In Other Words by Stephen Mulhall

Author:Stephen Mulhall [Mulhall, Stephen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780192696762
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Published: 2022-09-27T00:00:00+00:00

3. Affectation, Absorption, Self-Consciousness

It isn’t hard to see that the dispute, as so far laid out, between Arroyo and Kleist’s dancer might be transposed to the world of fiction, and so amount to Coetzee’s staging of a dispute between two conceptions of the relation between an author and his fictional characters. One implies that skilfully manipulating these textual marionettes in their fictional world permits the author to represent a mode of graceful human excellence unavailable to him in his actual life; the other implies that they distract the author from the only mode of being in which genuinely human spiritual excellence can be achieved—namely, his own actual embodied existence. And we might wonder whether the availability of such a reflexive reading speaks more for the first conception or the second: does it amount to a redoubling of Coetzee’s literary excellence, or a misuse of those excellences, to construct an acknowledgement of the risks of merely literary excellence whose literariness only further distracts him from realizing such excellence in his real life? Or we might instead attend to the fact that, precisely because these two conceptions are enounced by characters in Coetzee’s fictional world, neither can simply be attributed to him; so perhaps that authorial distance embodies a scepticism about both, and more particularly about the distinction that both conceptions agree in assuming—that between literary excellence and existential excellence. For what is literary excellence but one mode of human excellence or flourishing—one way of realizing our distinctively human potential?

However that may be, there are broader implications of this contestation that turn out to be relevant to a range of other themes in the ‘Jesus’ trilogy; extending Coetzee’s Kleistian image, we might think of these further textual constellations as if they were marionettes operated by the marionettes whose strings are manipulated directly by their human operators—as further articulated bodies of thought into whose centres of gravity the soul of our authorial operator transposes itself indirectly or transitively, via his initial transposition into the bodies who dance through Kleist’s text. To see this, however—to identify and trace out the threads leading to the additional layers in this ramifying array of texts and concepts, and to demonstrate that doing so is part of properly reading Coetzee’s text—we need to engage with the rest of Kleist’s dialogue, which follows out a number of issues that are implicit in his two examples of dancerly affectation.

To begin with, there’s a pointed contrast between the situation of the two dancers and the situation of the characters they are playing: the discomfort and dissatisfaction engendered by their affectation is plainly intensified by the fact that both Daphne and Paris would, in the situations they find themselves (in which their destiny, and indeed their very existence, hangs on the obsessively focussed attentions of various divinities), be completely caught up in the unfolding course of events, and so be completely lacking in the self-awareness that consumes those dancing their parts. The sharpness of that contrast between role and occupant positively invites

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