Abandoned Creatures: Creaturely Life and the Novel Form in J. M. Coetzee’s Slow Man

Abstract

In an often-quoted interview from 1990, J. M. Coetzee describes relation between his literary work and his life as in unexpectedly direct terms: Let me add ... that I, as a person, as a personality, am overwhelmed, that my thinking is thrown into confusion and helplessness, by fact of suffering in world, and not only human suffering. These fictional constructions of mine are ludicrous against that being-overwhelmed, and, me, transparently (Doubling 248) Such a plain statement was all more surprising coming from a writer whose work was, at time of interview, routinely categorized as 'metafiction.' It is remarkable that this writer confesses that he is deeply affected by very thing his fictional work, on an ungenerous but far from uncommon reading, seemed unable confront directly: the fact of suffering in world. Coetzee's statement explicitly connects this affective experience his writings, which are not be taken as a failure acknowledge affect generated by fact of worldly suffering, but rather as so many against it; his fictions serve as a strategy contain overwhelm[ing] intensity of affect. Yet if they manage mitigate this intensity, they do not neutralize it completely: constructed by fiction are paltry, ludicrous. Coetzee's statement not only offers us a glimpse into affective economy propelling his fiction, it also obliquely registers a limitation of his early work; in this way, it anticipates several of trajectories that his work will explore after 1990. Coetzee describes his ambition convey an affective response suffering, yet he also subtly signals an awareness that his work has failed do so effectively when he notes that status of his fictions as paltry, ludicrous defenses is a fact, and to me [Coetzee], transparently so. This phrasing indicates that this understanding of his fiction is less transparent people other than author, as reception of his early work seems confirm. There are at least two suggestions embedded in this dense passage, both of which are instructive for an understanding of Coetzee's trajectory in last two decades: first, it announces Coetzee's exploration of different modes of writing that more successfully communicate affect of suffering, and second, it indicates that two of notions that will have be renegotiated in such a writing practice are 'authorship' and 'authority.' Coetzee's fiction in last two decades has returned time and again these two closely interlinked projects. The reconsideration of authorship and authority was already central in The Master of Petersburg, first novel he published after interview, and it directly implicated person of Coetzee himself in his three peculiar autobiographical fictions (Boyhood, Youth, and Summertime). And as David Attwell has noted, in Elizabeth Costello, Slow Man, and Diary of a Bad Year, the practice of authorship itself' has become [t]he overriding subject (217); same can be said about his Nobel lecture, He and His Man. As for attempt convey a more direct affective response suffering, publication of Disgrace in 1999 seemed announce a shift a markedly more topical and realist register in its merciless depiction of life of a white man in a post-Apartheid South Africa that has totally erased terms of social contract that used pertain. The outspoken reactions its depiction of new race relationships, lingering xenophobia, and sexual abuse seemed signal that Coetzee, without abandoning his signature self-reflexivity, had finally managed convey and provoke an affective response reality of suffering which his work is committed. It is somewhat surprising, then, that Coetzee's twenty-first-century novels have not continued in this more realist vein. …