The source of the quote that gives this post its title is the novelist Arnon Grunberg, who is fond of occupying high tables where he sees our mediocre lives ripened for satire. This plays well to the novelist's moralizing, particularistic strength. In many circumstances this is what's needed, and the minute vision can sometimes even be heroic (in "contemporary China" or Columbia (see this sad case)). Grunberg defends an anatomical, descriptive role for the novelist: "I’m more than happy to describe the philosopher’s action while he is busy remaking the world." No doubt to remind us of our follies and vanity, or to insist that we're still (to echo Lady Chandos) "living in the time of fleas" or (to echo Thoreau) ants under a microscope.
Throughout my exchange with Grunberg (here, here, here) we have been invoking Coetzee's "“Elizabeth Costello” because this novel is (as Grunberg aptly notes) "among other things concerned with the idea that philosophers and novelists might need each other." Now Grunberg treats Coetzee’s work as "a relentless exploration of the inevitability of self-domestication." It becomes inevitable, of course, if that is what "a man thinks of himself, that it is which determines, or rather indicates, his fate." (Recall my ruminations on Wallace Stevens.)
It need not be so: Grunberg's conception of the novel needs its Wilberforce, one that inspires self-emancipation and that can permit it to speak again from the vantage point of the fleas about the giants that walk the earth. (Let's ignore Lady Chandos' angels.) Of course, when an author (Voltaire, Swift, Rabelais, etc) adopts this perspective, we are usually in for more satire. But in adopting the voice of Lady Chandos, Coetzee is insistent that mediocrity (understood as commonness) is not the only state of mankind--there are "extreme," -- that is, pusillanimous and magnanimous -- "souls." Near madness, we are reminded of undemocratic truths.
In fiction, Lord and Lady Chandos wrote Bacon in 1603--the hight of Bacon's political career. By 1603 Bacon had already published his Essays. There we learn that men are certainly not naturally great. Like dogs, we need the example of a superior nature or, perhaps, just "a jovial hullabaloo" to rise above ourselves. We need our novelists to play "witching chords."
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