Discourse, Gender And Body:the Study Of J.M.Coetzee’s Postcolonial Writing

John Maxwell Coetzee, a famous contemporary South-African novelist and the winner of the2003Nobel Prize for Literature, is entitled the "two literary stars" in South Africa together with Nadine Gordimer. In Coetzee’s post-colonial works, discourse, gender, and physic are the three perspectives from which Coetzee builds his literary mansion. At present, researchers to Coetzee do have touched these three perspectives, but their researches are not systematic and profound. Adopting discourse, narrative, gender, and physical theories, starting from Coetzee’s texts, as well as integrating the principles of theoretical analysis and text reading, this paper makes a discussion on Coetzee’s post-colonial creation from the historical, gender and physical perspectives in the post-colonial context of South Africa.Novel is an art for narration, and it is also an important means for Coetzee to express the theme of anti-colonialism. Therefore, in the process of writing this paper, the writer gives the same importance to the content and formality of the novel, analyzes the novel by integrating the content and the narrative techniques of the novel, so as to meet the shortfall of considering content more than formality in previous research. This paper aims to show that from discourse, gender and physical perspectives, Coetzee reveals the basis of discourse mechanism, philosophical and historical ethnics in the development of colonial history; discusses the strategies concerning discourse, gender, and physic in the deconstruction of colonialism; creates his own theory of discourse for novels; advocates to build an existence mode of diversified discourse; expresses his pursuit for the inter-subjectivity of the relationship among gender, race, and culture; discusses a natural, harmonious, and diversified standard of historical ethnics. These theories established by Coetzee enrich, to a large extent, the theoretical system of post-colonialism. Some ideas brought by Coetzee’s works not only play a guiding role, practically, in solving South African Problem, but bear significant reference value, theoretically, in settling racial, national, cultural conflicts and other ones existing in the context of globalization.This paper consists of five parts, including Introduction, the First Chapter, the Second Chapter, the Third Chapter and Conclusion. Introduction mainly introduces Coetzee, his creation, and the study on them both at home and abroad, and demonstrates the reasons for choosing this topic, the studying method, and the content of each Chapter. In the first Chapter, the first part analyzes the basis on which "African mythology" is established, and shows that the colonists impose their ideology on historical description by taking the advantage of fictional history. They establish "African mythology" on the basis of their discourse authority. By means of repression discourse such as observing and imaging the others in colonies, the colonists, on one hand, establish their authority, and on the other, internalize this repression mechanism into a psychological mode, thus it becomes a vital tool for colonial government. The second part discusses Coetzee’s theoretical skeleton of the relationship between history and novel. From Coetzee’s view, literature, as a form of discourse, plays an important role in building up the historical mythology of South Africa, and is an important contributor in weaving up colonial history and in promoting its development. So, in Coetzee’s eye, literature is somehow colonized by colonial history. Based on this, Coetzee disagrees with the idea that the novel should be the byproduct of history. Instead, he thinks that novel is a kind of discourse, and so is history. Further, he thinks that the novel should build its own operational mechanism according to its own way, establish its own mythology, and become an important form to confront history. To avoid the phenomenon that realism has become a tool for political expression in South African literature, Coetzee deliberately discards realistic way of creation in his works, and draws a sharp contrast both in content and descriptive techniques between his way of creation and realistic one, so as to justify his idea that history and novel are independent discourse systems. The third part analyzes Coetzee’s deconstructive strategies of discourse in his post-colonial narration from the aspect of deconstructing major historical narration. Coetzee’s works base themselves on the concerns upon current situation of South Africa and whole history of human beings. From the multiple perspectives of a diasporic writer, Coetzee tires to establish a multiple, and conversational existing form of discourse by deconstructing major narration in colonial literature through allegorical creation, classic adaptation, fictional narration of history, marginal narration, and unauthoritative narration.The second chapter analyzes the gender conceptions in Coetzee’s works by using the gender theory. Firstly, Coetzee overthrows the gender images including that of men and women so as to deny imperial authority. He is fully aware that the colonial system and the gender relations share the same construction. In his literature creation, Coetzee deconstructs the images of imperial men and constructs the images of women so as to question and overthrow the control mechanism over gender images under colonial system and criticize and reveal the empire’s gender suppression. At the same time, Coetzee introduces the spacial gender rhetoric into his works like In the Heart of the Country and Foe etc. and overturns the spacial gender suppression mechanism of colonialism. Secondly, the use of narrative skills has also become an important strategy in Coetzee’s gender conceptions. In quite a number of his works, Coetzee chooses female as narrators and intentionally uses some marginal female style as narrative carrier of the female. As a result, the voice which is made silent in the colonial narration has been reproduced and the historical mode of rational narration characterized by male has been broken. However, different from the narrative effect expected by feminists, the voice of female in Coetzee’s narration is unstable and has even been submerged in the end. The sexism presented by Coetzee is not the suppression of people’s voice but a process in which the voice of female is being wiped out and submerged so that readers can understand the operation mechanism of colonial system. Furthermore, Coetzee shows the socializing dilemma among people under colonial context from the angle of gender so as to explore the ways that female can break through the lonely dilemma. In his works, the protagonists try to break the dilemma in their interpersonal relations by gender-crossing and interracial sisterhood etc. However, Coetzee does not give his credit for their attempts but questions the effect and realistic possibility of interracial "sex marriage" against the backdrop of racial segregation. He probes into the root of the dilemma and criticizes the contradiction of binary opposition caused by western mainstream rational philosophy. By doing this, Coetzee expresses his intersubjective pursuit about interpersonal relationship, gender, race and cultural relations.The third chapter analyzes the body writing in Coetzee’s works by using the theory of body. Firstly, Coetzee has noticed that the colonial history is related with body. The physiological features of body are imposed by the colonial history with some social and cultural connotation so as to show special color politics. At the same time, he has found that colonial history itself is a history of violent discipline of body. The settler carries out culture assimilation and meanwhile achieves the purpose of making the colonized people others by body discipline mechanism. However, the history of body conquest is a history of body resistance. Having probed into the subject in several works, Coetzee gives the body a position of authoritative discourse power. Secondly, body becomes a metaphor to reflect the image of empire and the living state of white individual in his works. On the one hand, Coetzee reveals the declining process of the empire in colonial history from the aspect of body especially from sex. On the other hand, as a conscientious white writer, Coetzee realizes his own blood relation with the disgraceful colonial system. So can those white men, as a part of the empire system, get away from the colonial history? In Coetzee’s works, he has tried to find the answer from the angle of body and reveals an emotion of "escaping the history" among the conscientious white people against the background of racial segregation and finally he gives a negative conclusion in a form of game. In the end, Coetzee gives attention of the moral and ethical level to body especially physical violence. From the angle of body especially by using animal as ontology, he sees the damage colonial violence has done to the local people through the angle of humanity. Coetzee’s works reflect the awareness of humanity among some conscientious settlers under the colonial violence, discuss the writing ethics about violence in literary works and criticize the phenomenon of historical violence cycle and the historical ethical crisis behind it. He calls for establishing a harmonious and coexistent new historical ethics which also gives his ethical concern for body and history.