Spend enough time thinking about identity and the ways in which it is exploited and brandished and it begins to take on a sinister tone:
We are born subject. From the moment of our birth we are subject. One mark of this subjection is the certificate of birth. The perfected state holds and guards the monopoly of certifying birth. Either you are given (and carry with you) the certificate of the state, thereby acquiring an identity which during the course of your life enables the state to track you (track you down); or you do without an identity and condemn yourself to living outside the state like an animal (animals do not have identity papers). Coetzee, Diary of a Bad Year (4)
Notice the voice of sarcasm that sneaks in, so that the narrator is at once banal and proper (read the passage again but skip over the parentheticals) and yet also angry and irreverent. It’s all he can do to keep that sneering alter ego tucked inside those parentheses, as if the other voice is locked behind a door, but his whispers slip through the cracks.
On handwriting:
Because it is too much to expect her to read my handwriting, I record each day’s output on a dictaphone tape and give her both tape and manuscript to work from. It is a method I have used before, there is no reason why it should not work, though there is no denying my handwriting is deteriorating. I am losing motor control. That is part of my condition. That is part of what is happening to me. There are days when I squint at what I have just written, barely able to decipher it myself. Coetzee, Diary of a Bad Year (31)
“My condition” suggests an illness, as well as advancing age. But it’s more than that as well. It’s the condition of being in a society that’s all wrong, where the “war on terror” advances, and the surveillance state extends its reach, and democracy, such as it is, fails to offer any recourse. His own writing becomes obscured at the moment it is written: it is born into the state too, and so it is blurry, uneven, shaky – suppressed almost before it can be read for the very first time.
Relative to Eagleton’s comments on the body:
The fact that such common locutions as “my leg,” “my eye,” “my brain,” and even “my body” exist suggests that we believe there is some non-material, perhaps fictive, entity that stands in the relation of possessor to possessed to the body’s “parts” and even to the whole body. Or else the existence of such locutions shows that language cannot get purchase, cannot get going, until it has split up the unity of experience. Coetzee, Diary of a Bad Year (59)
Diary of a Bad Year starts off with a single narrator (an older male writer) but the text is split between his writings and his diary. Visually, this split is represented with a shift in the shape of the text: the top three-quarters of the page (the essay) are justified, while the bottom quarter (the diary) is ragged right; a thin rule separates the two. Above, the voice is proper, in its place (but only barely so); below, it’s casual and at times self-conscious. So the vertical shape of the page is precarious: a heavy block rests upon a few shallow, uneven lines.
As the book proceeds, another voice enters: that of a woman. Her voice comes up from the bottom, further splitting the page, so that it’s now in thirds. And she doesn’t respect the boundaries as he did; whereas the narrator was careful to craft sentences and paragraphs that could begin and end on a single page, her voice ranges across the pages. As a reader, you must choose between shifting from her narrative to the writer’s in mid-sentence (leaving her to trail off) or else skip over the writer’s voice and stay with her for a few pages, only to backtrack and catch up with him later. The design of the text then physically captures the sense of youth careening ahead, of an old man chasing after it, losing his way in the process.
When the woman’s voice first breaks the page, it’s in a passage where she talks about how the writer’s eyes are going:
He forms his letters clearly enough, m’s and n’s and u’s and w’s included, but when he tries to write a whole passage he can’t keep the line straight, it dips like a plane nosediving into the sea or a baritone running out of breath. Coetzee, Diary of a Bad Year (42–43)
It’s another twenty pages before he follows after her and runs across the page as well:
These thoughts about the body occur not in the abstract but in relation to a specific person, X, unnamed. On the morning of the day he died, X brushed his teeth, taking care of them with the due diligence we learn as children.…X was not buried but cremated; and the people who built the oven in which he was consumed ensured that it was hot enough to turn everything to ash, even bones, even teeth. Even teeth. Coetzee, Diary of a Bad Year (60–61)
In both passages, there is a sense of routine – of trying to maintain control even as it slips away – while the design of the page supports the text in subtle ways. The initial control of one voice gives way to two (and later, three); the essays cede space to the woman’s criticism of them, so that the justified lines are diminished as the ragged text swells up from the bottom of the page, in contrast to the writer’s own diving handwriting.
I love the way etymology can be so revealing:
What they have created is a system of deterrences, and indeed a spectacle of deterrences. It says: This is the purgatory to which you will be subjected if you arrive in Australia without papers. Think again. In this respect Baxter Detention Centre out in the South Australian desert is not dissimilar to Guantanamo Bay.…As evidence that their system works, the Australian authorities point to the drop in the number of what they call “illegal arrivals” since the system came into operation. And they are right, as a deterrent, their system clearly works. Deterrence, from terrere, to terrify. Coetzee, Diary of a Bad Year (112)
Every word we speak has a history, even if we cannot or do not acknowledge that history.
Further discussion of anti-theoretical language:
In private moments men like Blair defend themselves by saying that their critics (always labelled armchair critics) forget that in this less than ideal world politics is the art of the possible. They go further: politics is not for sissies, they say, by sissies meaning people reluctant to compromise moral principles. By nature politics is uncongenial to the truth, they say, or at least to the practice of telling the truth in all circumstances. Coetzee, Diary of a Bad Year (125)
They call them “armchair critics” because it connotes an image of leisure. The critic is maligned as a member of the privileged class, averse to hard work, spending his many hours reclining in a soft chair, a drink within arm’s reach. He knows nothing of the real world. Once this image of the critic takes hold, there is no need to engage the criticism that emerges from him; it becomes, a priori, irrelevant.
Supporting this image is the belief that physical action is somehow superior to intellectual actions such as speaking or writing. Nevermind that those who denigrate critics for being too soft in the middle, too unaware of the physical labors of the world (think farmers, construction workers, etc.), have themselves never broken a sweat over anything but the treadmill at the nearest luxury gym (a fresh towel nearby, afterwards a massaging shower and a $6 smoothie). In other words, an elite person in power waves aside criticism by attacking his critics with terminology that suggests it is the critic who is the true elite. Nothing short of brilliant, if it wasn’t so disastrously effective.
Another argument for criticism:
Harold Pinter, winner of the 2005 Nobel Prize for literature, is too ill to travel to Stockholm for the ceremony. But in a recorded lecture he makes what can fairly be called a savage attack on Tony Blair for his part in the war in Iraq, calling for him to be put on trial as a war criminal.…it takes some gumption to speak as Pinter has spoken. Who knows, perhaps Pinter sees quite clearly that he will be slickly refuted, disparaged, even ridiculed. Despite which he fires the first shot and steels himself for the reply. What he has done may be foolhardy but it is not cowardly. And there comes a time when the outrage and the shame are so great that all calculation, all prudence, is overwhelmed and one must act, that is to say speak.1 Coetzee, Diary of a Bad Year (127)
- Emphasis mine. ↩
On the ways in which a text can change as it passes through the reader:
What has begun to change since I moved into the orbit of Anya is not my opinions themselves so much as my opinion of my opinions. As I read through what mere hours before she translated from a record of my speaking voice into 14-point type, there are flickering moments when I can see these hard opinions of mine through her eyes – see how alien and antiquated they may seem to a thoroughly modern Millie, like the bones of some odd extinct creature, half bird, half reptile, on the point of turning into stone. Coetzee, Diary of a Bad Year (137)
In a similar vein, I’ve been thinking about the ways in which blogging affects the writing process, given the instant (and democratic) feedback and, perhaps more importantly, the exposure it affords. I use the word “exposure” in two ways: first, in the sense that the web provides an immediate and accessible audience, something that can be difficult to achieve in print (not that it’s easier on the web, but it is more democratic); and, second, in that it pulls the curtain away from the writer’s desk, “exposing” a process that is usually kept behind closed doors and only referred to in abstract, romantic terms. More on this soon.
Against criticism
Part of the underlying tension in Diary of a Bad Year surrounds the purpose of criticism. The narrator has been commissioned to write a series of essays which will appear in a German publication called “Strong Opinions.” The essays range in topic from statehood to Al Qaida, Machiavelli to intelligent design, music, and the afterlife. Nearly all express dismay with the political or social caliber of the world as it is now, with little anticipation that things will change. “These are dark times,” he says.
But neither the woman he hires to type his essays – nor her boyfriend – sees the world as he does. The woman encourages him to write about lighter fare, to tell stories about the birds, for example. The boyfriend goes further, and suggests that the narrator’s commitment to protest is a façade:
You put yourself forward as the lone voice of conscience speaking up for human rights and so forth, but I ask myself, if he really believes in these human rights, why isn’t he out in the real world fighting for them? What is his track record? And the answer, according to my researches, is: His track record is not so hot. In fact his track record is virtually blank. Coetzee, Diary of a Bad Year (197)
It’s not clear what the boyfriend is looking for in his research; but one could hazard a guess: a count of legislation passed, boycotts organized, fundraisers held? Perhaps a product endorsement or two? All things more substantial (more quantitative) than words on a page. The “real world” has no use for words; the “real world” measures everything in money.
Which is, of course, true; we don’t much value words – especially written words – anymore, if in fact we ever did. But it does not necessarily follow from that fact that words are themselves valueless. I suspect quite the opposite is true: we devalue words because they are a threat to our comfort, to our continued sense of well-being in dark times. We devalue words for the same reason that certain governments lock up activists in hidden jails: because unleashed they would wreck havoc on the systems they challenge. The only effective weapon against the word is to abort it before it can reach even one person’s ear.
And so the boyfriend, and many others like him, become convinced by the status quo that words are not the means to change. They become convinced that money and celebrity have more currency in the global market than words, that indeed words have no place in a modern world such as this. Words are archaic, relics of a past that we will not return to, like tuberculosis or polytheism.
It’s as if every potential writer carries a loaded gun, but has been convinced, through many and various methods, that the gun is not, in fact, loaded; that it’s a harmless toy, not worthy even of children, who play with much more sophisticated toys these days. And so every potential writer (every potential critic) tosses the gun aside and walks away, unaware of what they have relinquished.
There is, however, an upside: if at any point someone realizes their error – if at any point they remember the gun was loaded after all – they have only to lift their eyes to see the roads are littered with guns, every one loaded, every one longing to be raised and aimed, every one ready to fire.
