| The novels of J. M. Coetzee contain characters who variously inhabit the subject position of "author." From this position they are forced to confront the limitations of their ability to make meaning, and display unique solutions to the challenges they face in finding a unique voice. By placing these author-characters in involuted novels, Coetzee produces a series of metanarratological commentaries not just on the texts produced by his characters, but on the production of the novels of J. M. Coetzee as well. What is most startling about these authors is how troubled, how frustrated, and how violently disturbed each of them are by the composition process. Writing for Coetzee is inevitably a confrontation of the author with the fact that putting life into language is often a cruel act of distortion. To develop a representation of an existence which is not complicit in the tyrannical forces of language and narrativization, which does not find itself subject to the rationalist oppression of categorization and separation, Coetzee implies that he himself must be as despotic and controlling as his author-characters are. The ways in which the tyrannical paradoxes of authorship and the instability of language can be negotiated will be explored in relation to central themes in Coetzee's six novels. Themes explored in light of the problems of authorship include: the oppressive vision of history as truth, liberal humanism's complicity in the evils it attempts to attack, allegory as a mode of writing which suggests the instability of identity, the interdependence of the difficulties of familial relationships and warped cultural power politics, the inadequacies of European lessons of the Enlightenment for the African context, language as a tool which separates and dominates individuals more than it unifies or frees them, and the inevitable failure in trying to be a colonizer who refuses to colonize. The six chapters will generally focus on each of the following novels: The Master of Petersburg, Foe, Waiting for the Barbarians, Age of Iron, In the Heart of the Country, and Life and Times of Michael K. |
