Fugal Musemathematics Track One, Point One: J.M. Coetzee, Ethics, and Joycean Counterpoint
Fugal Musemathematics Track One, Point One: J.M. Coetzee, Ethics, and Joycean Counterpoint

Summary/Abstract: This multi-parted essay pursues as contrapuntal set of relationships some points of contact, overlap, or synchrony among various border-voicings: literary, linguistic, musical, autobiographical, mathematical, and ethical. Its controlling technique is the inescapably abstract and general notion of fugal pursuit more particularly lodged in the etymological derivation of “fugue” from fugere and fugare — to flee and to pursue. What the essay pursues, by way of that hunting call and response that characterizes fugal texture, is concretely particular: a reading of how the nomadic expatriate J.M. Coetzee in his later fiction follows into exile James Joyce’s siren-song fugal practice; especially — to begin with — in the contrapuntal arrangement of Diary of a Bad Year. Migrating across its own rows on the page and again migrating to and from the various segments of this multipartite essay, my reading articulates an always at least doubled performance, a fugal reading and writing, that first follows by imitation the linguistic practice of Coetzee following Joyce, but that also — as in Coetzee — subsequently seeks to unsettle the Sameness of imitation by the contrapuntal surprise attending the always unique advent of individual exile, expatriation, or the unexpected arrival of some Other, harbingers all of ethics perchance. In order to pursue its prey, this essay has itself entered into exile, fleeing from the eminent domain of orthodoxly-governed argument even to the point of risking the exceptionable: whereby, for example, and for the shape of its presentation, it eschews Chicago Style citation while conforming in other respects to the stylistic protocols of Word and Text.

• Details
• Contents