Review of Letter to Pessoa by Michell Cahill

This essay considers the title of J.M. Coetzee’s Summertime from the perspective of a remark Coetzee makes in Doubling the Point that ‘all writing is autobiographical,’ and posits a concept of ‘titular space’ tropologically exceeding the ‘reality effect’ envisaged by Roland Barthes.

This essay celebrates idea-recycling within and among various media and disciplines, and across several fault-lines. From an initial and informally mathematical account of that Möbius topology informing the recycling symbol, the essay turns and twists its attention to musical and literary analogues of the Möbius strip as performed before and after the strip acquired its name. Recycling material from Guillame de Machaut to J.S. Bach and J.M. Coetzee, the essay pursues the visible sound and aural linguistics of such Möbius topoi, concerning itself along the way with how Gabriel Josipovici narratively recycles and dislocates his 1972 short story ‘Mobius the Stripper’ into the contrapuntally more complex Goldberg: Variations (2002; 2007), a musical revisitation of Möbius topology also visible in Josipovici’s latest novel, Infinity (2012). Such recycling dis-locates (in geological terminology, to cause a fault), re-thinks, re-composes, and so also re-locates a medieval moment lodged in the Machaut rondeau, ‘Ma fin est mon commencement, et mon commencement ma fin.’

This life- and laughter-celebrating essay pursues with cannibal intent the anthropo- and semiophagy imagined and practiced by David Lurie, protagonist and "servant of Eros" in J.M. Coetzec's Disgrace. Circumstance, including encounters with non-human animals, leads Lurie to re-imagine a chamber opera he has long wanted to write on "the last big love-affair" of Byron's life. Pursuing the operatic changes, this essay engages with Coctzec's practice of musically contrapuntal narrative, which itself follows, but austerely so - by way of Beckett - the Joyce and joy of Ulysses. The essay thus traces and tracks and trails a Coetzee practice of writing in which Lurie and his chamber opera are but ciphers and sustenance a cannibal cartoon of otherness - ingested into a larger body of gracefully verbal music: Disgrace.

These pages seek to simulate the score of a contrapuntal composition that plays across three imbricated voice-parts as though it were some sort of fugue. By such gesture, music presents itself here among other media. Etymologically derived from fugere and fugare, to flee and to pursue, fugue has since the renaissance been imagined as a product of simultaneous composition along vertical and horizontal axes. In its call and response articulation among (here three) parts, such composition is always imitative. These pages thus imitate and contrapuntally respond to the call in J.M. Coetzee's fiction, especially after the "Plunk-Plink-Plonk" of banjo in Disgrace, and the polyphonic page presentation in Diary of a Bad Year.