The Joycean Hero as a Treacherous Villain in J. M.

Coetzees Summertime Fabricio Tocco

Abstract Generally speaking, it could be argued that we tend to identify villainy more often with action than with thought. When we first think of a villain, we may link him or her to illegal acts (such as murder and rape). This paper will deal with a different kind of villain, one whose villainy is defined by his world view and his ideology, not just by his behaviour. I will be referring specifically to the figure of the writer as a heroic villain in the fiction of James Joyce and John Maxwell Coetzee to explore how a writer can become a villain just because of his beliefs. In order to explain this, I will take two similar examples: Gabriel Conroy, the protagonist of The Dead, the last short story of James Joyces Dubliners (1914), and the fictional John Coetzee, the main character of Summertime (2009), J. M. Coetzees fake memoirs. (In order to avoid confusion, I will be alluding to the character when I mention John Coetzee and to the author when I mention the complete name, i.e., John Maxwell Coetzee.) Key Words: James Joyce, Dubliners, J. M. Coetzee, Summertime, heroes, villains. ***** 1. The Joycean Hero Gabriel Conroy, the main character of James Joyces short story The Dead, is seen as a hero by most of the guests who are attending the supper: he is intelligent, polyglot, wealthy, cultivated and a highly educated man. Most importantly, however, he is an intellectual figure who is expected to make a speech after the meal. Therefore, we could say that he is a figure who controls the words and their meanings, at least within the frame of this dinner. He is deeply admired by his aunts, the hostesses of the supper, who are fascinated by his language, his knowledge and his cosmopolitan character. Easily impressed by him, the aunts feel quite impatient as a result of his late arrival and feel safe around him when he finally arrives. A brief sample of dialogue from Joyces story is enough to illustrate this fascination. Gretta Conroy, Gabriels wife, is speaking with Aunt Kate and Aunt Julia: O, but youll never guess what he makes me wear now! Galoshes! said Mrs Conroy. Thats the latest. Whenever its wet underfoot I must put on my galoshes. Tonight even he wanted me to put them on, but I wouldnt. 1

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__________________________________________________________________ And then Aunt Julia asks him (not his wife): And what are galoshes, Gabriel? Galoshes, Julia! Exclaimed her sister. Goodness me, dont you know what galoshes are? You wear them over your ... over your boots, Gretta, isnt it? Yes, said Mrs Conroy We both have a pair now. Gabriel says everyone wears them on the continent. O, on the continent, murmured Aunt Julia, nodding her head slowly. 2 It is interesting to note that even though Gabriel and his wife travel together every year around the so-called, allegedly exotic, Continent only Gabriel is authorised to say what is fashionable in continental Europe and what is not. Hence, only he is asked about it and only his definition is the legitimate one. Through his aunts fascination, we can see that Gabriel embodies a cosmopolitan ideal: he is an international, urban character who is far more interested in what is happening abroad than in what is happening in his own country. Even when in his own country a historical and political process, such as the independence from Great Britain, was taking place. Significantly, Conroy does see himself somewhat as a hero: he seems proud of all his qualities and virtues, and he boasts about his more cultivated mind. For instance, he hesitates to quote a Robert Browning poem in his speech, for he feared they would be above the heads of his hearers. 3 Current readers may not be sympathetic at all to this idea, nevertheless, we have to bear in mind that Gabriel still is a modernist hero: a neo-romantic, aristocratic artist confronting the masses that surround him. It would not be forcing a comparison to claim that both Gabriel Conroy and John Coetzee are alter egos of their authors. Regardless of the extent that they are actually based on their real lives or not, what is important to underline is the fact that both authors are explicitly writing about and thus focusing on themselves. As such, they are bestowing a heroic status on their characters. 2. Gabriel Conroy Seen as a Villain by Molly Ivors It is well known that the core of The Dead lies in the storys final scenes, particularly in Grettas final epiphany, triggered by the memory of a late boyfriend Michael Fury. Nevertheless, I would like to emphasise a very brief but important scene, from earlier within the text, where Gabriel Conroy dances and chats with the Irish nationalist Molly Ivors, his female counterpart. She is the one character who does not see him as a hero; quite the contrary, she sees in Conroy a West Briton (as she calls him contemptuously), who writes in the Unionist Daily Express, the newspaper of the political party of Separatism. The narrator adds:

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__________________________________________________________________ A look of perplexity appeared on Gabriels face. It was true that he wrote a literary column every Wednesday in The Daily Express, for which he was paid fifteen shillings. But that did not make him a West Briton surely. The books he received for review were almost more welcome than the paltry check. He loved to feel the covers and turn over the pages of newly printed books. 4 Conroy is depicted as a writer who is only committed to Ireland at an aesthetical level. Later, in his speech, he will vindicate Irish hospitality, which he considers the only true Irish tradition and which is exemplified in his aunts, but he will make no nationalist remark at all: he will quote Browning instead of Yeats, he would allude to the three Graces and the choice of Paris from Greek Mythology, instead of drawing back narrative material from Celtic folklore. I claim that in this fragment the narrator is making a vindication not only of Conroy but of the kind of intellectual he embodies: a bibliophile who sees literature as something that stands above politics and history, a literary aestheticist who sees himself as someone that can stand above social commitment: He wanted to say that literature was above politics. But they were friends of many years standing and their careers had been parallel, first at the University and then as teachers: he could not risk a grandiose phrase with her. He continued blinking his eyes and trying to smile and murmured lamely that he saw nothing political in writing reviews of books. 5 Nevertheless, Miss Ivors does not even care whether Conroy writes about literature or politics, she just sees him as a traitor, someone who is working with and for, the enemy. Whilst the rest of the guests could see in Conroy an international spirit, Molly Ivors sees him as an ideological accessory to the British Empires interests in Ireland. In fact, she is explicitly ashamed of him. In the introductory chapter An Elegy for the Canon of his Western Canon, Harold Bloom claims that reducing aesthetics to ideology in modern literature through political interpretations is nothing but an update of Platos ideas on poetry. 6 From this Platonic tradition, we could say that the Separatist Ivors reads Conroy as a poet who should be expelled from the future Irish Republic. Therefore, instead of intellectual virtuosity, Molly Ivors sees betrayal to what should be Conroys national identity according to herself; instead of universal culture, she sees a rejection of his roots. Miss Ivors cannot stand the fact that Conroy barely knows his own country, that he deliberately does not want to know it, that he is even sick of it. That is the reason why she provokes him, by inviting him to spend the summer in Galway, instead of Continental Europe.

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__________________________________________________________________ But you will come, wont you? said Miss Ivors, laying her warm hand eagerly on his arm. The fact is, said Gabriel, I have already arranged to go Go where? asked Miss Ivors. Well, you know every year I go for a cycling tour with some fellows and so But where? asked Miss Ivors. Well, we usually go to France or Belgium or perhaps Germany, said Gabriel awkwardly. And why do you go to France and Belgium, said Miss Ivors, instead of visiting your own land? Well, said Gabriel, its partly to keep in touch with the languages and partly for a change. And havent you your own language to keep in touch withIrish? asked Miss Ivors. Well, said Gabriel, if it comes to that, you know, Irish is not my language. 7 I will come back to the language issue later: I just wanted to stress the fact that since Miss Ivors abandons the table in the middle of the supper and abruptly leaves the party, it could be argued that her viewing of Conroy does not stand as the dominant view we may have of him as readers. The narrator does not want us to see him in this light. In other words, what we might gain from the text is that actually Molly Ivors is a villainess, a political radical and Gabriel Conroy is the hero: a noble and witty intellectual. As I have said before, if Gabriel is in control of words and their meanings, through his speech he can condemn what he sees as villainous. As I mentioned earlier, this scene does not only deal with making Conroy a hero within the world of the Dubliner supper but also with proposing an intellectual model according to Joyces world view. Although I do not follow Sainte-Beuves critical tradition of trying to understand and artists life in order to understand his work, I do want to stress the fact that Joyce himself could be easily identified with Gabriel Conroy: he lived in exile most of his life abroad, specifically on the Continent and remained very sceptical towards Irish nationalism through his whole intellectual life. Before I continue with this idea, I will offer a brief reading of John Maxwell Coetzees Summertime (2009), regarding the position occupied by his main character within the frame of the fiction. 3. John Coetzee Seen as a Villain by Margot and Sophie Before dealing with the fictitious John Coetzee as a treacherous villain, it is necessary to sum up the structure of Summertime, a novel which is presented as a fake memoir of its eponymous author. The novel presents a series of interviews

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__________________________________________________________________ made by Vincent, an English journalist, who is researching John Coetzee, who happens to be dead, unlike the real author John Maxwell Coetzee. Vincent interviews mainly women who have met the author in South Africa, in the seventies. Some of these women are his lovers, some are his relatives. All of them see him in an extremely hyper-critical and cynical way. In order to focus on this, I would like to quote a line of Mikhail Bakthins Problems of Dostoyevskys Poetics: Human thought becomes genuine thought, that is, an idea, only under conditions of living contact with another, with an alien thought, a thought embodied in someone elses voice, that is, in someone else's consciousness expressed in discourse. 8 Coetzee vilifies his own past as well as himself through the speech of his novel, embodied in the alien thoughts of these female interviewees, by transforming this Joycean intellectual hero into a villain, who women despise for different reasons. This portrayal of the self through the alien voices of these women is very enriching and has many angles. However, in order to put a frame in our paper, I will only focus in two narratives: Margots and Sophies, since both easily remind us of the Ivors-Conroy dialogue aforementioned. I cannot be sure to what extent I can talk about direct influence between both novelists, since Coetzee used to quote not James Joyce but Samuel Beckett as his model. Nevertheless, both works share common elements, which are interesting enough to take into consideration, regardless of influence issues. Through Margots narrative, we learn that like Gabriel Conroy, John Coetzee prefers to speak in English than in what should be his mother tongue. Margot suspects her English is better than his Afrikaans. 9 According to his cousin, this is due to the fact that he has lived abroad a long time, specifically in Englishspeaking countries, but also in English-speaking environments inside South Africa. Both Conroy and Coetzee are Anglophiles, who are living on the former periphery of the British Empire but they seem bound to live with a political and linguistic community that defines itself as reluctant to any English influence. Like Molly Ivors, Margot and her sister Carol, are a representation of this colonial world view: [Margot] blames the deterioration in his Afrikaans on the move he made to Cape Town, to English schools and an English university, and then to the world abroad, where not a word of Afrikaans is to be heard. 10 Carol mocks Coetzees accent. They both are concerned, not only with the linguistic deterioration but also to the heresy of his cultural identity:

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__________________________________________________________________ Does he really think of himself as an Afrikaner? She doesnt know many real Afrikaners who would accept him as one of the tribe. Even his father might not pass scrutiny. To pass as an Afrikaner nowadays you need at the very least to vote National and attend church on Sundays. She cant imagine her cousin putting on a suit and tie and going of to church. Or indeed his father. 11 As for Carol, she does not only mock him, but also disdains him: He thinks too much of himself. He cant bear to lower himself to talk to ordinary people. When he isnt messing around with his car he is sitting in a corner with a book. 12 Coetzee, as Conroy, is also a bookish intellectual. He is interested in South Africa only through books: he cares less about his familys language, Afrikaans, than what he cares about exotic, tribal dead languages: What sort of word is Koup? she says. Is it English? The place where no one can cope? Its Khoi, he says. [It means] dry place. Its a noun, not a verb. You can tell by the final p. Where did you learn that? From books. From grammars put together by missionaries in the old days. There are no speakers of Khoi languages left, not in South Africa. The languages are, for all practical purposes, dead... And Xhosa? Do you speak Xhosa? He shakes his head. I am interested in the things we have lost, not the things we have kept. Why should I speak Xhosa? There are millions of people who can do that already. They dont need me. I thought languages exist so that we can communicate with each other, she says...Once you have learned Hottentot out of your old grammar books, who can you speak to? she repeats. Do you want me to tell you? he says...The dead. You can speak with the dead. 13 From Sophies narrative, we learn that Coetzee, like Conroy, is a literary aestheticist. Just as Conroy, he is very far from what we call an engag writer, i.e., a writer who is politically committed to his historical time. Conroy is not in favour of the Irish independence neither is Coetzee struggling for the abolition of the

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__________________________________________________________________ Apartheid. I will not dwell on this, since they are not political processes that could be qualified as symmetrical; we just have to bear in mind that both fictitious writers are oblivious to the concerns of the intellectual community that they belong to, even if they do not want to belong to them. The African literature courses that Coetzee and Sophie teach together are not followed by many black students. According to her, this happened because we were not radicals ourselves, not by their standards. 14 Sophie adds about Coetzees politics that they were too idealistic, too Utopian In fact he was not political at all. He looked down on politics. He didnt like political writers, writers who espoused a political program. 15 As well as Conroy, Coetzee is depicted as a bookish person. When Vincent asks Sophie about how did he come to be teaching African literature when his training was in the literature of the metropolis 16 she answers: It is true, he had no formal training in the field. But he had a good general knowledge of Africa, admittedly just book knowledge. 17 4. Conclusion Both heroic villains are surrounded by strong female characters who do not play the role of wives but that of work colleagues: Ivors and Conroy taught in the same University for some years just as Sophie and Coetzee did. These relationships are quite tense, since they involve women challenging men on an intellectual level. Villainy, in both characters, stems from the fact that they are seen as traitors by some and as heroes by others. Certainly, these are not heroes or villains as they are understood in a popular culture context, but rather protagonists that become heroes or villains of a piece of fiction, since they embody its dominant voice. We can conclude that villainy and heroism simultaneously coexist in them, since they are only evil or virtuous depending on the interpretations of others. Conroy and Coetzee are mere blank slates where both readers and the other characters project what they consider to be good or bad, universal or imperialistic, cosmopolitan or oblivious. Summertime draws heavily on self-deprecation, which is almost a genre of Jewish humour but is seldom used in a serious, grave novel. I claim that through self-deprecation, embedded in the alien voices of these women, John Maxwell Coetzee tries to persuade us that actually he was a villain, not a hero. Thomas Jones said about Summertime that the stories of the other characters in the novel, from Coetzees father to the interviewees parents, husbands and children to the interviewees themselves, are all at least as compelling, funny, moving and full of life as Coetzees own. 18 I agree with this statement and add that this novel of self-deprecation pulverises the image of the Romantic writer, whose heroic life is allegedly filled with passionate experiences. Vincent believes that John Coetzee is a hero, since he is a great writer. 19 Sophie answers: A great writer? How John would laugh if he could hear you! The day of the great writer is gone forever, he would say. 20 Yet,

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__________________________________________________________________ fiction is not possible without the existence of an author, who may or may not have heroic attributes, but still remains at the centre of the speech.

Notes
James Joyce, , in Dubliners (London: Penguin, 1914), 180-181. Ibid., 181. 3 Ibid., 179. 4 Ibid., 188. 5 Ibid. 6 Harold Bloom. An Elegy for the Canon, Western Canon (New York City: Harcourt, 1994), 21. 7 James Joyce, The Dead, 189. 8 Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoyevskys Poetics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 81. 9 John Maxwell Coetzee, Summertime (London: Harvill Secker, 2009), 175. 10 Ibid., 177. 11 Ibid., 182. 12 Ibid., 190. 13 Ibid., 195-197. 14 Ibid., 415. 15 Ibid., 416. 16 Ibid., 408. 17 Ibid. 18 Thomas Jones, Summertime by J M Coetzee, The Guardian, 9 June 2009, Accessed 6 September 2009, http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/sep/06/jm-coetzee-summertime. 19 Ibid., 366. 20 Ibid.
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Bibliography
Bakhtin, Mikhail. Problems of Dostoyevskys Poetics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984. Bloom, Harold. An Elegy for the Canon. In Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages. The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry. New York City: Harcourt, 1994. Coetzee, John Maxwell. Summertime. London: Harvill Secker, 2009.

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__________________________________________________________________ Jones, Thomas. Summertime by JM Coetzee. The Guardian, 6 June 2009. Accessed 6 September 2009. http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/sep/06/jm-coetzee-summertime. Joyce, James. The Dead. In Dubliners. London: Penguin, 1914. Fabricio Tocco grew up in Argentina and Brazil. He has a degree in Comparative Literature (University of Barcelone) and is currently finishing his Masters degree in Littrature, Histoire, Socit (University of Paris VII - Diderot). Fabricios research interests include the contemporary novel, the sociology of literature, literary genres and the relationship between modern history and literature.