The Rules of the Game
1. The Setting
In the new land, there is no magic, no time travel, no ghosts, no miracles. Characters are mortal, finite human beings with emotional lives, interpretive tasks, disagreements, daily habits, worries about the future, and so forth. But there is a very great deal that is not part of any human world that has ever been or is now. So J. M. Coetzee’s three Jesus “fictions” are not realist novels, although the world the characters find themselves in is a recognizably natural world. In this respect, the three volumes are like the rest of Coetzee’s fiction, only “more so.” As he puts it in The Good Story,
I think of myself as using rather than reflecting reality in my fiction. If the world of my fictions is a recognizable world, that is because (I say to myself) it is easier to use the world at hand than to make up a new one.1 TGS, 69
1 It is always controversial to bring to bear an author’s remarks in his own voice, his criticism, on his fiction. But that need not amount to treating the latter as a mere expression of the former. Carrol Clarkson has established why the situation is unique in Coetzee and she shows how the connection can be made without making this mistake. I follow her lead here. See her remarks about her own approach: “This brings me to the foundational argument of my book: throughout Coetzee’s writing, in the critical essays as much as in the fiction, self-reflexive linguistic questions are at the core of his ethical enquiries, enquiries inflected by attentiveness to cultural and historical contingencies.” J. M. Coetzee: Countervoices (New York: Palmgrave Macmillan,
Accordingly, any attempt to interpret the fictions must begin by accepting the dimensions not borrowed from the real world, the “unreality” of the setting, and so cannot lose sight of four central, governing, highly unusual elements.
1. The first is metafictional. All three titles refer to Jesus, the most recognizable and significant name in the Western tradition, yet Jesus is not a character in any of the volumes and there is not much in the narrative, at least on the surface, that makes any reference to the familiar story of Jesus of Nazareth. This is not to say that the idea of Jesus, a messiah, a redeemer, does not play a structuring role in the fictions. It does.
2. Everyone in the fictions has been transported to this place from somewhere else. No one knows why this has happened or, apart from Simón, seems very curious about the fact. The common language is Spanish. Everyone, in other words, is in exile from their homeland, and many of the inhabitants, probably a significant majority, must learn and speak a language other than their mother tongue.
3. In the course of their trip to this place, their memories of their homeland have been “wiped clean.” They all can clearly remember various facts about human beings, animals, families, and so forth, but, apparently, only such facts. They don’t remember who they were or their life histories, their parents, husbands, wives, and children from their former lives, but they do remember that they had such histories and they know they can’t remember them. This is not a source of consternation, again except occasionally for Simón. In the second and third fictions, this feature of their new lives is present and is discussed occasionally, but it becomes somewhat less 2009), p. 16. The continuity between the Jesus novels and Coetzee’s other works is laid out in D. Attridge, “Reason and Its Other in Coetzee’s ‘Jesus’ Novels,” Novel 54, No. 3 (forthcoming).
prominent. The more Simón and David and Inés settle in, the less they have to explain to strangers why Simón is with David, and the less we hear about this strange cataclysmic event. In the third fiction, their fate has pretty much been accepted and the migration story is not as prominent.
4. There is a continuous recognizable narrative with a core problem to be solved. Simón has taken responsibility for David, a lost boy, during the voyage. He becomes something of a foster father or god father for the child, and he decides he can find his mother in the new land, even though he has never seen her and has no way of finding her. He insists he will know her, somehow, when he sees her. He does settle on someone, rather arbitrarily, not in a way that seems informed by anything or credible. She, Inés, accepts the role (also a seemingly arbitrary decision) and they both must care for and educate David. This means they must try to understand him. Both tasks prove extremely difficult, and those difficulties make up the main content of the developing narrative.
Everyone in the new world, in other words, can be considered “homeless” in a way. They don’t live on the streets but they are not at their original home, and they originally know nothing about where they are. This should lead us to think that they would all suffer from a kind of homesickness. But they do not, and for an obvious reason; as noted, they cannot. They have lost their memories. So, the most counterfactual premise of the fictions is a forgetfulness so thorough and so accepted that they do not experience their new world as all that strange, as “not their own.” I say “accepted” because they have not simply forgotten. They know they have memories and that the memories have been taken from them, somehow wiped clean. But the radicality of their situation is not much resisted; they simply try to figure out as quickly as possible what the rules are that they are expected to play by. They leave Novilla for Estrella but there does not seem to be any “outside” world. The new world appears completely
self-enclosed. No one mentions escaping or even desiring to escape (although there are some references to “the north,” their one migration in that direction shows us more of the same).2 The reader is in somewhat the same situation and by and large accepts the premise, the nature of the setting, and also tries to get oriented, to understand how things work here. That is, the fact that the situation is outrageous, appalling, seems quietly to escape notice. Whole populations have been relocated in some sort of forced migration. Children can lose touch with their parents and no one “official” seems to care. None of the immigrants we meet has any sense that they themselves have done this, migrated for a reason; it was done to them, and they all arrive to confront a bureaucracy which makes no attempt to explain the situation to them, why something has been done to all of them to wipe their memories clean, to destroy their individual identities. Relocation of populations to “camps” is a horrific feature of twentieth- and twenty-first-century life, from American internment of Japanese citizens, to Nazi death camps, to refugee settlements in the Middle East, to Australian indefinite detention centers. But everyone seems to accept this. Something also seems to have been done to what Plato called thymos, their spiritedness, the source of outrage at being dishonored or disrespected. It has been wiped clean as well. And the reader can too silently slip into the same somewhat passive, interrogative mode.
They also don’t seem to come to experience their new world, ever, even after a while, as “their own” either. It is not an issue. A kind of bland, shoulder-shrugging, stoical acceptance is the norm. Reading the “fiction” (I will use Coetzee’s preferred term), we at least find this acceptance strange, and we sympathize with Simón’s finding it strange, and begin to appreciate his uniqueness in being the only one, aside from David, who finds it strange, not to
2 Only Simón mentions once that he would like to hear “news of what is going on in the world.” CJ, p. 64. His interlocutor Álvaro is surprised at the very notion, that there is anything going on anywhere.
mention unjust.3 On reflection, though, it seems no more strange than the widespread unreflective acceptance of cruel industrial animal farming, the thoughtless destruction of the environment, massive inequalities in wealth, deaths caused by inadequate health care, graphic pornography accessible to ten-year-olds, Australia’s policy of indefinite detention of migrants without visas,4 and so forth. For that matter, if the trilogy is a treatment of the state of human being as one of exile, as I want to suggest, then the fact that one is simply “thrown” into such a form of life with its arbitrary requirements and an end point in no sense ever up to anyone could also understandably provoke the kind of fierce resistance one sees in David and in a more muted way in Simón. But the fundamental human gesture here (and not just in the new land) might be the shoulder shrug, isolated and highlighted here in this bizarre situation. In Elizabeth Costello’s lecture on realism, and throughout Diary of a Bad Year, the contingency and arbitrariness of the complex structure of a world we find ourselves simply thrown into, and the sense that everything could have been otherwise, especially the structures of power and authority, are quite prominent.
The exile of all the inhabitants in these senses is what I want to call “absolute,” and so creates a kind of metaphysical allegory. The situation in the new land is not a temporary displacement due to war or famine. No one experiences the situation as a temporary moment or even as a historical moment at all. It, whatever it is, just is now what the world is. They are not in a space, a geographical area, bounded by any different space, any different way of life. And it is absolute in another sense as well. They have all been cut off from, exiled from, their homeland, but they have also been exiled from themselves, from who they were. Like exiles everywhere, they attempt to make a new
3 In Schooldays, the dance teacher, Ana Magdalena, also does not accept the idea of a permanent block on memories. She believes that dance, especially for children, can recover a version of memories or at least a “shadow” of memories.
4 The Australian situation clearly has some analogue with what Simón and David face and we will return to the issue.
home for themselves and can even be said to try to “create” for themselves new identities, new roles as parents, workers, citizens even. But they continually encounter practices that make little sense to them, like primitive work conditions that could be alleviated by available technology, a bland, boring diet, bizarrely de-eroticized brothels, an unsympathetic and cold educational bureaucracy, strange pockets of privilege in what is otherwise an egalitarian society, traveling metaphysicians, dance instruction as primary education. No one seems to accept their way of life as a distinct way of life; distinct and so contingent, potentially mutable. They eventually run up against regulations about educating David that create such concern that they become, in effect, fugitives, exiles yet again, from their new land of exile. They “escape” one city and are on the run, must avoid census takers and school officials. They are triple exiles: from their homeland, from their old selves, and even from their new country. Now, forgetfulness and homelessness have often been themes in modern Western philosophy, and, I think one can say, “accordingly,” the three Jesus volumes are filled with philosophy. In a fragment, Novalis remarked, “Philosophy is really homesickness, an urge [Trieb] to be at home everywhere.”5 It is important to note the implications of the metaphor. Novalis does not mean that philosophers simply seek to understand their world, say, by providing explanations of it. We can certainly come to understand how a world from which we feel deeply estranged “works.” The ideal is rather some sort of deep “fit” between who I am, as a human being, and an individual, and a world (human and cosmic) “as if” suited for such a species and its individual inflections, hospitable to such a life form; that one can experience some purposive fit between how one feels one should live and what the world, especially the social world, makes available to one.6 That would require some sort
5 Novalis, Schriften, ed. J. Minor (Jena, 1923), vol. 2, p. 179, Fragment 21.
6 Cf. Coetzee’s remark in The Good Story: “I would like to believe that the universe is just, that there is some or other eye that sees all, that transgressions of the Law do not
of illumination, a way of looking at the world that might reconcile us to it, but that illumination does not consist of explanations of why things happen as they do. It would have to be an experiential sense of “the meaning of Being,” a reflection back to one of one’s own sense of oneself and so of a world that is one in which one “fits,” is suited.
The primary implication for philosophers of the image of homelessness is that it is permanent; we have never succeeded in such a search for such experienced harmony. There has never been “progress” in philosophy in this sense, and so philosophy is an expression of permanent exile, perhaps the expression of exile, not being at home in any world, and it is not a practice that can be imagined ending. That is no doubt why for most people, people unavoidably wholly engaged in an exhausting struggle for existence and security, or people with a strong religious faith, philosophy seems such a bizarre way of life, inspired as it is by a disaffection most do not feel. For many, it could be called the “luxury” of disaffection. (There is no such struggle visible in the new land, and there is no evidence at all of religion. This may have something to do with the mild, prevalent interest in philosophy that Simón encounters. They have to try to understand where they are and how to live, somehow.) An experience of homesickness must assume that we have something like a memory of such a “fit” world that has been “lost,” and this even if such a lost world is only an image for what we would have wished, what we can imagine a humane world could have been. That is, the possibility of experiencing one’s world as not a suitable human home, without knowing very much more than a vague aspiration about what such a home would be, is no more unusual than feeling the need to seek a form of redemption or forgiveness without knowing what either would be, or insisting on recognition
ultimately go unpunished. But a voice keeps asking: Is that really so? Is everyday life not bursting with examples of people who have forgotten what is not convenient for them to remember, and prosper nonetheless?” TGS, 34.
as an equally worthy human being without knowing just what that would amount to.
This all amounts to quite an unusual philosophical “problem,” if that is even the right term. The issue is worth attending to, thinking about as a matter of philosophy, if one feels that there might be some appearance/reality distinction involved, that the experience of estrangement and homesickness might be mitigated in some way at some deeper level or reality, or that the intensity of the bewilderment and confusion could be lessened by some experience, perhaps an aesthetic one. (For Kant, for example, the pleasure we take in the beautiful in nature, a result of a spontaneous harmony between our intellectual and sensible faculties, intimates a “purposiveness,” a sense that what he calls our “supersensible” vocation resonates with, fits in with, the deeper reality of the phenomenal natural world. So, both a sense of the non-phenomenal real and an experience of a purposive fit with it, can be said to promote a sense of homecoming in such pleasure. This may have a great deal to do with Simón’s interest in the beautiful, both in this fiction and with respect to Davíd’s dancing in Schooldays.)7 In both cases though, this would involve being shown something, not having something demonstrated by argument. And being exiled, homeless, orphaned are quite general metaphors. There might be a way, in attending to work by Kleist, or Kafka, or Beckett, or Woolf, or Eliot, or Pound (or Hegel or Nietzsche or Heidegger) to understand more determinate dimensions of the problem. Greater clarity might even suggest more concrete mitigations, that something can be done. Even greater clarity about what can never be clarified and why would be illuminating in a way. Modernist writers at least since von Hofmannstahl’s Chandos Brief may have lost faith in the stability and power of language, but even the Brief counts as a work of literary, that is, linguistic, genius.8
7 “I am starved of beauty,” he writes. “Feminine beauty. Somewhat starved. I crave beauty, which in my experience awakens awe and also gratitude . . . ” CJ,139.
8 The Chandos Brief plays an important role at the end of Elizabeth Costello. I discuss it in “Philosophical Fiction: On J. M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello,” in Philosophy by Other
Even that sort of illumination can be a source of orientation. What could never be imagined is that a discursive argument attempting to “prove” that the basic institutions and practices of the contemporary world make a genuinely human abode, or a demonstration that feeling in this way is not is a psycho-pathology, could be the decisive factor in overcoming such experiences. (As we shall see, Heidegger raises a particular consideration to show why it is all in principle unovercomable, and that will be important in the fourth chapter of this book.) Not having or not understanding such an argument or failing to appreciate a medical fact is not the origin of the problem. Things that had mattered could simply cease to matter, and philosophy’s task in such a situation is not, cannot be, to provide arguments for why something ought to matter. That would only be relevant if philosophy already mattered, and it matters at a very low level of significance in the new land. One could, for example, imagine Simón being given some explanation of why everyone had to be re-settled, and some evidence that this form of life is, all things considered, the best now available, but none of that would lessen the strangeness of what Simón experiences and none of it would provide any help in the question of understanding and educating David in a world where so much thoughtlessness and indifference seems to be the rule. It is a “problem” that can be addressed—Simón’s interrogation and dissatisfactions as well as David’s resistance, especially David’s resistance, show us that—but the basic question remains how to live in a community whose basic assumption seems to be: live as little, as quietly, as possible.9
This resonates with themes in much of Coetzee’s work. He has some faith that, even if a writer of fiction might not be able to “answer” such a grand question, how one ought to live, the author
Means: The Arts in Philosophy and Philosophy in the Arts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, forthcoming).
9 There are exceptions, as in the case of other forms of resistance, such as Dmitri’s in the second and third fictions. But even the nonconformist Arroyos cannot count as resistance. Like David and Inés, they try to lie low, avoid the census takers.
can make credible that “something is wrong,” and the artist has “the power to find words for what is wrong, or what has gone wrong.”10 For another, the images of exile and homelessness suggest a very general picture of unknowingness that is not the same as philosophical skepticism, at least in so far as skepticism has become a canonical problem in figures like Descartes and Hume.11 Traditionally such skepticism designates something-to-be-known, like the external world or other minds, and argues that any evidence we might have for such a claim to knowledge could just as well ground the negation of such a claim. But in this general state of unknowingness, a lived-out sense that we don’t know what we need to know to live well or even endure life, there are enough “flickers” of insight, such as what it would be to fail to live well, that the idea of simply failing to know what we want to know is not apt or is too simple. For another, we can feel at a loss about issues of meaning or purpose or our self-knowledge without knowing very well what it would be to know any of these, even though we can only be at a loss if we have some sense of the desiderata. This would be what it is to live with a form of existential irony, “suspended,” or hovering over options, but more aware than one would be without such a realization.
This figurative idea of homelessness is quite general. The Freudian picture of human life has an element of the idea, a homesickness from the polymorphous perverse childhood sexuality “left behind” in the regime of repression necessary for civilized life. Some criticisms of modernity, from Rousseau to other romantics, trade on the idea of a lost natural home, and German Hellenism, especially in Hölderlin, invokes the idea of a lost unity of sensibility and an enchanted world in Greek antiquity. This is what Nietzsche means in the collection of his Nachlass, The Will to Power, when
10 The Good Story, TGS, 59.
11 For more on this “state of being” conception (as opposed to epistemological problem), see my The Philosophical Hitchcock: Vertigo and the Anxieties of Unknowingness (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019).
he characterizes all German philosophy as a “homesickness.” (§419) And in his early writings, Heidegger often characterizes the basic human condition as forgetfulness, a forgetfulness about “the meaning of Being” that has become so thorough that there is a diminishing chance of any retrieval of the question. (Heidegger apparently believes such a sense of things was available to the PreSocratics but was lost with the Socratic-Platonic enlightenment.)
Heidegger will even coin one of his neologisms to emphasize the uncanniness of living a life that can end in death at any moment, “Un-zuhause,” not-being-at-home. In the broadest sense, modernity itself is sometimes considered a state of exile, less and less noticed as such as more and more of what a humane world would be or even the aspiration to one, is “forgotten.” 12
Hence the proposal for the following, that the basic allegorical situation of Novilla and Estrella, not being at home, being in exile, and forgetfulness, has a philosophical significance that is then explored in the fictional narratives. This would be the significance of the landscape within which one of the most important human tasks must be carried out—caring for, loving, and educating a child. How could we think about that in a state of such unknowingness?
If Simón’s exile, his homelessness, is an intensely focused reflection on the deepest sort of human disorientation, more and more accepted by being “forgotten” in daily distractions, then what light is shed by what happens to Simón and Inés and David? I don’t mean to suggest that the allegorical dimension could not have many other resonances. As noted before, we now live in a world of nations filled
12 It would obviously be a major and lengthy digression to go much further into Heidegger’s account of such homelessness, but it should be noted that his position is much complicated by the fact that he regards this state of being as something that has not simply happened to us, but that we have done it to ourselves. He speaks even of a kind of basic “violence” (Gewalt) against the state of things. It is complicated even further by the fact that in the work beginning in the 1930s, he suggests that this too is not quite right, that such an event was unavoidable and so should be characterized as required in some sense by a basic ontological state of things, by Being itself. See his Introduction to Metaphyiscs, trans. G. Fried and R. Polt (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), pp. 98–221.
with refugee camps, Coetzee’s Australia being one of the most controversial, along with the border policy of the United States. It is not much of a strain to imagine that everything we read in the trilogy occurs in one of the camps with “indefinite” detention, so indefinite that the residents come to accept that world as the “real” world and can never leave.13 And obviously “our world” differs from Novilla, but it is equally no imaginative strain to see the situation in Novilla and Estrella as aspects of metaphysical as well as historical exile.
There have been many other ways of expressing such a condition of and inspiration for philosophy—that life is a “dream,” for example, or that it might be a dream and we can’t tell the difference, or that human existence is like life in a cave, that we are prisoners who do not realize we live in such a cave and are prohibited from escaping. But the link between such exile, or homelessness, and philosophy is meant to be a deep one by the philosophers who invoke it. The idea is close to the notion that philosophy begins in and is always animated by wonder, but in this inflection, the idea is that philosophy is inspired by the utter, alienating strangeness of a historical human condition, the fact that human beings do not seem to have the fixed natural cycle of life that other animals do, and so have created over time and at any given time an array of very different ways of living. Not feeling at home in the world could arise when one, for example, contemplates the intertwining between physical passion, reproduction, and romantic love and is astonished by the strangeness of this conjunction, when one wonders whether desiring beauty matters all that much, or tries to understand what it means for a life that we will die. To say that we live in a condition in which these issues are just some manifestations of the strangeness
13 See Daniel Rooke, “The Childhood of Jesus,” at HTMLGIANT, n.d., http://www. htmlgiant.com/reviews/the-childhood-of-jesus, especially on the reviewers’ “appalling lack of recognition of the Australian context.” Also quite valuable on the Australian context, see Vincent P. Pecora, Secularization Without End: Beckett, Mann, Coetzee (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2015), Chapter 3, “The Ambivalent Puritan: J. M. Coetzee.”
of the situation we find ourselves in, and especially of our inability to come to any secure consensus about what any of this means, is what is evoked in the situation of Simón in Novilla and Estrella, and this is meant, I am suggesting, to be the natural condition of philosophy, why philosophy is so present in the fictions—philosophy of a sort, one should say, a conception formed in some opposition to traditional discursive philosophy. Establishing that this is so and exploring its implications are what I want to explore in this book.
Given Derek Attridge’s oft-cited case “against allegory” in interpreting Coetzee, especially taking the literary text to be an allegory of philosophical ideas, I should also say that I am not proposing an “allegorical” reading in the sense that Attridge rightly criticizes, although I am suggesting that the trilogy is an allegory of absolute exile.14 In his sense, what an allegorical reading does is to draw a strange text into the light of the “already known,” and so familiarize, make sense of it; allegories of class conflict, tyranny, and patriarchy are like this (Animal Farm, for example). And that then is just the problem. Attridge charges that such a familiarizing and universalizing can easily block the singularity of the text and the particularity of the reading experience. (The notions of the “event” of reading, and literary “performance” are at the center of his concerns.) I think he is right, at least with respect to novels like Coetzee’s.15 What I am proposing is more an allegorical setting or
14 See D. Attridge, The Singularity of Literature (Routledge: New York, 2017), Chapter 7, p. 133ff. See also R. Gaita, The Philosopher’s Dog: Friendship with Animals (New York: Random House, 2003), p. 59.
15 Another important discussion of the dimensions of allegory in Coetzee is Teresa Dovey’s “Waiting for the Barbarians: Allegory of Allegories,” in Critical Perspectives on J. M. Coetzee, ed. G. Huggan and S. Watson (New York: St, Martin’s, 1996). For example: “Allegory has been theorised in different ways, which can be broadly divided into two categories: it is either constructed as a mode which is subservient to an extra-textual reality which it simply represents, or as a mode in which there is repetition of one text by another. Within both these categories, allegory can further be regarded as either conservative or subversive, according to whether it locates meaning in terms of a pre-existing transcendent truth, or master code, or whether it is mobilised on the side of resistance to an oppressive system or master code.” pp. 138–9. Neither option seems adequate for the Jesus fictions.
a premise, the implications of which do not simply follow, are not directly implied by such a premise, are continually novel and unexpected in ways that demand philosophical reflection, not just a location in what is presumed to be the “real” analogue of a philosophical idea. The allegorical element is simply the situation, and the exploration of its implications are something like imaginative explorations, not exercises in analogical geography. The “fictions” then should be understood as explorations of a particular set of experiences, reactions and discussions occasioned by being in such a setting. It is a version of our “setting,” but that does not resolve anything. It rather always presents the reader with a challenge. What is it to live in a condition of such homelessness and forgetfulness? Why might it be illuminating to think about such a problem by trying to understand what these characters do and say, what happens to them?
We might also note that there is in the trilogy itself a considerable skepticism about translating something allegorical into some discursive “message.” A significant element of the humor in the fictions arises from confused discussions about the meaning of Don Quixote, and especially, in The Death of Jesus, about David’s putative “message.”
So, my hypothesis is that there is a point to such a proposed interrogation of the implications of such homelessness and forgetfulness because, while the world of Novilla and Estrellita is bizarre and unfamiliar, it also is, despite appearances, like our own world, in a way in which the concerns of Nietzsche and Heidegger have some resonance. Such a way of reading the fictions would link up with other moments in Coetzee’s work where something like the same thought is at work. In Elizabeth Costello, for example, in Elizabeth’s lecture on literary realism, she suggests a variation on Borges’s Library of Babel, a variation on forgetfulness, memories being washed clean, a gap between the present and the past.
But of course the British Museum or (now) the British Library is not going to last for ever. It too will crumble and decay, and
the books on its shelves turn to powder. And anyhow, long before that day, as the acid gnaws away at the paper, as the demand for space grows, the ugly and unread and unwanted will be carted off to some facility or other and tossed into a furnace, and all trace of them will be liquidated from the master catalogue. After which it will be as if they had never existed.
That is an alternative vision of the Library of Babel, more disturbing to me than the vision of Jorge Luis Borges. Not a library in which all conceivable books, past, present and future, coexist, but a library from which books that were really conceived, written and published are absent, absent even from the memory of the librarians. EC, 17
We have not been transported anywhere of course, and we remember our childhoods, our schooling, etc. But while we might be “free” to choose our own educational institution or to choose our occupation, or to choose to be married or not, none of these might be institutions that make much sense to us anymore; they could seem arbitrary, aspects of which could seem pointless, damaging, or even absurd.16 We might find ourselves not only exiled from what such a genuinely human world might be, but living in internal exile from the “real” world we do live in, playing by its rules, but in no way invested in it, committed to it, all in the way Simón tries to find his way in his baffling environment. It is not difficult to imagine moments when one might come to experience a polluted, corrupt, conformist, soulless world, our world, as alien, “another world,” a strange planet; not where we belong. This might even be true if the world is, basically, morally in order, but banal, boring,
16 Cf. Señor C’s animadversions in Diary of a Bad Year: “Always the subject is presented with the accomplished fact. . . . The ballot paper does not say: Do you want A or B or neither? It certainly never says: Do you want A or B or no one at all? The citizen who expresses his unhappiness with the form of the choice on offer by the only means open to him—not voting or else spoiling his ballot paper—is simply not counted, that is to say discounted, ignored. J. M. Coetzee, Diary of a Bad Year (New York: Penguin, 2008), p. 8.
unable to generate any commitment, willingness to sacrifice. What kind of issue is that, such that a rational discursive philosophical response would be appropriate?17 And we might occasionally remember that we have forgotten what a genuinely human world would be like, so much so that, like most of the residents Simón encounters, the question no longer has any force or resonance; does not claim us.
It is in such a setting or, more discursively, under such a premise, that the major questions that arise in the novel should be understood. The most sweeping question Simón must face is simply, as he formulates it: “How ought one to live?” Or in the question David asks several times: “Why am I here?” The urgency of the questions does not require that one imagine oneself to have actually been “wiped clean” of memories. It gains its urgency simply by the realization that very little of how we used to live is of any use in figuring out how to live now in this world. Forgetfulness might be a figure for an unbridgeable gap in time, for the irrelevance of remembering a now distant past. Or it might figure simply a lack of concern for either who we are, who we have become; a figure for thoughtlessness, intellectual lassitude, an unwillingness “to remember.”
