Bodies freedom by Roberto Vecchi

A limb of liberty: loss, disability and fictions of authenticity in J.M.Coetzee’s Slow Man Roberta Gefter Wondrich (University of Trieste)

I. Bodies,freedom, resisting subjects J.M.Coetzee’s work is imbued with a preoccupation with individual freedom which is inextricably bound up with a concern for ethical and historical responsibility. These concerns are often expressed into fictional aporias and unfathomable conditions of uncompromising, resistant, crystallized isolation. As Derek Attridge puts it in his fundamental study of Coetzee’s work, “the task Coetzee seems to have set himself is to convey the resistance of these figures to the discourses of the dominant culture (the culture, that is, which has conditioned the author, the kind of reader which the novels are likely to find, and the genre of the novel itself) at at the same time to find a means of representing the claims they make upon those who inhabit this culture (Attridge, J.M.Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading, 13). In Slow Man (2005) Coetzee furthers his exploration of these forms of resistance with a special emphasis on the subjective borders – or limits – of freedom, by placing the body once again at the centre of his narrative construction. The all-pervasive presence of the body as cultural construct, ideologically and historically determined reality and primary site of power in postcolonial literature and criticism, alongside mainstream philosophy and cultural studies, with a main focus on the repressed and violated colonial other and on the female body, on the body of the other and as other, have almost turned body and otherness into something of a syntagm, or rather a buzzword collocation. This not the case of Coetzee’s work, though, in which most of his best novels, from Waiting for the Barbarians to Life and Times of Michael K, Foe and Disgrace feature the body as the paramount site of inscription of power, history, truth, as the ultimate, unalterable reality. Slow Man (partly because the historical/political context appears to be less relevant) seems to probe even more radically into a representation and conception of the body which amounts to the very narrative locus of the text, the very site of inscription of writing itself. It marks a sort of dividing line between Coetzee’s earlier

“allegorical” and South African novels until Disgrace and Elizabeth Costello and his later, more recent autobiograhical fiction, the “autrebiography project” (Boyhood, Youth, Diary of A Bad Year, Summertime). The protagonist, Paul Rayment, male, white, middle aged, is a somewhat anomalous postcolonial subject: three times an émigré, now living in Adelaide but “a foreigner by nature”, intimately displaced, he refuses a prosthetic limb after losing part of one leg in a cycling accident and remains selfabsorbed in his voluntary, though helpless condition of isolation. He falls in love with his Croatian nurse, Marijana, and goes so far, in his one-sided romance, as to imagine for himself a kind of godfather status to her teenage son. The novel thus thematizes the “body in pain” from the start – both diegetically and thematically – as an accidentally maimed body, and constructs the rejection of an artificial replacement in the terms of an obdurate vindication of freedom, conceived as the right to selfdetermination. This choice can be variously read as a troubled acceptance of loss and surrender, but it also assumes an allegorical hue when framed in the long shadow of the colonial legacy. In this respect, in fact, this novel looks back to Foe, Age of Iron and Waiting for the Barbarians and their powerful, disturbing figurations of physical disfigurement and impairment. Bodily deformity and disability, the wounded, mutilated, aging and deteriorated body that – often impassibly and unfathomably – stands at the centre of Coetzee’s work, is the repository of a rich hermeneutics, as the self-contained, selfreferential chief resisting element, the one single source of uncontestable reality, authority, “a counter to the endless trials of doubt” (Coetzee in Attwell, Doubling the Point, 248). It is the body – the body in pain – which ultimately holds sovereignity; the impaired, disabled body in Coetzee’s fiction, from Age of Iron to Summertime (as in the character of the protagonist’s father) which stands, in its displacing, disturbing presence, as the central catalyst of a process which undermines the very notion of a stable, unitarian identity, and, consequently, as a generating core of narrativity. This is perhaps more allegorically conspicuous in Foe, where Friday’s mutilated tongue and consequent dumbness, his obdurate refusal to express himself along the lines of the controlling discourses is the very core of the narrative feat pursued by Susan Barton, in parallel to her private genealogical quest for her lost daughter. The resisting, imperfect, dis-abled body is thus the most foundational image and working semantics for the resisting, unyielding, ungratifying Coetzean text, which ultimately eschews all attempts at a thorough and fulfilled intellectual possession and mastery, yet another form of power discourse with which this author refuses to

comply. A bond – between resisting bodies and resisting texts – which is further illuminated by that between corporeal reality and linguistic expression, body and language, corporeality and significance. The body always speaks in Coetzee’s writing, even – and even more forcefully – through its silencing, as in the case of Foe: ““Friday is mute, but Friday does not disappear, because Friday is body” (Coetzee, Foe, 133). There is, then, in all Coetzee’s novels which figure the body in pain, a direct contiguity between the disabled body and the fissure in the subject’s identity and selfrepresentation, which the narrative aims to encompass and offer to the reader, though not as a self-contained, closed signifying construct, but rather as something that opens up a space for the other: for our – as readers – interrogating ourselves about the experience of otherness and the necessity of questioning. In other words, which do little justice to the complexity of Coetzee’s writing, the body figures as a liminal, border-like domain marked by an irretrievable loss/lack and an often ineffectual, anguished attempt at self-determination. The importance of the body – as well as in many other of Coetzee’s works – is thus presented in this novel in relation to the multidimensional issue of freedom, in terms of individual suffering and collective responsibility, estrangement and unbelonging, dependency and care, aging and desire. Coetzee’s investigation into the complexity of the ontological and political reality of freedom has always been one of the core concerns of his output. As early as in 1987, his writing foregrounded this reality as an elusive “urge”: Foe contains a sentence which sounds almost tantalizing in its apparent clarity: “there is an urging that we feel, all of us, in our hearts, to be free; yet which of us can say what freedom truly is?” (Foe, 149). Significantly, though, one of Coetzee’s most quoted “political” statements points to the refusal of spokesmanship in favour of freedom for any group: I am not a herald of community or anything else. I am someone who has intimations of freedom (as every chained prisoner has) and constructs representations – which are shadows themselves – of people slipping their chains and turning their faces to the light. I do not imagine freedom, freedom an sich; I do not represent it. Freedom is another name for the unimaginable. (Coetzee in Atwell, Doubling The Point, 341) More specifically, Coetzee has been deeply involved in the problem of the contractarian and liberal ethics issue of “the rights of the individual as against the

rights of the collectivity”, a debate to which he says he has “nothing to contribute except perhaps a caution against the kind of moral vigilance that defines vulnerable classes of people” (Coetzee, Giving Offense, 12). This assumption of the responsibility of writing the other is a crucial aspect in the critical reception of Coetzee’s work as “postcolonial”, an inherently ambivalent position which Jane Poyner defines as the “paradox of postcolonial authorship” which Coetzee “stages” in his novels: “whilst striving symbolically to bring the stories of the marginal and the oppressed to light, stories that heretofore had been suppressed or silenced by oppressive regimes, writers of conscience or conscience-stricken writers risk re-imposing the very authority they seek to challenge” (Poyner, J.M.Coetzee and the Paradox of Postcolonial Authorship, 2). Along with these introductory references to Coetzee’s own words about his “intimations of freedom”, a discussion about his narrative imagery of freedom simply cannot help mentioning – and should actually take its move from – another wellknown assertion published in an interview contained in Doubling the Point: If I look back over my own fiction, I see a simple (simple-minded?) standard erected. That standard is the body. Whatever else, the body is not “that which is not” and the proof that it is is the pain it feels. The body with its pain becomes a counter to the endless trials of doubt. (One can get away with such crudeness; one can’t in philosophy, I’m sure.) [...] it is not that one grants the authority of the suffering body. The suffering body takes its authority: that is its power. To use other words: its power is undeniable. (Atwell, Doubling the Point, 248) The body is thus the essential domain with which power structures are concerned, while retaining, in Coetzee’s vision, true authority from suffering. It is therefore a central repository of knowledge and the primary evidence of the abuses and infringements of freedom and justice of our times. As such, it figures in Coetzee’s socalled allegorical novels like Waiting for the Barbarians and Life and Times of Michael K, which deliberately relocate the oppressive regimes of South African apartheid in an a-historical context. In this respect, it has been pointed out that the lost bodies of apartheid figure as an abiding, ghostly, silent image of lack, loss, diminishment, and that “Coetzee’s novels resist this process of verbalization (a realist account of apartheid that would

turn it into a digestible historical narrative) and relentlessly force us to confront the brute, indigestible materiality of the suffering engendered by apartheid” (Durrant, “Bearing Witness”, 446). In Life and Times of Michael K, for example, the wasting body of the captive who refuses food from his captors is a graphic embodiment, a token of the high price of the protagonist’s stubborn commitment to self-determination against the enforcement of communal welfare. Michael’s body is one of Coetzee’s most powerfully unsettling figurations of resistance; his is a resisting, unyielding body, and his agency, his only tragic agency, in fact, that of being a body that can be turned into an agent and vessel of resistance against the power structures which are enforced on him. As an epitome of Coetzee’s “faith” in the power of the suffering body and the body as standard, Michael K’s body is finally acknowledged as the only true and trustworthy interlocutor: in his address to him the medical officer states “Now I had been taught that the body contains no ambivalence” (Coetzee, Life and Times of Michael K, 164). K maybe only survives on “the bread of freedom” alone and states “I have escaped the camps, perhaps, if I lie down, I will escape the charity, too” (Ibidem, 146). Similarly to this puzzling character, who is “as unwilling to ingest the food of captivity, as he is reluctant to accept the bread of charity” (Dragunouiu, “The thin theory of the good”, 70), Paul Rayment in Slow Man is another resisting character who basically refuses the idea of pity and charity (especially sexual charity), be it spontaneous or mercenary and purchased, as well as a form of captivity, subservience, loss of dignity or autonomy. But, as usual with Coetzee’s oeuvre, nothing is just what it seems, and this attitude, evolving as it is during his relationship with Marijana, is not to be taken at face value as a form of self assertion. The kindred notions of endurance and resistance which are in play in the novel are linked with a sort of passivity and irresolution on the part of a man who ultimately does not belong in his own life, in much the same way that he does not belong in his own place/home, to the extent that his body becomes the physical foil to his prison-self. The body of this anomalous postcolonial subject – part colonizer, part émigré, returnee, and inner exile, always inherently displaced – thus becomes an ideal ultimate border, a liminal site of confinement of the public and private persona after the accident which “has shrunk his world, turned it into a prisoner. But escaping death ought to have shaken him up [...] renewed his sense of the preciousness of life. It has done nothing of the sort. He is trapped with the same old self as before [...]” (Coetzee, Slow Man 54).

If we take Waiting for the Barbarians as one of the most important examples in Coetzee’s earlier fiction, the disabled body is gendered and historically and politically marked as an object of power (first exterted as torture and then as care by the magistrate). The most important body in pain is the young woman’s, the barbarian captive to whom the imperial magistrate feels attracted, although he cannot properly identify the nature of his bond towards the girl, nor think of such attraction in purely sexual terms. He cannot, then, fully see into his attachment to her, which is in keeping with the semantics of blindness and impaired vision that runs through the narrative, from the opining image of colonel Joll wearing a rudimental pair of sunglasses that he never takes off, to the tortured girl, who has has partly lost her sense of sight as a result of her tortures, as she can only see obliquely, looking awry. In this novel the scarified, violated body is that of the colonized and controlled subject, and it is gendered as female, in compliance with a postcolonial literary trope which can, at times, though certainly not in this case, become almost prescriptive, cliched. Here, however, the girl’s body remains “closed, ponderous” and “seems beyond comprehension”(Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians 45), and the kind of relationship that is established between the two characters is far from stereotypical, as it is customary with Coetzee, so that the woman’s disability ultimately entangles the judge in a bond of ambivalent complicity, attachment and guilt. This dovetails with one of the most interesting aspects of the reconfiguration of the maimed/disabled body in Slow Man, where the protagonist’s plight can be read as a political and cultural metaphor which subtly eschews predictable tropes and rather questions assumptions about social constructions of corporeal identity. By displacing the disabled colonial body onto an anomalous postcolonial subject, whose identity is as socially privileged as it is inherently hybrid, displaced and uprooted, Coetzee offers another perspective on the semantics of disability in the contemporary postcolonial and global world. As Ato Quayson reminds us, The presence of disabled people in postcolonial writing marks more than just the recognition of their obvious presence in the real world of postcolonial existence and the fact that in most cases national economies woefully fail to take care of them. It means much more that that. It also marks the sense of a major problematic, which is nothing less that the difficult encounter with history itself. For colonialism may be said to have been a major force of disabling the colonized from taking their place in the flow of history other than in a position of

stigmatized underprivilege. [...] the encounter with the disabled in postcolonial writing is as much a struggle to transcend the nightmare of history. (Quayson, Calibrations, 123) As suggested, in Slow Man Coetzee displaces the colonized’s “stigma” of disability – which is also a physical consequence of the many colonial wars and warfare that succeeded over the decades, especially in Africa – onto an anomalous subject, who is a resident, an outsider as much as a migrant, but who has certainly never experienced the destructive reality of a colonial conflict. It remains for us to wonder, then, what is Paul Rayment’s “nightmare of history”. Is it a common, global, and metaphysical condition or is it yet another elusive metamorphosis of South Africa’s ghastly historical past? And what, conversely, is Marijana Jokic’s nighmare of history? A Croat migrant who managed to settle peacefully and rather successfully in Australia with her husband and family, and hence a valiant survivor, she implicitly evokes the status of refugee from the Balkan’s wars of the early nineties, thus acting as a potential counterpart to the protagonist’s sanitized, controlled life-experience. It would be tempting, then, but deceptively easy when dealing with Coetzee’s writing, to see this narrative invention as a fable of retribution, a tale of ineffectual poetic justice for the sins of the forefathers, that befalls a man who just never belonged anywhere and whose circumscribed life has remained unscathed up to the moment of the accident. Significantly, though, Rayment is not an Afrikaaner, so that his identity is not made to fit into an allegorical pattern of retribution inflicted on the guilt-ridden offspring of the ancestors who deprived the natives of their integrity, culture, identity. II. Loss and the lesser condition, prosthetic bodies and fictions of authenticity. Slow Man is informed by a semantics revolving around of two terms, lack and less, which stand in mutual relation, often in conflation and oscillation: the initial traumatic deprivation, the diminishment and physical maiming which affects the protagonist stands as the point of departure a pervasive textualisation of this nexus. The ontological and existential lack (absence and deprivation) that impels desire is graphically projected by the accident which turns the protagonist into an amputee, and initiates a narrative probing into the folds of a physical, emotional, existential condition which lacks plenitude: “A leg gone: what is losing a leg, in the larger perspective? In the larger perspective, losing a leg is no more than a rehearsal for losing every thing.” (Coetzee, Slow Man, 15) This katabasis into the experience of loss

and diminishment to a “lesser” dimension will find an apt epitome in Rayments’ final dismissal of his feelings for Elisabeth Costello upon parting from her: “No this is not love. This is something less” (Ibidem, 263). After his intercourse with the bind woman that Elizabeth Costello has arranged for him, in the melancholic post coitum awareness of the unnaturalness of their complying with her instructions, he reasserts his idea of loss as diminishment, as a lesser condition: A man without sight is a lesser man, as a man with one leg is a lesser man, not a new man. This poor woman she has sent him is a lesser woman too, less than must have been before. Two lesser beings, handicapped, diminished: how could he have imagined a spark of the divine would be struck between them, or any spark at all? (Ibidem, 113) This pervasiveness of these joint lack/less- motifs is also embedded in a set of binary oppositions which recur throughout the narrative, identifiable through some correspondent characters and roles: the childless single man and the would be adoptive father, the caregiver Marijana, mother and wife, and the blind, love-starved, assigned blind date Marianna. Furthermore, Paul’s scrupulous concern with the authenticity of his collection of old photographs is counteracted by young Drago’s careless disregard for the uniqueness of that object, which he recklessly replicates and modifies. Finally, Paul’s obdurate refusal of a prosthetic leg as a pars pro toto of a loss of integrity and authenticity pairs up with his being “invaded”, controlled and shadowed by Elizabeth Costello, novelist and “trader in fictions” (Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello, 195), a figure who, in her controlling and manipulative role, embodies the principle of fictionality and the questioning of both authority and authorship. The two objects which catalyse Paul’s desire for authenticity are in fact two replicas, two inherently artificial manufacts: one, the prosthesis, provokes his refusal and revulsion, the other, which stands metonymically for his whole collecting enterprise, is a photograph which young Drago, Marijana’s son, morphs into a fake, substituting the old miners’ faces with his family’s. The original is not only lost, but proved to have never been truly such, as Marijana states with regard to photography, but thus implicitly addressing the larger canvas:

Original? She says. “What is this thing, original photograph? You point camera, click, you make copy. That is how camera works. Camera is like photocopier. So what is original? Original is copy already. Is not like painting. (Coetzee, Slow Man, 235) The agent of this progressive undermining of Paul’s narrative of authenticity (and illusion of authenticity) is the intrusive, unexpected guest, Elizabeth Costello, whose attitude towards Paul is both caring and manipulating, deeply elusive, disturbing but effective in bringing out the awareness of his diminishment and failure. Yet It is also decisive in fostering his vindication of a right to self-determination. Elizabeth’s presence, in its bodying forth of the principle of fictionality and authority, is also represented by her authorial gaze, which triggers that peculiar version of authorial (intertextual, metafictional) game of exposure that so complexly permeates Coetzee’s work, and especially his later work, in which he has experimented with fictionalised autobiography and the subversion or violation of the pacts the preside over genres.1 This nexus of unconditional hospitality, fictions of self-determination and free agency is intensely dramatized in the episode in which Paul is drawn by Elizabeth Costello into a blind date, literally, with a blind woman, Marianna. The sexual tryst between the two is entirely arranged by Costello, and even while both seem to be accepting all her terms and conditions, Paul makes a statement which ironically unmasks the nature of his search for authenticity and freedom:“‘There is no need’, he begins again, for us to adhere to any script. No need to do anything we do not wish. We are free agents.” (Coetzee, Slow Man, 105) Their blindness during the encounter, then, artificially enforced in Paul’s case, is an effective allegorical dramatization the impaired vision of what is in fact a subjective notion of freedom, while it also problematizes the very conception of beauty. Equally, the fragmentation of a maimed and diminished body constitutes to Paul’s eyes a very disruption of the idea of beauty, a sort of radical obstacle to the very 1

As is well known, Coetzee has expressed his concern with writing, authorship and authority through narrative strategies which can be formally ascribed to postmodernism (among which this authorial self-exposure), but which are always deeply imbued with ethical and political preoccupations. As Jane Poyner reminds, “authorship for Coetzee is always already imbued with power, mastery and colonization” (Poyner, J.M Coetzee and the Paradox of Postcolonial Authorship, 2). Even his late fiction’s focus on the plurality of competing interrogating and questioning voices (Diary of a Bad Year and Summertime) hinges on an investigation of the limitations, complicities and inadequacies of the idea of the public intellectual. See Ibidem, especially chapter 9.

possibility of beauty, as pointed out when the Venus of Milo is mentioned as a case history: Despite having no arms the Venus de Milo is held up as an ideal of feminine beauty. Once she had arms (…) then her arms were broken off; their loss ony makes her beauty more poignant. Yet if it were discovered tomorrow that the Venus was in fact modelled on an amputee, she would be removed at once to a basement store. Why? Why can the fragmentary image of a woman be admired but not the image of a fragmentary woman, no matter how neatly sewn up the stamps? (Coetzee, Slow Man, 58) Rather, the prosthesis materializes the irretrievable loss of a “natural” integrity, and foregrounds the ersatz nature of that recovered autonomy, while proclaiming both loss and lack through the presence of a lesser replacement. It becomes, in Paul’s eyes, a fiction of wholeness, refused in the name of a quest for an integrity which, actually, was never possessed. The diminished, maimed body at the centre of the novel in fact implies an interesting dramatization – in absentia – of the prosthetic body. While the protagonist’s only revolt is his refusal to comply with the logic of common welfare by rejecting a prosthetic leg, the idea of the prosthesis is clearly synechdocal in the novel. Rayment perceives the pressure of the welfare system and assimilates the idea of the artificial limb to an artificial larger entity: a prosthetic body as a prosthetic identity in contrast to the plenitude of bodily presence which is clearly ”embodied” by Marijana, a whole and natural creature. “I don’t want to look natural”, Paul says, “I prefer to feel natural”; however, it is quite clear from the start that his “truncated old body” (Ibidem 59; 61) cannot retain much of its former dignity: on the contrary, the spatialization of the body as a problematic “home” (and conversely the trope of the house as body, après Bacherlard) turns it into “the zone of humiliation” which is “his new home” (Ibidem, 61). His body then becomes a space of enclosure and caesura from the rest of the world, a site of physical and inner confinement, where self-seclusion problematizes the idea of selfdetermination and freedom as choice. While the prosthesis could also be seen as a means to regenerate a sense of self through an objectual, external prop, this opportunity is rejected by the protagonist. The refused prosthesis (which in Marijana’s Slavic misspelling,

“prosthese”, almost becomes a German humorous sequel to thesis and antithesis), thus remains a central phantom of the novel, an object of revulsion which entails an act of psychological but also of cultural resistance. The theme of the disabled and prosthetic body as a site of power structure is also related, in more that one way, to the idea of hospitality, a key concept which intersects some of the most recurrent and important concerns of Coetzee’s oeuvre: the irreducibility of the other and the writer’s allegiance to it, the public role of the writer, the relationship between the literary text and history, the literary text and love, the writer and his text as a home for the other. The most conspicuous figuration of hospitality is that of Elizabeth appearing unexpectedly in Paul’s life, revealing herself as the presumed author of his story and eliciting Paul’s resistance to her control.2 To simplify an otherwise subtle and contrived textualization of the theme in the novel, unconditional hospitality in the Derridean sense, as characterized by responsiveness to otherness, “an effect of the the host being taken ‘hostage’ by the visitor” (Marais, “Coming into being”, 276), is experienced by Rayment in his response to Marijana, but resisted in the case of his visitaton by Elizabeth. I would argue, however, that a further, disruptive visitation of otherness which affects the protagonist is, significantly, that of the newly disfigured, mutilated body and the ensuing the idea of the prosthesis. An alterity – a corporeal alterity, which he cannot host, become home to, but only painfully accommodate.3 Coetzee has often used the objectification of the body as subject and of the subject as body, from Friday in Foe, to Elizabeth in Age of Iron, to Michael K; Slow Man, however, does not expand this trope in relation to the imbrications of the prosthetic/artificial limb as part of the technological body, the utopian, theory-imbued postmodern, cyber-body as a fable of resistance to the idea of the transformation of the human into a sort of posthuman. Still, the novel masterly valorises the representational power of the prosthesis and of disability and the political and philosophic implications they entail. The disabled body, in fact, represents “a potent site of literary investment” (Mitchell and Snyder, Narrative Prosthesis, 47) and disability itself is a narrative device upon which the literary writer of “open-ended” 2

Mike Marais, who has written extensively on the theme, remarks what is an evident trait of the plotline: “In Slow Man, this focus on the unannounced visitor and the unwilled change that he pay precipitate in the unwilling host is more apparent than in any of his previous novels. Much of the narrative consists in the forms of hospitality that Paul Rayment extends to various guests and visitors, both invited and uninvited […]” (“Coming into being”, 277). 3 Marais does not mention this further and relevant aspect in his treatment of the theme.

narratives depends for disruptive, critical representations of society. I called the protagonist’s prosthesis a “phantom” bearing in mind the importance of the “discursive dependency” of literary narratives on disability as something that is also an oddly invisible, unstable, and disappearing act. David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder coin the term “narrative prosthesis” to describe the function of disability within narrative structures. They argue that narratives depend on disability to represent, disrupt, and critique society, and identify disability “as a narrative device upon which the literary writer of “open-ended” narratives depends for his or her disruptive punch” (Ibidem, 49). Compared to the powerful, almost graphic representation of disability in Waiting for the Barbarians, Foe, Life and Times of Michael K, Slow Man seems to reconfigure bodily impairment as a representational challenge less overtly charged with a historical and political background but nonetheless similarly intersecting with issues of justice and freedom. As disability has been variously considered over the recent decades as a major category of postmodernity because it redefines the body in relation to concepts of normalcy, which underlie the very foundations of democracy and humanistic ideas about the body, the “ontological” foundation for a linking of the maimed/disabled body and an articulation of freedom is then quite apparent. As it was pointed out with regard to the character of Michael K, “Coetzee’s well-meaning liberal narrators must confront the impotence of liberal ethics when dealing with those unable or unwilling to articulate their needs and desires” (Dragunuiou, “The Thin Theory of the Good”, 82). Slow Man marks a further step in the development of this theme, as his protagonist is perfectly able to articulate, but certainly unable or unwilling to act and progress in his life in accordance to the expectations of a welfare system which does not envisage a condition of disability as radically other and not amenable to a process of adjustement to normalcy. In particular, by barring him access to freedom of movement and to the basic human capability of bodily integrity (to quote Martha Nussbaum’s terminology), his condition of dependency turns him into a figure who implicitly advocates a redefinition of a notion of independence. Nussbaum, in the context of her theory of the capabilities approach as working from within the tradition of liberalism, but being more responsive to the problems arising in contemporary society, states: “The conception of the person as a political animal includes an idea related to the contractarian idea of ‘freedom’ : the person is imagined as having a deep interest in choice, including the choice of a way of life and of political principles that govern it”. The capabilities approach,

however, holds that “people vary greatly in their needs for resources and care” and does not imagine people as “independent”: Because they are political animals, their interests are thoroughly bound up with the interests of others throughout their lives, and their goals are shared goals. Because they are political animals, they deped on others asymmetrically during certain phases of their lives, and some remain in a situation of asymmetrical dependency throughout their lives. (Nussbaum, Frontiers of Justice, 89) Slow Man confronts the readers with a powerful representation of this kind of asymmetry, leaving us, as usual with Coetzee, with no take-away, ready-made hermeneutics, or, in David Attridge’s terminology, no satisfying allegorical reading. Yet one insight the novel seems to offer is in keeping with one of the arguments that characterize both Nussbaum’s work and disability studies, namely that the apparent state of exception of disability is ultimately the unexceptional state of existence. III: Freedom, liberty, capabilities The entanglement of freedom, self-determination and dignity that underscores the thematic texture of the novel cannot be approached without mentioning the recurrent metafictional dimension signalled by the presence of Elizabeth Costello, Coetzee’s fictional and authorial alter-ego who first appeared in The Lives of Animals and in the later eponymous novel, Elizabeth Costello. Intruding on the protagonist’s life, Costello is an obtrusive, hardly amiable figure. We may think that she inhabits the novel – and, quite literally, Paul’s flat – mainly in order to personify the authorial power of manipulation, and in this respect she functions primarily on a metaliterary and metafictional level. As a matter of fact, her role gains momentum, though without the flippancy of tone and the customary apparatus of metafictional props typical of classic postmodern metafiction.4 Costello’s presence is rather instrumental to a staging of the problem of agency, as well as a reminder of one of Coetzee’s most prominent themes in his recent output, that is, the 4

Among the many intertextual echoes of the novel, which Kenneth Pellow mainly identifies in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and, more persuasively, The Secret Sharer, an indirect allusion to the seminal use of the intrusive narrator of Fowles’ French Lieutenent’s Woman is also plausible in the use of the visitation device (the famous 13th chapter where the author/narrator makes an unexpected apparition in the plot), but its fabulistic turn is grounded in a radical questioning of the limits of authorship and authority.

concern with the moral and aesthetic difficulty of turning “real” human suffering into art, with aging, its limitation of personal freedom and the inevitabile necessity of care. Costello’s function in this novel, though, transcends the metafictional agenda: she besieges Rayment even while prodding him out of his lair, the flat of his “circumbscribed life”. And, prompting the protagonist into action and having him confront his own “coldness” she also further dramatizes the complexity of any condition of “freedom of movement”, physical impairment and dependency. Both, in fact, are affected by a disability – she is older than him and aging ungracefully with a bad heart – and both feel “unstrung” in their bodily self. Both are then disabled by their need for care, and in this respect Elizabeth is also a brooding philosophical counterpart to the brisk efficiency of Marijana, the real carer and provider of a renewed possibility of health. Furthermore, she also personifies another instance of the concern for communal welfare over personal freedom of self-determination, in what she herself acknowledges as her personal obsession: “I have been haunted by the idea of doing good”. As such, and given her manipulatory personality, her concern never rings entirely true. Significantly, though, she also acts as a foil to Paul’s condition of unbelonging when she declares that when she is with him she is “at home” and when “I am not with you I am homeless”. He will later confess to her his threefold condition of exile (born in France, uprooted to Australia then returned to France only to come back to Australia) and admit that he has never known the warmth of home: “ I seem to go cold whenever I go” (Coetzee, Slow Man, 192). Finally, it is tempting to consider another possible approach to the protagonist’s predicament in the light of the relationship between positive and negative freedom, as this is determined by the interplay of both external and internal factors which affect the degree of self-determination. Isaiah Berlin, one of the modern examiners of the difference between these two concepts of liberty, resorts to an explanatory paradox in which he states that, “if one has a wounded leg,” there are “two methods of freeing oneself from pain. One is to heal the wound. But if the cure is too difficult or uncertain, there is another method. I can get rid of the wound by cutting my leg” (Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty”, 10). I am not quoting it out of a penchant for macabre paradoxes which echo the tragic accident of the novel, but rather because this strategy of liberation involves a condition which is quite familiar to Coetzee’s protagonists, and is significantly evoked in Slow Man: in other words “a retreat to the inner citadel” (Ivi) – a soul or a purely noumenal self – in which the

individual protects himself from outside forces. An outlook which reminds the reader of the “third way” Coetzee’s alter ego mentions in the opening pages of Diary of a Bad Year: “the way of quietism, of willed obscurity, of inner emigration” as “the third way between servitude and revolt” (Coetzee, Diary of a Bad Year, 12). A sort of existential way out which is ethically reformulated as a aut aut in the memorable ending of Summertime, when John has to admit to his failure as a caregiver and a donor of enduring filial love to the wasting father: “Alternatively, if he will not be a nurse, he must announce to his father: I cannot face the prospect of ministering to you day and night. I am going to abandon you. Goodbye. One or the other: there is no third way.” (Coetzee, Summertime, 266) Slow Man, then, ends on a protagonist whose stance recalls a recurrent paradigm of Coetzee’s fictional project, that “consistent refusal to be enlisted into civil society on its own terms can be found in Disgrace, Elizabeth Costello, [...] as well as his three fictional memoirs, Boyhood, Youth, and Summertime” (Dooley, J.M.Coetzee and the Power of Narrative, 10); the deliberate framing into what reads as a recessive displacement into the self. Thus David Lurie was “trying to accept disgrace as (his) state of being” (Coetzee, Disgrace, 172) and John in Youth knew that “What is wrong with him is that he is not prepared to fail” and keeps, “playing himself, with each move, further into a corner and into defeat” (Coetzee, Youth, 167; 169). Broadly speaking, this may be the precondition, Paul Rayment’s underscoring life-choice of a “sliding through the world” (Coetzee, Slow Man, 19), except, perhaps, when it comes to desire: desire is in fact one of the few driving forces in the narrative, and the reader is invited to follow its winding rising and falling in the midst of the protagonist’s initial loss of any form of desiring. After the accident he even refuses the idea of suicide on these grounds : “he does not want death because he does not want anything” (Ibidem, 26). His falling for Marijana marks the resurgence of desire, of imagination and a wish for plenitude which he realizes to have missed only when it it is too late. And his battle for dignity sustains him in his final refusal of Costello’s offer of “affection”, a surreptitious surrender to the manipulative coercion of language, the illusive fictiveness of art. Eventually, Slow Man makes no exception to Coetzee’s protagonists’ line of conduct, whose resistance “heroic or otherwise, is not to be rewarded with illuminations and resolutions” (Dooley, J.M.Coetzee and the Power of Narrative, 24). Freedom thus looms as a no longer definable value, although a vital one. It may be defined as presumed, and elusive, as Pellow suggests when noting that “this granting of putative freedom is one of the paradoxical phenomena central to

Slow Man. Like the characters in this novel… we all, in our personal, private lives, want freedom, except when we don’t.” (Pellow, “Intertextuality and Other analogues”, 533) It is, after all, the freedom to refuse and renounce, to question and resist even in the face of defeat: and Paul Rayment’s refusal to adapt and comply is then as much a cry for freedom as it is the decision of a prisoner. His lost limb is then a limb of liberty, though of a lesser kind.

Works Cited Works by Coetzee Coetzee, John Maxwell, Diary of a Bad Year. London: Harvill Secker, 2007 --- Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews. Ed. David Attwell. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992. --- Foe. London: Penguin 2004 (1986). --- “Introduction”. In Giving Offense. Essays on Censorship. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1996 --- Life and Times of Michael K. London: Vintage 2003 (1983). --- Slow Man. London: Vintage, 2005. --- Summertime. London: Vintage, 2009. --- Waiting for the Barbarians. London: Vintage, 2004 (1980). --- Youth. London: Vintage, 2003 (2002).

Critical Works Attridge Derek, J.M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2004. Berlin, I., 1969, “Two Concepts of Liberty”, in I. Berlin, Four Essays on Liberty. London: Oxford University Press. New ed. in Liberty, ed. H. Hardy, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. http://www.wiso.unihamburg.de/fileadmin/wiso_vwl/johannes/Ankuendigung en/Berlin_twoconceptsofliberty.pdf Dooley, Gillian, J.M.Coetzee and the Power of Narrative. Amherst: Cambria Press, 2010.

Dragunouiu, Dana, “J.M.Coetzee’s Life & Times of Michael K and the Thin Theory of the Good”. Journal of Commonwealth Literature 41:1 (2006), 69-92. Durrant, Samuel, “Bearing Witness to Apartheid: J.M.Coetzee’s inconsolable Works of Mourning”. Contemporary Literature 40: 3 (1999), 430-463. Marais, Mike, “Coming into Being: J.M.Coetzee’s Slow Man and the Aesthetic of Hospitality”. Contemporary Literature 50:2 (Summer 2009), 273-298. Mitchell, David T., Snyder, Sharon L., eds, Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000. Nussbaum, Martha C., Frontiers of Justice: Disability, Nationality, Species Membership. Harvard: Harvard UP, 2009. Pellow, Kenneth P., “Intertextuality and other Analogues in J.M.Coetzee’s Slow Man”. Contemporary Literature 50:3, Fall 2009, 528-552. Poyner, Jane. J.M.Coetzee and the Paradox of Postcolonial Authorship. Farnham: Ashgate, 2009. Quayson, Ato, Calibrations: Reading for the Social. Minneapolis University of Minensota Press, 2004.