Materiality and the Modern Cosmopolitan Novel

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108 Materiality and the Modern Cosmopolitan Novel


his vulnerability, deepening the pathos that the reader feels toward
the character.
In a sense, the clash or dissonance we observe between Lurie’s
thoughts and the events can also be said to highlight the singular-
ity of the being who suffers, rather than the behavioral traits that
the character desperately deploys as a defensive mental distraction.
Following this train of thought, we could say that we do not empa-
thize with Lurie because we come to feel closer to his psychological
processes (indeed, the tone employed at this point in the narrative
courts psychological distance). Rather, we empathize in a more self-
reflexive, critical manner because our familiarity with these processes
prompts us to see through them, toward the vulnerable living being
who is suffering beneath. We therefore come to feel a momentary
sense of mastery over Lurie’s thoughts—we know what his mind is
really doing, and why. In a sense, we self-consciously subordinate his
consciousness to our own (dismissing his thoughts as “false”), and
we are confronted with the spectacle of the residual singular being
in an exposed state of helplessness. A difference of singularity can
therefore be said to be revealed between the reader and Lurie by
virtue of a kind of synthesis of consciousness. Such an event shares
patterns with Levinas’s ethical formulation: “Consciousness appears
as the very type of existing in which the multiple is and yet, in syn-
thesis, is no more , in which, consequently, transcendence, a simple
relation, is less than being.”^54 Thus the techniques of tone and narra-
tive voice that Coetzee uses to establish our sense of separation from
Lurie (“the multiple” in Levinas’s parlance) create an impression of
privileged psychological insight that paradoxically brings about a
sense of immediate unity.^55
Given its impact, the ordeal Lurie undergoes should also be ana-
lyzed in terms of its effects on the character himself. For Pamela
Cooper, a major consequence of the event is that it “pushes Lurie to
the limits of his knowledge, and in this way beyond the familiar par-
adigms of Western epistemology.”^56 This assessment certainly has its
merits, particularly given the fundamental change that takes place
in Lurie after the event. Although his omnipresent supercilious tone
lurks in almost every sentence, particularly when discussing other
people, he nonetheless begins to display a humbling willingness to

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