Disgrace as Coetzee's Completed Narrative Vision

Zach Thomas
English 620JMC
12/14/2011



Disgrace as Coetzee’s Completed Narrative Vision



J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace stands as an interesting departure from much of the rest of his body of work, as he sheds his tendency to subvert realism by presenting the narrated events of David Lurie’s life in an uncharacteristically straightforward manner.  Much has been made of the fact that his aversion to realism stems from an attempt to reverse the effect it has as a literary tradition in the context of the imperialist culture from which it arises, namely the reinforcement of symbolic structures which serve as the basis for the colonial imperatives of imperialism.  By denying that an account of things situated from a singular viewpoint can stand as an accurate representation of said things, he essentially undermines the mechanism of imperialist cultural production at its most elementary level.  As such, the stylistic departure of Disgrace from Coetzee’s oeuvre is rather disconcerting when taken at face value, as it seems to stand as a declaration of unilateral sympathy and complicity with the historic oppressors.  This was especially evident in its initial reception by the government of the New South Africa, which was marked with controversy given the novel’s rather one-sided depiction of its black characters as almost uniformly untrustworthy.  A closer examination though reveals aspects of the narrative for which the narrator cannot account, chinks in the armor of totality that is assumed by the realist viewpoint, as the narrator’s unquestioningly sympathetic involvement in presenting the protagonist’s consciousness necessitates that the narrative correspondingly fall prey to David’s deficiencies in self awareness.  Though the reader at first has no reason to question the given representation of David’s interior and exterior realities, the fact that he is inevitably degenerated in his attempts at manifesting his inner reality, by acting on the drives it imparts him with, reveals a conspiracy towards self-destruction on the part of the narrator.  This in turn reveals the holistic endorsement of realism as the novel’s form to be in fact his most subversive treatment of realism yet undertaken.
Though this conception of the novel’s attitude towards realism provides a more nuanced view of the way realism functions in the novel, it does little to address the significance of the contrast this presents with respect to the rest of Coetzee’s work.  If any indicator can be given in this regard, it seems to rest in Coetzee’s sense of authorial ethics, insofar as his narrative productions are always fashioned so as to share in the limitations of contemporary colonial discourse.  By definition this discourse stands as the accepted social truth of colonial relations at any given moment in time, hence though it is continuously being created, its temporal omnipresence imparts it with a monolithic cultural perception that itself objectifies its subjects through its totality.  In which case the production of literature is invariably subjugated to an engagement with this discourse as well.  Therefore Coetzee’s narrative realities stand as a reclamation of both individual agency as an artist, and of the autonomy of the “Others” which colonial discourse produces through alienation and aggression.  This is so because these “realities” are designed by him to self-reflexively fail in their aspirations towards authentic, narrative truth along the same indices that colonial discourse is failing to uphold the human rights of all those affected by its assignations of social value.  Thus by willingly engaging in the act of reconstructing the ideological paradigms of colonial society, and carrying them out to the point of narrative failure, his art manifests itself as the only pure form of cultural defiance possible, as it consciously posits nothing beyond the shortfalls of imperial discourse.
In this light, Disgrace’s relatively generous sense of faith in the realist form seems to stand as a recognition of the human progress made by the abolition of apartheid, but also as a word of caution against the false hope this may bring for the future, as the dynamics of oppressor and oppressed will become harder to discern in an age that no longer derives these roles from the rule of law.  Indeed, though oppression may no longer be socially endorsed, the abuses of power which connote the act of oppression are still clearly very much a part of the spectrum of human reality.  This is the essence of Disgrace’s realism:  avoiding the recognition of the casual self-deceptions abound in David’s mind as narrative truth, and thus avoiding complicity in the ongoing sustenance of oppressive symbolic structures, becomes the reader’s chief responsibility and the reader’s responsibility alone.  This responsibility is imparted onto the reader by the fact of David’s ultimate inability to organize his various experiences throughout the novel into a single, meaningful whole.  Though it can be argued that he makes meaningful progress in some areas of his life, it is readily evident that in others he remains largely the same, providing him with a character arc that is at best problematic in its attempts to resemble an arc (i.e. cohesively presenting progress in terms of a point-A-to-B trajectory).  Thus the effect of the novel’s realism is twofold as well, as on the one hand it acclimates its readers to the potentially deceptive dimensions of post-colonial society by submerging them in its world, and on the other it illustrates the fact that the primary limitations of imperialist rationality inexorably stem from whatever aspects of human life that this rationality holds sway over but fails to acknowledge.  This is due to the fact that David’s ability, or lack thereof, to address his transgressions is always derived from the extent to which he is able to achieve a full awareness of the implications of not just his actions, but of the beliefs and drives which led to them as well.  Thus the struggle for justice and liberation is equated with the struggle to realize a perfect and complete self-awareness, a prospect which is infinitely deferred in the pursuit of its realization, leading to the novel’s corresponding refusal to allow David to close out the narrative with a sense of total internal resolution with his external reality.
In this way the novel builds a powerful ontological relationship between itself and its readers, as when one is forced to experience the incompleteness of David’s trajectory towards total self-awareness, one is forced to derive the meaning or purpose of this abortive process for oneself.  Disgrace then stands as the single most visceral undertaking of ethical action in all of Coetzee’s work, as the reader is thereby forced to assume a certain measure of the author’s narrative responsibility by being forced into interpretation as a means of constructing meaning.  This is different from his other novels, in which the reader is forced to recognize the creative limitations of an imperialist discourse in the context of reality, as in Disgrace the reader must both acknowledge these limitations and form an interpretive response if a sense of “truth” or “moral right” is to be found.  Where the other novels include these things as conscious textual absences, Disgrace does so with a split consciousness, as David is necessarily unaware of his textuality while the author by all rights must be.  This creates a situation in which David cannot know that his existence lacks veracity, therefore he cannot truly reach for it himself, making Coetzee’s construction of Lurie’s life (and subsequent deliverance to the reader’s interpretation) out to be a kind of metaphysical uplift for David.  His life may be pathetic and futile, but we as readers can allow it to be something more.
To that extent, certain theoretical claims can be made about Coetzee’s work as it pertains to the understanding of literature as a cultural institution, and an examination of Disgrace provides the strongest basis for these claims of all his novels, in the aforementioned ways that it differs from the rest of his work.  The first such claim is that Coetzee’s writing is an act of insistence on literature as being more than a mere collection of all the narrative fictions a culture has produced, but rather is a manifestation of cultural will, which it in turn manifests.  To that end Coetzee aims to liberate literature from its fictional trappings by actively de-fictionalizing the act of writing in his novels, blurring the lines between fictive creation and the critical perception of real experience.  Secondly, Coetzee’s work is engaged in this enterprise specifically because of the fact that such an understanding of literature is itself the most comprehensive model available for understanding the nature of selfhood, wherein one’s “self” is circumscribed by an amalgamation of disparate socio-historical forces which are nonetheless coalesced into a single unique entity (the individual “I”) that in turn lends aid in the production of socio-historical forces.  Thus the “liberation” of literature must be crafted along the lines of a liberation of the “self”, in the form of an augmented awareness of its metaphysical influence, and of the forces which influence it.  This means that his work also stands as a path to liberation from human suffering, as the increased awareness of selfhood and literature also imparts an increased awareness of the dynamics of oppression at work in both one’s own life and the world at large, providing the necessary tools for true personal and social agency.  This also provides yet another layer on which Coetzee’s work posits literature as having existential implications that go beyond itself and into the broader context of what is called “reality”.   Using the structures of ethics, self-awareness, and the engagements with literature itself presented in Disgrace, these claims can be demonstrated to be the modus operandi of Coetzee’s style without falling prey to intentional fallacy.


Viewing Disgrace as an Ethical Action

In order to fully account for the means by which Coetzee’s writings represent efforts at personal, social, and artistic liberation, it is important to form an understanding of his work as a strict model of ethical narrative representation.  This is done by examining the textual patterns that surface around moments of narrative self-reflexivity in his novels, as these will reveal whether or not a specific attitude is being developed toward the act of writing and its appropriate uses.  In her article Is the Writer Ethical?, critic Marianne de Jong identifies certain dimensions of the philosophy of ethics, and critical aspects of Coetzee’s work, that are greatly useful in forming a comprehensive reading of Disgrace.  She explains that “in order to speak of ethical action, not only agency but also intentionality has to be at hand” (de Jong 73).  This of course implies authorial intention, but she establishes that this is not to be mistaken for intentional fallacy, as it is only the recognized presence of intention (and not a consideration of the values intentionally presented) that is necessary to define an act as ethical.  She writes, “Donald Davidson summarizes intentionality in action simply as doing something for a reason.  He distinguishes between intentionality in action and intentional states of mind.  An intentional state of mind is not necessarily linked to an action actually performed.  Should we make use of Davidson, it would appear that the intentional fallacy could be excluded from the description of ethical literary acts” (de Jong 73).  She goes on to identify that such an “action-based description of literary ethics is that ethicality is not made dependent on the content of values” (de Jong 74).  This serves to help avoid ethical foundationalism, which is itself susceptible to “infinite regress” in its attempts to identify ethical behavior from the standpoint of an assumed moral right (de Jong 74).
With these suppositions as to what constitutes an ethical action, it becomes relatively easy to see the ways in which Coetzee’s writing fits into this category of action.  Indeed, the act of writing itself seems to fall under this designation, as intentionality and agency are obviously present when one undertakes the writing of something.  This is misleading though, as the fact that all writing is indicative of these qualities means that though a literary act may be seen as an ethical act, it is not a literary ethical act, as it does not necessarily deviate from “normal” literary production.  To that end it becomes necessary to identify specific textual modalities in a body of written work to determine the dimensions in which it is an act of literary ethicality.  Specifically, the text must espouse “specific ways of writing” that are upheld throughout the text, and which in turn reveal a coherent attitude towards both writing itself and the text in question (de Jong 75).  She posits, “It is not sufficiently described by referring to what the text is “about”, that is, to its referential contents or values.  Novels may be about the ethical without themselves being ethical actions” (de Jong 75).  The ethicality of an act is similarly not limited by its endorsement or rejection of social and historical ethical norms, but rather exists entirely in relation to the text’s expressed attitudes towards itself.
What then is the shape of Coetzee’s literary ethicality, as he engages rather heavily with the act of writing in his texts, and with much skepticism as to its ability to realize its aims of positing “truth?”  De Jong points out that Attwell’s comments in Doubling the Point serve as a particularly incisive description of the ethics at work in Coetzee’s writing.  Given that “the discursive-political consequences of the country’s protracted trauma militate against fictionality,” the only power that the novel has to remain socially relevant lies in its ability to “[find] the means, within fiction, to interrogate this paralysis--indeed, not only to interrogate it but to move beyond it to a reconstructed position in which fiction begins to speak to the political in its own terms” (Attwell in de Jong, 75).  If Coetzee’s authorial ethics revolve around his aspirations to construct literature as an independent body of thought, capable of critically engaging other forms of social discourse on equal footing, language must first be construed as a tool capable of lifting literature from its own sociopolitical limitations, namely its very fictionality.
The principle means by which Coetzee transcends this paradigm is what de Jong identifies as his tendency to defictionalize his narratives, meaning “any way in which the novel is self-reflexive or metafictional, includes or hints at the presence of the writing agent, co-textualizes literary writing or in any other way draws attention to its writtenness, thereby distorting the fictional illusion” (de Jong 76).  Over the course of her article, she demonstrates that the general trend in Coetzee’s moments of defictionalization is to emphasize an interpretation of language as innately flawed, an object unable to fulfill its promise of representing reality to its subjects.  She elaborates on several such instances throughout Coetzee’s work, most notably in reference to Magda’s observations on language, writing, and her own writtenness.  According to de Jong, “In the closing pages of the novel the sound of aeroplanes signify, in Magda’s imagination, the fulfilled sign, signifier united with signified” (de Jong 77).  This, in tandem with the fact that “The words are Spanish but they are tied to universal meanings,” becomes problematic in that the Spanish language is utterly foreign to Magda when she says this (Country, 126).  Thus language takes on a characteristic in which “fulfilled meaning amounts to the absence of meaning, since it is meaning as pure imagination or wish fulfillment” (de Jong 77).  To that end, this moment stands as a reduction of language to nothing but its structuralizing components.  Any relation of word to meaning exists solely in Magda’s imagination, such that the text presents nothing but the empty framework necessary for this relation to have a space to occur, which is essentially the text itself in a state of being divested of meaning (de Jong 78).
Offering an explanation of the novel’s overall attitude towards language, de Jong presents the following points, “These excursions on the nature of language, centring around the issue of language as sign system, seem to explain the defictionalising tendency in In the Heart of the Country as a whole.  The way in which the text is written displays a linguistic skepticism and an awareness of the artificiality or constructedness of meaning in language, as well as the role of the desire for truth or meaning fulfilment which underlies the constructing of meanings” (de Jong 78).  She continues to explain how the novel is an endeavor to establish autonomous, individual agency “without being subjected either to the set structures of language or to the demand to be a supplement to historical events” (de Jong 78).  What is interesting about these assertions is the uniform quality with which the notion of language as meaning is subverted, insisting instead on a measure of interpretive work to be undertaken in order to locate the point at which meaning is derived.  This expresses the notion of “meaning” in literature as something of an oppressive force, as it is itself only located in the deconstruction of language, but exists as an imperative to which language must aspire in its constructions.  In this sense, true meaning becomes the proverbial carrot on a stick, and Coetzee’s novel stands as an attempt to reject the pursuit by representing it as pursuit ad infinitum.  This also stands as a step towards removing literature from the aims and auspices of imperial discourse, as the novel form itself is deeply rooted in the history of imperialism, hence the notion of the novel as containing its meaning is almost completely avoided, allowing the novel to exist as its meaning.  As de Jong notes, “As such, this practice implicitly comments on the discursive practices holding sway in the South Africa at the time of these novels’ production and publication.  Instead of offering discursive meanings by means of which the reigning discourse can be challenged, thereby implicitly affirming the presiding discursive order, they offer an ethical counterpractice” (de Jong 90).
It is along these dimensions then that Disgrace becomes a more literal realization of this process of avoiding the “offering of discursive meanings” in order to form an “ethical counterpractice” to the reigning sociopolitical discourse, as Disgrace becomes this ethical counter practice rather than simply offering it.  The note on which Disgrace ends is the novel’s most clear indication of this state of affairs, as David inexplicably decides to euthanize one of the dogs that he himself is partial to and that he can save for a while if he wishes.  As David brings the dog to Bev, Coetzee writes, “Bearing him in his arms like a lamb, he re-enters the surgery.  ‘I thought you would save him for another week,’ says Bev Shaw.  ‘Are you giving him up?’ ‘Yes, I am giving him up” (Disgrace 220).  It is interesting to note the extent to which this verbal exchange resembles a master-slave dialogue, as David’s response is forced to be an answer to her question, denying him any opportunity to explain his actions.  This lack of an explanation is impossible not to notice, as David himself muses on keeping the dog for another week before suddenly proceeding to take the dog in at that very moment, and Bev’s initial response seems to indicate the expectation of some kind of reasoning for his action.  Instead what the reader is given is a statement of the obvious delivered in master-slave dialectic form, presenting only that which is already self-evident in the text in a way that presents language as obsolete.  It also presents the notion of textual representations of discursive meaning as an empty formality, one that can by definition only have meaning in the space of the text and hence limits the ability of language to have a meaningful relationship to the real world.  It is no surprise then, that these are the final words of the novel before silencing itself.
It is in this way though that the book itself begins to build a meaningful relationship to the world, as the absence of David’s reasoning forces the reader to engage in a critical discourse with the novel in order to discover why the novel seemingly ends itself with an unceremonious, and unsatisfying, dialogue that contributes nothing substantial to the narration of events.  Whatever interpretations one may arrive at in this respect, it is inevitable that one is engaging in the work of David’s former profession, the interpretation of literature as a means of developing a sense of the “truth” of one’s experience (what this book means in its reading).  This is interesting though because David starts the novel doing this very thing, applying his literary interpretations to derive meaning from his subjective experiences, and it is this engagement with literary interpretation that leads him to justify and commit the transgressions which set the novel in motion.  It seems unlikely that Coetzee would be thus encouraging readers to embark on an endeavor that has them unwittingly participating in the sustenance of oppressive symbolic structures, as it would defeat the purpose of David’s suffering in the text to fashion an ending that cultivates the attitudes that led to his suffering.  There is a critical difference though, one that is fairly obvious in that it constitutes the reader’s advantaged position over David in the act of observing his life.  Where David is unaware of the fact that he is using his means of literary interpretation to feed an inappropriate conception of things, the reader is aware of it by necessity on simply reading the book‘s events as they happen.  Further, the reader’s interpretive engagement with the novel’s close stands as an appropriate use of the act of literary interpretation, whereas David’s use of literary models in his personal conceptions stands as a misappropriation.  Essentially, the novel writes the reader into a position of responsible readership, something that David seems unable to accomplish in his own right.  In a sense this represents a sort of literary “passing of the torch”, as David Lurie’s professional authority over the cultural institution of literature is reduced to nothing by the end of the novel, granting the reader a corresponding increase in authority to make interpretive claims about the novel in the face of David‘s failing subjective reality.
On the whole this seems to place the role of the reader in a privileged position over the role of the writer, as it is ultimately the readership which determines the accepted “meaning” of a story.  This stands as the ultimate act of defictionalization in Coetzee’s work, as the role of fiction itself is reduced to a meaningless object (as in the master/slave dialectic at the end) in the absence of adequate reading.  In this sense literature has been liberated from the oppressive dimensions of meaning as a demand, as it is revealed to be beyond the ability of literature to accomplish this task, and is thus beyond its responsibility.  This also completely relieves literature of its complicity in sustaining imperial discourse, as literature is revealed to no longer be engaged in any enterprise beyond being read, essentially not engaged in anything beyond simply existing.  This does however implicate the reader, as it is now their responsibility to prevent the reproduction of imperialist modes of interpreting experience.  Fortunately, the dynamics of David’s self awareness, or lack thereof, provide the reader with the tools necessary to prevent such an occurrence.  Where David’s failings stem from his inability to account for the actual way that his subjective existence relates to the real world of which he is a part, as he experiences his interiority as monolithic in its existential authority, the reader is forced to see David’s inner reality in the context of its interactions with the world around him.  Therefore what the novel is espousing is a model of awareness of subject-as-event, as this is the way in which the reader experiences David’s self, and thus the only conception of self-hood that results in responsible readership.  This is contrasted with the imperialist, monolithic conception of the self, which apparently results in the reduction of the self to an empty sign requiring an external reader to validate the substance of its experience.




Disgrace in Pursuit of the Subject-as-Event

If the liberation of literature from the conception of it as strictly fictive is to be achieved, then a form of awareness must be furnished that allows for a space between fiction and reality.  Using the self/other dialectic as an analogue, Coetzee creates this intermediary space of literary conception by illustrating the ways that his characters’ beliefs in the totality of their sense of self fail in a way that reveals them to be in constant flux between the existential states of self and other.  Grant Hamilton’s article J.M. Coetzee’s Dusklands:  The Meaning of Suffering identifies this paradigm at work in Coetzee’s writing from as far back as his first novel, and though the form of Dusklands arguably differs more from Disgrace than any of the rest of Coetzee’s novels, the presented structures of identification still correspond.  Hamilton writes, “Dusklands presents the narratives of two men who begin to experience themselves uncontrollably oscillating between the ontological states of the known-subject and the incomprehensible-Other:  the Self perceived as a continuum of possible states and written as the subject-as-event” (Hamilton 298).  He further argues that it is in these moments of compromised self-identification that the imperialist methodologies of subjectification are most actively used and evident (Hamilton 298).  He identifies that this subjectification involves both a physical violence being meted out upon the body of the “other”, and a drive “to transform the incomprehensible Other into the known value of Subject by means of identification through representation” (Hamilton 299).
At the outset of Disgrace, David Lurie is himself involved in such an undertaking, as evinced by his obsession with trying to become more involved in Soraya’s personal life.  The fact that Soraya is a prostitute colors her as a representation of the feminine as completely reduced to sexual object, and yet it is precisely this dehumanized, object status which leads David to attempt to “subjectify” her as he is drawn towards her.  After the incident in which he follows her and her sons around town, trying to somehow involve himself (even if only peripherally) in Soraya’s personal life, she eventually rejects him by simply disappearing from his life.
This rejection of David by his personal “other” leads him in turn to “otherize” himself, as he reflects on her “growing coolness” thusly, “He has a shrewd idea of how prostitutes speak among themselves about tehmen who frequent them, the older men in particular.  They tell stories, they laugh, but they shudder too, as one shudders at a cockroach…Soon, daintily, maliciously, he will be shuddered over.  It is a fate he cannot escape” (Disgrace 7-8).  In the growing absence of the “other” in his life, David starts to conceptualize himself in the context of his own imagined account of Soraya’s perspective.  Essentially, he starts to see himself as “other”, as reduced to object, as this imagined perspective of hers which he adopts is admittedly coming from his own prejudices and suspicions about prostitutes in general.  Of course he fails to realize that this means he is simply giving voice to an element of his own prejudices about himself, nor is he aware of the fact that the identity of the woman he knows only as Soraya (of which there are apparently many) rests primarily within his own imagination as well (Disgrace 8).  What this leads to is a desperate attempt to fill the void she has left in his life with other women, followed by an even more desperate attempt to track her down and contact her again (Disgrace 8-10).  What he desires is an opportunity to stave off the notion that his idea of her does not really exist, and by proxy to stave off the notion that he is given the same regard as a cockroach in “her” eyes, by being able to use her as his prostitute again.  Thus the entirety of the interaction between Soraya and David exists as a prime example of what Hamilton refers to as the “vigorous deployment of the determining structures of subjectification through imperial and colonial discourse in the face of this compromised access to the truth of the real” (Hamilton 298).
Following this line of thought, his subsequent taking advantage of Melanie, and consequent destruction of his literary career, seems to represent this process of “deploying the determining structures of subjectification” when carried out to its completion.  He has essentially tried to replace Soraya with Melanie, marking his most grotesque attempt yet at “transforming the incomprehensible Other into the known value of Subject”, as Melanie is the least interested in having sex with him of all the women he pursues in this section (even the call-girls at least stand to gain something tangible from it) and yet he subjects her to a mode of conceptualization that he has built in himself through his interactions with Soraya, a prostitute.  Hence, the act of his stretching the ideological framework of this type of male-female interaction (soliciting prostitution, and the masculine dominance which the passive role of the prostitute connotes) beyond its intended sphere of operation presents itself as a “deployment of the determining structures of subjectification” that is uniquely transgressive in its dynamics when compared with his engagement in this same process with other women.  Thus, according to Hamilton, Melanie’s suffering is the ultimate compromising of the veracity of David’s unwittingly internalized imperialist model of self-conception (Hamilton 299).  This is because of the fact that imperialist discourse, in its endorsement of enlightenment-era rationality as the single supreme mode of conceiving reality, represents a “death of the value of subjective experience, and ultimately promise[s] the death of the body in favor of an extension in the value of the ideational” (Hamilton 299).  Thus his attempt to place her in the role of the “other” within his own imperialist-oriented vision of reality is actually a destructive act against her humanity, exposing imperial discourse as illegitimate in its discursivity and therefore a failure as a means of accurately representing reality.  In this manner one’s “access to the truth of the real” is in fact further compromised by attempting to employ subjectification as a means of revitalizing compromised modes of conceiving one’s reality.
In this way David’s disgrace can be seen as an outcome of his inability to recognize himself as “subject-as-event”, endorsing an erroneous perception of himself as nothing but “self” and almost everyone else as nothing but “other”, rather than acknowledging himself and everyone else as vacillating between these states depending on the context in which their self-hood is being regarded.  The reason that this unified sense of self that David seems to believe he possesses cannot in fact be realized has its roots in stoic philosophy, as Hamilton clarifies (Hamilton 303).  He identifies that “only bodies exist in space; and secondly, only the present exists in time”, and that “events” are therefore incorporeal as they subsist through a duration of time rather than simply existing in it (Hamilton 302).  He goes on to elucidate that linguistic associations can be made to this model of conception, in which “the incorporeal event is identified as the verb, while the static structures of material bodies are best thought of as substantives or adjectives” (Hamilton 303).  It would appear then that David’s misconception of reality constitutes his willingness to see himself as one of the “substantives or adjectives”, a readily understandable misconception given the status of names as proper nouns.  Seeing as how all individuals identify themselves by their names, this proper noun status becomes erroneously conferred onto one’s sense of self.  As Hamilton has readily identified that one’s subjectivity is in fact an “event” however, one’s self-hood is therefore a verb and does not truly exist, according to stoic thought.  This is far from an assertion of the self as nothingness however, as Hamilton identifies this verb-oriented existence as an “unlimited becoming” (Hamilton 304).
It would seem then that David’s decision to give up the dog in the novel’s closing pages stands as a “giving up” on the upkeep of symbolic entities as sources of meaning, i.e. proper nouns, acquiescing instead to the “unlimited becoming” of subject-as-event.  After reflecting on keeping the dog, and what it would mean to him to put it down, he suddenly gives up this line of thought and carries out the idea he was considering right then and there, allowing his actions to speak for him (Disgrace 219-220).  Indeed, his admission to her that he was giving up the dog is nothing more than a spoken statement of the action he is presently carrying out, seemingly intimating a union with a sense of the “subject-as-event.”  This is a problematic assertion though, as it implies self-awareness and agency on David’s part that is not textually evident, not to mention the semantic issue of the fact that his statement of giving up the dog is produced in the context of a master/slave dialogue.  What this reveals then, is that in David’s lack of self-awareness, he cannot experience his becoming one with the true nature of himself, as an infinitely becoming event, as liberating or unifying.  Instead what happens is that his subjective space vanishes from the novel altogether, subjecting his will to what seems to be the blind force of impulse, and he only speaks as a response to direct inquiry, revealing nothing when he does so.  In this way David’s final “becoming” of himself is in fact a silencing of himself, as he lacks the tools necessary to experience this as a viable means of self-hood in that he lacks any conception of a literary framework that exists without a center or without the self at its center.  The reader however does have these tools, as David Lurie’s narrative provides us with a self as an absence at its center, allowing the reader to more fully experience the implications of David’s subjective reality than David himself even.  Hence David’s acquiescence to existence as subject-as-event is merely an affectation of the reader’s perception, making whatever David “becomes” in his “infinite becoming” an expression of the reader’s will.
It is because of this complex arrangement of the reader in relation to textual meaning that literature is ultimately presented as a manifestation of cultural will.  This is due to the fact that the way in which something is read bears more weight on the accepted social value of a piece of literary work than does the way it is written.  While all writers can account for the totality of their work insofar as its physical body is concerned, in that they did in fact produce every word which constitutes the piece, they cannot ever account for what will become the theoretical body of their work.  Though writing may aspire towards totality in its ability to represent reality, it can never succeed because there will obviously always be elements of reality that exist outside of literature.  These elements (politics, society, personal life) invariably inform the context into which a work is received, hence these elements hold the power to completely redefine a work in ways that have no relation whatsoever to authorial intention.  As writers can only control their own work however, it is their responsibility to at least attempt to address these contexts if they wish their voices to be heard above the prevailing social, political, cultural, or personal discourses at work in the multiple lives of one’s various readers.  By adopting these discourses as the primary models of his narratives, and then representing their limitations through literature, Coetzee has succeeded in forming a body of work that is as complete a representation of reality as possible.  This is because his writing exists as the point of interaction between individual existence and the manifold contextual discourses that circumscribe one’s reality.   Works Cited
de Jong, Marianne. “Is the Writer Ethical?: the Early Novels of J.M. Coetzee Up to Age of Iron.” Journal of Literary Studies. 20 (2004). Gale Power Search. Web. 6 Sep. 2011.

Hamilton, Grant. “J.M. Coetzee's Dusklands: the meaning of suffering.” Journal of Literary Studies. 21-3.4 (2005). Gale Power Search. Web. 6 Sep. 2011.

Coetzee, J.M.  Disgrace.  Penguin Books, New York:  2000.

Coetzee, J.M.  In the Heart of the Country.  Penguin Books, New York:  1982.

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.

The Lives of Animals

On reading J.M. Coetzee's "The Lives of Animals", the central idea I take away is that there is an extent to which people have to be willing to admit that rationality itself is imperfect if significant change in the treatment of animals is to occur.  Several times in the "story" people use the example of babies or the mentally challenged as human analogues to animal consciousness, and thus as representatives (in that we treat them as equals) of the argument for the better treatment of animals.  By the end of the "story" though, we see Elizabeth herself essentially admit to having relinquished reason, as she says she often feels she "must be mad", and that she doesn't understand why she can't come to terms with the world like everyone else does.  At this point, rather than react to her as he would towards a dog on account of her operating outside of rationality, John reacts the way most people would at seeing their mother in distress, with compassion.

This serves as a rather telling example of the fact that a great deal of human behavior, babies and the handicapped aside, is not rationally motivated, including the feeling of empathy for the suffering of others.  John in fact sets aside his own rationality at this point as well, as he first asks himself what his mother wants, ventures a question as an answer to his own question, then pulls over to hug her in light of his inability to generate satisfying answers.  Elizabeth's own revelation as to her motivations in supporting animal rights also exposes rationality itself as being a kind of afterthought, a construction implemented as a kind of band-aid in order for consciousness to have a means of explaining its own unconscious drives, which the conscious being must account for out of fear of the very unconscious, alien nature of these drives.

By thus undermining the central argument of his own story, Coetzee seems to be implying that the rationality behind any argument is on some level irrationally motivated.  In this case, he seems to ask if it even matters whether or not its rational to treat animals more respectfully.  He and those who share his views are being vocal about an issue that causes them suffering, rational or not, and we, like John, can either respond with compassion or not.  He rather obviously urges his audience towards compassion, as he suggests it as a primal response to the breakdown of reason and the suffering this can cause.  Ultimately I feel this is the purpose of having John rather cynically tell his mother "it will be over soon," as this immediately invokes our own compassion towards Elizabeth, given her son's rather fatalistic mindset in comforting her.  In this way it seems like Coetzee delivers a challenge to the audience, to first feel compassion for a fictional character (Elizabeth), and then to do better than John's intellectually empty (though poignant) pity for her by understanding the irrational nature of that compassion,  and then realizing that this very irrationality must motivate us to sustain this irrational compassion for the irrational in reality as well.

Is the other silent in Foe?

There are two key moments in Foe that I feel provide a great degree of insight into the novel's thematic structure, as they seem to specifically inform one another.  One of these is the novel's ending, which doesn't make much sense by itself, until looked at from the perspective of Susan's thoughts on the nature of her relationship with Cruso.  As she's trying to figure out the meaning of their sexual encounter, she reflects on the way individual agency sometimes seems absent in retrospect, as she says:

"What are these blinks of an eyelid, against which the only defence is an eternal and inhuman wakefulness?  Might they not be the cracks and chinks through which another voice, other voices, speak in our lives?  By what right do we close our ears to them?  The questions echoed in my head without answer" (30).

This seems to address the topic of whether or not the "other" can have a voice, answering in the affirmative as it asserts the presence of voices beyond the narrator's.  What it suggests though is not just that the "other" can have a voice, but rather that the "other's" voice is always the voice we don't hear.  This begs the question then of whether the subaltern is really even being silent or if it just communicates in ways beyond the awareness of an individual.  This can also be taken to imply that the "other" is not necessarily that which we perceive to be the other, in fact it should always be that which is not perceived at all.

This is why when "Friday" speaks at the end of the novel, neither the reader or the narrator really hears anything.  What they experience is more like some kind of unbreakable, all-encompassing force rather than words.  This is further compounded by the fact that Friday's identity here is ambiguous.  The Friday in the wrecked ship could not be the same Friday who scattered the petals which the narrator is presently swimming through, as Friday is presently "half-buried" in sand (157).  I'm also relatively certain that this whole scenario is some kind of dream, either that or our narrator is Aquaman or has gills.  Either way, this Friday seems to specifically be a representation of Friday drawn from someone else's perceptions of Friday.  Essentially this means what we get from Friday's "voice" is just some vague articulation of meaning as an incomprehensible yet present force, much in the same mode as that in which many of the other characters perceive the meaning of Friday and his actions.  Thus, this notion of Friday as the possessor of some kind of truth is revealed to be an imaginary notion in the mind of the narrator; but at the same time Friday has clearly succeeded in subverting the agency of the narrator as he has been inserted as a false identity within the the symbolic construct of the narrator's world.  This subversion of agency aligns with Susan's earlier remarks that it is in these lapses of agency that we experience these unheard voices, that we experience the unperceived.

Something like an introduction

Well, if you've found your way to this page then the odds are that this is not your introduction to Mr. Coetzee's work, but I'll say a couple things about him anyway for the sake of framing the rest of this paragraph.  Mr. Coetzee is a postmodern anti-imperialist author hailing from South Africa with a particular interest in the personal, political, and social dynamics of oppression.  Among other things.  Or so he would seem to have us believe.  Anyway, his work is like a literary critic's Gordian knot, and with no Alexander to come cut it in two for us, we literati are just going to have to put our thinking-caps on and get our hands dirty if we want to try and figure it out.  To that end, this blog is intended to be a place for the dirtying of hands, as I, and anyone who may feel so inclined, share freely our critical observations of his work.  Hopefully we can all come away from this with something resembles an understanding of his writing, or at the very least that warm, fuzzy feeling that we all surely get from engaging in focused literary critical discourse.