Mocker works is to select someone
as a host, as a sort of base of operations, and then range out from
him whenever it wants to eat. For some reason, whenever it leaves
its host, it takes on his features and body and dresses itself in his
clothes. That's what happened here. One of the first signs that a
Mocker is taking hold is a spell of amnesia, and of course that's what
happened to you, Saunders, when we were taking on cargo at
Aphrodition, though I didn't realize it at the time.
"A Mocker doesn't usually kill its host directly, but it does draw on his
life force to keep itself going, and he usually complains of feeling
worn out and tired."
Kauss halted. Marta looked down at her husband's brown suit and
the ice cream slowly melting across it.
"Please, George, pick up that stuff before it ruins your suit
completely," she said automatically. And then, to Kauss, "But what
happened when you threw the plate at it? What happened? Oh, I
was so scared!"
"Yes, the Mockers are terrifying." Kauss agreed. He seemed to
square his broad shoulders. "However, at bottom they are
unintelligent—look at the stupidity of this one in attacking you when
your husband and I were in the next room—and they are really not
especially dangerous provided you know the defense against them.
"You see, their body structure, while based on the same elements as
our own, involves large quantities of free hydrogen between the body
cells. Hydrogen ignites in ordinary air with explosive force—the end
product's water—and when I threw that burning stuff at the creature,
the hydrogen in its tissues exploded. It blew up. There's probably a
good deal more water vapor in the air in this room than there was
before I got rid of the thing."
Kauss cleared his throat.
"There's another life form," he said with a faintly professional air,
"allied to the Mocker, but with important differences, which is far
more dangerous. That's the Stroller."
"The Stroller?" Marta asked. George had put his arm around her;
they were not an affectionate couple, but the moment seemed to call
for tender demonstration. "Why do they call it that?"
"No one knows, exactly. It seems to come from the creature's own
name for itself, for its fondness for taking long, long, walks."
Kauss turned the cigar in his mouth. He poked at the suit lying on the
floor with the toe of his shoe.
"What does it do?" Marta queried. "Why is it so terribly dangerous?"
"The Stroller doesn't hunt a host, like the Mocker," Kauss replied.
"Early in life it takes over the identity of some human being, and it
remains indistinguishable from a human being to any usual test. It's
so dangerous because there's absolutely no defense against it. No
free hydrogen in its tissues. It's indestructible."
"My!" Marta said. "Goodness!"
"It feeds, like the Mocker, on both the flesh and the life force of
human beings. Fortunately"—Kauss smiled—"it's very, very rare.
There are probably only a few Strollers in the entire solar system,
and they reproduce only at widely separated intervals."
Once more Kauss halted and poked absently at the clothing on the
floor with the toe of his boot.
"There's a peculiarity about their feeding habits," he said. "They'll go
for years without feeling any desire to eat their special food, and then
something will happen which makes them—greedy, and after that
they can't be stopped before they feed."
"Goodness!" Marta said again. She hid a nervous yawn behind her
hand. "George, get me a chair, will you? I'd like to sit down." To
Kauss, she said. "How did you find out all these things? You must
have made quite a study of the subject. Why, I've read several books
about Venus, and I listen to all the casts on the video about it, but I
never heard either of these creatures mentioned before. It seems to
be a sort of hobby of yours."
George pushed a kitchen chair out for her; she sat down with a sigh
of relief.
"Not a hobby," Kauss corrected gently.
His face began to waver and flow as the Mocker's had done. Then it
snapped back into place.
He licked his lips very delicately.
"You see, I'm a Stroller myself. And, somehow, I'm feeling that I'd like
to eat."
 *** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE
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