For our president on the occasion of his invasion of Iraq and the awarding of the Nobel Prize to J. M. Coetzee, MMIII.
Posted by jim at October 3, 2003 06:32 PM | TrackBackI carry my papers and photographs about with me in one of those oldfashioned briefcases which the Essen auto-workers nowadays use as lunch pails. If I do not keep this bulky, fatuous load with me Marilyn pores through my manuscript trying to find out what I am up to. Marilyn is a disturbed and unhappy woman. I let her see nothing because I know that she discusses me with other people and because she is in my estimation not equipped to understand correctly the insights into man's soul that I have evolved since I began to think about Vietnam. Marilyn is eager, but for her own sake only, that I should have a prosperous career. She is alarmed to see me leave the high road of orthodox S-R propaganda and strike out on a path of my own. She is a conformist who hoped to marry in me her conformist twin. But I have never in my heart been a conformist. I have always just been biding my time. Marilyn's great fear is that I will drag her out of the suburbs into the wilderness. She thinks that every deviation leads into the wilderness. This is because she has a false conception of America. She cannot believe that America is big enough to contain its deviants. But America is bigger than all of us; I acknowledged that long before I began to say my say to Coetzee—America will swallow me, digest me, dissolve me in the tides of its blood. Marilyn will have no fear: she will always have a home. Nor, in the true myth of America, is it I who am the deviant but the cynic Coetzee together with all those who no longer feel the authentic American destiny crackling within them and stiffening their marrow. Only the strong can hold course through history's doldrums. It is possible that Coetzee may survive the 1970's; but simple natures like Marilyn's will rot without a core of belief.
[J. M. Coetzee. 1974. Dusklands, pp.8f.]