University of Calgary PRISM: University of Calgary's Digital Repository Graduate Studies The Vault: Electronic Theses and Dissertations 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 What is Done in Silence: Agency, Narrative, and Silence in J.M. Coetzee’s Foe and Slow Man (Unpublished master's thesis).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 University of Calgary graduate students retain copyright ownership and moral rights for their thesis. You may use this material in any way that is permitted by the Copyright Act or through licensing that has been assigned to the document. For uses that are not allowable under copyright legislation or licensing, you are required to seek permission. Downloaded from PRISM: https://prism.ucalgary.ca UNIVERSITY OF CALGARY What is Done in Silence: Agency, Narrative, and Silence in J.M. Coetzee’s Foe and Slow Man by 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 © Stephen Bauhart 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. ii 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. iv 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 v 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. 2 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