Kai Wiegandt (Berlin)

J. M. COETZEE'S COMPLICATED MIGRATIONS

In this artieie I read J. M. Coetzee's novel Slow Man as arefleetion on how nation• ality infleets migrant identities and how migration ean result in a erippling of the seifthat the novel emblematieally duplieates in the amputation ofthe protagonist's leg after an aeeident. Diseussions of relevant passages from Coetzee's Diary 0/ a Bad Year and Here and Now eomplement my reading in whieh I show that Ray• ment's life in Australia is presented as a seeond, redueed stage of his life, a meta• phorieal afterlife. This afterlife is a dark reading of 'emigration', equating it with a erippling ofthe seifthat does not only involve the self's body but also, as the soli• tary Rayment remarks, its soul. Rayment's insistenee on an authentie, eomplete body is motivated by the memory of his former body, while his yeaming for an 'authentie' horne is motivated by the memory of his early years in Franee. These yeamings are questioned by Marijana Jokic, an immigrant from Croatia who nurses the erippled Rayment and whose adviee that he use a prosthesis is in line with her view that identities - national, re1igious, even physieal- ean be rebuilt and ehanged. I show that Marijana and her family exhibit a eosmopolitanism that relies neither on the body nor on a notion of authentieity but remains haunted by the ghost of nation• alism. Throughout my analysis I triangulate the novel's eompeting eoneepts of identity with Etienne Balibar's ideas on nationality and immigration to assess what is at stake in Coetzee's attempt to eomplieate the reader's notion of migration by teasing out ambivalenees ofthe migratory experienee.

What does 'horne' mean for recent migrants in different parts of the world? Is it their place ofbirth, the displaced cultural community or the new nation• state? The last twenty-five years have seen an increasing acceleration of glo• balization that has transformed migration and notions of horne in ways not yet understood. At the same time, a heightened political concem for the larger economic and social impact of migration has tended to obscure the actual nature of the migratory experience itself, such as the emotions and practicalities of departure, travel, arrival and the attempt to rebuild ahorne. It is in contemporary literature that particularly rich and subtle explorations of emerging forms of migration and their effects on migrants' identities can be found. Since J. M. Coetzee's move to Australia in 2002, the South African-Aus• tralian writer's fiction has been increasingly concemed with emigration, nationality and belonging. These issues were already pertinent in Youth

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(2002), in which the South African protagonist John emigrates to London and eventually moves to the United States. Elizabeth Costello (2003) deals with an Australian writer who unceasingly travels around the world giving lectures. Slow Man (2005) addresses migration and national identity most explicitly: its protagonist Paul Rayment is born in France, emigrates to Aus• tralia at the age of six and returns to his country of birth as an adolescent before re-emigrating to Australia. The protagonist of Diary of a Bad Year (2007), JC, has emigrated to Australia, and questions of nationhood often crop up in the essays and conversations of the novel. In Here and Now (2013), his exchange of letters with Paul Auster, Coetzee addresses ques• tions of linguistic and national identity. Coetzee's recent novel The Child• hood of Jesus (2013) features a man and a boy who arrive in an unknown, possibly otherworldly, city and try to find ahorne there. In the present article I read Slow Man as a reflection on how nationality inflects migrant identities and how migration can result in a crippling of the self that the novel emblematically duplicates in the amputation of the pro• tagonist's leg. Discussions of relevant passages from Diary of a Bad Year, Here and Now and The Childhood ofJesus complement my reading of Slow Man, the story of Paul Rayment, a 60-year-old citizen of Adelaide, which beg ins when he is thrown off his bike in an accident. A leg has to be ampu• tated, and the novel henceforth deals with Rayment's coping with this loss which does not only immobilize hirn but makes hirn gradually lapse into general neediness, astate in which his yearnings for the lost integrity of his body and for ahorne reinforce each other. Hope arrives in the guise ofMari• jana Jokic, a resolute and vivacious Croatian-born nurse who takes care of Rayment. Marijana finds Rayment's yearnings understandable but of little help and ultimately unnecessary. Her advice that he use a prosthesis is in line with her view that identities - national, religious, even physical - can be rebuilt and changed. The protagonists' diverging views on identity are put to the test when Rayment falls in love with the married Marijana, and when the well-known Australian novelist Elizabeth Costello, titular heroine of Coet• zee's previous novel, suddenly appears on his doorstep one-third into the novel. Costello does not move from Rayment's side, gives unwelcome advice and sets up a tryst with a second, false Marianna (note the different spelling). Rayment, who peeks into the notebooks Costello keeps on his life, discovers that Costello is in fact writing his life as she goes along - a meta• fictional migration of Rayment to the literary realm which renders his iden• tity even more precarious. Determined not to be Costello's puppet, Rayment continues pursuing Marijana, but eventually settles for becoming her son's godfather and benefactor. In order to bond with the boy named Drago, Ray• ment intro duces hirn to his valuable collection of photographs depicting life

Downloaded from Brill.com10/03/2021 07:15:26PM via free access J. M. Coetzee's Complicated Migrations 147 in early Melbourne and on the goldfields - to the effeet that Drago replaees one ofthe pietures with a forged eopy and uploads a digitally doetored ver• sion ofthe photograph on his website. As I will show, Marijana and her fam• ily exhibit a eosmopolitanism that relies neither on the body nor on a notion of authentieity but remains haunted by the ghost of nationalism. Throughout my analysis I triangulate the novel's eompeting eoneepts of identity with Etienne Balibar's ideas on nationality and immigration to assess what is at stake in Coetzee's attempt to eomplieate the reader's notion ofmigration by teasing out ambivalenees of the migratory experienee.

Photography and Authentieity

Slow Man's sustained referenees to photography and the role of Rayment's eolleetion of photographs offer a good starting point for an analysis of the relationship between nationality and identity in the novel. The photographs were taken by Antoine Fauehery (1827-1861), a Freneh writer and photog• rapher who sailed to Australia in 1852 and 1857 and worked in and near Melbourne for several years as a gold-digger and as a photographer. 1 Ray• ment's insistenee on ownership ofthe 'true' Fauehery eonstitutes one of sev• eral interrelated realms in whieh Rayment's yearning to find ahorne is invested and negotiated. Donald Powers sees the funetion ofthe photographs in highlighting the contrast between Rayment seeking identity in clinging to an 'authentie' origin and past and the Joki6 family's more flexible, eosmo• politan view of identity. Rather than representing an authentie origin, the Fauehery photographs demonstrate how the past, in the form of a static image, is open to different interpretations in the present. This eonstrueted nature ofphotographie 'authentieity' is already hinted at by the name Faueh• ery whieh resembles the Freneh wordfaux and the English 'forgery'. Sinee the historieal Fauehery must be seen as a model for Rayment - both were photographers, both emigrated to Australia twiee -, the reader is also invited to note that the name Rayment is not only close to the Freneh vraiment but also to the English 'raiment' whieh eoneeals rather than bares. It is not alto• gether surprising, then, that Rayment's desire for an 'authentie' photograph soon runs into eontradietions. While Rayment insists that Drago has stolen his Fauehery photographs and wants them back, he pretends to be only the temporary eustodian ofthe Fauehery eolleetion and denies his claim to own• ership. Elizabeth Costello debunks Rayment's pretension that he just guards

I See "Fauchery, Antoine", in: Australian Dictionary 0/ Biography, vol. 4, Melboume: Melboume University Press, 1972.

Downloaded from Brill.com10/03/2021 07:15:26PM via free access 148 Kai Wiegandt photos for the sake of national history: he does it also to establish a relation• ship with Drago and his family,2 and that is something entirely different from his desired affiliation with the Australian nation by bequeathing the "Ray• ment Bequest" (p. 49)3 to the State Library of Adelaide. The photos are Rayment's attempt at creating a mutual past of immigra• tion for the Joki6s and hirnself, an unacknowledged nesting on Rayment's part in a family held together by primary identities: the community of the family itself, heredity, ethnicity, etc. It is a strategic attempt to affiliate him• self with the nation that proves too weak to 'Australianize' hirn - to break down primary identities in order to define a particular identity and to offer hirn ahorne. Rayment yeams for such national affiliation but also senses that it cannot be had without letting the nation manipulate his innermost self. As Etienne Balibar argues, national identity is a secondary identity, whereas gender and race are primary identities that constitute anthropological differ• ences. The nation singles out certain primary identities that form the homo nationalis. Carriers ofthese primary identities are national subjects; they are eligible for positions within the nation as long as they repress other primary identities - if these identities are not already broken down through school• ing. 4 The history ofthe Australian nation seems to be captured in the Fauch• erys, and Marijana approves ofRayment's collection because it demonstrates that Australia is not a place "without history, just bush and then mob of immigrants. Like me. Like us" (p. 48). Rayment does not know whether Marijana's "us" inc1udes hirn, however, and soon doubts whether the Fauch• ery collection will accommodate hirn in the tradition the photographs depict: "Look, that is where we come from: [ ... ] Gur story, our past. But is that the truth? Would the woman in the picture accept hirn as one of her tribe? [ ... ] Is

2 Donald Powers, "Emigration and Photography in J. M. Coetzee's Slow Man", in: Journal ojPostcolonial Writing 49:4 (2013), pp. 458-469, here pp. 466 f. 3 Throughout this articie, quotations from Small Man are substantiated in the text and taken from J. M. Coetzee, Slow Man, London: Secker & Warburg, 2005. 4 See Etienne Balibar, We, People ojEurope? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship, trans. by James Swenson, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004, pp. 19-27. Balibar insists that the nation "is not at all an abstract superstructure but the essence ofthe historical construction of human nature - ofwhat Rousseau called 'the human of the human' and of what Freud tried to explain as identification. I, for my part, would use the term homo nationalis" (Etienne Balibar, Nous, Citoyens d'Europe? Les Frontieres, rEtat, le Peuple, Paris: Descouverte, 2013 [eBook], no page, my trans.). Elsewhere Balibar argues more cautiously that a human being is a homo nationalis amongst other personae - animal sociale, homo oeconomicus - "but we cannot of our own accord escape this determination, wh ich penetrates our categories ofthought and action, in order to adopt an opposite point of view, an 'intemationalist' or 'cosmo• politan' worldview for example (these very terms show just how inescapable the na• tional reference is)" (Etienne Balibar, We, People ojEurope? [see above], p. 12).

Downloaded from Brill.com10/03/2021 07:15:26PM via free access J. M. Coetzee's Complicated Migrations 149 the history he wants to claim as his not finally just an affair for the English and the Irish, foreigners keep out?" (p. 52; italics in original). The photo• graphs of Australian history - and, by metonymie extension, of the nation - seem too tenuous and open to interpretation to secure hirn membership in the Joki6 clan. Nationality is at all stages only a means for Rayment offinding a horne in the Joki6 family. The promise ofa primary identification with a fam• ily supersedes the secondary identity offered by the nation. If Rayment shares a particular identity with the Joki6s, he eventually has to look for it in their common non-Anglo-Irish European past and their migratory experi• ence rather than in their being Australian. The novel's longest and most explicit passage on emigration and horne dem• onstrates what is at stake in the debate over the Fauchery photographs, and how Costello forces Rayment to acknowledge his search for ahorne. When Ray• ment tells Costello that Drago has become interested in his collection, Ray• ment speculates that the adolescent Drago must be feeling his way into what it is like to have an Australian past. Rayment insists that he can sympathize with Drago because he is not unfamiliar with the immigrant experience:

I had three doses of the immigrant experience, not just one, so it imprinted itself quite deeply. First when I was uprooted as a child and brought to Australia; then when I dec1ared my independence and retumed to France; then when I gave up on France and came back to Australia. Is this where I belang? I asked with each move. Is this rny true horne? (p. 192; italics in original)

When Costello asks Rayment whether Australia is his horne, he argues that the concept ofhome is

a very English concept [ ... ] Hearth and horne, say the English. To them, horne is the place where the fire bums in the hearth, where you come to warm yourself. The one place where you will not be left out in the cold. No, I am not warm here. [ ... ] Among the French, as you know, there is no horne. Among the French to be at horne is to be among ourselves, among our kind. I am not at horne in France. Transpar• ently not. I am not the we of anyone. (pp. 192 f.; italics in original)

When Rayment later says that he is not at horne but only has aresidence, he tries to explain why for amigrant like him, Australia cannot serve as ahorne: "I can pass among Australians. I cannot pass among the French. That, as far as I am concemed, is all there is to it, to the national-identity business: where one passes and where one does not, where on the contrary one stands out" (p. 197). The remark is one of the instances where the novel ironizes Ray• ment, and where the reader is to detect Rayment's self-deception. As Ray• ment's choice of the disparaging phrase of "the national-identity business" suggests, he is trying to distance himself from such an idea because as a

Downloaded from Brill.com10/03/2021 07:15:26PM via free access 150 Kai Wiegandt multiple emigre, he is unusually lacking in national identity and a sense of horne that is connected with it. Rayment affirms how little he is representa• tive ofmore recent immigrants like the Jokics who have come to their coun• try of destination in the age of accelerated globalization.5 Rayment has come earlier and, as Powers observes, "hardly recommends hirns elf as an emblem• atic migrant figure, for compared to the adaptable Marijana he is someone who resists change (hence the title 'Slow Man') and longs for the stability and security of affiliation".6 These longings, I would add, are present in Marijana and her family too, but the Jokics seem to be able to satisfy them more flexibly than Rayment who can find ahorne only in an 'authentie', primary identity such as the one offered by the family when he wants to become Drago's godfather (see pp. 223 f.). Rayment's fixation on authenticity has biographical roots. He was born in France and, as his birthplace Lourdes suggests, was raised a Catholic. Brought to Australia when he was six years old, he later dropped out ofuni• versity and returned to France. There he tried to establish a rapport with his mother's French family but failed because he "had missed too much ofwhat should have been my formation: not just a proper French schooling but a French youth, including youthful friendships". People called hirn "I 'Anglais", and so he was the odd one out on both continents. After an affair with a

5 Balibar and Anna Tsing convincingly demonstrate that the rapid acceleration of glo• balization in the 1990s involved not only the rise of corporations operating on a glob• al scale and challenging some ofthe nation-state's functions, but also the breakdown ofthe former bi-polar world order which had fenced in global dynamics, new means of communication that made information instantaneously available around the globe, and an increasing awareness of global interdependencies in fields as different as econ• omy, ecology and culture (see Balibar, We, People ojEurope? [see note 4], pp. 146- 150, andAnna Tsing, "The Global Situation", in: Cultura! Anthropo!ogy 15:3 [2000], pp. 327-360, here pp. 330-334). 6 Powers, "Emigration and Photography in J.M. Coetzee's S!ow Man" (see note 2), p. 468. Powers helpfully refers to some stock positions conceming the migrant com• monly held in postcolonial studies and undermined by the Rayment character. As Andrew Smith notes, it is "precisely because they represent a removal from 'old' foundations and from previous 'grounded' ways ofthinking about identity" (Andrew Smith, "Migrancy, Hybridity, and Postcolonial Literary Studies", in: Neil Lazarus [ed.], The Cambridge Companion to Postco!onial Studies, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004, pp. 241-261, here p. 249), such as nationality and ethnicity, that migrants have gained an emblematic status in postcolonialliterary studies. Gra• ham Huggan has critiqued the metaphorization ofmigration in contemporary postco• lonial theory on the grounds that it overlooks "often conspicuously hierarchical atti• tudes towards different migrant groups" (Graham Huggan, "Unsettled Settlers: Postcolonialism, Travelling Theory and the New Migrant", in: Sam DurrantiCathe• rine M. Lord [eds.], Essays in Migratory Aesthetics: Cu!tura! Practices Between Mi• gration and Art-Making, New York: Rodopi, 2007, pp. 129-144, here p. 138).

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Moroccan girl he returned to Australia (see p. 43, pp. 155 f., pp. 195-197, quotes from p. 196; all French terms in italics in original). It is ironie - and understandable - that Rayment, whose development of stable primary iden• tities was prevented by a history of indecisive shuttling between worlds, is the novel 's staunehest defender of authenticity and origins. He who has nev• er enjoyed the comfort of feeling at horne has the hardest time letting go of the desire for ahorne. When Rayment returned to France, he invested his identity in an authenticity and origins that were to cement the factors guar• anteeing his primary identity, and the novelleaves little doubt that he was never quite able to undo this investment upon returning to Australia. His obsessive insistence on the values that supposedly led hirn to go to his native country seem to prevent hirn from building emotional ties with Australia. If there are failed nations -like Yugoslavia - Rayment is a failed homo nation• aUs, and for Rayment his missing leg emblematizes this incompleteness.

Mother Tongue vs. Primary Language

Besides Rayment's body, his speech - equally a primary identity crucial to most definitions of the human - illustrates this dilemma most impressively. Before Costello and Rayment address the topic, the reader observes that "fe jambon" (p. 29, literally 'the harn') as a label for his stump is the first French term to turn up in the novel, and that this term keeps the stump "at a nice, contemptuous distance" (ibid.). This is Rayment's explanation ofhis choice of the French word, for the narrative is focalized through hirn - even if Cos• tello later reveals herself to be Rayment's 'author' - so it appears that the function of French is to alienate the objects and events described by it in order to cope. This suggests that English, not French, constitutes Rayment's primary identity. The suggestion is deceptive, however, because the use of "fejambon" is one ofvery few instances where Rayment's conscious inten• tion to belittle and to distance is plain; another instance is his use of the phrase "the national-identity business" which belittles the question of national identity. The subsequent uses of French follow a different, more spontaneous and more telling logic. Rayment muses that Marijana com• plains about Drago's ''joie de vivre" (p. 41), and here Rayment's term for Marijana's complaints does not have a distancing effect. On the contrary, Rayment seems to use it because it is c10ser to the phenomenon it describes than any English term of similar length; it is arguably an untranslatable term that the English 'joy ofliving' could only c1umsily approximate. Drawing on Barbara Cassin's Vocabufaire europeen des phifosophies: Dictionnaire des intraduisibles, Emily Apter has made the case that each

Downloaded from Brill.com10/03/2021 07:15:26PM via free access 152 Kai Wiegandt language comprises specific terms - for example "cyclopaedia", "peace", "fado", "saudade", "sex", "gender", "monde" - that do not translate into other languages without essential loss of meaning, and that other cultures appropriate these terms by mistranslation.7 Whereas David Damrosch sees translatability and transnational circulation as the metric for texts that quali• fy as world literature,8 Apter's insistence on untranslatability involves a thrust against the hegemony of English because no language can 'absorb' another through translation. Rayment's case illustrates that linguistic identi• ties cannot be translated either. When Rayment next ponders the phrase "Who is going to take care ofyou" (p. 43; italics in original), this leads hirn to the observation that occupe in the French "je m 'en occupe" (p. 44) could have quite a different meaning from the English "care"; namely that his father used the same term when he shot a whimpering dog. Invoking the French translation, and recognizing that the meaning of the French word is quite different, undermines the sense that there is an essential identity of word and meaning, and analogously undermines Rayment's sense of lan• guage as primary identity as such. Australian nationality demands a loosen• ing ofRayment's tie with French qua primary identity, but this tie has already become tenuous. At the same time, English is to Rayment just a language like French - and next to French - and never acquires the status of a primary identity offering a horne in Australia. Coetzee's use ofFrench terms is quite unusual if compared to other writ• ers, who commonly employ terms from a speaker's native language when the speaker is emotionally excited, demonstrating areturn to the 'real' lan• guage that serves as their primary identity.9 In Rayment's case, the French terms highlight that he is the odd one out: a figure between languages, not in a hybrid or cosmopolitan way but in the manner of someone who is lost. Rayment explains to Costello:

7 See Emily Apter, Against World Literature: On the Polities 0/ Untranslatability, Lon• don, New York: Verso, 2013, pp. 31-44, pp. 117-190. Apter traces the belief in uni• versal translatability (which may be more ofa straw man than she admits) to an ideol• ogy of 'oneworldedness', i.e., a planetary paranoia that everything is interrelated by hidden cartels, cyber-surveillance, within and without the nation. Apter insists the concept is different from Wai Chee Dimock's and Gayatri Spivak's notions ofplane• tarity and from Balibar's concept oftransnational citizenship where borders become transitional objects rather than cordans sanitaires, and finds the delirious paranoia of oneworldedness represented in the works ofThomas Pynchon and Don Delillo (see ibid., pp. 70-98). 8 See David Damrosch, What is World Literature?, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003, pp. 1-37. 9 Compare, for example, the use of Afrikaans in Zoe Wicomb's You Can t Get Lost in Cape Town (New York: Feminist Press, 2000).

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As for language, English has never been mine in the way it is yours. Nothing to do with fluency. [ ... ] But English came to me too late. It did not come with my moth• er's milk. In fact it did not come at all. Privately I have always feit myselfto be a kind ofventriloquist's dummy. It is not I who speak the language, it is the language that is spoken through me. It does not come from my core, mon coeur. (pp. 197 f.; italics in original)

Costello will confinn this when she observes that although he speaks English faultlessly, he speaks it like a foreigner who picks words from a word-box. Rayment could not agree more and claims that he speaks like a foreigner because he is one (see pp. 230 f.), and his remarks closely resemble JC's comment in Diary 0/ a Bad Year that "as I listen to the words ofEnglish that emerge from my mouth, I have a disquieting sense that the one I hear is not the one I call myself. Rather, it is as though some other person (but who?) were being imitated, followed, even mimicked".10 Like Rayment, JC relates this to the feeling that he has "no mother tongue",ll but unlike Rayment, he does not dweIl on his own being lost in between languages and cultures but fonnulates a hypothesis about human nature when he ruminates that perhaps "aIllanguages are, finaIly, foreign languages, alien to our animal being. But in a way that is, precisely, inarticulate, inarticulable, English does not feel to me like a resting place, a home"P Why "but"? Because the hope that lan• guage could provide ahorne does not leave JC, and it certainly does not leave Rayment. The question raised by JC is about the role oflanguage in the constitution of the human, whether we are to conceive of it as something added to our animal body or whether the mother tongue - in contrast to our primary let alone secondary language - is not part of our physical being in the way our tongue is part of our body. Only in the second case, these thoughts suggests, does language offer ahorne. The question is addressed at greater length in Here and Now, where Coet• zee describes Australia as a mono lingual, English-speaking nation despite massive immigration from Southem Europe and Asia. He writes that this monolingualism leads to an unquestioned epistemology of how one thinks, feels and relates to others, and prompts his own distancing from and scepti• cism of English. 13 In particular, it strikes hirn that although a person can be more or less monolingual, it is possible that the language this person speaks - even perfectly speaks - is not his or her mother tongue. In Coetzee's child• hood, English was just one of many school subjects. Coetzee's biographer

10 J. M. Coetzee, Diary ofa Bad Year, London: Harvill, 2007, p. 195; italies in original. 11 Ibid. 12 Ibid., p. 197. 13 See Paul Auster/J. M. Coetzee, Here and Now: Letters 2008-2011, London: Faber and Harvill Secker, 2013, p. 73.

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John Kannemeyer explains that Afrikaans was Coetzee's mother tongue and that there was, in fact, a time when Coetzee could have become an Afrikaans writer. 14 When Coetzee emigrated to England in his early twenties, he did not get rid ofthe feeling that although he mastered the rules ofEnglish more perfectly than most natives, he gave himself away as a non-native as soon as he opened his mouth:

I resolved this paradox by distinguishing between two kinds of knowledge. I told myselfthat I knew English in the same way that Erasmus knew Latin, out ofbooks; whereas the people all around me knew the language "in their bones". It was their mother tongue as it was not mine; they had imbibed it with their mother's milk, I had notY

In other words, the mother tongue is part of a body that belongs to nature, whereas Coetzee's English belongs to culture - and not to a particular national culture but to the canon of so-called world literature in English. Both kinds of language constitute the human but constitute it to different degrees: whereas the embodied language of the mother tongue constitutes a primary identity of the speaker, a primary language that is not a mother tongue offers only a secondary identity because it is disembodied. Coetzee's own 'bookishness' - his linguistic self-constitution through a language not his 'own', he argues himself, accounts for the lack oflocal colouring in his English. When he tells Auster that the French editions ofhis works say "Tra• duit de l'ang/ais (Sud-Ajricaine)", he remarks that "[t]o me it reads like anglais purged of markers of national origin, and a little bloodless for that reason". 16 However, more than bloodlessness is at stake; the very concept of identity becomes unstable: "[H]ow much worse if you are good enough at English to hear in every phrase that falls from your pen the echoes of earlier usages, reminders of who owned the phrase before yoU!"17 Paul Rayment, who turns out to be created by Elizabeth Costello, illustrates precisely this bookishness: being made out of books and literature and not possessing words that uniquely define oneself because these words would have to be embodied in a mother tongue. When Rayment says that he has always feit himselfto be a ventriloquist's dummy, it is clear that the relation between English and Rayment mirrors the one between Costello and Rayment. Much has been written about the meta• fictional aspect of the novel as staged in the relationship between Rayment

14 See John C. Kannemeyer, J M Coetzee: A Life in Writing, trans. by Michiel Heyns, Johannesburg, Cape Town: Jonathan Ball, 2012, pp. 40-76. 15 Auster/Coetzee, Here and Now (see note 13), p. 67. 16 Ibid., p. 72; italics in original. 17 Ibid., p. 67.

Downloaded from Brill.com10/03/2021 07:15:26PM via free access J. M. Coetzee's Complicated Migrations 155 and his author Elizabeth Costello,18 but little attention has so far been paid to the function of Slow Man's metafiction in the context ofnational and human identity. To begin with, it is surprising that Rayment's lack of his own lan• guage - or language as a primary identity - does not free hirn from the epis• temological limits of language. The common assumption would be that someone whose use of his native language was never rivalled by another language will be at the mercy of the epistemological framework offered by his native language because he has no point of comparison. Someone who only has a primary language but no mother tongue should be able to distance hirnself from that language, as Coetzee hirnself suggests in a letter to Auster:

I agree that one's weltanschauung is formed by the language that one speaks and writes most easily and, to a degree, thinks in. But it is not formed so deeply that one can never stand far enough outside that language to inspect it critically - particu• larly if one speaks or even just understands another language. That is why I say that it is possible to have a first language yet nonetheless not feel at horne in it: it is, so to speak, one's primary tongue but not one's mother tongue. 19

Slow Man advances and tests the contrary hypothesis that you have to be at horne in a language in order to transcend it, and that a language in which you

18 David Attwell, for example, argues that a "measure of the significance of Coetzee's relocation from South Africa to Australia is that he has moved from apart of the world where conquest and settlement have almost totally failed to one where they have more or less achieved their purpose" (David Attwell, "Coetzee's Postcolonial Diaspora", in: Contemporary Literature 57:1 [2011], pp. 9-19, here p. 10). This re• sults in a "light-touch quality of Coetzee's relation to Australia", and this quality "facilitates a further tuming inward to the preoccupation with authorship itself. That preoccupation has been present in the metafictional treatment Coetzee gives to all his material, but in the Australian writing it becomes more thoroughly allegorized" (ibid., p. 12). Tonje Vold, discussing national identity, reads the novel as a reflection on the idea of world literature. In her reading, novels like Youth and Slow Man undermine the sense that literary capitals such as London or Paris possess singular authority over the definition ofwhat literature is allowed to join the canon: "Coetzee's references to his own work become the means that allow hirn to loop the reader back to his own writing whenever she wanders astray trying to measure its importance with reference to literary 'centrality' in the world ofletters, its 'national themes,' the author's South Africanness or anything beyond the worlds of the novels. By these disorientating strategies, Slow Man attempts to move beyond the hindrances and frameworks of national literature" (Tonje Vold, "How to 'rise above mere nationality': Coetzee's Nove\s Youth and Slow Man in the World Republic of Letters", in: Contemporary Literature 57:1 [2011], pp. 34-53, here p. 48). In another metafictional reading, Zoe Wicomb focuses on the relation between author, character and narrator and extracts lessons about the writer's handling of the 'real' in fiction (see Zoe Wicomb, "Slow Man and the Real: A Lesson in Reading and Writing", in: Graham BradshawlMichael Neill [eds.], J. M Coetzee's Austerities, Famharn: Ashgate, 2010, pp. 215-230). 19 Auster/Coetzee, Here and Now (see note 13), p. 72.

Downloaded from Brill.com10/03/2021 07:15:26PM via free access 156 Kai Wiegandt are not at horne will speak you - as the English writer Costello, and in a sense J. M. Coetzee, speak Paul Rayment - and not vice versa. This points to one ofthe few convictions ab out which the novelleaves no doubts: that it is necessary to have a horne in order to feel sure of one's humanity, and that the perpetual in-between-ness of constantly travelling transnational subjects in a world without identity, as suggested by Deleuze and Guattari,20 is utopian not in the sense that it does not exist yet but that it cannot exist at all. 21 Even the cosmopolitanism ofthe Jokics is marked by adaptability, not by a lack of identity. This does not mean that nationality is essentialized in the novel. It is no coincidence that one ofthe most detailed memories Rayment has ofhis childhood in France is of"a book called Legendes dorees" (p. 129), suggest• ing that his early image of France is as much fiction - or an imagined com• munity, to invoke Benedict Anderson's concept22 - as it is truth. Slow Man shows that even as a collective fiction, the nation fulfils the function of defin• ing a humanity that provides a common identity for its subjects - we are reminded of Balibar - and that this function is what makes the nation attrac• tive for the individual in the first place.23 It is France, rather than Australia, that shows the nation 's power over Ray• ment even if he tries to brush the "national-identity business" away. The

20 See Gilles DeleuzelFelix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus - Capitalism and Schizo• phrenia, trans. Brian Massumi, London, New York: Continuum, 2004, p. 475. 21 This seems a more important connection between the novel's metafictionality and its concem with migration than that pointed out by Dominic Head, who argues that metafictionality reveals the novel's treatment of ethnicity and be\onging to be a 'for• gery'. Head claims that this has partly to do with the facts that novels in general do not lend themselves to the treatment ofpredetermined political and ideological ideas. In that sense, Head argues, Slow Man is poorly suited to a treatise on ethnic hybridity. While the novel can contribute usefully to the debate on Australian social hybridity, it casts doubt on the authority of the writer through the character of Elizabeth Cos• tello. If Costello is an outsider to the world of her own fiction, Coetzee is an outsider as a new immigrant to Australia (see Dominic Head, The Cambridge Introduction to J. M Coetzee, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009, p. 89). It remains un• clear why a novel should not engage with migration in complex and non-polemic ways, and the claim that metafictionality undermines the authority of the writer ap• plies to all metafiction and pays too little attention to the specificities of Slow Man. 22 See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread ojNationalism, revised ed., London: Verso, 1991, pp. 1-8. 23 According to Balibar, national institutions such as the national kinship system, the national churches or confessions or the subdivisions of the national labour market provide secondary, particular identities that guarantee recognition. This means that each man or woman in a nation is an individual with special moral and social qualities that are recognized by the nation: there is, for example, the family man, the amateur musician, the good Christi an, the good Muslim, the worker, the entrepreneur, etc. (see Balibar, We People ojEurope? [see note 4], pp. 27 f.).

Downloaded from Brill.com10/03/2021 07:15:26PM via free access J. M. Coetzee's Complicated Migrations 157 homo nationalis of his imagination bears a French inflection because he expects hirnself to conform to the French model of a man and of a human being in general. That the idea of cultural variants of the human - of homo nationalis - is deeply embedded in Rayment's consciousness is shown when he takes seriously remarks that others would shrug off as petty bickering, for example when he remembers what his ex-wife said about hirn:

Cold was not a word his wife used. What she said was quite different: I thought you were French, she said, I thought you would have same idea. Some idea of what? F or years after she left hirn he puzzled over her words. What were the French, even if only the French oflegend, supposed to have an idea of? Ofwhat will make a wom• an happy? What will make a woman happy is ariddie as old as the Sphinx. Why should a Frenchman have the power to unknot it, much less such a notional French• man as he? (p. 161; italics in original)

Marijana, by contrast, would not even refute the idea of a homo nationalis because the concept as such would be alien to her - wh ich, of course, does not mean that her humanity is not defined by the nation which, for Balibar, cannot be separated from nationalism and whose essence is to exclude those who do not match its definition ofthe properly human.24 Marijana is not free from such nationalism and the ressentiments it entails when she teIls Ray• ment about her daughter's theft of a chain from a shop. The lewish shop owner, she says, claims the chain was of silver and demands an extortionate sum in compensation. When Rayment asks how Marijana knows the shop owner is a lew, Marijana answers evasively: "OK, he is lew, he is not lew, is not important", and Rayment returns: "Perhaps I am a lew. Are you sure I am not a lew?" (p. 168) Rayment is uncomfortable with Marijana's latent anti• Semitism, a sentiment that is most likely imported from Europe where it has a long tradition and was used to sharpen national self-definition through denial of the humanity of 'non-Germans', 'non-Croatians', particularly of the giobally dispersed lewish population that was not united in a nation.25

24 See Balibar, We, People ofEurope? (see note 4), pp. 1-10, pp. 101-114, pp. 120-132. Since it is not possible to find a set of attributes and practices that simultaneously lets a huge group of heterogeneous subjects appear as homogeneous without including other subjects (that is, subjects belonging to another nation), Balibar explains, the definition of normality must be exclusive and therefore paradoxically proclaim some nationals to be more valid than others. In other words, the creation of a homo na• tionalis supposedly ensuring coherence among citizens positions some at the centre of society and pushes others to its periphery. This leads, for example, to the simulta• neous inclusion of minorities in legal terms and their exclusion in social terms. 25 Anderson addresses the 'discontinuous link' between nationalism and racism in Im• agined Communities: "The fact of the matter is that nationalism thinks in terms of historical destinies, while racism dreams of etemal contaminations, transmitted from the origins of time through an endless sequence of loathsome copulations: outside

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Emigration, Amputation, and Diminished Man

Rayment is childless, divorced, retired and living solitarily. He has barely been connected to the world even before his accident. The loss of his leg aggravates his isolation, as it limits his movements and provides Rayment a posteriori with a reason for his solitary existence, leading in a vicious circle of causes and effects to even deeper solitude. The loss of his leg also rein• forces his alienation from Australia in a specific way. When Dr. Hansen decides without Rayment's consent that his leg be amputated and that a pros• thesis be fitted to the stump, Rayment realizes that the nation he sought to belong to severed his physical wholeness for an idea ofhealth that is not his own. The seemingly banal Dr. Hansen turns out to represent the nation's authority to draw the line between health and illness.26 First Hansen severs the body which Rayment wants to keep whole by all means (see p. 15). Then he seeks to manipulate Rayment's bodily identity again by forcing an artifi• cialleg onto his stump rather than letting Rayment be his crippled self. The same infringement on Rayment's 'authentie self' would have occurred in other nations with similar ideas of health and wholeness, including France. But the accident happens in Australia and those who operate on Rayment are Australian. The severed leg thus not only emblematizes to Rayment his alienation from Australia but also increases this alienation. Dr. Hansen is professional, emotionally detached and lacking in charisma, a personifica• tion ofbureaucracy, associated with papers rather than the surgeon's knife. Like the knife, these papers bring Rayment's identity into line with ideas that are not his own: "First the violation, then consent to the violation. There are papers to sign before he will be left alone, and the papers prove surprisingly difficult" (p. 8). The papers are difficult because they force Rayment to reveal his family situation and - even more importantly - to describe that situation in words that fit one of the boxes the nation state offers for his answer: divorced, no children (see pp. 8 f.). Australia defines Rayment pre• cisely when he least welcomes it. The hospital is related to that other national institution ensuring the homo• geneity ofthe population - healthy, well-educated humans - that Slow Man repeatedly refers to: the school. Wellington College - the school Drago wants to attend - is not astate school, but as a feeder school for the Defence Force Academy (see p. 90) would strongly affiliate Drago with the Australi-

history. Niggers are, thanks to the invisible tar-brush, forever niggers; Jews, the seed of Abraham, forever Jews, no matter what passports they carry or what languages they speak and read. (Thus for the Nazi, the Jewish German was always an impos• tor.)" (Anderson, Imagined Communities [see note 22], p. 149; italies in original) 26 See Balibar, We, People ofEurope? (see note 4), p. 240 n. 21.

Downloaded from Brill.com10/03/2021 07:15:26PM via free access J. M. Coetzee's Complicated Migrations 159 an nation. Rayment stresses the importance ofthe school when he blames his own schooling for neither fitting with the French, nor with the Australians completely. When he retumed to France, he lacked the experience of a French school and the youthful friendships that blossom in it, which ren• dered hirn not French enough to connect with his French relatives of the same age and to feel at horne (see p. 196). Early schooling in Australia could have made hirn at horne in that country, but as with language, his mixed schooling has made Rayment the odd one out. The only Australian institution he associates with positive feelings seems to be the State Library of Adelaide, invested with Rayment's hope to inscribe hirnself into the historie al record through the bequest ofhis Fauchery photo• graphs. This may even be possible, but it may not be enough. What sense of horne can Rayment's well-meaning towards Australia entail, compared with the love he feels for Marijana's family? The question draws on a central dichotomy of The Childhood of Jesus, where the homogenizing school appears in a more sinister light than in Slow Man: the dichotomy between goodwill, which might be enough to keep a nation running, and love, which satisfies the desires of citizens - in Rayment's case notably the desire for a horne. Even the National Library, it appears, can only spark Rayment's well• meaning but not the love that could make hirn feel at horne, and that seems to be the nature of national institutions. When the novel eventually suggests that Rayment and Costello could become a couple, it is no coincidence that their (im)possible union is described in terms that echo the novel's concem with nationality. Costello is imagining something she at least faindy knows is oxymoronic when she tells Rayment: "We could tour the whole land, the twO ofus, the whole ofthis wide brown land, north and south, east and west. [ ... ] We would become a well-loved Australian institution. What an ideal What a capital ideal Is this love, Paul? Have we found love at last?" (p. 263) A "national institution" and "love" - these two do not go together, and nei• ther do Paul Rayment and Elizabeth Costello. Trusting national institutions less than ever after his accident, Rayment feels that both his authentie self and his bond with Australia are damaged beyond repair. David Attwell has argued that Rayment's unwillingness actively to embrace a diasporic identity has to do with Rayment's feeling of post-historicity. Although the accident prompts hirn to say that "a new life commence[ s]" (p. 26), it is an afterlife of sorts: his formative experiences lie elsewhere and he enters arealm of private accommodations.27 Since the novel associates the truncation of Rayment's leg - a potentially lethalloss - with emigration and existential homelessness, Attwell's comment suggests

27 See Attwell, "Coetzee's Postcolonial Diaspora" (see note 18), p. 11.

Downloaded from Brill.com10/03/2021 07:15:26PM via free access 160 Kai Wiegandt that emigration is somehow assoeiated with the idea of an afterlife. The key to understanding the nature of this assoeiation is memory. The question whether the soul has a memory of the life it has passed on from after death is raised in Diary 0/ a Bad Year where, in JC's remark, the world of The Childhood 0/ Jesus ean be glimpsed: "[t]he persistenee ofthe soul in an unreeognizable form, unknown to itself, without memory, without identity, is another question entirely".28 Slow Man and The Childhood 0/ Jesus give us two vers ions of an afterlife, with memory of the past life, and without. In The Childhood 0/ Jesus, nationality is strangely erased from memory, and the journey to this afterlife seems less of an 'emigration' beeause of this laek of memory. It is more like being born again and thus truly deserving of the name 'new life'. The pain radiating from Rayment's missing leg, on the other hand, is equivalent to the memory of the soul that has emigrated to an afterlife but is plagued by memories ofthe first life. This is why Rayment says: "There is no sueh thing as a new life. We have only one life, one eaeh" (p. 246). Unlike David and Sim6n of The Childhood 0/ Jesus, Rayment is not eommeneing a new life and eannot eseape his past beeause he remains attaehed to it through the umbilieal eord of memory. Rayment's life in Australia is a seeond, redueed stage ofhis life, or a meta• phorieal afterlife. If it provides a reading of what 'emigration' means, it is a dark reading, equating emigration with a erippling of the self that does not only involve the self's body but also, as Rayment remarks, its soul. Some part of hirn, he realizes, will always stay Freneh and will thus prevent hirn from ever beeoming a homo Australicus. Rayment's insistenee on an 'authen• tie', eomplete body is motivated by the memory of his former body that made hirn a 'man in full', while his yearning for an 'authentie' horne is moti• vated by the memory of his birth in Franee. Balibar argues that the body is often the site of resistanee against the 'nation-form's' attempts to break down and reeonstruet primary identities. Even if individuals intelleetually reeognize the primaey of nationality, they ean uneonseiously, physieally, oppose integration.29 To be sure, the erippling of Rayment's body and his humiliation are existential blows that damage mueh else besides his ties to the nation. Rayment is one ofCoetzee's wooden men who will rather break than undergo a transformation into another being.30 Beeause ofhis insistenee on the body as a primary identity Rayment is not flexible enough to aeeept the prosthesis he is offered (see p. 10). But

28 Coetzee, Diary ofa Bad Year (see note 10), p. 154. 29 See Balibar, We, People ofEurope? (see note 4), pp. 28-30. 30 Compare, for example, Coetzee's fictionalized alter ego John in Summertime whom his former dancing teacher Adriana describes as a "wooden man" (1. M. Coetzee, Summertime: Scenesfrom Provincial Life, London: Harvill Secker, 2009, p. 200).

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Rayment's unwillingness to have his body reeonstrueted also eontains resist• anee against national pedagogy. The truneation ofhis leg, whieh he believes has erippled his self, was after all performed by a representative ofhis adopt• ed nation's health system, Dr. Hansen (see p. 17). Shortly after the aeeident, Rayment still insists that only his body has been damaged, but that his humanity is somehow still intaet:

The man he used to be is just a memory, and a memory fading fast. He still has a sense ofbeing a soul with an undiminished soul-life; as for the rest ofhim, it is just a sack of blood and bones that he is forced to carry around. [ ... ] [H]e is trying to remain a man, albeit a diminished man. [ ... ] A man not wholly a man, then: a half• man, an after-man, like an after-image; the ghost of a man looking back in regret on time not weil used. (pp. 32-34)

All old people beeome Cartesians beeause they try to assert the integrity of their spirit vis-a-vis the deeay of their bodies, JC states in Diary 0/ a Bad YearY Rayment's aeeident, Costello observes eorreetly, is only an antieipa• tion ofwhat happens to all people growing old, and his initial reaetion to the aeeident is likewise the reaetion of all people who are growing old: he attempts to salvage his spirit from the wreek of his body, whieh in his ease allows hirn to hope for redemption for "time not well used". The words refer to the obligation that, Rayment feels, comes with being a 'man': the obliga• tion to proereate that he has frivolously ignored. His awakening desire for Marijana, involving his will to become part ofher family or at least Drago's godfather, promises this redemption whieh will be a redemption purely of the soul. The stump he earries around is, tellingly, an "unwanted ehild" (p. 58), i.e., not the right one, but he nevertheless prefers erutehes to a prosthesis beeause "[e]rutehes are honest" (ibid.) in the sense that they do not pretend that his primary identity is intaet. However, it is preeisely this insistenee on authentieity that Marijana eriti• eises as more artifieial than a prosthesis would be. Isn 't it more natural to walk like normal, prototypieal, unimpaired humans - even ifwith the help of a prosthesis - than to walk the way an impaired person would 'naturally' walk? (see p. 59) The status of the prosthesis is ambivalent beeause it is a supplement in Derrida's sense: the prosthesis belongs to the body beeause the body needs it in order to be eomplete and to perform all its funetions, and yet it does not belong to the body and is disowned by Rayment in an effort to be authentie. Brushing these diffieulties aside, Marijana's answer is prag• matie and clear: "Of course we want to hold on to our old memory systems. [ ... ] Otherwise we would not be human. But we must not hold on to them

31 See Coetzee, Diary ofa Bad Year (see note 10), p. 181.

Downloaded from Brill.com10/03/2021 07:15:26PM via free access 162 Kai Wiegandt when they hinder our progress" (p. 60). It is not our sense of our humanity that matters, Marijana implies, but that we manage to get on, both in terms of physieal movement and of adaptation to our new environment. Marijana reverses Rayment's hierarehy of authentieity and adaptability when she pits her eosmopolitanism against Rayment's belief in origins and primary identi• ties. Marijana's eomments suggest a eore tenet of a partieular version of posthumanism: that the human is "fundamentally a prosthetie ereature that has eoevolved with various forms of teehnieity and materiality, forms that are radieally 'non-human' and have yet made the human what it iS".32 The human is not only a hybrid beeause human and animal are amalgamated in itself, but also beeause it eompletes itself with things; and as the nature of these eomplements varies, no universal claims ean be made about the human.33 In this view, Rayment's erutehes and the prosthesis fulfil the same eomplementary funetion, though the prosthesis fulfils it more perfeetly, less visibly; eaeh option renders hirn a different but nonetheless authentie human being. Rayment's and Marijana's approaehes to authentieity show how life experienees, rather than pure reason, shape beliefs and make persons more or less suseeptible to views sueh as the prosthetie nature of the human - a point even more explieitly made in Elizabeth Costello where Costello's lee• tures are embedded in stories that shed light on what kinds of experienees might have led Costello to hold some of her opinions. Diary of a Bad Year follows a similar agenda by juxtaposing opinion and experienee vertieally on eaeh page. If Rayment found Marijana responsive to his love, he would possibly be eonvineed by her belief in the transformability of identity. Marijana would literally transform hirn and perform the validity of her argument, but Ray• ment's failure to win Marijana strengthens his beliefthat his authentie 'man• hood' is lost. As he believes less and less in the Cartesian line between his damaged body and his mind, the loss of his leg is no longer just a material loss but a "hole in his existence" (p. 183; italies in original). Rayment knows Augustine's argument that bodily parts are unruly beeause of man's fallen nature, but he disagrees. The body is hirn, and his most sublime love is also bodily love: "It all feels one to hirn, one movement: the swelling ofthe soul,

32 Cary Wolfe, What is Posthumanism?, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009, p. xxv. 33 Donna Haraway's "A Cyborg Manifesto" was an early and infiuential model for the argument, although her manifesto was primarily to show feminism a way from es• sentialist identity politics to a politics of chosen affinities (see Donna Haraway, Sim• ians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention ofNature, New York: Routledge, 1991, pp. 149-181). Posthumanism has broadened this claim and often given Haraway's cyborg metaphor a more literal reading.

Downloaded from Brill.com10/03/2021 07:15:26PM via free access J. M. Coetzee's Complicated Migrations 163 the swelling of the heart, the swelling of desire. He eannot imagine loving God more than he loves Marijana at this moment" (p. 186). The impossibil• ity of separating mind from body seems to affeet Rayment's ability to adapt to a new environment and to adopt a new identity, and therefore to widen the gap between hirn and Marijana. Just as weighty as the faet that his primary bodily identity has been violated is Rayment's diseovery that his mind ean• not emaneipate itself from the body, regardless of whether that body is erip• pled or not. Refusing the prosthesis, Rayment is ready to suffer for the sake of his primary identity. Marijana's eosmopolitanism, on the other hand, refutes the authority of the body when she proposes to get rid of "our old memory sys• tems". In her view, the body is permanently under eonstruetion by training and - if needed - by the addition of a prosthesis. If she ean more easily iden• tify with her new nation than Rayment despite his more extended residenee in Australia, it is also beeause less stands in the way of her adapting to the new environment. Her example shows that eosmopolitanism, understood as an attitude and an ability rather than as a norm,34 is not a laek ofrootedness in nationality but the ease of adopting a new nationality, and that this ease in her ease involves an attitude towards the body that differs from Rayment's. When Marijana says that we would not be human if we did not want to hold on to our old memory-systems but that we should get rid ofthem when they hinder our progress, she suggests that adaptation does not eontradiet authen• tie humanity even if it involves ehanging the body as the earrier of a seem• ingly 'authentie' humanity. Slow Man's ambivalenee regarding these different approaehes to the adoption of a new national identity shows in the body's ill-fitting the new form. The novel abounds with deseriptions of the eharaeters' bodies - not only Rayment's, but also of the bodies of stout Marijana, her tall and lanky husband, of Drago and others, but only Rayment's body is violated and serves to test whether the nation - including its approaehes to health, mobil• ity and ultimately humanity - ean eonstruet his body without alienating hirn. Rayment's bodily integrity is the most eonvineing justifieation of his cling• ing to notions of authentieity beeause its uniqueness and its being Rayment are immediately clear to the reader: manifest evidenee that bodies eannot be

34 Vertovec et al. point out the potential meanings the term 'cosmopolitanism' has ac• quired in academic, political and public discourse: cosmopolitanism as a socio-polit• ical condition, as a philosophy or worid-view, a political project for creating transna• tional institutions, a political project to allow people to act upon their multiple subject positions, the cultivation of an attitude, or an ability to deal with others in the world (see Steven Vertovec/Robin Cohen [eds.], Conceiving Cosmopolitanism: Theory, Context and Practice, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002, pp. 9-14).

Downloaded from Brill.com10/03/2021 07:15:26PM via free access 164 Kai Wiegandt constructed as freely as nationalities. Rayment's suffering demonstrates that there is no way to be something other than your body, and that being a Car• tesian - in the sense ofretreating to the realm ofthe mental- is an untenable position. There is, in other words, something heroie, if Quixotic, in Ray• ment's insistence on authenticity. His attitude suggests that the tendency to regard one's body as a commodity that can be optimized through exercise and surgery is misguided. Marijana, to be sure, would not go so far as to regard the body as commodity; but her belief in adaptability, training and prosthetic supplementation endorses a constructivist approach to the body, which is rejected not only by Rayment but also, it seems, by Coetzee him• self. Cosmopolitan adaptability as evinced by the Joki6s, the novel suggests, may only be possible because decolonization and globalization have not reinstated local culture in former colonies such as Australia, as Stuart Hall remarked, but has left them open to a globalization of capitalism and particu• larly of American mass culture.35 If the world has become more homogene• ous, adaptation has become easier, but adaptation to what? As Richard Sen• nett has shown, one of the trends in American capitalist society has been that the self markets itself as a product for the labour market, the marriage mar• ket, etc., and therefore has to understand itself as malleable.36 This is espe• cially the case for immigrants like the Joki6s who held jobs with higher prestige and pay in Croatia - Miroslav was an engineer, Marijana a restora• tion curator - and who had to reinvent themselves as members of the upwardly mobile working classes: he as a mechanic, she as a nurse. Rayment thinks that Marijana does "not wholly cast offthe old world in favour ofthe new" (p. 40) because she wears a head-scarf "like any good Balkan house• wife" (ibid.), but these seem to be cliche projections on Rayment's part. If Marijana wears the head-scarf, the novel gives no reason to suspect that she does it to make a point about her Croatian origins.

Cosmopolitan Adaptability and the Ghost ofYugoslavia

Although the novel hints at a possibly negative background of adaptability, it seems unusually partial in deconstructing Rayment's position and demon• strates that the Joki6s' approach to the question ofhome and identity is more

35 See Stuart Hall, "The Local and the Global: Globalization and Ethnicity", in: A. King (ed.), Culture, Globalization and the World System, New York: Macmillan, 1991, pp. 19-40, here p. 27. 36 In The Corrosion ofCharacter (New York: Norton, 1998), Richard Sennett also iden• tifies changed attitudes towards risk, failure and routine.

Downloaded from Brill.com10/03/2021 07:15:26PM via free access J. M. Coetzee's Complicated Migrations 165 attuned to the globalized age. Things whose authenticity and preservation would be valuable to Rayment are hidden pragmatically by Marijana: although she is Catholic, she takes care to keep her religion to herself in secular Australia; although she is an educated woman, she shows no preten• sions of dass, even less so than Marijana's husband who does not want Dra• go to go to the fancy Wellington college because it seems snobbish (see p. 43, p. 86, p. 147). Drago in particular is the novel's exponent ofadaptabil• ity. The boy was born in Croatia and knows no other world than a globalized one, his age assigning hirn a crucial role in the Jokic family's immigration to Australia. In contrast to The Childhood of Jesus with its exceptional child hero David, Slow Man makes the point that finding a new horne is a skill that decreases with age. As Peter Burke observes, there are social groups and age cohorts within amigrant population that typically advance the founding of hornes while others stay more passive, and it is well-known that young migrants commonly live a double life, one traditional and following the cus• toms of their parents' culture, and one adapted to the new home.37 Drago plays an increasingly significant role in the novel 's testing of ideas - a dynam• ic that is the heartbeat of Coetzee's fiction in general- and further compli• cates Rayment's and Marijana's approaches to migration and adaptability. As I will show in this final section, his extreme fonn of cosmopolitan adapt• ability is itself pitted against a historical scenario that remains in the back• ground but preserves the rhythm of doubt characterizing all of Coetzee's writing. Drago has just enough experience of life in Croatia to understand it and has absorbed Croatian values and habits from his parents. He speaks fluent Croatian, is familiar with the native country ofhis parents from holidays (see p. 179, p. 183) and is able to switch between cultures for a telephone call. But he identifies with Australia, as demonstrated by his wish to join the national defence forces. lronicaIly, the flexibility that comes with Drago's youth also leads hirn to question the relevance of age - along with the rele• vance of one's geographical origin - when it comes to the ability to adopt new ways oflife and possibly new identities. He teIls Rayment ofhis grand• parents he visited in Zadar last Christmas. His grandparents are "prerty old" and "overtaken by time" like Rayment, but they quickly adapted to using the computer Marijana bought for them, so they can now shop online, exchange emails and receive pictures fromAustralia. "So you can choose" (all p. 179), Drago sums up his lesson, implying that adaptability is a matter ofwill rath• er than of age. His grandparents may have lived their life in apart of the world other people thought backward or even benighted, but this does not

37 See Peter Burke, Cultural Hybridity, Cambridge: Polity, 2009, pp. 62-70.

Downloaded from Brill.com10/03/2021 07:15:26PM via free access 166 Kai Wiegandt prevent them from quiekly adapting to advaneed teehnologies. Drago sug• gests that eategories like age, nationality and even history have fluid borders and are not as limiting as Rayment thinks they are, and ultimately that the same goes for the eoneept of horne. Like no other eharaeter of Slow Man, Drago puts the nation's ability to furnish an individual with a reliable iden• tity in question. His example suggests that in an age of globalization, Bali• bar's homo nationalis is dissolving into hybrid self-eonstruetions, and that these self-eonstruetions fit more and more easily into Western soeieties that have beeome inereasingly hybrid. If there is a eounterweight to optimistie Drago, a eharaeter so perfeet he barely seems real (Costello likens hirn to an angel who has kept traees ofhis 'horne', i.e., heaven; p. 182), then that eounterweight exists only in the form ofhints. The novel aeknowledges the desire for essentials and authentieity as human and hints at the possibility that this desire may break through the homogeneous surfaee prepared by the nation-state, espeeially of a nation• state that homogenizes a broad array of ethnieities. Even ifDrago's example suggests that a nation ean inseribe hybridity into its statutes, this hybridity remains ultimately fragile. Crities have given little thought to the question of why Croatia is Coet• zee's ehoiee for Marijana's native eountry. The faet that many Southern Europeans have reeently migrated to Australia may have played a role, but more relevant seems the faet that Croatia is a former, 'severed' part ofYugo• slavia, the multi-ethnie nation that proved too weak to be eapable of dissolv• ing the partieular ethnie and religious identities of its different peoples in order to prevent ideologies of 'authentie' ethnieity (for example, Serb or Croat) and 'authentie' religion (Christian or Muslim) from fuelling hostile eonfliet. The lesser evil of anational eoneept of the properly human gave way to eivil war in whieh eaeh group insisted on its exc1usive humanity. Behind the eosmopolitan adaptability ofthe Jokics thus 100m at least nomi• nally the failed nation ofYugoslavia and the Balkan wars, mentioned in pass• ing just onee (see p. 64) and indieating the danger that ean lie in primary identities resisting the homogenizing forees of the nation. Peter Burke points out that it is no eoineidenee that the present age of eultural globalization is also the age ofreaetive nationalisms and ethnieities,38 and while Coetzee is eareful not to overstate any eausality between Marijana and Miroslav JokiC's emigration to Australia and the war in Croatia, the war may well have played a erueial role. "What were they fleeing when they fled the old eountry?", Rayment wonders about Marijana and her husband (p. 40), hinting that it may well have been the war without naming it. After

38 See ibid., p. 7.

Downloaded from Brill.com10/03/2021 07:15:26PM via free access J. M. Coetzee's Complicated Migrations 167 all, the reader is told that Marijana Joki6 left Croatia for Australia twelve years before (see p. 27), and ifthe novel's publication in 2005 may serve as a measure, the Joki6s emigrated around 1993, in the middle of the wars in Croatia (1991-1995) and Bosnia (1992-1995). Of all possible names Miro• slav Joki6's sister Lidija bears the sumame Karadzi6 (see p. 135, p. 167). The reader cannot but take this as an allusion to the notorious Bosnian Serb lead• er Radovan Karadzi6, president of the self-declared autonomous Bosnian Serb republic, held responsible, among other crimes, for the murder of more than 7000 Muslim Bosniaks in the town ofSrebrenica in July 1995.39 Coet• zee tellingly complicates the allusion because Radovan Karadzi6 is a Bos• nian Serb and the Joki6s are Croatian. But the incongruence of ethnicities in one person's name - Lidija Karadzi6 - could be precisely the point. The question as to whether there is a Serbo-Croatian language or only Serbian and Croatian mayaiso playa role. Lidija, who uses a Croatian proverb (see p. 135) and is herself most likely a Croat, has probably married aSerb. The ethnicities are intimate with each other on the most personal level, and yet they have been bitterly divided. "Lidija and Marijana do not get on, have never got on" (p. 135), Costello knows, strengthening the subtext of ethnic hostility that exists even within a single family. Focussing on Drago and obliquely referencing the Yugoslav wars, Coet• zee adds yet another facet to his novel's searching exploration ofthe ambiv• alences and contradictions of the migratory experience - of a search for horne that is no less urgent for being inconclusive.

39 See Robert J. Donia, Radovan Karadiic: Architect olthe Bosnian Genocide, Cam• bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014, pp. 248-273.

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