Changing EnglishVol. 18, No. 1, March 2011, 57–66

ISSN 1358-684X print/ISSN 1469-3585 online© 2011 The editors of Changing EnglishDOI: 10.1080/1358684X.2011.543511http://www.informaworld.com

Disturbing Reading: J.M. Coetzee’s ‘The Problem of Evil’

Aparna Mishra Tarc*

Faculty of Education, York University, Toronto, CanadaTaylor and FrancisCCEN_A_543511.sgm10.1080/1358684X.2011.543511Changing English1358-684X (print)/1469-3585 (online)Original Article2011Taylor & Francis1810000002011Aparna MishraTarcAmishratarc@edu.yorku.ca

A literary representation can give us grief. J.M. Coetzee’s ‘The Problem of Evil’follows the crisis of reading of his main character Elizabeth Costello as shestruggles to comprehend discursive images of evil. Costello’s trouble with readingis not attributed to a cognitive deficiency in her ability to read the text but to apsychical disturbance she experiences while reading. Thinking through our‘disturbances’ while and after reading gives readers an opportunity to rethinkreading as affected by the thoughts and words of others.

Keywords: affect; crisis of reading; emotional life; J.M. Coetzee

I do not want to read this. (Elizabeth Costello, in ‘The Problem of Evil’, Coetzee 2003)

Reading Paul West’s novel The Very Rich Hours of Count von Stauffenberg, ElizabethCostello is overcome with terrible anxiety. She is horrified by West’s depiction of themercenary actions of Hitler’s executioners. Deeply troubling for her is the writer’sgraphic depiction of human torture and extreme suffering. She wonders how anyonecould imagine, let alone write, such scenes of ‘obscenity’. Filled with revulsion, shedecides that West’s book is not fit to read. Moreover, she determines that representingthis evil (and reading it) is immoral. Yet, she is unable to stop reading. Engaging inWest’s scenes from the Shoah, despite her best judgment, ‘suck[s] her into a mood ofbottomless dejection. Why are you doing this to me? she wanted to cry out as she read,to God knows whom’ (Coetzee 2003, 157).

An experience in reading can leave us shaking from the outside in. Some texts getunder our skin, finding their way to the fragile raw material of a carefully concealedself. Novels can provoke from us intense gut reactions and irrational emotionaloutbursts. Some content presses our buttons, causing us to shut the book and vowingnever to return. At these times we are left at a loss. How did we let a mere book getto us? Why did we not flee while we still had a chance?

Such is the case for J.M. Coetzee’s fictional character Elizabeth Costello, amother, academic and celebrated novelist, stricken to the core simply by reading abook. West’s novel afflicts Costello with palpable, unbearable feelings. Overcome byreading a fellow writer’s fictional depiction of atrocity makes her feel ill. Shebecomes, ‘sick with the spectacle, sick with herself, sick with a world in which suchthings took place, until at last she pushed the book away and sat with her head in herhands’ (Coetzee 2003, 158).

Reading a novel brings Costello terrible grief. It leaves her despondent anddejected. She determines not to read, but this determination is short lived. She simply

*Email: Amishratarc@edu.yorku.ca

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cannot stop herself: ‘I do not want to read this, she said to herself; yet she had goneon reading, excited despite herself. The devil is leading me on: what kind of excuse isthat?’ (178).

‘The Problem of Evil’ inserts readers into the warring dynamics of psychical activ-ity, affectively narrating one reader’s crisis of reading. Caught in the thick of Costello’sreading break-down the reader is put upon to sort through the internal trouble that read-ing makes for Costello’s disintegrating sense of self. A literary representation of evilsends Costello spiralling into rapidly moving thoughts and feelings she is unable tocontain. At times, her emotional and starkly contradictory reading response disablesher, the narrative and the reader. In an intense, grief-stricken push for symbolic relief,the narrative and the reader travel uncontrollably along the formless lines of Costello’sconflicting thoughts. Reading in the case of this short story is through Costello’snonsensical thoughts, desperately seeking relief from interpretation that does notsimply arrive.

In Psychoanalysis and the Scene of Reading, Mary Jacobus conceives reading asan intensely subjective, intra-personal activity. While reading we travel within theinternal worlds of self and other. Engaging with literary works, in particular, immersesthe reader in the psychical processes cohering the reader’s sense of the writer’s text.Reading mediates an intimate, one-to-one communion between the innermostmeaning-making thoughts and feelings of a writer and reader. Jacobus (1999) suggeststhat, more than any other symbolizing activity, reading literature allows us the tempo-rary pain and pleasure of entering into the timeless (un)conscious thought of the other.The pain and pleasure of reading some fictional works, she suggests, reminds us of anearlier time in childhood and infancy when we struggled by any available means totake in, make sense of and articulate our desire and need of the (un)known contents ofthe (m)other’s existence. Communing with the other’s psychical stuff, driving theemotional content of fiction and formally and aesthetically arranging some literaryworks, returns us to our infancy where we first magically learned how to make senseof fleeting feeling reverberating off the presence of others.

Jacobus (1999) demonstrates that close reading supported by the interpretiveconstructs offered to us by psychoanalysis and deconstruction provides us with limitedaccess into the internal world of another producing some literature. But as DeborahBritzman (2006) poignantly finds in her engagement with Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never letme go, the spectacular thought residing in the other’s internal world and writing, someliterary works can also make us painfully aware that our constructs break downbeneath the weight of our difficult readings. At the moments when reading is slow andinterpretations fall short of comprehension we can find ourselves helplessly flailingfor a semblance of meaning of our self and others. Britzman (2006) reveals that thereis much about reading that we do not know, are not ready to know and cannot beginto know. A certain kind of reading teaches us to bear a fragile leap of faith held by thethoughts of the self in attempting to relate to those of the other. As an activity ofdeeply personal self–other communion, reading, Daniel Coleman (2009) suggests,requires of the reader an uncertain faith in the mystery-laden, affecting expressions ofthe other. Reading the other’s fiction can profoundly affect us even if we do notalways wish to be affected.

Both Jacobus, a literary scholar and Britzman, a scholar of education, look toMelanie Klein’s study of the internal worlds of infants to think through the mysteriesof one’s reading development. Unlike many literacy theorists, Klein (1955/1987) situ-ates ‘reading’ in the pre-Oedipal time of infancy and childhood when human beings

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first begin to make relations with ‘objects’. Peggy Kamuf (2000) suggests learning toread, in its primal sense, first takes place in originary scenes of relation betweenmother, father and child. Kamuf theorizes one’s first self–other readings as forcefullyinstituting the family of man.

The institution of the family of man takes place in a scene of learning to read. But whatwe forget, what we have to forget or repress is that this is always also a violent sceneinasmuch as it has to repeat, reinflict the violence that wrenches the human animal outof the state of sheer animality, where, as we are taught to believe once we can read, thereis no such thing as reading in this common sense, the sense we all supposedly share, sharingthus the belief that only humans read or do what we call reading. (2000, 11–12)

Klein’s (1928/1987) theory of object relations is staged in the force of affect drivingthe infant’s first readings, where she is ‘wrenched out of the state of sheer animality’and inserted in a man-made world of meaning-filled symbols. As with Kamuf (2000),Klein’s conception of reading is not only bound to symbols as we have come to knowthem through an instrumentally literate education. Reading in the primal scene refersto the animal and human capacity for making sense of the objects and environmentupon which their survival depends. Klein (1928/1987) theorizes the baby’s need of(m)other as activating the child’s innate capacities for making sense. I term this humanneed to activate a psychical sense-making apparatus, ‘first reading’. In dependent,immobile infancy first reading characterizes our uncertain attempts to make sense offorces of affect internally coming at us from the world as primarily a matter of survival.

For Klein (1935/1987), object relations or psychical reading is the human being’sprimitive practice of interpretation. Psychically and physically taking in (introjection)and putting out (projection) objects/breast initiates the infant’s capacity for sensethrough feelings affectively surfacing in her dire need of the other’s sustenance. Theactivity of desperately incorporating and projecting the first object, the mother’sbreast, is a highly psychically, as well physically, intensive experience for infants.This violent, gripping, suckling activity of babies latching onto an object for their verysurvival mirrors the activity of internal, psychical attachment to mother that is takingplace and building up in the babies’ mental world.

The object-world of the child in the first two or three months of its life could bedescribed as consisting of hostile and persecuting, or else of gratifying parts and portionsof the real world. Before long the child perceives more and more of the whole person ofthe mother, and this more realistic perception extends to the whole world beyond themother. The fact that a good relation to its mother and to the external world helps thebaby to overcome its early paranoid anxieties throws a new light on the importance ofits earliest experiences. (Klein 1935/1987, 141)

Klein suggests the lessening of the precariousness of infancy and psychical develop-ment depends on how well the infant manages and makes sense, with and without theother’s support, of the all-encompassing, persecuting perceptions forced upon her byher need of external objects. Accordingly, the (m)other plays a fundamental, culturallyand uniquely informed role in laying down the resourceful meaning-making system inthe infant. (M)other’s response to the infant supports the baby’s unique way of manag-ing, ordering and making correspondence between her internally felt sensations andexternal objects. The infant’s faltering activity of making correspondence betweeninternal affects and external objects, or first readings, supports her educated secondarycapacity to substitute symbols for felt people and things (Klein 1930/1984).

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Coetzee’s portrayal of Costello’s reading difficulties is located in the sacred, infan-tile practice of a confronted reader. As with the baby towards the mother, the novelanimates affects of hostility and neediness in Costello. Hostility and need arise fromthe baby’s limited capacity for making sense of how or what the mother is doing orsaying. Similarly, the hostility and need for comprehension of West’s novel arise fromCostello’s overwhelming incapacity to make sense of the infantile affect plaguing herreading. These affects silently yet symptomatically show themselves through herbordering-on hysterical response to a novel. In her disturbed state Costello uncontrol-lably wrestles with resurfacing affects from another time and place rudely transferredon to her present reading event. She is caught by and forced to contend with a surfac-ing – seemingly from nowhere – flood of affect to gain a sense of what the contentsof the novel are speaking to her.

Costello is reduced to childlike behaviours in her rush to know why she is so both-ered by West’s novel. Her trouble with the book’s content spills out of her in anoutburst of uncontrollable hatred directed at the novelist. She compulsively and repet-itively babbles out rationalizations of this hatred in an internal, irrational monologueshe holds with the unknown person, West. She makes various attempts to deny thenovel’s worth and denigrate the writer’s craft. She feels great resentment towards thenovel for giving her such grief. Desperately searching for relief from the grievancecarried within, Costello begins childishly to project her feelings of the novel’s‘obscene, rank touch’ on to West’s book and to some extent him (Coetzee 2003, 159).When her hateful feelings fail to satisfy Costello, she turns to a public opportunity toviolently and finitely destroy the novel and tear into its author once and for all by wayof scathing, over-determined, punishing critique.

When affect is animated in adulthood, we are faced with an infantile vulnerabilitycalling out our need of others. This need is irrational, unreasonable, demanding, withthe self’s distress and hungers and yet, paradoxically, our pathetic need of others iscritical to the self’s survival, to a meaningful existence in a sometimes hostile worldthat we do not create and in which we are made to live. Klein (1937/1984) finds theinfant gains perspective on the affects animated by the fact of her dependence onothers by sustaining and perpetually working through relations made to her object.Costello too, through her inability to let go of West’s novel, is bound to work throughher troubled relations to her object. At first the novel’s grip on her is too unbearable.There seems no way for Costello or the reader to gain a handle on reading’s insur-mountable challenges. But, as we will see, residing deep down in her inability to letgo of the object resurfacing her unwieldy infantile affects is the chance for her and thereader to gain perspective on Costello’s disturbing reading and disturbed self.

Costello cannot get away from West and we cannot get away from her. Characterand reader are riveted to startling narrative circumstances and to the traitorous infil-tration of pounding, despondent ‘black thoughts’ that refuse to let Costello and thereader go (Coetzee 2003, 160). Contained in an overwhelming narrative combinationof form and feeling is Costello’s unending thoughts of West. She has no idea whereher black thoughts begin and her distress with him ends. She talks to herself to talkout her suffering with the novel to an unavailable person she imagines is West. Sheinternalizes his absent presence to sort through the unstoppable suffering he brings.She makes numerous attempts to work West out of her mind in an incessant ramblingmonologue she delivers within herself and post-dates to his absence within.

She finds no relief from the book despite numerous defensive attempts to ward offthe novel’s unrelenting, pressing content. So consumed is Costello with her deeply

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ambivalent feelings for West’s novel that she decides to use his book as an examplewhen invited to give an international lecture on ‘Witness, Silence and Censorship’(Coetzee 2003, 160). Rather than give her ‘routine paper on censorship’, liberal in itsacceptance of free thought and speech she decides that after reading West’s book herprevious position no longer holds (160). Untenable now after her reading encounterwith evil is her liberal stance on the writer’s right to ‘venture into the darker territoriesof the soul … She has begun to wonder whether writing what one desires, any morethan reading what one desires, is in itself a good thing’ (160). West’s book, she ratio-nalizes, changes her for the better. Still Costello is unsure of this new direction inthought. Abruptly changing her life-long stance on the writer’s right to freedom ofexpression finds Costello ‘disoriented’, unable to focus, deliberate and reflect on herresponses. She fights to reach a sound conclusion to her new-found views. She ishelpless to hold on to a position she has no idea why she clings to.

When Costello finds, through a development in the plot, that West is in attendanceat the very conference where she has chosen to speak about him she is beside herselfwith worry: ‘How can she give the talk … with Paul West himself sitting in the audi-ence?’ (Coetzee 2003, 161). The narrative dramatically places Costello directly in aface-to-face encounter with West, where she is made to confront head-on herunfounded objections to the writer’s work. Learning of his presence resurfaces withinmore odd affects. Strangely, the reader can also feel anxious at the thought ofCostello giving a public lecture driven by the irrational content of an emotive readingresponse. We feel the peril of Costello’s speaking position oversaturated with anxietyand drowning in affect and worry about her mental state. We wonder if she can gothrough with it.

As the moment of her talk approaches, Costello becomes overwrought with anxi-ety. She begins to second-guess her rigid position on West’s novel. The force of moraloutrage writing her conference paper instantly dissolves in fits of panic. She stays upall night ‘wrestling’ with her lecture. She cuts out and slashes her paper’s textual refer-ences to West and his novel. She tries to soften her argument by removing potentiallyoffensive passages. She berates herself for reacting so violently to a man she has nevermet. She is nervous about how her talk will be received by him and others. She growsheavy with doubt. And, without warning, in the midst of these whirling thoughts onherself, on West, on her lecture and on censorship, she remembers:

It was her first brush with evil. She had realized it was nothing less than that, evil, whenthe man’s affront subsided and a steady glee in hurting her took its place. He liked hurt-ing her, she could see it; probably liked it more than he would have liked sex. … Whydoes her mind go back to this long-past and – really – unimportant episode? The answer:because she has never revealed it to anyone, never made use of it. … For half a centurythe memory has rested inside her like an egg, an egg of stone, one that will never crackopen, never give birth. She finds it good, it pleases her, this silence of hers, a silence shehopes to preserve to the grave. (Coetzee 2003, 165–6)

Costello’s profuse bout of self-punishing anxiety contains the affects of a trau-matic rape experienced by her in her youth. The memory bears down and breaks herand the narrative wide open. The memory of rape appears like a still-frame among herrambling thoughts. For the reader there is a moment of relief and recognition that wehope desperately Costello also experiences. But the moment passes over too quicklyfor Costello. Oddly enough, she puts the memory away and continues as if it neverhappened. We are left to wonder. What ‘really’ happened?

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Within Costello’s flood of senseless thoughts, within her conflicted reaction toWest’s novel resurfaces a memory from the past. If Costello cannot listen to thememory, she affectively feels the memory’s meaning. Perhaps it is too soon. Andtoo late.

Britzman (2000) reminds us that affect ‘is too encrypted with other scenes to counton understanding’ (43). Perhaps there is more to this memory than we think. Perhapsthe memory has nothing to do with thinking.

According to Lyotard (2002): ‘The affect only “says” one thing – that it is there –but is witness neither for nor of what is there. Neither when nor where. The affect saysonly that it is there if one pays attention to it (32, italics added). Affect bears unreliablewitness to an unspeakable event. It says nothing. And it seems as though Coetzee’snarrative has all along been cryptically calling attention to traumatic affect throughCostello’s trouble with reading. Her trouble signals an unconscious, affective responsesurfaced only by reading and processing West’s novel. Costello’s reading crisis culmi-nates with a trace of traumatic memory startlingly popping from nowhere out of thebarrage of her self-sabotaging thoughts.

Costello’s refusal to analyse her experience in relation to her reading of West’snovel is ironic, given her original drive and determination to know in the first placewhy his book upsets her so. After all she embarks on a transatlantic journey toconfront first West’s novel and then West himself, both of whom she has taken to bethe true source of her reading trouble. At first it makes no sense that when the memoryresurfaces she quickly glosses over the memory’s significance in terms of her troublewith West and his novel. But in a second reading it also makes complete sense thatCostello cannot bear even the mere thought of evil in the light of her failed attempt torepress her memory of it. For Costello any real or fictional capacity to think about orthrough evil is too tied up in her actual and still incomprehensible brutalizing experi-ence of evil at the hands of another. And yet, if she seems completely unaffected bymemory’s vivid revelation and unable to hear and read the terrible content that residesthere, the novel resounds back to her an evil that ultimately she could never keepdown. As she indicates to herself after her lecture ‘something has happened’ in thespan between ‘now’ and first ‘reading the accursed book on the lawn that Sundaymorning’. She asks herself, ‘What was it that upset her so much that a year later sheis still grubbing after its roots? Can she find her way back?’ (Coetzee 2003, 177). Theappearance of traumatic memory that has happened in the after time of readingdisturbs her in a different way from the disturbance experienced in the real time ofreading West’s book. And if she and if we do go back, this some ‘thing’ might holdprofound insight for both Costello and the reader. Reading then can take us unwill-ingly back to a self we thought we left behind for good. We can find ourselves in abook in detours made through the thoughts and words of another. And findingourselves again can leave us infinitely changed.

What we learn from Costello’s disturbing reading disturbs. Costello herself has beenunmercifully subjected to a horror as unthinkable to her as those resounding off thepages of West’s horrible text. Through the tranferential reading between oneself anda novel, Costello engages affects of evil of another time and space recreated for her inthe far-reaching thought figure of another. Her first-hand encounter with evil experi-enced in a brutal rape is psychically called forth by the traumatic affects resurfacingfrom the pages of West’s incomprehensible depiction of human atrocity. Costello’sincapacity objectively to engage with the form and content of evil is experience-afflicted, and so reading makes her fall apart. Costello is shown to suffer a reading

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break-down that repeats and resembles the actual physical and mental break-down shesuffers to survive the aftermath of a violent rape, ruining and leaving in ruins her subse-quent capacity to comprehend textual and actual representations of evil. Meaning breaksdown not because she can’t read the words on the page but because she is barred fromthe novel’s affective content, a content that has previously threatened and thus still feelsthreatening to her own existence.

Reading can bring us back to our psychical injuries, sometimes kicking andscreaming, at other times with utter relief. Despite traumatic memory’s fleetingappearance, Costello continues to deny the impact of the rape on her difficult readingof evil. However, in spite of her wish to preserve the memory in silence she also indi-cates that her relation to evil is altered. Each failed attempt to work through her distur-bances while re-reading West’s novel in the after-time of interpretation results in thesurfacing of a deeply buried memory encasing a silent untold suffering for 50 yearslike an ‘egg in stone’ (Coetzee 2003, 165–6). Working through psychical disturbancesagainst the unresponsive, unaffected fictional and real body of Paul West, Costello isgiven some relief from a forgotten but failed to be repressed trauma, with which shehas yet to come to terms. In her case, coming to terms with her personal experience ofevil is too much to ask on a first reading and even on a second or third. However work-ing through evil as represented by another does provide her with an opening, as sheherself eventually realizes that somewhere between her half-century-long grief withevil and her present facing up to the problem evil: ‘She has a choice’ (Coetzee 2003,182).

Coetzee skilfully demonstrates that a reader’s struggle to comprehend text is asmuch or more a feature of an aesthetic/affective response to the text (for example aresponse to how the symbols or words make one feel and bring to the fore one’s readingconflicts) as it is a feature of cognitive processing (in the educational psychologists’sense). Costello could master the words on the page but could not comprehend them.She had no recourse but helplessly to project out her feelings in wounding words onto the body of West and his novel. These projections gave her temporary relief fromthe psychical vice grip of the novel’s hold. However, the traumatic, affected injurycontained in her projecting words could not get her off the piercing hook of her trauma.Words, constructs and reasonable thought can fail reading, as it did for both Costelloand the reader, when our psychical injuries rub up against the limits of our interpretivecapacities and refuse to admit what conflicts the novel’s affect hold for us.

Coetzee’s text powerfully moves both reader and character through an intenseexperience of deferred meanings and faltering interpretation until a semblance ofmeaning, in a flash of memory silently screaming out its traumatic affect, piercesthrough the dull, obtuse surface-edge of the symbolic. We feel formally the mute forceof trauma simultaneously with Costello, before being able to discern symbolically theform of its content. The narrative drives us to feel before we know inside the internalworld of Costello. At times this sensation – being held captive inside the other’s head– can be oppressive. Reading her mind the reader can feel confused by Costello’sinternal confusion, persecuted by her persecutory feelings, distracted by her mind’smany distractions. Reading feels as if we are going round and round in circles to endup everywhere and to become none the wiser. The unruly and invisible affects‘become’ the narrative that steers one’s faltering reading. Radically unlike the linearnarrative of conventional fiction, these affects, with their accompanying grating tones,mixed signals and wrong directions, guide the narrative force, constantly frustratingone’s reading. The reader is pushed and pulled back and forth by the narrative and is

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surprised, just as Costello is startled, to learn of the secrets the affect-steered narrativekeeps. One cannot help but wonder. Maybe the formless affect driving the narrative isthe narrator.

Costello and the reader are made to fight through the labyrinth of reading’s crisisand confusion. We are given few conceptual constructs and resources to penetrate thethick barrier of affect the internal world erects to fortress the self from its knowledgeof an evil that it cannot bear to admit knowing. Without the ‘terrible gift’ of readingWest’s unfathomable novel Costello might never have had the internal impetus to returnto a place she carefully hid inside, away from others (Simon 2005). In a second readingof another’s novel remains her chance to return and work through the unthinkable traumathat resides within.

Disturbing readings make shaky attempts to penetrate layers and layers of thereader’s psychical stuff. Reading for the truth of the self and other’s meaning canbring news and newness to our understandings of our world and those of others(Britzman 2003). Reading, as the carrier of news and newness, also brings to us theprocess by which we seek repair of the harm we imagine or actually experience at thehands of others. Resurfacing affects we have deeply and partially repressed of earliertimes when we were left unloved by others, reading seeks out the self’s repair. In thesemoments, with some texts, reading can help us ‘find our way back’ to what MelanieKlein (1940/1984) calls ‘the strangeness of ourselves’ (338).

Readings in crisis serve as the means by which we restore an internal world shakenby the unknown contents of traumatic grievances recorded mutely inside. Although itcan be hard to tap into the qualities of our grief when we are in the thick of it, as bothCostello and the reader are while reading this short story, our troubled readings cancompel us to go back to the beginning and start again. In the second-chance, after timeof our first readings, emotional responses become blue prints holding startling andoriginal interpretations for self and others. Our second and third readings give us theopportunity to ‘Hold fast to the word, then reach for the experience behind it’ (177),to think through the disturbance that reading presents to a confronted self begging formeaning in relation to the gift of thinking, of being uncomfortably with one’sthoughts, that the novelist’s literary creation invites.

Twisting and turning along the contours of Costello’s psychical ruin and repair wecan grow weary with reading. The confused text is strewn with reading stops andstalls, making the reader also feel I don’t want to read this. However, the affective gripCoetzee’s narrative has on the reader, the thing that keeps us reading, is our own affec-tive trouble with reading. Costello’s insufferable processes of thought seem vaguelyfamiliar and oddly comforting. One is at home and not at home in her chaotic, mood-altering non-sense. When read for its affect Coetzee’s representation of his unforget-table character takes on new meanings for reading and writing – for literacy – offeringus ‘the opening of new signifying organizations … new possibilities’ (Nouvet 2002,245). The opening of new significant organizations for readings of the self and othersgrounds our capacity to repair and renew our wounded and wounding, self-sufferingrelations with others and the world.

We have not yet come to think of reading as a process by which the self and worldcan be made, ruined, repaired and remade in the span of a few hours or days. Coetzee’ssustained attention to his female character’s inner life dramatizes quite starkly andremarkably one’s internal world in conflict. The naked inside view of reading he givesdisturbs existing conceptions of reading: what reading is, how we learn to read formeaning, how reading, in its ordinary and formal sense, profoundly makes and remakes

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one’s thinking and acting in the world. In Costello’s case, and in all our cases, readingis through affects recursively bubbling on the barred edge of ‘non-knowledge’ ratherthan through conscious, cognitively thought-out series and segments of logical connec-tions, understandings and conclusions (Derrida 1976).

A particular kind of engagement with literature can give readers insight into theinterpretative practice we use to understand how we read and write the social realitieswe live and live out with and on the bodies of others. I say a ‘particular kind’ of read-ing practice of literature because I do not think we have learned to read the text imag-inatively, speculatively, experimentally, tentatively for what it cannot say in wordsand only in feeling. Our most common way of reading is functionally, instrumentally,thematically for understanding, mastering and describing the world and others. Teach-ers of literacy and literature can learn much about the less ascertainable processes ofmeaning-making writing, literary works like that of Coetzee’s daringly forcing thereader into alienating yet strangely familiar practices of reading. Some novels canreturn us to our first readings of the world and others when words were hard and whenwe used our feelings to guide our sense of objects and things outside ourselves. Ourdifficulties with reading can compel us to rethink how it is that we have constrainedhuman existence in practices of interpretation that fail to do justice to the infinite,unfathomable qualities of sentient life (Lévinas 2003; Coetzee 1999).

Reading, Britzman (2006) reminds us, is a faltering attempt to feel out unstablemeanings always already exceeding our means of gaining complete understanding ofknowledge and things.

Psychoanalytic reading teaches us a lesson we already know, that we cannot let go ofaffected life, we are always reading between the lines, wagering meaning and deferringit. Here is where we find that our constructs fail. (317)

If as literate subjects we have closed off the uncertain feeling bolstering childhoodinterpretations to favour a set of closed-thought readings by which we attempt to navi-gate the illusory grand narratives driving adult concerns, literature can help us and ourstudents return to a lost childhood, when words were few and we had to use feelingsabout the world and others to figure out the surprising plot line of our affectivelynarrated precarious existence. Reading then might teach us to bear the soft fragileinside of our being, the limits of our thinking constructs, the folly of believing toodeterminedly in omnipotent knowledge as the sole truth of our existence. Here,suspended disbelievingly in the timeless space of reading, we can learn of ourprofound affective need of the other. In this intimate, sacred space of communion wethink to forget, we read to make ourselves recognizable, grievable, survivable, memo-rable (Coleman 2009). Through reading we learn about our own straining capacity tobe lovable and loving, and that we are all affectively teeming with the possibility oflife and worlds given to us by grace of the existence of others (Britzman 2006).

To forge a literacy of the other, one that acknowledges the other’s affect that repre-sentation cannot anticipate and so is not equipped to hear, we engage, take note of andwork through our singular and collective crisis of reading. Coetzee’s human story ofdisturbing reading reminds us that reading is not only our life-long project; reading isalso our life-long projection, because language makes of us what it will as much as weforcefully will language to make us other than what we once were. Coetzee’s gift ofstartling literature contributes a lasting change to our readings, ourselves and theworld, so that we too might become the human beings we were once and always meant

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to be – helpless creatures, dependent on our first readings of the world and others inbecoming a self teeming with the frailty of human significance, gracefully given to usthrough an other affected life.

Notes on contributorAparna Mishra Tarc is an Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Education, York University,Toronto. She teaches and carries out research in education, using literary and reading theoryand resources. Her current scholarship theorizes the affective and/or aesthetic dimensions ofhuman subject-formation through literature. Her articles have appeared in Educational Theoryand Educational Philosophy and Theory.

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