METAPHORS of the BODY in the FICTION of J.M. COETZEE Jan Kosecki

View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Royal Holloway - Pure METAPHORS OF THE BODY IN THE FICTION OF J.M. COETZEE Jan Kosecki Royal Holloway, University of London PhD Thesis 1 DECLARATION OF ACADEMIC INTEGRITY I hereby declare that the work presented in this thesis is my own. Jan Kosecki 2 ABSTRACT This dissertation investigates the role played by the image of the body that features prominently in Coetzee’s novels. In a series of close readings and utilising the tools of cognitive linguistics, it argues that the image creates meaning because of the employment of two conceptual metaphors, TRUTH IS IN A CONTAINER and BODY IS A CONTAINER, which endow the represented body with the attributes of truth. The meaning is then created through the foregrounding of the body (most commonly in the images of mutilation, disability and disease), through the use of the image as a blended space (a signifying body) and through the situating of the image as the narrative focal point, an object of scrutinity and interpretation. Such use of the image aids in interpreting the body as a container for truth, a kernel of human identity, a source of thought and morally purposive action. This often leads to interpreting the image of the body allegorically and partly explains the nature of the critical reception of Coetzee’s novels. The dissertation is divided into four chapters. Chapter 1 presents the history and theory of thinking about the metaphor from Aristotle to cognitive linguistics with an emphasis on the context-based understanding of metaphor and on its cognitive value. The final section of this chapter presents the author's engagement with the ideas expressed in Derek Attridge's J.M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading. Chapter 2 presents the problem of reading and interpreting the body on the example of Waiting for the Barbarians and Life and Times of Michael K. Chapter 3 analyses corporeal metaphors and gender symbolism in history through the reading of Dusklands and The Age of Iron. Chapter 4 presents Foe and Master of Petersburg as examples of the representation of literary thinking, creation and interpretation of bodily experience. 3 CONTENTS Acknowledgements Introduction 1. Metaphor: From Aristotle to Lakoff, From the Noun to the Text. 2. Metaphor and Truth: Reading the Body. Waiting for the Barbarians and Life and Times of Michael K. 3. Organic Metaphor: Embodied History or History of the Body. Dusklands and The Age of Iron. 4. Metaphor and Fiction: The Perversion of Substantiality. Foe and Master of Petersburg. Conclusion Bibliography 4 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I wish to thank Royal Holloway for the generous funding provided for my PhD studies in the form of the Royal Holloway University of London Research Studentship without which my studies would not have been possible. I have benefited hugely from the lively, inspiring, and supportive research environment at Royal Holloway, and I am indebted to a number of academics and colleagues at the College. My supervisor, Professor Robert Hampson, has provided immense encouragement and support at every stage of this project. It has been a privilege to work with him. His patience and his incisiveness, his intellectual insight and his sense of humour guided and sustained me in the process of thinking about, writing, and rewriting this dissertation. For many conversations, intellectual and otherwise, for their criticism of my work, and for their supportive friendship, I would like to thank Professor Bradley S. Epps, dr. David Allinson, dr. Katy Iddiols, dr. Eugenia Russell and dr. Katherine Feinstein. A special note of thanks goes to my parents, Jolanta and Tadeusz, for their love and support throughout the years. 5 Introduction One of the things a reader of Coetzee’s fiction might soon notice is the ubiquity of bodily mutilation and disability represented in his novels. There is impotence and rape (as well as disease, stabbing and murder) in Dusklands; rape, hatred for one’s 'monstrous' physicality and fantasies of self-mutilation in In the Heart of the Country; blindness and torture in Waiting for the Barbarians; cleft palate and starvation in Life and Times of Michael K; mutilation and muteness in Foe; cancer, mastectomy, and disability resulting from an accident (in addition to fantasies of self-immolation) in Age of Iron; epilepsy and suicide in The Master of Petersburg; rape and violence in Disgrace; ageing, disability, execution, dying, sexual attack, and the Holocaust in Elizabeth Costello; amputation and blindness in the Slow Man; Parkinson’s disease in the Diary of a Bad Year. Another thing our reader may notice is the endowing of a mutilated body with meaning whereby the body is made the object of scrutiny: it is read and analysed with the hope of uncovering and expressing the mystery imagined to exist within it. The tortured Barbarian girl and Michael K, Friday and Vercueil, Joll and Nechaev, are all mysterious creatures, who are read by other characters but repeatedly elude their interpretative attempts. Unclear are the reasons for Lucy’s acceptance of her fate, the source of Joll’s evil, Elizabeth Costello’s obsessions, Pavel’s death or Friday’s history and behaviour. Similarly problematic seems to be the characters’ relationship to their own bodies. Much is made of their coming to terms with the fact of embodiment: Mrs 6 Curren, Magda, Dostoevsky, Dawn or Paul Rayment all share estrangement from their bodies and strive to understand them, and for all the lack of acceptance, the analysis of disease, illness, old age or sexuality is an obsessive fact of daily life. While most of these characters crave understanding and expression of their embodiment, all of them are at the mercy of language as the medium in which their experience is conceptualised. Many crave, variously understood, ‘bodily communication’ from which the imperfections of language as a tool for expressing bodily truth would be absent. Many directly discuss language as the reason for their failures to express, and thus come to terms with, their physicality. The most extreme, and consciously realised, case of this entrapment in language can be found at the end of Elizabeth Costello. No longer a “lesson,” the ending passage is suggested to be Costello’s fiction, an example of her “parasitizing the classics” (14). This part begins with an excerpt from the Letter of Lord Chandos to Francis Bacon1 that presents Chandos experiencing bliss and joy at the sight of the world. Expressing a sentiment akin to that expressed earlier by Costello,2 his letter makes a reference to figurative meanings by distinguishing between things and signs: “It is as if . everything that exists, everything that I recall, everything my confused thinking touches on, means something” (226). The passage is followed by a letter from “Elizabeth C” (“Lady Chandos”) to Bacon (230). Fictional Elizabeth Costello, Coetzee’s creation, follows in the footsteps of Von Hoffmannsthal's Philip. His crisis of faith in literature and language is mirrored 1 The passage is dated according to the publication of von Hoffmannsthal's Ein Brief (1902), rather than the fictional date given to the letter by von Hoffmannsthal (1603). 2 Her argument that being alive is being “full of being” (77) is rephrased by him as “fullness” (226). Her “light soul” (215) is akin to Lady Chandos’s “extreme soul[]” (228). 7 by Costello.3 Both are writers of considerable repute. Their first defeat is in academia where their discourse on philosophy and morality does not gain desired acceptance. Later, both experience the failure of language in everyday communication, and both turn to the Classics for inspiration. These failures lead to mental disarray in which reasoning fails, no proposition can be seriously maintained, and no thought grasps experienced reality. This lack of conceptual coherence contrasts with the promise of illumination and attaining full meaning offered in emotional epiphanies which, when expressed, remain imperfect mistranslations. Costello and Philip both seem to embody the assertions of Wittgenstein's Tractatus that sees in the limits of language the limits of thought, but also undermine its pronouncements about the relation between language and the world insofar as they find their experience inexpressible.4 Both Costello and Philip are thus trapped in language which circumscribes what could be thought and expressed, relegating their bodily experience to the non-existent. Elizabeth’s letter explicitly deals with the entrapment in metaphorical language. She first admits to experiencing epiphanies through embodiment: “moments when soul and body are one, when [she] is ready to burst out in the tongue of angels” (228). Such moments arrive through sex; the “ruptures” form ‘body language’ that unites her mind and her body: “Soul and body he speaks to me, in a speaking without speech; into me, soul and body; he presses what are no longer words but flaming 3 Thomas Kovach sees this also as a crisis of “cognition” where the “inability to speak coherently is preceded by the inability to think coherently” (88). This seems to be how Costello is often perceived by her audience. He also presents the tension between “the self as observing subject and creative portrayer of reality” as opposed to “the self as object” as well as the tension between language as a product (a thing) and a medium (a sign) (91). Both these dichotomies exist in Costello’s experience. 4 The analysis of Wittgenstein’s role for von Hoffmannsthal’s work and his fascination with Ein Brief falls beyond the scope of this thesis. For a brief account see: Alfred Nordmann Wittgentstein’s Tractatus: An Introduction (2005). 8 swords” (228). Yet, the non-communicativeness of such experience threatens to trap the couple within figurative language in which words do not refer to objects but to other words, where meaning is perpetually in flux, and where the unanchored signifier always slips: Flaming swords I say my Philip presses into me, swords that are not words; but they are neither flaming swords nor are they words.

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