The Problems of Endless Confession
The idea of secular confession hounds J.M. Coetzee’s literary and critical work from the late seventies into the eighties. His characters routinely confess, and routinely question the nature and sincerity of their confessions. Coetzee the literary critic diagnoses the problems of truthful and sincere confession in his discussions of Tolstoy, Rousseau and Dostoyevsky. Confession, when taken up by a self-conscious mind, can spiral out into an endless act, either because self doubt leads to a critical position on one’s truthfulness that can never be answered, or because one chooses to stand behind one’s confession as the “truth” and thereby ignore all other interpretations, leading to an endless defense of the self. Both forms of endlessness come from the inability of the self-conscious mind to fully understand itself. Thus confession in Coetzee’s criticism poses problems of self-knowledge.
There is a further element to the endlessness of confession that Coetzee only hints at in his critical work and interviews, that of the inability of language to adequately represent feelings, desires, mental states, motives, etc. of the confessant. Not only can the confessant never truly know whether the motives for her confession are the “right” ones – the ones that actually motivate her – but the very language she uses to confess cannot display what she means to communicate. This problem of linguistic identity – the problem that our identity described by language does not match, or is reductive of, our true identity – occurs throughout Coetzee’s novels from the late seventies to the eighties.
We need a sense of Coetzee’s critical depiction of confession in order to grasp how his novels depict the linguistic problems the confessant faces. With both the critical and literary portrayals of confession under our belts, I will try to provide some possible reasons for why the literary Coetzee does not match up with Coetzee the critic. Accordingly, we must begin with Confession and Double Thought.[1]
We need a sense of Coetzee’s critical depiction of confession in order to grasp how his novels depict the linguistic problems the confessant faces. With both the critical and literary portrayals of confession under our belts, I will try to provide some possible reasons for why the literary Coetzee does not match up with Coetzee the critic. Accordingly, we must begin with Confession and Double Thought.[1]
Confession and Truth in Coetzee’s Criticism
In CDT, Coetzee uses literary works to provide examples of secular confession, and the problems that these examples entail. There are two distinct problems of confession, “how to know the truth about the self without being self-deceived,” i.e. how to know if one is confessing truthfully, “and how to bring the confession to an end in the spirit of whatever they [the authors of these examples] take to be the secular equivalent of absolution” (CDT, 252, brackets mine). In religious confession, the confessant is granted absolution at the end of the confessional act. In a secular confession, it is unclear what the parallel to absolution is. Thus the second problem is not only a question of how confession should end – how does it reach its destination in absolution –but where it should end – what exactly its destination is.
Tolstoy
Coetzee uses Tolstoy, Rousseau, and Dostoyevsky as his examples of authors who both pose these problems and attempt to answer them. He begins with Tolstoy, and Pozdnyshev’s confession in Kreutzer Sonata. Tolstoy attempts to solve both problems in one stroke, by “short-circuiting self-doubt and self-scrutiny in the name of an autonomous truth” (CDT, 263). If a truth that is independent of the confessant arises from the confession, self-doubt and self-deceit are rendered harmless. By expressing such a truth the confessant reaches absolution, and thus ends the need for confession.
Tolstoy presents a moment of confession as Pozdnyshev tells the story of his life during a train ride. A frame narrator sits with Pozdnyshev and listens to his tale, but he provides no commentary; the reader must presume that Pozdnyshev is taken at his word. But, Coetzee points out, the confession is without any self-reflection. We are told a story of a man who performs a number of bad acts which he know understands are wrong – sleeping with prostitutes, using contraception, etc. - which, he claims, leads to his murdering his wife. Now he has seen the light, and regrets what he has done. Never once does Pozdnyshev question whether his justifications are sound – the murder of his wife follows from his sins, and that is that. It is one thing to question the logic of one’s justifications and ultimately conclude that those justifications are sound, but Pozdnyshev does not question them at all.
There are many cases in literature where characters do not possess an ounce of self-reflection and ultimately miss the true motives for their actions. But, Tolstoy writes as if Pozdnyshev does no such thing. Tolstoy goes out of his way to argue that there is no ambiguity to Pozdnyshev’s confession. Firstly, the frame narrator does not to share the reader’s suspicions that Pozdnyshev is self-deceived, and, furthermore, Tolstoy adds an “Afterword” to Kreutzer Sonata where he claims “what Pozdnyshev believes to be wrong with society…is wrong” (CDT, 258). Thus “A confession embodying a patently inadequate self-analysis is mediated through a narrator who gives no hint that he questions the analysis, and the analysis is then reaffirmed…by the author writing outside the fiction” (Ibid).
“At all levels of presentation” in Kreutzer Sonata “there is a lack of reflectiveness” (CDT, 258). But one cannot assume that Tolstoy is being sloppy, apparently blind to his own work, since there are plenty of cases in his oeuvre where he is well aware of a character’s self deception. Tolstoy believes that self-deceit is overcome by the truth – since Pozdnyshev speaks the truth, the objections Coetzee raises are silenced. “Whatever the will behind the confession might be,” Coetzee explains, “the truth transcends the will behind it.” (CDT, 263). In the end it does not matter why Pozdnyshev confesses, only that he confesses the truth. Tolstoy grants him absolution – he is out of prison and a better man when he tells his story – so the truth of his confession must absolve him. Tolstoy does not suggest that self-reflection is unneeded or specious, but that once the truth emerges it is silenced.
Coetzee takes Tolstoy’s position to be problematic, arguing:
…Whatever authority a confession bears in a secular context derives from the status of the confessant as a hero of the labyrinth willing to confront the worst within himself….A confessant who does not doubt himself when there are obvious grounds for doing so (as in Pozdnyshev’s case) is no better than one who refuses to doubt because doubt is not profitable. Neither is a hero, neither confesses with authority. (CDT, 263-264)
Tolstoy’s defense for Kreutzer Sonata is that “Pozdnyshev speaks the truth so his confession is genuine.” But for confession, in either a secular or religious context, why something is said is equally important as what is said by the confessant. If a murderer confesses to his crime in an attempt to appeal to our sympathies so that he will not face the gallows, we would not consider the confession genuine, but self-serving. Since Pozdnyshev never doubts himself, is never “willing to confront the worst within himself,” he never confesses with authority. A confession is supposed to reveal the confessant in some way, but if the confessant has no authority over the confession, there is no reason to suppose the confession reveals anything at all. So the autonomous truth is an inadequate solution to the two problems of confession. Secular confession, then, needs self-reflection to have any authority. But, as we shall see, whatever authority self-reflection brings is fragile.
Rousseau
In the Confessions, Rousseau answers the problem of self-deceit by an appeal to how he confesses. Unlike Tolstoy, who dismisses the need for self-reflection in the name of a higher truth that confession reveals, Rousseau provides no interpretation at all. He gives us “everything that has happened to me, all my acts, thoughts and feelings” (Confessions, Book 4; I, 159) and not a narrative of his life. What Rousseau aims for is not a story of the things he has done, but a display of his “inner self” – “What I have promised to relate is the history of my soul” (Confessions, Book 7, I 252). By focusing on his “inner self,” Rousseau claims to dodge the problem of self-deceit. As Coetzee puts it, “Rousseau’s position is thus that self-deception with respect to present recollection is impossible, since the self is transparent to itself” (CDT, 265).
In response to skepticism about this position, Rousseau asserts that his language is unmediated, and thus provides us with truthful confession. He contends that the very style and words he uses are the immediate, un-interpreted expression of his inner self. The confessions are written “without affectation, without constraint,” and thereby are truthful. “The immediacy of the language Rousseau projects is intended as a guarantee of the truth of the past it recounts” (CDT 268) - since there is no interpretation at all, merely expression through language[2], the truth is displayed.
The displayed truth need not be historically accurate. By leaning on the immediacy of his language, Rousseau attempts for what Coetzee calls, following Starobinski, authenticity. “Authenticity does not demand that language reproduce a reality;” Coetzee explains, “instead it demands that language manifest its ‘own’ truth. The distance between the writing self and the source of the feelings it writes about is abolished…for the source is always here and now” (CDT , 268). Thus Rousseau can claim he is being truthful, in a sense, because he appears to be accurately expressing his inner self, and has professed his “inner truth.”
It would seem that Rousseau puts us in the same intractable position as Tolstoy does. His claim of authenticity – his claim that his true self is expressed in his confession – leaves us once again with no room for interpretation. If Rousseau gives us his true self, full stop, then there is no reason for us to interpret his motives for acting or confessing. But Coetzee takes issue with this as well, providing a rereading of Confessions where he takes Rousseau to be “inconsistent.” Coetzee creates a plausible interpretation in his rereading (CDT, 269-273), which ultimately puts Rousseau in peril. Confessions was not supposed to need interpretation, yet Coetzee creates a plausible one from the text. This does not necessarily mean that Rousseau was self-deceived when confessing, but it is unclear what the truth of his confession is – if there is any truth to it at all.
Dostoevsky
The lack of reflection both in Kreutzer Sonata and Confessions leads to a lack of authority for the confessants in those books. A self-reflective confessant is required for authority, a person who questions the truth of his confession, and if faced with a better interpretation of his motives (a “deeper” truth, as Coetzee calls it) adopts that interpretation. But this raises the question of where the confessant should “stand his ground” (CDT 273), where he should stop the confession, and say, “these are my motives, this is why I confess now.” There appear to be two answers to the question of where to stand in the face of a new interpretation, together they create a dilemma.
Firstly, the self-reflective confessant “may refuse to yield to the new truth (the new interpretation), thereby adopting precisely the stand of the self-deceived subject who prefers not to avow the ‘real’ truth of himself to himself, and prefers not to avow this preference, and so on to infinity” (CDT, 274). By standing his ground with a particular interpretation of his motives and actions, a confessant denies the validity of any other interpretation. But Coetzee suggests that this denial is endless. The confessant who refuses to yield must disavow the knowledge that he is refusing to yield – for to admit that he chooses one interpretation from many is to admit that his choice is not the only possible truth. But that disavowal must be denied as well, or it too sheds light on the self-deception the confessant perpetrates. Coetzee concludes that the confessant who stands his ground has no way of knowing whether he is any different from the self-deceived confessant – from Pozdnyshev, or possibly Rousseau. Thus refusing to yield proves untenable.
Yet,
If the confessant is in principle prepared to shift his ground with each new reading [of his confession] as long as he can be convinced that it is ‘truer’ than the last one, then he is no more than a biographer of the self, a constructor of hypotheses about himself that can be improved upon by other biographers. In such an event, his confession has no more authority than an account given by any other biographer…it does not proceed from self-knowledge. (CDT, 273, brackets mine)
If the confessant does not necessarily take a stand, she then loses any authority she has over her confession. In response to the question “are you telling the truth?” the most she can say is “this interpretation of the truth seems the best fit.” This is the second horn of the dilemma, both endless and self-defeating. It is endless because there is always room for more interpretation, and thus more confession in the vein of that new interpretation. It is self-defeating because by never taking a stand – by taking a “wait and see” approach to the truth of her confession - the confessant gives up any authority she has as confessant. As discussed above, a confession without authority is at best ambiguous, at worse meaningless.
So how does one then end confession, either as a writer or a confessant?[3] Coetzee sees an answer in the work of Dostoyevsky, who acknowledges the problems of the positions described above. In the end, Dostoyevsky relies on grace as the cessation of confession – a divine moment where the confessant learns to forgive herself.
Most confessants in Dostoyevsky’s work are self-conscious, and they are aware of the possibilities of self-deceit and multiple interpretations of motives. What then becomes of confession when these possibilities and interpretations are explicit?
So how does one then end confession, either as a writer or a confessant?[3] Coetzee sees an answer in the work of Dostoyevsky, who acknowledges the problems of the positions described above. In the end, Dostoyevsky relies on grace as the cessation of confession – a divine moment where the confessant learns to forgive herself.
Most confessants in Dostoyevsky’s work are self-conscious, and they are aware of the possibilities of self-deceit and multiple interpretations of motives. What then becomes of confession when these possibilities and interpretations are explicit?
The possibility we face is of a confession made via a process of relentless self-unmasking which might yet not be the truth but a self-serving fiction, because the unexamined, unexaminable principle behind it may not be a desire for the truth but a desire to be a particular way. (CDT, 280)
Even if the confessant decided to plumb the depths of her soul to find the truth of her confession, it is not clear that she understands why she feels the need to confess in the first place. She may have an interpretation that is solid – let us suppose that she has done the kind of rigorous self-reflection that both Rousseau and Pozdnyshev do not – but still no understanding of what her reasons for confessing are. Perhaps her motives for confession are not because she wishes to tell the truth, but because she wishes to be a particular way, to be the kind of person who confesses. This leads us to another possibility of endless confession – the constant questioning of one’s motives to confess – but it also presents the possibility of ending confession as well. To grasp the reasons why one confesses also presents the possibility of sating those reasons. In identifying and addressing her motives to confess, the confessant has a chance to forgive herself of the acts she confesses.
This too is problematic, “Self-forgiveness means the…end of the downward spiral of self-accusation whose depths can never be plumbed because to decide to stop at any point by an act of will, to decide that guilt ceases at such and such a point, is itself a potentially false act that deserves its own scrutiny” (CDT, 290). It is unclear if the confessant knows for sure that she has forgiven herself; self-forgiveness is a common delusion. Dostoyevsky poses this problem in The Possessed but provides no answer for it, aside from suggesting that one might find certainty of self-forgiveness in Christianity.
Dostoyevsky does not suggest that Christianity has a hard and fast rule to know when one is self-deceived, but rather that it is something beyond the realm of rules that lets the confessant know she is absolved – what Coetzee calls grace. He sums up the relationship between confession and grace at the end of his section on Dostoyevsky,
This too is problematic, “Self-forgiveness means the…end of the downward spiral of self-accusation whose depths can never be plumbed because to decide to stop at any point by an act of will, to decide that guilt ceases at such and such a point, is itself a potentially false act that deserves its own scrutiny” (CDT, 290). It is unclear if the confessant knows for sure that she has forgiven herself; self-forgiveness is a common delusion. Dostoyevsky poses this problem in The Possessed but provides no answer for it, aside from suggesting that one might find certainty of self-forgiveness in Christianity.
Dostoyevsky does not suggest that Christianity has a hard and fast rule to know when one is self-deceived, but rather that it is something beyond the realm of rules that lets the confessant know she is absolved – what Coetzee calls grace. He sums up the relationship between confession and grace at the end of his section on Dostoyevsky,
The endless chain (of confession) manifests itself as soon as self-consciousness enters; how to enter into the possession of the truth of oneself, how to attain self-forgiveness and transcend self-doubt, would seem, for structural reasons, to have to remain in a field of mystery; and even the demarcation of this field, even the specification of the structural reasons, would similarly have to remain unarticulated; and the reasons for this silence as well. (CDT, 291)
The understanding of how a confession can be truthful itself cannot be confessed. If indeed the confessant manages to achieve the truth of herself, that is not something she can express. Grace is something beyond language – beyond any communicability – but is, perhaps, achievable. Coetzee will pick up the relationship between confession and incommunicability in his novels of the period in which he wrote CDT.
Confession and Language in Coetzee’s Literature
David Atwell notices the discrepancy between Coetzee’s discussion of confession in CDT and his literature, couching it in the terms of deconstruction. In his interview with Coetzee in Doubling the Point[4], Atwell notes,
It is logical that you [Coetzee] should bring deconstruction to bear on the analysis of confession where the problem of the self’s residence within language is so visible; but despite this…you imply that you find the arguments valuable but ultimately (and paradoxically) too large, too incautious….By contrast, it seems…in the fiction you seem willing or able to exploit the resources of deconstruction more easily: in Barbarians[5], the unstable and inconclusive features of signification feature prominently; Michael K is himself a kind of Derridian trace (refusing to occupy a fixed place in the system); and in Foe…the tongueless Friday is a guardian of significant silence or absence. (DTP, 245, brackets mine)
We should both take up Atwell’s point and move away from it. Take it up in the sense that the following pages will explore the confessional moments in Coetzee’s texts where language is inadequate to fully express what is to be confessed. But, for the sake of clarity and brevity, we should not remain within the jargon of deconstruction. Atwell is right to point out the break between Coetzee the critic on confession and Coetzee the author, and I would like now to fully illustrate what that break entails.
In the Heart of the Country
Linguistic problems of confession follow a trajectory in Coetzee’s work, beginning In the Heart of the Country[6]. The book is confessional, a series of small chapters where the female narrator, Magda,[7] attempts over and over again to disclose exactly who she is. All the problems of confession Coetzee discusses in his literary criticism appear in IHC. “To explain is to forgive,” Magda says, “to be explained is to be forgiven, but I, I hope and fear, am inexplicable, unforgivable” (IHC, 5). These lines echo the discussion of absolution and self-knowledge of CDT concerning Dostoyevsky, but there is this linguistic element at play as well.
Consider the moment when Magda’s colored farmhand brings home his bride. At first Magda begins to give an account of the woman, describing her “toes demurely inward” and her “soft flesh” (IHC, 26). But then, “words begin to falter. Words are coin. Words alienate. Language is no medium for desire. Desire is rapture, not exchange. It is only by alienating desire that language masters it” (ibid). Very quickly into Magda’s description of this new presence in her life, she finds she no longer has the ability to adequately describe her. This is not a case of not knowing how to describe the woman – not knowing the “right” words to use – but the inadequacy of words themselves. Words falter because they are “coin” – representatives of exchange, something we use to lubricate transactions and interactions, but having no worth aside from representational value. This makes them inherently alienating – there is a distance between the words and what they are meant to represent, so that when something like desire is put into words, the very nature of desire is changed. Language is no medium for desire because once desire is expressed in language it becomes something different – desire as represented in language is alien to the desire that exists in the self, the desire that the subject wishes to express.
Already we can see how confession is troubled by such alienation. As discussed above, confession must address the motives of the confessant – it must address the reasons why the confessant desires to confess. A true, robust confession will never just be a disclosing of acts, but also of desires. What then can the confessant do if the very means of confession distorts what is to be disclosed? How can Magda properly depict herself if the very language she uses alienates who she is?
One might consider IHC as one woman’s attempts to confront this problem. At points Magda wishes to be rid of language – “Would that I had never learned to read” (IHC, 49) she curses – knowing that her problem is one of expression. But in confession, Coetzee rightfully shows us, expression and self-knowledge are inextricable from each other. “I was born into a language of hierarchy, of distance and perspective,” Magda says, “It was my father tongue. I do not say it is the language my heart wants to speak, I feel too much the pathos of its distances, but it is all we have... I have no words left to exchange whose value I trust” (IHC, 97). She admits that she has been born into a language, one of rules and customs that she must abide by if she is to communicate. Her linguistic identity – the identity she expresses when she speaks – is one defined by the rules of her “father tongue.” It is not an adequate language, not the one her “heart wants to speak,” but she has nothing else. Any claims she has of self-knowledge rely on the rules of her father-tongue, because any claim she makes is necessarily in that father-tongue – it is “all we have.” But the expression of claims of self-knowledge - the act of confession - is inadequate, because the medium of expression is inadequate. By saying she has no words left to exchange whose value she trusts, Magda admits that there is no part of her lexicon which she knows will adequately express what she means to convey. As the Magistrate in Barbarians suggests, “perhaps whatever can be articulated is falsely put” (64). Confession thus becomes even shakier than Coetzee presents it in his criticism.
The Life and Times of Michael K
The inadequacy of linguistic expression gets taken up again in The Life and Times of Michael K[8], but from a different angle. Michael K is a litany of how human beings fail to communicate with each other. While Magda cannot believe that her words will communicate what she wishes to disclose, Michael K constantly finds himself at a loss for words. Magda tries to step over her failure to communicate by continuing to speak, to keep sending out words into the world in the hopes that something will ring true; Michael K, by contrast, falls silent. Throughout Michael K there are countless times he either cannot understand what is asked of him, or cannot conjure words with which to speak. In either case, he becomes quiet.
K himself embodies failures of communication. He has a harelip, and has moments where a “fog” comes over him; he is unable to speak with any degree of success, becoming more a tired beast than a man. Throughout his odyssey to bury his mother he is hounded by the question, “Do you understand?”[9] Very often he does not, and answers with question with “sorry,” or “no.” The most heartbreaking example of his inability to understand comes at his mother’s death bed, where “She seemed to be whispering something, but he could not make out what” (Michael K, 30). His mother’s dying words are something K does not have access to. He can only be silent in response.
It is not merely K’s inability to understand that plagues him, he also cannot speak. At the breakfast table of a family who has taken him in, he tries to give thanks, “…the urge again came over him to speak….His heart was full, he wanted to utter his thanks, but finally the right words would not come. The children stared at him; a silence fell; their parents looked away” (Michael K, 48). In a sense this is the same problem as in IHC – K looks for the right words, the words that can adequately express the thankfulness he feels towards the family. But, finding nothing, he remains silent. In an attempt to confess his feelings he finds he has no means of doing so, and instead forgoes the whole confession. This response fares no better than Magda’s over-expression: his silence is turned away from, or stared at quizzically. “What is he doing?” the characters around him must be asking themselves. To remain quiet in the face of not finding the “right” words leaves one no better off than if one speaks with the “wrong” words.
As in IHC, K’s problems of expression are inextricable with his self-understanding. Like Coetzee’s previous protagonist, K cannot express himself, even to himself.
Always, when he tried to explain himself to himself, there remained a gap, a hole, a darkness before which his understanding baulked, into which it was useless to pour words. The words were eaten up, the gap remained. His was always a story with a hole in it: a wrong story, always wrong. (Michael K, 110).
The notion of an absence, or gap, is prevalent in all of Coetzee’s work during the era to which Michael K belongs. What is important is that the gap cannot be plastered over by language. This passage is emblematic of K’s failure of words. He cannot find the right ones with which to explain himself, to confess – any words he does try become swallowed whole. What remains is a failure of self-explanation, a failure of self-understanding. He cannot explain himself because there are no words that adequately perform the explanation. There is no sense of suspicion as there was in IHC. K does not think that his words are somehow destroyed or perverted as he speaks them. The problem is that the words are not good enough from the get go. Once again, language is an inadequate means for expression, and furthermore an inadequate means for self-knowledge.
K’s problems are not entirely different from Magda’s. For both of them, words cannot express what they feel in their hearts, and thus they cannot confess with authority. The distinction is that K cannot find the words at all while Magda does not trust the words she uses.[10] This distinction will be blurred in Coetzee’s greatest novel from this period, Foe.
Foe
Foe gives answers to the linguistic problems of the previous works, although the answers may be inadequate. The two main characters of Foe are new incarnations of the protagonists of IHC and Michael K. Susan Barton, like Magda, is a woman who tries to tell her story but finds that she cannot trust the words she uses. Michael K’s problem of not having the right words is taken a step further in Friday, who has no words at all. In the final chapters of Foe, the titular character who may or may not be the author of Robinson Crusoe attempts to provide Susan and, by proxy, Friday, absolution. It is unclear whether this attempt succeeds, but here Coetzee takes the problems of confession he has laid out in earlier works and provides a glimmer of an answer to them.
In dialogue with Foe, Barton divulges her worries, both for herself and Friday. These worries are the same as those voiced in Michael K and IHC.
[Friday] desires to be liberated, as I do too. Our desires are plain, his and mine. But how is Friday to recover his freedom…? When I am rid of Friday, will I then know freedom?…As to Friday, how can Friday know what freedom means when he barely knows his name? (Foe, 148-149, brackets mine)
The word Barton uses to label her desire and the desire itself have come apart. Friday, devoid of words entirely, may not even be able to understand the desire of which Barton speaks. In a sense, Magda and K are now in the same room, their plights united into a problem of language that is twofold. Foe responds reassuringly,
There is not need for us to know what freedom means, Susan. Freedom is a word like any word. It is a puff of air, seven letters on a slate. It is but the name we give to the desire you speak of, the desire to be free. What concerns us is the desire, not the name…It is enough that we know the names of our needs and are able to use these names to satisfy them… (Foe, 149)
Foe’s answer echoes Magda’s claim that language is all she has. But instead of that being a burden, Foe suggests it is simply something we should accept. Words as signifiers are not as exacting as we would like, but what does that matter if they do a suitable job? As long as the word freedom can be used to satisfy Susan’s need for freedom, what does it matter if it is a puff of air? Foe goes on to say that even with the frailty of words it still makes sense to teach Friday language, so that he may be able to express his desires. Thus the point of confession is not that we express our desires perfectly, but that we express them at all.
Is this answer suitable? Coetzee is never one to make such a bald statement. There are many reasons to distrust Foe’s easy answer – most glaringly the fact that his name is foe – and it appears that Susan is unhappy with Foe’s attempts to put her at ease. But perhaps Foe’s name provides an example of how names are ultimately meaningless; in no sense is Mr. Foe a typical antagonist. His name may have great signification, but searching for that great signification is probably akin to searching for the meaning of freedom, a fruitless quest. Here we have a fourth possibility of endless confession - the possibility that Coetzee refuses to admit within his criticism - that of endlessly searching for the words which truly signify the desire one wishes to confess. And it appears that the answer to this endlessness is the same answer in CDT – silence.
At the end of Foe, an unnamed narrator takes us to “the home of Friday,” which is “…not a place of words. Each syllable, as it comes out, is caught and filled with water and diffused. This is a place where bodies are their own signs” (Foe, 157). This place is where Foe ends – where the confession, so to speak, stops. The reader is left with silence, with the absence and diffusion of words, instead of a worded conclusion.[11] Foe, in an earlier section, suggests the same, saying “there comes a time when we must give reckoning of ourselves to the world, and then forever after be content to hold our peace” (Foe, 124). Notice also that this silence comes after confession – it is not the silence of Michael K.
It appears, then, that the answer to the problems of confession is one that cannot be articulated. Barton does not take Foe’s moral to heart, but that is probably because it does not explain how to hold one’s peace, only that one must. Coetzee’s suggestion in his literary criticism that the ending of confession must remain hidden, outside of words, is given once again in his fiction. But if the problems of confession all have similar structures - in that they are both possibly endless and answered by silence – why does Coetzee shy away from speaking of the problem of linguistic identity in the critical realm?
Conclusions
I hope to provide some provisional answers to the question posed at the end of the last section here, starting with Coetzee’s own answer to Atwell’s point.
I feel a greater freedom to follow where my thinking takes me when I am writing fiction than when I am writing criticism. One reason is that…I am not a trained philosopher…It would be pointless for me to try to rethink Dostoyevsky in Derridean terms…because I don’t have the mind for it, to say nothing of the philosophical equipment.
Another reason for what strikes you as a paradox (the missing discussion of language in the criticism) has to do with the two discursive modes. Stories are defined by their irresponsibility…. The feel of writing is one of freedom, of irresponsibility, or better, of responsibility toward something that has not yet emerged, that lies somewhere at the end of the road. When I write criticism…I am always aware of the responsibility toward a goal that has been set for me….
Where I do my liberating, my playing with possibilities, is in my fiction. (DTP, 246)
Coetzee’s answer seems simple enough – he does not have the mind or patience to explore certain issues in criticism, but fiction gives him free reign to do so. Perhaps this is the case, but Coetzee’s confession, like Pozdnyshev’s, can be read more than once. Consider his point about the two discursive modes. Narrative as a communicative medium is wildly different than that of criticism – it is “irresponsible” Coetzee says. But it is not merely that fiction allows him to work out ideas unhindered, the very communication of those ideas is of a different kind. This, strangely enough, is linked to the problem of linguistic identity in confession. Narrative allows the speaker – the confessant – to enter into a discourse where words should not always be taken at face value[12], and where plot and the telling of the plot can separate from each other and have points of contention.[13] Indeed, many of Coetzee’s books do this.
In narrative, words need not tightly correspond to what is meant by the speaker. In criticism, words are not supposed to have such ambiguity. Thus the problem of linguistic identity – the problem of words being untrustworthy or untenable – is one that criticism and regular confession cannot embody in their use of language. Narrative is rife with multiple interpretations, failures of communication, and the like. Not only does Coetzee not want to discuss problems of linguistic identity in his criticism, it seems that he cannot, or cannot do so adequately. It is in narrative discourse that the idea that “words are coin,” can be fully expressed. Perhaps Coetzee is ignorant of this, and like Pozdyshev is content to stand by only one set of motives. Or, perhaps, he is all too aware, and knows that on certain things he must keep silent.
Works Cited
Coetzee, J. M., and David Attwell. Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1992. Print.
Coetzee, J. M. Foe. New York, NY, USA: Penguin, 1987. Print.
Coetzee, J. M. In the Heart of the Country. New York, NY: Penguin, 1982. Print.
Coetzee, J. M. Waiting for the Barbarians. Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England: Penguin, 1982. Print.
Coetzee, John M. Life and Times of Michael K. [Harmondsworth]: Penguin, 1983. Print.
[2] This indeed is a form of interpretation, and the root of the problem of confession that only appears in Coetzee’s literature, but for now let us grant Rousseau his point.
[3] One might instead use the phrase “as a writer and confessant.” Indeed, this conflation (or equivocality) between the two roles will play an important part in Coetzee’s literature.
[7] At one point the narrator refers to herself as Magda, but it is unclear whether that is her true name, or further whether Magda is the same narrator as in previous chapters. Nonetheless, for brevity’s sake I will refer to the narrator of IHC as Magda.
[9] His conversation with the nurse taking care of his mother is a fabulous example of this (Michael K, 28).
[10] This is a reduction - Magda does speak of not being able to imagine the right words (IHC, 97) – but is useful to help distinguish the various linguistic problems of confession.
[12] Coetzee is one of many authors to use unreliable narrators.
[13] Consider something like irony, its home is in common speech and narrative, not criticism.
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