Stranger Shores: Essays 1986-1999

by J. M. Coetzee

  The powers of all these angelic intercessors are linked to their sexually closed state. We are back with Ficino: ‘It is not this or that body that [the lover] desires but the splendour of the celestial majesty shining through bodies, a splendour that fills him with wonder.’

  It is a proper grasp of this variety of masculine love, rooted in the late medieval cult of service of the donna and given philosophical depth by Renaissance neoplatonism, that is lost, by 1748, to Richardson. If his Lovelace is a thoroughly debased version of the lover-worshipper, that is not only because Richardson wants to set him within the English social scene as the representative of a hostile class with a hostile ethos, but also because Richardson has never been properly in touch with this Catholic-mystical, neoplatonic tradition and is therefore unable to conceive the scale of the betrayal of love that occurs when the lover takes the beloved by force.

  My sketch of what Lovelace might have been makes him a larger figure than Richardson allows him to be. In fairness I must admit that there exists a sub-reading of Lovelace that does some justice to the genealogy I have been outlining, yet preserves Richardson’s hostility to him. In this reading the real-life problem created by that male construct, the angel-woman, is that men cannot always maintain their fiction that the woman’s chastity is a sign of angelic indifference to desire; the woman’s self-containedness is felt as a disturbing autonomy or self-sufficiency. In this reading, Lovelace the rapist-revenger is the dark side of the coin of which Dante the pilgrim-lover is the bright, ideal side.

  4 Marcellus Emants, A Posthumous Confession

  THE NETHERLANDS OF the mid-nineteenth century was one of the cultural backwaters of Europe. The great current of the Romantic movement had barely stirred its complacent materialism. It had produced only a single literary work of stature, Eduard Douwes Dekker’s novel Max Havelaar (1860), an attack on abuses in the colonial East Indies.

  In the last quarter of the century, however, the new waves of Impressionism, Wagnerism and Naturalism began to wash Dutch shores, and by the 1880s a full literary awakening, the Movement of Eighty, was under way. Among the prophetic forerunners claimed for themselves by the young men of the movement was the writer Marcellus Emants. It was a role Emants declined, as he was to decline affiliation to any group or school.

  Born in 1848 into a patrician family from The Hague, Emants was intended for a career in the law. But he detested the joyless drinking and promiscuity of Leiden student life and abandoned his studies as soon as his father died. Thereafter he lived as a writer of independent means, travelling abroad to avoid the Dutch winters. He made three marriages, the last of them singularly wretched. After the First World War, fearing Socialist government and high taxes, he removed to Switzerland, where he died in 1923.

  Though Emants thought of himself as a playwright first and foremost, it is his novels and stories that have kept his name alive, principally Een nagelaten bekentenis (A Posthumous Confession, 1894), Inwijding (Initiation, 1900), Waan (Delusion, 1905), Liefdesleven (Love-life, 1916), and Mensen (People, 1920). Their principal subjects are love and marriage: deluded love, unhappy marriage. Emants is one of a line of European novelists who, in dissecting the intimate discords of modern marriage, have also explored the discontents of modern Western civilisation: Flaubert, Tolstoy, F.M. Ford, Lawrence.

  In the literary handbooks Emants is usually classed among the Naturalists. He seems to belong there because (like the Goncourt brothers) he is interested in the sexual underlife of the bourgeoisie and because (like Zola) he uses the language of the new sciences of heredity and psychopathology to explain human motivation.

  But though Emants was influenced by the patron thinkers of Naturalism – Taine, Spencer, Charcot – he differs from the Naturalists in important respects. His pessimism is far removed from Zola’s faith in the power of the novelist to guide man toward a better future. Nor is there in Emants much of the painstaking and systematic description of milieu characteristic of Naturalism. His interest is in psychological processes, his style analytic rather than descriptive. Where the committed Naturalist gathers a corpus of data on which to base his roman expérimental, Emants comes to his material in the traditional way, via chance, memory and introspection. His true sympathies lie with the older generation of European realists, in particular with Flaubert and Turgenev.

  In 1880 Emants published an essay on Turgenev which describes his own philosophy rather better than it does Turgenev’s. In youth, he writes, we create a fantasy ideal of the self we hope to be. The pattern our life takes, however, is determined not by any ideal but by unconscious forces within us. These forces impel us to acts; and in our acts it is revealed to us who we truly are. The transition from living in terms of fantasy ideals to living in self-knowledge always entails disillusionment and pain. Such pain becomes most acute when we recognise how unbridgeably vast the gap is between the ideal and the true self.

  There is a dual emphasis in this account: on the powerlessness of the individual before unconscious inner forces, and on the painful disillusionment of coming to maturity. In Willem Termeer, the narrator of A Posthumous Confession, we find both aspects present: a helpless drifting in a sea of passions, fears and envies; and an agonised twisting and turning to escape confrontation with the true self his life-history reveals to him: impotent, cowardly, ridiculous.

  Yet in terms of his own view of life, Termeer cannot be blamed for being what he is. The son of a cold, spiteful mother and a sickly, irascible father with a taste for pornography, who ends his life in a mental asylum – a ‘degenerate’, in the language of the day – Termeer is doomed (or at least feels himself to be doomed) by his birthright to repeat the past: to become a voluptuary and crypto-sado-masochist terrified of women, to choose a cold, dutiful spouse with whom to recreate his parents’ loveless marriage, and at last to descend into madness.

  As for social relations, the first memory Termeer has is of being taken to school and abandoned there like a rabbit in a cage of wild beasts. All around him he senses antagonism: people know there is something wrong with him, and for the good of the species want to put an end to him. His fellow men are savage beasts, and society itself a gigantic system of cogs and wheels in which ineffectual creatures like himself are doomed to be crushed.

  From the beginning of his life-story, Termeer thus presents himself as a victim, a victim of heredity, of the Darwinian jungle of life, of the impersonal social machinery. Quite as much as it is a piece of self-rending analysis and sly exhibitionism, his confession is an agonised plea for pity.

  But is Termeer simply a victim? His self-fulfilling conviction that everyone hates him can equally well be read as a projection of his own malevolence. Before he commits his murder, he experiences episodes of blind rage during which he barely deflects himself from assaulting his wife, whom he has already contemplated raping. When he eventually kills her, the act is directed not only against a woman who denies him both love (the mothering love he craves) and – in the name of her duty to the institution of marriage – freedom, but also against the society on whose behalf she stands like a wardress barring his way to what he wants: bliss. (Like Emma Bovary, Willem Termeer has read of bliss and is convinced it exists, somewhere.) Indeed, the agitated leaping and darting of his language is indication enough of the violence within him.

  Only when words fail him does Termeer resort to action in his battle with society. The document he bequeaths us, we should remember, is his second confession. The first, ‘an unadorned revelation of my most secret feelings’, has been offered for publication and turned down as ‘trivial’. In his failure to become a writer – an occupation for which he feels eminently qualified, being ‘sick, highly complex, neurasthenic, in some respects of unsound mind, in other respects perverse’ – we detect what is perhaps Termeer’s deepest crisis. If there is no symbolic avenue by which he can claim a value for his life, then the only recourse left is a direct act. Since revelation of his inner self, no matter how bizarre and wretched tha
t self, is not enough to win him currency, he must create something outside himself and display that to the world, to give himself substance.

  From this point of view we can see Termeer, and perhaps Emants too, as children of Rousseau, who in his Confessions inaugurated the literary mode of the exhaustive secular confession. Since Rousseau’s time there has grown up the genre of the confessional novel, of which A Posthumous Confession is a singularly pure example. Termeer, claiming to be unable to keep his dreadful secret, records his confession and leaves it behind as a monument to himself, thereby turning a worthless life into art.

  But what of his author? In the name of investigating the inner life of this superfluous man, this marginal member of the upper bourgeoisie, what exactly is Emants doing?

  Some twenty years after A Posthumous Confession, in the heyday of Freud, Emants was to defend his interest in psychopathology by claiming scientific goals. The deviant, he suggested, is characterised above all by an inability to censor and repress the forces at work within him. By documenting the self-expression of the deviant psyche, can we not expect to uncover fragments of what is kept so carefully hidden in the ‘normal’ inner life?

  I would not deny the importance of the aims Emants claims here. Artists have told us as much about our inner life as psychologists ever have. But are the artist’s motives ever as clear-cut and dispassionate as Emants would have us believe? Marcellus Emants is not disjunct from Willem Termeer: the author is implicated in his creature’s devious project to transmute the base metal of his self into gold.

  The gabble of Termeer, so frank, so perceptive, yet so mad, is not new. We have heard these accents at least once before, in 1864, from the nameless ‘underground man’ of Dostoevsky’s story. Both he and Termeer tell their woes and pick their sores in the name of the truth; both acknowledge the exhibitionism of their performance, despise themselves for it, yet go on nevertheless. The difference between Dostoevsky and Emants is that, after Notes from Underground, Dostoevsky, with deeper insight into the motives behind and inherent demands of the confessional mode, would go on to write The Idiot and The Possessed, in which he would destroy the pretensions of Rousseau and his heirs to arrive at true self-knowledge, uncovering the worm of ambition at the heart of the feigned disinterestedness of secular confession. Emants, a lesser thinker, a lesser artist, a lesser psychologist (as who is not?), remains bound in Rousseau’s toils.

  5 Harry Mulisch, The Discovery of Heaven

  I

  LET US IMAGINE, says the Dutch novelist Harry Mulisch, that there exists a clique of celestial beings with an unlimited capacity to intervene in human affairs, gods as the Olympians were, powerful without necessarily being good. Let us imagine further that for nearly four hundred years, since a pawn of the infernal powers named Francis Bacon set in train the inductive-scientific revolution, these celestial beings have been waging a losing battle for the allegiance of humankind. Let us imagine that in 1968, as a last resort, they plant an agent of theirs, an innocent child, on earth. Now, in 1985, that agent is about to be brought into play. His orders will be to sever the last tie between God (‘the Chief’) and man, after which humankind must fare as best it can. ‘From now on Lucifer has a free hand.’1

  The Discovery of Heaven is the story of ‘our man on earth’, an emissary who in olden times would have been called an angel. His story is told in a natural way, the way of the realist novel, that is to say, without intervention by the author (until the very end of a long book) to remind us that the personages whose lives we follow are in the hands of puppet-masters. Thus, aside from occasional eerie moments and a few disconcerting coincidences, we might as well be reading a story of our own world, a world that is ruled – or so we presume – not by gods but by blind laws of nature.

  The paternal grandparents selected for the agent of the heavenly forces are Wolfgang Delius, born in 1892 in Austro-Hungary, and Eva Weiss, born in 1908 in Belgium of German Jewish parents, both settled in the Netherlands. Their son Max is marked out to father the angel.

  Max is still a child when the Second World War breaks out. During the war Wolfgang Delius runs ‘a semi-governmental institution’ specialising in the plunder of Jewish goods. (p. 32) Though Eva is by now separated from him, her status as his wife ought to save her from arrest. But Delius chooses to repudiate her, and she joins thousands of other Dutch Jews transported to Auschwitz.

  With telling modifications, this happens to be the story of Mulisch’s own parents. An important figure in banking, Mulisch Senior had a Jewish wife (estranged) and a half-Jewish son. When the Germans took over, he was able to shield them from persecution. Unlike the fictional Delius, he did not cast them off. His wife survived the Occupation and in 1951 emigrated to the United States. After the Liberation he was arrested as a collaborator and spent three years in detention.

  Harry Mulisch has written frequently, even obsessively, about his ancestry, and particularly about his father (among the few books in Max Delius’s apartment is Franz Kafka’s Letter to My Father, the cry of another son struggling to escape from under the suffocating weight of a father). In doing so Mulisch has to some extent mythologised his origins. In an autobiographical essay published in 1974, he traces his lineage on the paternal side back to the Turks, who invaded Europe in the sixteenth century, and thence to the Huns of central Asia, and on the maternal side to the Israelites in bondage in Egypt.2 ‘One can hardly imagine a more ethnically “impure” Dutchman than myself,’ he writes in A Ghost Story (1993). ‘I . . . embody, not a struggle, but a continuous dialogue, between Christianity and Judaism, between Germany and the Netherlands, and several other things as well.’3

  Pursuing this self-mythologisation further in The Discovery of Heaven (Max Delius is transparently a fictional version of himself), Mulisch awards to Max’s parents the fates that fortune spared his own: death in Auschwitz for his Jewish mother, execution for his collaborationist German-speaking father. This revision allows him to grant Max an intensified awareness of the terrible fissure in European history opened by the Holocaust, as well as of the diagnostic and perhaps even prophetic role that might be filled by a man who, ‘Dutch, Austrian, Jewish and Aryan all at once . . . belonged only with those who, like him, belonged with no one’. (The Discovery of Heaven, p. 40)

  As a grown man, Max visits Auschwitz. There he has an uncanny experience: it is as if he refuses to be fully present, as if his real presence were lagging behind his physical self. Why? What is he resisting?

  The reluctance of Europe to face the enormity of Auschwitz, and in general the failure of the imagination in the face of atrocious evil, has been one of Mulisch’s recurrent themes since The Stone Bridal Bed (1959; English translation 1962), a novel in which he tries to fix a steady, Nietzschean gaze upon the peculiarly male pleasure in violation, a joy in destruction that is to be found as much among Homer’s Greeks as among the American airmen who bombed Dresden. What happened in the death camps, reflects Max after his visit, must surely have shaken the foundations of the divine order and of the universe itself. ‘Was everything possible and could anything be done?’ he asks himself, echoing Ivan Karamazov. Surely, even in heaven, bliss will henceforth be possible only at the price of a criminal loss of memory. ‘Should the blessed not be punished with hell for this? Everything had been wrecked for all eternity – not only here, but by thousands of earlier and later occasions, which no one remembered. Heaven was impossible; only hell might perhaps exist. Anyone who believed in God . . . should be executed.’ (p. 116)

  ‘If hell had this branch [Auschwitz] on earth, where was heaven’s?’ (p. 117) Auschwitz belongs to what Mulisch elsewhere calls anti-history, ‘the anti-history of . . . Attila, Tamerlane, Genghis Khan, Hitler . . . [where] there is no . . . thought, no purpose, no result – only nothingness . . . The massacres of the Huns and the concentration camps of Hitler . . . lie side by side at the bottom of eternity.’4 Max sees Auschwitz as Satan’s challenge to God, a challenge that resounds even across the spaces o
f heaven. Nothing in The Discovery of Heaven leads one to believe that God knows how to answer that challenge.

  Max is trained as a physicist and astronomer. In the 1960s he accepts the position of chief astronomer at an observatory situated at Westerbork in rural Holland. Westerbork is a place with a shameful history. Set up in 1939 by the then Dutch government as a camp for Jewish refugees from Germany, it was taken over by the Nazis and turned into a trans-shipment camp to Birkenau. A hundred thousand Dutch Jews – including, presumably, Max’s mother – passed through it. After the war, Dutch fascists were imprisoned in Westerbork. Later the camp was used to house allies of the Dutch colonial regime in Indonesia fleeing reprisals. To Max it is an accursed place, the ‘asshole of the Netherlands’ (as Auschwitz itself is anus mundi). The twelve huge dish aerials of the observatory look to him like ‘sacrificial altars [entreating] the blessing of heaven’. Yet there is no other place on earth where he can imagine working. ‘He belonged here; here was where he must spend his life.’ (pp. 375, 117, 378)

  Max’s best friend is Onno Quist, scion of a wealthy patrician family. Onno has already made a scholarly name for himself by decoding certain baffling pre-Hellenic inscriptions. Meeting by chance (except that in their lives chance and design are not mutually exclusive), they discover that they are, in a sense, twins, having been conceived on the same day. They become inseparable, ‘[creating] a kind of infinity, like two mirrors reflecting each other’. (p. 37) Even the entry of Ada Brons into their lives, first as Max’s mistress, then as Onno’s wife, does not cause a rift. Together they form a threesome; to Ada falls the role of admiring listener as Max and Onno conduct their ‘intellectual fencing match[es].’ (p. 69) (These fencing matches, of which Mulisch gives extended samples, read uncomfortably like raillery of a rather juvenile kind.)