I find it interesting that Coetzee links the idea of repression succeeding with the idea that justice does not out. In some ways it feels that what marks a highbrow or arthouse sensibility is just this latter idea -- there is not going to be a moral reckoning because the world is not, in fact, a just or kind place. I also think that it is possible for art to ask whether repression can succeed by making the viewers doubt the sanity of the character tasked with remembering or understanding the truth (eg I Saw The TV Glow, or much of David Lynch).
Thanks for writing this and your NYTBR review, both were so interesting and both really instructive and provoking.
I think for Coetzee (or at least Coetzee as represented by this letter) even that default "highbrow or arthouse sensibility" is somehow false. It's not just that there can be no moral reckoning, it's that the book itself, in order to be "true" to the success of repression and injustice of the world, has to itself be wiped of anything like conclusive evidence of the crime.
I don't think this is a really defensible position, but it is an interesting provocation.
Have you read his "Jesus" trilogy? This kind of total forgetting is a big thing in the book -- everyone has come to the city where they are set from "across the sea" (or something like that), "scrubbed clean" of all their memories. In some obvious sense this is VERY IMPORTANT to the books, but we can't really say how, because we never learn a single thing about it!
After I wrote this post I remembered (hehe) that, years ago, I read a novel that felt like a really interesting response to JMC on this front. So now I might have to do a follow-up post when I get the time...
I would be very interested to hear more about novels that feel like responses to this issue! I have not read the Jesus trilogy, I love JMC but I felt he fell off with diary of a bad year, and I didn't persevere beyond... but that was some time back so perhaps I should try again. I still have huge respect for his work.
This did make me think of how the broader issue of communicating around a lack -- or even at its most meta, how to communicate the lack of any possible communication -- is taken up by Aysegul Savas in her book about giving birth ("The Wilderness"), and also a central issue in the zen texts, since kensho / enlightenment is beyond discursive thought ie language. (Actually a theme I took up in my own recent work if you are interested, here https://rottenandgood.substack.com/p/88b )
But there's of course, as I think you are saying, an even higher level where you repress everything so thoroughly you dont even realise there is a lack or gap at all, no confusion, nothing. I think however that this becomes almost statistical or astrophysical. You can in fact find out certain information about things you don't see from things you do; of course, there could be things which are never possible to detect in any way. But then, how do those unmissing things become of interest to us? Perhaps only as a conceptual reminder of our own limitations.
I find it interesting that Coetzee links the idea of repression succeeding with the idea that justice does not out. In some ways it feels that what marks a highbrow or arthouse sensibility is just this latter idea -- there is not going to be a moral reckoning because the world is not, in fact, a just or kind place. I also think that it is possible for art to ask whether repression can succeed by making the viewers doubt the sanity of the character tasked with remembering or understanding the truth (eg I Saw The TV Glow, or much of David Lynch).
Thanks for writing this and your NYTBR review, both were so interesting and both really instructive and provoking.
I think for Coetzee (or at least Coetzee as represented by this letter) even that default "highbrow or arthouse sensibility" is somehow false. It's not just that there can be no moral reckoning, it's that the book itself, in order to be "true" to the success of repression and injustice of the world, has to itself be wiped of anything like conclusive evidence of the crime.
I don't think this is a really defensible position, but it is an interesting provocation.
Have you read his "Jesus" trilogy? This kind of total forgetting is a big thing in the book -- everyone has come to the city where they are set from "across the sea" (or something like that), "scrubbed clean" of all their memories. In some obvious sense this is VERY IMPORTANT to the books, but we can't really say how, because we never learn a single thing about it!
After I wrote this post I remembered (hehe) that, years ago, I read a novel that felt like a really interesting response to JMC on this front. So now I might have to do a follow-up post when I get the time...
I would be very interested to hear more about novels that feel like responses to this issue! I have not read the Jesus trilogy, I love JMC but I felt he fell off with diary of a bad year, and I didn't persevere beyond... but that was some time back so perhaps I should try again. I still have huge respect for his work.
This did make me think of how the broader issue of communicating around a lack -- or even at its most meta, how to communicate the lack of any possible communication -- is taken up by Aysegul Savas in her book about giving birth ("The Wilderness"), and also a central issue in the zen texts, since kensho / enlightenment is beyond discursive thought ie language. (Actually a theme I took up in my own recent work if you are interested, here https://rottenandgood.substack.com/p/88b )
But there's of course, as I think you are saying, an even higher level where you repress everything so thoroughly you dont even realise there is a lack or gap at all, no confusion, nothing. I think however that this becomes almost statistical or astrophysical. You can in fact find out certain information about things you don't see from things you do; of course, there could be things which are never possible to detect in any way. But then, how do those unmissing things become of interest to us? Perhaps only as a conceptual reminder of our own limitations.