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Reading the Body-Soul in JM Coetzee's Late Fictions Pojanut Suthi

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Reading the Body-Soul in JM Coetzee's Late Fictions Pojanut Suthi ‘My truth: how I lived in these times, in this place’: Reading the Body-soul in J.M. Coetzee’s Late Fictions Pojanut Suthipinittharm PhD University of York English and Related Literature September 2015 Abstract This thesis offers readings of a number of less discussed texts by J.M. Coetzee and attempts to take as full an account as possible of the human beings that are embodied in these works. Suggesting that critical approaches are often too invested in their specific ideologies to accommodate for the protean nature of certain Coetzee’s narratives, it contends that a better ground for approaching his writing can be found in the unmediated experience of living, which Elizabeth Costello—Coetzee’s lecture alter ego—once calls ‘the body-soul.’ This study thus traces Coetzee’s fascination with what it means to be fully alive as an individual being in his writing during the period between his apartheid-era novel Age of Iron (1990) and the final fictional memoir Summertime (2009). By paying attention specifically to the living beings of the characters, or in the case of Coetzee’s fictional memoirs, that of John Coetzee himself, this thesis shows how it is possible to make better sense of Coetzee’s puzzling late works and their formal inventiveness. While on the whole the thesis advances an alternative approach of reading Coetzee’s fiction, its individual chapters focus on employing the concept of the body-soul to help release the works’ meaning. The first chapter examines Coetzee’s fiction-as-lecture ‘The Lives of Animals: The Philosophers and the Animals,’ which forms part of Elizabeth Costello. I reconstitute Costello’s philosophical exposition about the ‘sympathetic imagination’ for animals as being inseparable from her personal desires as a body-soul vulnerable to death. Chapter Two also centres on Coetzee’s characters as living beings and connects the metafictional Slow Man (2005) with the epistolary Age of Iron through their common reiterations of the figure of a writer who follows another character with his/her imaginative writing. In Chapter Three, the living being of John Coetzee in Boyhood (1997), Youth (2002), and Summertime provides a basis from which to contend with the narratives’ mixed tactics of fictionalisation and confessional truth-telling. Chapter Four looks at Elizabeth Costello’s ‘The Problem of Evil’ and The Master of Petersburg. Here again, the attention to the body-souls of the protagonists enables a confrontation with the possibility that Coetzee’s fiction writing and the living beings within it may not always be a force for good. Throughout the thesis, I assert that the truths contained in these works of Coetzee are truths of the body-soul that cannot be fully extricated from their embodiments, yet by their embeddedness in living experiences that cannot be doubted, they seem to be what Coetzee, as he was in those times and places of writing, was able to believe in. 2 Table of Contents ABSTRACT ................................................................................................................................ 2 TABLE OF CONTENTS……………………………………………………………………………………..3 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ........................................................................................................ 5 AUTHOR’S DECLARATION ................................................................................................... 6 INTRODUCTION ...................................................................................................................... 7 APPROACHING ELIZABETH COSTELLO’S ‘BODY-SOUL’ ................................................................... 13 HISTORICISING THE BODY-SOUL ......................................................................................................... 18 COETZEAN CLARITY AND THE ROLE OF CRITICS .............................................................................. 21 THE BODY-SOUL AND THE AUSTRALIAN FICTIONS ......................................................................... 26 THE AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL .................................................................................................................... 29 1. SYMPATHY FOR ELIZABETH COSTELLO .................................................................. 34 I. SYMPATHY/EMPATHY: THE MISSING THEORETICAL CONTEXT AND DEFINITION .................. 37 II. COSTELLO’S SYMPATHETIC IMAGINATION AND THE PHILOSOPHERS ...................................... 41 Thomas Nagel and Jacques Derrida ........................................................................................ 43 Costello and Franz Kafka ............................................................................................................. 59 III. SYMPATHETIC REALISM ................................................................................................................. 64 2. ‘STORIES IN WHICH YOU LEAD, I FOLLOW’: WRITER-CHARACTER RELATIONSHIP IN AGE OF IRON AND SLOW MAN ..................................................... 72 I. AGE OF IRON ........................................................................................................................................ 78 Mrs. Curren’s realism ..................................................................................................................... 78 Writing Vercueil ............................................................................................................................... 86 II. METAFICTIONAL RELATIONSHIPS: ‘HE AND HIS MAN’ AND SLOW MAN ............................... 91 ‘He and His Man’ .............................................................................................................................. 92 Slow Man ............................................................................................................................................ 96 CONCLUSION ....................................................................................................................................... 104 3. THE CONFESSIONS OF JOHN COETZEE: BOYHOOD, YOUTH AND SUMMERTIME ..................................................................................................................... 106 I. FICTIONALISING AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL WRITING ....................................................................... 112 3 The lessons from Roland Barthes ........................................................................................... 112 Coetzee’s fictional memoirs ...................................................................................................... 114 II. TRUTH-TELLING IN CONFESSIONS .............................................................................................. 122 Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Paul de Man ............................................................................ 122 Boyhood: stating the truths ..................................................................................................... 124 III. BETWEEN TRUTH AND FICTION: YOUTH ................................................................................. 135 IV. A RETURN TO ROUSSEAU: SUMMERTIME ................................................................................. 147 CONCLUSION ....................................................................................................................................... 158 4. WRITING EVIL, READING THE BODY-SOUL: ‘THE PROBLEM OF EVIL’ AND THE MASTER OF PETERSBURG ....................................................................................... 159 I. ‘THE PROBLEM OF EVIL’ ............................................................................................................... 164 Representing absolute depravity ............................................................................................ 164 ‘The weak vessel’ ............................................................................................................................ 173 II. EVERYTHING TURNED TO ANOTHER USE: THE MASTER OF PETERSBURG .......................... 179 From grief to perversions .......................................................................................................... 182 CONCLUSION ....................................................................................................................... 194 BIBLIOGRAPHY .................................................................................................................. 198 4 Acknowledgements In completing this thesis, I am deeply grateful to Professor Derek Attridge, my PhD supervisor, who to me epitomises the ideal reader anyone can wish to have. I thank him for his brilliance, his kind support, and for showing me that generosity can go hand in hand with the highest level of academic achievements. I owe the opportunity to pursue a doctorate degree to the Royal Thai Government Scholarship and the efficient team who run the programme. I sincerely hope to be able to positively impact Thailand’s education system in the near future. Special thanks go to Assistant Professor Charturee Tingsabadh, who introduced me to J.M. Coetzee in 2008 and has since crucially shaped my life to what it is today. My appreciations also to the friends I have made during the five years at the University of York, many of whom have long left, while many I will be sad to leave. Thank you for bringing so much joy into my life and for making these years my best yet. Finally, endless gratitude is owed to my family for allowing me the freedom to learn and for providing the love that sustains me. If studying
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