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Truth and Love Together at LastSTYLE, FORM, AND MORAL VISION IN AGE OF IRONSamantha Vice |
It is plausible to think that the spare style and distinctive form of J. M. Coetzee’s writing has some close connection to the content and quality of his moral vision. In this paper, I explore this connection against the backdrop of a debate in moral philosophy, the debate about whether morality, or the “moral point of view,” is essentially impartial. Here I will explore the moral point of view of Coetzee’s 1990 novel, Age of Iron, though much of what I say applies to his other novels, too. In particular, I ask how Coetzee reconciles the demands of love with the demands of truth. Intuitively, the demands of love, whether moral or not, seem partial and personal, while the demands of truth, at least in one way it is presented in Age of Iron and in the philosophical tradition, require from us what Coetzee’s protagonist, Elizabeth Curren, calls a “cold eye”—the kind of detached impartiality with which the moral point of view is often identified. It is one of the concerns of the novel to achieve a balance between truthful perception and the ethical demands of love. Mrs. Curren’s dying hope, expressed in the long letter to her daughter that makes up the narrative, is that in her writing she can bring the two requirements together: “In this letter from elsewhere (so long a letter!), truth and love together at last” (Age of Iron, 129). To accomplish this synthesis is, Mrs. Curren realizes, the task of the moral life, and Coetzee’s novel suggests that it is also the task of narrative art, which is worked out through the relation between the style, content, and particular form in which the narrative comes to us.
We might ultimately reject Coetzee’s stringent ethics here and in all his novels. I aim neither to argue in its favor, nor to criticize it, but instead to suggest that his novel reminds us of neglected possibilities in the debate about partiality and impartiality.
Impartiality is the absence of bias or favoritism toward oneself or one’s own, whether one’s own projects, loved ones, or just those related to one in some way felt to be significant. Insofar as morality has something to do with the equal consideration of everyone’s well-being, to be partial is then prima facie at odds with morality. From the moral point of view, everyone counts equally, so one’s moral judgments should not be affected by sentiment or loyalty toward loved ones or, at the limit, one’s self. Partiality toward particular people and the love that is its ally has been regarded by some philosophers as extraneous or even inimical to morality. William Godwin’s famous dismissal of partial relationships in favor of impartial moral principles—“what magic is there in the pronoun ‘my’ to overturn the decisions of everlasting truth?”1—is extreme, perhaps, but brings to the fore the commitments lying behind the modern moral tradition: that morality is essentially impartial and that the demands of love and self constitute a competing realm of value. Paul Taylor, for instance, lists impartiality as one of the necessary conditions for a rule or principle to “belong to the category of morality.”2 And R. M. Hare’s “Archangel,” Roderick Firth’s “Ideal Observer,” and the “point of view of the universe,” in Sidgewick’s words, provide vivid images of the kind of detached supermen thought to provide true moral exemplars.3
Adopting these exemplars’ point of view as far as possible is therefore, on this view, ethically required. The images assume, too, that partiality is also epistemically required. Favoritism, bias, considering some things more worthy of attention or protection than others: all these habits of thought and feeling are obstacles in the way to truth. In order to see clearly and attain knowledge it is best to achieve some distance from the self and its loves, to “step back,” as we say, in order to ensure the objectivity that comes from surveying one’s own self as one would any other. So both in the realm of knowledge and in the ethical realm, we have strong reason to take up the impartial point of view. While more contemporary accounts of impartial theories are less stark than this and find ways of justifying from the impartial point of view some partiality on the ground,4 the basic images recur, as Margaret Urban Walker notes:
God’s eye, the ideal observer, the third-person spectator, the disinterested judge. Such pictures are a familiar part of the prevailing rhetoric of impartiality—the way the concept is ‘deployed’ in standard tropes, repeated images or common patterns of description by philosophers.5
If the moral point of view in this conception reveals any love at all, it is agape—a universal love or concern for humankind, rather than love for the particular person one’s fancy or instinct inexplicably lights on. And it is perhaps also worth noting here that agape or caritas belong properly in a theistic context. Probably only God, or some elect saints, can achieve this universal love. What we are asked to do, however, if as moral agents we also desire to love, is to aspire to God’s benevolence. And here utilitarianism, that most resolutely secular of moral theories, oddly comes closest to articulating a version of this religious vision.
However appealing the vision of impartiality—and any moral theory must contain the prohibition against unfairness that is central to worries about partiality—the truth remains that ethical reality contains partial elements, and rightly so.6 Most of us strive for particular love, not agape. Most of us would think that Iris Murdoch is on the right track when she says that “love is knowledge of the individual.”7 We favor certain people when there is no objective reason for picking them out as special. We know that each one of us matters no more than any other, and yet in the face of this knowledge we persist in pursuing our projects because they are our own and in favoring certain people because they stand in some significant relation to us. While we can, as Thomas Nagel rightly reminds us, naturally take up what he calls the impersonal point of view, we cannot, it seems, live comfortably and extensively from it.8 And yet, at the same time, the demands of impartial truth cannot be ignored, and the cool objectivity and perspective that come from stepping back from oneself are often both morally and prudentially required.9
It is apparent already that allied to the notions of partiality and impartiality are others that have some more or less close conceptual connection. “Disinterestedness,” “impersonality,” “objectivity,” and “abstraction” are often used interchangeably or in conjunction with “impartial,” for example. However, this conflation of terms is unfortunate, and the worries generated on both sides of the debate are often a result of confusion here. We can, for instance, be impartial without being impersonal or abstracted, as Adrian Piper reminds us.10 I will argue that the union of truth and love for which Mrs. Curren strives is then a union in which a true and unbiased vision is allied to a deep interest in particular individuals.
There is, however, a striking passage in Age of Iron that seems to accept the dichotomy between love and impartiality. An interest in loved ones apparently undermines truth, and the novel at this point demands that we be impartial if we are to see truthfully and know how best to respond. The novel’s narrator, Mrs. Curren, is describing in a letter to her daughter her shattering journey into a South African township in the dying days of Apartheid and the terrible sight of her domestic worker’s son, Bheki, lying dead from a gunshot wound. Then she stops her narrative of events and addresses her daughter directly. I quote the passage in full:
I tell you the story of this morning mindful that the story-teller, from her office, claims the place of right. It is through my eyes that you see; the voice that speaks in your head is mine. Through me alone do you find yourself here on these desolate flats, smell the smoke in the air, see the bodies of the dead, hear the weeping, shiver in the rain. It is my thoughts that you think, my despair that you feel, and also the first stirrings of welcome for whatever will put an end to thought: sleep, death. To me your sympathies flow; your heart beats with mine. Now, my child, flesh of my flesh, my best self, I ask you to draw back. I tell you this story not so that you will feel for me but so you will learn how things are. It would be easier for you, I know, if the story came from someone else, if it were a stranger’s voice sounding in your ear. But the fact is, there is no one else. I am the only one. I am the one writing: I, I. So I ask you: attend to the writing, not to me. If lies and pleas and excuses weave among the words, listen for them. Do not pass them over, do not forgive them easily. Read all, even this adjuration, with a cold eye.
(Age of Iron, 103–4)
Mrs. Curren takes it for granted that her daughter’s sympathy will align her to her mother’s distress. Love makes us far more attuned to the distress of those we love than to those far away or to vague humanity in the abstract. Furthermore, the activity of narration itself and so of literature typically requires imaginative engagement with at least some characters, usually the protagonists and those to whom they are attached. Entering into the narration in the first place requires that the reader set aside some impartiality, that she be prepared to follow the characters, that she care for their fate. Mrs. Curren’s letter requires sympathy from her daughter and concern for what she narrates if the act of writing is to have any force and if the significance of the terrible events are to be conveyed. We—her daughter and the reader of the novel—see the situation through her eyes, an instance of the characteristic work of the narrator or focalizer generally: “It is through my eyes that you see; the voice that speaks in your head is mine.” Imaginative engagement gives rise to emotional responses, and also requires some sympathy to begin with if it is to work at all. The heart, in short, must be engaged if the literary act is to be successful.
And yet, just as her daughter and we are reminded of this, we are called back from our sympathies: We must “attend to the writing,” not the writer, attend, that is, to what is being depicted, not to the person describing it. Imaginative engagement with the writer, so essential to the writing process, also brings with it the possibility of error—“lies and pleas and excuses”—which must not be passed over or forgiven. “Do not read in sympathy with me. Let your heart not beat with mine,” she insists a little later (104). It is so easy for her daughter’s sympathy with her mother’s illness and her distressed reaction to the events in the township to cloud what is really morally important: the death of a child—and many children—and the injustice of Apartheid that makes these deaths a cause of terrible comradeship and pride. From this objective point of view, the suffering of her mother, a white woman accidentally caught up in events in which she feels complicit but to which she is really extraneous, are lower down the scale of moral significance than the sufferings of black people in a racist police state. Partiality toward her mother too easily obscures this, and it is, after all, her mother who is the “only one” speaking. Mrs. Curren, says Sam Durrant, “must find a way of writing that does not invite the traditional movement of identification. . . . A writing, then, at odds with itself, that writes against its own eliciting of the sympathetic imagination.”11 If we are to “learn how things are,” the conclusion here is, we must “read everything” with “a cold eye”; this is the only way, insofar as there is a way, to truth and a mature ethical response. In an age of iron, at least, only the cold eye can be trusted.
Despite Mrs. Curren’s warning to her daughter, she is aware that the ethical task is that of finding some accommodation between cold truth and love. As she says, her hope is that her letter will bring about some reconciliation: “truth and love, together at last,” with the implication that, at least in her life, they have been divorced. A good life for any morally sensitive person requires such a balance or risks losing many of the goods that distinguish human life. Achieving this might require that we rethink the opposition with which we began. Truth and love are both more complex than the stark terms of the debate allow. The love Mrs. Curren feels for her daughter comes easily, for instance, but there is also another, more difficult love to strive for. What happens when both the heart and the clear eye meet the impenetrable other—those in Age of Iron like Vercueil or Bheki’s friend, John, who reappear so often in Coetzee’s novels; those who resist understanding and interpretation, and to whom the heart finds it hard to incline in warmth? Vercueil, John, the barbarian girl, Michael K, Friday, the Namaquas in Dusklands, the Russian Nechaev, and the dogs that populate Coetzee’s novels all represent the limits of understanding and sympathy and therefore the astonishing difficulty of meeting ethical demands. There is a love that is not knowledge of the individual but an acceptance of the unknowable, and it is here, where sympathy and trust seem utterly unearned and gratuitous, and where knowing seems impossible, that the task to bring love and truth together is most difficult and most exigent.
As many commentators have pointed out, Coetzee’s work here can be instructively read through the notion of the Other.12 For Levinas, for example, ethics is essentially about the encounter between the self and the Other for whom the self finds itself responsible. In this light, the terms at play are not just those of, on the one hand, love of the particular person who is special because he stands in some relation to me and, on the other hand, universal impartial benevolence. What is at stake is also the highly particular love for someone beyond one’s epistemic grasp—and achieving this is the true ethical task. Here, the information that might be revealed to the impersonal, abstracted point of view (at least to God’s) is not available for the subject. And if every person can be the Other to someone, then this situation is the norm; it is the ethical situation.
Rather than investigating the often frustratingly protean notion of the Other, I want to pursue a more modest line of thought: I want to suggest that some accommodation between the impartial viewpoint and the demands of love is achieved in the novel in the interplay between Coetzee’s style, the act of writing and the form it takes here, and the encounter with the elusive Other. Seeing this at work in the novel might make us more inclined to follow Walker’s call for different, more earthly images of impartiality.
Coetzee’s instantly recognizable style in Age of Iron and in all his work to date is a good starting point because it brings into relief what is at stake in the conflict between the demands of sympathy, or love, and those of impersonal truth. Derek Attridge stands for many when he describes Coetzee’s style as “chiseled” and marked by “economy and efficiency.”13 One of the most notable features of Coetzee’s fictions has always been its austerity, spareness and the “slight self-consciousness” that makes his writing “forever on its guard against itself.”14 The paucity of ornament or flourish gives the texts an air of robust truthfulness—or less ambitiously, sincerity—and their very lack of adornment adds to the novels’ intense effect on the reader. The impression is that truth is not hidden behind rhetorical tricks; the worst is depicted without any obvious “fashioning,” even though the effect is the result of much stylistic work and discipline. If we could imagine the writing style of the Ideal Observer or the Archangel, if it made sense to talk of the “style of the universe” or of God, this might be the style we would imagine. Regardless of the content, there is some intuitive connection between an absence of rhetorical flourish, emotional excess, or ornament, and the kind of vision of the world attained by the impartial point of view.
However, allied to this sparse purity is the absence of any authorial intrusion, and this undermines the impression of impartiality toward which the style naturally seems to incline. As Attridge writes, the narratives are conveyed through the characters’ consciousness, which, “whether they are represented in the first or third person, occupy the entire affective and axiological space of the fiction.”15 Even in a third-person narrative like The Life and Times of Michael K everything comes to the reader through the consciousness of the protagonist, K.
There is, therefore, on the face of it a rather strange cohabitation between the elements of Coetzee’s style: On the one hand, there is the scrupulous, unadorned recording of events and mental states, which rewards the reader with a sense of impartiality. On the other hand, the channeling of events and meaning through one consciousness is just as much a feature of Coetzee’s style. The particular socially and historically embedded consciousness is precisely what is supposed to be the cause of distortion, partiality, and moral blindness. Both these modes—detached recording and the filtering of events through one consciousness—carry their moral dangers.
For instance, there is the risk that the accurate, thorough, and impartial gaze will become detached or pitiless. Why, after all, should the Ideal Observer or the Archangel or especially “the point of view of the universe” attend with valuing or sympathy rather than utter disinterest or, given our apparently inexhaustible capacity for evil, even intense dislike?16 Even when directed toward the self, why should the cold eye care? This is what those suspicious of the impartial gaze fear, and Mrs. Curren writes: “With every day I add to it the letter seems to grow more abstract, more abstracted, the kind of letter one writes from the stars, from the farther void, disembodied, crystalline, bloodless. Is that to be the fate of my love?” (Age of Iron, 137). That love will be lost to abstraction is the danger which the impartial eye must avoid.
On the other hand, the familiar and much discussed device of restricting the reader’s access to events by the use of the focalizing consciousness has its own complexities. That some integrity and exculpation is earned by the mere fact of scrupulous and thorough honesty toward the self is a somewhat dubious idea, but one with roots, at least, in that romantic ur-text, Rousseau’s Confessions. He begins, recall: “I am commencing an undertaking, hitherto without precedent, and which will never find an imitator. I desire to set before my fellows the likeness of a man in all the truth of nature, and that man myself.”17 Rousseau takes his sincerity, both here and throughout his life, to justify whatever was less than admirable; merely being true to himself and thus to the world is enough to exculpate him before God:
I have shown myself as I was: mean and contemptible, good, high-minded and sublime, according as I was one or the other. I have unveiled my inmost self even as Thou has seen it, O Eternal Being. Gather round me the countless host of my fellow-men; let them hear my confessions. Lament for my unworthiness, and blush for my imperfections. Then let each of them in turn reveal, with the same frankness, the secrets of his heart at the foot of the Throne, and say, if he dare, ‘I was better than that man!’18
Rousseau was, of course, confessing his own life, but the idea that sincere depiction carries some merit in itself is not restricted to autobiography. While sometimes less self-absorbed than those of Rousseau, the struggles of the conscience in Coetzee’s fictions are somewhat soothed by the recording of principles, ambivalence, despair, disgust, and anger. One is at least knowledgeable enough about one’s self to realize one’s own shortcomings and to feel some degree of shame, guilt, or just discomfort about them. And if not immediately so, the novels follow the progression towards such self-knowledge or self-acceptance. More positively, the act of writing this progression can be the act of constituting the self,19 or keeping it from dissolution in the face of threats. One is constituted and known—by the self and others—by what one stands for, as the Magistrate (Waiting for the Barbarians), Mrs. Curren, and David Lurie (Disgrace) realize. Writing then can be a way of saying, “Here I stand; this is who I—morally—am,” even if later we come to see the limits of our commitment. In this way, writing the self can have significance beyond exculpation to the formation and maintenance of moral identity and integrity.
We can sometimes gain epistemically and morally from this kind of self- assessment, but there are undoubtedly risks. Returning to fiction, one risk is that while characters may achieve some scrupulous and anatomical self-scrutiny, they may also meticulously record an enclosed and self-justifying vision. Notoriously, Rousseau revealed his own fantasies, and many narrators in Coetzee’s fictions are unreliable in the same way. With no authorial presence to keep check, error, bias, and distortion too easily creep in. From even her limited perspective, this is the error that Mrs. Curren is aware of and warns her daughter against, and her intervention in the quoted passage is reminiscent of the explicit intrusions of the omniscient author in much nineteenth-century fiction. She steers herself and her audience to a more correct reading of reality.
A second danger attending the device of the focalizing consciousness is that other equally vivid, equally valid sites of consciousness will be ignored. At the limit, this risks the extreme biases of solipsism or madness. I am reminded of that beautiful moment in Middlemarch, a world away from Coetzee, when George Eliot reorients the reader’s sympathy. The chapter begins:
One morning, some weeks after her arrival at Lowick, Dorothea—but why always Dorothea? Was her point of view the only possible one with regard to this marriage? I protest against all our interest, all our effort at understanding being given to the young skins that look blooming in spite of trouble; for these too will get faded, and will know the older and more eating griefs which we are helping to neglect. . . . Mr Casaubon had an intense consciousness within him, and was spiritually a-hungered like the rest of us.20
The reader is recalled to other sites of consciousness just as intense as the heroine’s, Casaubon’s “blinking eyes and white moles” notwithstanding.21 And Mrs. Curren does try to imagine other lives: An extended example occurs when she drops off Florence at her husband’s place of work and, aghast at seeing him among the blood and feathers of chicken carcasses, imagines their evening together: “While I was driving back to this empty house, William took Florence and the children back to the living quarters. He washed; she cooked a supper of chicken and rice on the paraffin stove, then fed the baby” (42). And so she continues, describing as if she were there, as if it were a fact, the weekend of her domestic worker and her family. “All of this happened. All of this must have happened” (43). A later crucial instance occurs when she imagines John’s death, and I shall return to this below. In Waiting for the Barbarians, the Magistrate tries to imagine the world of the torturer; in Foe, Susan Barton tries to enter Friday’s consciousness. These attempts meet with more or less success, but there is something salutary in the attempt. As I shall explore below, there is also ethical significance in the failure.
How, then, can we understand the relation between Coetzee’s austere style, which reminds us of the impartial point of view, and the absence of an impartial authorial presence? One possibility is that it is the device of the focalizing consciousness that prevents the spare style from becoming abstract or pitiless. What is filtered through a particular consciousness is scrupulously noted down, but what is recorded is, for the most part, the states of that particular consciousness. The writing is thus anchored by the focalizer, a device that gives us the moral identity and distinctive perspective of someone personally invested in the events. In this way, the writing cannot become entirely abstracted or impersonal, even if the purity of the style may contain an inherent tendency toward this. And this then suggests that the impartial eye need not also be impersonal or abstracted. At its core, as Adrian Piper notes, “impartiality” is fairness and lack of prejudice, while “impersonality,” quoting from the OED, is “‘having no personal reference or connection.’ . . . the view of oneself and others sub specie aeternitatis.”22 Impartiality and impersonality can thus come apart, and the relation between impartiality and personal involvement thus becomes more complex. In the context of the debate between partialists and impartialists in the moral realm, Piper argues that one may be personally invested in impartial moral principles, which inform one’s public and private life, or one might be impersonally attached to particular people as, for instance, occasions for one to do the most good. If we worry that taking up the impartial point of view will necessarily also mean losing interest in particular people, the worry is unfounded. And so, to return to Coetzee, the style that eschews ornamentation and emotional excess in the service of truth needn’t also eschew a deep interest in particular people.
This helps us with the question of how to reconcile the different responsibilities that both moral philosophy and Coetzee’s novel note: the responsibility of escaping distortion and limiting sympathy by attending with a cold eye, while at the same time avoiding pitilessness or abstraction. However, it is not obvious that there can be any final resolution in these terms. Instead, what we are given is a different kind of truth and a different kind of seeing, with the suggestion that these are alternatives to that stark contrast. The formal device of the letter shows this alternative working, as Mrs. Curren tells her daughter the story of her physical disintegration and, perhaps, the tentative birth of her soul. The address to the second person, the intimate encounter between an “I” and a beloved “you,” also shows how alternative images of unbiased thought and feeling might get a grip in the ethical realm. Marilyn Friedman argues that a public dialogue “with people of competing interests” might be a way of avoiding bias and unfairness and that “dialogue” provides a more practical model of impartiality than familiar devices like the veil of ignorance or universalization.23 Walker, drawing on Friedman, argues that the central images of impartiality “are largely preoccupied with themes of detachment: one is to observe rather than engage, cogitate rather than converse, dispose of moral cases rather than situate them coherently in a continuing history of responsibilities, evaluations, and relationships.”24 And she responds that
one methodological corrective is vigorous emphasis on facing up to the particular reality of each person and case and on refinement of perception, acuity of communication, flexibility of perspectives, and use of a range of moral categories closer, in variety and nuance, to our full nonmoral resources of interpersonal description and expression.25
It is not my aim here to assess these views, and what Friedman and Walker call for is clearly not sufficient to guarantee the elimination of bias. However, their views are useful because they make us aware of the assumptions underlying the traditional debate and open up the possibility of a fair, objective, yet engaged relation to others. My suggestion is that the second-person address of the intimate letter is yet one more device for anchoring clear vision to the particular, for achieving an undistorted yet still interested vision of the world. Again, this by no means guarantees moral knowledge and just outcomes, but then no model can. And it is not meant to be an answer to the debate between impartialists and partialists but an attempt to refigure the debate in a more fruitful direction. I want now to explore how this is worked out in the novel, beginning with a look at the two realms of duty suggested in Age of Iron: the ethical and the political.
Coetzee has noted in an interview with David Attwell that the “contest of interpretations” between the political and ethical is “played out again and again in my novels” (Doubling the Point, 338). The political realm is associated with violence and death and the ethical with the refusal of “retributive violence” (337). In a rare moment of autobiography, he calls the ethical the realm in which “my craving for privacy . . . distaste for crowds, for slogans . . . my almost physical revulsion against obeying orders” can be accommodated (337). Implicit in most of Coetzee’s work, as he notes, the tension between these realms is obvious in Age of Iron. In this novel, the ethical also requires the sensitive discernment and appreciation of the significant features of each situation. The political, on the other hand, requires the singleness of purpose demonstrated by Bheki, John, and their comrades, and the natural condition for this, they think, is that abstraction from particularity with which the impartial point of view is often associated. Too much involvement with the particular is apt to muddy the moral waters just at a time when clarity and certainty are required if anything is to be achieved. In fact, however, the real conflict in the novel is not between impartiality per se and partiality. There is, after all, a fierce kind of partial loyalty within Bheki’s pure political interpretation of the world—Florence’s cousin, Mr. Thabane, insists that Mrs. Curren “doesn’t understand very much about comradeship” (Age of Iron, 149). Rather, the conflict is between a movement of abstraction that notices only generalities, on the one hand, and an insistence on detail and particularity, on the other. As already suggested, however, this abstraction is not an essential constituent of impartiality per se. We can retain the virtues of impartiality without lapsing into abstraction, and, I shall argue further, we can pay attention to the details of situations without losing the fair and undistorted vision of reality that impartiality in its purest form strives for. The “cold” eye, while impartial, need not also be abstracted.
The conflict between abstraction and particularity is nicely illustrated in Mrs. Curren’s words to John when she visits him in the hospital (it is hardly a conversation, for John remains sullen and unresponsive throughout):
Thucydides wrote of people who made rules and followed them.
Going by rule they killed entire classes of enemies without exception. Most of those who died felt, I am sure, that a terrible mistake was being made, that, whatever the rule was, it could not be meant for them. ‘I!—’: that was their last word as their throats were cut. A word of protest: I, the exception.
Were they exceptions? The truth is, given time to speak, we would all claim to be exceptions. For each of us there is a case to be made. We all deserve the benefit of the doubt.
But there are times when there is no time for all that close listening, all those exceptions, all that mercy. There is no time, so we fall back on the rule. And that is a great pity, the greatest pity. . . . It is a great pity when we find ourselves entering upon times like those. We should enter upon them with a sinking heart. They are by no means to be welcomed.
(Age of Iron, 80–81)
Here, Mrs. Curren admits that the times can demand that we live inflexibly by rules in order to achieve political ends, but she insists that this is nevertheless at great personal and moral loss. The Apartheid years are such a time. The death-bound comradeship of the youthful activists, their refusal to admit shades of ambiguities and complexities into their responses to the world—all these are natural consequences and probably prudential necessities of acting. As she comes to realize in her interaction with Mr. Thabane, Bheki, and John and in her journey into the township to discover young Bheki’s dead body, their comradeship has its own terrible beauty and logic: “What I had not calculated on was that more might be called for than to be good. For there are plenty of good people in this country. . . . What the times call for is quite different from goodness. The times call for heroism” (165). And heroism requires, it seems, inflexible vision and action—it is, after all, in an age of iron that goodness is not enough. However, she insists, too, that this alone cannot be the foundation of a better and just society and that it comes with a terrible price: the inversion of natural relationships between parent and child—“there are no more mothers and fathers,” Florence says (39)—the neglect of individual dignity and inevitable exceptions to the rules, the hardening of the heart so that it is cold and so that the love that recognizes the unrepresentable essence of another person becomes impossible. As she says, “For each of us there is a case to be made”; each of us is an “exception” to every rule precisely because no person is in every respect relevantly alike and because every person, however unlovable, can be the recipient of love. If rules are tailored for similarities and generalities, then significant differences among cases may be lost.26 The ethical is the realm of the individual, the particular, and, we may suppose, though it is never put in these terms, the web of partial connections and interests that attach individuals to one another and upon which our flourishing so largely depends.
This view of the ethical is, Derek Attridge argues, performed through Coetzee’s fiction, which “opens the possibility of an ethics of unique acts, rooted always in the here and now, yet acknowledging a deep responsibility to the otherness of elsewhere, of the past, and of the future.”27 I now want to explore the way the novel achieves this ethical vision while still allowing impartiality its proper place. One of the aims of ethical living is to prevent the abstraction that is inimical to a proper engagement with others. At the same time, however, the virtues of impartiality, separated from its inessential abstraction, need also to be retained. In order to see how these two aims are “performed” in the novel, I shall concentrate on the epistolary form and the encounter with the Other.
My suggestion is that the novel’s epistolary form, along with its particular content, show this ethical ideal at work. The address to the second person, the very intimate encounter between an “I” and a beloved “you,” shows how images and practices of unbiased thought and feeling might get a grip in the ethical realm. In Age of Iron, the reconciliation (of sorts) that is performed through the device of the letter concerns the ethical demands of love, and this connection is not accidental: it is through the letter to a distant but nevertheless beloved daughter that reconciliation between truth and love is worked through.
The particularized demands of the ethical are played out and meet their limits in Mrs. Curren’s relationships with John, Bheki, and the vagrant, Vercueil. The most unlikely relationship is with Vercueil, who is outside the demands of conventional morality, decency, and obligations and yet to whom Mrs. Curren finds herself oddly drawn. Her letter to her daughter—and thus the novel—begins on the day she learns that her cancer is terminal, and it is also the day she discovers Vercueil in her yard: “A visitor, visiting himself on me on this of all days” (4). An unlikely messenger or angel (168), she finds herself thinking; a “herald of death,” as Coetzee puts it in an interview (Doubling the Point, 340). Much of the dialogue in the novel takes place between Mrs. Curren and her visitor, and her letter to her daughter is increasingly filled with Vercueil and their unexpected closeness.
That Mrs. Curren’s growing intimacy with Vercueil is based on no rational grounds is central to Age of Iron, which enacts a form of love and engagement with another person that is ethical precisely because of this. “I look for him to care, and he does not. Because he is beyond caring. Beyond caring and beyond care” (Age of Iron, 22).28 Despite his indifference—or because of it perhaps—Mrs. Curren cares for him without reason and without understanding and in the end relies on him, though Vercueil’s intentions and emotions remain opaque in return. But to have her love returned is not part of the novel’s ethical compact. She risks on him, with no certainty of success, the only significance her death will have—she asks him to post the letter that constitutes the novel to her daughter after her death; her daughter’s only inheritance, “all she will accept, coming from this country” (31–32):
What is the wager, then, that I am making with Vercueil, on Vercueil? It is a wager on trust. . . . If there is the slightest breath of trust, obligation, piety left behind when I am gone, he will surely take it. And if not? If not, there is no trust and we deserve no better, all of us, than to fall into a hole and vanish. Because I cannot trust Vercueil I must trust him. I am trying to keep a soul alive in times not hospitable to the soul.
(130)
This wager on Vercueil is also Mrs. Curren’s wager on humanity and on her own capacity to keep her soul alive even as her body is dying, not to be another “soulless doll,” as she characterizes white South Africans (110–12). Not to trust is to be unable to imagine a world that is better than hers, and if this is true—if no such world is possible—then it is better that we all vanish. Her wager on Vercueil is a wager on the possibility of ethics itself.
It is clear that reasonless trust cannot be an imperative of the reasoning, impartial “cold eye.” And further, allied to this reasonless trust, Mrs. Curren suspects, is reasonless love. She describes herself to her daughter as being in a “fog of error” (136), and her error is that she cannot love the sullen, unattractive John. There is some unlikely warmth between her and Vercueil that makes her gesture of absolute trust possible, if nonetheless inexplicable. The love for her daughter is the reasonlessness of nature, but there is no such affection between her and John: “I do not love this child, the child sleeping in Florence’s bed. I love you but I do not love him. There is no ache in me toward him, not the slightest. . . . My heart does not accept him as mine: it is as simple as that” (136). And yet, “Not wanting to love him, how true is my love for you? For love is not like hunger. Love is never sated, stilled. When one loves, one loves more. The more I love you, the more I ought to love him. The less I love him, the less, perhaps, I love you” (137).
This is a “cruciform logic, which takes me where I do not want to go!” (137), a logic that is difficult not only for Mrs. Curren to accept. Love does not seem to be the kind of thing that can be commanded.29 And how, in any case, can we insist that such personal and engaged love must “travel” to all others and that unless it does so, the original love is not “true”? Here we have a command that is assisted neither by instinct nor reason. The sentiment is not entirely alien to us, however; we have it in some interpretations of the Christian injunction to “love thy neighbor” and in its secular counterpart in universal benevolence.30 As I said in the introduction, it is not my concern to defend the ethical commands of Coetzee’s novels. It is, however, good to have the difficulty and rigor of certain ethical visions fully apparent and imaginatively worked out for us, especially for those attracted to it. I will return to this point in the conclusion.
In Age of Iron and other novels by Coetzee, the ethical test—the success of which will enable the soul to remain alive—is thus to love and trust in the face of opacity and indifference and against all reason, a test that still insists on its own “logic.” I mentioned earlier that one of the dangers of narratives that are filtered through a character’s consciousness is that other sites of consciousness, and thus sites of love, are ignored. However, as I also noted, Mrs. Curren does attempt to enter other people’s consciousness and to understand them. Sometimes her efforts have plausibility. Sometimes we suspect they reveal, rather, simply her wish to “connect”: listening to the Goldberg Variations, aware of Vercueil outside, she remarks: “At this moment, I thought, I know how he feels as surely as if he and I were making love” (30). And at other times she finds that she is unable to comprehend, despite her efforts; sometimes the searching gaze meets blankness and opacity.31 John and, in a different way, Vercueil, both represent the limits of understanding; in the one case because she finds affection impossible, and in the other because the person is so utterly beyond normal mores and expectations. And at this point, something other than ordinary vision is required if we are still to respond ethically to the Other, and it is not provided by even the interested cold eye.
The radical love and trust upon which the soul depends are achieved, the novel suggests, through a different kind of vision and truth. The image of the cold eye is countered by complex images that track the working of this alternative. The images of sight remain, but not ‘cold’ sight, and often they turn to blindness and closed eyes, the sight of the imagination and heart.32 The form of the letter to a loved one, which can only be personal and particular even while it strives to report accurately, allows Mrs. Curren to “follow where her heart leads” precisely because it is the recording of love—for her daughter, for the unlikely Vercueil, and, finally, for John and Bheki. There is some safety in her love, which allows her to say what is in her heart without fear of rejection or ridicule. But her love strives also for truthfulness toward reality: not to be indifferent to unfamiliar virtues, not to allow self-pity to overwhelm her duty toward others, not to attribute to Vercueil emotions or beliefs it is merely comforting to wish for. With a letter there is always a concrete addressee in mind, a potential respondent, someone to take one up on what one has written and who therefore ensures a measure of responsibility for what is written. However personal the record of a soul, and however unlikely a response, there is reason to portray oneself and what one sees truthfully when one’s audience is someone both loved and admired.
Let us look at some of the alternative images that work in her letter, first, the vision of the imagination. There is a seemingly casual description that suggests the process:
A fly settles on my cheek. . . . It walks across my eye, my open eye. I want to blink, I want to wave it away, but I cannot. Through an eye that is and is not mine, I stare at it. . . . There is nothing in those bulging organs that I can recognize as a face. But it is upon me, it is here: it struts across me, a creature from another world.
(27)
While there is nothing in this passage about love, it is an instance of that familiar encounter between the protagonist and the alien Other that we find in most of Coetzee’s novels. The ethical task is to imagine and love these creatures from another world—whether Vercueil’s world of sufficiency and terrible innocence or Bheki and John’s world of comradeship and narrow courage or, perhaps, even her daughter’s safe life in America. And it becomes John who, despite her dislike, “is with me more clearly, more piercingly than Bheki has ever been” (175). Near the end, she imagines John’s death, hovers with him as he crouches in Florence’s room with the pistol “that was his and Bheki’s great secret, that was going to make men of them” (175). Here, second, we have another image, this time of the searching closed eye: “His eyes are open and mine, though I write, are shut. My eyes are shut in order to see” (175). It is worth noting that she imagines him in his last—political—stand here. She takes a step outside herself to that heroism she earlier could not comprehend and she does this as she is writing, in the act of her extended address to her daughter.
In the end, however, she is closer to these dead children and to Vercueil than she is to her daughter: “Because he is here, beside me, now. Forgive me. Time is short, I must trust my heart and tell the truth. Sightless, ignorant, I follow where the truth takes me” (162). This third further complex image, of following the heart in blindness and ignorance, does important work in the novel. An obvious way of reading “the heart” would be as a representation of our emotional life and, if we assume a cognitive view of emotions, its judgments. The emotions have their logic, even if “cruciform.” However, this logic is often hidden from us, so while we trust to it we can follow the heart only in ignorance.33
It is important that the truths of the heart are not necessarily welcome, that they might not be what one wants to hear. This shows that they are not merely wishes or self-deceiving comforts. The heart can discriminate; as Pascal famously insisted, it has reasons, not just whims.34 Mrs. Curren is following truth where it leads; this is important if the heart is to be allied to the search for truth and not inimical to the lessons of the cold eye in its proper sphere. And this, again, happens through the format of the letter: in a nice echo of her other words, she says, “I wrote. I write. I follow the pen, going where it takes me. What else have I now?” (108). Following the heart and following the pen: committed writing to a loved one is the following of a heart toward ethical truth.
Just what these truths are is not entirely clear. Sometimes they are accurate descriptions of events, unclouded by sentiment; sometimes they seem to be what is discovered about the self and other through emotional honesty and trust; at other times they are that which demands love and response in another person. What is important throughout is the commitment to being truthful: being respectful of and open to a reality that is often obdurate or painful, and to the slow, faltering progress toward this reality.
Finally, sometimes the truth seems to be revealed or unveiled. Perhaps only in death is another person exposed in her ethically essential nature to the attentive gaze. However, it seems that this moment of insight is also earned and is not gratuitous. Thinking over Bheki’s death, for example, Mrs. Curren sees him as a child from whom the age of iron demanded adult courage: “So why should I grieve for him? The answer is, I saw his face. When he died he was a child again. The mask must have dropped in sheer childish surprise when it broke upon him that last instant that the stone-throwing and shooting was not a game after all” (125). This moment is repeated with John. Despite his rejection of her, she finds herself whispering, “Poor child” (147), seeing him as he is despite his posturing. Here is a moment of clarity, of vision unimpeded by the self and its dislikes or difficulties; possibly it is a moment in which the soul is glimpsed, an unimpeded truth of the heart. It is perhaps terrible that such clarity is achieved in this novel only in the face of death, but it is nowhere suggested that this realization comes easily even then. In order to reach it, much emotional, moral, and intellectual work is necessary. Mrs. Curren must transcend her visceral dislike of John and her impatience with Bheki and see them as they are: as children, not men, demanding a parent’s love, not the admonishment of adults. This deep change is revealed in her last words, the last lines of the novel. Vercueil joins her in bed, and “for the first time I smelled nothing” (198). This difficult ending at least suggests the emergence of a soul to a new perception, even if “there is no warmth to be had” (198) in the embrace of death—Vercueil’s embrace. We do not know whether the “soul, neophyte, wet, blind, ignorant” (186), emerges to new life; we do not know what final insight, if any, Mrs. Curren has. The novel is not obviously to be read in any redemptive way. But what is notable is that, once again, instinctual reactions—here disgust for Vercueil’s usual smell—vanish. If the soul is that which is loved and which loves, and if her letter has been the faithful recording of its birth, we can see here that such a birth is hard and requires that we shed much that is learned or instinctual or even deeply valued. The soul must undergo a metanoia; the ethical life is a “discipline,” a “task.”35
Coetzee is, properly, seldom explicit about the content of the truths sought in the ethical realm. That individuals, even in their final opacity, should be loved is certainly one of them; that one’s own preoccupations and sufferings should not obscure reality is another; that one has responsibilities to others that come from one’s place in the social order rather than from any direct actions on one’s part and that this order can corrupt our relations to one another is perhaps a further truth. These and others can be grasped by the intellect, the emotions, the imagination, or a mixture of these. While complete understanding of situations and people may elude our grasp, we can still strive to attend to them in the receptive and vulnerable way that Coetzee’s fictions suggest is ethically required, where this “attending” is at once intellectual and emotional and changes the way we perceive the world. We come to “see” John and Bheki and their comrades as mere children, though forced into the role of adults. We see that Apartheid policies changed white South Africans into soulless “dolls”; we come to see unwashed, indifferent vagrants as messengers upon whom the life of the soul depends. They are “truths of the heart.” It takes an interested and partial exploration into the details and moral potential of others, as far as is possible, to yield such truths.
The truths of the heart have a central place in Coetzee’s ethical realm, but ethics is not complete without a dimension of impartiality. The imagination, the emotions, and even the intellect, when they have settled into habits, can fail us or distort reality or be simply inefficacious. Because they issue from an individual who is limited in knowledge and restricted in sympathy, they may cloud her vision of situations that are unfamiliar and risky or to which she is extraneous. It is here that one needs to step back from the self in order to see better, with a cold eye unclouded by sympathy or self-concern. This “stepping back” and the impartial point of view it yields can, however, be achieved without abstraction and a loss of particularity; in fact, an impartial view might require the recognition of particularity if a complete appreciation of the situation is to be achieved. When the stepping back occurs from a generous impulse or from the sincere wish to understand oneself and the world, along with the commitment to attend to the details of the situation, an impartial gaze can yet remain deeply interested and rooted in the particular. It is when the cold eye ignores detail and exceptions—often as a political necessity—that abstraction occurs and moral losses result, despite the possible short-term political gains. The “coldness” of the impartial eye therefore contrasts to the comforting warmth of self-love or emotional attachments that undoubtedly can be distorting. Mrs. Curren, for instance, must abjure the natural sympathy her story will arouse, and her natural desire to be cared for as she dies, in order to achieve the interested objectivity required, she thinks, to understand her place in the Apartheid regime and her responsibilities to others.
I have argued, with Friedman and Walker, that a useful model of this kind of interested impartiality is sincere and well-intentioned interpersonal engagement. In Age of Iron, a letter to a beloved yet distant child becomes in the end a letter about the nature of proper ethical engagement in general—how one can love and see clearly at the same time. The love that motivates the writing of a letter can have its own ways of seeing clearly, even if they are not those of the “cold eye.” But this is not enough unless a sense of proportion, of relative significance, of justice and responsibility in themselves motivate and inform the kind of personal encounter that the letter performs. Mrs. Curren “follows the heart” out of a sense of justice, out of a desire to reach truth, and this end in turn anchors partial love to what is reasonable and right.
While the demands of impartiality and partial love can therefore in many cases be reconciled, this certainly cannot be guaranteed. Sometimes the one will preclude the other; sometimes choices have to be made and values sacrificed. The world, tragically, might be such that open-hearted attention to particulars and exceptions is simply luxurious in the face of overwhelming social, structural, and political injustice. This seems to be the suggestion in this novel: that in an age of iron, in which natural relations between parents and children are undermined or destroyed, in which love must for the sake of efficacy step aside, we cannot blame those who forget individuality and ignore the exceptions, even while, the novel insists, living ethically requires just these things. Sometimes, living ethically may be impossible.
The novel is morally helpful here, I think, for at least three reasons. First, we explore through the novel how the attempt to live as well as possible might play out in the world: when it might be appropriate to follow the heart and when, rather, to trust to the cold eye; how people could conceive of and carry through these tasks; and what it means for their lives and self-conceptions. It is significant that we learn this through the exploration of imaginatively realized lives. The knowledge of when to look coldly and when to follow the heart can only be context- and character- dependent, something we learn through a literary act that is similarly so. We learn, too, the novel suggests, that living ethically is living in relations of partiality to particular people; the abstractions of politics and general principles, while sometime regrettably necessary, cannot give us guidelines for living in a difficult world. This is a world of concrete individuals: Florence, Bheki, John, not “black people”; Vercueil, not “the homeless”; Elizabeth Curren and her daughter, not “white South Africans.” We need not agree fully with William Blake that the “General Good is the plea of the scoundrel, hypocrite and flatterer,” to nonetheless agree that “He who would do good to another must do it in Minute Particulars.”36
Second, we learn through the emotional engagement that literature demands and brings to us that truths are not the exclusive possession of the cold eye. That the emotions can give us knowledge of value is a familiar view in philosophy today, but here we see, again, how this might play out in a life. And, moreover, we see the remaining possibility, which cannot be ruled out, of tension between the emotions and the impartial perspective. Sometimes the emotions can distort reality, and impartiality is required. Equally, however, the cold eye can also distort if it demands reasons for loving “all the way down.” This is especially apposite for an ethical vision centered around love and trust for the unknowable Other.
Finally, perhaps the most crucial lesson in light of the content of this ethical vision, is that of realizing just how hard it might be to live it. The vision that Mrs. Curren—and Coetzee37—is drawn to requires a groundless love and trust that is astonishingly stringent, that makes the responsibility for others boundless, and that may very well require the abdication of deeply entrenched and even admirable habits and principles, the shrugging aside of dignity and the need to be loved oneself. It is both helpful and necessary for philosophers to have before them some subtly imagined world in which this is the goal, to see just what it entails and how difficult it is. Only by fully inhabiting such a world in intellect, emotion, and imagination can its resources or truthfulness be adequately assessed.
If, in conclusion, to be impartial is to judge justly and fairly, to see the world as it is, unclouded by love or self-interest, then a better image for this kind of vision might be, as Walker argued, a loving and interested interaction between people. The intimate letter, though not ideal, suggests how one particular and complex exploration might take place. By addressing another person who is trusted and to whom one feels the need to justify oneself, one can remain invested in the process, yet alert to bias. This is not yet ideal, because one would wish one’s address to be reciprocated. Mrs. Curren has to make do with imagining her daughter’s reactions, with apologizing in advance if she hurts her, or with talking—usually in vain—to Vercueil or John or Florence. The letter is not yet a conversation, but in an age of iron it might be the best we can get.
Notes
My thanks to Tom Martin and Anton Leist for helpful comments on earlier drafts.
1. W. Godwin, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and Its Influence on General Virtue and Happiness (1793), ed. F. E. L. Priestly (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1946), 2.2.
2. P. Taylor, “On Taking the Moral Point of View,” in Studies in Ethical Theory: Midwest Studies in Philosophy, vol. 3, ed. P. A. French, T. E. Uehling Jr., and H. K. Wettstein (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1978), 37.
3. R. M. Hare, Moral Thinking (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981); R. Firth, “Ethical Absolutism and the Ideal Observer,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 12, no. 3 (1952): 317–45; and Henry Sidgewick, The Methods of Ethics, 7th ed. (London: Macmillan, 1907), 382. Along with these images of the ideal moral agent, we also find images of the kind of epistemic status of the ideal agent, e.g., Rawls’s notion of the “veil of ignorance” in A Theory of Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973).
4. E.g., see M. Baron, “Impartiality and Friendship,” Ethics 101, no. 4 (1991): 836–57; and P. Railton, “Alienation, Consequentialism, and the Demands of Morality,” in Consequentialism, ed. S. Darwall (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), 160–96 (originally published in Philosophy and Public Affairs 13, no. 2 [1984]); for, respectively, a Kantian and consequentialist response along these lines.
5. M. U. Walker, “Partial Consideration,” Ethics 101, no. 4 (1991): 759–60.
6. John Cottingham has argued this in a series of papers: see, for example, “Partiality, Favouritism, and Morality,” The Philosophical Quarterly 36, no. 144 (1986): 357–73; “The Ethical Credentials of Partiality,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 98 (1998): 1–21; and “The Ethics of Self-Concern,” Ethics 101, no. 4 (1991): 798–817. I leave it open whether these partial elements are essentially partial—“all the way down”—or whether they are ultimately justified impartially.
7. I. Murdoch, “The Idea of Perfection,” in The Sovereignty of Good (London: Routledge, 2000), 28.
8. For a discussion of this within the context of the impartiality debate, see T. Nagel, Equality and Partiality (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991).
9. As S. Conly argues in “The Objectivity of Morals and the Subjectivity of Persons,” American Philosophical Quarterly 22, no. 4 (1985): 275–86.
10. See A. Piper, “Moral Theory and Moral Alienation,” The Journal of Philosophy 84, no. 2 (1987): 102–18, sect. 2.
11. Sam Durrant, “J. M. Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello, and the Limits of the Sympathetic Imagination,” in J. M. Coetzee and the Idea of the Public Intellectual, ed. J. Poyner (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2006), 126.
12. E.g., see M. Marais, “‘Little Enough, Less Than Little: Nothing’: Ethics, Engagement, and Change in the Fiction of J. M. Coetzee,” Modern Fiction Studies 46, no. 1 (Spring 2000): 159–82; E. Jordaan, “A White South African Liberal as a Hostage to the Other: Reading J. M. Coetzee’s Age of Iron through Levinas,” South African Journal of Philosophy 24, no. 1 (2005): 22–32; and D. Attridge, J. M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading (Scottsville: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).
13. Attridge, J. M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading, 74, 70.
14. Ibid., 74. With the phrase “forever on its guard against itself,” Attridge is quoting Peter Strauss, “Coetzee’s Idylls: The Ending of In the Heart of the Country,” in Momentum: On Recent South African Writing, ed. M. J. Daymon, J. U. Jacobs, and Margaret Lenta (Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press, 1984).
15. Attridge, J. M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading, 138.
16. M. Friedman makes a similar point in “The Impracticality of Impartiality,” The Journal of Philosophy 86, no. 11 (1989): 651–52; also see Walker, “Partial Consideration,” sect. 3.
17. J.-J. Rousseau, The Confessions (1781), trans. anonymous (Ware: Wordsworth Editions Limited, 1996), 3.
18. Ibid., 3.
19. Montaigne’s Essays are an extended example of this: M. Montaigne, The Complete Essays (1580), trans. and ed. M. A. Screech (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1991).
20. G. Eliot, Middlemarch (1874; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965), 312.
21. Ibid.
22. Piper, “Moral Theory and Moral Alienation,” 104.
23. Friedman, “The Impracticality of Impartiality,” 656.
24. Walker, “Partial Consideration,” 771.
25. Ibid., 773.
26. Whether moral rules must be construed like this is, of course, a matter of debate. Barbara Harman, for example, does an admirable job of rescuing Kant from this charge (see The Practice of Moral Judgment [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993]). I am not endorsing the stark distinction between rules and a sensitive appreciation of particularity that seems to map the distinction between the ethical and the political in Coetzee’s work, only noting it.
27. Attridge, J. M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading, 8.
28. That there is nothing lovable or even likable about some of the characters Mrs. Curren feels obligated to love separates this view of love from the more familiar tradition of groundless love. This tradition argues that contingent features of the beloved cannot ground constant love, as the lover would then be rational in “upgrading” to a person who possesses those features to a higher degree. This view insists, however, that there is something lovable or attractive that draws the lover in the first place.
29. See I. Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785), trans. and ed. M. Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 4:399.
30. A helpful discussion of the Christian injunction to “love thy neighbor” is provided in D. S. Oderberg, “Self-Love, Love of Neighbour, and Impartiality,” in The Moral Life: Essays in Honour of John Cottingham, ed. N. Athanassoulis and S. Vice (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 58–84.
31. On this, see Durrant, “J. M. Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello.”
32. As Marais notes in “‘Little Enough, Less Than Little: Nothing.’” Marais, it should be noted, tracks the images of blindness and closed eyes without making the contrast, as I do here, between this and the image of the “cold eye.”
33. Allied to images of the heart, are those of the soul. The moral task involves “trying to keep a soul alive in times not hospitable to the soul” (130), and the soul is what loves and what love responds to. Near the end of her narrative, Mrs. Curren writes that her letter was meant to be, not a “story of a body, but of the soul it houses” (185–86).
34. B. Pascal, “The Heart Has Its Reasons Which Reason Knows Nothing,” in Pensées (c. 1662), trans. A. J. Krailsheimer (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1966), 423.
35. See Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good, e.g., 28, 38, and 91.
36. W. Blake, Jerusalem, f.55 I.54, quoted in Cottingham, “The Ethical Credentials of Partiality,” 7.
37. While the need to keep distinct the narrator and the author is obvious, the fact that this vision recurs through Coetzee’s fictions and that he has articulated at least some of it in the interviews with Attwell suggest that here he shares his vision with his creation.
References
Coetzee, J. M. Age of Iron. London: Penguin, 1990.
——. Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews. Ed. D. Attwell. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992.