Double Entendre: Listening for Angels

Abstract

Summary This article is an interpretation of the figure of the double across several of J.M. Coetzee's works. It argues that the double serves principally as a metaphor for meaning and investigates the way in which Coetzee's works position themselves on the threshold of meaning, exploring how literary characters enter into, or remain excluded from, a world of discourse and representation. The peculiar and paradoxical narrative space Coetzee creates is one peopled by lives without stories, one where “life” and “story” or “meaning” seem to be mutually exclusive categories. Coetzee explores how lives ostensibly outside meaning become storied. This advent of meaning, or passage into meaning, I suggest, is also a metonymy for the passage of extradiscursive and extraliterary characters into history, into literature and into truth. By positioning his characters at the boundaries of meaning, and interrogating the “conditions of messengerhood”, Coetzee is able to express his ambivalence about the success or even the possibility of such passages.