Contesting Discourses and Transmodalization in J.M.Coetzee’s Fiction

Abstract


 
 
 South African metafictive literature by white writers, specifically J. M. Coetzee (Nobel laureate, 2003), is essentially pivoted on the black-white dialectics of discourse. The narrative is informed with a variety of sociopolitical inflections that pronounce in various ways the contemporary ideology in South African literature. Critics have greatly delineated the racio-political quagmire of the colonial subject in metafictive literature appearing in the last few decades of twentieth century. However, a deeper analysis of the representation of the colonial subject that interrogates the discourses in narrative is still untapped. J.M.Coetzee’s South African-based novels, mainly Waiting for the Barbarians (1980), Life and Times of Michael K (1983) and Age of Iron (1990), manifest a metafictional consciousness that investigates the constructs of reality of the colonial subject. It is significant to explore the logocentric premise in the representation of colonial subject and how this contributes to the meaning of the fictional word. This study is a narratological research of Coetzee’s technique of transmodalization (narrative mode shifts) between two types of discourses, the pedagogical and performative, and employs Homi K Bhabha’s (1994) theoretical framework of representative discourse. In examining the narrative mode shifts between frame breaks, metanarrative, narrative of words, narrative of dreams, and narrative of topography, this research argues that a non-position is generated between the contesting discourses. This research becomes a model for the study of colonial dynamics in metafictive white writing. It aims to unravel the elements integral in voicing the conditionality of the colonized subject and the contention of representation. This study also explores the metonymical relationships in narrative that reflect intrinsic aspects of the signification of representation.