Slow Man

With Slow Man it seems as though Coetzee is returning to the questions of authenticity he raised in Elizabeth Costello, especially considering the fact that she herself appears in the text seemingly from out of nowhere.  The mysteriousness of her arrival serves to put the reality of the narrative into question at this point, as prior to that the novel generally employs realism in the unfolding of its plot.  The sudden turn towards metafictional intertextuality in a realist novel, combined with the way that Elizabeth is able to assert her will almost unimpeded, poses some rather obvious concerns about the authenticity of both realism and experience.  What are we to make of a reality that reveals its own constructedness so readily?  Elizabeth appears to have a kind of supreme awareness of Paul's existence, going well beyond his own knowledge at least, such that she comes to embody the illusory and rather circumstantial nature of self awareness .  That she also represents the novel's own constructedness serves to establish this illusory self awareness as being the source of questions regarding the "truth" of one's reality as a whole.

This is compounded by the novel's ending, as the Jokic family pushes Paul to realize who he is by embracing his one-leggedness, in the hopes of allowing him to experience a more complete life.  This "new Paul" though is somewhat of a cliche, "one of the quaint types who lend colour to the social fabric" (256), so that even in accentuating that which makes him unique he falls into a preconceived role rather than one chosen of his own accord.  Though the scene ends on a positive note with Ljuba's joke connecting Paul to the novel's title, the novel itself seems to be suggesting a particularly bleak (surprise surprise) outlook on the prosepct of self-knowledge and understanding reality.  Apparently neither of these goals is attainable, as complete self awareness depends on being aware of the "self" that others see in oneself, which in turn is the result of the signifiers one is saddled with in a reality governed by circumstance.  The novel seemingly suggests humor as an anaesthetic for the anxiety caused b the awareness of one's incompleteness, but it is merely an anaesthetic, as Costellow's own trepidation when she smiles at the novel's close reveals ongoing fear of the uncertainty defining her own existence (263).

Disgrace

One of the things that struck me about Disgrace was the extent to which Petrus and other black characters come to fill roles traditionally associated with imperialist archetypes, varying between pillaging marauders and the land-grabbing plantation owner.  While the overall purpose of this reversal seems elusive, identifying it as one of the novel's central paradigms allows one to make other interesting connections between moments in the text.  Specifically, I thought Petrus' treatment of the two sheep he slaughters for his party stood as a kind of inversion of David's developing attitude towards animals.  David at first feels like a hypocrite in being kind to the animals he's about to help put down, but in the instance of the sheep he is somehow dissatisfied enough with Petrus' actions (or lack thereof) towards them that he takes it upon himself to let them graze at least.  Petrus on the other hand seems mutely obstinate about keeping the sheep where he put them, as David finds them right back where they were after that, without a word from Petrus as to why he insists on leaving them there in particular.

This directly clashes with the reader's experience of David, as much of the novel consists of his attempts to explain (to himself and thus to the reader) his reasoning in treating the animals with compassion.  The fact that this contrast is so obviously present in this moment, and that Petrus' behavior in many ways resembles the cultural practices of imperialism, seems to complicate the traditional master/slave paradigm at its core.  It appears that Coetzee is suggesting that one does not merely inherit these roles out of a combination of culture and history, but rather that they are defined by (and in turn define) one's attitude towards internal experience, particularly regarding the unconscious (represented by the animals).  Where David comes to at least attempt explanations of his behavior out of a will to reconcile himself, all the while changing the way he behaves (even if unconsciously), Petrus seems to be completely apathetic and almost mechanical about his impulse to keep the sheep away from the grass.  Ultimately this establishes introspection as the prevailing value, because although it is uncertain whether self-reflection can actually bring about some kind of transcendent truth, it at least seems certain that to deny introspection is to doom oneself to reinforce historically accepted cultural institutions.

Elizabeth Costello

In Elizabeth Costello I felt that the question of authenticity was a central concern, as characters grapple with the instability of the ideological frameworks that structure their lives.  This "instability" is apparently inherent in everything that has existential presence extending beyond its corporeality, such that Elizabeth, by the novel's close, admits that even the notion of self-hood falls short of the standards it sets for itself.  Her judges accuse her of changing her story, and so to be able to rectify the discrepancy and thus maintain the appearance of being a single, coherent existent, she must rely on the fact that the self is often self-contradictory and yet still exists nonetheless (221).

But if something can fundamentally compromise itself without in turn negating its presence, there must be some transcendent factor that enables this.  The novel seems to assert the body as being the source of this existential power, as its inarguable presence turns it into the proverbial tortoise's back on which the world can sit.  This seems to be why Elizabeth struggles to accept her surroundings in the afterlife as authentic, as everything there reminds her of someone or something else she seems to have known before but she is never sure who or what.  Being in some kind of wholly metaphysical dimension implies the absence of physical bodies, and thus an absence, on an essential level, of even present-tense experience as being true.

Being free of rules subjected to bodies, like mortality or the need to acquire more resources, means compromising the value of things like time, the normal passage of which is necessary for the thought processes that generate authentic self-experience to occur.  Although this would seem to present a solution (in embodiment) to the questions of meaning posed by existential self-doubt, it seems more accurate to say that the novel insists on the inaccessibility of this meaning.  Since we cannot experience ourselves as mere bodies, but only as embodied selves, we will always be outside of the fundamentally true existence that the body itself insists upon.