{ "Nor is it a question of who endures longest." }

[delga]

I've been talking a little about Absalom, Absalom! this week, but I've also been reading J. M. Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians for Af. Lit. Truthfully, Waiting is a lot easier to read than Absalom, Absalom!, mostly because it's a straight-forward, chronological novel. I feel stretched by the novel, wound too tightly. Sometimes a novel can do that. It can pull you ever close to a destination and then when you get there, you realise it is not at all what you expected, and that you are still waiting. And that's what the novel is about, too.

I leave it feeling stupid, like an old man who lost his way long ago but presses on along a road that may lead nowhere.

-- J. M. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians

It's a novel about an uprising, about torture and about resistance. It's also a novel about justice and Colonialism, and is an allegory of oppressor and oppressed. I recommend it because I think you can get a lot more from a novel like this than you ever can from Dickens or Austen. Not because they aren't good writers, or because they aren't important; rather, that Coetzee is important too, and for every bent-backed snob (myself included) who can't see past their Shakespeares, Goethes, Dumases and Nabokovs, there is someone who is reaching into what has made the world as it is right now. And this, ultimately, is why I am dismayed that people who 'love' Shakespeare can't be arsed to read Marlowe's Faustus; why I get irritable when someone makes a value judgement based on canon alone. The canon is there for a reason, but whether or not it's a good reason leaves much to be desired. Just because you have read all of Dickens, or all of Shakespeare, or all of Austen etc, etc, does not mean that you are literary in nature. It just means you've read the fucking canon. Try something new every now and again. Don't turn your nose up at what you've never tasted. It only makes you more of an idiot.

(We like to be seen as academic. Oh, I've read so-and-so. Me too, and so-and-so. It's a marker that we're intellectual. We're proud of it, we have pride. And I find it a little disgusting, which is hypocritical, but I also get tired when a person who can tell me that such-and-such is a reference to the Greek Classics can't tell me who Anansi the Spider is. Anansi, for fuck's sake. Or, a person who is an expert on Sherlock Holmes has no time for Nancy Drew. I actually detest Harry Potter with a passion, but I've at least read it to be able to pass judgement on it. Oh, Ulysses is a load of bollocks because no-one can understand it. Oh, Ulysses is amazing, and I'm better than you because I read it, and I'm obviously reading something in it that you aren't, because my intellectual capability exceeds yours. FUCK OFF. That's not how it works. That's not even the point. The point is in the discourse that we have about these texts. It's about what the lyricality says about us, what the subject says about us, what our reactions say about us. It's about what our reactions say about others. Always, always, always I feel like shouting because you are missing the point, you overgrown, egotistical imbecile. And you are missing out, too.)

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I suppose the ultimate question is: what does it say about me that I chose to make this post instead of the one that tells you I'll be going to the Mayflower Theatre three times in the next term?

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