The Politics of Narrative: J. M. Coetzee's Diary of a Bad Year

147 4 The Politics of Narrative J. M. Coetzee’s Diary of a Bad Year Copyright © 2019. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved. [T]he antagonism between writer and state is straightforward. The writer tries to tell his truth and the state tries to stifle him; or the state offers seductions to which the writer either succumbs or replies with a truthaffirming No. —J. M. Coetzee, “The Politics of Dissent”1 J. M. Coetzee’s novel, Diary of a Bad Year (2007), is structured as a tripartite narrative. The “dominant” narrative that occupies the top of each page is an assortment of “Strong Opinions,” dated 12 September 2005 to 31 May 2006, followed by a collection of softer sentiments under the title “Second Diary.”2 These essays and musings are attributed to one Señor C., so identified by the other characters in the novel but not by the narrator himself, who is an aging South African writer living in Australia. These short essays, while related in style and perspective, do not comprise the “story” as such. Instead, there are two “subordinate” narratives that put forward what is finally a minor romantic and fiduciary intrigue. Separated from the essays by rulers, the second narrative is made up of entries in the writer’s journal, recording his growing infatuation with a much younger and very attractive Filipina woman, Anya, whom he seeks to employ as a typist for the essays, literally, “above.” The third narrative represents Anya’s and her domestic partner Alan’s stinging appraisals of their elderly neighbor, most likely in the form of a “file” on the computer on which she types the manuscript. Diary of a Bad Year is thus a type of hybrid genre that combines nonfiction political essays on such transnational concerns as Guantánamo Bay, al-Qaeda terrorism, and the slaughter of animals, with literary biography, and a “realist” fiction of thwarted romance.3 At one level we can read the book as a “political novel” that innovates with respect to narrative conventions. Where we expect to find factual references in the subordinate commentary, we instead find the narrative diegesis. Conversely, the writer’s personal foibles literally undermine and destabilize the political arguments that we might otherwise—if they were published Conte, Joseph. Transnational Politics in the Post-9/11 Novel, Taylor & Francis Group, 2019. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/buffalo/detail.action?docID=5983951. Created from buffalo on 2023-01-05 23:21:49. 148 The Politics of Narrative 148 separately—take to be earnest. To what extent do we ascribe the provocative opinions of Señor C. to Coetzee? Or does the thinly veiled fictional spokesperson exonerate Coetzee from responsibility for the opinions? Tolstoy is held up as the exemplar of “authority in fiction,” unmasked by the poststructuralist criticism of Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault. Yet Tolstoy and Señor C. alike are unmasked as nothing more than “ordinary men with ordinary, fallible opinions.”4 Copyright © 2019. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved. A Narrative Gambit Coetzee has consistently employed literary masks in his fictions, and in “28. On tourism” in his “Strong Opinions,” Señor C. pays homage to his “illustrious predecessor” Ezra Pound in his account of a cycling tour of Provence in pursuit of the lives of the troubadours.5 Pound’s selection of his short poems, including “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley,” appeared as Personae in 1926. Having inhabited the literary personae of Franz Kafka in Life & Times of Michael K (1983), Daniel Defoe in Foe (1986), and Fyodor Dostoevsky in The Master of Petersburg (1994), as well as having created his own surrogate author, Elizabeth Costello, for the novel by that name (2003), Coetzee assumes the mask of a character who is likewise a South African writer and author of “a collection of essays on censorship” published in the 1990s and the novel, Waiting for the Barbarians (1980).6 And yet the fictive Señor C., or Juan, or J C, as he is variously dubbed in the novel, is discovered via an Internet search conducted by Alan and reported by Anya to be born in South Africa in 1934, unmarried and childless; whereas the biography of John Maxwell Coetzee reports that he is born in 1940, was married, and has two children. Thus, the mask is slightly askew, the lives asynchronous, allowing us a glimpse of a diegetic author’s self-portrait but refusing a positive identification and providing some degree of plausible deniability for the author regarding the strong opinions ventured in the book.7 But those Strong Opinions are themselves a literary allusion that provides insight into the narrative structure of the novel. Strong Opinions is also the title of a collection of interviews, letters to the editor, and essays by Vladimir Nabokov, published in 1973. In its Foreword, Nabokov recounts that “my fiction allows me so seldom the occasion to air my private views that I rather welcome, now and then, the questions put to me in sudden spates by charming, courteous, intelligent visitors.”8 Coetzee, for his part, has given a rather cold reception to visitors with questions about his work and only occasionally grants interviews,9 but it would appear that he relished the opportunity to air some of his opinions on transnational politics after 9/11, though not quite in letters to the editor that would be signed under his own name.10 The novel by Nabokov that most obviously serves as a model for Diary of a Bad Year is Pale Fire (1962).11 That novel is divided into a Foreword, Conte, Joseph. Transnational Politics in the Post-9/11 Novel, Taylor & Francis Group, 2019. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/buffalo/detail.action?docID=5983951. Created from buffalo on 2023-01-05 23:21:49. Copyright © 2019. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved. 149 The Politics of Narrative 149 a 999-line “poem in heroic couplets,”12 Pale Fire, by John Shade, and a far more extensive Commentary on the poem by Charles Kinbote, complete with an Index. Neither poet nor critic is an alter ego for Nabokov, but the conventional relationship of a literary text, here a somewhat fustian piece of verse, and its commentary is, as it were, inverted. Those notations that should appear below the rule, as on this page of commentary, swell to assume the dominant role in the narrative. We can say that a similar inversion takes place in Diary of a Bad Year, such that the political opinions, which are above the rule and in fact make up the preponderance of the text, assume a subordinate role in the novel’s diegesis. Where we would expect to find commentary, references to sources and other addenda appropriate to an argument in political philosophy, we instead find the novel’s story. The second allusion that allows us to assert that Señor C. inhabits a Nabokovian postmodern narrative, if not exactly a Nabokovian sensibility, is to his controversial masterpiece, Lolita (1955). In Giving Offense: Essays on Censorship, Coetzee discusses the “taint of the pornographic” with respect to the obscenity trial of D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover in the United Kingdom in 1960,13 a scant five years after British Customs officers seized all copies of the original French edition of Lolita entering the country. On his own behalf, Señor C. opines in “12. On paedophilia” regarding the “current hysteria about sexual acts with children” and considers that when “Stanley Kubrick filmed Lolita thirty years ago [1962], he got around the taboo—relatively mild in those days—by using an actress who was well known not to be a child and could only with difficulty be disguised as one.” However, he continues, in today’s more censorious climate, the very fact that the “fictional character is a child would trump the fact that the image on the screen is not that of a child. When the issue is sex with minors, the law, with public opinion baying behind it, is simply not in the mood for fine distinctions.”14 Commentators on Diary have noted at least a passing resemblance between the mature Juan and the literary scholar Humbert Humbert as well as between the seductive Anya and Lolita. Anya tells Señor C. that she works in the “hospitality industry,”15 and notes in her first entry that she makes sure she “waggle[s] [her] behind” when passing Señor C. in the laundry room.16 Though not remotely underage (she’s 29),17 the Filipina Anya18 has a somewhat improbable name—it’s the Russian diminutive of Anna; just as Humbert has nicknamed the American Dolores Haze a Spanish Lolita; and Señor C. is mistaken by his neighbors as hailing from Columbia, South America rather than South Africa. But the further and more germane analogy regards the complaints against censorship being made by both Señor C. in his “Strong Opinions” and Coetzee in Giving Offense. If we substitute “incendiary political opinions” for “depictions of paedophilia” in the essay by Señor C., we realize Coetzee’s objection to the identification Conte, Joseph. Transnational Politics in the Post-9/11 Novel, Taylor & Francis Group, 2019. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/buffalo/detail.action?docID=5983951. Created from buffalo on 2023-01-05 23:21:49. 150 The Politics of Narrative 150 Copyright © 2019. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved. of his fictional character with the author: because the fictional Señor C. appears to resemble in many respects the “real” John Maxwell Coetzee, the law (i.e., the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation [ASIO]) and public opinion (see the letter to the editor, published in The Australian)19 after 9/11 disregard nuances of literary authority and attribute controversial statements to the author. Naturally, the actual notice in The Australian appears under the title, “Coetzee ‘diary’ targets PM,” and states that “the Adelaide resident and now Australian citizen uses the conceit of a 72-year-old author writing a series of incendiary essays for a German publisher to launch a (fictional) assault on issues ranging from David Hicks, Australia’s anti-terror laws” and Prime Minister John Howard.20 In “05. On terrorism,” Señor C. observes: “The Australian parliament is about to enact anti-terrorist legislation whose effect will be to suspend a range of civil liberties indefinitely into the future. The word hysterical has been used to describe the response to terror attacks by the governments of the United States, Britain, and now Australia.”21 The transnational political climate after 9/11, in the midst of the so-called War on Terror, is just as hysterical in its suppression of those who defend civil rights as it is in jailing child sex abusers. Furthermore, “Included in the new Australian legislation is a law against speaking favourably of terrorism. It is a curb on freedom of speech and does not pretend to be otherwise.”22 I want to argue that Diary of a Bad Year represents a double gambit on the part of the author, such that these two “pawn sacrifices” (in the parlance of chess; see Nabokov’s Luzhin Defense [1930]) are structurally related in the narrative. In one of the last of his strong opinions, “30. On authority in fiction,” Señor C. argues: In the novel, the voice that speaks the first sentence, then the second, and so onward—call it the voice of the narrator—has, to begin with, no authority at all. Authority must be earned; on the novelist author lies the onus to build up, out of nothing, such authority. No one is better at building up authority than Tolstoy. In this sense of the word, Tolstoy is the exemplary author.23 When in his later life Tolstoy is sought after by disciples “not only as a great author but as an authority on life, a wise man, a sage,” he is revealed instead to be an “ordinary m[a]n with ordinary, fallible opinions.”24 Likewise, when queried by David Attwell on the significance of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2003, Coetzee responded: In its conception the literature prize belongs to days when a writer could still be thought of as, by virtue of his or her occupation, a sage, someone with no institutional affiliations who could offer an authoritative word on our times as well as on our moral life. . . . Conte, Joseph. Transnational Politics in the Post-9/11 Novel, Taylor & Francis Group, 2019. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/buffalo/detail.action?docID=5983951. Created from buffalo on 2023-01-05 23:21:49. 151 The Politics of Narrative 151 Copyright © 2019. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved. The idea of writer as sage is pretty much dead today. I would certainly feel very uncomfortable in the role.25 Even worse, the authority of political opinion is impossible to assert in nuanced, modern literary fiction; and, it is impossible for Coetzee to remove his mask and speak the language of politics, without irony, ethically, without receiving “a blow from [the] lead cosh” of public opinion.26 Therefore, unable to do the one or the other, the novel employs a double gambit that permits him to do both with relative impunity. Reflecting on his youth in South Africa in Doubling the Point,27 Coetzee describes himself as one of those raznochinets [“persons of various status,” specifically, the 19th-c. intelligentsia politically opposed to the nobility] to be found in “Dostoevsky’s novels with their pallid faces and burning eyes and schemes to change the world,”28 and exemplified by the anarchist Sergei Nechaev (1847–82) in Coetzee’s The Master of Petersburg.29 As such, however, Coetzee, while “sympathetic to the human concerns of the left,” finds himself alienated “by its language— by all political language, in fact. As far back as he can see he has been ill at ease with language that lays down the law, that is not provisional, that does not as one of its habitual motions glance back skeptically at its premises.”30 Alienated by the determinism of political discourse, and yet ethically compelled to speak to the injustices visited in the aftermath of September 11, 2001, Coetzee effectuates his own ambivalence, alienation, and ironic quandary by the slim fissure that he opens between the author and Señor C. in the narrative structure of the novel. What happens if, in a game of chess, white tenders a pawn sacrifice for position and black replies by offering its own pawn in a mirroring move? What if the novelist author dons the mask of an autobiographical narrator so that he might speak of political matters, though not in propria persona? This double gambit describes the narrative structure of Diary of a Bad Year. Part One of the novel, Strong Opinions, appears to lend authority to the political and public discourse of the narrator while relegating his erotic fantasies to an inferior position, literally, on the page. Part Two of the novel, the Second Diary, while hardly free of political commentary, lends greater authority to the narcissistic, personal, and literary musing of the narrators, largely at the suggestion of Anya, his “Segretaria,”31 who urges him to “Write your memoirs. Anything but politics. The kind of writing you do doesn’t work with politics. Politics is about shouting other people down and getting your own way, not about logic.”32 If we further extend these lines of attack on the chessboard of Diary, we perceive the doubled threat in either direction: between the dialogic and the reflexive; direct and indirect discourse; advocacy and irony; nonfiction political essays and fictional narrative; citizen and artist; the tropes of nineteenth-century realism as represented by Dostoevsky and those of postmodernism represented by Nabokov. Conte, Joseph. Transnational Politics in the Post-9/11 Novel, Taylor & Francis Group, 2019. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/buffalo/detail.action?docID=5983951. Created from buffalo on 2023-01-05 23:21:49. 152 The Politics of Narrative 152 We can turn to Mikhail Bakhtin’s “Discourse in the Novel” on Dostoevsky’s first-person narrators33 for enlightenment on this duplicity: The speech of such narrators is always another’s speech (as regards the real or potential direct discourse of the author) and in another’s language (i.e., insofar as it is a particular variant of the literary language that clashes with the language of the narrator). Thus we have in this case “nondirect speaking”—not in language but through language, through the linguistic medium of another— and consequently through a refraction of authorial intentions. The author manifests himself and his point of view not only in his effect on the narrator, on his speech and his language (which are to one or another extent objectivized, objects of display) but also in his effect on the subject of the story—as a point of view that differs from the point of view of the narrator. Behind the narrator’s story we read a second story, the author’s story; he is the one who tells us how the narrator tells stories, and also tells us about the narrator himself.34 Among the instances of “nondirect speaking” in the narrator’s Strong Opinions are two that comment reflexively on the difficulties of adopting political discourse. In a “glance back skeptically” on “political language”35 at the conclusion of the very first Strong Opinion, “01. On the origins of the state,” the narrator observes: Copyright © 2019. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved. Why is it so hard to say anything about politics from outside politics? Why can there be no discourse about politics that is not itself political? To Aristotle the answer is that politics is built into human nature, that is, is part of our fate, as monarchy is the fate of bees. To strive for a systematic, supra-political discourse about politics is futile.36 Just as the narrator Señor C. finds it impossible to speak of politics in his essays without invoking the authority of political discourse, so the author considers the impossibility of speaking with political authority inside the literary novel. The narrator meets himself en passant, as it were, in 26. On Harold Pinter, discussing the Nobel Lecture, “Art, Truth & Politics,” by the 2005 recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature (Coetzee was, of course, the recipient in 2003), in which Pinter levied “a savage attack on Tony Blair for his part in the war in Iraq, calling for him to be put on trial as a war criminal”: When one speaks in one’s own person—that is, not through one’s art—to denounce some politician or other, using the rhetoric of the agora, one embarks on a contest which one is likely to lose because it takes place on ground where one’s opponent is far more Conte, Joseph. Transnational Politics in the Post-9/11 Novel, Taylor & Francis Group, 2019. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/buffalo/detail.action?docID=5983951. Created from buffalo on 2023-01-05 23:21:49. 153 The Politics of Narrative 153 practised and adept. . . . Despite which [Pinter] fires the first shot and steels himself for the reply. What he has done may be foolhardy but it is not cowardly. And there come times when the outrage and the shame are so great that all calculation, all prudence, is overwhelmed and one must act, that is to say, speak.37 . Copyright © 2019. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved. But that is precisely what the novelist author J. M. Coetzee is not doing with regard to political sentiments that he presumably—though we cannot know definitively—shares; i.e., speak in one’s own person (in the novel). Let me suggest that for Coetzee there has come a time after 9/11 in which the ethical obligation to speak his opinion is irresistible. He chooses to speak indirectly on matters of transnational politics such as Guantánamo Bay, al-Qaeda terrorism, national shame, and the slaughter of animals because an ethics cannot be only locally applicable (which is the province of the law; as one passes the bar only in the State of New York, not in the entirety of the US); and thus he cannot speak from the subject position of a white, South African with adoptive Australian citizenship in 2006. And so while his narrator does comment on the passage by John Howard and the Australian Parliament of the AntiTerrorism Act of 2005, he observes that such repressive laws were likewise passed “in apartheid South Africa . . . in the name of a struggle against terror. I used to think that the people who created these laws that effectively suspended the rule of law were moral barbarians. Now I know they were just pioneers, ahead of their time.”38 While the political pundit always speaks her own opinion, or else it’s worthless, the novelist author never speaks as an individual, or else it’s worthless. If the ethics of a transnational politics is spoken in Diary of a Bad Year, it is because Coetzee, borrowing again from Bakhtin, “fus[es] ‘the language of truth’ with ‘the language of the everyday,’ [by] saying ‘I am me’ in someone else’s language, and in my own language, ‘I am other.’”39 A Political Argument In Summertime (2009), the third installment of Coetzee’s fictionalized autobiography, subtitled “Scenes from Provincial Life,” in which he describes his somewhat ignominious return to South Africa in the 1970s, Coetzee ventriloquizes his political philosophy at the time through his colleague and lover at the University of Cape Town, “Sophie Denoël.” Mme. Denoël reiterates some of the conditions of Coetzee’s boyhood in a family that remained “cultural Afrikaners but not political Afrikaners.”40 At great personal and professional cost, the Coetzees resisted a transformational process that began in “Europe in the nineteenth century. All over the continent you see ethnic or cultural identities being transformed into political identities,” culminating in Conte, Joseph. Transnational Politics in the Post-9/11 Novel, Taylor & Francis Group, 2019. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/buffalo/detail.action?docID=5983951. Created from buffalo on 2023-01-05 23:21:49. 154 The Politics of Narrative 154 the Balkans, Central Europe, and the First World War. That wave breaks over the Cape colony, and “Dutch-speaking Creoles begin to reinvent themselves as the Afrikaner nation and to agitate for national independence.”41 Yet the Coetzees opposed the wave of nationalism and young John was permanently affected with a “mistrust of political activism”42 and a bent toward cultural conservatism as a result. Speaking about autobiography (and shifting between the first and third person) with David Attwell, Coetzee states: Copyright © 2019. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved. A sense of being alien goes back far in his memories. But to certain intensifications of that sense I, writing in 1991, can put a date. His years in rural Worcester (1948–1951) as a child from an Afrikaans background attending English-medium classes, at a time of raging Afrikaner nationalism, a time when laws were being concocted to prevent people of Afrikaans descent from bringing up their children to speak English, provoke in him uneasy dreams of being hunted down and accused; by the age of twelve he has a well-developed sense of social marginality.43 Coetzee’s indictment of Afrikaner nationalism and the politics of apartheid that it virulently bred are of course the subject of his most widely lauded novel, Waiting for the Barbarians; extensively discussed in such works as Attwell’s J. M. Coetzee: South Africa and the Politics of Writing, it need not be rehearsed here.44 In exile in the UK from 1962 to 1965, in part to avoid military conscription in South Africa, and then in the US from 1965 to 1971, where his bid for permanent residency was denied because of his arrest for participation in an anti-Vietnam War protest while a faculty member at the State University of New York at Buffalo, he returned to a self-imposed internal exile in South Africa—the subject of Summertime. In his fiction from Dusklands (1974) to Disgrace (1999), Coetzee has allegorized the tragic national politics of Afrikaner apartheid and South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. His frequent disavowal of politics in his writing stems from his disgust with “the policies that the nationalists took over from the radical right in Europe: scientific racism, the policing of culture, militarization of the youth, a state religion, and so forth.”45 Thus, the initial Strong Opinion in Diary of a Bad Year is “01. On the origins of the state,” because being born a subject of the nation state makes us irrevocably subject to its politics.46 Yet Coetzee’s fictions of a post-9/11 world, Elizabeth Costello (2003), Slow Man (2005), and Diary of a Bad Year are deeply salted with the direct address of key matters of transnational politics—the exercise of power, predatory capitalism, terrorism, censorship, demilitarization, vegetarianism—whose resolution would require global adjudication and a recognition of a universal birthright that is the very antithesis of the nationalist political identity from which he was alienated in his boyhood. Whereas the politics of apartheid that Conte, Joseph. Transnational Politics in the Post-9/11 Novel, Taylor & Francis Group, 2019. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/buffalo/detail.action?docID=5983951. Created from buffalo on 2023-01-05 23:21:49. Copyright © 2019. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved. 155 The Politics of Narrative 155 segregated white Afrikaners, “natives,” and “coloured” was fundamentally identitarian and mandated residence in regionally prescribed “homelands” and townships, the transnational politics towards which the narrator of Diary of a Bad Year strives is both anti-identitarian and transcendent of geographical and state borders. He becomes cosmopolitan, a citizen of the world, a literary migrant. I have already suggested that the novel’s narrative diegesis is consigned to the minor section (in volume) and lower register (below the rule) of the page, the inverse of what one would normally expect in such nonfiction works as histories, biographies, or political theory. And yet we shouldn’t be beguiled into thinking that the numbered essays in Strong Opinions, beginning with the origins of the nation state and our birth into it and ending with the magnificent deconstruction of religion’s promise of the self’s persistence in “31. On the afterlife,” constitute a haphazard series of Pensieri in the mode of Leopardi or Pascal’s Penseés. Although Coetzee thinks of himself as “a miniaturist” in his fiction and essays,47 it would be better to regard the Strong Opinions, and to a lesser extent the “soft opinions” of the likewise numbered Second Diary, as the narrator’s development of a “political ethics.”48 One finds if not story then an argumentative coherence to the opinions, one that moves from the birth to the death of the political subject and from the philosophical abstractions of the state in Hobbes, power in Machiavelli, and political systems of anarchism and democracy to considerations of specific post-9/11 historical figures and individual authority. If the opinions describe a line of thought, it’s rather more a devolution in parallel with the narrator’s personal decline and thwarted amour. Reflecting on the younger Coetzee, Sophie Denoël observes that in the 1970s his “politics were too idealistic, too Utopian” and that he “looked forward to the day when politics and the state would wither away.”49 Such “Utopian longings” reflect the alienation of the young South African with the state, but their ecstatic embrace is beyond that of a man raised in Calvinist discipline. In the first Strong Opinion of Señor C. he ponders the impossibility of life “[o]utside the state (the commonwealth, the statum civitatis)” in which, according to Hobbes, the individual will not enjoy “perfect liberty” but rather be subject to unalloyed passions and other forms of barbarity.50 Just as it is impossible for the modern subject (so defined by Western Enlightenment philosophy) to exist outside of the state, so it is impossible to evade politics and political discourse. Mme. Denoël ventures an analysis of “what lay behind Coetzee’s politics,” though she suggests rightly that it is best gotten from his books (with postmodern irony, those would include both the one in which she is “interviewed” and the novel here under discussion): In Coetzee’s eyes, we human beings will never abandon politics because politics is too convenient and too attractive as a theatre in which to give play to our baser emotions. Baser emotions meaning Conte, Joseph. Transnational Politics in the Post-9/11 Novel, Taylor & Francis Group, 2019. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/buffalo/detail.action?docID=5983951. Created from buffalo on 2023-01-05 23:21:49. 156 The Politics of Narrative 156 Copyright © 2019. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved. hatred and rancor and spite and jealousy and bloodlust and so forth. In other words, politics is a symptom of our fallen state and expresses that fallen state.51 Such is the quandary of the young author and that of his much older alter-ego, Señor C., who laments in a passage already quoted, at the conclusion of his first Opinion, that to “strive for a systematic, suprapolitical discourse about politics is futile.”52 Regardless of his utopian longings, the narrator recognizes with Aristotle that politics is intrinsic to human nature and that he can no more evade its consequences than Oedipus can avoid his fate by striking out alone on the road to Thebes. The antithesis of utopian longings for a supra-political discourse might well be cynicism, as Señor C. criticizes the justification (among several advanced) for America’s invasion of Iraq as the “spreading of freedom and the spreading of democracy”53 when it is clear that an occupied nation, which formerly had no choice in its governance under the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein, still had no choice in its governance under the Coalition Provisional Authority. How to observe this “irony in the description of the process” without devolving into the discourse of politics? In “02. On anarchism” Señor C. imagines whether between utopian disavowal and rebarbative response there might be some third way—“of quietism, of willed obscurity, of inner emigration.”54 The precedents for quietism, to which Señor C. will return in the Second Diary, are noble: Christ’s “render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s” (Mark 12:17); Thoreau’s refusal to pay taxes to a state which had not yet renounced slavery and which had provoked a territorial war with Mexico; or Gandhi’s nonviolent civil disobedience in the face of British imperialism. Quietism, which should be inherently appealing to the reticent Coetzee, is a recusal of oneself from the pursuit of power. The obvious dilemma that Señor C. encounters is that such passivism/pacifism offers no resistance to an injustice such as the invasion of Iraq and may merely be suing for a “separate peace,” as Hemingway famously phrased it in A Farewell to Arms.55 Remembering that the essays incorporated in Strong Opinions do not stand alone as argument, we can see how the narrative below the rule literally undermines the assertions above. Señor C. spends days “devising felicitous coincidences”56 to pursue his meeting with Anya, a woman half his age, suggesting something other than reclusive retirement. His contribution to the German publication of Strong Opinions, in which “[s]ix eminent writers pronounce on what is wrong with today’s world,”57 is certainly not a “willed obscurity.” And like Coetzee, he has not merely withdrawn within himself but emigrated from South Africa to Australia. In short, however appealing the “third way” of quietism, it has not actually been Señor C.’s practice. It is somehow inadequate to the task he has set before himself. This obvious inadequacy provides Conte, Joseph. Transnational Politics in the Post-9/11 Novel, Taylor & Francis Group, 2019. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/buffalo/detail.action?docID=5983951. Created from buffalo on 2023-01-05 23:21:49. 157 The Politics of Narrative 157 textual evidence of a debate in political philosophy that is not the narrator’s, though he participates in it, so much as it is the author’s, whose conflicted thoughts on the matter are expressed through the “nondirect speaking” of the novel. Bakhtin reminds us that behind “the narrator’s story” in which intention and practice diverge there is a Copyright © 2019. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved. second story, the author’s story. . . . We acutely sense two levels at each moment in the story; one, the level of the narrator, a belief system filled with his objects, meanings and emotional expressions, and the other, the level of the author, who speaks (albeit in a refracted way) by means of his story and through this story.58 Thus, in order to understand Diary of a Bad Year one needs to appreciate how the author is testing his belief system through the presentation of the narrator’s. In fact, Coetzee embeds a splendid example of this narrative theory in “24. On Dostoevsky,” in which his narrator marvels at how “Dostoevsky, a follower of Christ, could allow Ivan [in The Brothers Karamazov] such powerful words” in renouncing his faith in the Almighty.59 Just so, Coetzee tests his own beliefs in the strong (and soft) opinions of Señor C. In these initial and more abstract meditations on political philosophy, Señor C. largely considers the deficiencies of systems of governance. Anarchism, in theory the rejection of political leadership, becomes in practice a diminished and selfish form of libertarianism, “a reluctance to pay taxes,”60 or in any other way to contribute to the commonweal. Although Australia is “by most standards an advanced democracy,” its practice breeds cynicism and contempt for politicians. In one of his more strongly worded assertions, Señor C. observes: “If you have reservations about the system and want to change it, the democratic argument goes, do so within the system. . . . Democracy does not allow for politics outside the democratic system. In this sense, democracy is totalitarian.”61 Just as he recognizes the impossibility of existing outside the state, or speaking of politics in a supra-political discourse, here he points to the impossibility of activism or reform or redress outside of the political system, however labeled. As Coetzee remarks to David Attwell, “democratizing” is a word “about which I’m cautious here— kratis is power, after all.”62 Thus the people are presented with the illusion of an election, literally, a choice; when in fact the system has been engineered to ensure the orderly transference of power. Into the Dark Chamber The maintenance of political power at all costs brings Señor C. to “04. On Machiavelli.” In the founding document of political philosophy, Il Principe (1532), Machiavelli takes “necessity, necessitá . . . as his Conte, Joseph. Transnational Politics in the Post-9/11 Novel, Taylor & Francis Group, 2019. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/buffalo/detail.action?docID=5983951. Created from buffalo on 2023-01-05 23:21:49. Copyright © 2019. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved. 158 The Politics of Narrative 158 guiding principle” and thus divorces moral or natural law from politics. “To hold onto power, you have not only to master the crafts of deception and treachery but to be prepared to use them where necessary.”63 Señor C. discerns duplicity in a modern state that pays lip service to religion and morality but is always prepared under duress to violate any ethical principle “in the interest of self-preservation.” The modern state and its politicians are preeminently guided by κράτος (kratos, power) rather than ἔθος (ethos, moral character). The immediate application of this duplicity in the post-9/11 political environment is the torture of detainees seized in the prosecution of the global War on Terror. While torture is normatively considered to be immoral when presented in the abstract to “ordinary members of the public,”64 its application is deemed a necessity when the prisoner is thought to be withholding information regarding terrorist activity; that is to say, any and all prisoners, who would not be otherwise be detained if they did not possess such information. “The kind of person who calls talkback radio” (Anya corrects Señor C.’s use of the American idiom, “talk radio,” which indeed “doesn’t make sense”)65 is capable of justifying the use of torture in the interrogation of prisoners by holding “the double standard in his mind in exactly the same way.”66 Without denying “the absolute claims of the Christian ethic . . . such a person approves freeing the hands of the authorities—the army, the secret police—to do whatever may be necessary to protect the public from enemies of the state.”67 What particularly horrifies Señor C. is that the Machiavellian principle of necessity “has been thoroughly absorbed by the man in the street.”68 What hope is there of an indictment of rulers on charges of torture and war crimes when the public holds its safety higher than “some abstract moral code”?69 This is what may be called a “state of consent,” in which the populace agrees to that governance which provides to it the highest degree of personal security. No longer the princely state of Machiavelli, or even the nation state of Franklin Delano Roosevelt that provided primarily for the nation’s welfare, the market state’s raison d’ȇtre is “the protection of civilians, not simply territory or national wealth or any particular dynasty, class, religion, or ideology.”70 If protection in the post-9/11 environment of a War on Terror is paramount, then no cavils on the morality of torture in interrogations will hold. Señor C. is not, however, the man in the street. He takes the next step in observing that if international laws against the torture of prisoners, including the Geneva Convention, can be relaxed for “unlawful enemy combatants” and terrorists, there is little or no protection in national laws for that same man in the street against the use of torture by the state’s secret police. After 9/11 the exigencies of a market state as it pursues a global conflict with terrorism—liberally defined as any force such as al-Qaeda that threatens state security—have brooked little or no restraint; not at the Conte, Joseph. Transnational Politics in the Post-9/11 Novel, Taylor & Francis Group, 2019. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/buffalo/detail.action?docID=5983951. Created from buffalo on 2023-01-05 23:21:49. 159 The Politics of Narrative 159 Guantánamo Bay indefinite detention center in Cuba, not at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, once the site of Saddam Hussein’s torture of political prisoners; and not at CIA “black sites” in Bucharest, Romania or Stare Kiejkuty, Poland. Presiding over and publicly defending the use of torture to extract information of dubious reliability at these sites is the twenty-first century’s answer to Machiavelli’s “il principe,” Richard “Dick” Cheney. In “10. On national shame,” Señor C. states: An article in a recent New Yorker makes it as plain as day that the US administration, with the lead taken by Richard Cheney, not only sanctions the torture of prisoners taken in the so-called War on Terror but is active in every way to subvert laws and conventions proscribing torture. We may thus legitimately speak of an administration which, while legal in the sense of being legally elected [though only under the guise of the Supreme Court’s politicallytainted 5–4 decision in Bush v. Gore (2000)], is illegal or anti-legal in the sense of operating beyond the bounds of the law, and resisting the rule of law.71 Copyright © 2019. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved. Although our narrator is fictional, the article in question by Jane Mayer can be easily referenced: “A Deadly Interrogation: Can the C.I.A. Legally Kill a Prisoner?” from the November 14, 2005, issue of the New Yorker. Among the salient points ventured in the article regarding the legality of torture and who, if anyone, might be held responsible for the death of Manadel al-Jamadi during interrogation at Abu Ghraib prison is the following: After September 11th, the Justice Department fashioned secret legal guidelines that appear to indemnify C.I.A. officials who perform aggressive, even violent interrogations outside the United States. Techniques such as waterboarding—the near-drowning of a suspect—have been implicitly authorized by an Administration that feels that such methods may be necessary to win the war on terrorism. (In 2001, Vice-President Dick Cheney, in an interview on “Meet the Press,” said that the government might have to go to “the dark side” in handling terrorist suspects, adding, “It’s going to be vital for us to use any means at our disposal.”)72 Like Machiavelli’s Prince, Vice President Cheney is driven to the dark side in his zeal, or by necessitá, in extracting confessions from prisoners under the guise of preventing further attacks on Americans. Cheney’s duplicitous defense is a textbook example of a statesman who will invoke the necessity of protecting the citizenry even to extremes of violence and homicide when it is chiefly the retention of power that is at stake. Just as there were no “weapons of mass destruction” discovered Conte, Joseph. Transnational Politics in the Post-9/11 Novel, Taylor & Francis Group, 2019. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/buffalo/detail.action?docID=5983951. Created from buffalo on 2023-01-05 23:21:49. Copyright © 2019. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved. 160 The Politics of Narrative 160 in Iraq, though the Bush administration sought to justify a preemptive invasion of Iraq, so the interrogation and torture of political prisoners such as Manadel al-Jamadi on unfounded grounds produced no credible information on terrorism.73 It proved only that the government would be willing to forego any moral code in the exercise of power. Conferring on a bill introduced into Congress by Senator John McCain, who was tortured as a P.O.W. during the Vietnam War, which would “require Americans holding prisoners abroad to follow the same standards of humane treatment required at home by the U.S. Constitution,” Cheney and Porter Goss, then CIA director, “argued that the C.I.A. sometimes needs the ‘flexibility’ to treat detainees in the war on terrorism in ‘cruel, inhuman, and degrading’ ways. Cheney sought to add an exemption to McCain’s bill, permitting brutal methods when ‘such operations are vital to the protection of the United States or its citizens from terrorist attack.’”74 No clearer illustration is needed of the Machiavellian position that “infringing the moral law is justified” when it is deemed necessary.75 The issue, of course, resonates deeply with Coetzee, who has written both a novel, Waiting for the Barbarians, “about the impact of the torture chamber on the life of a man of conscience,”76 and essays on the subject such as “Into the Dark Chamber: The Writer and the South African State.” In the latter, Coetzee discusses his moral reservations as an artist against venturing into the dark chamber to describe the extremes of torture. Yet other South African writers have done so, he says, because “relations in the torture room provide a metaphor, bare and extreme, for relations between authoritarianism and its victims. In the torture room unlimited force is exerted upon the physical being of an individual in a twilight of legal illegality, with the purpose, if not of destroying him, then at least of destroying the kernel of resistance within him.”77 While it is certainly the province of an investigative reporter such as Jane Mayer in The New Yorker and film documentarian Alex Gibney in Taxi to the Dark Side (2007) to enter the torture chamber and describe what has occurred there, and indeed it may be necessitated by the reportorial obligation to gather evidence, for a novelist such as Coetzee the fictionalized narration of such scenes—again, following Bakhtin—inevitably implicates the author in the moral taint of that which is narrated, for to describe torture compellingly will place the author, however remotely, in the mind and hands of the torturer and the tortured. This is the essence of Lesson 6, “The Problem of Evil,” in Elizabeth Costello. In her lecture at a conference in Amsterdam, Elizabeth Costello (another of Coetzee’s author-surrogates) deliberates on how she might present her view that Paul West’s novel, The Very Rich Hours of Count von Stauffenberg (1989), which graphically depicts the torture and execution of the Wehrmacht officers who attempted to assassinate Hitler in the Wolf’s Lair in 1944, is itself a form of obscenity, “not just the deeds of Hitler’s executioners . . . but the pages of Paul Conte, Joseph. Transnational Politics in the Post-9/11 Novel, Taylor & Francis Group, 2019. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/buffalo/detail.action?docID=5983951. Created from buffalo on 2023-01-05 23:21:49. Copyright © 2019. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved. 161 The Politics of Narrative 161 West’s black book too.”78 And uncomfortably for Costello, the “real” Paul West will also be attending the conference.79 Finally declaring before the audience that “I read the von Stauffenberg book with sympathy, not excepting (you must believe me) the execution scenes, to the point that it might as well be I as Mr West who hold the pen and trace the words. Word by word, step by step, heartbeat by heartbeat, I accompany him into the darkness” of the torture chamber.80 Powerful literature thus brings the writer to an empathetic identification with the characters, and yet she concludes, “What arrogance, to lay claim to the suffering and death of those pitiful men. Their last hours belong to them alone, they are not ours to enter and possess.”81 Perhaps as Paul West himself has suggested, Coetzee does not fully share Costello’s urge to censure the representation of evil and unspeakable suffering in fiction, yet Coetzee undoubtedly understands that for the novelist to represent torture (“Hitler commanded his man. ‘Strangle them. I want them to feel themselves dying.’”)82 he must be prepared to empathize not only with the hopelessness of the victims but with the moral horror of the executioner as well. Something of the moral outrage of Count von Stauffenberg-by-proxy syndrome was recently experienced by the Polish government when it was revealed that a CIA “black site” had been secreted within a Polish military base at Stare Kiejkuty. It was at this site that Abd alRahim al-Nashiri, accused of plotting the attack on the US destroyer Cole in Yemen in 2000, was allegedly threatened with a gun and a power drill pointed to his head. As Vice President Cheney testified, the gun and drill were not actually used.83 The Polish attorney for al-Nashiri, Mikolaj Pietrzak, remarked that as the Poles so vividly remember the Soviet occupation and before that the German occupation of Poland, it is unthinkable that “this beacon of liberty which is America would allow” a secret prison on Polish soil that would not be allowed in the United States.84 The Poles were understandably upset because their director of intelligence service, Zbigniew Siemiatkowski, appears to have condoned one of the worst human rights violations in Eastern Europe since those perpetrated by the secret police of the Soviet Union and East Germany. Like the author Elizabeth Costello who recoils at the thought of the horrors described in West’s novel and yet feels besmirched by them, Poles were repulsed to discover that torture had been done on their soil, if not by their own hand then by that of the CIA. For Coetzee, these episodes—both Cheney’s defense of the legality of waterboarding and other harsh coercive measures and West’s venture into the dark chamber of the last hours of Count von Stauffenberg—illustrate an essential difference between the politician and the novelist: the Machiavellian politician easily divorces morality from legality; but the novelist feels too keenly the moral force of his own narration. Conte, Joseph. Transnational Politics in the Post-9/11 Novel, Taylor & Francis Group, 2019. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/buffalo/detail.action?docID=5983951. Created from buffalo on 2023-01-05 23:21:49. 162 The Politics of Narrative 162 Copyright © 2019. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved. In the Name of Terror In “05. On terrorism,” Señor C. laments the imminent passage by the Australian parliament of “anti-terrorist legislation whose effect will be to suspend a range of civil liberties indefinitely into the future.”85 The statesmen in Australia, who passed the Anti-Terrorism Act in December 2005, and their counterparts in the United States who had previously passed the USA PATRIOT Act in December 2001, are aptly described as hysterical. Why should the nuclear-armed West, which had faced down a Cold-War foe that was capable of the annihilation of a vast preponderance of the population of North America and Eastern Europe, in particular during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, become unnerved over a few “pin-pricks of terrorism”86 in 2001? Let us stipulate that in comparison to a hypothetical full nuclear exchange between the United States and the USSR, the loss of life on September 11th of 2,966 persons and the nearly 4,800 coalition casualties in the invasion of Iraq after 2003 (setting aside the disputed figures of Iraqi military and civilian casualties that range between 150,000 violent deaths and upwards of a million total deaths by means direct or indirect), the number of Western casualties due to terrorism is quite small. Why then does Señor C. writing from Sydney, Australia,87 and to a European audience, deliberately provoke the ire of readers who would regard the description of 9/11 and other terrorist attacks such as the USS Cole in October 2000, the Bali nightclub bombing in October 2002 that killed mostly Australian tourists, the Madrid train bombings in March 2004 (known in Spain as 11-M), or the London Underground bombings of July 2005 (known in the UK as 7/7) as mere “pin pricks”? If this seems a bilious and demeaning opinion of these attacks, is it because the retraction of civil liberties that were subsequently visited upon Western democracies on such a massive scale was so totally disproportionate to the provocation? That the response from Australian and American politicians to threats to state security was entirely irrational? Señor C. proffers two explanations for such hysteria that speak to the nature of transnational politics in the age of terror. The first, ironically, is the contention that the “new foe is irrational.”88 The bilateral standoff between Washington and the Kremlin during the Cold War pitted two foes whose arsenals portended a Mutually Assured Destruction that, despite the acronym, brought a sobering reciprocity to the decision to launch an attack. Invoking the logic of the Slavic chessboard and John von Neumann’s key contributions to both the Manhattan Project and the theory of strategic decision-making in two-person zero-sum games, it’s possible to characterize the symmetrical antagonism of the Cold War as “eminently rational,” and so therefore one could expect that “the game would be played by the same rules on both sides.”89 If the Russian calculation of national survival in a hypothetical war game Conte, Joseph. Transnational Politics in the Post-9/11 Novel, Taylor & Francis Group, 2019. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/buffalo/detail.action?docID=5983951. Created from buffalo on 2023-01-05 23:21:49. Copyright © 2019. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved. 163 The Politics of Narrative 163 was entirely rational, Islamist terrorists are neither concerned with their individual survival (as evidenced by numerous suicide bombings and the attackers, most notably Mohamed Atta, on 9/11) nor that of the nation state in the prosecution of global jihad. Because the Islamist terrorist will be a martyr before Allah and richly rewarded in the afterlife, his actions will not be guided by reasonable concerns for self-preservation. Because “Islam is larger than the nation” (the modern states of Iraq and Iran are postwar constructs of Western diplomacy) and “God will not allow Islam to be defeated,”90 the actions of these states will be irrationally governed by religious precepts rather than realpolitik. Thus, the Islamist foe will not “follow the rationalist calculus of costs and benefits: to deal a blow to God’s enemies is enough, the cost of that blow, material or human, is unimportant.”91 The prospects of such an irrational and therefore unpredictable enemy who defies the mathematics of game theory (and implicitly rejects the foundations of Western Enlightenment philosophy) is so unnerving to national security authorities that their correspondent reactions are likewise unsound, hysterical, and prone to selfinflicted wounds. Or so goes the theory, for Señor C. makes it clear that this policy analysis of a fundamental shift from a bilateral balance-ofpower in the Cold War to multilateral instability and unpredictability— for such is the nature of terrorism—in global jihadism is not his but rather the prevailing wisdom on this matter. Let us turn briefly for a point of comparison to the work of another writer of strong opinions, Martin Amis’s The Second Plane, subtitled “September 11: Terror and Boredom” (2008). Like Diary of a Bad Year, this book combines provocative essays and a pair of short fictions (one, “In the Palace of the End,” is told by an insane dictator’s body double who is maimed in order to better resemble his model, and the second, “The Last Days of Muhammad Atta,” contends that Atta was neither religious nor political but a fundamentalist in the way of all extremists). As such The Second Plane resembles the sort of book, Strong Opinions, which Señor C. imagines for himself, but with a rather different political perspective: not a story so much as a “set of opinions” that “counts as a miscellany. A miscellany is not like a novel, with a beginning and a middle and an end.”92 In the title essay of Amis’s collection (originally published in The Guardian on September 18, 2001), we find an opinion that hews closely to that presented by Señor C. in “On terrorism”: “the West confronts an irrationalist, agonistic, theocratic/ ideocratic system which is essentially and unappeasably opposed to its existence. The old enemy was a superpower; the new enemy isn’t even a state.”93 What’s more, while world socialism was “a modernist, indeed a futurist [1917], experiment,” the militant fundamentalism of global jihad is anti-modernist, pre-Enlightenment, “convulsed in a latemedieval phase of its evolution.”94 In turn, Amis reiterates aspects of the controversial argument by political scientist Samuel P. Huntington Conte, Joseph. Transnational Politics in the Post-9/11 Novel, Taylor & Francis Group, 2019. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/buffalo/detail.action?docID=5983951. Created from buffalo on 2023-01-05 23:21:49. Copyright © 2019. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved. 164 The Politics of Narrative 164 that “the principal conflicts of global politics will occur between nations and groups of different civilizations. The clash of civilizations will dominate global politics.”95 In “Iran and the Lord of Time” (originally published by the New York Times Syndicate in June 2006), Amis argues strenuously that Iran must not be allowed to develop nuclear weapons because its President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad operates under the sway of Shia eschatology that promises the return of the Lost Imam, the Mahdi, “during a period of great tribulation” such as a nuclear war.96 Thus, he reasons, “no theocracy can be allowed to wield a nuclear weapon” because Mutual Assured Destruction is no deterrent. While Israel might be completely destroyed by a nuclear bomb, Ahmadinejad believes that a “counterstrike on Iran will merely ‘harm’ the Islamic world.”97 The victory of Islam over the nonbelievers is assured, even if the nation of Iran were reduced to cinders in the process. Señor C. summarizes much the same “explanation”98 for the hysterical turn in global politics, but Amis has advanced these opinions in newspapers and journals under his own name. Accused in some quarters of Islamophobia, Amis speaks, like Harold Pinter, in his own person and so renders himself vulnerable to reprisals, most notably by Terry Eagleton, in the arena of public opinion.99 The second explanation for the hysterical and censorious response of Western governments to terrorism carries more weight with Señor C.: “namely that since terrorists are the equivalent not of an opposing army but of an armed criminal gang representing no state and claiming no national home, the conflict in which they engage us is categorically different from the conflict between states and must be played by a quite different set of rules.”100 It’s possible to speak of the Cold War as a “war” insofar as the conflict was between two organizations of states with competing ideologies. But the so-called War on Terror cannot actually be considered a war because there was never a state against which a declaration of hostilities could be made. In effect, the Iraq War, or the Second Persian Gulf War, was the manufacture of an enemy state (in possession of “weapons of mass destruction”) that would justify the conventional use of aerial bombing, “Shock and Awe,” in the fashion of Tokyo, Dresden, and Hanoi, and an invasion and occupying force familiar from the Philippines (1898), Central Europe (1944), or the First Persian Gulf War (1991). But what unnerves the state, according to Señor C., is the asymmetrical tactics and transnational constituency of Islamist terrorism. As before, an ideological conflict arises between secular democracy and fundamentalist theocracy; yet now the true threat is neither to materiel nor territory but rather to the very legitimacy of states of consent. States “define diplomacy, including the use of military force as the ultimate diplomatic measure, as a matter solely between governments. Infractions of this meta-rule are penalized with extraordinary severity.”101 The state must take extraordinary measures against terrorism Conte, Joseph. Transnational Politics in the Post-9/11 Novel, Taylor & Francis Group, 2019. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/buffalo/detail.action?docID=5983951. Created from buffalo on 2023-01-05 23:21:49. Copyright © 2019. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved. 165 The Politics of Narrative 165 because it strikes a blow to the illusory consent of the governed and the expectation of security that the market-state citizen holds dearly in exchange for that consent. Whether by anarchist terrorists in 1901 or fundamentalist terrorists in 2001, these attacks are directed primarily against the legitimacy and power of the state and so its rulers regard such attacks as inherently more destabilizing than, say, a territorial dispute over the South China Sea between the nations of Vietnam, Malaysia, Brunei, the Philippines, Taiwan, and the People’s Republic of China. Diplomacy can be counted upon to resolve the latter situation, but only the extremes of extirpation, rendition, unmanned drones, and detention camps are suitable for the former. Regarding the treatment of those who refuse to play by the rules of nationhood, there are no rules. That is paradoxically why the governments of the United States and Australia turned to censorship in the aftermath of terrorist attacks in New York and Bali.102 “Included in the new Australian legislation is a law against speaking favourably of terrorism. It is a curb on freedom of speech, and does not pretend to be otherwise.”103 Compared to the casualties inflicted on soldiers and civilians in conventional warfare between nation states, terrorism is but a “pin prick.” But the ideological damage done to confidence in the state as protector and ensurer of a way of life among its citizens is far more deflating. Thus, any unpatriotic speech that gives even partial credence to the beliefs of Islamist terrorists whose object is to destroy democratic consent and replace it with theocratic submission must be suppressed. Señor C. then provides two distinctly unpatriotic reasons for why one should be concerned about retractions of free speech in the interest of national security. First, “because, though dropping bombs from high altitude upon a sleeping village is no less an act of terror than blowing oneself up in a crowd, it is perfectly legal to speak well of aerial bombing (‘Shock and Awe’).”104 In its bombardment of Baghdad on March 22, 2003, the United States, following a joint resolution of Congress, believes itself to be a nation in time of war. Pursuing his right to free speech, Señor C. argues that both aerial bombing and suicide bombing of the sort that has inflicted untold civilian casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan are acts of terrorism; both acts are reprehensible, but in equating them, he undermines the state and could be prosecuted. Second, he argues that “the situation of the suicide bomber is not without tragic potential” and finding no other means than his own death in retribution for his grievances is “perhaps even a definition of the tragic.”105 As a case in point, political satirist Bill Maher was fired from his talk show, Politically Incorrect, when he responded to conservative panelist Dinesh D’Souza’s assertion that the hijackers on 9/11 were not “cowards” (as George W. Bush attested) but “warriors,” making a comparison very similar to Señor C.’s: “We have been the cowards, lobbing cruise missiles from 2,000 miles away. That’s cowardly. Staying in the airplane when it Conte, Joseph. Transnational Politics in the Post-9/11 Novel, Taylor & Francis Group, 2019. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/buffalo/detail.action?docID=5983951. Created from buffalo on 2023-01-05 23:21:49. 166 The Politics of Narrative 166 hits the building, say what you want about it, it’s not cowardly.”106 Again, speech that validates the terrorists’ resolve, if not their moral righteousness, is a threat to state security and therefore is politically equivalent to an attack on the state. The Lead Cosh of Public Opinion Copyright © 2019. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved. Coetzee is not the only writer in Australia to object to the repression of civil liberties under the conservative government of John Howard. Tasmanian novelist Richard Flanagan excoriates post-9/11 paranoia in The Unknown Terrorist (2006), in which individual rights are severely compromised by the triad of sensationalist news media, grandstanding politicians, and a police state empowered to detain suspects without charge or legal representation in the interests of public safety. Likewise set in Sydney, Australia, Flanagan’s thriller features an exotic dancer who has an ill-timed liaison with a Muslim Australian immigrant and drug mule running packets from Pakistan and Kuala Lumpur who comes under suspicion for a thwarted plan to place backpack bombs in Homebush Olympic stadium. When an Australian police detective interrogates the roommate of the unlikely terror suspect, nicknamed “The Doll,” he declares that the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation Act, as amended in 2004 and 2005, allows the state “the power to detain without charge if it has reason to believe that you are likely to commit an offence, or if we think you have information about terrorist activity.”107 The detained has no right to remain silent about what she may know, and if she “talk[s] to a journalist about this, any of this—tonight’s raid, this, these questions—you go to jail for five years. Under the ASIO Act that’s Australian law too, now. You breathe one word about your arrest, this interrogation, to a neighbor, your sister, your best friend, you go to jail for five years. Besides,” he says, “under the ASIO Act the media isn’t allowed to run any story about your arrest and detention or they go to jail for five years.”108 Not above sensationalizing his plot and characters in The Unknown Terrorist, Flanagan nevertheless describes the new restrictions brought to bear on Australians by the hysterical Anti-Terrorism Act of 2005 that makes anyone under suspicion subject to indefinite detention and places a gag order on any investigative reporting. Flanagan’s novel is dedicated to David Hicks, an Australian convert to Islam who was seized for associating with the Taliban in Afghanistan in 2001 and detained as an enemy combatant at Guantánamo Bay until 2007, when he was convicted under the Bush government’s Military Commissions Act of 2006 for violations of the laws of war. More soberly Conte, Joseph. Transnational Politics in the Post-9/11 Novel, Taylor & Francis Group, 2019. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/buffalo/detail.action?docID=5983951. Created from buffalo on 2023-01-05 23:21:49. 167 The Politics of Narrative 167 discussing Australian “security—by which they mean secrecy”109 measures in Diary of a Bad Year, Señor C. remarks on the Hicks case, observing that Australia has Copyright © 2019. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved. fallen into the same anti-legality or extra-legality as America. . . . In the new powers of policing that the Australian government is in the process of awarding itself, one detects a comparable contempt for the rule of law . . . where on the basis of denunciations from informers (“sources”) people simply vanish or are vanished from society, and publicizing their disappearance qualifies as a crime in its own right.110 Of the many offenses in post-9/11 global politics tallied by Señor C. in Diary of a Bad Year, he is most appalled by the repression of speech that is the signature of a police state. As the author of a “collection of essays on censorship,”111 the ASIO Act rankles him more than any other aspect of the Coalition’s overreaction to Islamist terrorism. Instead of the expansion of the freedom of speech promised by the end of the Cold War, the millennial age of terror has witnessed “legislation in the United States, the UK, and now Australia”112 that a. heightens surveillance by security agencies especially of satellite telephony and electronic communications; b. retains and enhances the secrecy afforded to government activity and documentation because, runs the mantra, “extraordinary times demand extraordinary measures”;113 and c. revisits “old-fashioned restrictions of the baldest sort”114 on the Australian citizen’s right to speak out against the state or of the press’s right to report it. Señor C. comes a cropper, however, when he imprudently offers his opinions—heretofore reserved for the essays we are reading—in a public forum. We’re told in “06. On the hurly-burly of politics” that the author has gone to the National Library in the Australian capital of Canberra to give a reading from his novel, Waiting for the Barbarians, on the twenty-fifth anniversary of its publication in 1980. He takes the opportunity to preface the reading with “some remarks about pending security legislation. These remarks were reproduced in garbled form on the front page of the newspaper The Australian.”115 It is at this juncture in the narrative that the opinions of Señor C. and those of John Coetzee, slightly misquoted, are most closely correlated. In fact, coverage of the reading at the Australian Book Review function appears in The Australian for October 24, 2005, under the title “Nobel Author Sees Parallel in Terror Laws.”116 The author is quoted as saying that my novel Waiting for the Barbarians “emerged from the South Africa of the 1970s, where the security police could come in and out and barnstorm [sic: the word I used was blindfold] and handcuff you without explaining why, and take you away to an unspecified Conte, Joseph. Transnational Politics in the Post-9/11 Novel, Taylor & Francis Group, 2019. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/buffalo/detail.action?docID=5983951. Created from buffalo on 2023-01-05 23:21:49. 168 The Politics of Narrative 168 Copyright © 2019. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved. site and do what they wanted to you.” The police, I was claimed to have said, “could do what they wanted because there was no real recourse against them because special provisions of the legislation indemnified them in advance.” For real read legal.117 Despite the reporter’s poor transcription of his remarks, this account of the author’s public reading attains special importance in Diary of a Bad Year as Coetzee could easily have chosen to invent a stage on which Señor C. might make his strong opinions known; instead, Coetzee seems determined to speak his accusation—that anti-apartheid laws in South Africa of the 1970s and the Anti-Terrorism Act in Australia in 2005 are equivalent—in his own voice. Let’s briefly compare the narrative strategy of Coetzee’s presentation of the two lectures that comprise “The Lives of Animals.” They are first delivered by J. M. Coetzee at Princeton University as part of a series (that included Antonin Scalia), The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, on October 15 and 16, 1997. “The Philosophers and the Animals” and “The Poets and the Animals” are then published in The Lives of Animals (1999), with an introduction by Amy Gutmann and four “Reflections” on animal rights by interdisciplinary scholars. As one of the respondents, Peter Singer, observes in a droll fiction of his own, the lectures are cast as “a fictional account of a female novelist called Costello giving a lecture at an American university. . . . [H]e’s going to stand up there and give a lecture about someone giving a lecture? Très post-moderne.”118 The two lectures are then included verbatim as Lessons 4 and 5 in Elizabeth Costello, but with the significant difference that the detailed footnotes for sources and references (that appear at the bottom of the page of scholarship in reduced font size) are missing. That is, the “original” (Coetzee) is a series of lectures delivered in the postmodern form of a narrative fiction; whereas the “copy” (Costello) is a postmodern novel delivered in the form of a series of lectures. We might be teased into thinking that the same sort of double gambit is at work in Diary of a Bad Year, and it is; but in the “Second Diary” section “On the hurly-burly of politics” the “original” remarks (Coetzee) and their “copy” (Señor C.) come even closer to conflation. Both the Tanner Lectures and “The Lives of Animals” in Elizabeth Costello are represented as fictions and are thus both ventriloquized by the eponymous character; whereas Coetzee’s remarks as reported in The Australian are his own, and the supplements are the errors in transcription and Señor C.’s account of his response to the actual newspaper report; that is, the “original” is nonfiction while its “copy” is fictional. Here the “Nobel Author” reproduces a quotation in public media. His remarks lament that under the Australian Anti-Terrorism Act the repression of freedom of the press would be as severe as in South Africa under apartheid. And yet his criticism of the new law has been reported in The Conte, Joseph. Transnational Politics in the Post-9/11 Novel, Taylor & Francis Group, 2019. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/buffalo/detail.action?docID=5983951. Created from buffalo on 2023-01-05 23:21:49. 169 The Politics of Narrative 169 Australian and assumes an independent standing as public discourse, attributable to John Coetzee, a postmodern irony that appeals to Coetzee perhaps more than Señor C. The latter continues: I went on to mention—but this was not reported—that any journalist who reported such a disappearance might be arrested and charged with endangering the security of the state. “All of this and much more, in apartheid South Africa,” I concluded, “was done in the name of a struggle against terror. I used to think that the people who created these laws that effectively suspended the rule of law were moral barbarians. Now I know they were just pioneers, ahead of their time.”119 While this quotation is included almost verbatim in The Australian’s report, Señor C. is being disingenuous about the journalist’s failure to include his remarks on the threat of arrest of reporters. In his coverage of the event, journalist Matt Price does in fact quote Coetzee’s extended comments on press censorship in a security state: Copyright © 2019. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved. He went on to tell the packed auditorium: “If somebody telephoned a reporter and said, ‘Tell the world—some men came last night, took my husband, my son, my father away, I don’t know who they were, they didn’t give names, they had guns,’ the next thing that happened would be that you and the reporter . . . would be brought into custody for furthering the aims of the proscribed organisation endangering the security of the state.”120 Why does Señor C. claim that this statement which bears directly on the universal rights of an independent press was not reported, if not to suggest that he is more stalwart in defense of freedom of speech than the newspaper reporter himself? In any case, the man who makes these remarks (Coetzee) and the character that provides an account of their coverage (Señor C.) diverge in this respect. Coetzee surely knows this— that the omission in the text of Diary makes the objection of the narrator all the stronger and his character an ever so slightly aggrandized version of the author himself. Where the newspaper article and the “Second Diary” do not diverge, however, is in the “unsubtle jibe at the new anti-terror laws”121 enacted by John Howard’s government. It’s here, in stating explicitly at his Canberra reading the (im)moral equivalence of the Coalition in the global War on Terror and the South African government under apartheid that Coetzee speaks in his own person. Were it not for the fact that Coetzee’s remarks are delivered on October 23, 2005, and Harold Pinter’s broadside against the Blair government in his videotaped Nobel Lecture is screened at the Swedish Academy on December 7, 2005, one could say that Conte, Joseph. Transnational Politics in the Post-9/11 Novel, Taylor & Francis Group, 2019. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/buffalo/detail.action?docID=5983951. Created from buffalo on 2023-01-05 23:21:49. 170 The Politics of Narrative 170 Coetzee’s indictment of the Howard government on the same grounds is positively Pinteresque. The attack, as we’ve seen, does not go unnoticed, and the review of Diary of a Bad Year that appears in The Australian in 2007 refers to the Canberra reading and states that the book “targets [the] Prime Minister.”122 In doing so Señor C. and Coetzee alike know that they are “giving offense,” to invoke the title of the book on censorship published in the 1990s, by suggesting that the Australian government is no slouch at moral barbarity. Furthermore, because one cannot in truth attack a fictional character, Coetzee knows that it is he, like Pinter, who “will be slickly refuted, disparaged, even ridiculed”123 for venturing such a contentious political opinion. He does not have long to wait, as two days later, in a letter to the editor of The Australian, a writer suggests that if he doesn’t like Australia, he might as well go back where he came from, and if not there, then to Zimbabwe.124 Determined to express his resistance to the oppressive laws of a security state, Coetzee might well expect to find himself, in his own person, on the sharp end of charges by politicians, or even by the ASIO itself. But he is most distressed that the assault, “irascible, illogical . . . heavy with bile,”125 comes not from the state but from “the man in the street”126 in the forum of public opinion. What’s more, the letter writer is expressing his own right to speech, however ignorant and offensive. As an otherwise withdrawn and taciturn man, Señor C. is not well suited for “the rough and tumble world of politics.” While such retorts are common among the unpracticed debaters in the agora, “me it numbs like a blow from a lead cosh.”127 The sensible thing to do would be to keep one’s strong opinions to oneself. That after the Canberra reading in 2005, we have both Señor C.’s account and Coetzee’s novel suggests that author and narrator alike feel too aggrieved by post-9/11 global politics to sensibly keep their silence. Copyright © 2019. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved. On Political Philosophy I have suggested that we can read the opinions of Diary of a Bad Year not as a miscellany but rather as the development of the writer’s political thought in the aftermath of 9/11. As such we come to the summary statement of his philosophy near the end of his comments, in “17. On having thoughts.” He says: If I were pressed to give my brand of political thought a label, I would call it pessimistic anarchistic quietism, or anarchist quietistic pessimism, or pessimistic quietistic anarchism: anarchism because experience tells me that what is wrong with politics is power itself; quietism because I have my doubts about the will to set about changing the world, a will infected with the drive to power; and pessimism because I am skeptical that, in a fundamental way, things can be changed.128 Conte, Joseph. Transnational Politics in the Post-9/11 Novel, Taylor & Francis Group, 2019. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/buffalo/detail.action?docID=5983951. Created from buffalo on 2023-01-05 23:21:49. 171 The Politics of Narrative 171 Copyright © 2019. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved. The writer expresses his political philosophy only through its negation; his is a political thought in not being political. As an anarchist and not a Machiavellian, he rejects the pursuit and retention of power, which is the essence of politics. As a quietist and not a raznochinets with thoughts of revolution, he rejects direct action that inevitably results in the struggle for power among opposing factions. And as a pessimist and not an ambitious reformer, he rejects the promise of a world that can be improved upon. Like Jean-Paul Sartre who, when informed that he had been awarded the 1964 Nobel Prize in Literature, said simply, “Je refuse,” J. M. Coetzee believes that to accept a political identity—Afrikaner, leftist, or animal liberationist—would be to compromise his ability to reflect on that which is melior (better) and that which is peior (worse) in kratos (power, rule). Only by his refusal of political thought in his own person—the willing suspension of political belief—can he compose a fiction that retains the power to persuade (ῥήτωρ, rhetor; the orator whose talent Plato deprecates in the Phaedrus); and in so doing there is perhaps another who, in his own person, will be moved to act. That is why in “24. On Dostoevsky” Señor C. is deeply moved by Ivan’s repudiation of faith in the “Rebellion” chapter of The Brothers Karamazov, even though his “vengeful views” are unlike the quietistic “political ethics” of Jesus, whose doctrines break “the cycle of revenge and reprisal.”129 Dostoevsky, a devout Christian when he composes his final novel in 1880, gives the most impassioned speeches in the book to a rationalist who returns “his ticket of admission to the universe God has created.”130 Dostoevsky’s success in summoning the debate among the Karamazov brothers—the sensualist Dmitri, the atheist Ivan, and the Orthodox novice Alexei—“has nothing to do with ethics or politics, everything to do with rhetoric.”131 Thus, we return to the narrative strategy of Diary of a Bad Year by which a narrator espouses a variety of political thoughts in more, or less, convincing fashion; and yet that political discourse is spoken not in the author’s own language but through another’s, not in his own person but through his art. Notes 1. J. M. Coetzee, Giving Offense: Essays on Censorship (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 205. 2. J. M. Coetzee, Diary of a Bad Year (New York: Penguin, 2007). 3. On the novel as a hybrid of essay writing and fiction, see the review essay by Richard Samin, “J. M. Coetzee’s Diary of a Bad Year: Between Essay Writing and Fiction,” Commonwealth 32, no. 1 (Autumn 2009): 45–53. 4. Coetzee, Diary of a Bad Year, 151. 5. Ibid., 141. 6. Ibid., 22. See Giving Offense: Essays on Censorship (1996). The diegetic author in “06. On the hurly-burly of politics” identifies Barbarians as “my novel,” Diary of a Bad Year, 171. 7. Derek Attridge parries criticism of Elizabeth Costello that “Coetzee uses his fictional creations to advance arguments . . . without assuming Conte, Joseph. Transnational Politics in the Post-9/11 Novel, Taylor & Francis Group, 2019. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/buffalo/detail.action?docID=5983951. Created from buffalo on 2023-01-05 23:21:49. 172 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. Copyright © 2019. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. The Politics of Narrative 172 responsibility for them, and is thus ethically at fault.” He states correctly that this complaint takes such arguments qua arguments, overlooking their literary purpose, and so failing to account for the “full ethical force of the fictions.” J. M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 197. Vladimir Nabokov, Strong Opinions (New York: Vintage, 1990), xvi. After winning the Nobel Prize, Coetzee made an exception for David Attwell, his most prominent critic, though he demurred to discuss his recently published novel, Elizabeth Costello, stating: “I tend to resist invitations to interpret my own fiction. If there were a better, clearer, shorter way of saying what the fiction says, then why not scrap the fiction? Elizabeth, Lady C, claims to be writing at the limits of language. Would it not be insulting to her if I were diligently to follow after her, explaining what she means but is not smart enough to say?” “An Exclusive Interview with J. M. Coetzee,” Dagens Nyheter 12 Aug. 2003, dn.se/kultur-noje/an-exclusiveinterview-with-j-m-coetzee/, 3 Mar. 2012. The book for which Señor C.’s essays are solicited by “Bruno Geistler of Mittwoch Verlag GmbH” is likewise titled Strong Opinions, adding to the mise en abyme of the novel. Diary of a Bad Year, 19, 21. Reviewer Jeff Simon makes the identification of the fictional strategy of the two novels explicitly in “J. M. Coetzee: A Man with Strong Opinions,” Buffalo News 30 Dec. 2007, Factiva, https://doi.org/BFNW000020080 101e3cu00022, 3 Mar. 2012. As David Attwell points out, Coetzee published an early essay on Pale Fire, “Nabokov’s Pale Fire and the Primacy of Art” in 1974. Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews, ed. David Attwell (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 398. Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1962), 13. Coetzee, Giving Offense, 48. Coetzee, Diary of a Bad Year, 53. Ibid., 12. Ibid., 25. On Anya as Lolita, see Richard Samin, “J. M. Coetzee’s Diary of a Bad Year: Between Essay Writing and Fiction,” 46. Coetzee, Diary of a Bad Year, 100. Ibid., 29. Ibid., 172. Deborah Hope, “Coetzee ‘Diary’ Targets PM,” The Australian 25 Aug. 2007, theaustralian.com.au/news/coetzee-diary-targets-pm/story-e6frg6no1111114264599, 1 Mar. 2012. Coetzee, Diary of a Bad Year, 19. Ibid., 21. Ibid., 149. Ibid., 151. Coetzee, “An Exclusive Interview.” Coetzee, Diary of a Bad Year, 172. In an interview with David Attwell, Coetzee admits, “All autobiography is storytelling, all writing is autobiography,” Doubling the Point, 391. Ibid., 394. J. M. Coetzee, The Master of Petersburg (New York: Penguin, 1994). See Margaret Scanlan, “Incriminating Documents: Nechaev and Dostoevsky in J. M. Coetzee’s The Master of Petersburg,” Philological Quarterly 76, no. 4 (1997): 463–77. Coetzee, Doubling the Point, 394. Conte, Joseph. Transnational Politics in the Post-9/11 Novel, Taylor & Francis Group, 2019. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/buffalo/detail.action?docID=5983951. Created from buffalo on 2023-01-05 23:21:49. Copyright © 2019. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved. 173 The Politics of Narrative 173 31. Coetzee, Diary of a Bad Year, 30. 32. Ibid., 35. 33. Coetzee has absorbed Bakhtin on the Dostoevskian novel as hybrid writing, “as a form of Menippean satire, a mixture of fictional narrative with philosophical dialogue, confession, hagiography, fantasy” and the “‘dialogic’ attitude toward the self in Dostoevsky’s first-person narrators, the self becoming its own interlocutor,” as demonstrated in his essay, “Confession and Double Thoughts: Tolstoy, Rousseau, Dostoevsky,” in Doubling the Point, 422–23. 34. Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 313–14; emphasis in the original. 35. Coetzee, Doubling the Point, 394. 36. Coetzee, Diary of a Bad Year, 9. 37. Ibid., 127. 38. Ibid., 171. The “real” J. M. Coetzee made these remarks prefatory to a public reading at the National Library in Canberra on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the publication of Waiting for the Barbarians. See Matt Price, “Nobel Author Sees Parallel in Terror Laws,” The Australian 24 Oct. 2005, Local sec.: 1+. 39. Bakhtin, Dialogic Imagination, 315. 40. J. M. Coetzee, Summertime: Scenes from Provincial Life (London: Harvill Secker, 2009), 239. 41. Ibid. 42. Ibid., 240. 43. Coetzee, Doubling the Point, 393. 44. David Attwell, J. M. Coetzee: South Africa and the Politics of Writing (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993). 45. Coetzee, Summertime, 239–40. 46. Coetzee, Diary of a Bad Year, 4. 47. Coetzee, Doubling the Point, 243. 48. Coetzee, Diary of a Bad Year, 224. 49. Coetzee, Summertime, 229. 50. Coetzee, Diary of a Bad Year, 4. In his review of Diary, Michael Valdez Moses observes that Señor C.’s “search for an apolitical existence free from the evils of state power inevitably comes face to face with the dangers and discomforts of a ‘natural’ world where the clash of personal desires is unregulated by any independent governmental authority,” “State of Discontent: J. M. Coetzee’s Anti-political Fiction,” Reason 40, no. 3 (July 2008), reason.com/archives/2008/06/20/state-of-discontent, 27 Feb. 2012. 51. Coetzee, Summertime, 229. 52. Coetzee, Diary of a Bad Year, 9. 53. Ibid. 54. Ibid., 12. 55. Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms (New York: Scribner’s, 1929), 243. 56. Coetzee, Diary of a Bad Year, 12. 57. Ibid., 21. 58. Bakhtin, Dialogic Imagination, 314. 59. Coetzee, Diary of a Bad Year, 226. 60. Ibid., 11. 61. Ibid., 15. Conte, Joseph. Transnational Politics in the Post-9/11 Novel, Taylor & Francis Group, 2019. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/buffalo/detail.action?docID=5983951. Created from buffalo on 2023-01-05 23:21:49. Copyright © 2019. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved. 174 The Politics of Narrative 174 62. From the Greek, κρατέω, to be strong, powerful; hence, to rule. Coetzee, Doubling the Point, 24. 63. Coetzee, Diary of a Bad Year, 17. 64. Ibid. 65. Ibid., 51. 66. Ibid., 18. 67. Ibid. 68. Ibid. 69. Ibid. 70. Philip Bobbitt, Terror and Consent: The Wars for the Twenty-First Century (New York: Knopf, 2008), 12. 71. Coetzee, Diary of a Bad Year, 39. 72. Jane Mayer, “A Deadly Interrogation: Can the C.I.A. Legally Kill a Prisoner?” New Yorker 14 Nov. 2005, newyorker.com/magazine/2005/11/ 14/a-deadly-interrogation, 10 Mar. 2012. 73. A comparable indictment of torture and homicide of a prisoner in extrajudicial detention is Alex Gibney’s Academy Award winning documentary, Taxi to the Dark Side (United States, THINKFilm, 2007), which focuses on the case of an Afghan taxi driver named Dilawar, beaten to death at the Parwan Detention Facility adjacent to Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan. 74. Mayer, “A Deadly Interrogation.” 75. Coetzee, Diary of a Bad Year, 17. Cheney later defended the legality of the practice, or at least his own exemption from prosecution. He “described the use of waterboarding and other coercive methods—including threatening detainees with a gun and a drill—as legal and crucial elements of the counterterrorism war. ‘I knew about the waterboarding, not specifically in any one particular case, but as a general policy that we had approved,’ said Mr. Cheney, who noted that neither a gun nor a drill had actually been used on detainees.” Rachel L. Swarns, “Cheney Offers Sharp Defense of C.I.A. Tactics,” New York Times 31 Aug. 2009, nytimes.com/2009/08/31/us/politics/31cheney.html, 29 June 2012. 76. Coetzee, Doubling the Point, 363. 77. Ibid. 78. J. M. Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello (New York: Viking, 2003), 159. 79. In response, Paul West writes his own review of “Lesson Six” in “The Novelist and the Hangman: When Horror Invades Protocol,” Harper’s (July 2004): 89–94. West rebuts Costello’s claim: “‘If you don’t get into the nitty-gritty of this horrible stuff, then you are not sympathizing, empathizing with the people who went through it,’ West says. ‘I think literature has an obligation to do that.’ Of the perpetrators, he says, ‘[If] you close the gate on certain destructive forms of behavior, then you have failed your obligation as a novelist to be those people—in other words, you’re not going to present a representative slice of human life and human horror if you don’t do it.’” “Paul West Responds,” The Elegant Variation, 21 Jan. 2004, marksarvas. blogs.com/elegvar/2004/01/paul_west_respo.html, 24 Mar. 2008. 80. Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello, 174. 81. Ibid. 82. Ibid. 83. Swarns, “Cheney Offers Sharp Defense of C.I.A. Tactics.” 84. Henry Chu, “Poland Shaken by Case Alleging an Illicit CIA Prison There,” Los Angeles Times 21 June 2012, latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/lafg-poland-cia-20120622,0,1305119,full.story, 3 July 2012. 85. Coetzee, Diary of a Bad Year, 19. Conte, Joseph. Transnational Politics in the Post-9/11 Novel, Taylor & Francis Group, 2019. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/buffalo/detail.action?docID=5983951. Created from buffalo on 2023-01-05 23:21:49. Copyright © 2019. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved. 175 The Politics of Narrative 175 86. Ibid., 19. 87. See Anya’s comments regarding the residence of Señor C. in Sydney, Diary of a Bad Year, 224, 226; whereas Coetzee actually resides in Adelaide. 88. Ibid., 19. 89. Ibid. 90. Ibid., 20. 91. Ibid. 92. Ibid., 54. 93. Martin Amis, The Second Plane: September 11: Terror and Boredom (New York: Knopf, 2008), 8. 94. Ibid., 9. 95. Samuel P. Huntington, “The Clash of Civilizations?” Foreign Affairs 72, no. 3 (Summer 1993): 22. 96. Amis, Second Plane, 124. 97. Ibid., 126–27. 98. Coetzee, Diary of a Bad Year, 20. 99. In a review of The Second Plane, also in The Guardian, Tim Adams recounts his conversation with Terry Eagleton on Amis’s attacks on the liberal left’s response to Islamic terrorism: “I have no idea why we should listen to novelists on these matters any more than we should listen to window cleaners,” “Amis’s War on Terror by Other Means,” The Guardian 12 Jan. 2008, guardian.co.uk/books/2008/jan/13/politics.martinamis, 15 July 2012. Like Pinter, but from another political direction, Amis has ventured into the field of direct political statement at some personal cost. 100. Coetzee, Diary of a Bad Year, 20. 101. Ibid., 21. 102. Anya specifically references this event in upbraiding Señor C. that he should have no pity for Islamist fundamentalists who murder “infidels,” Diary of a Bad Year, 74–75. 103. Ibid., 21. 104. Ibid. 105. Ibid. 106. Celestine Bohlen covered the controversy in the New York Times, noting that Susan Sontag and other writers made similar statements, noting that bravery is not the same as morality, “Think Tank; In New War on Terrorism, Words Are Weapons, Too,” New York Times 21 Sept. 2001, nytimes. com/2001/09/29/arts/think-tank-in-new-war-on-terrorism-words-areweapons-too.html?_r=0, 15 July 2012. 107. Richard Flanagan, The Unknown Terrorist (New York: Grove Press, 2006), 218. 108. Ibid., 221. 109. Coetzee, Diary of a Bad Year, 41. 110. Ibid., 43. 111. Ibid., 22. 112. Ibid. 113. Ibid., 43. 114. Ibid., 22. 115. Ibid., 171. 116. Matt Price, “Nobel Author Sees Parallel in Terror Laws,” The Australian 24 Oct. 2005, Local sec.: 1+. 117. Coetzee, Diary of a Bad Year, 171. 118. J. M. Coetzee, The Lives of Animals, ed. Amy Gutmann (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 85. Conte, Joseph. Transnational Politics in the Post-9/11 Novel, Taylor & Francis Group, 2019. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/buffalo/detail.action?docID=5983951. Created from buffalo on 2023-01-05 23:21:49. 176 The Politics of Narrative 176 Coetzee, Diary of a Bad Year, 171. Price, “Nobel Author Sees Parallel in Terror Laws.” Ibid. Hope, “Coetzee ‘Diary’ Targets PM.” Coetzee, Diary of a Bad Year, 127. Ibid., 172. Ibid. Ibid., 18. Ibid., 172. Ibid., 203. Ibid., 224. Ibid., 223. In Coetzee’s Age of Iron (New York: Penguin, 1990), the narrator-author of the diary that comprises the novel, Mrs. E. Curren, who is dying of cancer, considers whether she might hand back her ticket, in an allusion to Dostoevsky, though she doubts that “the handing back of tickets will be allowed,” 188. 131. Coetzee, Diary of a Bad Year, 225. 119. 120. 121. 122. 123. 124. 125. 126. 127. 128. 129. 130. Copyright © 2019. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved. Works Cited Adams, Tim. “Amis’s War on Terror by Other Means.” The Guardian 12 Jan. 2008, guardian.co.uk/books/2008/jan/13/politics.martinamis. 15 July 2012. Amis, Martin. The Second Plane: September 11: Terror and Boredom. New York: Knopf, 2008. Attridge, Derek. J. M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. Attwell, David. J. M. Coetzee: South Africa and the Politics of Writing. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993. Bakhtin, M. M. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Edited by Michael Holquist. Translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981. Bobbitt, Philip. Terror and Consent: The Wars for the Twenty-First Century. New York: Knopf, 2008. Bohlen, Celestine. “Think Tank; In New War on Terrorism, Words Are Weapons, Too.” New York Times 21 Sept. 2001, nytimes.com/2001/09/29/arts/think-tankin-new-war-on-terrorism-words-are-weapons-too.html?_r=0. 15 July 2012. Chu, Henry. “Poland Shaken by Case Alleging an Illicit CIA Prison There.” Los Angeles Times 21 June 2012, latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fgpoland-cia-20120622,0,1305119,full.story. Archived, pqasb.pqarchiver.com/ latimes/doc/1021425402.html?FMT=ABS&FMTS=ABS:FT&type=current& date=Jun+22%2C+2012&author=Chu%2C+Henry&pub=Los+Angeles+ Times&edition=&startpage=A.1&desc=Poland+shaken+by+case+alleging+an+ illicit+CIA+prison. 3 July 2012. Coetzee, J. M. Age of Iron. New York: Penguin, 1990. ———. Diary of a Bad Year. New York: Penguin, 2007. ———. Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews. Edited by David Attwell. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992. ———. Elizabeth Costello. New York: Viking, 2003. ———. “An Exclusive Interview with J. M. Coetzee.” Interview with David Attwell. Dagens Nyheter 12 Aug. 2003, dn.se/kultur-noje/an-exclusive-interview-with-j-mcoetzee/. 3 Mar. 2012. Conte, Joseph. Transnational Politics in the Post-9/11 Novel, Taylor & Francis Group, 2019. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/buffalo/detail.action?docID=5983951. Created from buffalo on 2023-01-05 23:21:49. Copyright © 2019. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved. 177 The Politics of Narrative 177 ———. Giving Offense: Essays on Censorship. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. ———. The Lives of Animals. Edited by Amy Gutmann. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999. ———. The Master of Petersburg. New York: Penguin, 1994. ———. “Nabokov’s Pale Fire and the Primacy of Art.” University of Cape Town Studies in English 6 (1974): 1–7. ———. Summertime: Scenes from Provincial Life. London: Harvill Secker, 2009. Flanagan, Richard. The Unknown Terrorist. New York: Grove Press, 2006. Hemingway, Ernest. A Farewell to Arms. New York: Scribner’s, 1929 Hope, Deborah. “Coetzee ‘Diary’ Targets PM.” The Australian 25 Aug. 2007, theaustralian.com.au/news/coetzee-diary-targets-pm/story-e6frg6no1111114264599. 1 Mar. 2012. Huntington, Samuel P. “The Clash of Civilizations?” Foreign Affairs 72, no. 3 (Summer 1993): 22–49. Mayer, Jane. “A Deadly Interrogation: Can the C.I.A. Legally Kill a Prisoner?” New Yorker 14 Nov. 2005, newyorker.com/magazine/2005/11/14/a-deadlyinterrogation. 10 Mar. 2012. Moses, Michael Valdes. “State of Discontent: J. M. Coetzee’s Anti-Political Fiction.” Reason 40, no. 3 (July 2008), reason.com/archives/2008/06/20/ state-of-discontent. 27 Feb. 2012. Nabokov, Vladimir. Pale Fire. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1962. ———. Strong Opinions. 1973. New York: Vintage, 1990. Pinter, Harold. “Nobel Lecture: Art, Truth & Politics.” Nobelprize.org 7 Dec. 2005, nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2005/pinter-lecture. html. 11 Mar. 2012. Price, Matt. “Nobel Author Sees Parallel in Terror Laws.” The Australian 24 Oct. 2005, Local sec.: 1+. Factiva, http://dx.doi.org/AUSTLN0020051024 e1ao00001. 3 Mar. 2012. Samin, Richard. “J. M. Coetzee’s Diary of a Bad Year: Between Essay Writing and Fiction.” Commonwealth 32, no. 1 (Autumn 2009): 45–53. Scanlan, Margaret. “Incriminating Documents: Nechaev and Dostoevsky in J. M. Coetzee’s The Master of Petersburg.” Philological Quarterly 76, no. 4 (1997): 463–77. Academic OneFile, http://dx.doi.org/GALE|A300060447. 10 Mar. 2012. Simon, Jeff. “J. M. Coetzee: A Man with Strong Opinions.” Buffalo News 30 Dec. 2007. Factiva, http://dx.doi.org/BFNW000020080101e3cu00022. 3 Mar. 2012. Swarns, Rachel L. “Cheney Offers Sharp Defense of C.I.A. Tactics.” New York Times 31 Aug. 2009, nytimes.com/2009/08/31/us/politics/31cheney.html. 29 June 2012. Taxi to the Dark Side. Directed by Alex Gibney. United States, THINKFilm, 2007. West, Paul. “The Novelist and the Hangman: When Horror Invades Protocol.” Harper’s (July 2004): 89–94. ———. “Paul West Responds.” The Elegant Variation, 21 Jan. 2004, marksarvas.blogs.com/elegvar/2004/01/paul_west_respo.html. 24 Mar. 2008. ———. The Very Rich Hours of Count von Stauffenberg. Woodstock, NY: Overlook Press, 1989. Conte, Joseph. Transnational Politics in the Post-9/11 Novel, Taylor & Francis Group, 2019. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/buffalo/detail.action?docID=5983951. Created from buffalo on 2023-01-05 23:21:49.