As we are discussing Schooldays, and I am open to disagreement and deferral, I have come up wth five categories from which to observe things. The first is "names", or the "nomological", that is, that which culture or society or man imposes upon things in order to fix them, or tie them down (with a nod to Plato's Cratylus and Meno). Think even possibly of an imposition if not violence placed upon nature. As infants, we are given names, Adam supposedly named all the animals, etc. Frege was mentioned in conversation today and he distinguished between sense and reference (see here for his famous article of 1891). To put Frege and Kafka into conversation with Coetzee would be extremely interesting and valuable. (that is Kafka's writing pictured above) Another way to translate the nomological is in terms of law, or laws of nature. Education can be seen as imposing certain cultural names and understandings upon things. On page 3 of Schooldays, the question of names is raised. Davíd, Simon, Inès. These are not real names. The order of society is arbitrary. And yet we use (and abuse) names and symbols. I do not want to fix anything down, even the number 5 (as if there are only five categories, of which I will defer the other four until a later blog). To force something into a box is to do violence to it and yet that is what language and law does. Nomos in Greek is continually contrasted to physis (which could translated as nature). In terms of Schooldays, or education, the typical terminological distinction (which I do not necessarily like) is between nature (physis) and culture (nomos). When Aparna mentioned behaviorism today, or Darwinism, the line between these two can easily blurred. But for now let us say that for Coetzee names are an imposition and he wants in this minor allegory to make the reader aware of that fact through these characters and this place, Estrella. The less said, the better, the more pure...
I will end with a passage from the first page of Deleuze's book on Kafka that Lucy recommended,
How can we enter into Kafka's work? This work is a rhizome, a burrow. The castle has multiple entrances whose rules of usage and whose locations aren't very well known. The hotel in Amerika has innumerable main doors and side doors that innumerable guards watch over; it even has entrances and exits with- out doors. Yet it might seem that the burrow in the story of that name has only one entrance; the most the animal can do is dream of a second entrance that would serve only for surveillance. But this is a trap arranged by the animal and by Kafka himself; the whole description of the burrow functions to trick the enemy. We will enter, then, by any point whatsoever; none matters more than another, and no entrance is more privileged even if it seems an impasse, a tight passage, a siphon.
3 comments:
Names and naming are very important in Coetzee's writings. Names are arbitrary, at least people's names but in Coetzee's novels they are quite symbolic. If I remember it well, Andrew Van der Vlies has a chapter on the names in Disgrace. To me equally important to names and what they may mean is who and how has the power to name. David Lurie changed Melanie's name...“Melanie - melody: a meretricious rhyme. Not a good name for her. Shift the accent. Meláni: the dark one”, but Michael K who "lived on the bread of freedom" didn't change any names (his name was changed to Michaels by the medical officer). This shows a relationship of power (giving and becoming new names).
Great insights, Michael...
I also think names and naming are important. The math exercise with David demonstrated how the child can reject the categories by which his teacher tries to hold the objects. For him two is insufficient to describe the objects. I think Coetzee's work always unveils how the nomos, the normative is insufficient to name complex persons, or things, or beings.
Because I tend to read Coetzee through Derrida, ideas of naming bring to mind Derrida's thoughts on the name: ""The name: What does one call thus? What does one understand under the name of name? And what occurs when one gives a name? What does one give then? One does not offer a thing, one delivers nothing, and still something comes to be, which comes down to giving that which one does not have, as Plotinus said of the Good. What happens, above all, when it is necessary to sur-name, renaming there where, precisely, the name comes to be found lacking? What makes the proper name into a sort of sur-name, pseudonym, or cryptonym at once singular and singularly untranslatable?"
Even though Simon seems to want for David a very classical philosophical education. David, on the other hand, seems to be more like the nuisance questioning Derrida posing threats to philosophical arguments and taking to them to their logical end which reveals a kind of absurdity at the heart of Western thought. Where does the narrator's sympathies lie? One never knows.
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