The Limits of Sympathy: J. M. Coetzee's Evolving Ethics of Engagement‪.‬

I would like to open this article with two quotations: "Despite Thomas Nagel, who is probably a good man, despite Thomas Aquinas and Rene Descartes, with whom I have more difficulty in sympathizing, there is no limit to the extent to which we can think ourselves into the being of another. There are no bounds to the sympathetic imagination" (Coetzee, The Lives of Animals 35); "We are invited to understand and sympathize. But there is a limit to sympathy. For though he lives among us, he is not one of us. He is exactly what he calls himself: a thing, that is, a monster" (Coetzee, Disgrace 33-34). These brief passages from two of J.M. Coetzee's texts, when placed in tandem and out of the context of the narrative developments in which they appear, form a neat little disagreement, a paradox to which this paper's attention will finally tend in its investigation of what one might term--whether or not one chooses to see it as superficial or essential--the affective aim of Coetzee's fictions. Both quotes are taken from lectures delivered by fictional characters, and since both of these characters are academics and writers, the contrast at hand between these dueling viewpoints and how they come to be represented could reverberate forcefully within a larger discussion over the more general public role of the writer or intellectual, as well as of literature and the criticism of literature. Certainly, no one can accuse Coetzee of having shied away from such issues during his career as a novelist and scholar; if one charges him with any crime, it is usually that of refusing to offer quick and easy prescriptive solutions to the debate. In her assessment of Coetzee's two most recent publications (1)--the Booker Prize-winning novel Disgrace (1999), and The Lives of Animals (1999), the Tanner lectures Coetzee delivered at Princeton--Elizabeth Lowry asserts that "Disgrace is a deeply pessimistic book. It may have made the Booker short-list [Lowry writes, of course, before the novel actually wins the Booker], but it will not win unqualified praise from Coetzee's more prescriptive critics in the South African literary establishment" (14). It is not difficult to imagine the average size and shape of the sternly prescriptivist criticism that Lowry predicts will be leveled at Coetzee, because we have seen it before, in the form of Mike Marais' and Benita Parry's somewhat reproachful critiques of Age of Iron (1990). I will explore the specifics of their trouble with Age of Iron later; suffice it to say, for the present, that Parry and Marais both maintain in these essays that Coetzee's novels, because of their disinclination to realist narrative modes and their willful contestation of any claim to positional authority, become mired in paradox and thus renounce the possibility of any movement toward real, practical, political engagement.