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Årgång 141 2020
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Recensioner av doktorsavhandlingar
Charlotte Elmgren, J.M. Coetzee’s Poetics of the Child. Stockholm University. Stockholm 2019
J.M. Coetzee’s oeuvre — it is indeed a canon be-cause it has acquired considerable cultural author-ity, even if some of his novels question the mean-ing of canonicity — is a formidable body of work, with thirteen major novels, a trilogy of fictional-ised memoirs, nine collections of non-fictional es-says and extended dialogues, not to mention a large number of uncollected essays and ephemeral writ-ings. In addition, his writing is now also the subject of a huge body of criticism, which shows no sign of slowing down in scale, philosophical depth, or disciplinary range; on the contrary, since Elizabeth Costello, each new work brings in new fields of
in-terdisciplinary commentary, mainly but not only from philosophy.
Such is the situation that confronts new entrants to the field, who in terms of the protocols of the-sis writing have to establish their own voices and original critical narratives. The scale of the field that has to be traversed is now huge. It is not just that the primary and secondary reading has grown ex-ponentially; it is also that the field is richly the-orised, so one has to become a linguist, a philos-opher of art, language and ethics, a social histo-rian, a cultural historian (especially of the novel) as well as a literary critic. The advice that one has to give to early career scholars embarking on a pro-ject in Coetzee studies ought to begin with a ques-tion — are you sure you want to scale this Ever-est? — and if she persists, a firm steer is required: find your own patch and cultivate it well.
Charlotta Elmgren’s entry into the field of Coet-zee studies is an impressive one. She is absolutely right in identifying the figure of the child in Coet-zee as ‘a story waiting to be told.’ It is, as she rightly points out, indeed surprising that no one has tack-led this subject systematically until now, although there are a number of insightful essays that she has dutifully engaged with in the course of her research. She is right to point to such anomalies as the fact
that an entire collection of essays is published on the first novel in the Jesus trilogy, The Childhood of Jesus, without a single essay in the volume
ad-dressing the subject of childhood. It is a curious situation, that while Coetzee has given wide-rang-ing and sustained attention to the moral, aesthetic, and epistemological complexities of remembering and representing childhood, until now no critic has come forward who is prepared to point this out and to engage with the subject at any length.
The choice of topic is therefore a timely one, but not only that, Elmgren enters the field with a clear and confident sense of her disciplinary ori-entation and her intellectual positionality, that is to say, literary studies. The subject lends itself to a degree of philosophical slippage, to wanderings in the psychology and philosophy of education, fields that are referred to in the thesis, but this could have given way to an emphasis that obscures the fic-tional complexity of the writing. It is important to Elmgren’s work that she is very specific in pointing to the ‘poetics of the child,’ the child as the focus and the occasion for fictional representation and experimentation, rather than the child as such. The point is not so much to explore how the novels rep-resent children and childhood, although that is rel-evant; rather, it is the other way around: how does Coetzee’s interest in the child influence and shape his fictional practice, his ars poetica?
Elmgren knows the relevant educational schol-arship, and in the space of some six pages in her in-troduction, she summarises what we need to know about the history of representations of childhood in western educational thought, from the unruly child who needs to be managed into sociability, to the child of natural innocence and goodness whose innate gifts are to be protected and nurtured, to the child who faces the world as a figure of limit-less potential. The philosophical and cultural-his-torical contexts are sufficiently acknowledged, but the focus is on the authorship, the fiction-making, the epistemological, aesthetic and moral self-con-sciousness of Coetzee, the creative artist. In
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oping this line of inquiry, Elmgren develops her own theoretical and philosophical support system, adapting key ideas from Hannah Arendt and Geor-gio Agamben in grappling with the ethical dimen-sions of Coetzee’s representations.
The central proposition of the thesis develops from the way in which Elmgren puts Arendt and Agamben in conversation with Immanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida. The immediate critical fo-cus of this theoretical encounter is a conversation she conducts with her fellow Coetzeeans, Michael Marais and Derek Attridge. Marais and Attridge have argued convincingly that Coetzee’s work en-acts an ethical consciousness based on the idea of hospitality, in which they invoke Levinas and Der-rida. Confronted by forms of otherness, difference, and heterogeneity that are not fully knowable, that is, otherness that is potentially infinite, the self is drawn into a relationship of hospitality without limit, an encounter in which responsiveness and responsibility are called into being. In this reading, the fiction of Coetzee is coloured by its ethical reg-ister, before other considerations, although there are significant differences between various Levina-sian readings of Coetzee, with Marais focussing on the way fiction stages arguments in ethical philos-ophy and Attridge emphasising the alterity of the text itself, and what he calls the ‘event’ of reading.
Elmgren argues that these positions, taken to-gether, represent one half of an equation that is clarified by Coetzee’s poetics of the child, because responsibility to the other ought to be seen as matched by what she calls ‘irresponsibility.’ This is irresponsibility in the specific sense of undirected, creative play, not the famed jouissance of
decon-struction, although that is relevant, but the dom of the child to live in the moment, the free-dom to be irresponsible as an enactment of being. This formulation is influenced by Coetzee himself saying in an interview that while he respects literary theory and acknowledges that it has an influence on his writing, he prefers the kind of irresponsibil-ity that acknowledges the inner logic of the writing as it follows its own unpredictable course. Elmgren enriches our understanding of Coetzee’s ethics by exploring this line of thought fully; in so doing she places the ethical discussion of Coetzee back into the domain of authorship, of fiction-making, where it properly belongs.
The thesis is more than a single argument, how-ever, because it has a critical arc and tells an ab-sorbing story. It begins with fictions of the child
as fictions of the self, the nascent self, thus bring-ing into focus a characteristic ambiguity — and, it seems anxiety — in Coetzee around truth-telling, an ambiguity in which a quest for the truth of the self is matched by doubt, by extreme forms of self-consciousness that speak of both existential inse-curity and ethical accountability. The focus of this discussion, suitably, is Boyhood, the first of
Coet-zee’s fictionalised memoirs.
The project then moves on to the historical con-text, showing how a significant part of this drama of self-apprehension has to do with the fraught self– other relations of life under South African apart-heid. The fictional self, the protagonist of much of Coetzee’s writing, though this is especially true of the work up to and including Disgrace, is often
de-fined through encounters with children who are different, in ethnic, class and linguistic terms. The effect of these encounters is that they interrupt self-actualisation, introducing new voices and de-mands, thus enabling the characters (and ourselves as readers) to see their and perhaps our own limita-tions. The discussion of this phenomenon ranges widely across Coetzee’s oeuvre, from the first South African novel Dusklands to the first of Coetzee’s
Australian novels, Slow Man.
At this point, the project’s philosophical regis-ter becomes more pronounced as we move into the third chapter which introduces key concepts from Arendt: natality, amor mundi, or love of the world,
and infancy. While the chapter begins with Magda in In the Heart of the Country grappling with a
de-bilitating sense of inauthenticity and a struggle to develop a language of selfhood that is her own, that is not dependent on the patriarchal and colonial constructions of her past that keep her from form-ing intimate relationships with the servants on the farm, its philosophical reach is prompted by Life & Times of Michael K, a character who presents to the
world the enigmatic silences of a being untouched by history. Michael K is in fact an exemplary fig-ure in Elmgren’s analysis, because as a child-adult, or adult-child, set apart from society and linguisti-cally unschooled, he embodies a potential for radi-cal renewal.
Appropriately, Chapters Four and Five tackle two of Coetzee’s most recent and arguably most enigmatic novels, The Childhood of Jesus and The Schooldays of Jesus. The philosophical tenor of the
project strengthens in these chapters, first with ref-erence to Agamben’s reflections on infancy and po-tentiality. The quest for the truth of the self and
184 · Recensioner av doktorsavhandlingar
for authenticity that drives much of the early fic-tion, is ironized and partly relinquished in these texts, which dramatize and implicitly celebrate the potentiality, even the disruptive potentiality, of the child. Agamben speaks of ‘impotentiality,’ by which he means a withheld, but redemptive pos-sibility. I do wonder here whether ‘impotential-ity’ might be one of those unhelpful neologisms of theory, or whether the term is a product of specu-lative translation from the Italian, but we get the drift. Interestingly, Elmgren emphasises what she calls ‘the revocation of vocation,’ the special incan-descence of childhood that comes from its lack of seriousness.
This quality goes a long way to capturing the pe-culiar airiness of these novels, which manage to be both playful and philosophically portentous with-out having an obvious allegorical point. While on the subject of vocabulary and the vagaries of trans-lation, it also strikes me as odd that Agamben, or his translator, should use the word ‘study’ to convey the undirected free play of the child. We know what he means — study in a pure sense has no agenda, it is a blue-sky undertaking, and is therefore close to play — but its connotations evoke earnestness, and studiousness, a note that is not necessarily helpful. Charlotta Elmgren has written an exception-ally fine dissertation that will undoubtedly make its mark on Coetzee studies, especially as critics try to come to terms with Coetzee’s most recent tril-ogy, the Jesus novels.
David Attwell
Sandra Grehn, Dom stökar och bråkar och kastar sten. Iscensättning och hybridisering av dominerande diskurser i Backa Teaters uppsättningar Lille kung
Mattias, Gangs of Gothenburg och 5boys.com.
Gö-teborgs universitet. Göteborg 2020.
Sandra Grehns avhandling i litteraturvetenskap –
Dom stökar och bråkar och kastar sten. Iscensättning och hybridisering av dominerande diskurser i Backa Teaters uppsättningar Lille kung Mattias, Gangs of
Gothenburg och 5boys.com – har inte den
drama-tiska texten i fokus. Avhandlingen vetter snarast mot teatervetenskap då det är tre av Backa Teaters uppsättningar som analyseras. Sandra Grehn söker kopplingar mellan Backas teaterföreställningar och det omgivande samhället genom att analysera och jämföra de diskurser som gestaltas på scenen med
dominerande diskurser i samtidens Sverige. Det övergripande syftet med studien är att bidra till en kritisk diskussion om hur och med vilka medel som barn och unga iscensätts inom den professionella scenkonsten för ung publik. Grehn vill också dis-kutera hur scenkonst för barn och unga kan repro-ducera eller förändra problematiska maktstruktu-rer, där hennes underliggande syfte är att visa om – och hur – Backa Teaters scenkonst bidrar till ett ifrågasättande av normer rörande barn och unga. Ytterligare ett uttalat syfte är att utforma en metod för diskursanalys av scenkonst.
Sandra Grehn utgår från att scenkonst är ett diskursivt medium. I Backa Teaters uppsättningar knyts rollfigurerna till specifika dominerande dis-kurser och i avhandlingen undersöks huruvida dessa diskurser reproduceras eller hybridiseras. Hy-bridisering använt på detta symboliska sätt är ett begrepp lånat från postkolonial teori, där hybri-den består av flera olika delar, som kan vara olika och polariserade diskurser, men som i kombina-tion betyder något ytterligare. Hybrida diskurser öppnar alltså för nya perspektiv. Det gäller gene-rellt dominerande diskurser i svensk och väster-ländsk kontext, genom att de fångar upp debatten i offentligheten och utgör en bas för de regelverk som styr samhällets institutioner. Grehn undersö-ker sedan på vilka sätt diskurserna hybridiseras ge-nom uppsättningarnas komposition. Forsknings-frågorna leder in på hur idéer om kön/genus, sexu-alitet, ras och ålder kan utgöra delar av de aktuella diskurserna och hur diskurserna byggs upp genom konstnärlig gestaltning, som rollbesättning, skåde-spelarkonst, dramaturgi, regi och scenografi/rums-skapande. En fundamental fråga handlar om vilka representationer av barnet/den unga människan som gestaltas utifrån diskurserna.
Backa Teater är en fristående scen vid Göteborgs stadsteater. Backa började 1978 som en grupp skå-despelare på Göteborgs stadsteater med uppdrag att spela för barn och unga och har genom decen-nierna utvecklats till den mycket etablerade scen som det är idag. Namnet Backa fick man 1982 när man flyttade till en lokal på Backa fritidsgård, där man stannade i fyra år. Sedan 2007 huserar Backa i en renoverad maskinhall på Lindholmen. Spelsti-len, som präglat Backa sedan teaterns första konst-närliga ledare Eva Bergman, utmärks av bland an-nat teatralitet, tydligt publiktilltal och musikaliska inslag – teatern hade redan från början flera heltids-anställda musiker. Backa Teater har haft en förhål-landevis stabil ensemble och starka regissörer som
