1 - J. M. Coetzee on Truth, Skepticism, and Secular Confession in “The Age We Live In”

Summary

IN THE FOLLOWING I investigate Coetzee's concept of truth. A valuable lead is given in the recent publication The Good Story: Exchanges on Truth, Fiction and Psychotherapy (2015), a record of Coetzee's conversations with the psychotherapist Arabella Kurtz. In these conversations Coetzee defines the writer's outlook as materially and qualitatively different from that which governs the work of psychotherapy. I consider how the special type of truth Coetzee defends in these exchanges is situated with respect to postmodern consciousness. In Coetzee's understanding of the writer's task, as I go on to argue, the idea of secular confession becomes a pivotal concept in view of problems that weigh upon such consciousness in “the age we live in” (68).

The Question of Truth

“As a genre,” Coetzee observes in his most recent publication The Good Story, “the novel seems to have a constitutional stake in the claim that things are not as they seem to be, that our seeming lives are not our real lives” (191). He further notes, summarizing the long discussion that has taken place in the volume with his interlocutor, the psychotherapist Arabella Kurtz: “And psychoanalysis, I would say, has a comparable stake” (191). This is the concluding statement of the book. The note of amity struck in these final words belies the differences between the novelist and the psychotherapist that are a feature of these exchanges. Throughout the volume Coetzee holds passionately to the importance of “the one and only truth” (67), a finally unattainable truth about self and being in the world. Kurtz, by contrast, defends—just as tenaciously—what she calls “intersubjective truth,” the notion that truth can appear as an event in the consulting room as patient and therapist work together in a labor directed at its discovery. Coetzee, for his part, cultivates a sense of the transcendent reach of subjective truth in the world, a truth-search that radiates from the personal consciousness of the writer, yet a search at the same time that is in some ways “tragic”: the writer must have a belief in the existence of such a truth to write, but the writer knows at the same time that the results of writing are “not the truth” (76).