How to Read
Jan Wilm, The Slow Philosophy of J.M. Coetzee
Bloomsbury, 251pp, £60.00, ISBN 9781474256452
reviewed by James Draney
Towards the end of his life, Heidegger gave up on philosophy. The emerging world of high technology no longer demands the reasoning logic of the philosophe, he argued in an essay from 1969, because metaphysics, like everything else, has been spoiled by the positivistic impulse of science. Instead, we require a new task, something Heidegger preferred to call, simply, thinking. Our world has become ‘entirely technical,’ he writes. The triumph of science and cybernetics ‘transforms language into news,’ and reduces the arts to ‘regulated-regulating instruments of information.’ Elsewhere, in a talk entitled Discourse on Thinking (Gelassenheit), Heidegger distinguishes what he calls calculative thinking from meditative thinking. The latter is a reflexive, contemplative, disengaged form of thought, and the former a purely rational, quantitative, ends-oriented system. Calculative thinking is busy – it ‘races from one prospect to the next’ – while meditative thinking is an end in itself, more a mindset that a methodology. The true task of this type of thinking is to ‘confront meditatively what is really dawning in this age.’
Calculation is one of JM Coetzee’s great subjects, and his critique of it – reason, rationality, instrumental thinking, whatever we wish to call it – finds its most lucid articulation in Elizabeth Costello (2003): ‘A sparrow knocked off a branch by a slingshot, a city annihilated from the air, which is worse?’ we are asked in ‘The Problem of Evil.’ Whatever trouble we might have with such a question, it is less the content of the inquiry than its form that seems flawed. The binary either/or logic, pure calculation (‘in which the very act of measuring leaves a vile taste in the mouth’), receives an appropriately sharp response: ‘Evil, all of it. An evil universe invented by an evil god.’
This will-to-calculate has preoccupied Coetzee from the very beginning of his career, and it finds its most hyperbolic expression in Dusklands (1974). In it, a ‘mythographer’ named Eugene Dawn, one of the ‘backroom boys’ for the American war effort in Vietnam, suffers a mental breakdown as he composes his hyper-rational report for the neocolonial ‘New Life’ for Vietnam project. Dawn describes himself as one of ‘an honorable line of bookish men who have sat in libraries and had visions of great clarity.’ His favourite genre of book is the encyclopedia. And yet, despite the title’s Spenglerian overtones, Dawn claims to ‘speak with the voice of things to come.’ The same voice, it seems, that Heidegger warns us about.
To follow the trajectory of Coetzee’s career is to chart his reaction to a world system that has only accelerated its calculative logic. The rise of Guantanamo Bay, the triumph of neoliberalism, the imperial logic of the Iraq war and its destructive aftermath all have something eerily Coetzeeian about them in their allegiance to an ethically bankrupt rationality. In a letter to Paul Auster, published in Here and Now: Letters, 2008-2011 (2013), he describes a planet sick with ‘a vision of human beings as machines of self interest and economic activity as a contest of all against all for material spoils.’ Yet in a different letter collected in the same volume he directs part of the blame for this world at his generation of artists: ‘Something happened, it seems to me, in the late 1970s or early 1980s as a result of which the arts yielded up their leading role in our inner life […] I nevertheless feel that there was a general failure among writers and artists to resist the challenge to their leading role, and that we are poorer today for that failure.’
This is why, as Jan Wilm argues in The Slow Philosophy of J.M. Coetzee, the author’s stark fictions are so urgent today: they are a rare sight of fertile soil in which we can cultivate meditative thinking. The sheer volume of criticism and writing on Coetzee can attest to this. Over the past decade, what may have once been a small critical industry as grown into a complex intellectual economy. The recent establishment of his archive at the Harry Ransom Center has fed a growing interest in the Nobel laureate, who turned 76 earlier this year. Indeed, Coetzee is one of the few living authors on whom monographs are still being published, and Wilm’s book is a thoughtful and learned addition to this emerging body of criticism.
For Wilm, slowness is not only a matter of form, style or content, but is the defining characteristic of Coetzee’s entire oeuvre. The slow tempo and pacing of the novels, the deliberate plodding of their sentences, function as mechanisms to enable reflection. These books are ‘overflowing with questions,’ Wilm writes in the introduction. More than anything else, Coetzee’s novels demand inquiry, and this demand conditions a slow, meditative attitude in their readers. Much as Derek Attridge argues in J.M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading: Literature in the Event (2004), the way Coetzee’s novels stage and problematise their arguments forces us to suspend judgment before embarking on this interrogation.
Unlike most monographs on Coetzee, Wilm does not divide his chapters into sections on each of the novels, but separates his analyses by subject. There are chapters on Coetzee’s syntax, his fictional settings, his open-ended endings, his slow creative process, his interrogative dialogue as well as what Wilm calls his ‘gaps’. This word is used quite literarily – Wilm refers to typographical gaps on the page, such as the tripartite textual division in Diary of a Bad Year (2007) and the numbered sections of In The Heart of the Country (1977). These visual chunks of blank space recharge the text-reader relationship, according to Wilm. They demand further connection, further reflection, and they stand in for a larger, more metaphorical gap that Coetzee’s work, a metaphorical gap that both challenges and defies interpretation.
Much like David Attwell’s critical biography, J.M. Coetzee and the Life of Writing: Face to Face with Time (2015), Wilm uses the wide resources now available at the Harry Ransom Center, where the fastidious Coetzee deposited his manuscripts and composition diaries, each of which he meticulously dated and numbered. One of the fascinating aspects of Wilm’s book is the way it interrogates Coetzee’s slow, methodical process, tracking draft after draft through the painstaking process of composition. The creative process has interested Coetzee since he was a PhD student at the University of Texas in the 1960s, where he came across Samuel Beckett’s manuscripts in the library’s archives. In an interview with Attwell, he describes the experience as ‘heartening…to see from what unpromising beginnings a book could grow, to see the false starts, the scratched out banalities, the evidence of less than furious possession by the Muse.’ With the availability of the Harry Ransom Center archives, books like Attwell’s and Wilm’s have lifted the curtain and invited us to have a heartening look at the dedication and seriousness with which Coetzee treats his craft.
Not surprisingly, Coetzee has referred to his own beginnings as a writer as ‘tortuous.’ (‘Every morning since 1 Jan 1970 I have sat down to write. I HATE it,’ he scribbled in a diary he kept while working in Waiting for the Barbarians). Yet the questions of composition and process have ethical content that can only be answered or acknowledged through a process of self-reflection, hence Coetzee’s meticulous and fascinating composition diaries. It is in The Slow Philosophy, even more than Attwell’s critical biography, that we most clearly see Coetzee’s effort to resist the automatism inherent in certain kinds of writing, ‘writing unaccompanied by real thought, any self-reflection,’ as he says in Doubling the Point.
Despite its use of the word in the title, The Slow Philosophy does not argue that Coetzee ‘does philosophy’ per se. The book has more in common with Derek Attridge’s The Singularity of Literature (2004) than it does the philosophically inclined wing of Coetzee criticism. More than once, Wilm identifies himself as a partisan in an ongoing debate in literary studies: he pledges allegiance to Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus’s concept of ‘surface reading,’ described in a 2009 edition of the journal Representations as a rejoinder to the Jamesonian hermeneutics of suspicion (what they prefer to call ‘symptomatic reading’). Best and Marcus, like Wilm, advocate strict adherence to the words on the page, preferring an ethically engaged close reading to politically inclined demystification. Wilm proposes that the aforementioned gaps in Coetzee’s novels are not absences waiting to be filled, but that the empty space itself is a sort of presence within the text, which needs to be taken on its own terms. These gaps are in service of slow, considered reflection, rather than an invitation to debunk.
As a result of this allegiance, Wilm’s book does not really take us anywhere other than to the texts themselves. Though we learn much about Coetzee’s process, the way his novels function, there is little said about what this insight is about, what it is in service of. Yet, Wilm doesn’t necessarily want to take us anywhere: The Slow Philosophy is as much a book about a certain kind of reading than it is about JM Coetzee. Its purpose is to do away with purposiveness, to meditate on process rather than cobble together a strategy. Novels like Disgrace (1999), The Master of Petersburg (1994) and Foe (1986) lend themselves to this kind of meditative reading, which does not necessarily empty them of political content. In his essay on commitment, Theodor Adorno describes Paul Klee’s trajectory from an artist who drew political caricatures of Kaiser Wilhelm to the master who created the Angelus Novus, a work ‘which no longer bears any overt marks of caricature or commitment but far surpasses both.’ In the conclusion to The Slow Philosophy, Wilm argues the same for Coetzee’s trajectory. Though they bear few marks of literature engagée, Coetzee’s slow, contemplative novels teach us how to think, in the Heideggerian sense. They demand us to resist the calculative thinking that has engendered the bleak vision of the human as mere machine of self-interest.
Calculation is one of JM Coetzee’s great subjects, and his critique of it – reason, rationality, instrumental thinking, whatever we wish to call it – finds its most lucid articulation in Elizabeth Costello (2003): ‘A sparrow knocked off a branch by a slingshot, a city annihilated from the air, which is worse?’ we are asked in ‘The Problem of Evil.’ Whatever trouble we might have with such a question, it is less the content of the inquiry than its form that seems flawed. The binary either/or logic, pure calculation (‘in which the very act of measuring leaves a vile taste in the mouth’), receives an appropriately sharp response: ‘Evil, all of it. An evil universe invented by an evil god.’
This will-to-calculate has preoccupied Coetzee from the very beginning of his career, and it finds its most hyperbolic expression in Dusklands (1974). In it, a ‘mythographer’ named Eugene Dawn, one of the ‘backroom boys’ for the American war effort in Vietnam, suffers a mental breakdown as he composes his hyper-rational report for the neocolonial ‘New Life’ for Vietnam project. Dawn describes himself as one of ‘an honorable line of bookish men who have sat in libraries and had visions of great clarity.’ His favourite genre of book is the encyclopedia. And yet, despite the title’s Spenglerian overtones, Dawn claims to ‘speak with the voice of things to come.’ The same voice, it seems, that Heidegger warns us about.
To follow the trajectory of Coetzee’s career is to chart his reaction to a world system that has only accelerated its calculative logic. The rise of Guantanamo Bay, the triumph of neoliberalism, the imperial logic of the Iraq war and its destructive aftermath all have something eerily Coetzeeian about them in their allegiance to an ethically bankrupt rationality. In a letter to Paul Auster, published in Here and Now: Letters, 2008-2011 (2013), he describes a planet sick with ‘a vision of human beings as machines of self interest and economic activity as a contest of all against all for material spoils.’ Yet in a different letter collected in the same volume he directs part of the blame for this world at his generation of artists: ‘Something happened, it seems to me, in the late 1970s or early 1980s as a result of which the arts yielded up their leading role in our inner life […] I nevertheless feel that there was a general failure among writers and artists to resist the challenge to their leading role, and that we are poorer today for that failure.’
This is why, as Jan Wilm argues in The Slow Philosophy of J.M. Coetzee, the author’s stark fictions are so urgent today: they are a rare sight of fertile soil in which we can cultivate meditative thinking. The sheer volume of criticism and writing on Coetzee can attest to this. Over the past decade, what may have once been a small critical industry as grown into a complex intellectual economy. The recent establishment of his archive at the Harry Ransom Center has fed a growing interest in the Nobel laureate, who turned 76 earlier this year. Indeed, Coetzee is one of the few living authors on whom monographs are still being published, and Wilm’s book is a thoughtful and learned addition to this emerging body of criticism.
For Wilm, slowness is not only a matter of form, style or content, but is the defining characteristic of Coetzee’s entire oeuvre. The slow tempo and pacing of the novels, the deliberate plodding of their sentences, function as mechanisms to enable reflection. These books are ‘overflowing with questions,’ Wilm writes in the introduction. More than anything else, Coetzee’s novels demand inquiry, and this demand conditions a slow, meditative attitude in their readers. Much as Derek Attridge argues in J.M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading: Literature in the Event (2004), the way Coetzee’s novels stage and problematise their arguments forces us to suspend judgment before embarking on this interrogation.
Unlike most monographs on Coetzee, Wilm does not divide his chapters into sections on each of the novels, but separates his analyses by subject. There are chapters on Coetzee’s syntax, his fictional settings, his open-ended endings, his slow creative process, his interrogative dialogue as well as what Wilm calls his ‘gaps’. This word is used quite literarily – Wilm refers to typographical gaps on the page, such as the tripartite textual division in Diary of a Bad Year (2007) and the numbered sections of In The Heart of the Country (1977). These visual chunks of blank space recharge the text-reader relationship, according to Wilm. They demand further connection, further reflection, and they stand in for a larger, more metaphorical gap that Coetzee’s work, a metaphorical gap that both challenges and defies interpretation.
Much like David Attwell’s critical biography, J.M. Coetzee and the Life of Writing: Face to Face with Time (2015), Wilm uses the wide resources now available at the Harry Ransom Center, where the fastidious Coetzee deposited his manuscripts and composition diaries, each of which he meticulously dated and numbered. One of the fascinating aspects of Wilm’s book is the way it interrogates Coetzee’s slow, methodical process, tracking draft after draft through the painstaking process of composition. The creative process has interested Coetzee since he was a PhD student at the University of Texas in the 1960s, where he came across Samuel Beckett’s manuscripts in the library’s archives. In an interview with Attwell, he describes the experience as ‘heartening…to see from what unpromising beginnings a book could grow, to see the false starts, the scratched out banalities, the evidence of less than furious possession by the Muse.’ With the availability of the Harry Ransom Center archives, books like Attwell’s and Wilm’s have lifted the curtain and invited us to have a heartening look at the dedication and seriousness with which Coetzee treats his craft.
Not surprisingly, Coetzee has referred to his own beginnings as a writer as ‘tortuous.’ (‘Every morning since 1 Jan 1970 I have sat down to write. I HATE it,’ he scribbled in a diary he kept while working in Waiting for the Barbarians). Yet the questions of composition and process have ethical content that can only be answered or acknowledged through a process of self-reflection, hence Coetzee’s meticulous and fascinating composition diaries. It is in The Slow Philosophy, even more than Attwell’s critical biography, that we most clearly see Coetzee’s effort to resist the automatism inherent in certain kinds of writing, ‘writing unaccompanied by real thought, any self-reflection,’ as he says in Doubling the Point.
Despite its use of the word in the title, The Slow Philosophy does not argue that Coetzee ‘does philosophy’ per se. The book has more in common with Derek Attridge’s The Singularity of Literature (2004) than it does the philosophically inclined wing of Coetzee criticism. More than once, Wilm identifies himself as a partisan in an ongoing debate in literary studies: he pledges allegiance to Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus’s concept of ‘surface reading,’ described in a 2009 edition of the journal Representations as a rejoinder to the Jamesonian hermeneutics of suspicion (what they prefer to call ‘symptomatic reading’). Best and Marcus, like Wilm, advocate strict adherence to the words on the page, preferring an ethically engaged close reading to politically inclined demystification. Wilm proposes that the aforementioned gaps in Coetzee’s novels are not absences waiting to be filled, but that the empty space itself is a sort of presence within the text, which needs to be taken on its own terms. These gaps are in service of slow, considered reflection, rather than an invitation to debunk.
As a result of this allegiance, Wilm’s book does not really take us anywhere other than to the texts themselves. Though we learn much about Coetzee’s process, the way his novels function, there is little said about what this insight is about, what it is in service of. Yet, Wilm doesn’t necessarily want to take us anywhere: The Slow Philosophy is as much a book about a certain kind of reading than it is about JM Coetzee. Its purpose is to do away with purposiveness, to meditate on process rather than cobble together a strategy. Novels like Disgrace (1999), The Master of Petersburg (1994) and Foe (1986) lend themselves to this kind of meditative reading, which does not necessarily empty them of political content. In his essay on commitment, Theodor Adorno describes Paul Klee’s trajectory from an artist who drew political caricatures of Kaiser Wilhelm to the master who created the Angelus Novus, a work ‘which no longer bears any overt marks of caricature or commitment but far surpasses both.’ In the conclusion to The Slow Philosophy, Wilm argues the same for Coetzee’s trajectory. Though they bear few marks of literature engagée, Coetzee’s slow, contemplative novels teach us how to think, in the Heideggerian sense. They demand us to resist the calculative thinking that has engendered the bleak vision of the human as mere machine of self-interest.