To Speak In His Own Voice

J. M. Coetzee, the Nobel Prize winner, is in the foremost rank of contemporarywriters. As a writer of fiction and scholarship, Coetzee musters his scholarly resourcesbehind him. An engagement with linguistic questions is always at the core of Coetzee’swriting. In his sustained attention to problems of language across his novels and criticalessays, Coetzee makes an active and original contribution to contemporary literary-criticalthinking. Thinking in the tracks of Coetzee as critic, with the combination of his fictionsand critical essays, this dissertation explores the relations between Coetzee’s linguisticchoices and ethical value and aesthetic effects of the linguistic structures that he puts intoplay.It’s impossible to appreciate Coetzee’s academic concerns without examining theframe of postcolonial context and Coetzee’s Diaspora experience. Being in marginality, heputs forward the term ‘countervoice’ which has linguistic-philosophical underpinnings. Itis in this context, then, that Coetzee’s aspiration to ‘speak in his own voice’ takes on theconnotation of raising the coutervoices within himself.Coetzee strongly prefers not to say ‘I’. Various strategies such as use of the thirdperson, questions related to autobiography, confession, authorship and the authority of thewriter as focus of his critical essays, the deployment of fictional characters, etc. are usedby Coetzee to question the authority of the writing self, the ‘I’.The ethics and aesthetics of literary address in Coetzee’s oeuvre is a field invitingattention. Complicated situations and human encounters in various forms is a recurrentmotif in Coetzee’s novels. Coetzee’s fictional characters in a deeply divided society wherea language of equal exchange seems to be unavailable are desperate in establishingintimacy. What’s more, Coetzee reflects on literary address from philosophical perspectivein his critical pieces.Coetzee is deeply concerned with historical changes reflected in languages ofdifferent races. His investigation into history is often done through linguistic analysis ofmorphology, etymology, etc. In Coetzee’s works the question of names has more to dowith the history of its namers than it has to do with the geography of the place. Names tell us about the shifting literary landscapes in which those who have the authority to name arealso revealed. Coetzee explores the specific historical effects of language that names carrywith them.Coetzee claims that history is unrepresentable. Ideas of etymologies in Coetzee oftenseem to be occasioned by an enquiry into the capacity of language to tell the truth, whichexposes the impossibility of conveying extreme physical and psychological suffering inliterary language. Nevertheless, Coetzee tries his best to imagine torture and death on hisown terms.With justice in mind, Coetzee revolts against membership of any group and maintainsthe position of speaking from marginality. Coetzee always holds that a serious writershould awaken countervoices in himself and embark upon speech with them. His oeuvrecan be though of as responding to questions, to sources of literary inspiration, and tophilosophical ideas. During writing-in-response, Coetzee develops his own uniqueliterary-critical discourse and in so doing maintains his consistent efforts to speak in hisown voice.