Coetzees Waiting for the Barbarians and Foe, and Gordimers My Sons Story and The Conservationist - Essay Example

?Introduction The role of the in the canon of South African literature has been a of ongoing critical concern The as artist has historically taken on, either voluntarily or as a function of social expectation, an inevitable sociopolitical importance in a society where large race-based power imbalances have played a critical role. J.M. Coetzee and Nadine Gordimer, both of whom have received Nobel Prizes for their fictional accounts of life during apartheid, have come to be viewed through critical perspectives that often include political implications as well as literary. Part of the reason Coetzee and Gordimer have received such acclaim, in fact, is found in the way that both writers have approached their craft as writers in the context of such political implications. Through employing literary techniques that allow for self-conscious analysis of culture from a critical sociopolitical stance, both Coetzee and Gordimer have achieved masterly balances of social commentary and artistic exposition concerning writing and its purposes. In this paper, the proposition that both Coetzee and Gordimer are best viewed as self-aware writers who have written about the act of writing will be weighed against the difficulties they have faced while writing in such a turbulent political context. Through a consideration of four representative works written during the apartheid period, Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians and Foe, and Gordimer’s My Son’s Story and The Conservationist, the paper will detail the way the authors have spoken to and about their societies, even as they have written from a privileged position that postcolonial studies suggest tends toward linguistic and cultural marginalization. The paper will emphasize the use both writers make of certain metafictional and postmodern devices to self-consciously draw attention to their literary works while nevertheless speaking to truths about South African society. In order to do this, a brief introduction to postcolonial and postmodern literature is in order. Such an examination is critical, because it drives, in part, the choices made in developing literary structures. Postcolonial literary criticism is marked by an attempt to undercut dominant discourses of colonization to allow for expressions that portray political and cultural exclusions.2 Viewed in both the research literature and in the actual world of politics as a project of resistance, postcolonialism seeks to allow colonized societies to redefine for themselves their cultural identities. Because postcolonial literature is characterized by an attempt to develop authentic voices that are free of colonial ideology,3 it virtually requires a recapturing of traditional forms and expressions that are freed from the influence of empire.4 The act of writing is often viewed as a way to challenge the authority of residual colonial ideology as “a means of fulfilling a political agenda of retrieving identity.”5 In an important sense, therefore, the mere fact that both authors write in English can be questioned under the guise of postcolonial studies, as it implies a culturally dominant perspective that continues the oppression of colonialism. In fact, some critics have argued that the very act of social criticism implies a narrative that is “ironically, almost imperialistic in scope”6 When applied to the case of describing South Africa, these implications become even more complicated. Simply put, the fact both Coetzee and Gordimer wrote the books considered in this paper not as postcolonial writers, but during a time when colonialism was still very much in effect, raises questions about the legitimacy of representations made in the books, when viewed through a postcolonial lens. Such a consideration highlights the problem of representation that is inherent in the colonial relationship. Gordimer, especially, has been cognizant of the implications of this, as she writes the following in her book Telling Times: The creative act is not pure. History evidences it. Ideology demands it. Society exacts it. The writer loses Eden, writes to be read, and comes to realize that he is answerable. (2010, p. 409) Gordimer’s view of her own role as a writer is based on what she calls a responsibility to make the “essential gesture” – to speak for the oppressed and to accept any consequences that come from doing so.7 In light of her having such a willingness to use her craft to make such representations, one might find it acceptable for the writer to use literary skill in order to advance a cause or deconstruct an injustice. However, the postcolonial critique questions whether any form and expression of Western literature, even if applied with good intent in order to deconstruct power relationships, is legitimate in the case of literature describing colonial societies.8 This is because it can lead to a “re-inscription” of European values through application of Western-inspired ideological approaches to literature.9 Dominic Head acknowledges this reality in the case of Coetzee when he points out that Coetzee was the first South African writer to utilize “Western preoccupations” with literary techniques that emphasize textuality.10 The word Head uses to describe Coetzee’s appropriation of such techniques is “import,” suggesting that Coetzee’s use of such techniques is problematic because it implies an imposition of colonial thought processes. The question of authority regarding who has the right to representation and how it should be handled remains, therefore, a critical concern, when reviewing both author’s work. Susan Gallagher provides an answer to these concerns regarding the nature of postcolonial literature when she writes the following: By questioning colonial authority, postcolonial writers do not necessarily question all authority. Rather, they set out to dismantle a specific historically grounded discourse in the hopes of demonstrating that an alternative discourse is possible. (p. 14) Particularly she suggests a possible link between postmodernism and postcolonialism that is indicative of the approach both traditions take to deconstructing “truth.” Challenging textual authority in such a way that it questions the legitimacy of an objective claim of truth, as it turns out, is compatible in very many ways with challenging sociopolitical authority in a way that admits no normative justification for inequality. Some critics have argued, in fact that postcolonialism and postmodernism, in so far as they approach authority, are not very different at all.11 Therefore, in adapting postmodern literary techniques in a self-reflexive way, both Coetzee and Gordimer can be seen to use textual approaches to writing that offer legitimate insights into the power relationships that existed in apartheid South Africa. So what are the techniques the authors use in the novels in question, and how does their self-conscious application of such techniques permit an artistic approach to writing that emphasizes the process of writing itself? To answer these questions, we now turn to the texts. In Waiting for the Barbarians, Coetzee uses allegory as a means of addressing what Head calls “the destructiveness (and self-destructiveness) of an imperial regime – obstructed by one man of conscience”12 In doing so, he novelizes the equivalent of South Africa as a brutal, impersonal “Empire” that crushes its native population through senseless acts of violence. Coetzee draws the protagonist, known as “the magistrate,” as a man who attempts to say something to stop the violence but is proved impotent. He ultimately fails in his attempt to write his narrative in a compelling way, as shown near the end of the story. This self-awareness on the part of the protagonist, leads him to admit vulnerability through relaying his effective defeat and humiliation at the hands of the Empire. Coetzee’s own self-awareness and his accompanying understanding of the limits of language and the limitations of his ability to persuade are on display in this characterization. It also signals a kind of subjective understanding of truth and knowledge that is particularly bound by such concerns as perspective and political power. Coetzee, the author, is admitting the possibility of his own bias in the examination and positioning of the character in the story by showing the purported author within the story as representing the human weaknesses inherent in his society and the artistic limitations of his craft. Contrast this with the seemingly complete lack of self-awareness of Gordimer’s Mehring, in The Conservationist. Gordimer portrays Mehring, a bigoted, white member of the wealthy ruling class, as having almost no real self-awareness throughout the novel. He simply moves through his life with privileged entitlement. His son, with whom he has a strained relationship, seems to be the only character with whom Mehring wants to connect. In the pieces of dialogue in which Mehring is either talking with his son or imagining himself to be doing so, he approaches a kind of self-awareness that he lacks otherwise. It is as if he is writing himself through the son’s life, making the son his legacy. The fact that his son wants no part of it is the only real weakness that Mehring will admit, until near the end of the book when he develops an awareness that his time on earth and his hold on his land as a colonial master are slipping away. Gordimer suggests through the internal monologues that the man undergoes, especially in regard to the running conversation he has with his son, that he is attempting to write his lines upon himself in the same way that a writer might before he commits his words to paper. The use of characters within a story as purported authors is significant in both Coetzee’s and Gordimer’s work and serves as a vehicle that allows both writers to weigh their own prejudices within the context of the story. It also serves to highlight the problematic nature of writing from their particular societal positioning. In order for a novel to be classified as self-conscious, something more is needed than a novelist merely using the voice of a character to tell a story.13 After all, every writer, in one way or other, uses characters within a story to narrate. In a self-conscious novel, the character is not only narrator, but author.14 The characteristics of the self-conscious novel are designed to promote an ongoing dialogue between the reader and the author (in this sense, either the narrative author or the actual author). This promotes an interpretive stance toward the text allowing room for the author to take a point of view and speak with some authority on it because of an understanding that the reader, too, has a point of view. In the interpretive act that each undergoes, communication is had. A self-conscious novel allows the character who is purported to be the author to actively participate with the reader in ways that promote a kind of questioning through consideration of the perspective the “author” uses. In the case of both Coetzee and Gordimer, the use of a character as author allows the actual author to deal with the potential prejudices of the culture and the views of their readers. Nowhere is this better seen than in the case of Coetzee’s Foe. The novel is the story of Susan Barton, a feisty female character who goes in search of her daughter only to come, through a series of misadventures, to be stranded upon the same island as the literary character Robinson Crusoe (in this case treated as historical). She meets Cruso and the African slave Friday who coexists with him on their deserted island. (Coetzee writes the story as a frame story, with his characters presented as though they were the first and original, and the spelling differences and other dissimilarities from actual historical or the prior literary account are intended.). Coetzee’s Cruso bears little resemblance to the literary figures drawn by the actual historical novelist Daniel DeFoe. Barton is presented as the main character of the story throughout the novel, and the placement of a woman as protagonist in the midst of a world so traditionally identified as male allows for a reconsideration of many of the themes of DeFoe’s masterpiece. For example, while on the island, Cruso tells Barton that Friday had his tongue cut out by slave traders and, therefore, he cannot talk. Barton wonders whether this is true or whether Cruso himself possibly did it, recognizing that the silenced cannot tell their own histories. In this one simple observation and question, Barton opens a world of possibilities that will become clear only later in the story, after the characters have been rescued and returned to England. Barton attempts to convince a novelist she meets, Daniel Foe, to tell her story about Cruso (who died on the ship that rescued them, while in transit). Friday, the slave, has also accompanied her to England and his continuing silence offers several opportunities for gaps in the narrative to be explored as examples of marginalization. Foe thinks the part of Barton’s story about searching for her daughter is more interesting than the part about Cruso, and he initially refuses to write about the deserted island experience. When he finally consents, he inserts his own perspective into the story and removes Barton altogether, injecting his own imagined action and presenting it as real. Barton had, at one moment in the story, attempted to write the tale herself but she did not have confidence in the result. When Foe writes her story and removes her, therefore, she is silenced as surely as Friday is with his removed tongue or Cruso in his distant memory. Further, the questions of silencing those who don’t have a voice comes up again in the final portion of the book when a young woman purporting to be Barton’s daughter arrives, and the question of knowing even those with whom one should be familiar is raised. Throughout these narratives, the injustices that marginalized people face when they are robbed of their voices come to play. This is a central theme in the novel’s presentation, and Coetzee – though white and male, in a society where white males are generally viewed as the bigoted, ruling class – is able to escape some of the criticisms of writing from such a privileged perspective. His portrayal of Barton as protagonist, and his presentation of the act of writing include such concerns as how to survive as a writer in the face of crushing debt. Such a condition drove Foe to make decisions he made throughout the story, just as Barton’s positioning within society as a woman drove her to make decisions she made. Both constraints impact the characters’ artistic expression. The interweaving narratives of characters, all presented to show that the characters’ voices were silenced in crucial ways, suggest that in the real world of South African society the power relationships of actual actors within society are socially determined in ways that make listening to narratives particularly important. Gordimer’s My Son’s Story presents a similar approach that tells the story of a black father and mother – the ironically named Sonny, and Aila – as they raise a family that eventually falls apart in the midst of Sonny’s awakening political conscience. This awakening results in Sonny losing his job and eventually having an affair with a white woman who shares his political beliefs. The story is told through the eyes of the story’s purported author, Will, Sonny’s boy, who sees his father involved in the affair and comes to hate him for his abandonment of the family. He writes near the end of the book that “I am a writer and this is my first book that I can never publish.”15 The reason he cannot publish is that he keeps the secret of his infidelity to himself, treating it “as if it never happened”16 Such simplistic expressions on the part of the author, coupled with a reliance on traditional realism as a form for narrative storytelling, signify that the character-as-author is of a different class and mindset than Gordimer. The novel is, on one level, a love story showing the love that Sonny has for his family, and describing how that love eventually becomes negated by the love he has for his country. The fact that the father and son share the same name/title (Sonny/Son) suggests that they operate as a kind of mirror image for each other. This relationship, complicated by the son’s witnessing of the affair, may well have ended up with mixed feelings anyway, as many father-son relationships do. However, by Gordimer indicating that the father had an affair with a white woman and that this was the cause that split up the black family seems deeply suggestive about the role that Gordimer herself, as author and activist, plays in determining black characters17 Gordimer claims she sees her role primarily as an imaginative critic, but that her own activism compelled here to write about certain subjects.18 In this case, she developed her first black protagonist and it is instructive that she approached the subject in a way that admits the possibility that she misidentifies and (perhaps) even separates black identity from its family resemblance. She places the narrative authority of the story in the character of Will to show that he reacts out of his own struggle to be free, and that she, as white woman both in the literary piece and in the real world, is limited in her ability to connect. The fact that much of the discussion here revolves around political themes and realities is determined by the nature of South African literature itself. Matthews argues the following regarding this point: Considering the responsibility of the novelist in South Africa involves questions deeply embedded in the country’s troubled history. The spectre of apartheid casts an unavoidable shadow over writers from white privileged society despite the breakdown of the political system of apartheid.19 In addressing the way both Coetzee and Gordimer approach the subject of writing, it is inevitable that questions of privilege will be raised. In writing about the reception that Foe received in 1986, for example, Marais argued that the critical community “understandably” found it “wanting.” There was a general perception widely embraced that, during a time when the country was burning both literally and figuratively, Coetzee, as one of the nation’s most prominent authors, decided to publish a postmodern textual piece about “a somewhat pedestrian eighteenth century novelist.”20 Such an argument offers insight into the importance that the writer has as a political force in South Africa. Both Coetzee and Gordimer have expectations placed upon their work to create works that speak to the ills of the society. In reviewing how they have accomplished their objectives, it is important to acknowledge the political implications of their work. But what can the authors do, and how should they go about it, in order to address those public expectations in ways that are still appropriate to their own artistic visions? Matthews argues that there are two extreme responses that the “racist hierarchy” can apply in order to deal with the “Other” in literary work. The first is an effort to speak out for the “Other,” risking falling into a “a continuing form of linguistic colonialism.” The second is an outright refusal to engage the “Other,” thereby acknowledging “unbridgeable differences” in a way that hints at the rhetoric the drove apartheid.21 Gordimer, for example, in speaking out for the “Other” in order to invite public discourse on sensitive topics comes near the first error, while Coetzee, in seeming often to pursue his art in ways that suggest representation is impossible, leans toward the second. However, both writers used characters in their stories as purported authors to suggest a textual approach that allows them to consider certain societal perspectives that may be controversial. Simply put, both use such characters because certain outlooks are unreachable for them as members of the privileged classes, due to the nature of subjective identity. Such use allows the authors to explore applications of writing as art form that may transgress social boundaries. In showing Mehring to be essentially imperious to anyone’s opinion but his own in The Conservationist, for example, Gordimer seems to suggest that whites are either not open to input from blacks or don’t need it. Further, in showing how Will loses his family over an affair that was basically the result of his father finally awakening to his real and free identity, and after finding love with a white woman in the process, she seems to suggest a kind of paternalism that may not have been intended, but crept in anyway. The fact that Sonny moved his family to a white neighborhood in order to give them a chance to improve their lives also is suggestive here. Gordimer writes from a perspective that attempts to openly address her imputed desires to represent marginalized people, but one may wonder whether in dong this she misrepresents those who do not subscribe to her ideology (benevolent though it may be). Coetzee, in fact, has been publicly critical of Gordimer because he says that she engages only those blacks who come along with whites in an effort to throw off the shackles of white supremacy.22 Oddly, in light of this, Gordimer has Sonny claim in My Son’s Story, that freedom and equality are different, and that equality is just an effort to soothe envy.23 This statement suggest that blacks must, in the end, become independent and self-determined to be free. If this is true, one wonders why her characters often pursue equality rather than freedom. It seems almost as if Gordimer is unwilling to allow her characters to pursue their own dreams because she is worried they will choose the wrong ones – either ends that are not good for them or ends she can’t approve of. Coetzee’s Friday is portrayed as an eccentric, but in the end he is claimed to “possess the key to the closure of the narrative.”24 For all her good-heartedness, Gordimer does not seem to be willing to give up such a key to her characters. While she comes closest to doing so in The Conservationist, when the farm workers bury the dead body in their own way with a proper burial following the floods that unearthed it from a previous grave, even here – by showing Mehring to be disjointed from understanding or caring about his workers – she robs them of the pleasure they might get from their growing power. On the other hand, the fact that Coetzee showed the slave Friday to communicate only through trained commands, suggests that Coetzee does not believe white society can engage black society ultimately. There are moments in Foe in which this impossible gulf seems on the verge of being insultingly racist. For example when Cruso is explaining to Barton that he had attempted to get Friday to go get wood by telling him “wood” several times, even pointing to the wood, before he realized that he had trained Friday with the word “firewood” and that it was the only cue he understood, the presentation verges on racist. Not only does it not give credit to Friday to be able to make extrapolations (Coetzee could have done this, since he controlled the story), it also suggests that the fault in miscommunication is all with Friday. Cruso, further, speaks about Friday as though he is a trained animal, saying he only taught him the cues he needed to know in order to be a better slave. While part of this content may have been chosen to distinguish Coetzee’s (or Barton’s) version of Cruso from the DeFoe character, Coetzee’s drawing of both his characters and their situations suggests a very broad gap that identifies the “Other” as almost impossibly far away. In another incident involving Friday – the one in which Foe found Friday attempting to write and grew excited, only to find that Friday had merely draw an “O” – he seemingly indicates that Friday is an empty space to be filled up, or a void to be completed.25 Such a positioning of the slave in the story, coupled with Barton’s realization that she risks colonizing him during their travels together calls forward a number of possible ugly strands of residual colonial ideology that Coetzee struggles with, even as he admits the struggle through his literary technique. In her book, Telling Times, Gordimer writes that even though one may fight against it and may attempt to engage society in order to bring about positive change, one perhaps always feels, as a white, person, slightly superior.26 According to this view, even with a self-conscious approach, the presentations of the author’s works may contain colonial ideologies that continue to run through the society and its history and traditions. The Conservationist, as the one book considered here that does not actively use a character within the story as purported author, offers a glimpse into Gordimer’s own efforts to write through the problem of apartheid in a way that will achieve artistic satisfaction and social commentary. It represents Gordimer’s first break with conventional realism, and as a result, it includes a new consideration of the “sanctioned versions of history” by weighing the claims of Mehring to his rightful ownership of his land, backed by his logic and his millions, compared to his workers’ rights to the land, backed by their traditions and their numbers.27 Throughout the novel, Gordimer moves the character through the development of an awareness as he metaphorically attempts to write his own story in his head – as we saw above – to a new understanding of truth. Gordimer lets the same silences speak here that came to play such an important role in My Son’s Story.28 In that later story, the silences or gaps consisted of such concerns as Aila’s failure to be represented in the narrative until very late in the story. In this story, they are represented by such concerns as the son’s rejection of the father and the dead body that was buried in silence on Mehring’s land, only to haunt him until it washes up in the floods. Such representations provide a voice for perspectives that have historically been ignored. They are in line with Head’s statement regarding Gordimer, that her narratives always seem to be purposive.29 In very many cases, the inclusion of silences in the narrative spark recognition that move the mind to a new truth. Coetzee’s work, on the other hand, suggests that such silences may not even be explorable. In fact, one should not replace old “truth” with a revolutionary new “truth” – but one should question the nature of authority and truth in the first place. This may, in fact lead to a less activist political stance than Gordimer’s achieves. As Marais argues, Coetzee “‘defends’ the politics and ethics of his writing practice by questioning the assumption of history’s causal relation to the literary text that is implicit in such critiques.”30 In other words, Gordimer listens to the silences and hear the truths of the downtrodden and overlooked. Coetzee sees silence such as that emanating from the barbarian girl in Waiting for the Barbarians and is content to let them remain silent. His Friday could have learned to write, as Foe suggested in the story in order to communicate, for example, but he does not. The silence is not to be discovered, because the relationship between “truth” and such silence is irrelevant – or at least not with the artist’s control. A final concern which will be weighed here is found in Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians It revolves around the feeling that the magistrate had for the barbarian girl. Like the illicit relationship that Sonny had in My Son’s Story, this relationship can be viewed through the lens of a postcolonial perspective in such a way that the power imbalances that were evident in the relationship seemed to doom it from the start. However, Coetzee makes a telling analogy in comparing the magistrate’s impotence with the girl by saying that any man “who does not know what to do with the woman in his bed should not know how to write.31 In this description, Coetzee’s narrator admits a vulnerability that revolves around the central question we have been focusing upon in this paper: What does it mean to write? What is the process? Coetzee suggests that, in ways that are similar to Mehring in The Conservationist, Barton in Foe, and Will in My Son’s Story, a basic inability to write accompanies a feeling of impotence – whether it be cultural, sexual, political, and spiritual. The marginalized, he seems to suggest, have a right to speak, but not always the tools. The character of Friday, especially, seems tragic because he knows something particularly important about Cruso and the island but having had his tongue cut out, he is unable and perhaps unwilling to tell it. Coetzee suggests that the impotence of his narrator character offers the reader a way to reassess the world, not necessarily to find truth but merely to understand it anew. Like Gordimer’s weakened and marginalized characters, Coetzee’s survivors of colonial violence have a story to tell but they often find themselves so beaten up or unsure of themselves that they are not sure how to begin telling it. Part of Coetzee’s literary project is to suggest that it doesn’t matter where one begins because there is no objective truth. However, for the characters in Foe the temptation to imitation and the willingness to adapt accepted is too great. For the magistrate in Waiting for the Barbarians, the pain he is holding is too deep. In both cases, the expression will not come. Coetzee seems to suggest in both books that the writing task, for the self-aware writer, is painful and challenging no matter what the sticking point is. Gordimer, on the other hand, argues in the books considered here that a search for themes writ large across individual lives is an appropriate focus. Her stories reflect a struggle for identity among the subjects she described. Politics, love, nationalism, and other macro concerns play a key role in defining her characters. She writes, therefore, against the seemingly very personal explorations of Coetzee, a challenges to the world and engages a search for truth. Perhaps this is the difference in her emphasis on individualism relative to Coetzee. He views view the world through a microscope, while she views it through a telescope. He looks at psychology and motivation while she considers broader social trends to be deterministic. In conclusion, this paper has considered the role of the writer in four representative works by Coetzee and Gordimer. It has been shown that both authors use a self-conscious approach to describe the world around them in fictional detail. Specifically, both authors use such devices such as an intra-narrative “author” and other framing devices that allow them to overcome concerns of postcolonial bias and speak to South African truths. It has been further suggested that Coetzee approaches his subjects with an apolitical stance that is devoted to challenging the aesthetic implications of truth generally, while Gordimer approaches society in a more pragmatic and political way. Both authors offer insightful analysis of postcolonial experience within the framework of innovative and provocative literature and engaging stories. Ako, E. O. (2004). From commonwealth to postcolonial literature. CLCWeb 6, 2 Article 1 Available at: Berger, R. (1992). Book review of: Past the last post. Postmodern Culture, 2, 2. Boehmer, E. (2005). Colonial and postcolonial literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Coetzee, J.M. (1982). Waiting for the barbarians. New York: Penguin. Coetzee, J.M. (1988). Foe. New York: Penguin. Gallagher, S. (1991). A Story of South Africa: J.M.Coetzee’s fiction in context. London: Harvard University Press. Gallagher, S. (1994). Introduction. In S. Gallagher (Ed.), Postcolonial literature and the biblical call for justice. University of Mississippi Press. Gordimer, N. (2003). My Son’s Story. London: Bloomsbury. Gordimer, N. (1983) The Conservationist. New York: Penguin Books. Gordimer, N. (2010) Telling Times: Writing and Living, 1954-2008. New York: W.W. Norton and Company. Head, D. (1994) Nadine Gordimer. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Head, D. (1997). J.M. Coetzee. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jacobs, J.U. (1993). Nadine Gordimer's intertextuality: authority and authorship in "My Son's Story." English in Africa, 20, 2 (Oct), pp. 25-45. Marais, M. (2006). Death and the space of the responses to the other in J.M. Coetzee’s The Master of Petersburg. In J. Poyner (Ed.), J. M. Coetzee: and the idea of the public intellectual. Ohio University Press. Matthews, H. (2009). Both Gordimer and Coetzee have been preoccupied, throughout their careers, with the responsibility of the novelist. Enervate. Available at: Monson, T. (2004) Conserving the cogito: rereading Nadine Gordimer's The Conservationist. Available at: < http://www.accessmylibrary.com/article-1G1-124642267/conserving-cogito-rereading-nadine.html> Stonehill, B. (1988). The self-conscious novel: artifice in fiction from Joyce to Pynchon. University of Pennsylvania Press. Tiffin, H. (1987). Post-colonial literatures and counter-discourse. KUNAPIPI, 9, 3, 17-34. Read More