Late Essays : 2006-2017

by J. M. Coetzee

  French anti-Semitism extended across the social spectrum and had several strands. One was the traditional anti-Judaism of the Catholic right. Another relied on the burgeoning pseudo-science of race. A third, hostility to ‘Jewish’ plutocracy, became the province of the socialist left. Thus when popular resentment began to fester against refugees, Jewish refugees in particular, there was no substantial political grouping prepared to stand up in their defence.

  France’s established population of secularized Jews, too, viewed with unease the flood of poor cousins pouring in from the East, cousins who adhered to their own language, dress, and cuisine, followed their own rites, were riven by their own political factions. Spokesmen for French Jewry tried to warn the new arrivals that their unwillingness to fit in would give fresh impetus to the anti-Semites, but got nowhere. ‘The nightmare of old assimilated French Jewry had come true: what was perceived as an uncontrollable flood of exotic oriental Jews has compromised the position of them all,’ write Michael Marrus and Robert Paxton.11

  The Judaic slant of Les Chiens et les loups – a more substantial, more ambitious, and less equivocal work than David Golder – thus comes as somewhat of a surprise, considering Némirovsky’s own assimilationist record and her comfortable place in French society. Partly as a result of happenstance but mainly because her innermost soul tells her so, Némirovsky’s Ada Stiller opts not for the tame dogs of the fashionable daytime suburbs but for the wolves from the Eastern darknesses – the wolves from whom most dogs prefer to distance themselves, not wishing to be reminded of their origins.

  Set mainly in Russia around the time of the revolution, published in 1935 but probably written years earlier, Le Vin de solitude is a study in mother–daughter relations for which Némirovsky draws freely on her own life-history. Hélène Karol is a gifted, precocious adolescent. Her father is a war profiteer, selling obsolete weaponry to the Russian government. Her mother, Bella, is a beautiful but depraved society hostess (‘To hold in her arms a man whose name she did not know, or where he came from, a man who would never see her again – that alone gave her the intense frisson she craved’).12 Antagonistic to her daughter, Bella does all she can to undermine and humiliate her (a rerun of Le Bal). To revenge herself, Hélène sets out to steal her mother’s current lover. In doing so she strays into murkier and murkier moral territory. Lying in the man’s arms, she glances into a mirror and sees her own face, ‘voluptuous, triumphant, reminding her … of her mother’s features when she was young’.13 Troubled by this transformation, she dismisses him:

  You are the enemy of all my childhood … Never will I be able to live happily with you. The man I want to live side by side with would never have known my mother, or my home, not even my language or my native country; he would take me far away, it doesn’t matter where.14

  Le Vin de solitude is part novel, part autobiographical fantasy, but mainly an indictment of a mother who casts her daughter in the role of sexual rival, thereby robbing her of her childhood and precipitating her too early into a world of adult passions. Jézabel (1936) is an even more lurid attack on the mother figure. Here a narcissistic socialite of a certain age, obsessed with her public image, purposely lets her nineteen-year-old daughter bleed to death in childbirth rather than have it emerge that she herself has become a grandmother (years later the spurned grandchild will return to blackmail her). Books like Jézabel, dashed off in a hurry, offering sensationalistic glimpses into the lives of the fast set, make it easier to understand why Némirovsky was not taken seriously by the literary world of her day.

  Némirovsky’s real-life mother was, by all accounts, an unsympathetic person. When in 1945 her orphaned granddaughters, aged sixteen and eight, turned up on her doorstep, she refused them shelter (‘There are sanatoriums for poor children,’ she is reputed to have said).15 Nonetheless, it is a pity we will never hear her side of the story.

  11. Juan Ramón Jiménez, Platero and I

  Platero and I is usually thought of as a children’s book. In the book trade it is certainly marketed as such. Yet in this set of vignettes held together by the figure of the donkey Platero there is much that an impressionable child will find hard to bear, and in addition much that is beyond the range of interest of children. I therefore find it better to conceive of Platero and I as impressions of the life of a town, Juan Ramón Jiménez’s home town of Moguer in Andalusia, recollected by an adult who has not lost touch with the immediacy of childhood experience. These impressions are recorded with the delicacy and restraint that is proper when side by side with the adult reader is an audience of children.

  Besides the ever-present gaze of the child, there is a second and more obvious gaze in the book: the gaze of Platero himself. Donkeys are, to human beings, not particularly beautiful creatures – not as beautiful as (to speak only of herbivores) gazelles or even horses – but they do have the advantage of possessing beautiful eyes: large, dark, liquid – soulful, we sometimes call them – and long-lashed. (We find the smaller, redder eyes of pigs less beautiful. Is this the reason why we do not find it easy to love or befriend these intelligent, friendly, humorous beasts? As for insects, their organs of sight are so alien to us that it is not easy to find a place in our affections for them.)

  There is a terrible scene in Dostoevsky’s novel Crime and Punishment in which a drunken peasant beats an exhausted mare to death. First he beats her with an iron bar, then he beats her over the eyes with a club, as if above all he wants to extinguish the image of himself in her eyes. In Platero and I we read of an old blind mare who is chased away by her owners but insists on returning, angering them so much that with sticks and stones they kill her. Platero and his owner (this is the term our language provides for us – it is certainly not the word Jiménez uses) come upon the mare lying dead by the roadside; her sightless eyes seem at last to see.

  When you die, Platero’s master promises his little donkey, I will not abandon you by the roadside but bury you by the foot of the great pine that you love.

  It is the mutual gaze, between the eyes of this man – a man whom the gypsy children mock as crazy, and who tells the story of Platero and I rather than of I and Platero – and the eyes of ‘his’ donkey that establishes the deep bond between them, in much the same way that a bond is established between mother and infant at the moment when their gazes first lock. Again and again the mutual bond between man and beast is reinforced. ‘From time to time Platero stops eating to look at me. I from time to time stop reading to look at Platero’.1

  Platero comes into existence as an individual – as a character, in fact – with a life and a world of experience of his own at the moment when the man whom I call his owner, the crazy man, sees that Platero sees him, and in the act of seeing acknowledges him as an equal. At this moment ‘Platero’ ceases to be just a label and becomes the donkey’s identity, his true name, all that he possesses in the world.

  Jiménez does not humanize Platero. To humanize him would be to betray his asinine essence. By its asinine nature, Platero’s experience is closed off and impenetrable to human beings. Nevertheless, this barrier is now and again breached when for an instant the poet’s vision, like a ray of light, penetrates and illuminates Platero’s world; or, to make the same claim in a different form, when the senses that we human beings possess in common with the beasts, infused with our heart’s love, permit us, through the agency of Jiménez the poet, to intuit that experience. ‘Platero, his dark eyes scarlet from the sunset, walks off gently to the pool of crimson and rose and violet waters; he dips his mouth gently into the mirrors which seem to turn liquid at his touch; and through his great throat flows the heavy stream of shadowy, bloodlike water’. (p. 37)

  ‘I treat Platero as if he were a child … I kiss him, tease him, infuriate him; he understands very well that I love him and he bears me no spite. He is so like me that I have come to believe that he dreams my very dreams’. (p. 58) Here we tremble on the edge of the moment so urgently longed for in the fantasy lives of chil
dren, when the great divide between species crumbles away and we and the creatures who have so long been exiled from us come together in a greater unity. (How long exiled? In the Judaeo-Christian myth, the exile dates from our expulsion from Paradise, and the end of exile is yearned for as the day when the lion shall lie down with the lamb.)

  At this moment we see the crazy man, the poet, behaving toward Platero as joyfully and affectionately as small children behave toward puppies and kittens; and Platero responds as young animals do to small children, with equal joy and affection, as if they know, as well as the child knows (and the sober, prosaic adult does not), that we are finally all brothers and sisters in this world; also that no matter how humble we are we must have someone to love or we will dry up and perish.

  In the end Platero dies. He dies because he has swallowed poison, but also because the lifespan of a donkey is not as long as that of a man. Unless we choose to befriend elephants or turtles, we will mourn the deaths of our animal friends more often than they will mourn ours: this is one of the hard lessons that Platero and I does not shirk. But in another sense Platero does not die: always this ‘silly little donkey’ will be coming back to us, braying, surrounded by laughing children, wreathed in yellow flowers. (p. 45)

  12. Antonio Di Benedetto, Zama

  The year is 1790, the place an unnamed outpost on the Paraguay River ruled from faraway Buenos Aires. Don Diego de Zama has been here for fourteen months, serving in the administration, separated from his wife and sons.

  Nostalgically Zama looks back to the days when he was a corregidor with a district of his own to run: ‘Doctor Don Diego de Zama! … The forceful executive, the pacifier of Indians, the warrior who rendered justice without recourse to the sword … who put down the native rebellion without wasting a drop of Spanish blood.’1

  Now, under a new, centralized system of government meant to tighten Spain’s control over its colonies, chief administrators have to be Spanish-born. Zama serves as second-in-command to a Spanish gobernador: as a creole, an americano born in the New World, he can aspire no higher. He is in his mid-thirties, his career is stagnating. He has applied for a transfer; he dreams of the letter from the viceroy that will whisk him away to Buenos Aires, but it does not come.

  Strolling around the docks, he notices a corpse floating in the water, the corpse of a monkey who had dared to quit the jungle and dive into the flux. Yet even in death the monkey is trapped amid the piles of the wharf, unable to escape downriver. Is it an omen?

  Besides his dream of being returned to civilization, Zama dreams of a woman, not his wife, much as he loves her, but someone young and beautiful and of European birth, who will save him not only from his present state of sexual deprivation and social isolation but also from a harder to pin down existential condition of yearning for he knows not what. He tries to project this dream upon various young women glimpsed in the streets, with negligible success.

  In his erotic fantasies his mistress will have a delicate way of making love such as he has never tasted before, a uniquely European way. How so? Because in Europe, where it is not so fiendishly hot, women are clean and never sweat. Alas, here he is, womanless, ‘in a country whose name a whole infinity of French and Russian ladies – an infinity of people across the world – [have] never heard’. To such people, Europeans, real people, America is not real. Even to him America lacks reality. It is a flatland without feature in whose vastness he is lost. (p. 34)

  Male colleagues invite him to join them in a visit to a brothel. He declines. He has intercourse with women only if they are white and Spanish, he primly explains.

  From the small pool of white and Spanish women at hand he selects as a potential mistress the wife of a prominent landowner. Luciana is no beauty – her face puts him in mind of a horse – but she has an attractive figure (he has spied on her, bathing naked). He calls upon her in a spirit of ‘foreboding, pleasure, and tremendous irresolution’, unsure how one goes about seducing a married lady. And indeed, Luciana proves to be no pushover. In his campaign to wear her down, she is always a move ahead of him. (p. 43)

  As an alternative to Luciana there is Rita, the Spanish-born daughter of his landlord. But before he can get anywhere with her, her current lover, a vicious bully, humiliates her grossly in public. She pleads with Zama to avenge her. Although the role of avenger attracts him, he finds reasons not to confront his formidable rival. (Di Benedetto provides Zama with a neatly Freudian dream to explain his fear of potent males.)

  Unsuccessful with Spanish women, Zama has to resort to women of the town. Generally he steers clear of mulattas ‘so as not to dream of them and render myself susceptible and bring about my downfall’. The downfall to which he refers is certainly masturbation, but more significantly involves a step down the social ladder, confirming the metropolitan cliché that creoles and mixed breeds belong together. (p. 10)

  A mulatta gives him an inviting look. He follows her into the dingier quarter of the town, where he is attacked by a pack of dogs. He dispatches the dogs with his rapier, then, ‘swaggering and dominant’ (his language), takes the woman. Once they are finished, she offers in a businesslike way to become his kept mistress. He is offended. ‘The episode was an affront to my right to lose myself in love. In any love born of passion, some element of idyllic charm is required.’ Later, reflecting on the fact that dogs are as yet the only creatures whose blood his sword has spilled, he dubs himself ‘dogslayer’. (pp. 57, 58, 66)

  Zama is a prickly character. He holds a degree in letters and does not like it when the locals are not properly respectful. He is under the impression that people mock him behind his back, that plots are being cooked up to humiliate him. His relations with women – which occupy most of the novel – are characterized by crudity on the one hand and timidity on the other. He is vain, maladroit, narcissistic, and morbidly suspicious; he is prone to accesses of lust and fits of violence, and endowed with an endless capacity for self-deception.

  He is also the author of himself, in a double sense. First, everything we hear about him comes from his own mouth, including such derogatory epithets as ‘swaggering’ and ‘dogslayer’, which suggest a certain ironic self-awareness. Second, his day-to-day actions are dictated by the promptings of his unconscious, or at least his inner self, over which he makes no effort to assert conscious control. His narcissistic pleasure in himself includes the pleasure of never knowing what he will get up to next, and thus of being free to invent himself as he goes along. On the other hand – as he intermittently recognizes – his indifference to his deeper motives may be generating his many failures: ‘something greater, I knew not what, a kind of potent negation, invisible to the eye … superior to any strength I might muster or rebellion I might wage’ may be dictating his destiny. (p. 97)

  It is his self-cultivated lack of inhibition that leads him to launch an unprovoked knife attack on the only colleague who is well disposed toward him, then to sit back while the young man takes the blame and loses his job.

  Zama’s incurious and indeed amoral attitude toward his own violent impulses led some of his first readers to compare him with the Meursault of Albert Camus’ novel L’Étranger (existentialism was in vogue in the Argentina of the 1950s, when Zama first appeared). But the comparison is not helpful. Though he carries a rapier, Zama’s weapon of choice is the knife. The knife betrays him as an americano, as does his lack of polish as a seducer, and (Di Benedetto will later imply) his moral immaturity. Zama is a child of the Americas. He is also a child of his times, the heady 1790s, justifying his promiscuity by invoking the rights of man – specifically the right to have sex (or, as he prefers to put it, to ‘lose himself in love’). The configuration, cultural and historical, is Latin American, not French (or Algerian).

  More important than Camus as an influence was Jorge Luis Borges, Di Benedetto’s elder contemporary and the dominant figure in the Argentine intellectual landscape of his day. In 1951 Borges had delivered an influential lecture, ‘The Argentine
Writer and Tradition’, in which, responding to the question of whether Argentina should be developing a literary tradition of its own, he poured scorn on literary nationalism: ‘What is our Argentine tradition? … Our tradition is all of Western culture … Our patrimony is the universe.’2

  Friction between Buenos Aires and the provinces has been a constant of Argentine history, dating back to colonial times, with Buenos Aires, gateway to the wider world, standing for cosmopolitanism, while the provinces adhered to older, nativist values. Borges was quintessentially a man of Buenos Aires, whereas Di Benedetto’s sympathies lay with the provinces: he chose to live and work in Mendoza, the city of his birth in the far west of the country.

  Though his regional sympathies ran deep, Di Benedetto as a young man was impatient with the stuffiness of those in charge of the cultural institutions of the provinces, the so-called generation of 1925. He immersed himself in the modern masters – Freud, Joyce, Faulkner, the French existentialists – and involved himself professionally in cinema, as a critic and writer of screenplays (Mendoza of the post-war years was a considerable centre of film culture). His first two books, Mundo animal (1953) and El pentágono (1955), are resolutely modernist, with no regional colouring. His debt to Kafka is particularly clear in Mundo animal, where he blurs the distinction between human and animal along the lines of Kafka’s ‘Report to an Academy’ or ‘Investigations of a Dog’.