Agency, Narrative, and Silence in JM Coetzee's Foe and Slow

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2019-09-13 What is Done in Silence: Agency, Narrative, and Silence in J.M. Coetzee’s Foe and Slow Man

Bauhart, Stephen

Bauhart, S. (2019). What is Done in Silence: Agency, Narrative, and Silence in J.M. Coetzee’s Foe and Slow Man (Unpublished master's thesis). University of Calgary, Calgary, AB. http://hdl.handle.net/1880/111070 master thesis

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UNIVERSITY OF CALGARY

What is Done in Silence:

Agency, Narrative, and Silence in J.M. Coetzee’s Foe and Slow Man

Stephen Bauhart

A THESIS

SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES

IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE

DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS

GRADUATE PROGRAM IN ENGLISH

CALGARY, ALBERTA

SEPTEMBER, 2019

Abstract

My thesis analyzes J.M. Coetzee’s novels Slow Man and Foe to show how Coetzee presents silence and agency in relation to each other. The two novels will be looked at separately, first with Slow Man revealing that Coetzee is rejecting a Platonic metaphysic of the self and adopting something like a Nietzschean construction of language in order to show how in the case of Paul Rayment, the protagonist, silence is productive and allows for him to become an agent in the world. Foe will show a different presentation of silence through which Coetzee makes the reader engage in a narrative overwrite of a main character, Friday, in a manner similar to the characters. This metaliterary trap will draw into relief how Friday reveals a dualism of engagement operating in Foe, with Friday’s silence making treating him as a subject all but impossible, while treating him as an instrumentalized object is very easy. These two presentations will show how Coetzee presents silence as productive of agency in Slow Man and cautionary of overwriting agency in Foe.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank my mother, father, and brother. Each of you has, in your own way, provided the impetus to make this work, and my academic progress at large, possible. Even as we are now geographically distant a day does not go by that the impact of what you have all done for me isn’t evident in my life.

In the present I would like to thank Dr. Shaobo Xie who invited me into his classroom with open arms and has laid the intellectual groundwork for the new direction my academic life has taken. He has been both a friend and a mentor and, more recently, a patient and supportive editor. I could not have been more fortunate in who I met to guide me through this project.

To the University of Calgary English department at large I thank you for the intellectual and financial support. I have not come across a more welcoming department.

Lastly, and most importantly, I would like to thank my wife Amanda for all her patience and encouragement as I’ve undertaken my largest project to date. I would say more but she won’t let me.

iii

To my Nana, Cappy, and Aunt Sher. You saw this begun, but will not see it finished –

but it will be finished.

Table of Contents

Abstract ...... ii

Acknowledgements ...... iii

Dedication ...... iv

Table of Contents ...... v

Introduction...... 1

Chapter One Stage Setting...... 9

Chapter Two Rayment on the Narrative Battlefield ...... 34

Chapter Three Coetzee’s Metaliterary Trap ...... 66

Chapter Four Friday as Man, Friday as Monument ...... 82

Conclusion ...... 111

Works Cited ...... 115

Introduction

Silence, as an object of critical thought, is one with a long and conflicted history in the

West. We see philosophical and religious traditions placing the word, with a direct relation to speech, as central to thought, reason, philosophy, and indeed human life itself. In the Christian tradition God’s speech is integral to the creation of the universe with the proclamation of “Let there be light,” (Life Application Study Bible, Genesis. 1-3) the word being part of creation itself.

In more contemporary terms, empowerment is tied to having a voice in popular rhetoric. In

Theories of Africans Christopher Miller states that “politically, the voice remains our central metaphor for political agency and power” (248) and that silence “is the most powerful metaphor for exclusion from the literary mode of production” (250). In contrast to this “valorization of the oral and aural” (247) that Miller identifies there has been a part of our philosophical tradition which recognizes a value of silence, of a distancing from noise or speech. In Pensées Blaise

Pascal declares that “man’s unhappiness springs from one thing alone, his incapacity to stay quietly in one room” (44) tying happiness to silence, an absence of speech. In A Room of One’s

Own Virginia Woolf places value upon a woman being able to have “a quiet room or a soundproof room” (44), with quiet being tied to a certain level of material security as a foundational requirement to the ability to develop a voice. In Either/Or Part I Søren

Kierkegaard says that “In language, the sensuous as medium is reduced to a mere instrument and is continually negated” (67) and shows, if not a valuation of silence explicitly, something of value that is lost in the word. The Western tradition has been rife with examples of authors and thinkers who have explored alternatives to the valorization of the oral that is central to the West placing value on absences of speech and noise, on silences of various sorts. The intent of this

1 thesis is to look at a contemporary example of a literary figure, J.M. Coetzee, who engages silence in a manner that deals with silence as a symptom of oppression, explicitly a negative in the lives of those it touches, and as a positive, generative force which stands to inform us greatly.

In doing this Coetzee will be considered as a figure who is speaking back to, but also intimately involved in a conversation with the Western philosophical tradition, doing so in a way that engages the reader in the philosophical problems he deals with—implicating the reader and the critic in the very issues he deals with. Coetzee will be revealed to be a thinker who foregrounds both an exclusive notion of silence and a productive notion of silence.

The occasion of my thesis is reflective of what I see as a gap in Coetzee scholarship.

What is present in Coetzee’s scholarship at large is a propensity to treat him as a scholar who is offering powerful critiques of and alternatives to a Western system of thought or glimpses of the resistance of the other to Western modes of classification and exploitation. We can see critics like Gayatri Spivak presenting Foe’s character Friday as the “guardian of the margins who will not inform” (189) in her A Critique of Postcolonial Reason and outlining how Coetzee has created a character who resists appropriation by colonial structures. In Benita Parry’s “Speech and Silence in the Fictions of J.M. Coetzee” we see the possibility of a protowriting being present on the body of the silent other offering a sort of alternative scripting to the dominant

Western discourse. In “Oppressive Silence: J.M. Coetzee’s Foe and the Politics of Canonisation”

Derek Attridge considers how Foe subverts the process of canonisation as a structure of Western dominance. The dominant strands of Coetzee scholarship focus on resistance, subversions, and alternative to Western modes of being, and rightly so as this is core to Coetzee’s work.

Even so there is a strand of less prominent Coetzee scholarship which considers him in light of a Western tradition that he resists but is also a part of, beholden to, and engaging with.

We see this in works like Martin Woessner’s “Coetzee’s Critique of Reason” where he declares that Coetzee has a “post-philosophical position” (223) while also suggesting that he is “rescuing a lost strand of the enlightenment” (240) focused on empathy rather than reason, tying him into something more like Adam Smith’s sympathy-based morality than a deontological or virtue- based scheme. The gap in Coetzee’s research which I wish to fill requires the effort to consider

Coetzee in a similarly conflicted way to how Woessner does, examining Coetzee as a subversive and resistant writer that is engaged with and beholden to Western traditions of thought. While many scholars are aware of Coetzee’s location within the Western tradition, there is not a great breadth of scholarship which focuses on Coetzee’s direct engagement with Western thought as there is focusing on his critiquing and rejection of it. As such, my approach to the topic is to view him in a light similar to how Spivak and Parry do, as subversive, but do so paying close attention to his ties to the Western tradition that he both inhabits and critiques.

To the larger question of method this project will occupy a multifaceted position. While parts of the thesis will show a postcolonially oriented concern for Coetzee’s treatment of the other, with notions introduced like the metaliterary trap which present Coetzee as being very concerned with issues of marginality and the voice of the silenced other, it would be a mistake to present this paper as postcolonial in its approach. The approach of this paper is heavily informed by the idea that Coetzee, while an important figure in postcolonial literature, is also one who is rooted in Western philosophical thinking that informs his positions to a great degree, and this thesis will have the influences of such Western thinking on Coetzee at its core. David Atwell, in

J.M. Coetzee South Africa and the Politics of Writing describes Coetzee as having

“intellectualism unmatched by any other South African Writer” (26) and that he gives some of his characters an “ostensible ‘universality’” (26) because they were written in a “refracted way”

(26) rather than one grounded in a particular place or firm identity. In doing this Attwell is drawing attention to Coetzee oftentimes attempting to strip strict identity markers from his characters or settings, as he does with Friday in Foe and the empire in Waiting for the

Barbarians, and instead tries to make them abstract representative forms in a way reminiscent of classical Western philosophical methodologies. This leaves Attwell asking if Coetzee is “more at liberty to articulate general conditions?” (26) than other South African authors because of this distancing, but also asking the question of whether Coetzee might “represent no one but himself”

(26) with his abstractions. At times Coetzee attempts to abstract his general approach to the politics implicit in his characters and settings to engage in what I will later call a non-politics, since it intentionally engages in no single political setting and in doing so may represent no real politics at all and instead only an abstracted shell. While I will be dealing with a specific series of narrative framings within Coetzee, this formal approach is a widely utilized one in Coetzee’s works that extends beyond what I will be dealing with. This abstracted approach opens up a postcolonial critique of the hidden politics of Coetzee’s non-politics and while this thesis is aware of this potential critique it will not engage with it, and will instead focus, earnestly, on the types of Western underpinnings of Coetzee’s thoughts which have not been thoroughly explored in other scholarship surrounding Coetzee. The intent of this is to look at Coetzee in a way which has not been done often in Coetzee scholarship that I have encountered – to give a philosophically informed account of the Western theories that inform Coetzee’s writings, and give an account of how particular theoretical formulas might manifest in Coetzee’s novels. As such, while the thesis does engage in some postcolonial speculations, it is at large new historicist in its approach, attempting to give an account of how certain philosophical influences upon

Coetzee manifest in his work. The value of this, I believe, is to give a framing of the type of

4 particular models of agency and silence that Coetzee himself was attempting to forefront in the manner he might have intended to do so. In short, I am attempting to focus on what Coetzee himself might have been attempting to model as the means by which silence and agency interact rather than make a postcolonial critique of that modeling.

My topic itself is silence and its relationship to agency in Coetzee’s work. The choice of this topic is the product of several considerations. First, this is a topic which is widely considered in Coetzee’s work, with his silences serving to do many different things. How closely tied his silence is to the creation of agency has not been considered at length though so there is room for my thesis to help fill that gap. The central question of my thesis will be how

Coetzee’s silences relate to the formation of the agent. Second, in light of what Christopher

Miller described as a “valorization of the oral and aural” (247) in our culture I wanted to examine Coetzee’s use of silence as productive rather than as merely exclusionary. Coetzee, through complicated and multifaceted treatments of silence, very much falls into the school of thought where silence offers many productive possibilities while also recognizing the exclusive, negative powers of silence. Though it is not my intent to analyze him in the context of a larger tradition of valorizing silence, this thesis is perhaps the first step to examining Coetzee as part of such a tradition. As such my method has been to try and situate Coetzee’s treatment of silence and agency within a Western framing of thought, as a response to classical thought and modern modes of consideration about silence and agency. I will spend a significant amount of space analyzing thinkers that Coetzee is responding to, and which thinkers offer clues to the way in which he is responding.

In order to pursue this I will be largely examining two novels by J.M. Coetzee, those being Slow Man and Foe. It is the case that Coetzee deals with silence in many of his novels

5 which are rich with obscure alterities and resistant silences. In particular not examining

Disgrace and The Lives of Animals was a difficult decision. In Disgrace there was a particular instance where the protagonist, David Lurie, is asked to voice an utterance which would potentially save his job but was starkly opposed to the sensual nature of his experience and I saw a reflection of Kierkegaard’s statement from Either/Or Part I of “In language, the sensuous as medium is reduced to a mere instrument and is continually negated” (67) and I saw a great opportunity to delve into and discuss David Lurie’s situation in terms of authenticity, the disconnected between the narrative framing of the individual and their sensuous experience, and how Coetzee presents the sensuous as being alienated from the constructed self. In The Lives of

Animals Elizabeth Costello lectures on animal rights, so speaking for those who literally have no possibility of engaging in public discourse in any discernable way, and does so prefaced with an explicitly stated rejection of using philosophy to consider the value of animal life which would have led to interesting discussion. I decided not to include these two novels because of the more fruitful opportunities offered by the former two texts. Slow Man offers the opportunity to outline a coherent theory of authorial creation where silence became a staging ground for the cultivation of authorial force that would result in agency within the world. Foe has Coetzee implicating the reader in a sort of authorial overwrite of the other and draws to the forefront a duality of treating the other as both subject and object simultaneously, and how the inscrutable Friday robs us of our ability to treat the other as subject. More generally though, Slow Man offers the reader an opportunity to view the condition of being silenced from the perspective of the silenced, while

Foe has the reader withheld from the experience of being silenced, instead leaving the reader trying to penetrate silence from an outside perspective. The contrast between these two treatments of silence lets us consider the productive outcomes of silence from alternate positions.

The four chapters of the thesis will be done with the chronology of the works reversed, with the first two focusing on the 2005 novel Slow Man, and the latter two chapters focusing on the 1986 novel Foe. This inversion was done due to Slow Man representing a much more systematic project of the creation of a narrative landscape, with Foe presenting an image of the figure who is a tremendous complication upon that landscape. The first chapter of the thesis will be a stage setting for the more systematic work to follow and it will try and situate Coetzee in relationship to the problem of his silence presenting special capabilities, and what avenues he might take to deal with the problem of conceptualizing silence as productive rather than exclusive and disempowering. It will focus on how to tie Coetzee to a philosophical tradition, and what justification there is to do so. The second chapter will be a focused reading of Slow

Man which, first attempting to show Coetzee crafting Paul Rayment’s position as directly opposed to Plato’s notion of the tripartite soul, argues that his response to it is Nietzschean in character, and that a Nietzschean landscape of narrative is the basis for Paul Rayment’s development into an authorial figure within his own life. The third chapter will switch the focus to Foe and will examine how Coetzee engages the reader in a way which implicates them in the overwriting of the other, making the text function in a metaliterary manner to evidence how even the reader observing the silent character engages in an erasure of that other. The fourth and final chapter will be addressing the implications of this overwriting and how it leads to Friday revealing a distinct ontology of engagement with the other—that while we treat individuals as both subject and object, Friday’s silence leaves us in a position where we are unable to treat him as subject and we are left dealing with him entirely as object. In doing this we are aware that

Friday is an agent, an intelligent being that deserves our recognition as such, but his silence leaves us in a position where we cannot engage with him as such and rather treat him as a mere

7 object. Whereas for Rayment his silence outlines the formation of the authorial agent, Friday’s silence acts as a caution against how easily we can inadvertently treat the other as mere object.

My thesis ultimately reveals the diverse treatment of silence Coetzee engages in revealing how it can provide a staging ground for the production of agency, enabling a valuation of silence that is in defiance of a valorization of speech, and highlighting the necessity of the word in the valuation of the individual as an agent, and how the silent other calls attention to the risk of communication overwriting identity.

Chapter One

Stage Setting

The subject of silence is not one that has gone unconsidered in J.M. Coetzee’s fiction. In his novel Slow Man his protagonist Paul Rayment suggestively says “Silence can be full of meaning” (238) and Coetzee’s works are pregnant with silences of many types including the silence of the oppressed, the silence of the antisocial, and the silence of the mute. When one thinks of silence one’s first inclination might be to think of an absence, an inability, or a block – a person who is stripped of the ability to, or is otherwise unable to engage in, a type of action central to being in the world as an agent. In short, we might be inclined to think of it as a negative or an absence. In the following chapters my intent will be to show how Coetzee, across his works, has dealt with silence as having a relationship to agency and to unpack that relationship. What will be revealed is that silence, and its relationship to agency, is not monolithic in Coetzee’s work but rather takes different forms in different works, and that his exploration of silence and its relation to agency is an ongoing project that considers them in a philosophically informed way. Unpacking the philosophical projects underlying this exploration will be a major focus of this project.

Coetzee’s work has portrayed silence in different ways over the course of decades and as such we can look at Coetzee’s presentation of silence not as a single unified narrative but as him exploring the different ways in which silence manifests. The thesis to follow will not present silence as a single concept reappearing in Coetzee’s work but rather will portray silence as operating in very different capacities across his works. With this in mind my exploration will look at two of Coetzee’s works and two characters dealing with silence in very different ways,

9 each one giving us a different picture of how either the individual interacts with the world, or how the world interacts with the individual. One might say that this project will examine two cross sectioned samples from different times in Coetzee’s literary career. The first work that will be examined is a work that arrives quite late in Coetzee’s literary career, with that being

Coetzee’s 2005 novel Slow Man. The intent of the examination of Slow Man is to show how

Coetzee presents silence as a tool of negotiation with, or resistance within, a combative narrative landscape, and how silence is imperative to the individual establishing themselves as an agent within such a landscape. In order to do this Coetzee’s orientation in respect to a classic philosophical landscape will have to be determined, as I will argue that Coetzee’s treatment of silence is very much situated in a tradition of suspicion of the positive project of classical philosophy, and might be engaging in a very Nietzschean project. The second work to be explored is his 1986 novel Foe, in which Coetzee’s character of Friday is an inscrutable mute who raises a number of abstract questions concerning what we can know about the other, and what agency the reader has a right to attribute to a silent protagonist.

Before delving into Coetzee’s work and considering Coetzee himself two basic terms need to be explored briefly – agency and silence. Concerning silence I will be presenting both

Foe’s Friday and Slow Man’s Paul Rayment as silent characters. For Friday the case for this is obvious – he is an inscrutable mute and while he does engage in some limited utterances,

Friday’s silence is a curtain between the audience and his inner life, with the utterances he does perform not elucidating that inner life. Friday’s silence, though not absolute, does all but completely remove us from his thoughts and motivations. In contrast Paul Rayment does speak frequently throughout Slow Man and, unlike Friday, we are privy to his inner life. What that inner life tells us is that while Rayment is able to articulate himself he has an inner voice which,

10 as the reader is aware of, is effectively stymied and disempowered. Whereas Friday’s silence is quite literal, Rayment’s silence will be presented as more figurative, with elements of himself as agent being silenced rather than being silenced outright.

Concerning agency, Markus Schlosser’s entry on the subject in the Stanford

Encyclopedia of Philosophy states that “in very general terms, an agent is a being with the capacity to act, and ‘agency’ denotes an exercise or manifestation of this capacity” (Stanford) and would entail that, at its simplest, agency is the ability of a thing to act, which would cast everything from an uncoerced human adult to a housecat lounging in a sunbeam as an agent.

When considered in a more critical light though the issue of agency becomes tremendously philosophically sophisticated, usually explained within a series of metaphysical frameworks which value the relation of the being, who is a potential agent, to a causal chain resulting in the action (Stanford). Certain theories of agency, such as event-causal or agent-causal, try to properly situate the individual’s will and actions within causal chains which are externally located, whereas a volitionist theory will argue that a volition is a type of uncaused instance of willing that creates agents “in virtue of their (the volition’s) intrinsic properties, not in virtue of some extrinsic or relational property” (Stanford). This level of philosophical sophistication is not necessary for my case concerning Coetzee’s presentations of agency in relation to silence, and what is important is that the reader recognize that, as I reference the idea of agency, the simple form of agency which would include the cat in the sunbeam will not suffice to understand what Coetzee is exploring in his novels. The agency which is of importance to Coetzee is one where the being is an agent in an active, intentional way and, though it is not clear that he is adopting a volitionist approach, the volitions of the individual and how they are valued in the world around the individual are important to him. The type of agency I am interested in in

Coetzee’s novels is that of a willing, reasonable agent, and Coetzee’s concern seems to be less with the precise metaphysics of how one’s agency comes to be and more with agency as it plays a role in the social, narrative, and linguistic landscapes.

The notion of agency, in particular, will be revisited again when I deal with Foe in a more in-depth manner in the third and fourth chapters. Though Coetzee’s exploration of silence and agency are what this project will examine, the first chapter to follow will be more focused on laying the groundwork of the philosophical landscape Coetzee is staging his exploration within rather than elucidating the exploration itself, which will be the focus of the three chapters to follow.

A Narrative Continuum – Coetzee’s Concern with Authorship

In Benita Parry’s 1996 paper “Speech and Silence in J.M. Coetzee” she explores how

Coetzee deals with silence in some of his earlier works, especially Foe. Parry notes both dialectical and discursive elements in the relationship between sound and silence in Foe as she refers to the final scene of Foe where it is claimed that Friday, the mute protagonist, is in a place where “bodies are their own signs” (57). Parry makes much of this claim and reads into it that

Friday is locating himself in a place where “[he] does not cross the threshold into logical and referential discourse” (47)1 and in doing this “the body” is “spared the traumatic insertion into

1 Logical and referential discourse, which will be a term I utilize throughout the thesis, is a term that I am borrowing from Benita Parry that she herself does not clearly define. In “Speech and Silence in J.M. Coetzee” she contrasts it to a “paradisal condition where sign and object are unified, and where the body, spared the traumatic insertion into language, can give utterance to things lost or never yet heard” (47) which suggests it as the series of mediating signifiers which a codified language would represent. My usage will be slightly more broad as I will largely be using it to refer to scripts which are situated in a dominant position of power compared to other modes of communication. I will also be using it to not just refer to language but also non-linguistic modes of communication,

12 language” and “can give utterance to things lost or never yet heard” (47). In doing this she recognizes a special power in Friday’s silence, insofar as he can exist in this place where bodies are their own signs, allowing his silence an ability to utter things which are not available in a more common linguistic realm, which would constitute a type of discourse separate from the mediated discursive landscape of linguistic communication. What Parry draws attention to with her discussion of the power of these silent characters is Coetzee’s loaded deployment of silence and how that silence has the potential to give individuals who are silent particular capabilities.

It is on the notion of particular capabilities of silence in Coetzee’s work which I wish to initially focus. Parry notes that in the case of Friday his “inner consciousness is not narrated” and is “less available to the attention of conjectural readings, a sign of which is that he is offered alternative futures by fiction, one within and the other outside the formal structures of language”

(46-47). In Friday’s silence he somehow resists the entry into “logical and referential discourse”

(47) and is offered these alternate possibilities. His silence is the lynchpin on his ability to operate outside normal modes of discourse and raises this idea of Coetzee’s silent characters gaining special capabilities from their silence. In short, Friday’s silence gives him the special capability to resist entry into the logical and referential discourses of a common linguistic- narrative framework and, in resisting entry, fiction then offers him “alternative futures” not contained within those frameworks. With Parry revealing the special capability created through silence in Foe, exploring silence in Slow Man will reveal an equivalent, but very distinct, special capability of the protagonist Paul Rayment’s silence. Whereas in Foe Friday is, as Parry says, able to separate himself from the logical and referential discourse of a linguistic-narrative

and even more abstract things like Laura di Michele’s notion of a text that will be introduced in the third chapter. My consideration of “logical and referential” discourse will be referring to any form of systematic communication, particularly those that are engaged in a dominant power relationship.

13 framework, Rayment’s active goal in Slow Man seems to be to regain control within that framework rather than to establish alternative futures outside of it.

Returning to the theme of Coetzee not having a unifying treatment of silence in his many works, Slow Man’s Paul Rayment is a character who at once has much in common with Friday and is at odds with him in some important ways. Of Coetzee’s protagonists many suffer injury of various kinds, some even notably like Disgrace’s David Lurie and the unnamed girl from

Waiting for the Barbarians, but Friday and Rayment share the distinction of being the two who have been damaged in a way leading to an obvious decrease in capability. Friday loses his tongue through an unknown incident and, by reason of that, his power of speech along with virtually any means of substantive communication. The opening event of Slow Man is a biking accident where Rayment is struck by a car which causes him to lose his leg. For Friday the event of his loss is shrouded in mystery, an element which is central to the character’s ability to operate outside of “logical and referential discourse” (47) as Parry says. For Rayment the event is made quite explicit as the first two chapters of the novel are centered around the accident and the loss of his leg, and much of the novel after that features the difficulty and experience of having lost his leg. Both Rayment and Friday have relatively mysterious pasts though in the case of Friday the novel presents it that nobody, not even Friday’s master Cruso, likely knows the whole story of who he was before his loss, making the loss of the tongue a terminus point in our knowledge of Friday’s history and identity. Rayment’s past, on the other hand, is referenced by himself and other people who are aware of it and even though we do not learn more than fragments of it ourselves there is a presumed, and not overly extraordinary, linear narrative which lead Rayment to the disruptive event at the start of the novel. Rayment himself even shows a deep concern for the fidelity of narrative history through his career of photography setting a tone of an almost

14 reverence of narrative integrity in Slow Man. Late in the novel a “rare photograph” (223) depicting elements of “Australian past, an Australian descent, Australian forbears” (191-192) is stolen and it is the plot device that leads to the novel’s final confrontation which is over the loss of an authentic piece of a narrative history. Early in the novel Rayment’s nurse and love interest,

Marijana Jokić, comments that Rayment’s “old photographs” are important because it shows that

“Australia has history too” (49) giving a focus and a presumed general importance of an uninterrupted narrative history of Australia. Even with Rayment’s largely non-disclosed past we do learn some things about him – that he had a wife from a marriage that ended in divorce, has no children, has family in Europe and was born in France (43), came to Australia when he was young so is himself an immigrant. The reader is aware of a narrative history of Rayment and

Rayment himself shows an interest in preserving the narrative fidelity of Australia’s past through his collection of photographs. The novel itself pays passing attention to narrative history whether it be Rayment’s, that of the Jokić family, the backstory of Elizabeth Costello, or of

Australia itself. Slow Man is a work which has a latent sense of narrative continuum, of a story that follows logically2, presented as a backdrop to the disruptive event of Rayment’s loss which spurs the events of the novel. This contrasts to Foe since Friday himself is a constant and ultimate impediment to establishing that narrative continuum in an authentic way, though much

2 The notions of narrative framework and narrative continuum are important and interrelated concepts for my thesis, but also fairly mundane. The idea of the narrative framework, as I am using it, is constructed within the context of how I see Coetzee deploying narrative as a part of Rayment’s psychological makeup, or the types of stories that are told to reinforce existing power structures and social orders. This includes things like the previously mentioned history of Australia, a cohesive idea of what Australia is which is reinforced through and justified by a conglomerate of stories of Australia’s history. In the case of Rayment his narrative framework would be his own curated narrative of his past by which he justifies his lot in life. The narrative framework is the sum of stories told to enforce a certain identity or relationship, be it a person’s personal identity, a country’s, or the power relationships which bind people together. There may be a hegemonic component to some of these stories as they compose the commonly accepted justifying stories for certain consistent exercises of power. The narrative continuum is the persistence of such a framework over time, the series of stories that are continually added to, modified, and referenced to justify the continuation of an accepted identity, institution, or a relationship.

15 of that novel is also focused on narrative continuum through the character of Foe who, as an author wishing to capture Friday and Susan Barton’s story, becomes an agent of establishing and controlling that narrative continuum. Rayment’s history on the other hand looms over Slow Man, a palpable backdrop to the story of Slow Man giving it a feel of a story whose history is available but the continuation of that story is in question. Friday’s history is an utter mystery, a black hole in the narrative of Foe ultimately frustrating that attempt at narrative continuum, contrasted to

Rayment attempting to re-establish a continuum and his place in it.

If Coetzee deals with silence differently between his works then we must consider the question – if Rayment and Friday are similar characters insofar as they are most notably disabled in Coetzee’s works, what is the different special capability of silence that Coetzee is exploring in

Paul Rayment? I believe the difference lies in Parry’s assertion that Friday “does not cross the threshold into logical and referential discourse” (47) which recognizes Friday as this narrative black hole in Foe that Rayment is not in Slow Man. Whereas Friday, as a character, seems designed in such a way to allow him to operate outside of logical and referential discourse,

Rayment is constructed in such a way that his silence locates him very much within the narrative continuum. If we conceive that silence in each story grants the character special abilities of sorts

I tend to agree with Parry that Friday’s silence removes him from a continuum of discourse and see Coetzee’s exploration of Rayment’s silence, almost twenty years later, as an effort to examine the role silence plays in articulating the individual within a narrative. Friday’s silence is exclusive to an extreme degree, whereas Rayment’s is at least attempting to be inclusive.

Let us then consider Slow Man in terms of narrative and continuum so as to determine what it is that Rayment might be seeking to situate himself within. The novel as a whole is, in the simplest terms, the story of the rehabilitation of a man who has lost his leg and seeks to find

16 himself after the event. Referring to it as “the event” seems appropriate because it is suggested to mark a singular turning point, a drastic change, an interruption of continuum. One of the most obvious turns in the novel happens within the first two pages, with Rayment’s internal monologue remarkably optimistic, confident, and empowered. After those pages the tone of his internal monologue for much of the novel is timid, trepidatious, and disempowered. The first line of the novel captures the surprise interruption of the accident as being “sharp and surprising” and “like a bolt of electricity” (1), but what follows captures the confident and controlled inner monologue that takes place in the face of such a traumatic event as being struck by a car. In what is to become a recurring device within the novel, to be explored extensively in the second chapter, we see the very first instance of Rayment’s italicized internalized monologue being a declarative “Relax!” (1) further commentating on the accident with a description that Rayment

“flies through the air with the greatest of ease” (1). That very first paragraph represents a mode of description which speaks strongly of agency, capability, and an able response, with Rayment’s italicized inner voice describing himself “Like a cat” (1) and explaining that he should “roll, then spring to your feet, ready for what comes next” (1) with “the unusual word limber or limber is on the horizon too” (1). Rayment’s italicized inner voice, a stylistic feature which is not ubiquitous in Coetzee’s novels, is not specifically just a monologue but also a dictation of what is expected to happen, an explanation of what Rayment is to do, and in that expectant dictation of the italicized inner voice is an expectation of what Rayment is capable of. The inner voice simultaneously speaks as Rayment, for Rayment, and at Rayment at various times marking a flexible narrative tool. In a novel which broadly features an inner voice marked by frustration, trepidation, and a notable lack of empowerment, the very first paragraph represents that inner voice both speaking confidently and dictating a course of events which casts Rayment as

17 astonishingly capable. The confidence of the dictating inner voice pre-emptively telling the story of what is to happen is immediately dashed though with the second paragraph setting the tone for the novel with “That is not quite as it turns out, however” (1), which speaks volumes to what

Rayment’s life is like after the event. In that moment captured in the novel’s first chapter

Rayment’s italicized inner voice, which is telling a story of Rayment as capable and in control, has the continuation of that expected story of who Rayment is dashed, and that narrative continuum of Rayment’s self-identification shattered. As mentioned above, the tone of

Rayment’s inner voice is drastically changed after this with Rayment’s inner monologue much more often representing frustration, trepidation, and disempowerment in its ability to enact

Rayment’s desired outcomes.

If the accident is a turning point we can assume that the italicized voice we see in that opening paragraph, the only part of the novel that exists before the voice’s utter frustration of narrative expectation, is in some way representative of what that voice was like, or at least capable of, prior to the event. The first chapter’s italicized inner voice is decisive, dictates positive and empowered possibility, and casts Rayment as perhaps unrealistically capable. In contrast the italicized inner voice, for much of the novel that follows, is frustrated and adversarial but impotent in the face of the people and events that Rayment experiences, and is all but completely lacking this empowered tone of the first paragraph. Returning to the idea of

Rayment’s partially revealed history and the narrative continuum he inhabits I would like to consider this inner voice of the first paragraph as part of that narrative history. Rayment was a cyclist, so had an active body, was a reasonable professional success, and his work as a photographer is a practice which represents an inherent ability to apprehend and control a certain type of pictorial narrative. His presented life is not without a degree of failure as he has a failed

18 marriage and he has regrets about not having a son, but the limited image we are presented is one of a person who finds himself both materially comfortable and reasonably comfortable in his choices. Even his regrets and movings on are framed in terms of them being rationalized into choices which are importantly his choices even when they lead to regrets on his part. As we learn of Rayment we see a carefully crafted narrative of his life as failures and successes, pleasures and regrets, but at each point it is explained in terms of a something that fits into an expected narrative of himself he finds acceptable even if not agreeable. He does say concerning his regrets that “Chief among them is regret that he does not have a son” (44) and while he does frame this as a mistake, it was a mistake made through the reasonings of his youth. He looks back to his family history where his “grandparents Rayment had six children. His parents had two. He has none” (34) and considers how he “used to think it made sense in an overpopulated world” where “childlessness was surely a virtue, like peaceableness or forebearance” (34). He changed his mind on this, hence the regret, but it was a mistaken belief of his and a wrongly made choice that led him to this in his own mind, or at least a rationalization which kept him appearing as the author of his own history. What is also interesting to note is that his regret stems from selecting between competing continuities—that of the ethics of his decision to not have children versus the continuation of his family line. The example of his grandparents and his parents show his diminishing concern for hereditary continuity which he justifies by accepting a moral imperative, with the idea being that the sacrifice of family continuity benefits an already overpopulated world. The grounds of his choice are of fitting into a structure of moral fidelity or of family continuity with each one making his choice, an exercise of agency and control, central to the narrative. In short, his choice to not have children is framed as his choice

19 of a moral imperative over a hereditary/familial imperative, leaving him the actor orchestrating even his regret through a freely made, if mistaken, choice.

His career as a photographer and the terms of leaving it were similar. He describes it as

“his first real job” and that “his greatest pleasure was always in darkroom work” (65) where he would “sometimes experience a little shiver of ecstasy, as though he were present at the day of creation” (65). One must note that the emphasis of his experience working with the camera was that it brought him close to authorship, a device that “always seem[s] to him more a metaphysical than a mechanical device” (65) imparting special powers upon him, power to capture a moment and create a narrative of it. It is even suggested in the novel that his task as photographer is involved in establishing or maintaining a narrative continuum. When Marijana’s son Drago is perusing through his photographs he considers the motivation Drago might have for looking through those photographs. Rayment considers that he “must be feeling his way into what it is like to have an Australian past, an Australian descent, Australian forbears” (191-192) showing that he sees photographs as items with the potential to insert oneself into a certain narrative framework—that of having a family and national history. Earlier in the novel Marijana comments that “Is good you save history. So people don’t think Australia is country without history” (48) and this lets us put Rayment’s earlier comments about the power of the camera in context. It is a metaphysical device which puts him in the proximity of “the day of creation”

(65) but part of its metaphysical power, and part of what it creates and preserves, is a narrative framework. Rayment as a photographer is the one who closes the shutter and develops the material component of this narrative history—he is the agent of this narrative framework.

Considering these cases at large the Rayment prior to the accident either is the author at the helm of each action he takes or can explain why the things that are out of his hands are

20 largely done with his consent. His decisions are made in terms of a continuity—moral continuity, familial continuity, or being a part of a narrative continuity, with him seeking the authorial role when he can. Rayment is a figure who is framed in terms of a certain level of authorship and agency within the narrative of his own life and even uses the near magical device of the camera to be present at the day of narrative creation – until the opening paragraph of this novel, at which point his italicized inner monologue starts to spin a narrative of a catlike, limber man able to roll in a manner that would mitigate the damage of being hit by a car. The first paragraph of this novel captures the moment where the narrative continuum of Rayment’s life is tangibly shattered, along with his leg, and his role as agent in and author of his own story comes into question. I have used the term continuum several times and I would like to reiterate the earlier considered contrasting functions of Friday from Foe and Rayment from Slow Man: whereas Friday from Foe functions as a black hole which disrupts continuum, Rayment is an agent of continuums of various sorts. Slow Man is presented to us as a story where Rayment, in the face of a disruption to continuum, is attempting to orient himself within a framework as an author once again.

This focus on authorship has been noticed as a phenomena central in Coetzee’s later works. In David Attwell’s “Mastering authority: J.M. Coetzee’s Diary of a Bad Year” he notes that the “overriding subject of Elizabeth Costello (2003), Slow Man (2005) and Diary is really the practice of authorship itself” which was “always in the background of earlier work” but “has now become the fabric and substance” (217) and I believe this is an accurate assessment of these works, though some past works like Foe could be said to be centered on the issue of authorship in the sense of who has the right to tell, or author, a person’s story. This idea is seconded and expanded upon by Pieter Vermeulen in “Abandoned Creatures: Creaturely Life and the Novel

Form in J.M. Coetzee’s Slow Man,” who adds a degree of useful context to why Coetzee is focusing on the notion of authorship. Citing David Attwell, Vermeulen notes the prevalence of a focus on authorship Attwell outlines in his later work (656) but does so after quoting Coetzee himself where “Coetzee describes the relationship between his literary work and his life … in unexpectedly direct terms” (655). The direct terms Vermeulen is referencing foreground Coetzee describing himself as being “overwhelmed . . . that my thinking is thrown into confusion and helplessness, by the fact of suffering in the world” and that “These fictional constructions of mine are paltry, ludicrous defenses against that being-overwhelmed” (655). Vermeulen looks at

Disgrace as an “attempt to convey a more direct affective response to suffering” (656) and in so doing deals with the palpable experience of the suffering Coetzee is so concerned with. In the same paragraph Vermeulen also agrees with Attwell that a central focus in Slow Man, along with

Coetzee’s other later works, is authorship. Whereas Vermeulen brings these topics together and then moves on to deal with the “modern novel,” particularly the “novel tradition” and how “that tradition fails to exercise its hold on the novel’s characters” along with a consideration of “social and cultural forms that have exhausted their usefulness in the early twenty-first century” (658), what I wish to take from his and Attwell’s comments is that Coetzee is using his literature to respond to suffering, and one of the central mechanisms of his later novels is authorship.

Though Coetzee considers his works to be woefully insufficient, and by proxy his construction of authorship, at dealing with this problem of suffering, his writing and focus on authorships are both part of his attempts to deal with it.

What should be taken from this section is that central to Coetzee’s work is his concern with authorship. We have seen Paul Rayment as a figure who is intimately interested in his ability to author not only his own story but that of Australia through his photographs but finds

22 himself not able to do so in the face of his accident. We can take this as contributing to

Coetzee’s larger description of his own work as a “paltry, ludicrous defenses against that being- overwhelmed” (655) in the face of suffering, with Rayment’s attempt to regain authorship of his own story as a response to his own suffering. If this is such a significant part of Coetzee’s work though, with Attwell and Vermeulen identifying it as something central to Coetzee’s later works, and Coetzee himself viewing those works as a paltry defense to being overwhelmed by suffering, an intensive examination of what Coetzee might mean by authorship will be helpful in revealing how Rayment acts as an author and what special capability his silence gives him in regards to his ability to author. I have already identified Paul Rayment as having lost control of his narrative with the events at the start of his novel and through this his narrative continuum was interrupted which begs the question—how was Rayment an author, and what was he the author of? A simple answer of “his life story” captures part of what is being done here but I do not believe that this does credit to Coetzee as an author. As Benita Parry has pointed out, in Foe Friday holds a special capability that allows him to break beyond the logical and referential framework he inhabits putting Friday at the center of a remarkable metaphysical move of breaking beyond the realm of language and even, as is suggested by the conclusion of Foe, of Friday’s body becoming its own sign (157). Coetzee’s writing has a philosophical complexity to it which is unlikely to be captured by such a simple assertion that Rayment writes his own life story. In order to properly complete my analysis of silence and agency in Slow Man I must look at

Coetzee and determine what authorship might mean to him in a more intensive philosophical sense which will provide a framework that Coetzee might be using to make Rayment’s authorship of his life meaningful.

Coetzee and Philosophy—Within and At Odds with Philosophical Tradition

If Coetzee uses Slow Man to pursue this theme of authorship and Rayment is meant to deal with issues of authorship what is the medium upon which the author acts? I believe that

Rayment’s attempt to once again become the author of his story is informed by Coetzee engaging with a philosophical history which he is at odds with, and an adoption of a Nietzschean methodology contrary to that tradition. Coetzee’s relationship to philosophy will be established here, whereas the Nietzschean methodology I will justify here will be unpacked through an analysis of Slow Man in the second chapter.

Coetzee is a very philosophically fluent author and as such I believe it would be a mistake to discuss his work as if he is not in conversation with a philosophical tradition, commenting on philosophical frameworks. If one were looking for traces of a philosophical framework one might turn to Slow Man which gives us a hint of its relationship to philosophy in a reference to Plato. At one point Rayment is considering the whims of fate and what he “used to believe, was his philosophy” (53) which was a stoic fatalism in the face of adversity described as “Fate deals a hand, and you play the hand you are dealt. You do not whine, you do not complain” (53). In the face of what has happened to him he realizes that “he is running down” and that “whatever inside him was given the task of mending an organism after it was so terribly assaulted, first on the road, then in the operating theatre, has grown too tired for the job, too overburdened” (53). It is a telling realization for Rayment, showing an idealism of philosophy giving way to a stark philosophy of reality, a philosophy – or non-philosophy – of bodily realities. Immediately following this Rayment’s musings turn to a consideration of Plato, specifically “of a book he used to own, a popular edition of Plato” (53) signaling to the reader

24 that Rayment’s musings on his philosophy do have a tie to philosophy in a formal and classical sense, though how is unclear. Rayment’s consideration of Plato mirrors the fading of his previous fatalistic philosophy – he remembers the unnamed popular edition3 of Plato having cover art depicting “a chariot drawn by two steeds, a black steed with flashing eyes and distended nostrils representing the base appetites, and a white steed of calmer mien representing the less easily identifiable nobler passions” (53). He then goes on to describe the person

“gripping the reigns” of the chariot with “a half-bared torso and a Grecian nose and a fillet around his brow” which represented “presumably the self, that which calls itself I” (53). The picture, mirroring the tripartite presentation Plato makes of the soul with higher and lower drives being controlled by a higher faculty, is not one that Rayment relates to and he rather imagines a non-idealized caricature of the image representing him. He imagines his own version of the chariot as being “Paul Rayment… seated on a wagon hitched to a mob of nags and drays that huff and puff, some barely pulling their weight” (53). The idealized image of the chariot driver is perverted in the image presented, where the driver is faced with the realities of bodily harm and trauma resulting in the driver’s experience not being of an idealized philosophy of clean internal relations. This is a muddying of Plato’s clean internal relationships with tiredness and bodily failings, a philosophy of the ideal replaced with a skeptical philosophy of the body in its weakness and inability. The tone of Rayment’s, and Coetzee’s, brush with one of the most important figures of classical Western philosophy, is a one of suspicion towards and rejection of idealized presentations of the metaphysics of the human soul.

3 The image of the chariot suggests the work in question is the Phaedrus, a work in which Plato outlines his notion of the tripartite soul utilizing the image of a chariot rider.

This tone is not isolated to Slow Man either and a cursory reading of The Lives of

Animals, another of Coetzee’s relatively late works being written in 1999, sees a similar tone adopted through the character of Elizabeth Costello. Costello is, interestingly, also the subject of her own novel, Elizabeth Costello, and a character appearing prominently in Slow Man, making her a recurring figure in Coetzee’s works. The Lives of Animals is an odd work as it was originally delivered as a lecture in 1997 with the work itself being Elizabeth Costello delivering lectures on animal rights, a subject that Coetzee is passionate about. As a fictional lecture which

Coetzee himself delivers as a lecture, Coetzee is both directly engaged in the subject in question while being distanced from it to some extent by it being a story about a character giving a lecture. While the literary characteristics of the work are intriguing, it is primarily one element of Costello’s argument that is relevant to my topic – that of philosophy. Costello’s lecture is divided into two sections entitled “The Poets and the Animals” and “The Philosophers and the

Animals.” In “The Philosophers and the Animals” Costello discusses why she won’t be using the language of philosophy to argue her point concerning the value of animals. She says that

“such a language (of philosophy) is available to me” (22) but proceeds to outline her familiarity with it and her distrust in it. She paints a broad canvas touching upon many of the great figures of Western philosophy from Aristotle to Descartes, Bentham, Kant and Plato, and likewise ever so briefly touches upon the central tenets of many of their ideas and the great ideas of Western philosophy. Of central importance, she notes that philosophy would have us believe “The universe is built upon reason. God is a God of reason” (23) and that “reason and the universe are of the same being” (23), which constitutes her simple summations of ideas we can presume she, and Coetzee, is well acquainted with as is suggested by her claim to the language being available to her. She states that her rejection of the philosophical language is a rejection of this centrality

26 of reason saying “Both reason and seven decades of experience tell me that reason is neither the being of the universe nor the being of God” and that “reason looks to me . . . like the being of human thought; worse than that, like the being of one tendency of human thought” (23). In short, Costello is presented as aware of the cornerstone theories of Western philosophy which often posit the primacy of reason. She is skeptical of them because she views reason as a single part of human experience among many and suggests that it is inadequate to explain either the universe or God. Her relation to the philosophers and reason-centric unifying theories is one of suspicion and her mannerism is one more akin to those titled as engaging in a hermeneutics of suspicion than a sort of systemic classical philosopher.

Beyond just these two novels Martin Woessner has noted this skepticism spanning across

Coetzee’s works in his paper “Coetzee’s Critique of Reason.” Woessner declares that “if there is any thread that unites Coetzee’s many novels… it is this: the critique of reason, not for the sake of critique – not, that is, for the sake of reason – but for the sake of moral life” (223). Furthering

Costello’s position Woessner states that Coetzee “has outlined a post-philosophical position”

(223) and that Coetzee has “an abiding interest in the fragility of modern rationality” (225) and

“its inability to help us live our lives” (225-226). He describes Paul Rayment as a solitary individual who was “rational, contemplative, and perhaps even a little cold” (225) but that

Rayment’s case suggests that “cold, calculating, rationality must be supplemented, if not supplanted, by emotion and, more specifically, empathy” (225). Though it seems like he is outlining Coetzee as an almost anti-philosophical figure his conclusion suggests that Coetzee’s project is not “simply condemning the missteps of Enlightenment rationalism and its ties to imperialist brutality” but that it “is, in its own fashion, rescuing a lost strand of the

Enlightenment, a strand that made the education of moral sentiments as important a task… as the

27 pursuit of the mirror of nature” (240) as he speaks back to the relationship between literary forms, specifically the novel, and its philosophical focus on sympathy.4 He places Coetzee into a tradition of literature and philosophy which is focused not on a dogged pursuit of rarified reason but rather of sympathy, empathy, and emotional connection – and doing so while not alienating

Coetzee from philosophy at large, and instead only a dominant rationalist branch of Western philosophy. Despite his declaration of Coetzee having outlined a “post-philosophical position”

(223) it would be more accurate to say that Woessner complicates Coetzee’s relationship with philosophy—not rejecting it outright, but having a selective, and perhaps systematic, engagement with it.

When we consider these two examples of Rayment and Costello, who both feature heavily in Slow Man, we can start to infer that Coetzee’s project is not one that will easily invite a clear theory like Plato’s tripartite soul. His characters actively challenge the ideas of Western philosophy so the substratum on which the continuum Rayment inhabits is not likely to be one that is explained simply by citing Kant or Plato or any other figure offering a clean unifying theory beneath umbrella concepts like God or reason. Costello’s and Rayment’s tones of suspicion and active rejection or undermining is a strong clue though, and other scholars have picked up on it to suggest that Coetzee is operating in line with certain other philosophical messages more focused on suspicion of philosophical projects than on affirmation of them.

I would like to consider an idea brought up by Alena Dvorakova in her paper “Coetzee’s

Hidden Polemic with Nietzsche,” and later indirectly supported by Richard Alan Northover, with the idea being that Coetzee is engaging in a common cause, of sorts, with Nietzsche to the extent

4 To clarify anachronistic terminology Woessner notes that sympathy in works like Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments is “closer to what we would call empathy today” (235).

28 that Dvorakova believes that Coetzee is engaged in a “hidden polemic” with Nietzsche.

Considering the skeptical tone, couched in intimate awareness, directed towards the philosophers by Elizabeth Costello it may even be the case that Coetzee’s skeptical method could be coloured very much by a hermeneutics of suspicion5. Dvorakova starts off by suggesting that both

Coetzee and Nietzsche engage in a “resistance to philosophy” which “Is deliberate on the author’s part” and further states that “what they seem to be questioning in their writings is the power of reason to be the ultimate judge of reality, the ruler of experience, the source of value in individual life” (357). We can immediately see this statement as a reflection of the types of examples given above with Coetzee’s characters either rejecting a reason-centric notion of the soul or rejecting reason-centric philosophy as an explanatory tool. She draws attention to the difficulty in ascribing the views of characters in his novels to Coetzee himself (358) but states that “Coetzee is a writer of fiction that does not argue but attacks reason’s supposed supremacy indirectly, from outside philosophy, by attempting to subordinate philosophical discourse to fictional discourse” (358). Though she goes on to outline how she believes that Coetzee shares a

“hidden polemic” with Nietzsche, that it is “as if Coetzee shared Nietzsche’s view of the task of the artist in relation to philosophy by enacting” (358), it is the idea that Coetzee is engaging in a project which is somewhat directly Nietzschean that I am particularly interested in here. The hidden polemic, an idea Dvorakova borrows from Mikhail Bakhtin, describes “one kind of so-

5 In David Pellauer’s The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy Entry “Paul Ricoeur” he describes the hermeneutics of suspicion as a general hermeneutical position “found in Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud” that “held that nothing ultimately means what it first seems to say” as opposed to hermeneutics which “sought to recover meaning that was assumed to be already there” (Pellauer). In relation to Nietzsche, this would reference aphorisms like “How the ‘Real World’ at last Became a Myth: History of an Error” (49) from The Anti-Christ in which Nietzsche outlines and inverts the truth relationship between the “real world” of perceived metaphysical truth and the contrasted “apparent world” of becoming which was changeable and false. Nietzsche proposes that the “apparent world” of becoming is in fact the truth, and the “real world” of metaphysical truth is false in contrast to established thinking. This inverted means of interpretation is what Paul Ricoeur considered representative of a hermeneutics of suspicion. Coetzee’s relation to such ideas is that his project is hostile to the entrenched truth claims of classical Western thought in a way similar to Nietzsche’s.

29 called double-voiced discourses” (360). The hidden polemic is a case of “two discourses unexpectedly clashing with each other, both in spite and because of their shared interest in a subject, the closeness of their approach to it, and the similarity of their assumptions about it”

(360). In essence, they are similar projects with similar properties but, in part because of their closeness, they seek to differentiate themselves from each other. In the case of Coetzee

Dvorakova is suggesting that Nietzsche is not just another philosophical voice which Coetzee draws upon, but rather a figure that is very close in method and purpose to Coetzee generating a kinship—Coetzee is in a position where Nietzsche’s discursive program “needs to be contested even as it is evoked” (360). Dvorakova is careful to note that the “closeness (between Nietzsche and Coetzee) has remained largely unacknowledged by Coetzee himself” (360) and that she is

“not concerned to make a statement about Coetzee’s intentions, beliefs, or anxieties or influence”

(360) but rather that Coetzee is simply engaging in an (anti)philosophical discourse that is starkly

Nietzschean. She will go on to make claims that “Coetzee’s Costello is best read as a response to Nietzsche’s Zarathustra” (362) noting that “Costello’s travels are Coetzee’s way of staging the problem of truth, as well as his response to the problem, by stressing the role of creation” (362), which mirrors Attwell’s and Vermeulen’s suggestion of Coetzee’s focus on authorship showing a similar focus on the individual being able to exercise creative force in their lives. She goes on to say that Costello, as Coetzee’s response to a Zarathustra figure, “engages in a similar project to

Nietzsche’s yet she turns her back on it” (366) dealing with many of the same problems as

Nietzsche but essentially rejecting much of his positive project. Dvorakova essentially suggests that Coetzee adopts a Nietzschean method, but rejects a Nietzschean solution.

Dvorakova is not alone in suggesting that Coetzee has a covert sharing of method with

Nietzsche. Richard Alan Northover, in his dissertation J.M. Coetzee and Animal Rights:

Elizabeth Costello’s Challenge to Philosophy, identifies a Nietzschean tone to Coetzee’s own dealings with Platonic philosophy, and also in Elizabeth Costello as she is presented as a sort of

Socratic figure imagined through Nietzsche’s reading of Socrates. In relation to Coetzee coopting Plato’s allegory of the cave to discuss a notion of transcendent justice Northover notes that “In Doubling the Point, Coetzee reinterprets the Platonic image of the cave in a striking way” (57) saying that Coetzee’s interpretation “is more modest than Plato’s” (58) and that

Coetzee “does not make the Platonic ascent to the vision of the sun” (58). In Doubling the Point

Coetzee himself suggests an “awareness of an idea of justice, somewhere, that transcends laws and lawmaking” but that the awareness is “mainly as flickering or dimmed” (340-341) which

Northover takes as suggesting an admission on Coetzee’s part that “he merely constructs representation that allow other people to free themselves from false beliefs and prejudices” (58) rather than achieving the privileged access to a transcendental truth that Plato’s allegory of the cave is said to allow. Northover identifies this project of “constructing representations” that help free people from false beliefs and prejudices as what Elizabeth Costello “attempts to do in The

Lives of Animals” (58) and casts her as a sort of Socratic figure utilizing Platonic dialogue to pursue this end. Recognizing that Socrates is a figure associated very strongly with the primacy of reason and shares, perhaps even originating, Plato’s distrust for poets, he recognizes that

Costello is a very questionable figure to cast as a Socratic figure in virtue of her favouring a literary approach rather than a reason driven philosophical approach. In order to reconcile a supposedly Socrates-like Costello with her valuation of a literary approach to truth, Northover says that “It will be useful to follow Nietzsche’s characterization of the Socratic spirit in The

Birth of Tragedy, since he continues in that work the battle between philosophers and the poets”

(58), in order to explain Costello as a Socratic figure with a non-Platonic project. Northover

31 goes on to frame Costello in terms of Nietzsche’s conception of Socrates who is “arrogantly superior and herald of a radically dissimilar culture, art, and ethics” (60). Northover notes that

Costello is “perceived as ‘arrogantly superior’ and as heralding an alien set of values, those of animal rights in opposition to a blindly anthropocentric culture,” who, like Socrates, makes many enemies in courageously questioning the prejudices of the people around them” (60). Northover sees Costello as a Socratic figure in practice if not in message, a promulgator of an alien standard of judgment and practice within an existing system, much as Nietzsche describes Socrates. To add to this Northover leans on Nietzsche’s conception of a potential Socratic artist in order to reconcile Costello’s anti-rational dialogue with her being a Socratic figure, noting Nietzsche’s claim that “Perhaps art must be seen as the necessary complement of rational discourse?” (63-64) which Northover says “links Socrates closely with Elizabeth Costello, despite her attack on reason” (64), maintaining that Coetzee uses the Platonic dialogue in The Lives of Animals “not to displace reason, but to achieve a proper balance between reason and imagination” (64).

Though Dvorakova casts Costello as a Zarathustrian figure, and Northover portrays her as a Nietzschean Socratic figure, both orient Coetzee as doing something that has, as Dvorakova says, “everything to do with the problem of truth and value in art” (366) and, in doing so, applies

Nietzschean forms of rebellion and skepticism through his characters. Northover cites Coetzee speaking of Nietzsche in his acceptance speech for the Jerusalem prize as saying, “We have art, said Nietzsche, so that we shall not die of the truth. In South Africa there is now too much truth for art to hold, truth by the bucketful, truth that overwhelms and swamps every act of the imagination” (58). If we can recall Coetzee’s statement that his “thinking is thrown into confusion and helplessness, by the fact of suffering in the world” and that “These fictional constructions of mine are paltry, ludicrous defenses against that being-overwhelmed” (655), it

32 paints an image of a figure adopting something like a Nietzschean conception of art and truth.

Coetzee experiences a different balance between them relative to Nietzsche, as South Africa’s realities have left him attempting to use art so as to “not die of truth” but finding the capabilities of art taxed to its limits. We can remember Dvorakova saying that Coetzee’s Elisabeth Costello

“engages in a similar project to Nietzsche’s yet she turns her back on it” (366) and I believe this reading is quite plausible given both Dvorakova’s and Northover’s accounts of Coetzee’s engagement with Nietzschean formulations, along with his tensions with them. What I would like to take from this is an image of Coetzee as a writer for whom, as Dvorakova suggests,

Nietzsche “is not just one of many ‘voices’ that Coetzee as a novelist is free to exploit” (360) but rather that Coetzee is oftentimes adopting Nietzschean problems, frameworks, and formulations to work with or within, deploying them to his own ends which do not always entirely align with

Nietzsche’s.

Conclusions Moving Forward

Though the connection to Nietzsche may seem incidental, the problem of silence and agency, in Coetzee, cannot be discussed in a vacuum. What the next chapter’s analysis will reveal is that Paul Rayment’s attempt to regain his agency through silence is very much telling a story about a departure from a Platonic model of the individual, into a Nietzschean combative landscape of language in which Platonic models of control are shattered and Rayment must navigate as an author. This chapter merely lays the groundwork for what the text will reveal – that Rayment’s authorship is the task of gaining command over what Nietzsche describes as a

“mobile army of metaphors, metonymies, anthropomorphisms” (29) in his On Truth and Lie in a

Nonmoral Sense.

Chapter Two

Rayment on the Narrative Battlefield

At the heart of the relationship between silence and agency in Slow Man is a special capability. The previous chapter touches upon, through Benita Parry outlining a special capability of silence present in Foe, Coetzee imparting special capability to his silenced characters. This chapter will look to the text of Slow Man to outline what type of special capability a silenced Paul Rayment has which constitutes the action at the core of his agency within the novel. In order to accomplish this Coetzee’s philosophical fluency will once again come into play, and it will be shown that the framing of Paul Rayment’s special capability will be done against the backdrop of a rejection of a Platonic metaphysic, and his agency will make sense within a combative narrative landscape that is very Nietzschean in character.

A Wagon of Nags – A Silenced Author and Rejecting the Chariot

In the very first paragraph of the Slow Man we see the voice, or internal thought process, of a different Paul Rayment than is present in much of the novel, one exuding confidence and an expectation of capability. “The blow” (1) are the very first words of the novel which reference the car striking Rayment, followed by what are, presumably, his thoughts. “Relax! he tells himself” (1) and later “Like a cat he tells himself” showing an active internal monologue of sorts that is more a dialogue with him addressing himself with instructions. The dialogue itself is more of a dictation, at least in this very first section, with the inner voice narrating what Rayment is going to do and what he is going to be, describing him as “Like a cat” and saying that he will

“Roll, then spring to your feet, ready for what comes next.” In essence, it is as if Rayment is giving himself orders by describing what he is going to do and be in the face of the accident.

What is immediately apparent is that there seems to be a presumption of multiplicity within Rayment, with a voice that describes and commands directing its dictations and narrations towards himself – suggesting a commander and commanded. With Coetzee being the type of philosophically fluent author that he is this foreshadows his treatment of Plato’s chariot from the

Phaedrus and a discussion of silence and agency can be informed by Rayment’s response to that chariot. Plato’s chariot represents his formulation of the tripartite soul with there being a clear commanding reason, an aggressive spirit which follows the directives of reason and serves as a defender/enforcer, and a base appetite which is productive. According to Eric Brown in “Plato's

Ethics and Politics in The Republic” this tripartite construction of the human being leads to a productive, balanced and happy individual and, when the model is mapped onto the state, a harmonious and just state (Brown). Rayment considers this model but views his own inner being as more akin to him being “seated on a wagon hitched to a mob of drays and nags that huff and puff, some barely pulling their weight” (53) taking the horse and team model from Plato and making it indistinct, unhealthy, and non-productive. With the italicized inner voice opening the novel with dictations towards the presumed other parts of the self, Coetzee is immediately tying into this Platonic metaphysic of the self and engaging in the novel’s unstated action of undermining the cleanliness and productive power of that model.

If we take Coetzee’s engagement with this model seriously, even as he perverts it, then in his metaphor of driver and nags we have a relationship between an active and outspoken driver and the team. Given what is outlined with his driver/nag relationship it seems unlikely that there would be anything resembling a perfect mapping of Plato’s chariot model onto Rayment’s

35 wagon so it is reasonable to dispense with the Platonic relationship between reason, spirit, and appetite, and instead the focus is placed on the relationship between the driver and the nags with

Coetzee placing emphasis on Rayment’s tiredness and inability. He says of his wagon and its nags that “After sixty years of waking up every blessed morning, munching their ration of oats, pissing and shitting, then being harnessed for the day’s haul, Paul Rayment’s team will have had enough” and that it will be “Time to rest, time to be put out to pasture” after their “huff and puff, some barely pulling their weight” (53). Plato’s productive model is replaced with one marred by bodily and spiritual realities of tiredness and ineffectiveness. If the general form of Plato’s model is active in Coetzee its functioning is clearly altered. When the italicized voice speaks to

Rayment in the first chapter of the novel and for many chapters later, it is unclear if it is reason, spirit, or appetite that dictates to its subject and rather that distinction is replaced with a simple one of an unknown driver and a group of tired nags, stripping Plato’s chariot of its distinct divisions. An implication of this is that the pursuit of truth is also left in an unclear position as for Plato one of the functions of the tripartite arrangement being clear, with reason at the helm, is that reason is best suited to discovering truth.6 The Platonic metaphysic of the soul is effectively restaged into an indistinct metaphysic of a tired driver of a tired team, with no clearly defined roles between them outside of the commander and commanded relationship.

6 The relationship between the tripartite soul and truth is, for Plato, linked to this harmony of the individual specifically when it has reason at the helm. In the “Plato’s Ethics and Politics in The Republic” Eric Brown states that for Socrates, the central figure of the dialogue, “the harmony or coherence of their [an individual’s] psychological attitudes makes them good, that each of their attitudes is good insofar as it is part of a coherent set, and that their actions are good insofar as they sustain the unity in their souls” placings a value upon a unified soul as exemplified by the chariot as a means to achieve goodness. Goodness is tied intimately to reason, and the person ruled by reason loves “wisdom and truth” above all else. This reasonable person, exemplified in the philosopher, achieves a good life through this internal unity, with “the philosophers, by grasping the form of the good, will recognize goodness in themselves as the unity in their souls.” For Plato, the reasonable unity defined by the chariot is guided by reason’s focus on the form of the good, and it recognizes that good in the individual manifesting in the unity of the chariot. This makes Coetzee’s rejection of the chariot model a rejection of a Platonic metaphysics of truth outright.

It is through this tiredness that the metaphorical silence of the novel manifests in

Rayment’s character. As was pointed out in the first chapter Rayment’s silence is not literal but figurative – his ability to author is what is silenced. We see in Rayment’s italicized inner voice a voice that is constantly narrating a possibility of what could be either about himself or the world around him. As was mentioned it describes Rayment as catlike in that opening scene, telling the story of an agile and capable Rayment – and its powers to command are frustrated. Paying attention to what the italicized inner voice does following this we see it constantly either telling a story about the world around it or casting a demand that the world around it perform something.

In the hospital, shortly after waking up, the internal voice demands “Where are my clothes?

Where are my clothes and how serious is my situation?” (4). The italicized inner voice isn’t merely fantasizing about a possibility here but, it would seem, simulating a series of actions that

Rayment will perform – the driver spurring the team to action by providing a narrative frame of what is to be emulated by the injured man. We can see the correspondence between this dictation of the italicized inner voice, of its narration of what Rayment should be doing, with what Rayment is actually able to do as he says “‘Clothes’” to a passing young woman “with an immense effort, raising his eyebrows as high as he can to signify urgency” (5). This italicized inner voice obviously has a connection to Rayment’s action – it imagines him asking a question and his body responds. The italicized inner voice though, as it narrates and dictates, is a voice which seeks reflection in the world around it – and in the failure of that reflection the italicized inner voice has its intended authorial force, its power to affect change in Rayment and the world around it, silenced.

That immense effort, that articulate line of questioning reduced to merely “clothes,” represents a disconnect between the italicized inner voice’s capacity to imagine and describe

37 what Rayment is to do and what he actually can do. Though this is one of the most extreme periods of disempowerment for Rayment in the novel, that being immediately after the accident, the failure of Rayment’s actions to realize the narration of the italicized inner voice is emblematic of what afflicts Rayment in the novel – that he has an inner driver of his wagon in the italicized inner voice narrating what Rayment should do and who Rayment should be, while also making demands on the world. Those demands are realized imperfectly if realized at all. In the metaphor of the wagon and the nags, the tiredness represents a general inability of the wagon and team that is Paul Rayment to realize what the driver directs it to do. Thus the lack of realization of the italicized inner voice’s desires in the world are reflective of the tiredness of

Rayment’s team, and that tiredness leading to the imperfect or non-realization of the directing voice is a silencing that results in his lack of ability to be the agent carrying out his italicized inner voice’s narrative imaginings within the world. The author’s voice being unrealized in the world is the silencing that leaves Rayment being more object than agent in the world he inhabits.

The idea that Rayment’s italicized inner voice is a producer of narrative should be briefly explored. The range of action for Rayment’s italicized inner voice is quite broad and not all forms of its actions seem to be, specifically, narrative. One form of activity it engages in is admonishment towards Rayment or the world around him. We can see it at times prophesying a future that will not exist, such as when Rayment is imagining his “imaginary but imagined son”

(44) that he regrets not having, creating a facsimile dialogue of what his son might have said in the case of Rayment’s injury. That imagined son’s narrated statement was “Yes, I accept. You have done your duty, taken care of me, now it is my turn” (45) showing the italicized inner voice creating an as-if dialogue representing an unfulfilled wish on Rayment’s part, how it could have been. At times it will describe people around him as it does with Miroslav Jokić, the husband of

Rayment’s love interest Marijana, as having “A body like a whip” (143) before contemplating what the couple is like having sex. The italicized inner voice later describes Miroslav’s sentiment towards him as that of a “hated rival!” (149), the truth of which is not clear, but creating a narrative framework of competing lovers. At times it will essentially spin a story about a character as it does about the events surrounding Elizabeth Costello, with the Italicized inner voice describing the situation between him and the Jokićs as “Elizabeth Costello’s doing” and that “she is the one behind it all” (146), a dubious claim representing a story of Costello being some mastermind orchestrating all that transpires. It admonishes Rayment and others, it crafts narratives for the world around it which it is not able to bring to fruition, and in general it creates a series of possibilities and scenarios, many of which Rayment would like to see realized but do not manifest beyond those internal musings.

Let us consider that this silencing of an authorial voice at large represents Coetzee’s rejection of the cleanliness of the Platonic model of the chariot as the internal structuring of the individual. That silencing represents Rayment being unable to exercise his authorial voice over even himself and his own actions. Rayment’s italicized inner voice’s authorial agency is snuffed out by a weak team, with that weakness most notably manifesting in his lost leg but also a general psychological malaise that prevents this voice from effectively commanding himself.

Coetzee’s model of the chariot, his wagon with nags, is similar to Plato’s chariot but his comment on it is that it is ineffective and its divisions of labour unclear. It is marked ineffective by an inability to manifest its narrative within his own actions and his own self.

An Author’s Medium – the Substance of Continuum

The aspirations of Coetzee’s internalized inner voice do not simply extend to actions and its inability to realize its authorial agency is not merely the result of a tired team being unable to carry out the driver’s actions. Rather, if the authorial voice attempts to exercise its authorial agency within Rayment, it also represents a desire to express that narrative within the world around it. Rayment is constantly met with counternarratives which as his internalized voice works to construct narratives within him, its narrative is directly contradicted by others encountering him. This complicates framing Coetzee’s rejection of the Platonic model since it has implications on the world around it as well, making this not a problem of just self-image, but one of having a presence in the world and being able to affect change within it. In essence, where Plato’s model deals with the organizing of the self, the wagon of nags is presented through

Rayment as coming up against opposition in the world around him.

The issue becomes one of narrative attempting to relate to an established concept which is Paul Rayment himself, the relationship between the signifier of his name and the individual it signifies. Who is Paul Rayment? Paul Rayment is not merely an individual who in the first chapter perceives himself as nimble and catlike, but he is an individual who could be catlike in the world around him, perceived as catlike by others and widely recognized as catlike if circumstances aligned correctly – but this, and many other narrative moves made by the italicized inner voice, do not happen. Obviously, in the case of the accident, his ability to react like a cat does not come to fruition with an external reality of actual capability crushing that particular narrative of what Paul Rayment is without it becoming a subject of his own judgment or public consideration. Shortly after, when bolstering himself for pain to come, his italicized inner voice says “Pain is nothing . . . just a warning sign from the body to the brain. Pain is no

40 more the real thing than an X-ray photograph is the real thing” (12) with the novel immediately noting “But of course he is wrong” (12) as pain turns out to be quite real. In this case a physical reality once again crushes the italicized inner voice’s attempt to characterize himself, or the world around him, with a narrative. It is not always the simple physical realities of the situation contradicting what Rayment says about himself though, but also counternarratives coming from the external world about who the post-accident Paul Rayment is and who he is going to be. In discussing himself with Drago, Marjiana’s son, Rayment says “You may not think it, looking at me, but I used to lead an active life. Now I can’t even go to shops” (69) and though Rayment seems to be accepting of his infirmity here, this is oftentimes not the story his italicized inner voice tells. In a much later event, when Rayment slips in the bathroom, his inner voice’s immediate response is “Be calm, he tells himself” once again dictating the proper response (206).

It goes on to spin the narrative of “A slip in the bathroom, nothing to be alarmed about, it happens to many people, all may yet be well. Plenty of time to think plenty of time to set things right” (206) casting him in the role of just another person who slipped in the bathroom for whom it is not a big deal, a narrative which is both dashed by reality and called into question by

Marijana. It takes him “a full thirty minutes” (207) to escape the shower, breaking the hinges of the cubicle in the process since he could not maneuver properly, as his italicized inner voice says

“Thank God Drago does not have to witness it! And thank God the Costello woman is not here to make jokes!” (207). At this point, in the middle of the night, he calls Marijana to help him, telling her “I had a fall. I have done something to my back. I can’t move” (207) with her agreeing to come. Left frigid from his time trying to escape the shower, he waits while his italicized inner voice waxes about his state, saying “Not enough heat in his veins” followed by an imagining of “himself hung by the ankles in a cold chamber amid a forest of frozen carcasses”

(207) realizing the possibility of mortality in the face of his accident. His inner voice’s final comment is “Not by fire but by ice” (207), reminiscent of a Robert Frost poem about the end of the world,7 as his inner voice seems to change its narrative of the seriousness of the event and considers it an emergency, showing a flexibility in the story that Rayment’s inner voice is telling him of the event. After a tense exchange Marijana rebukes Rayment saying that “Is just spasm.

I leave you pills for it. Back spasm is not emergency” (212) with her idea being that it was unnecessary to call her for this issue. Rayment initially called her on the presumption that this was an emergency but Marijana offers a counter narrative, reframing the event as not an emergency. What is of particular interest is the terms by which Rayment comes to agree with

Marijana’s framing of the event as he thinks “Of course, in the language of caring professions, this would not count as an emergency” (212) and the nature of the event becomes defined by competing notions of what an emergency is. By many accounts a fall such as his which left him stuck in a shower for an extended period as he grew progressively colder, and being in extreme pain after, would be an emergency and, after an internal assessment and then re-assessment, this is how he treated it as he called Marijana. When confronted though he relents in his assessment, seemingly agreeing that it was not an emergency and that “he is the one who ought to blush”

(212), and it is in the face of the competing linguistic framework that he does so.

In realizing that there is an alternate framework of the event, according to which what happened to him was not an emergency, his own framework is overcome and it creates “a silence between them” (212). His silence is a result of his lack of ability to be the accepted author of the narrative understanding of the event around him as he no longer controls the framing of the event

7 “Some say the world will end in fire, / Some say in ice. / From what I’ve tasted of desire / I hold with those who favor fire. / But if it had to perish twice, / I think I know enough of hate / To say that for destruction ice / Is also great / And would suffice” (Robert Frost)

—his literal voice, his ability to argue the point, is stripped by the effectual defeat of his voice in a conflict over narrative control of the term “emergency” and its ability to be mapped onto the event in question. The idea that Rayment is coming up against here is that there is an established framing of the term emergency which his framing of the event does not conform to—that he is not the one who sets the narrative tone of the event, but it is a pre-established convention. It is this point of conflict which Rayment faces, where his inner voice attempts to stage a narrative of what is going on around him and have the world conform to it but it is ultimately trumped by another narrative framework, which reveals the substratum of the narrative continuum that

Rayment wants to exercise control over. That substratum is language, composed of metaphor and concept, specifically in a Nietzschean sense.

Rayment’s backing down to Marijana reveals the medium of Rayment’s authorship – specifically a framework of language and concept, of a competing structure of linguistic framings. The incident with Marijana draws out the barest form of this conflict in showing a struggle over the direct application of a word where the end result is Rayment being silenced when his notion of “emergency” turns out to not represent some sort of canonical definition.

Language is negotiated, in this case, insofar as there are competing attempts to establish a publicly accepted meaning to the term, but it is also combative in the sense that Rayment is defeated and feels shame in the face of it. It is as if there is a transgression in posing his conception of emergency, his narrative of precisely what happened, onto the events around him.

In this shame, in this transgression of the public definition of “emergency,” Rayment is both literally and figuratively silenced. What we can see in action here is a public narrative framing – a concept of a thing which is communally understood and agreed upon. This concept has a narrative force within it, to describe a thing and impart upon it a certain characteristic of being.

One might describe this conceptual framing as a hegemonic one which, as part of an established order, serves a dominant narrative interest within the narrative landscape – within the narrative landscape the individual or thing is defined in a particular way to serve the interests of the system at large. Rayment’s position is that his place within that narrative framing, which he previously consented to, has changed, and now his authorial approval no longer applies to the conceptual framing that he occupies within the dominant landscape. As such he wishes to exert authorial force which he did not previously have to in light of his approval of his conceptual framing within the landscape. He now wishes to become, to the extent that he can, an author within this landscape, and influence the way in which he is viewed. His italicized inner voice operates as his authorial intent, as it attempts to stage itself as one which can influence conceptual framing within the landscape. What we see in the incident of Marijana is a backlash against him abusing his linguistic license and opposing an established concept of linguistic meaning and being shamed for it, with an agent of an established conceptual framing enforcing that framing and leaving Rayment cowed and conciliatory in the face of it.

To further explain Rayment’s struggle here, and give a shape to the narrative continuum,

Nietzsche’s ideas of language and the human intellect presented in “On Truth and Lie in a

Nonmoral Sense” outlines a likely way to explain Rayment’s position8.

8 My justification for explaining this in terms of Nietzsche’s theory here is, ultimately, circumstantial, but I believe it is not an unreasonable leap. In the first chapter I explained the connections which other scholars have made between Nietzschean theory and Nietzschean narrative presentations to Coetzee’s work. From this I posit that Coetzee is a figure who, in the type of direct rejection of Platonic models this chapter has already dealt with, is attempting to frame modern solutions to the failings of classical models. Dvorakova presents a compelling case that Coetzee is dealing with a similar set of problems as Nietzsche, and Northover sees Elizabeth Costello as a sort of embodiment of Nietzsche’s conception of Socrates, so I am not alone in making this type of connection. In my own case I see Coetzee as adopting a notion of language, of concept formation, that is dynamic and negotiated. My immediate thought was to explain Rayment’s struggle with narrative framing within a Foucauldian discursive model but I noticed that Coetzee places an emphasis on conflict leading to the establishment of these concepts, that he presents it as a struggle between personalities as Rayment and Costello. While Foucauldian discourse would explain

The three key elements of Nietzsche’s paper, as it pertains to Rayment’s case, are that all language is metaphor, the chief function of the intellect is dissimulation, and truth is a matter of a publicly crafted convention rather than representative of any sort of thing in itself or in any abstract, transcendental form. Noting dissimulation as a means of preserving the human

Nietzsche says “This art of dissimulation reaches its peak in man: here deception, flattery, lying and cheating, talking behind the backs of others, keeping up appearances . . . donning masks, the shroud of convention, playacting before others and before oneself” (20) are some of the chief methods of this dissimulation. Nietzsche imagines this being done in a pre-civil state, saying that “in the natural state of things, the individual, inasmuch as he wants to protect himself against other individuals, uses his intellect mostly for dissimulation” (22). At base, in this pre-civil state,

Nietzsche describes a situation in which one person protects themselves or those outside by creating a series of false images and misrepresented presentations. One might think that this is in contrast to a perceived truth but truth is not forthcoming as Nietzsche says, “their [the individual’s] sensations nowhere lead to truth” after saying that “their eyes glide over the surface of things and see ‘forms’” (21), suggesting that the forms are a superficial layering on top of things and do not reveal any hidden depth. The chief work of the intellect is not a determining of truth in any sort of absolute Platonic sense but rather the creation of presentations which are advantageous to the wellbeing of the individual. The examples he gives include a series of false presentations to the self as well – a “playacting” to the self, or the donning of masks. There is

the actual landscape in flux, Coetzee’s focus on conflict between individuals as part of this process is reminiscent of a Nietzschean relationship where one is realized by acts of overcoming. Whether it is the self that is overcome or the dwarf on Zarathustra’s back, Nietzsche’s presentations of self-realization match with Coetzee’s presentation of Rayment’s self-realization more aptly than Foucault’s more abstract theory of discourse. Rayment not only engages in this type of meaning making, but he does so by struggling against others in direct conflict which is very Nietzschean in character. Again, while my reasoning for using Nietzsche here is circumstantial, the explanatory power Nietzsche offers paired with other scholars noting the Nietzschean projects Coetzee undertakes leaves me comfortable utilizing Nietzsche towards this end.

45 implicit in this an authorial element – the individual engages in creative acts with their intellect, crafting images which benefit themselves in the realm of self-image or in the public sphere.

Nietzsche’s dissimulation is a crafting of narratives as a means of self-preservation. Linking this to Rayment’s italicized inner voice, the aspiring authorial element of his self, it is constantly a matter of grasping at his own state and the world around it with the intent of controlling the image, the narrative, of what that thing is. Is Rayment a cripple who falls on the floor for whom it is an emergency, or is he a man for whom this is not a serious occurrence? Within his own head Rayment struggles to craft his presentation and have it adopted both by himself and in the world around him, engaging in a Nietzschean dissimulation, with the italicized inner voice oftentimes representing the active process of this constant narrative work.

Concerning convention and metaphor within language, Nietzsche sees convention entering language in the shift between the “natural state” and the civilized state for people. At some point he says that “out of both necessity and boredom, he [the human being] wants to exist socially and in herds” and in order to do this human need a “peace treaty” (22) to end what he describes as “bellum omnium contra omnes” (22) or, something like a Hobbesian war of all against all. One of the things which this peace treaty brings with it is “the first step in the attainment of that enigmatic drive to truth” which is that “what is henceforth to count as ‘truth’ is now fixed, that is, a uniformly valid and binding designation of things is invented” and this

“legislation of language likewise yields the first laws of truth” (23). It should be noticed that the truth here is arrived at and invented in Nietzsche’s view and not discovered or found as if it were a fact of the world, but it is a common conception that is legislated. When considering what a word is, Nietzsche says that it is a “copy of a nerve stimulus in sounds” (24) and he outlines the process of how the word is arrived at. He says “First, to transfer a nerve stimulus into an image

– first metaphor!” (26), suggesting that an original experience is translated into an image of some presumably mental sort, with the mental process being an association of that image with that sound. The word itself is “The image again copied in a sound – second metaphor!” (26) and a sound is created which is a metaphor of the created image. There are two degrees of separation in the metaphors at work, first between the experience and the mental image, and second between that image and the sound. Nietzsche goes on to say that “we possess only metaphors of the things, which in no way correspond to the original essences” (27), suggesting that language is always a false copy which never captures the thing it metaphorically represents.9 The metaphor’s work is not done when it makes this transference from original stimulus to sound, and Nietzsche says “every word becomes a concept” pointing to the fact that “it has to fit countless more or less similar—that is, strictly speaking, never equal, hence blatantly unequal— cases” (27). Each word then becomes a container which does not accurately represent the experience that originally led to it being adopted, but must then be applicable to other similar cases that convention dictates it must apply. The example he gives is that “no one leaf is exactly the same as any other” and that “the concept leaf is formed by arbitrarily ignoring these individual differences” (28). The terms of ignoring these individual differences would be the conventional legislation of language Nietzsche speaks of – an agreement that certain differences

9 It should be noted that there are limitations to Nietzsche’s conception of metaphor in this case. In Luís Sousa’s “Knowledge, Truth, and the Thing-in-Itself: The Presence of Schopenhauer’s Transcendental Idealism in Nietzsche’s On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense” he notes that “the thesis that all language is metaphorical does not refer primarily to an intra-linguistic phenomenon” (50) and that Nietzsche’s conception of language “does not refer… to relations that emerge between words” but rather to “relations between language, perception and reality (things in themselves)” (50-51). Whatever stress Nietzsche places on rhetoric and poetry, his focus on language as metaphor is not concerned with how language interacts with language, but how language interacts with a perceived external truth. In this Sousa points out that Nietzsche “reverses the traditional hierarchy between knowledge of the senses and knowledge of reason” (51) and places a sensual experience of a thing, the “nerve stimulus”, as the true referent of language and denies any transcendental experience achieved through rationality. Since the original nerve stimulus is never truly captured by the metaphor, language at best imperfectly captures the thing it references – or as Nietzsche would have us believe, the representation is ultimately a fiction, an illusion.

47 in certain situations will be habitually ignored. For Nietzsche, at the base of this, the formation of the word and the concept that follows it is one of an original misrepresentation of an experience that is doubled from image to sound, and then that misrepresentation is made standard through communal agreement that a certain set of misrepresentations shall be adopted by all. A truth then is in adhering to this agreed upon set of misrepresentations, and a lie is a departure from these agreed upon sets of misrepresentations.

What Nietzsche presents us is the landscape of language in which the signifier is a socially constructed form which is at best imperfectly connected to the signified and its truth value comes not from the connection to the signified, but rather to its consistent usage and acceptance within a community. To simplify, it is a form of narrative construct which is communally agreed upon. In Truth and Lie Nietzsche goes on to say “What, then, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonymies, anthropomorphisms – in short, a sum of human relations that have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, translated, and embellished, and that after long use strike a people as fixed, canonical, and binding” (30) and in doing so casts the truth a word represents in terms of a series of literary tools and ends with it becoming canon.

Relationships to things are taken and crafted poetically, and given rhetorical elements, and then embellished – so that original experience, the image in the person’s head, is narrated into something more, and this is the process which leads to language. It is “after long use they strike people as fixed, canonical, and binding” (30) and not in relation to a transcendent truth, ultimately being “illusions of which one has forgotten that they are illusions” (30) – they are

48 creations of a sort of stagecraft, phantoms of rhetorical force and poetic device, and these narrative structures become a common story within a social group10.

There is an obvious and drastic departure from the Platonic metaphysic of truth here, which is a transcendental form rather than Nietzsche’s misrepresenting and communally adopted form. For Plato it is of paramount importance that one reaches the truth, and the ordering of the self that is represented by his chariot metaphor is meant as the way by which a harmonized individual can effectively reach truth. What are we then to make of Coetzee’s wagon of nags and its relationship to truth? The wagon of nags is a perversion of the chariot model and it breaks down the clean lines of control and internal ordering that this represents, and it offers no route to a transcendental truth. The type of truth that Coetzee seems to be adopting is one of

Nietzschean linguistic convention which is central to Rayment’s authorship. The incident of his accident and Marijana’s rebuke of his call hinges upon the concept of an emergency and whether what Rayment experiences is one. In the face of Marijana’s rebuke Rayment bashfully appears to be a liar, in Nietzschean terms, insofar as he realizes that his call to her is predicated on the misuse of the convention of emergency – Rayment misused the conventional understanding of

10 The terms “landscape of narrative” or “narrative landscape” are, in this thesis, tied to this notion of the “sum of human relationships” (30) that Nietzsche outlines. This “sum of human relationships” is the series of terms and understandings of fact which are in a state of flux, negotiated between individuals and communities of people. They are narrative in character insofar as they are things crafted through poetic, theatrical, and rhetorical methods to convince others of things which may be recognized by the author as being a false or embellished presentation. The terms are transient in their meanings and impact, only remaining static to the extent that their rhetorical force convinces the community to adhere to a certain imagining of what the term is. For Nietzsche this qualifies the term as being true, which for him represents a sort of communal agreement arrived at through rhetorical conflict rather than accessing any sort of transcendent notion of truth. Nietzsche, in aligning this “sum of human relations” with “truth”, rejects the static nature of traditional notions of truth, robbing them of their normal consistency and instead imagining truth as consistent only insofar as they are constantly reestablished through this conflict of rhetorical force and poetic embellishment. This leaves the truths, whether it be claims of fact, definitions of terms, or otherwise, as being a series of rhetorical and poetically embellished conflicts between people and groups. The “landscape of narrative” is the field of this rhetorical and poetic conflict whereby truth is established, where the parties involved are swayed by the convincing narratives that others utilize or create to constantly reestablish an old truth, or supplant it with a new one. In short, the landscape of narrative is the dynamic field of relationships where truths are decided by rhetorical force and poetic embellishment.

49 the term to justify his call to Marijana. What we see in action here is Rayment attempting to negotiate with convention and have it reflect his authorial intent rather than reproducing the external hegemonic order – to make his version of this story communally accepted, with his being rebuked and then bashfulness mirroring the mechanism of control utilized by the dominant order to maintain the community’s standard convention. In his inability to be able to negotiate with and influence the existing convention of “emergency” with his own narrative of emergency his authorial voice is supplanted and silenced.

In terms of continuum of narrative, the continuum that Rayment inhabits is one formed of

Nietzschean metaphor and his struggle within it is that of finding himself in a position to influence convention – to exert authorial force on it and have that force reflected in the public convention. As an author with his agency hinging on his ability to make his narrative manifest in the world, the medium of his authorship is this Nietzschean legislated convention of language.

The action of the italicized inner voice is internal, or silent in the public sphere, with little effective voice in the world. That silent action is that of play-acting possibilities and mask- making of identities, of narrative construction, and it is that silent action which stages Rayment’s potential narrative frameworks. Rayment is constantly reaching into an established but flexible landscape of metaphor and concept and simulating, in his head, the types of narrative frameworks he might construct with it and potentially impose upon it since the landscape is determined by rhetorical force rather than connection to the signified. To map directly onto the

Nietzschean model and its three steps of original experience, image, and then word/concept, this turns into a process of narrative creation within Rayment’s head, and we see this process all through the novel in protracted form. Returning to the very opening paragraph of the book we see Rayment mapping the first two steps of this process in a very complex way, adding the

50 poetics and rhetorical elements to his image. There is the original experience (the blow) and that of flying, “as he flies through the air” (1), and Rayment’s mind engages in what Nietzsche sees as its chief power in dissimulation and starts to play act and construct a mask on it, recasting simply “flies through the air” as “flies through the air with the greatest of ease!” (1). Whether in a social situation or not Rayment is attempting to constantly frame the events with a certain sort of poetic or rhetorical force. He describes Miroslav as having a “A body like a whip” (143), he slips in the shower and immediately attempts to recast the situation as if he were just a regular person falling in the shower and not a cripple for whom it is potentially a very bad fall. Even in situations where he is not attempting to directly translate his narrative into the world around him, his mind does what Nietzsche states and “uses his intellect mostly for dissimulation” (22) or, more specifically, for the creation of the narrative of what is taking place concerning who he is, what he is doing, or what he will do. He does this in silence, staging potential narratives before he attempts to bring them into the public sphere, with his silent internalized italicized voice being the creation point of narratives he might broach into the contested landscape of word/concept around him.

Rayment’s mind, and the italicized inner voice, is a machine of narrative, constantly grasping and simulating the situation into a series of poetic or rhetorical frameworks, re- imagining what is and what might be, or what he might say and either not saying it, or having that narrative presentation rejected when he does say it. In this we see part of Rayment’s special capability of silence – the ability to dissimulate and craft potential narratives for the world around him with the intent of seeing them realized. On Nietzsche’s three-part movement from experience to image to word/concept, this is all the part of the move from experience to image with Coetzee showing this process of the aspiring author, in this landscape, crafting in his head

51 the stories that might withstand convention. The full realization of Rayment’s special capability within silence is found in the transition from image to word/concept, and it is in this second stage of creating image where Rayment’s authorial voice is stuck for most of the novel, its authorial potential silenced. It is in the move to the third stage of Nietzsche’s formula, where Rayment’s images are mapped onto the flexible landscape of language and he can see his images have impact in the world around him, where he is to make his move from silenced voice to the authorial voice of the agent. This move will require him becoming an author with the ability to make his own constructed narratives accepted by convention in this publicly contested landscape of metaphor and concept – to have his authorial force negotiate with and influence the public conventional framing of things.

Costello, the Transcendent Author – or, the Narrative to be Overcome

The figure of the author, in a literal sense, is a recurring one in Coetzee’s work. The protagonist of Disgrace, David Lurie, is an author of three books, though by his own admission they did not have an impact in his field. The titular character of Foe is a re-imagining of the author Daniel Dafoe whose name is Foe. Of special significance among the authors of Coetzee’s work though is Elizabeth Costello who appears in her own novel titled Elizabeth Costello, lectures as arguably the voice of Coetzee himself in The Lives of Animals, and is also one of the central characters in Slow Man, a figure who all but invades Paul Rayment’s life and in many ways is his chief adversary. The character of Elizabeth Costello is an aging author who inexplicably shows up at Paul Rayment’s house one day and immediately says something that marks her as not an ordinary character. After introducing herself with no pretense, though noting that she had considered telling him she was some sort of unrelated volunteer, she recites part of

52 the opening paragraph of Slow Man verbatim, saying ”The blow catches him from the right, sharp then surprisingly and painful, like a bolt of electricity lifting him up off the bicycle. Relax! he tells himself as he tumbles through the air, and so forth” (81). It is not made clear how she can recite the opening of the novel verbatim in its entirety, even including the proper italicization, an act that barring some exceptional explanation is a breaking of the fourth wall. At a later juncture where Rayment reads Costello’s notebook, suspecting that she may have left it there for him to find, he sees that she has been observing him and she “knows every jot and tittle” (122) and the affront he takes to this is that “he has been in a cage like a rat, darting this way and that” with “the infernal woman standing over him, observing, listening, taking notes, recording his progress” (122). He considers at one point that he might be a sort of “biologico- literary experiment” (114) of hers after Costello organizes a tryst for him with a woman he may or may not know, leaving him detailed instructions to put an elaborate eye covering of flour paste and lemon leaves on as he engages with a blind woman who arrives at his house unseen, and leaves in a taxi ordered by Costello. He accuses her of treating him “like a puppet” and that she treats “everyone like a puppet” (117) which is of particular interest because he describes what she does as “Make up stories and bully us into playing them out for you” (117) and he wonders if she may be trying to write a book about him. That it is never revealed how Costello is able to repeat the opening lines of the novel verbatim suggests that Costello, as author, seems to have a special power in this novel, somehow transcendent of the story so far. That Costello is a figure who appears repeatedly in Coetzee’s own works and is even arguably his own voice in

The Lives of Animals gives her a privileged place in his work, and the possibility of her displaying a metatextual awareness here makes her authorship potentially transcendental of the novel itself in Slow Man. That Rayment is possibly the subject of her authorial intent, that she

53 wishes to write him, and at the very least she frequently either orchestrates elements of his life or narrates his state to him, puts her in a distinct authorial role in the novel itself. In a novel where

Rayment’s ability to author in the world around him, a domineering authorial figure like Costello who may actually be intending to write Rayment’s story has significant implications on what

Rayment must achieve to regain his authorial voice. In short, her authorial force being an attempt to overcome him is what he must overcome to become author and agent rather than the object of her narrative.

It is important to note that the relationship is not nearly as clear cut as the puppet master and puppet that Rayment worries it is though. As Pieter Vermeulen notes in “Abandoned

Creatures: Creaturely Life and the Novel Form in J.M. Coetzee’s Slow Man” that the novel

“does not present the spectacle of a passive manipulative master and a passive victim” (664) and indeed the first words she utters to Rayment in person are “’Bad heart… Nearly as much of an impediment as’ (she pauses to catch her breath) ‘a bad leg’” (80) casting herself as similarly, if not identically, infirmed. The final parting of ways between Rayment and Costello, on the novel’s final page, suggests that Costello has a need of Rayment in some sense as she asks “’But what am I going to do without you?’” as he notes that “She seems to be smiling, but her lips are trembling too” (263). Whatever ways Costello transcends the boundaries of a character in a novel it seems as if she is not without her flaws, weaknesses, and possibly a need for Rayment as well.

Through her focus as author and her discussions with Rayment Costello draws to the forefront the central word, or concept, which is in question in Slow Man – that of Paul Rayment himself. Paul Rayment himself is a concept matched to the individual, and his name is a signifier representing a signified. In the wake of his accident it is the Nietzschean concept of

Rayment, what is accepted as canonically the truth of him, that is in question. Recalling my first chapter’s note of Rayment’s focus on authorship and how he seeks to exert an authorial voice both in his own life and the world around him, the concept that Slow Man places into question is the concept of Paul Rayment himself. Is he a cripple or, as he perceives it, normal? Is he an old man riddled with regrets or does he still have a chance at happiness? Is he a driver of a team of tired nags, or is there still a possibility of that vital and clear Platonic model working within him?

Can he exert some influence as author upon the conventional form of, the concept of, “Paul

Rayment”? Whether it is his resistance to adopting a prosthesis or his attempting to become a lover and a father within Marijana’s family, Rayment is attempting to exert some degree of authorial force upon his position in the world as, presumably, he believed he did prior to the accident. His struggle is to avoid a designation of being something less than he was before. The world around him rejects his framing though, hence his authorial voice being constantly silenced.

In a combative landscape of Nietzschean metaphor/concept, Rayment is attempting to establish a reconstructed image of himself which is constantly corrected by the people and the world around him which pushes back with methods of control like Marijana’s shaming him over the misuse of the term emergency. Costello as author, and possibly writing a story about Rayment and constantly presenting views of what Paul Rayment is doing is the avatar of the establishment of convention, the person who has the power to codify something into words on a page and canonize it. Costello represents the threat of Paul Rayment, as a figure she and not him is authoring, losing his ability to influence the canonical understanding of Paul Rayment – or, more broadly, that Paul Rayment has lost his ability to exert authorial force on his own story as it is exists in a space of public understanding.

What is of interest to my case is how Costello serves as an avatar of authorship and is the individual who most tangibly threatens to write Rayment’s story for him. Even in a later instance in the novel when she admonishes him to “Live like a hero” because “That is what the classics teach us. Be a main character. Otherwise, what is life for?” (229) there is an air of command and authorship of his situation in her dictate. She tells him to be a character in his story, rather than the author of it, and it is her dictate that he do so. The concept of Paul

Rayment is very much at stake here, whether he is a character in a story, even if it is his own story, or whether he is the one who will write it. What has transpired between Rayment and

Costello has had this tone for much of the novel. In their very first conversation she invites herself to live with him. He offers to call her a taxi and she says “it’s not like that. I’ll be with you a while yet” and while he says “I think not” she dismisses his refusal and says “Oh yes Mr

Rayment, I’m afraid so. For the foreseeable future I am to accompany you” (84) and this marks her moving in. Within pages, with minimal prompting from Rayment, Costello narrates his relationship with Marijana:

As you said, you merely want to pour out your love upon her. You want to give. But

being loved comes at a price unless we are utterly without conscience. Marijana will not

pay that price. She has been in this situation before, with patients who fall for her, who

cannot help themselves, so they say. She finds it tiresome. Now I will have to find

another job: that is what she thinks to herself. Do I make myself clear? (86)

In the face of this narration of his situation Rayment’s response is “He is silent” – his internal vision, conflicted though it may be, of what will happen between him and Marijana is neatly summed up and dismissed as an impossibility by the author, and his response to this narrative that dismisses his image of the future is silence. Shortly after he proposes the possibility of him

56 refusing to allow her to stay with him asking “And why should I put up with that? What if I refuse?” she responds, “You must put up with it. It is not for you to say” (87), and that is the end of the discussion – her vision of them being together immediately overwrites his want and expectation, and he is cowed. At later junctures she will accuse him of being bitter and he will respond “I am not bitter” and she will say “Of course you are. I can hear it in your voice. You are bitter, and who can blame you, after all that has happened to you” (117). Their interactions for much of the novel amount to Costello describing the situation, casting forth a narrative framework, and that being the final word – and his life, his expectations, all conform to her narrative and the resentful Paul Rayment is left silenced by this author who ably tells a story about him. Whether Rayment is envisioning himself as catlike as he flies through the air, or having Elizabeth Costello tell him he is bitter, he is constructing narrative that he intends to manifest in the world around him, to become accepted convention of the word of Paul Rayment.

This act of authorship is refuted and Rayment’s authorship is silenced in multiple ways as it manifests in the story, and his voice remains trapped in Nietzsche’s stage of image creation, never reaching convention, and no single figure in the novel controls the public narrative of Paul

Rayment so directly as the nearly transcendent author figure of Elizabeth Costello.

As was noted above, Costello seems to have some need for Rayment though it is never defined and it is not clear that Costello has any sort of ill will for Rayment. Twice in the novel she urges him to “Push!” (84, 204) qualifying further that Rayment should “Push the mortal envelope” (84) and Rayment’s only response is “I don’t know what you want” (203). Though it is not entirely clear how Costello wants Rayment to be more active, this does seem to be a directive to action from her to him. Her own framing of what she wants him to be is a “main character” in his own story (229) but this would, as mentioned above, cast him as a main

57 character in a story rather than the author and suggests that she wants a role for him that has more agency to it rather than just being written over in his own narrative. Rayment does start to push Costello in a way later in the novel and arguably pushes back against her narrative hegemony in subtle ways. In the twenty fifth chapter they have a discussion which sees

Rayment having a cordial conversation with Costello, for the first time as Rayment tells it, as they agree with a musing narrative about the future potential of youth. As he says, “For once they are on the same side: two old folk ganging up on youth” (191) and it is agreement in a narrative framing of someone else – him participating in a consensus of a narrative framing. In this instance he is having success in his negotiating a convention, that his authorial force is having an effect and achieving consensus with someone else. After the agreement though they engage in a series of disagreements where Rayment asserts himself, in a narrative manner, against Costello. Rayment willingly starts to tell Costello stories about himself but he asserts himself, doing so on his terms. She asks him to tell her about his marriage (199) and he responds, “I think not” (199), a repetition of the previously ignored statement he makes when she moves into his flat upon their first meeting (84), but with him in command in this instance. He takes the reigns of the storytelling saying “if it is stories you want, I will tell you a story from the period of my marriage that does not involve my wife” (200) and even says “you can use it to illustrate my character, or not, if you wish” (200) differentiating the stories he tells of himself from those she will spin, robbing her potential narrative of some level of its authenticity. He also challenges her on characterizations of what he does. Telling a story of his past Costello comments, as she often does, to give a narrative characterization of a move he made saying “You came home” (197) and he corrects this narrative characterization, reclaiming his story by saying

“Home… What does that mean?... An Englishman has a home, perhaps. I have a domicile, a

58 residence… Home is too mystical for me” (197) interrupting her efforts to reframe his narrative with a clarification of terms which he defines. He also rebukes her at one point after she claims a need to sleep outdoors, portraying herself as in some way destitute to which Rayment responds,

“You are making up stories. You are a prosperous professional woman, you are as comfortably off as I am, there is no need for you to sleep under bushes” (203) reframing, for the first notable time, her narrative about herself, directly to her. Costello does not dismiss him as previously, and concedes but modifies, saying “That may be so… I may be exaggerating a little, but it is an apt story, apt to my condition” (203) and finishes that “here I am, killing time, being killed by time, waiting – waiting for you” (203). When he says “I don’t know what you want” (204) her response is “Push!”, almost as if prodding him to push back against her. Costello seems to be acting not only as his adversary, the avatar of the authorial voice that he must overcome, but also as a sort of prompt to spur his inner authorial ambitions into the world around him. In a very

Nietzschean sense, she almost presents herself as the challenge that Rayment is to overcome, that he must “push” against to find his own voice.

If these exchanges reveal one thing it is that there is an aptness to Nietzsche’s characterizations of the metaphor/concept of language as a “mobile army of metaphors” (29) because they are involved in something which could be considered a war, of sorts, or at the very least a conflict. Rayment, in the face of being repeatedly narratively overwritten by the narratives of the transcendental author that is Costello, starts to regain control of his narrative when he fights back in a fairly direct way. They are engaged in a discursive process of back and forth attempting to achieve and then re-establish that Nietzschean consensus of words and concepts, to establish that consensus between them, and Costello has at large been able to run roughshod over Rayment up to this point. Rayment starts to resist though, and indeed starts to

59 gain traction in this narrative battleground as he cows Costello in her narrative authority. It is through his silent stagings of narrative that the terms of his resistance are formulated, and his agency comes when he moves past the image stage and becomes the author writing convention within the world.

It has been, up until now, Rayment’s silence in which he has created his narrative constructs which have not been able to impose themselves upon the world and in what appears to be an ability to narratively contend with Costello, the novel’s premier author figure, he moves on to the finale of the novel which shows us a Paul Rayment who is expressing an authorial agency that has been largely absent from the novel to this point. His final meeting with Marijana’s family does not go as intended, as he goes there with the plan to accuse Drago of stealing a photograph, a prized original, and he finds that the father and the son have been working on a project for him – a bike which he can operate as a one-legged person. This places Rayment in a position where he has a chance to regain some small part of the activity of his life pre-accident but, in the face of it, he immediately decides “Of course he will never put it to use” (256). He imagines himself on the improvised bicycle, becoming “One of the local sights, one of the quaint types who lends colour to the social fabric” (256) and in the penultimate utterance of the italicized inner voice he imagines “How the bystanders will smile! Smile and laugh and whistle:

Good on you, grandpa!” (256). This narrative imagining of what might be is obviously unpalatable and his decision is made that this is not a role that he will inhabit, a sign of there being a decisiveness within him in a way that has been absent through much of the novel. On the very next page the italicized inner voice makes its final statement of the novel as he is saying thank you to Marijana’s family, offering “Thank you most of all to the absent Drago Whom I have misjudged and wronged” (257), imagining something he could say, that he would like to

60 say – followed immediately by him saying “whom I have misjudged and wronged” (257). With this the italicized inner voice sees its very last utterance in the novel mirrored, immediately, in a statement by Rayment vocalizing a narrative framework, that of Drago being the one whom

Rayment has wronged, that he endorses, and is endorsed by those around him with Marijana’s husband responding “No worries” (257). That the last instance of the italicized inner voice appearing in the novel has its narrative framework immediately translated into an audible, spoken word which is publicly acknowledged and accepted speaks to Rayment’s ability, as the novel comes to a close, to have the simulations of his previously silenced voice manifest in the world around him as he regains the role of authorship within his own story.

The final pages of the novel are composed of what could be viewed as another confrontation with Elizabeth Costello but, in practice, it is more of a sendoff. Costello takes the opportunity to spin one last narrative tale to entrap Rayment within, exercising her role as author, to imagine a future for Paul and her where they ride bikes together and “tour the whole land, the two of us” and “You could teach me doggedness and I could teach you to live on nothing…

They would write articles about us in the newspapers” (263) imagining that they would become subjects in stories themselves. “We would become a well-loved Australian institution. What an idea!” (263), Costello proclaims as she sees their future together being one of fanfare and fame as an odd story, the “quaint types who lends colour to the social fabric” (256) which Paul has just rejected with the possible use of his new bike. As she finishes her story, referring to the two of them, she asks “Is this love, Paul? Have we found love at last?” (263). His response, after he examines his heart, is “No… This is not love. This is something else. Something less” (263) as he rejects the relationship, that narrated future, she has composed for them. The novel ends with

Rayment declaring that he will not be swayed, Costello asking “what am I going to do without

61 you?” (263), and with Rayment telling her “That is up to you, Elizabeth… But for now: goodbye” (263) followed by a formal French parting kiss, ejecting the reader from Rayment’s narrative alongside Elizabeth Costello.

The final chapter is the culmination of Rayment’s ability to realize his authorial voice in the world with him proposing narrative frameworks which are accepted by Marijana’s family, and rejecting Costello’s final narrative. Perhaps what is most important is that the italicized inner voice sees itself manifested into action immediately after its final appearance. It may well be taken that this final utterance marks the fluid transition from Rayment’s internalized construct of image into word, or words, in the world around him. Slow Man began with a drastic change to an established life – a life of narrative authority and acceptance of position that ends with

Rayment once again being able to participate in a communal process of narrative framing as someone who can exert authorial force again. His near final words of “This is something else.

Something less” (263) may well speak to what is beyond just his relationship to Costello, suggesting he has once again found his way to become the author. His rejection of the ability to cycle again, and his first point of cordial contact with Costello where he is comfortable with being an “old folk ganging up on youth” (191) both speak to an acceptance of diminishment. In essence, Rayment seems to have accepted his position as a person who is fundamentally changed, and diminished, compared to the narrative framing of who he was as the active photographer wielding his near magic camera to leaving him feeling “as though he were present at the day of creation” (65). His interaction with Costello has been a series of conflicts and defeats and with the novel’s end he has finally found his ability to move his authorial force from that inward simulation into that world beyond in overcoming her narrative force and finding the voice to realize his own. With this series of conflicts and successes of overcoming conflicts we

62 see the completion of the Nietzschean model with Paul Rayment finding the ability to realize his narrative framing in the world around him. With that we see the fulfillment of Rayment’s special capability of silence – the ability to stage narrative frameworks, to dissimulate within silence, and manifest those frameworks into the world around him in an effective manner, reestablishing Rayment’s authorial agency both in his own mind and in the narrative landscape he inhabits.

Final Thoughts

In my first chapter I argue that Benita Parry identifies a special capability that Coetzee reveals in the silence of the character Friday in Foe. Further I have suggested that Coetzee has been exploring silence in different ways across different works, concluding my examination of

Slow Man with the special capability granted by Paul Rayment’s silence, the ability to stage narrative within silence.

This special capability is ultimately framed by Coetzee in the face of the rejection of a

Platonic metaphysic, that of the chariot with its reasonable driver and spirited and appetite driven horses. Instead of this Platonic structuring of the self he gives us his model of the wagon driver of its tired nags and drays, constantly struggling to act but being defeated by their own tiredness.

This model takes the cleanliness of the Platonic model and redefines it by tiredness and incapability. The voice of the driver of the wagon, the author of the wagon’s actions, finds itself unable to realize its will in the world due to this tiredness. In Slow Man this silenced authorial driver is the italicized inner voice of Paul Rayment, the constantly dissimulating narrative engine we see frequently in Rayment’s presented inner life.

The rejection of the Platonic model and its struggling driver and team takes on a specific and modern philosophical character insofar as it does not merely describe the ordering of the individual, but also represents a model of struggle through dissimulation which we see Rayment constantly engaged in. That struggle is best explained by placing Rayment’s practice of narrative dissimulation within a Nietzschean framing of language. Rayment engages in constant acts of what Nietzsche describes as dissimulation, of creating possible narratives as images within his mind, which he then seeks to bring to bear in the world around him and take part in the Nietzschean narrative framing of things around him. Rayment’s authorship and agency become manifestations of this Nietzschean move from image to metaphor/concept – but within that attempt to stage his formed images, his narratives, into the world around him they are met with resistance. The world he seeks to influence with his own narrative framings has its own convention-driven narrative forms and the landscape becomes a battlefield, with Rayment and his tired team forging into the world with its narrative constructs which in turn pushes back against him with its own. Nowhere is there a Platonic truth to be found where consensus can be agreed upon, but rather consensus of narrative form is constantly achieved through a conflict of authorial forces.

The special capability of Rayment’s silence is this interior staging ground of the narrative frameworks which Rayment seeks to impose upon the world around him. At every turn the formed conventions of the landscape he inhabits seek to impose upon him, with the author

Elizabeth Costello becoming the avatar of this aggressive, overwriting authorial force, and

Rayment constantly engages in an internal dissimulation followed by a reaching out with his narrative force. This continues, with Rayment constantly facing defeat, until through repeated struggle he reaches a point where he finds the ability to win his narrative struggles, and his driver

64 and tired team see their authorial pushes realized in the world around him. In doing this,

Rayment achieves narrative success in being able to tell his own story on this embattled landscape of narrative formulation, becoming the author or agent of his own story through the silent narrative framings much of the novel sees his italicized inner voice constructing.

Chapter Three

Coetzee’s Metaliterary Trap

If Paul Rayment’s silence is a staging ground for a sort of battle of narrative within the world around him with the end result being him becoming the author of his own story in a

Nietzschean landscape of metaphor and concept, I would like to move back almost twenty years in Coetzee’s career to analyze how silence plays out in relation to agency in his 1986 novel Foe.

Whereas Slow Man offers a tale of a man attempting to come to terms with an accident, weaving an almost conventional tale of rehabilitation with a philosophically rich framework operating within it, Foe reveals a story which brings questions of silence and agency to light in a more abstract way. The story is not so much about how the main character becomes the author as about the relationship between author and subject, particularly that of the silent subject. What this chapter will show is that while Foe very much involves a relationship between author and narrative similar to what we saw in Slow Man the reader’s position will be altered as they are made to engage in the type of narrative overreach practiced by some characters within the novel.

Foe is a novel rife with characters who, to varying degrees, mimic Elizabeth Costello’s role in

Slow Man as they try and determine Friday’s narrative for him, and the reader is subtly drawn into this role as well. What Foe effectively does is create a subtle trap for the reader as we are enticed into engaging in a narrative overwrite of the silent character of Friday.

The politics of Coetzee’s writing deserves brief mention here as it is related to though not dealt with in my treatment of Slow Man. Simply put, Coetzee’s writings are overtly political.

Almost every scholar that writes about Coetzee does so, to some extent, by dealing with his relationship to colonialism, animal rights, the politics of care in the case of disability, or the

66 specific politics of South Africa. Foe is a work which is obviously very concerned in a postcolonial discourse as David Attwell notes in South Africa and the Politics of Writing, where

Attwell speaks about Foe as being the conclusion of an earlier focus in Coetzee’s dealing with the “problem of authority” (118). Attwell says of this early fiction that “From a combative, aggressive subversion of the authority of colonialism and its discourses, Coetzee's fiction develops toward a point of self-conscious deference, marginality, even abnegation” (118) and that “Friday’s silence is the culmination of this development” (118) and in doing so he recognizes that Friday is a form of direct response to forms of colonial power. Attwell even goes so far as to say that “The basic narrative of Coetzee’s oeuvre is . . . that of colonialism and decolonization” (14) and notes a development in his early fiction of various stages of colonial activity. He says of Foe that it is “no less concerned with questions of power and authority under colonialism, specifically, the power and authority of a mode of authorship straddling the metropolis and the colony” (14) but also points out that Foe “departs from this sequence” (14) of direct colonial representation. This departure is in part due to the abstractness of Friday as

Attwell notes of Coetzee’s style that “one of the effects of his (Coetzee’s) intellectualism is that his fiction tends to distill what are essentially heuristic models into narratological forms” (26) and that “Friday’s speechlessness” is such a distillation, giving it “a kind of ostensible

‘universality,’ a representativeness that they would lack were they written in a less refracted way” (26). What Attwell is suggesting is that while Foe, and Friday specifically, is entrenched in a postcolonial politics, he is also written in such a way so as to be distanced from any particular politics, which leaves him both reflecting a particular postcolonial narrative and distanced from one, acting as an empty form, a universality which hints at particular expression but never achieves it. Friday’s silence is a veil over the novel’s ability to realize Friday’s

67 particularity as we see the question of who Friday is constantly brought up, and eventually his backstory becomes the object of Foe’s interest. When asked about Friday’s past his master

Cruso gives conflicting stories – sometimes he was a little slave boy (12) and sometimes that

Friday was a cannibal that Cruso saved from being devoured by fellow cannibals (12). The speculation as to Friday’s origin, which is never actually disclosed, looms over the novel.

It is undeniable that this novel, and the story of Friday within it, are postcolonially oriented as Attwell rightly points out.11 That being said, in Novels of J.M. Coetzee: Lacanian

Allegories Teresa Dovey cites Coetzee saying about his work that “what I am now resisting is the attempt to swallow my novels into a political discourse… because, frankly, my allegiances lie with the discourse of the novels and not with the discourse of politics” (55). This suggests a way in which this distilled, and in some sense universal, mode in which Friday operates within the novel engages in a more abstract non-politics than the strictly postcolonial thrust in the novel.

This is in parallel to the postcolonial politics of the novel, and the relationship between the two is complicated. Friday has distinguishing factors about him, and even some distinct practices and displays of agency, but the context of these things are always withheld from the reader. As such, the politics of Friday are both postcolonial but also abstract, putting him in a realm of power relations which are not solely postcolonially oriented but also linked back to notions of language and identity. Much like Paul Rayment we will see that Friday inhabits a fraught landscape of

11 In J.M. Coetzee and South Africa: History, Narrative, and the Politics of Agency David Attwell approaches Foe with an eye for a relationship between agency and authorship in it but, whereas it was mentioned above that he notes the peculiar universality afforded to Friday through his silence, his focus is on how the novel comments on the particular politics of the colonial author—specifically those in South Africa. He sees Foe as an attempt to “examine the historical and discursive conditions under which white South African authorship must operate” (131) and says that he “shall read Foe with this purpose in mind: how does Coetzee define the limits of whatever textual authority he and his fellow white South Africa writers are able to achieve?” (132). He also declares that “Foe resides in the discursive field of peculiarity, but it does so in a peculiarly South African terms” (132). This is emblematic of an approach towards Foe that is very common—to treat the novel primarily as a postcolonial commentary of some sort.

68 narrative, with Friday being the object of external narratives pressing in on him. Foe’s attempt to write Friday’s story betrays a central form of narrative pressure but is ultimately frustrated by

Friday’s withholding. Coetzee will leave the reader, critics, and other characters in Foe playing the role of Elizabeth Costello in Slow Man, writing Friday’s narrative. In doing so he does not simply make a postcolonial statement, but an abstract philosophical statement concerning the ability of a being to engage in narrative overreach towards another.

The Making of a Text

The question of this abstract politics operating in Foe begins with a return to the notion of agency concerning Friday. The obvious answer to the question of whether Friday is an agent is yes, but this answer has to be considered in relation to the notion of agency introduced in this work’s first chapter and how Coetzee treats agency compared to that. That notion makes a distinction between an action performed by a willing, reasonable agent and one by an unwilling or unreasonable agent. There is flexibility within the idea of willingness along the axis of coercion but I do not believe that Coetzee is delving into this type of issue in any philosophically rigorous manner. What Paul Rayment shows us is that Coetzee seems to value a sort of existential fulfilment in the individual through a perception of agency rather than a philosophically rigorous notion of it. Paul Rayment was, in the case of the accident itself or after various mishaps, always acting as an agent within his own story in a philosophically rigorous sense. It is only when his position is considered further in the realm of a landscape of narrative that it becomes apparent that for Coetzee agency intersects with authorship, and the type of agent that Coetzee is interested in isn’t simply one who acts, but one who achieves a certain level of authorial agency within the narrative landscape they inhabit. Coetzee is not interested in the

69 philosophically rigorous agent so much as the perception of control of one’s story – that of authorship – which is what Paul Rayment eventually achieves. In a very Nietzschean sense,

Coetzee treats a character as a sort of fulfilled agent, as Rayment becomes, by their ability to exercise narrative power and engage in an aesthetic practice of self-authorship12. As such, we might modify the notion of agency Coetzee is concerned with to involve not simply an agent, but an author/agent who achieves a level of autonomy within the narrative landscape through the ability to either control or accept their narrative framework. In the case of Friday it seems readily apparent that he does not have narrative power in any public sense, and the type of aesthetic curation of the self in the public sphere is not something he seems to engage in at all.

At first glance it would appear that Friday has no ability to author himself in the narrative landscape, that he is instead subject to the narratives of others in his silent state, and in this we can imagine him being much like Paul Rayment in the earlier parts of Slow Man—a dejected individual, frustrated by his lack of authorial power, and secretly staging the narratives which he might later impose upon the world to achieve authorial agency. Susan Barton, the protagonist of

Foe, even comments in her confrontation with the author Foe that “Friday’s desires are not dark to me. He desires to be liberated, as I do too. Our desires are plain, his and mine” (148),

12 In Nietzsche’s The Gay Science he entertains a way of self-actualization which involves organizing one’s life by an aesthetic taste rather than some sort of normative moral rule or judgment. He describes this as giving style to one’s character, saying that “It is practiced by those who survey all the strengths and weaknesses of their nature and then fit them into an artistic plan until every one of them appears as art and reason and even weaknesses delight the eye” (290). While Rayment does not evidence a clear artistic plan for himself, he does engage in a process of coming to terms with his weakness which is notably not defined by external valuations. His method is quite at odds with external normative impositions. Rayment’s struggle is one that is waged through controlling narrative, and he evidences a need to control narrative within himself, to exert authorial force on his own story. I see this as Rayment engaging in something similar to Nietzsche’s giving of style to one’s character insofar as both are means of organizing oneself according to a personal aesthetic value rather than an external normative standard. This can be taken as an instance of engaging in Alena Dvorakova’s hidden polemic, as was featured in the first chapter, insofar as it shows Coetzee adopting a Nietzschean framing but using it in a way not mirroring Nietzsche’s own usage.

70 suggesting a rather uncontroversial idea as to what is behind the veil of Friday’ silence—a desire for freedom.

This idea of what Friday really wants fits well with the postcolonial narrative that is operating within the novel but it is an ascription of intent to Friday that is question begging.

With Paul Rayment we saw precisely what he was thinking, got to see the unfolding of desire, intent, and worldly obstruction, but with Friday we are denied access to any of. It is never revealed, truly, what Friday intends with his actions. At one point Friday dresses up in Foe’s wig and robes and starts dancing and Barton says “’In the grip of the dancing he is not himself. He is beyond human reach. I call his name and am ignored” (92) and we can imagine that Friday is engaging in a bit of irreverent whimsey, enjoying himself, but this is never revealed. In a later incident when Susan Barton attempts to teach Friday to write to allow him to communicate his story he is either unable to understand her intent or resistant to it. The attempt ends with Friday writing “rows and rows of the letter o tightly packed together” (152) for several pages where her instructions had been an attempt to teach him the alphabet and words including house, ship, mother, and Africa (146). It is unclear what Friday is attempting to do here, though in her paper

“Ethics and Politics in Tagore, Coetzee, and Certain Scenes of Teaching” Spivak describes what transpires as that he “resists the attempt of the white woman to teach him how to write” (27).

This reading is perfectly plausible and fits very well into the postcolonial elements of the narrative though it is never confirmed that this is in fact an act of resistance. At one point Susan

Barton sees Friday paddling out “some hundred yards from the shelf into the thickest of the seaweed” and then reaches into a bag and brings out “handfuls of white flakes which he began to scatter over the water” (31). The flakes are revealed to be flower petals. Later Foe imagines that

Friday was guiding his boat “to the place where the ship went down” and further imagines that

“we may surmise to have been a slave-ship, not a merchantman, as Cruso claimed” (140), which casts Friday in the sure role of an ex-slave, though it is not actually known that he is. Foe further spins the tale saying, “picture the hundreds of his fellow-slaves – of their skeletons – still chained in the wreck, the gay little fish (that you spoke of) flitting through their eye sockets”

(140). He then casts Friday’s role in this morbid tale, telling us to “Picture Friday above, staring down upon them, casting buds and petals that float a brief while, then sink to settle among the bones of the dead” (140), identifying the unknown white flakes as flower petals and Friday as performing some sort of memorial service. In this instance Foe does, in a very dramatic manner, what is done to Friday at many points throughout the novel and narrates the story of what Friday did or is doing and presuming knowledge of why, creating that narrative framework of motive and meaning which Friday himself does not provide. What is most notable about this, and with the character of Foe at large, is that it is clear that he does not actually have the information to definitively say that this is what Friday is doing and his attributions of intent are ultimately unjustified. The character of the author, Foe, inhabits a similar position in this novel as

Elizabeth Costello does in Slow Man but with a very notable distinction—whereas Costello’s narrative impositions are unwanted and actively opposed, Foe’s narrative impositions on Friday are not overtly opposed. If there is opposition from Friday it is never clearly indicated and if he acts in a way which may seem like opposition it is not made clear that this is what he is actually doing because his actions, such as his purported resistance to being taught to write, in fact are never directly revealed to be resistance per se. Friday’s ability to comprehend what he is being instructed to do is questionable throughout the novel, with instances such as the above mentioned one where Barton notes that he is “Beyond human reach” (92) not necessarily implying resistance rather than possible obliviousness or apathy. This leaves the reader unsure of whether

72 he is resisting, doesn’t care, or doesn’t understand. With every instance where Friday does not perform what is asked, where he does not learn what he is being taught, or where he acts contrary to the desires of those around him, the novel itself does not give us the markers that would clearly indicate a contrary or rebellious intent – it simply shows Friday, inscrutably, acting in a way that is contrary to what is desired or expected of him.

In J.M. Coetzee and South Africa: History, Narrative, and the Politics of Agency David

Attwell describes a significant portion of Susan Barton’s interaction with Foe as a “struggle to retain control over her story and its meaning” (132) and this is a major thrust of the latter part of the novel as Barton and Foe spar over how her story is to be told, whether pirates should be added, or whether her time marooned on the island is an episode in a larger story or a story unto itself. Concerning her story, which in her mind is centered on the island, Foe determines that there are “five parts in all: the loss of the daughter; the quest for the daughter in Brazil; abandonment of the quest, and the adventure of the island; assumption of the quest by the daughter; and reunion of the daughter with the mother” (117) and crafts a tale meant to titillate and excite the reader, commandeering her narrative to his narrative craft, complete with its own purposes and motivations. The meaning of her story, as she perceives it, falls prey to a narrative framework Foe creates and imposes upon it, giving it a new telos within the narrative framework he applies.

Barton’s response is one that draws attention to the conflict operating within these competing narratives and what such narrative frameworks are incapable of providing us. In response to Foe’s insistence that the island is not a story in itself and that it needs a narrative structure around it to make it interesting, Barton appeals to the fidelity, and perhaps the justice of, telling an authentic story about an unknown other. She says that “if the story seems stupid,

73 that is only because it so doggedly holds its silence. The shadow whose lack you feel is there: it is the loss of Friday’s tongue” (117) suggesting that the way in which Foe sees the story as lacking is because of the withholding of part of the story—and Friday’s missing tongue, an emblem of his inscrutable past and inner life, is the symbol of this. She goes on to say “The story of Friday’s tongue is a story unable to be told, or unable to be told by me” (118) and “That is to say, many stories can be told of Friday’s tongue, but the true story is buried within Friday, who is mute” (118). Her suggestion is that Foe can tell any number of stories about Friday, but lacking Friday’s voice Foe is giving voice to a silent unknown, and no true story will come from this. Foe’s narrative teleology, the need for the exciting story, leaves him feeling justified to write over the blank space and, in doing so, whatever truth may be hidden by Friday’s lack of voice. Barton laments that “The true story will not be heard till by art we have found a means of giving voice to Friday” (118) but since Friday never finds a voice his silence draws attention to the issue of narrative overreach as overtly engaged in by Foe. We can see a similarity to what is taking place in Slow Man but Slow Man is a story in which there is no palpable shadow of a lack hanging over it, and that changes the message of these attempts at narrative overreach. In Slow

Man the efforts of Costello to engage in a narrative overreach implicates her in attempting to overwrite a combatant in that narrative battlefield—Rayment has his tongue, so to speak, and we see its presence operating in his internal staging ground as he crafts narratives to bring to the field. With Friday the absence of his tongue leaves Foe an obvious trespasser over Friday’s story but the lack of an internal life and proposed counter narrative leaves it unclear that there is the opposition present in Foe in the same way that there is in Slow Man. To put it simply, Friday may well not care about Foe’s narrative overreach, and as such there would be no affront to

Friday like there was to Rayment, no railing against. There are even potential scenarios where

Friday could quite enjoy Foe’s narrative about him, effectively ratifying it and avoiding the despair Rayment felt over external narrative impositions upon him. His status as an authorial agent is not necessarily compromised by Foe’s false stories about him as he may well approve of the stories that are being told, completely bypassing the angst that Rayment experienced, and leaving his authorial agency fulfilled in acceptance of the stories if not the authorship of them.

Whereas for Rayment narrative overreach was a cause of despair and a perception of lack of control of his life we, as readers, cannot justifiably say that Friday shares in this plight as he gives no overt signs of it.

To put this narrative overreach into more technical terms, the type of narrative framework operating within Foe is outlined in Laura di Michele’s “Identity and Alterity in J.M. Coetzee’s

Foe” in which she considers an early interaction Barton has with Cruso, Friday’s master, while they are still stranded on the island. Barton sees Cruso building terraces for agriculture on the island and she “wants to understand the significance of those pieces of terraced but uncultivated land to which Cruso seems to attached” (163) assuming that they must have meaning if they do not rightly function. Michele outlines a series of relationships motivating Cruso’s seemingly useless labour which provides the narrative framework of intent bolstering his actions which leaves him in a position of authorial agency, even in his seemingly useless labour. Michele notes that “the ‘useless’ work of freeing the land from stones and weeds is, in Cruso’s mind, a necessary activity in constructing a basic ‘text’ on which others can inscribe their ‘signs’, their

‘alphabet’, and thereby ‘write’ a meaningful story” (163). Identifying his labour and distinctly non-textual things as a text places what Cruso is doing in a relational narrative framework and signifies him engaging with a narrative framework, seeking to gain an authorial role in it, and exercise that authorial agency within it by writing a part of the more grand “story” that he will

75 participate in. His perception of engaging in this shared narrative framework and attaining authorship within it is perhaps a precursor, within Coetzee’s fiction, to Paul Rayment whose story is based around becoming at odds with the narrative structures he inhabits and losing his ability to exert authorial force in the way he wishes. Michele goes on to outline the other participants in this narrative, as “On this circumscribed and clearly identifiable text, his compatriots who follow can engrave their story and plant seeds brought from the mother country; seeds that will bind this little island to the great island of England by an invisible, but highly resistant, umbilical cord” (163), making the narrative process both communal and colonial. The colonial element of this framing is not as important and rather what should be taken from this is that Cruso finds meaning and position in casting himself within a broader, socially interlinked, narrative structure, and he finds fulfillment within the structure by becoming a part of that narrative both as object and author. Even when the ‘writing’ is functionally useless, as he is constructing farms with no seed to plant, the participation within the narrative structure and his ability to author it, to engage with other authors if even at a distance, to create the ‘text’ which others will later add their own authorial note to, is what gives his labour meaning. He takes affront to Barton questioning his empty labour and rebuts her by simply explaining that he will leave behind this farm indicating his position as author within a narrative continuum.

In this case of Cruso we see a somewhat explicit instance of the Nietzschean landscape of narrative at work with Cruso imparting narrative framing upon, or making a ‘text’ out of, something as seemingly useless as a field with no crops. Effectively, objects are recast as collaborative works of art in which individuals can participate in either as the object of authorship or the authors themselves. His participation within this framing makes his work valuable to him and offers him fulfilment, and Barton’s questioning of what seems to be useless

76 labour is an affront to him. Considering this type of textuality present within Foe there is an obvious conundrum and stumbling block within this narrative landscape—the individual that one confronts and must deal with but has no narrative framework which they endorse either as author or as intentional participant. Friday, as a character, neither writes nor endorses a text that we know of—in the terms Michele uses, he gives no sign of writing a ‘text’ that anyone can understand, takes no visible affront when whatever he is doing is not understood, and seems to not work with any compatriots in mind. Within the narrative landscape he inhabits Friday shows no signs of being an authorial actor, or even a willing subject to a narrative, any more than the field Cruso works on, and appears effectively illiterate—but we cannot know that for certain as his silence withholds that from us. This leaves us in a position of conundrum because he is a human being, a presumably intelligent creature with all claims to human autonomy and dignity that any other person might have—but he does not participate in this structure of narrative.

Attempts to include him in the collaborative, or combative, narrative landscape may well be trespasses over a helpless victim.

Coetzee’s Metaliterary Trap

What Friday’s position in the novel reveals is a narrative trap, of sorts, set by Coetzee for all characters who interact with Friday, and in fact for the reader as well who is given the ability to fill the role of Foe, as the author who overwrites, in their relationship to Friday. The

Nietzschean narrative landscape revealed a landscape which was flexible and, to some extent, the achievement of authorial status in Slow Man hinged upon Rayment’s acceptance of the narrative framework he inhabited. In his case he insisted upon having a distinctly authorial role but if he had chosen to accept Costello’s narrative impositions, he would have been casting his seal of

77 approval upon someone else’s’ narrative framework for him, and he would have achieved satisfaction insofar as he ratified a narrative rather than constructed it.

When Susan Barton insists that she knows Friday’s mind, that what he desires is freedom

(148), she is imposing, as was mentioned above, an uncontroversial model of intent upon Friday.

In doing so she, in the terminology introduced by Laura di Michele, tells us what kind of ‘text’

Friday is writing. What I propose is that she is no more within her rights to impose that notion of Friday’s authorial intent, to enunciate the narrative framework identifying his desire, upon

Friday than Foe is to impose his various narratives upon Friday, and that her doing so reveals how Coetzee ensnares even the most well-meaning individual in a sort of narrative overwriting of Friday. She is by far more well-meaning towards Friday in her supposition of his wants but ultimately the story she seeks to tell still doggedly holds its silence as much to her as it does to

Foe, and she can no more suppose that Friday deeply desires freedom than Foe can suppose that

Friday sprinkling flowers upon the water is to honour fellow fallen slaves. Friday’s actions can certainly be interpreted as acts with a great deal of specific intent behind them – acts of resistance or of possessing some great whimsey. While these interpretations may accurately capture Friday’s intent, his story still holds its silence and the interpreter ultimately steps into the authorial role of Foe in making that interpretation. Friday’s silence does not disclose what type of inner life Friday has, and an attribution of specific agency upon Friday is ultimately an attribution which cannot be made with assurance by the one making it – and as such, it is a narrative about what Friday might be desiring or intending, and the form of his agency remains hidden in his silence. It may be the case that a general supposition of agency can be derived from Friday’s actions, but the content of that agency is denied to the reader.

As readers and interpreters, we have to consider that freedom may not be something that concerns Friday, nor resistance, nor honouring his deceased shipmates, nor love or hostility towards those around him. Foe, obviously, narrates Friday’s life and Barton resists doing it in almost all cases and when she does so it is the benevolent assertion that she knows his mind and that he wants freedom - but herein is a trap set by Coetzee. It is the case that, despite her claims,

Barton does not know Friday’s mind. She even says of Friday that “No matter what he [Friday] is to himself (is he anything to himself? - how can he tell us?), what he is to the world is what I make of him” (122) and that his silence is a “helpless silence” (122) showing that she ultimately does not know his mind, or even if he has one in the sense of a formed and assertive self-identity, but she still takes that further step to say that she knows his mind and that he wishes to be free.

Making that benevolent statement without knowing Friday’s mind leaves Barton in a position where she asserts his desire without actually knowing that desire. Though well-meaning Barton overreaches with her ability to describe Friday and in doing so she engages in the act represented by her statement of “what he is to the world is what I make of him” (122) and engages in a very similar form of narrative overwrite compared to what Foe does.13 As Barton says earlier “Friday has no command of words and therefore no defense against being re-shaped day by day in conformity with the desires of others” (122) and she is, in this instance, the one doing the reshaping.

What Coetzee has done with Friday is create a situation where he is someone we cannot speak about accurately, as it pertains to what he desires, and simultaneously makes Friday an obvious victim couched within a series of potential narratives that might capture who he is and

13 I make no claims about the relative justice of Foe’s narrative overwrite versus Barton’s. It is quite obvious that Barton’s move is well meaning and done from a place of well-wishing for Friday, whereas Foe likely has a profit motive. My intent is to point out the structural similarity between what they do and show that, ultimately, she is engaging in a narrative overwrite as well.

79 provide a narrative frame for speculating on those desires. On the one hand his apparent victimhood, and the general structures and inclinations of the postcolonially aware mindset spur us to treat him as a victim, put him into the role of the beleaguered ex-slave who wishes his freedom, a well-meaning and ethically sound approach to such an individual. On the other hand by making him the inscrutable figure that he is, we cannot say anything about him with conviction lest we overwrite who he is, either horribly botching his narrative or substituting our thought of what Friday should be for what Friday actually is. By describing Friday as a victim we make him the victim we cannot say for sure that he is—that is our narrative and not necessarily his. It may fly in the face of much of what is said about Friday in the novel but we can imagine a history for Friday which makes him not a victim—a history where Friday is the slaver complicit with colonial powers, where Friday’s injury is the result of a revolt from the people he oppressed, where Friday’s oddities and activities are explained by a deep desire to repent for past unforgiveable wrongs. It is not the narrative I choose to believe of the quite likeable and forlorn seeming Friday, but I cannot say that Friday is not these things any more than Foe or Barton can. As such if I speak for Friday I make him the object of my narrative rather than dealing with him as the intelligent human worthy of dignity that I must assume he is.

I would end up acting as Foe and write over the withholding silence, just as Barton warns us of, and then does herself.

This is the trap ingeniously set by Coetzee which he clearly illustrates for us through the character of Foe, if perhaps not to catch the readers then at the very least to rehearse for them how easy it is to fall into this role of the overwriting author. He shows it being sprung by Barton who falls into in her well-meaning imagining of Friday as only wanting his freedom, and that is

Coetzee’s siren song for the reader. By stacking the novel heavily towards a narrative of Friday

80 as a forlorn victim but never disclosing the truth of him Coetzee seems to invite us to join Foe in imagining Friday’s narrative without having the knowledge to actually confirm it, making the metaliterary trap as seductive to the reader as it is to the characters within it. What both Foe and

Barton do, in Laura di Michele’s terms, is make Friday the object of a text that he shows no signs of attempting to ‘write’ in himself, nor that he endorses as a narrative in the way Cruso might.

He exists in relation to the ‘text’ as its object, but not as a subject in any capacity – or so we might think but cannot know. Friday is a narrative void which we cannot ascribe the meaningful framework of narrative to without risking violating the withholding that his silence presents.

What Coetzee does by having Foe and Barton ascribe narratives to Friday, and then enticing the reader to ascribe narratives to Friday, is make all of us either overwrite Friday, coaxing us to become like Foe in our own right, or realize how easily we can become the overwriting author of the silent other through even our well-meaning imaginings about them. Foe, the novel, is written to be a metaliterary trap for the reader showing us, bit by bit, precisely the type of role we can so easily fall into in relation to Friday—that any ascription of what Friday is is always already an act of overwriting him. With this in mind, the politics of the work are not strictly postcolonial, but instead tap into that universal politics David Attwell spoke of, dealing with abstract relations between individuals as narrative agents and objects engaging in the act of producing texts on a narrative landscape, with Friday being a special case that reveals the risk of overwriting the silent other which we all can do if we are not careful about our narrative assertions.

Chapter Four

Friday as Man, Friday as Monument

Coetzee has crafted Friday as a character that, through his silence, we have trouble dealing with in a narrative landscape. If Friday is crafted as an individual that, through his withholding, we overwrite as we attempt to ascribe meaning to him and as we include him within the narrative landscape, he becomes a character that we tend to treat as an object when ascribing specific agency to him within our imposed narrative structure rather than dealing with him as a subject14 that has his own intentional narrative structure. In attempting to treat him as a subject by ascribing specific agency we cannot confirm he has, we perhaps inadvertently treat him as object since we author him into the narrative landscape in a specific form which we cannot verify. When Barton attributes a desire for freedom to Friday she steps beyond the bounds of what she can say about him while respecting his own authorial intent, because such a show of respect would require that she confirm what Friday specifically desires before she effectively narrates what he desires into public discourse. She is, simply put, speaking beyond her knowledge about someone she cannot know on such an intimate level. As such, what can we justly say about Friday, how can we interact with him, without overwriting him as Foe does?

14 The subject/object distinction which will be dealt with in this chapter is not referring to the categories outlined within formal logic, but a type of subject/object distinction described in “Object” by Bradley Retter and Andrew M. Bailey as “Each object is, roughly, an ‘it’, and each subject is a ‘you’” (Retter). The distinction they make is that “We are subjects; trees, universals, colleges, colors . . . all things not like us in relevant respects—are objects” (Retter). Concerning those relevant respects they say that “the answer must involve subjectivity or experience” and that “we are subjects because we experience or enjoy consciousness” (Retter). I am considering the subject/object divide in the context of the narrative landscape specifically. The person exercising, or at least evidencing, an intent to exert authorial force is the subject in the landscape, and the person who is written by those with authorial force is the object. If the individual is akin to a tree – or Cruso’s field – on the landscape of narrative, they are the object of that landscape, the medium of others’ writing rather than the practitioner of their own authorial intent. The subject on the landscape of narrative would be the individual who exercises, or evidences, authorial intent. Friday does not evidence an authorial intent that we can discern and, since we cannot discern it, we cannot engage with him as if he is an author—we interact with him as someone we write over, not someone who writes, since we are never privy to what he wants to author.

The question that is of interest to me is, how is Friday spoken of, particularly by postcolonial theorists? With this in mind I wish to revisit the works of Gayatri Spivak and Benita Parry and examine the ways they approach Friday. After this I will consider a dualistic approach of the individual stemming from Friday as both subject and object, making him a monument and a man simultaneously. This chapter will show how Coetzee’s portraying of Friday as this inscrutable, silent protagonist leaves the specifics of his subjecthood withheld from us, and that the implications of this withholding reveals a dualism in how Friday is treated and a tension between the two treatments. While there is an instrumentality in how all beings are treated Friday leaves the reader in a situation where his subjectivity can be speculated about but not known, and it leaves us constantly at risk of treating him as object even as we know he is subject. This reveals a duality of the way in which Friday is treated, both as an object or monument, and as a subject, with the former being the primary mode of treatment as the reader is trapped by Friday’s withholding into the role of the author who overwrites the other.

Coetzee’s metaliterary trap leaves Friday in a sort of agency-limbo perceived from the perspective of the reader, the critic, and other characters and it will be fruitful to look at what the novel tells us about him before we proceed onto the implications of ascriptions of specific agency to him. To preface this exploration, what does it mean when we say that we cannot ascribe specific agency to him? Specific agency would be opposed to a general ascription of agency without claiming knowledge of its content—the distinction between saying that “Friday is an agent” and that “We can see in Friday’s action his desiring to do a certain thing for certain reasons.” One implicates Friday as a being that has agency but the content of his agency is unknown, and the other makes a claim of knowledge concerning that agency. The metaliterary trap leaves us in a position where if we ascribe specific agency to Friday we overreach what we

83 have narrative justification to say, but if we do not ascribe specific agency to Friday we will think of him as an agent but will have great difficulty treating him as one since he withholds the information we need in order to do so.

Foe does have characters, Susan Barton specifically, wrestling with the issue of how to treat Friday with his agency being the crux of it. When Susan Barton declares “Friday’s desires are not dark to me” (148) she does so, as has been mentioned in the previous chapter, in a good willing effort to attribute specific intention to him and treat him not as an object to be overwritten but as a subject whose agency she can show respect and deference to. This is not the only instance where Barton considers Friday’s status as a desiring being, though it is the only one where she clearly states his desires. This particular incident has the virtue of being what is thought to be a universal desire but, as was mentioned in the last chapter, even this attribution goes beyond what Barton is justified in saying about Friday.

Throughout the novel Barton critically considers some things which Friday does and even tries to communicate with him in a more than purely practical or instrumental manner. At the point where she views Friday spreading petals on the ocean with unknown purpose, her thoughts on this incident show a consideration of Friday in terms not unlike those which distinguish a basic agency from a non-basic one. Upon seeing Friday spread the flakes upon the water Barton thinks, “Hitherto I had given to Friday’s life as little thought as I would have a dog’s or any other dumb beast’s – less, indeed” (32), showing herself adopting a language similar to what I have used describing the basic agency of a house cat, or the being that can act but does not really capture the type of valued agency we are interested in. She says, “This casting of petals was the first sign I had that a spirit or soul—call it what you will—stirred beneath that dull and unpleasant exterior” (32). What she is describing is the act of making the move between

84 considering Friday in purely instrumental terms—as a beast of burden, and regarding him as an entity that does things for her, a being which she values as having some trace of spirit or intention or whatever one may want to call it. Twice in the novel she makes an indirect reference to Friday as if he were not differentiated from the “dumb beast” she mentions here, first in the above, and later when she says “I talk to Friday as old women talk to cats” (77).

Finding the petals and seeing him performing what may be a ritual on the water leaves her seeing him, for the first time, as being distinct from the house cat in how it is to be treated, largely in virtue of this presumed spiritual faculty operating within it. He becomes a person to her upon her realizing the possibility of him having a complex intentional framework operating within him.

Barton does achieve a certain simple form of communication with Friday but it appeals to this notion of him as the dumb beast, or a beast of burden, and it instrumentalizes him. When

Barton and Friday make it to England and are looking for Foe, Barton suggests that she is

“turning Friday into a laundryman” (56). She brings him to the scullery and says, “Watch me,

Friday!” (56), performing the actions of washing and introducing him to soap. She then says,

“Now do, Friday!” (56) and then she stands aside. In her view, “Watch and Do: those are [her] two principal words for Friday” (56) and Friday seems to respond to this type of communication as she says “I accomplish much” (56) with those words. On the island Friday performed many functional roles, and now Barton is able to communicate with him as a being who can be made an instrument—she can communicate instructions for labour. This simple communication results in a Friday who is an able body to perform tasks but offers no insight into that spirit or soul

Barton thinks is within him. In this communication Friday is essentially treated as the beast of burden – like the cat that can act but does not appear to have the sophisticated desire and

85 intention that would move it beyond basic agency. Barton even considers herself as doing such, as she recalls that “I tell myself I talk to Friday to educate him out of darkness and silence. But is that the truth? There are times when benevolence deserts me and I use words only as the shortest way to subject him to my will” (60). Barton is aware that she is often on the verge of treating him as little more than an instrument, despite her belief in him as a being with a spirit.

Later Barton tries to communicate with Friday in another manner in order to achieve a communication that is beyond this simple instrumentalization. Barton speculates that “if there were any language accessible to Friday, it would be the language of music” (96) and she notes that Friday is constantly playing a certain tune on his reed flute (28). She determines that she might use music to communicate with Friday on a deeper level and start to have an exchange with Friday beyond the purely instrumental. In order to do this she acquires a flute of her own and learns to play Friday’s tune. When he plays she starts to play his tune with him. She does this for a while with no notable reaction from Friday and she realizes that “just as we cannot exchange forever the same utterances . . . and believe we are conversing, so it is with music” (97) and she determines that she must change the tune in order to approach an exchange between them, with a view to making contact with Friday’s creative faculties, if he responds, rather than engaging him in a way that allows simple instrumental repetition. She changes her tune and

Friday “persisted in his old tune” which “formed no pleasing counterpoint” (97) with hers.

Essentially, Friday remains outwardly oblivious even as Barton tries to elicit a response from him originating in his creative inner life rather than simple mimicry of mechanical tasks. This leaves her having no further communication with Friday beyond the instrumental level she achieves in teaching him to wash clothes.

These incidents capture the general result of attempts to communicate with Friday throughout the novel. About Friday we can assume, as Barton does, that he has an inner life, an aspirational authorial force perhaps like Paul Rayment’s. Paul Rayment attempts to exert this force into the world around him whereas Friday has no metaphorical counterpoint in the world.

Friday’s inner life never engages in a back-and-forth mode of communication with the world around him. As such, people around him treat him as instrument, vessel, or object, but not as subject, mainly because his lack of communication withholds the grounds by which they can do so. Mutual communication is then integral to treatment of the other as subject on a narrative landscape.

This outlines the condition Coetzee introduces in the novel for dealing with Friday as more than an instrument. That condition is that people must not simply be aware of Friday’s inner life, but must garner a response from his inner authorial force, his creativity, such that they can engage with him as a subject on the narrative landscape rather than an object. Barton uses music to attempt this and finds Friday unresponsive. Because of this lack of response to anything but pure instrumental “Watch and Do” (56) language Friday resists being engaged with as a being with a rich inner life and authorial force even as we know he has one. A more productive exchange requires that the characters, the author, or the critic be in a position where they will make ascriptions of specific agency towards Friday in a just manner. Without such an exchange, our attempts to speak of Friday’s desire, intent, or motivations are the narrative overwrite that trips Coetzee’s metaliterary trap, leaving us playing the role of Foe as overwriting author.

The Critic – Spivak’s Guardian as Object

This above conundrum greatly complicates what a reader or a critic can justly say about

Friday and I would like to look at Gayatri Spivak’s conceptualization of Friday to attempt to determine how she navigates Coetzee’s metaliterary trap. In A Critique of Postcolonial Reason

Spivak describes Friday and makes much of him as a character of withholding, a character who gains a special capability through the lack of disclosure of his mind. In doing this she is keenly aware of the types of relations which I have already touched upon, and the idea that what Friday does not reveal may not be something that is intentionally hidden so much as just unknown. This leaves open an avenue to ascribe no intent to Friday’s withholding. There is an incident in Foe where Barton is attempting to teach Friday to write in English and while failing to capture meaning with the letters he is taught, when left to his own affairs Barton sees Friday “filling it

[the slate] with designs of leaves and flowers. But as I came closer I saw the leaves were eyes, open eyes, each set upon a human foot; row upon row of eyes upon feet: walking eyes” (190).

This incident is where a motivated reader has a chance to fall into Coetzee’s metaliterary trap and ascribe to Friday knowledge of some sort of script or intent which cannot be justifiably ascertained. Such an ascription cannot be done because, in virtue of Friday’s withholding, we cannot say for certain that this is a meaningful script rather than a meaningless doodle – the work of idle hands and an idle, if creative, mind. This incident suggests that Friday is a subject with creative capacity but does not allow for an ascription of specific intent or knowledge beyond that of simple drawing and pattern formation – or, that he is able to produce some sort of rudimentary art which may not be tied to script. Spivak nuances this position by asking, “Are those walking eyes rebuses, hieroglyphs, ideographs, or is their secret that they hold no secret at all?” (190) and in doing so considers that though we may attribute to Friday a meaning-making endeavor like

Cruso’s making a ‘text’ of an object on his island with his farm, it may be the case that no such meaning making endeavor is taking place here. In such a case Friday would not be participating in the narrative landscape in the intentional way, engaging in a dominant narrative sphere, that

Cruso is, because Friday’s intention is not necessarily to engage within the language of that dominant sphere. Spivak goes on to say that a “scrupulous effort at decoding or deciphering will bring its own rewards; but there is a structural possibility that they are nothing” (190) suggesting that there is value in attempting to place Friday’s drawing, or writing, into context of text- production, of applying meaning. She also notes that the endeavor may be misguided. Given

Friday’s withholding it may be the case that it is nothing, and my consideration here is that this is where narrative overreach takes place—the ascription of unintended meaning to Friday’s actions.

Spivak then goes on to view Friday and his silence as a sort of modeling for colonial resistance at large. Spivak notes that “For every territorial space that is value coded by colonialism and every command of metropolitan anticolonialism for the native to yield his ‘voice,’ there is a space of withholding, marked by a secret that may not be a secret but cannot be unlocked” (190) and recognizes that the situation of Friday is mirrored in every instance when a colonial subject is asked to give voice in a space that is coded by colonialism. In doing this the individual is asked to give voice in a language that is not theirs, that cannot capture a coding which is present in the lived experience of the individual which is specifically non-Eurocentric, and cannot be translated into the colonial script. When this happens a text that is colonial in nature may be produced but that text’s coding is inadequate to capture the coding of the native.15 What this leads to is that

“space of withholding, marked by a secret that may not be a secret but cannot be unlocked”

15 I use the term native mainly because it is the term Spivak uses in this case, though she does so somewhat ambivalently, saying “whatever that might mean” (190) about the word. I adopt the terminology with a similar ambivalence, but for clarity’s sake it is worth using just to be in line with Spivak’s language.

(190), a situation which mirrors Friday’s silence insofar as there is bound to be text, a narrative framework, operating within Friday, but the colonial coding system that is being utilized to decipher its non-Eurocentric meaning is simply unable to perform the translation. The result of this is a new colonial text produced which has its own meaning within its own relational system to which Friday is central but he does not, in any apparent fashion, participate in as author or subject. The potential texts of the native are unable to be interpreted/read into this colonial system. The information this alternate coding system holds is not necessarily a secret because there may be no desire for it to be withheld, thus making it simply an unknown rather than a secret, but also rendering it impossible to be unlocked from within a colonial coding system due to the colonial coding system’s inadequacy. Whether Friday’s text is a hieroglyph or simple, meaningless drawings is a stand-in for this relationship here—it may be a text or a doodle.

Friday’s silence, in this instance, leaves him the guardian of the alternate coding system, the text which cannot be translated into the colonial system and his drawing on the slate represents that text insofar as its meaning remains necessarily unknown by the colonial reader.

The difference between the secret and what cannot be unlocked here is one of intent, one of agency, and not of end result. The individual who withholds because they wish to keep secret is an agent in that withholding. The individual whose text simply cannot be translated into an alternate coding system withholds information just as effectively as the secret keeper, but they lack intent—it is a case of inability rather than desire. Both represent cases of withholding, of effective silence, but one is implicated as an agent in this move and the other as simply an object in the context of that withholding, since the latter has no intent and does so simply by reason of inability or lack of activity. Spivak’s outlining of the “secret that may not be a secret but cannot be unlocked” (190) and Friday’s status as an “unemphatic agent of withholding” (190) captures

90 the indeterminate knowledge that Foe, Barton, and the reader has of Friday – that his silence withholds from us the information we need to classify the terms of his withholding. This leads us back to Coetzee’s metaliterary trap, and that Spivak is essentially outlining the conundrum that Coetzee has left us, this position of being aware of the secret but being unable to classify it as a secret. If we as reader see Friday withholding something from us in his silence and we seek to describe that thing we effectively construct a narrative about Friday which we cannot confirm.

In doing this we place Friday into a narrative structure we endorse and ignore whatever narrative he may have for himself, which recalls what Elizabeth Costello did with Paul Rayment in Slow

Man. In trying to describe Friday’s secret, or what may not be secret but still cannot be unlocked, we fall into Coetzee’s metaliterary trap precisely because we cannot say whether it is a secret that Friday intends to keep, or something that simply cannot be determined but Friday has no intent of keeping from us. One instance casts Friday as an intending secret keeper, the other casts Friday as simply withholding without intent to do so, and without knowledge of his inner state we cannot justly ascribe one or the other to the silent Friday.

Spivak’s reading of this is apt and insightful and she is obviously aware of the double bind operating here but she goes on to make several statements which are interesting given this awareness. In A Critique of Postcolonial Reason she describes Friday in several affirmative ways. She describes him as “the unemphatic agent of withholding” (190) and casts him as “The native” who is “not only a victim, but also an agent” (190). In this work she refers to him as “the guardian of the margin” (189) and in “Ethics and Politics in Tagore, Coetzee, and Certain Scenes of Teaching” she frames his inability to learn as an instance where he “resists the attempt of the white woman to teach him how to write” (27). In each of these instances Spivak is attributing what seems like a positive, intentional state to Friday. In one instance he is a guardian, in

91 another an agent, in the last he resists. Recalling the conundrum of Coetzee’s metaliterary trap discussed in the previous chapter, we can remember that Barton crossed into the realm of Foe as the author who overwrites when she attributed a desire for freedom upon Friday. Barton also made claims like “the silence of Friday is a helpless silence” (122) which is not entirely clear as it presumes a lack of ability rather than a willfully unexercised one, an attribution which cannot be made from a position of justified knowledge. Barton, in Spivak’s terms, fell into Coetzee’s trap because she narrated Friday as if she knows the secret of his withholding and treats him as if what is behind his silence is known. It strikes me that Spivak is doing a similar thing in attributing Friday with what seems like three active, intentional states.

Let us consider each attribution. First, Friday resists. Is Spivak within her rights to attribute resistance to Friday or is this a narrative overreach? The event where Spivak sees

Friday resisting is the one where Friday had been drawing his feet with eyes on the slate as he was supposed to be practicing letters. Barton commands, “Give! Give me the slate, Friday!”

(147). Friday’s response is “instead of obeying me, Friday put three fingers in his mouth and wet them with spittle and rubbed the slate clean” (147). This instance is perhaps the case where

Coetzee’s language suggests most strongly that Friday is actively resisting and, in doing so, engaging as an intentional agent within the dominant narrative landscape, but the event does not conclusively show such intention. The question this hinges on is, since Friday does not disclose his intent in any verbal way, do the events that transpire offer no other reading that leaves our understanding of what happens ambiguous? There is ample room for ambiguity in this incident.

Just before the event Barton is trying to teach Friday to write the word “ship” and instead he writes “h-s-h-s-h-s… on and on… or perhaps h-f” (146). Barton’s response to this is to take the slate back, after which “Long and hard I stared at him, till he lowered his eyelids and shut his

92 eyes” (146), which suggests a reaction of shame, though not necessarily. It is shortly after this that Friday does what Spivak casts as resisting Barton when she attempts to take back the slate from him as he is drawing his hieroglyphs or doodles – but are we certain that this is the case? If his reaction to his inability to write was shame, perhaps he does not resist but attempts to assist – to clean the slate for Barton before he gives it back. It is not clear at this point, not any more than it was in the case of Barton attempting to communicate with Friday through music, that his understanding of what is going on has moved past that instrumental one where he simply mimics what she does. After staring at Friday in frustration Barton muses, “Was it even possible for anyone, however benighted by a lifetime of dumb servitude, to be as stupid as Friday seemed?”

(146) and it is important to note that she considers that he might not be resisting her and might just not understand. She further speculates, “Could it be that somewhere within him he was laughing at my efforts to bring him nearer a state of speech?” (146) and it is again important that

Barton isn’t sure. Finally, she wonders if “in the deepest recesses of those black pupils was there a spark of mockery?” and concludes with “I could not see it” (146). Barton admits that she does not know if Friday is resisting or simply unaware of what is expected of him. This makes the latter incident, which Spivak views as resistance when Friday holds on to the slate and wipes it clean, something that we cannot determine for certain as resistance. As was stated above, it might not be resistance but an attempt at assistance – wiping the slate clear for Barton in a misinterpretation of what she wants. While this certainly has an appearance of defiance an act of defiance implies intent to resist and that is beyond what we can say about Friday because even

Barton is unsure of that, and Coetzee’s language does not reveal more – so if we, as the reader and critic, say more, we ascribe specific intent upon Friday which we lack the information to do.

We should recall the instance where Friday is dressed in Foe’s robes dancing, and when Barton

93 attempts to speak to him she describes him as “Beyond human reach” (92) and we must consider the possibility that Friday may simply be unable to understand her or becomes oblivious to others when certain things happen. Coetzee’s description of the exchange over the slate does not conclusively reveal resistance, a very particular set of actions and a motive, and rather simply the act of clearing the slate. Even if resistance is taking place we, as readers, are not in a position to conclusively identify it as such.

The second claim, that Friday is an agent, is one which is obviously generally true in the simple instrumental sense outlined earlier, but could be specifically false depending on how we consider one an agent. Being an agent in the senses that have been considered by this project is a condition which one only situationally participates in – one can be an agent sometimes, and sometimes not. That Friday is an agent is not in question – but is he an agent specifically in his withholding? Or, to put it differently, does Friday intend to withhold, intentionally keeping a secret, or is his withholding simply a feature of his silence which he does not intend? Basic agency, that of one who simply has the ability to act, definitely applies to Friday. The second type of agency, that of agency paired with intention, a sort of valued agency, would apply only in instances where Friday willingly chooses his actions. The third slight modification of that introduced in the third chapter is the notion of the authorial agent, an agent like the second but that is specifically engaged in the act of authorship either as a writer or an intentioned ratifier of narrative structures within the narrative landscape. Does Friday evidence agency in either of the latter two senses here, rather than the merely instrumental? Spivak speaks of Friday as the

“unemphatic agent of withholding in the text” (190) and while it is true that Friday withholds the question of agency can hinge on intent to withhold – or, upon Spivak’s own distinction of whether the thing withheld is an actual secret kept by an active agent, or something that is not a

94 secret but cannot be unlocked for reasons other than an attempt at secrecy. Simply put, is

Friday’s withholding an intentional act of withholding, or a product of either his own inability to communicate or of the gap between the colonial textual position he inhabits and the textual position that might mark his internal dialogue? If it is either of the latter options Friday is not an agent in his withholding in any but the first and most basic sense and his withholding is a structural feature of his condition rather than an intentional act. The reader cannot tell and attributing Friday agency in his withholding seems to be, again, a Barton like act of narrative overwrite. That Friday has intent and is an agent is not in question – but if his agency is withheld from us and we attribute specific agency to him, such as that he is keeping a secret, we do him an injustice insofar as we presume to write his story for him. Unless it is revealed to us that his intent is to withhold, saying he is keeping a secret speaks for him and not of him.

The third claim, that of Friday being a “guardian at the margins” (190) gives us a hint as to how Spivak, who is aware of the conundrum posed by Friday’s inscrutability, might be treating Friday to attribute this seeming intentionality to him. Every definition of guardian that I have been able to find ties it, to some extent, to personhood – it is someone who guards, who protects. The term has a certain flexibility to it though as one might refer to a dog as a guardian of a yard, and even beyond that there is a colloquial sense in which the term might be used to refer to a statue as the guardian of a location. In the case of the person there is, tied to their guardianship, presumed to be an intentional act tied to the word’s roots in wardship, where the individual takes it upon themselves to act as a protector of the thing in question. In the case of a guard dog there is, after a fashion, a similar presumption – the dog acts, engaging in a sort of intentionality and agency, in guarding. In the case of the statue something different is taking place as, obviously, the statue itself has no intention of guarding, but it does fill the role of the

95 guardian as a protector. There is no agency and no intention in the statue itself, a statue that is created with the intent of ornamentation may function as deterrent as well, while one could defer the agency to the statue’s creator. This would leave a guardian functioning as guardian with no intention motivating the guardianship at any point and it would be a feature of the thing as object which makes it a guardian, rather than an element of an intentioned subjecthood. This reasoning may be applied to a person who is, at large, a subject but does not participate in a certain act as subject. An example of this would be a large individual standing by a door who has no intention to guard – they simply stand there. In standing there though, in virtue of their physical bulk, another person might walk by the door and be deterred from entering upon seeing the large individual. The large individual, without intending to do so, is acting as a guardian of the doorway. This leaves that person, in relation to their act of guarding the door, an unintending object, while more generally they are a subject—their subjective intending is not related to their guardianship. They are an intending, intelligent, valued individual that is recognized as such who is simultaneously treated as if they were an object, an unintending thing performing a function, in the very specific context of them warding the door, and as such they are understood as a being with a dual nature – both subject and object, depending on context. This allows for them to be valued as a subject, while still being treated, at times, as an object. I believe that

Spivak, being aware of the dual possibility of Friday, leaves the avenue open for Friday’s guardianship to be of this unintending variety. His guardianship may well be intentional but it may not be; instead, it may be a mere feature of his silence rather than what he desires. Whatever

Friday intends, what he does is guard—specifically, guard the ‘text’ of that non-colonial codification, the experience of the other as non-European other. As such, in his role as guardian,

Friday may not be acting as a subject at all, but rather guards as an object, a guardian with no

96 intent to guard. In the narrative landscape he inhabits his guardianship may not be a product of his status as subject, his intending and desiring, but simply a product of his mode of being rather than his intentional manner of acting.

Part of what is unknown about Friday, of what may be secret or unintentionally withheld, is that he may not be intending to guard at all but rather may do so as a feature of his silence.

Because of this he may be a guardian-object rather than an intending guardian-subject, though ultimately we cannot tell since we have no access to his mind. Though more generally he is a subject, his guardianship would be what is performed by the unintending guardian, the guardian who guards unconsciously because of the structural relationship between him and others – a silent monument preventing the disclosure of the non-colonial scripting he has access to but neither the reader nor the characters in Foe do. An effect of this is that ascribing agency to him as guardian may be an act of overwriting—putting Friday into a narrative framework as an active guardian when that is not what he is doing. In light of Friday’s withholding, the only thing we can justly do with Friday is withhold our own judgement about whether he is guarding intentionally or not – we simply cannot know until Friday tells us.

Spivak’s acknowledgment of the secret that may not be a secret points to her awareness of the role of intentionality in Friday’s withholding – that if he is not intending to withhold, it is not a secret so much as just something that cannot be transmitted. She is aware of the role of intentionality in this withholding and as such I read her ascription of guardianship as not necessarily a pointer to intentional withholding. The term guardian can do double duty here – either as intending guard, or guardian monument, one an intending subject, the other an

97 unintending object16. It should also be noted that this dual nature is an active duality and not a case of one state being the sole nature of the individual in question. Describing Friday as a monument is not meant to, nor does it, strip Friday of his own status as subject, but is rather a recognition of how the subject Friday can and will be treated as an object in certain contexts even as his state as subject is recognized. Returning to the above mentioned notion of the large individual unintentionally warding people from entering a doorway (96), a person who is a subject with their own set of intentional framings may function as an object, in a way, without their willing or intending. As the interpreter views the large individual as guarding the door when the person does not intend to guard the door, the interpreter narratively overwrites the other, casting them in the role of guardian in virtue of their quality (being large) and location

(near the door) without that matching the intention of the large individual. The interpreter who says “the large individual guards the door” when the large individual does not intend to do that is effectively treating the large individual as an object to be written over, written with the narrative of “the large individual guards the door,” which is only true if one does not account for the large

16 The term monument as it is used here is meant to be a type of statue, or highly visible work of art, in the sense that was deployed earlier but with an added emphasis on it being an artistic work constructed in line with a particular intentional framing. This would make it not just a statue, but a work of art that has been inscribed with a certain significance on a narrative landscape. It is a sort of artistic work with a very specific representative framework attached to it, oftentimes to commemorate something or represent some greater whole or event, or be an emblem for certain ideas. Friday as monument would be Friday being treated as an object, the medium of someone else’s narrative or intentional framing, as he is inscribed with an intentional framing that is imposed upon him externally. He is an object within the narrative landscape insofar as someone else treats him as the medium for their intentional framing rather than recognizing him in terms of his own intentional framing—they reduce him, in this capacity, to the medium of their intentional framing rather than recognizing him as the author of his own. As such, he is treated as if he is a statue, a monument, a thing to be overwritten, and becomes a monument of someone else’s intentional framing. The core of this is that someone else ascribes meaning to the monument—and when the monument is also a human being, it represents a case of someone else overwriting the man. My own referring to Friday as monument is referring to this type of framing. I do not intend to reduce him to merely a monument, and my referring to him as such is recognition of the fact that Friday can be and is treated as a monument by characters, readers, and critics, despite the fact that he is a subject in his own right. This use of the term monument also prefaces the forthcoming examination of Rancière’s use of the term monument as an example of a certain type of artistic representation which also has notable political ramifications. Rancière’s considerations will add further context to how the term monument functions, but in general the term monument here denotes a particular type of a work of art.

98 individual’s lack of intent to guard the door. In doing this, the observer may recognize that the large individual is a subject, but treats them as an object to be written on—a statue or monument, an object which can be described as acting (guarding) even when they don’t in any way intend to perform the act. This dual notion of guardian allows for us to recognize Friday as an intelligent being with an unknown inner life: seeing him acting as a guardian without having to ascribe intention to him, as he is merely guarding as unintending object rather than subject.

Parry and Special Capability – the Body as Script

Spivak’s idea of Friday as a guardian of the margins, when she herself seems aware that

Friday’s silence holds a secret that would preclude casting him as an active guardian, begs a question about what Coetzee is trying to show us through our limited ability to comment on

Friday. Friday is the guardian of something, a nebulous space of “the margins,” but the content of those margins is something beyond our knowledge and that is likely by design on Coetzee’s part. The metaliterary trap that entices us to speak beyond what we are justly able to concerning

Friday reveals to us the all too easy fall into treating the silent other as an object of our own narrative reaching out without engaging him as a subject—he becomes the object upon which we write, rather than the collaborative figure in incidents like Cruso’s text making, or the combatant in Rayment’s. Built into Friday’s silence, and how we interact with him, are several different dualities which I believe align as a crossing point regarding the subject/object distinction, and in a line of reasoning Jacques Rancière pursues in relation to the monument as a work of art as well as a political presence. To consider these I will first return to the notion of the special capability that was briefly explored in my first chapter as it is brought up by Benita Parry in her paper

“Speech and Silence in J.M. Coetzee.”

If we can recall, my original position was that Coetzee gives his silent characters special capabilities through their silence. In the case of Friday Parry looks at the final episode of the novel, what she describes as a “dreamlike quest of a contemporary narrator for Friday’s story takes him into a hold of a wrecked ship” (47). This surreal experience has the unnamed narrator searching the hold of a sunken ship to find Friday. The narrator asks Friday “what is this ship?”

(157) and the novel describes the ship as “not a place of words . . . This is a place where bodies are their own signs. It is the home of Friday” (157). Parry says that in this place, Friday’s home,

“Friday does not cross the threshold into logical and referential discourse, but remains instead in that paradisal condition where sign and object are unified, and where the body, spared the traumatic insertion into language, can give utterance to things lost or never yet heard” (47). In the first chapter of this work I suggest that the special capability that Coetzee imagines for Friday is his ability to resist entrance into the “logical and referential discourse” and in the context of

Gayatri Spivak’s notion of the guardian we can consider what is represented by this ability to resist that insertion in a more in-depth fashion. The notion of the text was raised in the last chapter, through Cruso’s scripting of the island, of making the field not just a thing but rather the object of his narrative – the field becomes his text or, the medium on which he transcribes his script. Cruso’s script is meant to be communal, it is a narrative which he intends many to partake in, and the text he produces participates in a dominant, communal narrative landscape.

Friday is a character who holds a secret, or at the very least withholds something, and the dominant script17 seems unable to write what that is. In light of this there is an explanatory gap

17 While this would most commonly be the language of the colonizer any system of coding, whether it be spoken language or writing or cultural coding, by which groups communicate and is in a position to impose upon or overwrite another, could be the dominant script. The key here is that the dominant script need not be just language, but any sort of cultural coding, including things like the “text” of Cruso’s field mentioned in the third chapter, or even intentional frameworks motivated by dominant power structures.

100 in Friday which proves difficult to fill. An idea of a protowriting, raised by Parry, might prove useful in bridging this gap. Parry asks about “Friday and the other disempowered figures [in

Coetzee’s fiction] who cannot or will not make themselves heard in the recognized linguistic system” if “their bodies are to be read as encoding a protowriting” (48). This notion of protowriting offers the possibility of an alternative script of sorts, or at the very least as a marker which can be set up in relation to the dominant script even if it cannot be understood or made communally consistent and intelligible.

The question is, if there is an alternative script on Friday’s body, how does it arise and what is it? Parry is not clear on how this protowriting comes to be and, in fact, she merely poses it as a possibility, but I believe it is a possibility with a great deal of explanatory power. In

Friday’s withholding silence he avoids entering into the field of logical and referential discourse but a writing, or a sort of primitive text, still arises in the protowriting. How and why does this happen? Is it an emergent product of latent narrative potentials operating within the narrative landscape and, as such, ultimately a sort of residual product of the logical and referential frameworks Friday purports to avoid? Is it a product of Friday, an alternative but undecipherable

(within the colonial narrative) coding of the type that Spivak would count as “secret” which manifests itself as a protowriting rather than the clearly enunciated text of the type that Cruso creates on the island, or that Rayment seeks to control in the world around him? In either case there is a degree of separation from the logical or referential discourse which could be taken as the dominant forms of the narrative landscape that Friday inhabits – the protowriting is either just a residual trace of the dominant narrative structure or it is a product of a different encoding system, a secretive one withheld in Friday’s silence. Either way we see in this notion of the protowriting a type of narrative framing arriving either separate from the dominant narrative

101 landscape, or from within it but by a process quite different from the overt vying for authorship that we see a figure like Paul Rayment coming from. What we see is a duality of scripting – the dominant type of scripting that Costello, Foe, and Cruso use to write their “texts,” participating in the dominant narrative landscape and acting with authorial force within it, and a script which is captured within Spivak’s secret, that resists translation into the dominant scripting.

Essentially, it is an alternative way of “writing” a narrative.

This alternative scripting must be either secret or unknown, in the sense that Spivak considers, or it would simply be commandeered by the dominant discourse and become part of that discourse’s lexicon. What is notable about the dominant forms of narrative framing is revealed by Cruso making his field a ‘text’—that the scripting method he uses makes an object of the thing, commandeering it to a telos. In the case of the field Cruso writes it to be part of an empire and all of the subordinate ends built into the empire. In the case of Foe and Friday, Foe treats Friday as an object and re-writes him towards a profit motive or an end to excite a reader.

Each exercise within the dominant script writes its object to be an instrument within the framework, as they become subordinate both to the larger intentional framework of the dominant script, such as empire, and the writer’s intention of participating in the framework. For the writer, this is an act of subjective agency as they participate within the larger series of intentions the dominant script manifests. For the object, be it a field or a person, it becomes an object to both the dominant script’s intentional framework and the writer’s individual intention to contribute to that framework.

In the case of Parry’s protowriting, whatever it may be, it arises from being unable or unwilling to be represented in the dominant system and the protowriting is an alternative script to that. Most notably, from the standpoint of the dominant scripting, there is no intelligible

102 framework of intentionality provided by the protowriting even if one is likely present. What the protowriting withholds is its version of the intentional framework, both macro and individual, which makes the dominant script intelligible. In essence, the protowriting is the recognition of an intelligible framework by which one could participate in a larger scripting system, but a withholding of what is needed to translate that script into another. What seems to arise from a protowriting is, as manifested in the case of Friday, a recognition that the individual exhibiting the protowriting is likely participating within some sort of an intentional framework. There is no way provided for that intentional framework to become part of the larger intentional frameworks of the dominant script other than simply writing over them with the dominant script. In short, the only way for the dominant script to interact with the protowriting is overwriting the protowriting, prior to the disclosure of its intentional framework in a way that the dominant script can commandeer.

Returning to Friday, what Coetzee writing Friday as the inscrutable mute does is draw into sharp relief this object/subject distinction within the landscape of narrative, or the intentioned guardian versus monument guardian distinction. Friday is a being which we, by all rights, believe has the capacity to be a special subject on the narrative landscape and we value him as such for the evidence of creativity and spirituality which he reveals but we cannot understand. Likewise, since we cannot understand him as subject, we are limited to only an instrumental language—we end up making him the object of our authorial intent unawares and subjugate him to our dominant script as a thing to be written rather than a collaborator or combatant on this narrative landscape. The only way we can interact with him is not entirely unlike how Barton does with her language of “Watch and Do” (56) – we cannot interact with

Friday in a way that reveals the content of his intention and rather we simply subjugate him to

103 our own narrative framework. Friday might be a guardian, and his body reveals a protowriting which has content which we cannot understand as practitioners of a dominant script, but in the absence of our ability to understand his intention or decipher the protowriting we are unable to treat him as subject even when we believe him to be subject. All we can do is write on/for him rather than engage with him. Through this we see a mirroring of Barton’s sentiment of “I understand, that is to say, why a man will choose to be a slaveowner” (60) when she considers that “There are times when benevolence deserts me and I use words only as the shortest way to subject him to my will” (60) – Barton finds herself reducing Friday to a mere object of her desire even though she realizes he is more, and she cannot find a way to communicate what makes him more. What Coetzee provides to us through Friday is a lesson to learn, a way to foreground or rehearse the dual-treatment of a character both as subject and object: when stripped of our ability to justifiably treat Friday as subject since he withholds the tools we need to engage him as such, we tend to objectify him by overwriting him rather than engaging him. This is the metaliterary trap the author intriguingly stages in the novel to warn the readers of.

The Aesthetics of the Monument

My work so far has been interested in narrative, writing, in creating texts, which are all forms of creative expression, but what has not been spoken of yet is art or aesthetics. In the face of this dualism of the guardian, of the man and the monument, doing so will be fruitful because on a narrative landscape where practitioners of a dominant text write on/for Friday as an object,

Friday becomes a work of art of sorts, if unwillingly. Due to this being an overwrite of an individual who is a victim of that dominant narrative, that art becomes political in its

104 ramifications. I wish to consider Friday in the context of Jacques Rancière’s book Dissensus, specifically the twelfth chapter “The Monument and its Confidences.”

Rancière’s immediate interest in this chapter is resistance and art’s ability to resist and he opens saying that “Art is readily ascribed a virtue of resistance” (169) and notes that it is commonly accepted that “art resists in diverse ways, which all converge in a unique power”

(169). His central concern is a conundrum in the way in which art resists, as he says “there are two seemingly contradictory senses in which art is said to resist: first, it resists as a thing that persists in its being; and second, as people who refuse to remain in their situation” (170). In doing this he outlines art’s resistance as, essentially, staying the same or enduring, while simultaneously also resisting as a people’s desire to not remain static. He questioningly expresses a “need to think of art at once as a power of autonomy, of self-maintaining, and as a power of departure and of self-transformation” (170). The form of this resistance is contradictory – it resists in sameness which undermines that sameness.

For Rancière the work of art he focuses on is the monument and his formulation of the monument is something that represents the effort of a revolutionary people and the necessary stratification of that effort, the capturing of it, into the monument. As such it represents a process of becoming, a striving, which must reach a point of being. The effort of becoming, the desire for change, is an active, dynamic process of striving. Such a striving and a hope of revolution has a revolutionary goal which is hopefully reached. That goal reached is a state of being contrasted to but formed by becoming—so the monument contains both the revolutionary energy, its desire for change, and the crystallization of the revolution into the success of being.

He says, “The monument must become the revolution and the revolution again become the monument” (172), which I take to be a recognition of the form of being captured within a

105 becoming – a desire for, an energy fueling, and a possibility of change which move towards a goal. That goal is a static being, which is then defined by those processes which lead to its existence which are dynamic, of becoming. The monument is a monument to something, and

Rancière keeps his images somewhat abstract but concretizes them somewhat as he forefronts the monument’s relation to a people. He says, “The artwork is not only ‘in view of’ a people.

The people are part of the very condition of art’s ‘resistance’” (172), suggesting that art and audience are linked. He further concretizes the monument describing a hypothetical monument as “the union of contraries which defines it at once as an embrace of fighters set in a monument”

(172) suggesting a statue of, perhaps, freedom fighters, but also “as a monument in a process of becoming and struggle” (172). The monument captures the fighters in a still life, but that still life is both the product of past struggle and the promise of future struggle. The monument captures the contradictions of being and becoming, of process and goal, linked into a static monument that is built from its dynamic past and pointing to an uncertain future.

He proceeds through a series of other dichotomies which slowly reveal art to be politics and politics art. He identifies a relation without relation as what lay between aesthetics and humanity (173 -174). He notes a Deluzean contention that “from one humanity to another, the path can only be forged by inhumanity” (174). He hearkens back to the Nietzschean philosophy of the Apollonian as a sort of intellectual coagulation as “the moment when thought and unthought become fixed in a harmonious figure” (175) placed against the backdrop of the dark

Dionysian which “resists thought” and represents the “suffering of primary nature grappling with the cleavage of culture” (175). In doing these things he creates a pervasive picture of art, of the monument, as being either a synthesis or a relational process—perhaps either is too concrete to capture this state of unified alienation—of a thing and alterity, of a process and a completion of

106 relationship that is also a lack. In doing this he reminds me very much of Coetzee’s comments about the way an academic might read in the contemporary period. In White Writing Coetzee says, “Only part of the truth . . . resides in what writing says, of the hitherto unsaid; for the rest, its truth lies in what it dare not say for the sake of its own safety, or in what it does not know about itself: in its silences” (81). While Coetzee’s statement here predates Rancière’s Dissensus by decades the idea he broaches, when considered in the context of his presentation of Friday, seems to appear in the type of formulation that Rancière is elaborating upon. Rancière identifies a “human language of those monuments” that “have the ability to transmit to people of the future the intact grandeur of long-vanished free cities” (172) and simultaneously “the inhuman language of romantic stones whose silent speech belies the chattering and agitation of men”

(172). It is in this terminology, this duality of language, that I see emerging from Rancière’s series of dichotomies something very akin to Coetzee’s concern for what is borne by silence and the dual status of Friday as both object and presumed subject.

Let us speculate that Friday is a monument of sorts and, more than just a man, a work of art, or an aesthetic construct. He inhabits a narrative landscape in which an articulated language of humanity – a series of articulated narrative frameworks of dominant discourse – seek to capture him. In this sense Friday is very much part of this common aesthetic process insofar as he is the object of its interest. The Friday that inhabits the narrative landscape is part of the type of dialogue that Cruso engages in, the construction of his text on the field, but he is the object of it rather than the authorial agent. This language of text-making is collaborative or combative. It captures the possibility of future authorship, it is human in its aspirations and engagement. This captures that articulation of the Apollonian Rancière sees in the relationship with its culmination in a harmonious figure, where the public identity of Friday is essentially created from the

107 unknown by this narrative overwrite as the possibility of what Friday is, a state of becoming that never attains being so long as Friday holds his silence, becomes subsumed into the articulated narratives of a dominant discourse, or Rancière’s “human language.” Friday is a part of this landscape insofar as he is written over by it, that he becomes the medium of its text – he participates in it as object and not as subject, though it should be noted that this is done in the face of recognizing him as a subject that cannot be understood making this an overwriting rather than a writing with or against, both of which recognize a specific agency in the being. Friday also manifests the secret that Spivak sees in him though, something alien to this language, a protowriting which is emergent in him but cannot be assimilated by the narrative landscape because he withholds his truth. In this he captures that Dionysian darkness which resists the transition to being and his silence maintains the unbridled possibility of becoming afforded by his silence, with that possibility of what Friday might be never becoming solidified into being with the authoritative, knowledgeable, and just assertion of “This is what Friday is.” Friday is a person who is recognized as subject but whose subjectivity cannot be known and engaged with, and as such is engaged with as an aesthetic object, artistically constructed, by all who meet him, and not as an authorial subject who participates as author in the landscape of narrative. He is a monument in something very much like Rancière’s sense of the term, where his place in the narrative landscape leaves him constantly captured by a human language which makes him a being, a publicly accepted convention, but always contained in Friday is the possibility of all that is unrevealed in his silence leaving the promise of becoming ever emergent upon him. We see mirrored in this the human language Rancière outlines, the narrative landscape Friday inhabits and is the object of, but also we see the language of “romantic stones whose silent speech belies the chattering and agitation of men” (172) as Friday’s silence constantly revisits the possibility of

108 becoming upon the narrative landscape which can never truly capture him. Friday’s subjectivity which is known of but cannot be known in detail by the characters, the reader, and the critic, leaves Friday unwillingly (perhaps – we cannot know) captured in the coding of the dominant narrative landscape as an object. He solidifies into a static monument within that landscape but maintains the possibility of becoming, contained within what is not known about him, always allowing the possibility for change, for him to be other than the solidified monument in the future. Coetzee’s presentation of Friday captures Rancière’s state of tension within the monument as a thing which becomes solidified in being but promises a future of change in becoming.

Friday captures these two languages of Rancière when participating in the narrative landscape as object while remaining silent and, in that silence, frustrating the final crystallization into being in virtue of the possibility his silence offers, and it reflects on Coetzee’s comment that a part of the truth resides in what is said, and part resides in that left unsaid. Friday becomes a monument of resistance to a constant narrative framing attempting to cast him as a being, with his silence stubbornly holding him in a state of becoming, resisting the crystallization. Through this though we cannot ascribe to Friday agency in his resistance, since we do not know his intent in his silence. What Coetzee reveals to us through Friday is a man who resists as a monument, but is still a man though his inner life is silent to us.

Rayment and Friday – the Reach and the Limits

Friday’s silence is, as has been outlined by Spivak, the tool of his withholding. What

Coetzee accomplishes with a character who withholds as Friday does is to not just leave us

109 wondering who Friday really is but to draw into clear view a duality in how one person interacts with another, and specifically how in the case of the silent other this relationship is sorely imbalanced. In interacting with the other there is a degree of instrumentalization – one is both an object in the world that we treat instrumentally but also a subject who, in virtue of their subjectivity, demands a special kind of respect for them to not be reduced to a mere object written into our narrative. Instead they are what Paul Rayment aspires to be in Slow Man – a figure with authorial force in the world, who we can interact with as object but must always be respected and dealt with as subject as well. Friday, through his silence, withholds this possibility from us and leaves us in a position where we know he is a subject but since we cannot identify the form of his subjectivity, his desires, his authorial intent, we are left fumbling in any attempts to engage his subjectivity that we cannot identify, and in doing so he becomes the object of our authorship as we write who he is for him. Coetzee crafts Friday in a manner that reveals the duality of this recognition of the other, as both subject and object, and then through his silence rehearses the situation in which readers are seduced to treat Friday as object and are left at a loss when trying to engage his specific subjectivity.

The effect of this shows us the limits of our treatment of an unknown alterity as the reader realizes their overreach in their ascriptions to describe who Friday is and what he wants.

Friday stands as a warning that even well-meaning attempts to write the silent other, like that of

Susan Barton’s attempt to ascribe a desire for freedom to Friday, will upset the delicate balance of treating the other as both subject and object. At its core Foe functions as somewhat of a philosophical novel, inviting the reader to step back and consider the concretization of an abstraction as Friday reveals to us the form and limits of treatment of the silent other.

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Conclusion

As my thesis concludes what I hope to have outlined is a varied treatment of silence as it relates to agency in Coetzee’s two works, with silence seen from the perspective of the silenced and the outside observer resulting in a model of silence that is productive in Slow Man, and cautionary in Foe. What I hope my thesis has contributed to the field is a presentation of

Coetzee’s silence that is not monolithic, inviting future scholars to analyze Coetzee’s silence as a series of explorations rather than a uniform presentation with focused ends. In just these two novels, Coetzee’s use of silence does vastly different jobs. I also hope that my focus on

Coetzee’s response to and engagement with specific thinkers, particularly in my exploration of

Slow Man, will widen an avenue in the analysis of Coetzee as a postcolonial scholar to being one who is explicitly engaged with, both critically and as a foundation for his own ideas, with

Western thinkers. In order to understand Coetzee’s critique, an analysis of his engagement with the Western tradition is important in the case of this philosophically fluent author.

To be more specific there are four major points to which I wish to draw attention. The first point is that Coetzee is a philosophically fluent author that has, through these two novels, constructed a landscape of narrative that the characters in the novels participate in. Coetzee speaks back to a philosophical tradition, specifically to Plato, and in Slow Man offers a rebuttal to Plato’s model of the soul through something akin to the philosophy of a flawed body. Paul

Rayment, in the wake of his accident, finds his position within a narrative landscape that he was comfortable in destabilized and suddenly he is stripped of his ability to engage as an authorial agent within that landscape. The landscape itself, as it is framed, is a competitive one that is

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Nietzschean in character with Rayment left in a position where he must attempt to renegotiate his position within that narrative landscape to reclaim his authorial status.

The second point is that for Coetzee silence is not a deterrent to agency within this narrative landscape – in fact, silence can be the origin point of authorial agency and could perhaps even be a necessary one. What Paul Rayment reveals in his thoroughly described inner life is a productive narrative engine operating within his mind, constantly simulating potential narrative framings which he might impose upon the world. This simulation is the germination point of the assertion of oneself as an authorial agent and mirrors a Nietzschean model of concept construction in language, with Paul Rayment constantly trying to frame the narrative that he will introduce into the world to become part of the communal narrative landscape.

The third point is that Coetzee, after showing us a model of how the authorial agent engages with the dominant narrative landscape through Slow Man, greatly complicates this engagement by setting a metanarrative trap for the reader in Foe. If the authorial agent operating in the dominant narrative landscape is engaged in acts of applying narratives to the world around them, Coetzee greatly complicates this process of narrative creation and engagement by introducing a person who is inscrutable and resists participation as subject in that dominant narrative landscape. The dominant narrative landscape is defined by processes of competition or collaboration, with individuals framing narratives and introducing them, imposing them, or negotiating them on the world around them. The communal nature of this process necessitates others with which one engages. In the character of Friday we see someone that one cannot engage with as a subject since he has no evident intention—he is a blank slate in his history and his hopes. When one attempts to apply a narrative framing to Friday his inscrutability makes it so that the narrative framing is almost surely not fitting the reality of Friday or, at the very least,

112 it can’t be known if it does. Friday is also written in such a way as to beg narrative imposition upon him with people speculating that he is a slave, or a cannibal, or concerning his hopes and intentions, none of which can accurately be applied to him since he is an unknown. The narrative framings that constitute the narrative landscape find no purchase on him because his silence withholds the grounds for such impositions. As such, Friday exists within this landscape, but frustrates others attempting to include him within its dominant narrative structure. Coetzee entices the reader, along with the characters in his novel, to take up the role of the imposing author in Foe, imposing narrative framings on Friday which do not seem to fit, thus outlining the all too easy way by which the reader becomes something like the titular Foe of the novel.

The fourth and final point is that Friday’s silence leaves him blurring the lines between object and subject within the narrative landscape. We cannot say much about Friday but, in virtue of him being an intelligent human being and certain actions he engages in, we can at the very least assume him to be an agent with some form of authorial intent. Friday’s silence effectively withholds knowledge of the content of this agency and intent though and this leaves

Friday as an object within the narrative landscape who should be a subject, but that we cannot describe as a subject as doing so would leave us falling into Coetzee’s metaliterary trap. The result of this is that while people in the narrative landscape seem to exist simultaneously as valued subject and instrumental object, Friday can only be engaged with as an object. The implication of this is a dehumanizing treatment of Friday and shows the limits of the dominant narrative discourse in dealing with the silent other, with that limit finding its expression when the other does not participate in a dominant coding system in the expected way. That narrative cannot treat the other, the one who does not engage in its dominant scripting, as subject, but only as object.

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When all of these points are considered together the complete picture of Coetzee’s treatment of silence and agency in his work is one of a complex dynamic between authorial agents and authored objects, with silence oftentimes being the thing which allows a person to be one or the other. People will participate in this language as both but the obvious problem stemming from a person being only an object of the narrative is the stripping of the individual’s place within the landscape as subject. The risk of making the individual instrumental to the landscape, no more a person than the field Cruso works on in Foe, is very real.

Where I feel my thesis could be expanded on in a future project is to more broadly consider Coetzee’s influences and what this means for the problems he is dealing with in his novels. It is one thing to point out an explicit rejection of Plato and an adoption of something like a Nietzschean landscape of language to explain the way narrative acts within his work, but

Coetzee is a philosophically fluent author who is doubtlessly engaging many specific thinkers and framings in his work. Elizabeth Costello’s rejection of various specific parts of the philosophical tradition in The Lives of Animals could serve as a roadmap for precisely which figures Coetzee is engaged with. The question of how Coetzee, as a postcolonial scholar, is beholden to the traditions which he is critiquing could be explored much more intensively through the relationship he has to the Western philosophical tradition, offering insights into how he both subverts those traditions and promulgates them. This thesis has laid a groundwork for a direct connection in one instance but expanding that exploration to more broadly consider

Coetzee’s own education and who he directly and indirectly references throughout the corpus of his works as a whole would be a worthwhile future project.

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