The Waves #1 w. TWO_press release

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THE WAVES

The Waves #1

CONTENTS

ALLEGORY AS ENVELOPE ON THE NEGOTIATION OF AUTHORITY IN JM COETZEE’S NOBEL PRIZE SPEECH "HE AND HIS MAN" Julie Gufler

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HE AND HIS MAN John Maxwell Coetzee

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TIME/LINE/MOVEMENT Christian Falsnaes

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CERVANTES READ BY Paolo Chiasera

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EXHIBITION VIEWS

3, 4, 11-18, 31-38, 45, 46

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHIES

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CREDITS

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On the Negotiation of Authority in JM Coetzee's Nobel Prize Speech HE AND HIS MAN

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HE AND HIS MAN But to return to my new companion.

I was greatly delighted with him, and made it my business to teach him everything that was proper to make him useful, handy, and helpful; but especially to make him speak, and understand me when I spoke; and he was the aptest scholar there ever was.

Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe Boston, on the coast of Lincolnshire, is a handsome town, writes his man. The tallest church steeple in all of England is to be found there; sea-pilots use it to navigate by. Around Boston is fen country. Bitterns abound, ominous birds who give a heavy, groaning call loud enough to be heard two miles away, like the report of a gun.

Allegory as Envelope + He & his Man

The fens are home to many other kinds of birds too, writes his man, duck and mallard, teal and widgeon, to capture which the men of the fens, the fen-men, raise tame ducks, which they call decoy ducks or duckoys.

Fens are tracts of wetland. There are tracts of wetland all over Europe, all over the world, but they are not named fens, fen is an English word, it will not migrate.

In Holland and Germany they meet with others of their kind, and, seeing how miserably these Dutch and German ducks live, how their rivers freeze in winter and their lands are covered in snow, fail not to let them know, in a form of language which they make them understand, that in England from where they come the case is quite otherwise: English ducks have sea shores full of nourishing food, tides that flow freely up the creeks; they have lakes, springs, open ponds and sheltered ponds; also lands full of corn left behind by the gleaners; and no frost or snow, or very light.

By these representations, he writes, which are made all in duck language, they, the decoy ducks or duckoys, draw together vast numbers of fowl and, so to say, kidnap them. They guide them back across the seas from Holland and Germany and settle them down in their decoy ponds on the fens of Lincolnshire, chattering and gabbling to them all the time in their own language, telling them these are the ponds they told them of, where they shall live safely and securely.

And while they are so occupied the decoymen, the masters of the decoy-ducks, creep into covers or coverts they have built of reeds upon the fens, and all unseen toss handfuls of corn upon the water; and the decoy ducks or duckoys follow them, bringing their foreign guests behind. And so over two or three days they lead their guests up narrower and narrower waterways, calling to them all the time to see how well we live in England, to a place where nets have been spanned.

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ALLEGORY AS ENVELOPE Upon the 63-year-old John Maxwell Coetzee’s acceptance of the world’s most prestigious literary prize in all its glory of the Swedish Academy’s 2003 Nobel Prize Banquet, some perhaps went home puzzled, even outraged; confused, that this highly acclaimed and admired author in the moment, which presumably constituted the peak of his career, chose to respond with He and His Man — an accumulation of enigmatic parables, laconically rattled off by a Robinson Crusoe who seemed most of all to have missed the boat.

Rewriting is at the base of the text discussed in this essay. Naturally, rewriting means to write something again, but instead of just referring to another text, rewriting is used in literary theory about a re-creation of another text or parts thereof, which is more or less faithful to the source in question. To which extent or with what authenticity the source emerges is not central. The point is, that the rewriting relates to a canonical work. Within postcolonial critique, the relation to a canon has in addition a political resonance, because the rewriting is here used to question the normal and normalizing cultural understanding and the power relations, which the literary canon is an expression of.

Implied in the speech He and His Man, with which this essay deals, there is a rewriting-relation between three texts ; Like Coetzees novel Foe (1986), his Nobel Prize speech is a rewriting of Daniel Defoe’s novel Robinson Crusoe (1719).

In addition, He and His Man is also a rewriting of Foe, thus seeing Coetzee — in a unique manner in the history of literature — with his Nobel Prize speech writing a rewriting of his own rewriting.

He and His Man opens with a quote from Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. Aside from the quote, the immediate indications that He and His Man is yet another rewriting of Robinson Crusoe — or for that matter, a rewriting of Foe — are limited to a reuse of characters : he and his man as elaborations of characters associated with Robinson Crusoe, Robinson Crusoe and Friday respectively. Additionally, England is in Robinson Crusoe primarily mentioned as what I experience as a "prop" to the figure Robinson Crusoe in the sense that it, as a setting, only takes up a minimal part of the discourse time and has the nature of an art appendix ; in He and His Man, England has been "recast" in a more dignified role as [T]he island of Britain.

Unlike Foe, He and His Man is a short text written in a confession-like style, where the narrator, he — also called Robin, looks back on his life with what seems like a matured or deeper

Then the decoy-men send out their decoy dog, which has been perfectly trained to swim after fowl, barking as he swims. Being alarmed to the last degree by this terrible creature, the ducks take to the wing, but are forced down again into the water by the arched nets above, and so must swim or perish, under the net.

But the net grows narrower and narrower, like a purse, and at the end stand the decoy men, who take their captives out one by one.

The decoy ducks are stroked and made much This essay analyzes and discusses the way in of, but as for their guests, these are clubbed which authority in He and His Man is constantly on the spot and plucked and sold by the hunnegotiated, not least between fiction and reality. dred and by the thousand.

understanding, as well as a mental and physical distance to the island. Into the text are inserted a range of (paraphrased) reports by his man ; they detail what Robin calls spectacles of death, which refer to authentic, historical phenomena related to existing, geographic sites around the country.

Negotiation of cultural identity

All of this news of Lincolnshire his man writes in a neat, quick hand, with quills that he sharpens with his little pen-knife each day before a new bout with the page.

In Halifax, writes his man, there stood, until it was removed in the reign of King James the First, an engine of execution, which worked thus. The condemned man was laid with his head on the cross-base or cup of the scaffold; then the executioner knocked out a pin which held up the heavy blade. The blade descended down a frame as tall as a church door and beheaded the man as clean as a butcher's knife.

Custom had it in Halifax, though, that if between the knocking out of the pin and the descent of the blade the condemned man could leap to his feet, run down the hill, and swim across the river without being seized again by the executioner, he would be let free. But in all the years the engine stood in Halifax this never happened.

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With reference to the postcolonial thinker and literary critic Homi K. Bhabha’s theory of Hybridity as coined in his work The Location of Culture (1994), the analysis will explore the rewriting’s character and limits, especially with respect to the ambivalence of colonial power and the notion of colonial mimicry.

Through close-readings of three selected paragraphs from the speech, I will first pin down and discuss in which way the negotiation of cultural identity exists in and through the text. Next, I will elaborate on how this negotiation is a negotiation of authority. This I will do by zooming in on the way in which the use of allegory and its interpretation in the speech unfolds an interactive negotiation of authority between on one hand the concrete textual level and its abstract metatextual level ; on the other between narrator, author, characters and the reader. Finally, I will discuss and conclude on how the negotiation of authority can be interpreted as happening between fiction, reality and their subjects in and through Coetzee’s Nobel Prize speech.

He (not his man now but he) sits in his room by the waterside in Bristol and reads this. He is getting on in years, almost it might be said he is an old man by now. The skin of his face, that had been almost blackened by the tropic sun before he made a parasol out of palm or palmetto leaves to shade himself, is paler now, but still leathery like parchment; on his nose is a sore from the sun that will not heal.

A year ago he, Robinson, paid two guineas to a sailor for a parrot the sailor had brought back from, he said, Brazil – a bird not so magnificent as his own well-beloved creature but splendid nonetheless, with green feathers and a scarlet crest and a great talker too, if the sailor was to be believed. And indeed the bird would sit on its perch in his room in the inn, with a little chain on its leg in case it should try to fly away, and say the words Poor Poll! Poor Poll! over and over till he was forced to hood it; but could not be taught to say any other word, Poor Robin! for instance, being perhaps too old for that.

The parasol he has still with him in his room, standing in a corner, but the parrot that came back with him has passed away. Poor Robin! the parrot would squawk from its perch on his shoulder, Poor Robin Crusoe! Who shall save poor Robin? His wife could not abide the lamenting of the parrot, Poor Robin day in, day out. I shall wring its neck, said she, but she had not the courage to do so.

This paragraph, a little further than halfway through Coetzee’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech He and His Man, is emblematic for the constant negotiation of cultural identity, which I see as the text’s principal conflict. Its remarkable play with the identical, but however different – incarnated in the parrot, which possibly, possibly not, constitutes a valid replacement for Robin’s previous bird-friend — as well as the almost

When he came back to England from his island with his parrot and his parasol and his chest full of treasure, he lived for a while tranquilly enough with his old wife on the estate he bought in Huntingdon, for he had become a wealthy man, and wealthier still after the printing of the book of his adventures. But the years in the island, and then the years traveling with his serving-man Friday (poor Friday, he laments to himself, squawk-squawk, for the parrot would never speak Friday's name, only

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his), had made the life of a landed gentleman dull for him. And, if the truth be told, married life was a sore disappointment too. He found himself retreating more and more to the stables, to his horses, which blessedly did not chatter, but whinnied softly when he came, to show that they knew who he was, and then held their peace.

It seemed to him, coming from his island, where until Friday arrived he lived a silent life, that there was too much speech in the world. In bed beside his wife he felt as if a shower of pebbles were being poured upon his head, in an unending rustle and clatter, when all he desired was to sleep.

Allegory as Envelope + He & his Man

So when his old wife gave up the ghost he mourned but was not sorry. He buried her and after a decent while took this room in The Jolly Tar on the Bristol waterfront, leaving the direction of the estate in Huntingdon to his son, bringing with him only the parasol from the island that made him famous and the dead parrot fixed to its perch and a few necessaries, and has lived here alone ever since, strolling by day about the wharves and quays, staring out west over the sea, for his sight is still keen, smoking his pipes. As to his meals, he has these brought up to his room; for he finds no joy in society, having grown used to solitude on the island.

He does not read, he has lost the taste for it; but the writing of his adventures has put him in the habit of writing, it is a pleasant enough recreation. In the evening by candlelight he will take out his papers and sharpen his quills and write a page or two of his man, the man who sends report of the duckoys of Lincolnshire, and of the great engine of death in Halifax, that one can escape if before the awful blade can descend one can leap to one's feet and dash down the hill, and of numbers of other things. Every place he goes he sends report of, that is his first business, this busy man of his.

Strolling along the harbour wall, reflecting upon the engine from Halifax, he, Robin, whom the parrot used to call poor Robin, drops a pebble and listens. A second, less than a second, before it strikes the water. God's grace is swift, but might not the great blade of tempered steel, being heavier than a pebble and being greased with tallow, be swifter?

How will we ever escape it? And what species of man can it be who will dash so busily hither and thither across the kingdom, from one spectacle of death to another (clubbings, beheadings), sending in report after report?

A man of business, he thinks to himself. Let him be a man of business, a grain merchant or a leather merchant, let us say; or a manufacturer and purveyor of roof tiles somewhere where clay is plentiful, Wapping let us say, who must travel much in the interest of his trade.

Make him prosperous, give him a wife who loves him and does not chatter too much and bears him children, daughters mainly; give him

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clumsy articulation of the imprisonment as the fundamental premise for any kind of common life between Robin and the bird, make up a quite direct textual fixation of the conflict.

If we inspect the negotiation in itself, it is here materialized by a monetary exchange between Robin and a sailor, thus making concrete questions to the reader about who actually gets what out of the deal. That the reader poses him -or herself these questions implies an ambivalence in the power relation between the involved, colonial subjects.

Two guineas is a colonial monetary standard made of African gold, whose manufacture and lustre indeed can be seen as much more valuable than its face value in postcolonial England. In that respect, one could say that it is a low price Robin pays for his compensatory parrot, which presumably has been transported all the way across the Atlantic. In a sense however, he also gets it in return for his deceased parrot, which had followed him through thick and thin from his stay on the deserted island, and which to him had a great emotional value.

It is clear that the new parrot to Robin does not constitute a complete replacement, simply because it is not the same parrot. The new is not capable of comforting or affirming him in the same way by saying his name; rather it reminds him of the loss of the original parrot, Poll. Thus we experience how Robin is driven to negotiate with himself — to lay out pros and cons, defend and attack the new parrot vis-à-vis himself and the reader, in a way as if he were imaging that the two parrots (the new parrot and the parrot "ghost") were reading too, over our shoulders.

Although a parrot can talk, it cannot articulate itself on an equal footing with humans.

Nevertheless, the new parrot tries to interfere in the conversation, so that it gives an answer, which resembles a human response. Robin may not be satisfied with the answer, but it exists in the text and as such forms a part of the text subject. Thus it is not only the reader, but also the text subject, which is expressed through a range of characters, that asks itself the above questions. It is clear that no static reference point ensues in the form of an unequivocal answer, but on the contrary, a constant negotiation between subject positions.

The colonial subjects, which in the above quote are mise-en-scène — Robin, a sailor, two parrots — are characters that the reader are familiar with, not least from the tale of Robinson Crusoe. Furthermore, they are examples of stereotypes, which frequently appear in many other postcolonial texts about moving out into foreign territories. That He and His Man mimics the

Held up against Coetzee’s entire oeuvre, Foe and He and His Man have in common the combination of rewriting and allegory as stylistic denominator.

Allegory is one of the oldest forms of expression we know — the trope is very "homely" or familiar to us. Among others, we find it over and over again to abundance in The Bible and the Greek philosophers’ literary interpretations. Therefore, it is enveloped by a certain authority, but also an aesthetic awe or distance, which supports the reader’s feeling of a tactile or sensuous movement through layers of on the one hand reality and on the other, fiction.

Allegory can be described very literally as a narrative mode, which works with a "linear" relation between the fiction’s picture plane and that which the same picture plane should be translated to, outside the fiction. As a consequence of this seeming simplicity, there is a tendency in the history of literature to regard allegory as less valuable than, say, the symbol.

In literary theory of the 20th century, first the German philosopher Walter Benjamin and later the Belgian-American literary critic Paul de Man have settled with this view and developed weighty re-conceptualizations of the notion of allegory. Instead of establishing a fixed reference or a correct answer, both theorists focus on a trans-disciplinary notion of the function of allegory, which could be e.g. allegorizing tendencies in a poem or allegory-like elements in a painting.

a reasonable happiness; then bring his happiness suddenly to an end. The Thames rises one winter, the kilns in which the tiles are baked are washed away, or the grain stores, or the leather works; he is ruined, this man of his, debtors descend upon him like flies or like crows, he has to flee his home, his wife, his children, and seek hiding in the most wretched of quarters in Beggars Lane under a false name and in disguise. And all of this – the wave of water, the ruin, the flight, the pennilessness, the tatters, the solitude – let all of this be a figure of the shipwreck and the island where he, poor Robin, was secluded from the world for twenty-six years, till he almost went mad (and indeed, who is to say he did not, in some measure?).

Or else let the man be a saddler with a home and a shop and a warehouse in Whitechapel and a mole on his chin and a wife who loves him and does not chatter and bears him children, daughters mainly, and gives him much happiness, until the plague descends upon the city, it is the year 1665, the great fire of London has not yet come. The plague descends upon London: daily, parish by parish, the count of the dead mounts, rich and poor, for the plague makes no distinction among stations, all this saddler's worldly wealth will not save him. He sends his wife and daughters into the countryside and makes plans to flee himself, but then does not.

Thou shalt not be afraid for the terror at night, he reads, opening the Bible at hazard, not for the arrow that flieth by day; not for the pestilence that walketh in darkness; nor for the destruction that wasteth at noonday. A thousand shall fall at thy side, and ten thousand at thy right hand, but it shall not come nigh thee.

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reader’s notions of what colonial subjects are and which interrelations they have, brings in focus the issues surrounding them in a way, which to a larger extent involves the reader. It forces us to — at least to try to — take a stand.

Or, to take a stand, only to discover the next moment that we are again in doubt.

He and His Man’s characters hover between the familiar and the exotic. Between on the one hand a particular visibility, where one spots an object between others — something unusual, which stands out to one’s gaze ; and on the other hand an invisibility, where one does not spot the object between others, namely because it appears so normal — so natural or at one with the surroundings, that one does not notice it. As such, He and His Man’s characters are a mimicry, which plays with the displacement between what we as readers recognize and can identify with, and something else and more—a kind of distortion or extension.

Allegory and Authority

Taking heart from this sign, a sign of safe passage, he remains in afflicted London and sets about writing reports. I came upon a crowd in the street, he writes, and a woman in their midst pointing to the heavens. See, she cries, an angel in white brandishing a flaming sword! And the crowd all nod among themselves, Indeed it is so, they say: an angel with a sword! But he, the saddler, can see no angel, no sword. All he can see is a strange-shaped cloud brighter on the one side than the other, from the shining of the sun.

It is an allegory! cries the woman in the street; but he can see no allegory for the life of him. Thus in his report.

On another day, walking by the riverside in Wapping, his man that used to be a saddler but now has no occupation observes how a woman from the door of her house calls out to a man rowing in a dory: Robert! Robert! she calls; and how the man then rows ashore, and from the dory takes up a sack which he lays upon a stone by the riverside, and rows away again; and how the woman comes down to the riverside and picks up the sack and bears it home, very sorrowful-looking.

He accosts the man Robert and speaks to him.

Robert informs him that the woman is his wife and the sack holds a week's supplies for her

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and their children, meat and meal and butter; but that he dare not approach nearer, for all of them, wife and children, have the plague upon them; and that it breaks his heart. And all of this – the man Robert and wife keeping communion through calls across the water, the sack left by the waterside – stands for itself certainly, but stands also as a figure of his, Robinson's, solitude on his island, where in his hour of darkest despair he called out across the waves to his loved ones in England to save him, and at other times swam out to the wreck in search of supplies.

Allegory as Envelope + He & his Man

Further report from that time of woe. Able no longer to bear the pain from the swellings in the groin and armpit that are the signs of the plague, a man runs out howling, stark naked, into the street, into Harrow Alley in Whitechapel, where his man the saddler witnesses him as he leaps and prances and makes a thousand strange gestures, his wife and children running after him crying out, calling to him to come back. And this leaping and prancing is allegoric of his own leaping and prancing when, after the calamity of the shipwreck and after he had scoured the strand for sign of his shipboard companions and found none, save a pair of shoes that were not mates, he had understood he was cast up all alone on a savage island, likely to perish and with no hope of salvation.

(But of what else does he secretly sing, he wonders to himself, this poor afflicted man of whom he reads, besides his desolation? What is he calling, across the waters and across the years, out of his private fire?)

A year ago he, Robinson, paid two guineas to a sailor for a parrot the sailor had brought back from, he said, Brazil – a bird not so magnificent as his own well-beloved creature but splendid nonetheless, with green feathers and a scarlet crest and a great talker too, if the sailor was to be believed. And indeed the bird would sit on its perch in his room in the inn, with a little chain on its leg in case it should try to fly away, and say the words Poor Poll!

Poor Poll! over and over till he was forced to hood it; but could not be taught to say any other word, Poor Robin! for instance, being perhaps too old for that.

Poor Poll, gazing out through the narrow window over the mast-tops and, beyond the masttops, over the grey Atlantic swell: What island is this, asks Poor Poll, that I am cast up on, so cold, so dreary? Where were you, my Saviour, in my hour of great need?

A man, being drunk and it being late at night (another of his man's reports), falls asleep in a doorway in Cripplegate. The dead-cart comes on its way (we are still in the year of the plague), and the neighbours, thinking the man dead, place him on the dead-cart among the corpses. By and by the cart comes to the dead pit at Mountmill and the carter, his face all muffled against the effluvium,

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In He and His Man we get — around the middle of the text — a concrete description of an interpretive situation, where allegory as a notion is discussed. The quote is the conclusion upon two scenarios, which he imagines while fantasizing about which kind of person his man really is, and how he has come to be like that.

Taking heart from this sign, a sign of safe passage, he remains in afflicted London and sets about writing reports. I came upon a crowd in the street, he writes, and a woman in their midst pointing to the heavens. See, she cries, an angel in white brandishing a flaming sword! And the crowd all nod among themselves, Indeed it is so, they say: an angel with a sword! But he, the saddler, can see no angel, no sword. All he can see is a strange-shaped cloud brighter on the one side than the other, from the shining of the sun.

It is an allegory! cries the woman in the street; but he can see no allegory for the life of him. Thus in his report.

I have chosen this quote because I perceive it as a concretization of an interpretative situation, which is taking place throughout the text.

He and His Man consists, as said, of paraphrased reports from his man, as well as his reflections, which to a large extent deal with his man.

His man is thus a primary authority in the speech with whom the reader identifies. Because we as readers identify with his man — and he is otherwise depicted as a person with whom we can sympathize, our first impulse when we read the quote is typically to focus on his enunciation and relate to it.

Meanwhile, there are a number of factors, which effectuate that the reader quickly becomes insecure as to whether his man is sincere, or whether he is misleading us. The most conspicuous of these factors is other people’s — in the above quote the woman’s — very emotional and dramatic language, as contrasted by his man’s very laconic and mundane ditto.

Let us first note that it is a paragraph, which in any case lets the reader understand that allegory is not a natural phenomenon, and that it is possible to be skeptical towards, or completely reject, allegory. That notwithstanding, the quote ironically has such an evident reference to The Emperor’s New Clothes that the reader involuntarily must think of H.C. Andersen’s fairy tale and draw parallels to it.

As we remember, the fairy tale shows us how the unimpressed and uneducated child exposes the bourgeoisie’s intellectual snobbery.

The quote mixes up the notions of seeing and interpreting, respectively : [his man] can see no allegory for the life of him — which is obvious, because one cannot see an allegory in the figure

A man of business, he thinks to himself. Let him be a man of business, a grain merchant or a leather merchant, let us say; or a manufacturer and purveyor of roof tiles somewhere where clay is plentiful […].

Or else let the man be a saddler with a home and a shop and a warehouse in Whitechapel and a mole on his chin and a wife who loves him and does not chatter and bears him children, daughters mainly […].

The two scenarios in their entirety describe how his man finds happiness and then respectively leaves and is being left by his wife and daughters.

Also in these paragraphs, a contrast is created in the language between the very emotional and the laconic when his man’s exemplary and clichédly babbling happiness with a few words is turned: give him a reasonable happiness; then bring his happiness suddenly to an end.

It is difficult to determine whether the laconic is an expression of a kind of sober discretion, a lack of eloquence, or sheer sarcasm. At any rate, the tone makes us re-read the sentence with different eyes. A man of business, he thinks to himself. Let him be a man of business. Is it perhaps meant derogatory, and if so, is his whole — at first very empathetic — paraphrase and

lays hold of him to throw him in; and he wakes up and struggles in his bewilderment.

Where am I? he says. You are about to be buried among the dead, says the carter. But am I dead then? says the man. And this too is a figure of him on his island.

Some London-folk continue to go about their business, thinking they are healthy and will be passed over. But secretly they have the plague in their blood: when the infection reaches their heart they fall dead upon the spot, so reports his man, as if struck by lightning. And this is a figure for life itself, the whole of life.

Due preparation. We should make due preparation for death, or else be struck down where we stand. As he, Robinson, was made to see when of a sudden, on his island, he came one day upon the footprint of a man in the sand.

It was a print, and therefore a sign: of a foot, of a man. But it was a sign of much else too.

You are not alone, said the sign; and also, No matter how far you sail, no matter where you hide, you will be searched out.

In the year of the plague, writes his man, others, out of terror, abandoned all, their homes, their wives and children, and fled as far from London as they could. When the plague had passed, their flight was condemned as cowardice on all sides. But, writes his man, we forget what kind of courage was called on to confront the plague. It was not a mere soldier's courage, like gripping a weapon and charging the foe: it was like charging Death itself on his pale horse.

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that appears in a formation of clouds. In contrast, the definition of allegory has to do with interpretation ; a content, which must be understood figuratively, as a symbol of something else. Like one can for instance perceive a sword alone as a symbol of justice or the whole image in the quote of an angel with a flaming sword as a biblical warning against the coming of the Apocalypse.

The Emperor’s New Clothes is in H.C. Andersen a didactical allegory, to whose judgment we as readers have learnt from childhood to submit. When we read the quote in He and His Man, we thus dutifully must look inwards and think about whether our doubt as to the paragraph’s seriousness or legitimacy is really justified.

Should one listen to somebody who does not know the difference between seeing and interpreting? Or are we ourselves here actually the snobby bourgeoisie, which rejects a literary-philosophical problem too fast, just because of a small slip of the tongue ?

This negotiation relates to what I see as a fundamental tension in the text between on the one hand thought and processing, on the other trade and raw material, which primarily takes place in the relationship between on one side the narrator and thinker he, and on the other his man of action the protagonist.

The two scenarios, which I mentioned precede the above quotation, thus begin

Even at his best, his island parrot, the better loved of the two, spoke no word he was not taught to speak by his master. How then has it come about that this man of his, who is a kind of parrot and not much loved, writes as well as or better than his master? For he wields an able pen, this man of his, no doubt of that. Like charging Death himself on his pale horse. His own skill, learned in the counting house, was in making tallies and accounts, not in turning phrases. Death himself on his pale horse: those are words he would not think of. Only when he yields himself up to this man of his do such words come.

And decoy ducks, or duckoys: What did he, Robinson, know of decoy ducks? Nothing at all, until this man of his began sending in reports.

The duckoys of the Lincolnshire fens, the great engine of execution in Halifax: reports from a great tour this man of his seems to be making of the island of Britain, which is a figure of the tour he made of his own island in the skiff he built, the tour that showed there was a farther side to the island, craggy and dark and inhospitable, which he ever afterwards avoided, though if in the future colonists shall arrive upon the island they will perhaps explore it and settle it; that too being a figure, of the dark side of the soul and the light.

When the first bands of plagiarists and imitators descended upon his island history and foisted on the public their own feigned stories

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of the castaway life, they seemed to him no more or less than a horde of cannibals falling upon his own flesh, that is to say, his life; and he did not scruple to say so. When I defended myself against the cannibals, who sought to strike me down and roast me and devour me, he wrote, I thought I defended myself against the thing itself. Little did I guess, he wrote, that these cannibals were but figures of a more devilish voracity, that would gnaw at the very substance of truth.

But now, reflecting further, there begins to creep into his breast a touch of fellow-feeling for his imitators. For it seems to him now that there are but a handful of stories in the world; and if the young are to be forbidden to prey upon the old then they must sit for ever in silence.

Allegory as Envelope + He & his Man

Thus in the narrative of his island adventures he tells of how he awoke in terror one night convinced the devil lay upon him in his bed in the shape of a huge dog. So he leapt to his feet and grasped a cutlass and slashed left and right to defend himself while the poor parrot that slept by his bedside shrieked in alarm.

Only many days later did he understand that neither dog nor devil had lain upon him, but rather that he had suffered a palsy of a passing kind, and being unable to move his leg had concluded there was some creature stretched out upon it. Of which event the lesson would seem to be that all afflictions, including the palsy, come from the devil and are the very devil; that a visitation by illness may be figured as a visitation by the devil, or by a dog figuring the devil, and vice versa, the visitation figured as an illness, as in the saddler's history of the plague; and therefore that no one who writes stories of either, the devil or the plague, should forthwith be dismissed as a forger or a thief.

When, years ago, he resolved to set down on paper the story of his island, he found that the words would not come, the pen would not flow, his very fingers were stiff and reluctant. But day by day, step by step, he mastered the writing business, until by the time of his adventures with Friday in the frozen north the pages were rolling off easily, even thoughtlessly.

That old ease of composition has, alas, deserted him. When he seats himself at the little writing-desk before the window looking over Bristol harbour, his hand feels as clumsy and the pen as foreign an instrument as ever before.

Does he, the other one, that man of his, find the writing business easier? The stories he writes of ducks and machines of death and London under the plague flow prettily enough; but then so did his own stories once. Perhaps he misjudges him, that dapper little man with the quick step and the mole upon his chin. Perhaps at this very moment he sits alone in a hired room somewhere in this wide kingdom dipping

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indirect portrayal of his man just the token of a mockery at the expense of the tradesman — the common, simple-minded man on the floor ?

Or are we actually supposed to read the speech as the "thinker’s"— and the author’s — concession : His bow in front of his character, the raw material, which does all the work (for him).

We could also reasonably see his man as being the vehicle — the subject who feeds him with information — and thus the one who truly deserves the glory. If we inspect the relation of authority between the two characters, a shift takes place at the textual level around the middle of the speech, where he becomes increasingly longing after his man. Reading the speech from this perspective, one could suspect that he in fact is his man’s puppet — we could call him a parrot, which just repeats his master’s words.

This ambivalence is of course also reflected in the title of the speech, where the enunciation He and His Man can be interpreted in two diametrically opposed ways: the genitive construction can either mean that he "owns" another human, or that another human is his man, i.e. owns him, as e.g. boss, leader, or colonizer. The title alone thus strikes a fundamental negotiation of who actually owns whom, as well as which accompanying subject-object relations such ownership might elect.

First of all, the reader has difficulties distinguishing between the two characters’ voices, meaning the question of who is actually voicing himself through the narrator ; if he and his man are one and the same person, who is negotiating with himself, or if they are really two humans who have a mutual relation (of authority) — and, if so, which kind of relation that might be.

Because of our doubts as to the narrator’s sincerity, we are forced to review or negotiate the authority we ourselves — possible naively — have imposed on him. This re-evaluation is a basic narrative strategy, which again and again is put into play in He and His Man, so that the text feels like a place of inexhaustible negotiation inside time — we could call it the moment or the event itself. If we follow the enunciations blindly, there is an imminent danger that we are letting us be misled, and if we do not follow, we will have to admit that we let ourselves do exactly that in the first place.

Between Fiction, Reality and Their Subjects On the meta-literary level — which by means of the use of allegory in He and His Man is put in the foreground — the speech questions the power relation between fiction and reality : Is reality a fiction, or is fiction a reality? By being "in the

the pen and dipping it again, full of doubts and hesitations and second thoughts.

How are they to be figured, this man and he? As master and slave? As brothers, twin brothers? As comrades in arms? Or as enemies, foes? What name shall he give this nameless fellow with whom he shares his evenings and sometimes his nights too, who is absent only in the daytime, when he, Robin, walks the quays inspecting the new arrivals and his man gallops about the kingdom making his inspections?

Will this man, in the course of his travels, ever come to Bristol? He yearns to meet the fellow in the flesh, shake his hand, take a stroll with him along the quayside and hearken as he tells of his visit to the dark north of the island, or of his adventures in the writing business. But he fears there will be no meeting, not in this life.

If he must settle on a likeness for the pair of them, his man and he, he would write that they are like two ships sailing in contrary directions, one west, the other east. Or better, that they are deckhands toiling in the rigging, the one on a ship sailing west, the other on a ship sailing east. Their ships pass close, close enough to hail. But the seas are rough, the weather is stormy: their eyes lashed by the spray, their hands burned by the cordage, they pass each other by, too busy even to wave.

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moment", am I then alone and secluded from the reality of the outside world, or is that place — my reality — where I am in fact most real?

The questions and answers — in other words, the interpretation, which we derive from allegory, are of course also a fiction, inasmuch as we make it up as we read the text. Yet we tend to see interpretation as that which is really being talked about. That which is really being talked about (our interpretation) is usually something we relate to our own reality, i.e. the everyday life, which we as humans live. However, qua the rewriting in He and His Man of Robinson Crusoe and Foe, our interpretation in relation to this first text often has to do with the latter two texts’ reality.

In this way, allegory — in "He and His Man" working as a kind of fiction in the fiction — paradoxically as it sounds, serves to make us rethink what reality really is.

Meanwhile, the allegorical passages in He and His Man have a "documenting" role : they are the "reports", which his man sends. Several scientific papers however point to the fact that these passages are almost verbatim rewritings of a real text, namely Defoe’s A Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain1. Thus, the reader’s recognition of 1 — In the same way that Rothe allegory as "fiction bin's refletions consist of verbatim rewritings of Defoe's of the fiction" is not only Journal of the Plague Year (e.g.

Cornwell [2007], Attwell [2004], undermined; a mimicry Sanders [2009]). is presented to us — a perverse coexistence of suggestions as to the function of allegory in the text, which normally envelope on another, but are here peeled apartand arranged in a sequence with no end or beginning.

There is a range of enunciative dimensions, or modi, along which the negotiations of authority, which the text spans, move, that all confront the reader with the question of what we accept as on one hand fiction, the other reality. One can think of these dimensions as barometers on which the distribution of authority oscillates, but it is a basic premise that there is no natural order or hierarchy in the text as to which end of the barometer has a higher value or is perceived as more "correct".

At the same time, He and His Man works with a metonymizing dynamic, where the traditional, defined roles which we know from a text—author, narrator, character, reader — are constantly displaced. The two aspects — and the way in which they intersect — make the analysis and comprehension of the speech extremely difficult to fix in words or concrete notions. Thus this essay on the way in which authority in He and His Man is constantly negotiated between fiction, reality and their subjects is not thought as an

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Allegory as Envelope + He & his Man

exhaustive analysis of the speech, but rather an invitation to further reading, reflection and interpretation on the basis of the mapping of these core movements.

In this essay, I have shown how authority is negotiated in He and His Man especially in questions of fiction and reality, which through the function of mimicry takes on a screen-like or enveloping plasticity that is continually riped-up and rejoined. A relevant question of further analysis and discussion, which might follow, is how this screen is metonymized by the author-character — in other words, the mask with which Coetzee stages himself. Furthermore, how Coetzee throughout the speech indicates that this mask does not hide anything, but is in itself the "originating".

In a piece of fiction — be it a novel, a short story, a speech, or other, fiction, as opposed to reality, of course has the benefit of playing on its own ground. However, even if we talk about there being fiction and fiction, those will never be identical. Thus, if we stay with the notions of fiction and reality: Who, i.e. which subject (pre-)scribes reality, and who (pre-) scribes fiction? By unfolding a rewriting in and through at least three texts, J.M. Coetzee’s Nobel Prize speech He and His Man not only reinvents our notion of rewriting, but more importantly, our idea of where one story ends and another one begins.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

ATTWELL, David [2004] : J.M. Coetzee and South Africa: Thoughts on the social life of fiction in English Academy Review: Southern African Journal of English Studies 21:1 (p.105-117), Taylor & Francis 2004.

BHABHA, Homi K. [1994] : The Location of Culture, London and New York : Routledge 1997.

COETZEE, J.M. [1986] : Foe, London: Penguin Books 1987.

[2003] : He and His Man (Nobel Lecture). video and transcription available via http://www.nobelprize.org/ nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2003/coetzeelecture.html CORNWELL, Gareth [2007] : "He and His Man": Allegory and Catachresis in J. M. Coetzee’s Nobel Lecture in English in Africa, vol. 34 issue 1/May 2007 (p.97-114), Institute for the Study of English in Africa — Rhodes University 2007.

DEFOE, Daniel [1719] : Robinson Crusoe, London: Penguin Books 1994.

SANDERS, Mark [2009] : The writing business: "He and His Man", Coetzee and Defoe in Journal of Literary Studies, 25.4/Dec. 2009 (p.39-50), Taylor & Francis 2009.

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AUTHOR BIOGRAPHIES

Paolo CHIASERA (*1978, Bologna) Lives and works in Berlin.

Educated at the Accademia Bella Arti Bologna.

— Recent solo exhibitions ​​ include : ​De Vleesahl​,​ Middelburg​ (NL) /​ MAN,​ Nuoro​ (IT)​ / Ain't No Grave Gonna Hold My Body Down ​, ​ S.M.A.K​.,​ Gent​ /​ Unter Freiem Himmel ​-​Under the Open Sky​, ​MARTta Herford.

Julie ​GUFLER​(*1983, Copenhagen) Lives and works in Hamburg and Copenhagen.

Master of Arts in Literary Theory and Studies in Fine Art at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Currently a BFA student at the University of Fine Arts Hamburg.

— Recent exhibitions include : Berühren Sie nicht den Fluchtpunkt, Fotogalerie Wien / Helten, Vorbilder, Idole, Elektrohaus Hamburg / Poetry reading at the National Book Fair Copenhagen 2013 / Moonlight Lounge with Lea von Wintzingerode, KuLe Theater, Berlin Christian FALSNAES (*1980, Copenhagen) Lives and works in Berlin.

Educated at the Akademie der bildenden Künste Wien.

— Recent exhibitions include : Formations of bodies, KW Institute of Contemporary Art, Berlin / Ihre Geschichten, Bonner Kunstverein, Bonn / Grundfrage, Crac Alsace, Altkirch / Entweder/oder, Haus am Waldsee, Berlin.

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Published on the occasion of:

Acknowledgements:

The Waves #1: TWO with Christian FALSNAES & Lea VON WINTZINGERODE, Curated by Julie GUFLER & Julia METROPOLIT. 16.04 -21.04 2014 Galerie der HFBK, Hochschule für bildende Künste Hamburg SoSe14

Tim Albrecht, Paolo Chiasera, Christian Falsnaes, Bastian Jakob, Rosa Joly, Martin Koettering, Tilo Kremer, Julia Mummenhoff, Nicholas Schofield, Imke Sommer, Lea von Wintzingerode.

Editors: Julie GUFLER & Julia METROPOLIT Graphic Design and conception: Simon LADOUX Photos: Julia KNABBE

© 2014 the contributing authors and artists The Cervantes text: Chapter 8: Of the good success which the valorous Don Quixote had in the dreadful and never-before-imagined adventure of the windmills, with other events worthy to be recorded, Eng. transl.

by Charles Jarvis of El ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha (1605) appears in Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra: Don Quixote de la Mancha, London & New York: Oxford University Press 2008.

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TWO

Christian FALSNAES & Lea VON WINTZINGERODE Galerie der HFBK 17.4.14 – 21.4.14

We see, it is something strange, hoping, yes something very odd. One can walk in the morning along a riverside road shaded by pines; they grow white and solid in winter, in pairs. Like letters. And one can hope to come across on that road a human being whom one holds dear.

you swing in that direction, he said. Indeed it was true! And so the cobbler laughed with satisfaction and said: See, I did not know that forty fifty years ago, so I do see better now than then, it is still moving forward.

A lexicon of common nouns seems to be useful for the inversion of still lives. The emotional Does one come across this human being? No. support of the group falls into irrelevance Why not? Because on that morning, the huas one sees that love is being waged on one man being is preoccupied and quite elsewhere; in one’s isolation; one becomes a victim and that person is throwing up arrows. Those begins to behave like one. Thus, let W be the arrows we see, like we see that if the river estrangement under which we share a shelter, froze to a depth of twenty feet or more for the multiple broken arms with which we can six or seven miles on either side, and it were have new words ready to stretch towards so clear indeed that, congealed at a depth blue skies as soon as the sun comes out. of some twenty fathoms, a wrecked wherry We see three letters, but in fact it is two boat would be plainly visible, lying on the from where we start. bed of the river where it had sunk the autumn before, it could be overladen with apples and And the dancing remodels accordingly. birds. In such an exile, where the pigeons sit stiff with their heads tilted and look with their little beady eyes, there is an O in Two which tassels when we crawl through, and which oohs, entirely empty of water and song. Christian Falsnaes (b. 1980, Copenhagen) and Lea von Wintzingerode (b. 1991, Bayreuth) Whenever the T stands for seeing, there is both live and work in Berlin. an O in hoping.

Christian Falsnaes was educated at the AkaI made the acquaintance of an old blind cob- demie der bildenden Künste Wien and works bler in the hills; for fifty-eight years he had with notions of agitation and agency between seen nothing, and he was almost seventy now. performance and painting. Operationalizing It seemed to him that his sight got better classical theories of ritual and rhetorics at and better, moment upon moment. It was mo- eye-level, he challenges crowds to co-author ving steadily forward, he thought. When nojoint experience as continued and intermingling thing came in the way, he could glimpse the chains of interpretation. sun in some years. He still had black hair, but his eyes were completely white. His hands Lea von Wintzingerode has studied at the Akawere hollow and glasslike. When we sat todemie der bildenden Künste Wien and Hochgether in his cavern and smoked, he sung schule für bildende Künste Hamburg. She works to me about all that he had seen before with intuition and composition towards an inhe became blind. He was hard and healthy, clusive notion of painting. Dealing in particular without sensations, and he kept his hope. with potential situations as evoked by the depiction of on the one hand emotional strucWhen I had to take off, he followed me out tures between individuality and togetherness, and started pointing in different directions. on the other spatial structures between There is south, he said, and there is north. bodies and their architectural environment, Now you will walk first in this direction, and her work proposes a (po)et(h)ics of today’s when you have descended into the hills a bit, social animal.

Julie Gufler 2014

Two (2014) / Collaborative production of the performance Christian Falsnaes & Lea von Wintzingerode 1 — Syntax Error (2013) / HD color video on flat screen, 5:40 min Christian Falsnaes 2 — Hall at EXPO 2000 (2013) / Oil on canvas, 57x75 cm Lea von Wintzingerode 3 — The Terrace seen from Susan Barton (2014) / Oil on canvas, 70x100cm Lea von Wintzingerode 4 — Portrait (2013) / Oil on canvas, 120x100 cm Lea von Wintzingerode

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