Final Project: Birth and Death: Analyzing the Role of the Author and the Text in J.M. Coetzee’s Novels

To read the final project for the class, please refer to the tab above, "Birth and Death."

[Picture obtained from Wikimedia Commons] 

Disgrace: The Monster in Sexual Deviance

Through David, the main character is J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace, the reader is confronted, for the first time, with a character whose multi-layered personality deems him both a colonizer and a colonized individual, or if continuing the thread of binary oppositions, the monster and the victim. He is a colonizer in the sense that he sees himself in charge of the women whom he engages in sexual activity with; in his eyes the women are not individuals with a mind, a heart and a soul; rather, to him, they are objects of desire who could be courted, “fucked,” and forgotten. David sought it best to live without any attachment to anything and no one; in this sense, he had power over his life and nobody was to tell him how to live. The line that specifically stood out to me was when David, shamelessly tells Melanie, “ You ought to…spend the night with me…because a woman’s beauty does not belong to her alone. It is part of the bounty she brings into the world. She has a duty to share it” (16). As if women existed just to be subsidiary agents to men’s liking, David places a responsibility on Melanie just because she’s a woman. He in this same sense is a monster that places no importance on the age or the background of the women he sleeps with. In his obsession with Soraya at the beginning of the novel, he disregards the fact that she is a mother and a wife and stalks her. His selfishness feeds on his lonely and desolate being.

Ironically, David is also colonized by events linked by the women around him. The women do not become the direct colonizers; it is the sexual desire that David feels for them that in a sense gives them power. First of all, it is important to consider his past. He was married multiple times, and those marriages all ended up in divorce. I’m not implying that David was not at fault in the outcome of his marriages, given his view of women, but he did ultimately wind up alone, and this thus drove him not to see women as companions. Also, in having a sexual relationship with his student Melanie, he is confronted not only with her boyfriend who terrorizes him, but also by his friends, colleagues, and ex-wife. Worst of all, he finds himself jobless. He falls victim of his uncontrolled sexual desires for women. When everyone found out what he had done with his student, they all turned against him and wanted him nowhere close: “The circle around him like hunters who have concerned a strange beast and do not know how to finish it off” (56). This appalling mistake drove him out of town and with his daughter Lucy, where he would once again see himself puzzled by his daughter’s sexual orientation (86). David no longer had control over his daughter. In his mind he could not understand how she could be with a woman. This also increased his assumptions about women. He thought that the reason why his daughter wanted to be with a woman was perhaps because women did not creak the bed, for instance. This lack of understanding subsequently adds to the negative perception he had of women and further increased his doubts about having a serious and committed relationship again.     

The Dualities in Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals

Upon reading the two part lecture presented by J.M. Coetzee in his now published novel The Lives of Animals, I was able to understand why each of the critics had such a difficult time responding. I can, however, see how Coetzee’s writing develops and the patterns existent in many of his novels. One prime similarity we have seen in the novels we have read thus far, for example, is in terms of the dualistic elements presented in an attempt to both develop dual perspectives and to pose a social critique. We won’t after all understand the effectiveness or flaws on a concept or idea until we compare it with another. From similar novels we have read in class including In the Heart of the Country (slave/master discourse)and Waiting for the Barbarians (powerful/powerless and civilized and savage), we can see how the dualistic elements are either working against each other or are working in response to their binaries. In The Lives of Animals, dualistic elements are in play at different levels. As Marjorie Garber, for instance, writes, “Within the family…there is a distinction between the novelist and the philosopher, between Elizabeth [Costello]and Norma” (80). Garber then poses the question, “What is the structural relationship between…literature and philosophy” (80). Just in this short segment, we have multiple binaries. For one, Elizabeth Costello and Norma are very different characters. The only binding commonality among the two is John Bernard, son of Costello and husband of Norma. He always found himself in the middle of the two, always making an attempt to understand both. Part of the reason why they were each having such difficulties coming to terms with one another is based on their dualistic theoretic disciplines: literature vs. philosophy. 

When thinking about the dualities discussed here (literature vs. philosophy), several questions come to mind. For instance, is it possible to separate literature from philosophy as two different entities or is the line too fine? To complicate this question even further, we can focus on professor of philosophy, Costica Bradatan’s question, “Is there any relationship between the literary forms philosophers [such as Plato] make use of and the specific methods through which they develop their thinking?” When developing philosophical pieces, not only is the theorizing important, but the way the theories are structured is important as well.  Norma was a philosopher who thought of Costello’s perspective on the violence on animals as exaggerated, directive and at times underdeveloped. As a philosopher, Norma expected Costello too go deeper into her arguments, especially considering that was the prime focus of her lecture. As Peter Singer also adds, “I think she would go further than that. There’s a more radical egalitarianism about humans and animals running through her lecture than I would be prepared to defend” (86). Perhaps, Elizabeth Costello’s structure had to be carefully extracted to answer the philosophical questions that develop from her claims.    

Bradatan, Costica. “ Syllabus.” Philosophy 100.11: Philosophy or Literature? The Literary Art of Philosophers. Web. 25 October 2011.

Coetzee, J.M. The Lives of Animals. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton UP, 1999. Print.

J.M. Coetzee’s Foe: Quarreling with the (UN)Truth

The pen and the written word become powerful tools in the transgression of occurrences in  J.M. Coetzee’s novel,  Foe. The reader traces the narrator, Susan Barton’s, path and the manipulation, or lack thereof, of her own story through the four part structure of the novel. At the beginning of the novel, Barton has authority over the detailing of her story. Barton, who remains unnamed in the first part of the novel, identifies herself as a castaway who makes a personal connection with two other characters, Cruso and Friday, whom she describes as, “an imbecile incapable of speech” (22).  At this point, the reader is able to sympathize with the Barton, the desolate woman who was stranded on an island with two strange men and with little means of survival. As we, the reader, move forward in the novel, however, we begin to question the purpose and true meaning behind the way Barton relates her story. Thus, it is in the second and third part of the novel that we begin to question not only the credibility of Barton’s story, but also her identity and her sanity. 

The second section begins with journal entries directed to Mr. Foe, an author she wishes to share her story with. She asserts that she will reside in his home. This is where the story becomes multifaceted in the sense that many of the details mentioned in the first part begin to be questioned. The first question that came to mind as I began to read this section was, how is it that Mr. Foe opens his doors to a castaway woman and another man we can assume he knows little about? All we know is that he is an author who will lavish Barton’s story with detail. Her connection with Mr. Foe also opens up many aspects about Barton’s identity, especially because he is the only person who she can communicate with since her return. This closeness, even if at this point is through writing, reveals important aspects about Barton. Barton, in this section, is confronted with two young women. She finds the first girl outside of Mr. Foe’s apartment, standing still as if she was hypnotized by Barton’s close proximity. Oddly enough, the girl claims to also be named Susan Barton’s, and argues that she is Barton, the narrator’s, long lost daughter. Also, later on in this section, we also become aware of the baby’s bloody corpse whom Barton interestingly identifies, “Who was the child but I, in another life” (105). The questions that thus develop are: is the existence of the two children an uncanny form of repressing the loss of her child, the one she claims to have lost? Or, is the existence of these two children just a form of “spicing” up her story?  Attempting to answer these questions can be a bit complex, especially because she is the only person who can really say if what happened in the stranded island really did occur, especially since Friday was not able to communicate this information. Only she can provide the reader an insight into her past, so the reader must depend only on her account and her lens to investigate her story.

It is in the third section of the story that she begins to add and subtract pieces of her story, claiming that they are pieces of information she has not revealed to anyone. Barton states, “I am a free woman who asserts her freedom by telling her story according to her own desire” (131). Is her desire thus to embellish her story so that it fits Mr. Foe’s literary parameters. Though time after time she indicates that she does not want anything that will change her plot and the credibility of her story, Mr. Foe remains persistent with this idea. The reader must then question the validity of her statements. Moreover, so many ideas are playing in her head, that she appears at one point to be questioning her beliefs and ideas. Barton states, “Nothing is left to me but doubt. I am doubt itself. Who is speaking me? Am I a phantom too? To what order do I belong? And you: who are you?” (133). “Truth,” thus becomes just a subjective term that seems farther away from Barton’s story. As far as the reader knows, the story could have been all fragments of Barton’s imagination from the very beginning. Is it reasonable then to have reservations about Barton’s sanity? Barton later explains, “We, or some of us: it is possible that some of us are not written, but merely are; or else (I think principally of Friday) are written by another and darker author” (143). Who is this other entity she is once again referring to, this “darker author”?  To answer this question and the questions previously asked, we can then look at Barton’s detailing as a hyper-narrative (a non-linear, multidimensional structure) of her own imaginative truth, that is to say the author she fears to be, one that will cast a shadow, a dark ghostly shadow of the truth.

Waiting for the Barbarians: An Immersion into the Dream World

In the novel Waiting for the Barbarians, dreams play a prime component in the deliverance of the narrator’s fears, hopes, and desires. We can observe such dreams through a Freudian lens, in an attempt to understand the repression of his staggering emotions.  Freud asserts that “ [dreams like literature] displace unconscious desires, drives and motives into imagery  that might bear no resemblance to its origin but that nonetheless permits it to achieve release or expression” (Rivkin 390). In the novel, the narrator, who presents himself to be the only person among other soldiers who demonstrates empathy for the imprisoned, finds himself trapped by his own inner consciousness. The manifest content behind some dreams demonstrates a sense of physical incompleteness and animalistic characteristics. The latent content, that information which is not directly revealed to the narrator, explores a possible meaning to the dreams and explores the metaphorical castration of a group of people referred to as the barbarians. The ideals behind that castration can be representative of the narrator’s repressed fears or anger for the injustices committed by the soldiers. There are various specific dream descriptions throughout the novel, but I will focus on just two.

                Time after time, the narrator dreams of snow and a young child whose face is not clearly shown. Such visions, which are manifested within his memory trouble him and cause him to continuously wake up every night. As the narrator vividly illustrates, “The face I see is blank, featureless; it is the face of an embryo or a tiny whale; it is not a face at all but another part of the human body that bulges under the skin” (42). Clearly, the narrator is troubled by this child he could not identify; the only aspect that can help him look at the child is replaced by a vision of emptiness and animalistic features that remove them farther away from “the normal” or the “accepted.” The narrator who is himself a magistrate, understands the power dynamics between himself, the soldiers and the most remote of civilizations in their eyes, the barbarians.  In this case, “normality” or “acceptance” is thus defined not by the fact that barbarians have arms, legs, and all other characteristics that are attributed to human beings, but by the savage like features that characterize them as the “other,” the not-nearly human savage.  In reference to his dream, not being able to identify the child might be a representation of his inability to understand the cruel doings of the soldiers who had violently attacked the prisoners. This notion of the “otherness,” ascribed to the barbarians feeds off of the idea that they are savages who do not even deserved to be recognized, as marked by the absence of the child’s face. After realizing that the beggared girl is a barbarian, who had been heavily attacked and who could very well be the face that is ascribed to the child in the narrator’s dreams, the narrator recognizes that she is a representation of the other who is trapped within the reigns of power.

http://blog.lib.umn.edu/meyer769/myblog/2011/10/freuds-dream-protection-theory--what-is-the-meaning-of-our-dreams.html

                Another important dream was when the narrator describes, “There are other dreams in which the figure that I call the girl changes shape, sex, size. In one dream there are two shapes that arouse horror in me: massive and blank, they grow and grow till they fill all the space in which I sleep” (101). At this point in the story, the girl has returned with her group of people. The narrator, the magistrate is kept in poor conditions, becoming himself another prisoner. In order to be able to fully analyze the meaning of the dream, it is important to consider the state of mind and the physical conditions under which he is kept: a dark and isolated room with little to no access to clean water and food. He has attempted to forget the memory of the girl who was once her companion as a way to displace the hidden emotions he feels for her. Her image in his mind thus becomes distorted.  The two shapes mentioned also emphasize the power dynamics present in his inner conflict. What grows tremendously now that he has lived in the shoes of the prisoner, is his inner conflict: being the colonizer who must hold and keep power for the sake of his soldiers and to prevent him from being punished, and the colonizer who does not want to be colonizer based on the ideals of those governing around him. These anxieties are thus manifested in his dreams as blank and incomplete vision of the enemy.

Coetzee, J.M. Waiting for the Barbarians. New York: The Penguin Group, 1980. Print. 

Rivkin, Julie and Michael Ryan. “Introduction: Strangers to Ourselves: Psychoanalysis.” Literary Theory: An Anthology. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2004. Print.

In the Heart of the Country

                The complexity of the J.M. Coetzee’s In the Heart of the Country is not only apparent through the characters that bind the story together, but also through the structure, language and elements of fiction and reality. When analyzing the structure of the novel, it is important to consider not only the way in which it is separated into numbered sections, the point of view of the narrator, but most importantly, the constant shifts in binary perspectives. These all contribute to Coetzee’s modernistic and  intricate literary approach.

                The novel is separated into 266 different sections, all of which detail a specific scene in Magda, the main character’s, life. As Derek Attridge explains in his article, the numbering of the sections indicate, “we are not to suspend disbelief as we read, that our encounter with human lives, thoughts and feelings is to take place against the background of a constant awareness of their mediation by language, generic and other conventions, and artistic decisions” (663). The reader must recognize the humanistic manner of the events that occur and place focus on the way they are introduced into the novel, moving from a set of events to a realistic literary narrative. Magda narrates the events in her life in a linear manner. Though we become aware of this linear structure and can highlights the chronological events that occur, it is without a doubt that there are missing gaps that are left unanswered. This brings the reader closer to the story, as the reader becomes a witness in Magda’s struggle to feel wanted and loved while simultaneously piecing together the puzzle pieces that formulate the “solitary spinster” she is described to be.

This brings us back to the narrative anomalies structured by the constant shift in the voice of Magda. The narrator, Magda shifts time after time from the first to the third person. The reader becomes entangled in a first person narrative−third person focalizer paradigm, one that provides dualistic points of view. The first person narrator allows for the narration of the events as they occur. The third person focalizer brings the reader into Magda’s consciousness and makes the reader aware of her thoughts and emotions as she narrates the story. On section 13, for instance, Magda states, “The Angel, that is how she is sometimes known, The Angel in black who comes to save the children of the brown folk from their coups and fevers…She needs to be needed. With no one to need her, she is baffled and bewildered” (Coetzee 5). Magna never really identifies herself as the “Dark Angel” she is speaking of, but little clues such as the idea that the “Angel” needs to be needed can clue the reader into assuming that she is speaking about herself. Also, the only other woman that has been presented at this point in the story is the woman Magda’s father brings home. Magda, however, does not know enough to identify this woman as an Angel. Though we are not told directly, we can assume that these are part of her unconscious thoughts and emotions that are circulating in Magda’s mind. The reader thus becomes a literary surgeon who must attempt to extract pieces of information from Magda’s  desolate mind.    

Introduction

This blog was developed in association with English 620JMC at California State University, Northridge.

In dissecting any particular piece of literature, it is important to consider not only the words on the page, but also the social and historical factors influencing it. In such a way, I hope to explore how through the symbolic imagery and powerful choice of words, J.M Coetzee constructs narratives that revolve around his characters while simultaneously posing historical critiques. 

There is a famous phrase that states, “Language is Power.” How might Coetzee thus use and manipulate language to transcend beyond the limitations of social issues such as age, class and gender? How is this apparent in his work? These are questions I also hope to explore in an attempt to learn more about J.M. Coetzee and the mystery that lies behind his serious and reserved demeanor.