Slow Man: The Blurring of Boundaries Between Reality and Fiction

Until the thirteenth chapter, J. M. Coetzee’s Slow Man closely resembles his novel Disgrace. Like Professor David Lurie of Disgrace, Paul Rayment is a proud, older man who is forced to acknowledge his vulnerability and dependency on others, particularly women, due to losses he has suffered. While Lurie has lost his academic position and ends up seeking familial companionship from his daughter, Lucy,  Rayment, after losing his leg, has to rely on his Croatian nurse, Marijana. Like Lurie, Rayment is forced to reflect on his relationships and on how his options have been suddenly and radically reduced. Because he is convinced that his life is meaningless, Rayment longs for those who can provide value to his existence and longs for a woman to love and a child of his own. He falls in love with Marijana and wants to befriend her troubled son, Drago. Like Lurie’s paternal attempts to control Lucy’s life which end in rejection, Rayment’s paternal gestures to Marijana’s family only cause turmoil for him.

However, unlike Disgrace, Slow Man takes a metafictional turn when Elizabeth Costello, a character in two of Coetzee’s earlier novels, rings the doorbell of Rayment’s flat. An accomplished novelist, she insinuates herself into Rayment’s life, while claiming that he in some sense came to her. Rayment feels overpowered by the presumptuous, seventy-two-year-old intruder who is trying to “write” his story for him. By inserting novelist Elizabeth Costello in Rayment’s life at this point, Coetzee shatters the reader’s belief in the reality of Paul Rayment. Elizabeth Costello’s principle function appears to be to antagonize the fictional Rayment who declares that he is not a subject for her fiction and refuses to submit to being a character in her script.

 Coetzee’s narrative strategy blurs the boundaries between the fictional and the “real” world. Slow Man is a metafiction that demands an active role in the literary experience. Just as Rayment is lured into taking charge of his life, so is the reader forced to assume a kind of authority for Slow Man. As with many of his previous texts, Coetzee refrains from resolving the dilemmas he provides for his characters and his readers. In the end, when Rayment ultimately rejects Costello, the author who would take responsibility for his existence, it is up to him and the reader to face the future without illusions.

A Narrative of Trauma in J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace

In Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History, Cathy Caruth discusses how often “texts of… literature…both speak about and speak through the profound story of traumatic experience” (4). J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace is not only about the effects of an individual trauma, that of Lucy’s rape, but also about the collective historical trauma of a race who has undergone years of violence and contempt at the hands of their white oppressors. Cathy Caruth claims that “history, like trauma, is never simply one’s own, that history is precisely the way we are implicated in each other’s traumas” (24).   The effects of the violent rape that Lucy experiences parallel the effects of trauma of the victims of apartheid.  Because she is traumatized by the violent act of rape, Lucy withdraws to a world of suppression and silence. Because of the debilitating effects of trauma, she is unable to put into words the unspeakable act she has endured. Likewise, the victims of apartheid were forcibly silenced and rendered unable to verbally articulate the many atrocities imposed upon them.

“Reenactment of one’s own victimization seems to be a major cause of the cycle of violence” that often occurs to victims of trauma (van der Kolk 199).  After years of racial cruelty and humiliation, the three black men who rape Lucy are attempting to take back some of the power they have been robbed of.  Although Coetzee is in no way condoning the act of violence against a white woman in order to gain power over their oppressors, he is instead showing the likely effects of the kind of anger and rage that come out of apartheid. Trauma expert Judith Herman states that traumatic events “shatter the construction of the self that is formed and sustained in relation to others. They undermine the belief systems that give meaning to human experiences…and violate the victim’s faith in a natural or divine order” (51).  In Disgrace, Coetzee is showing how many of the victims of apartheid have lost faith with man’s ability for compassion as well with  their own.

Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1996. Print.

Herman, Judith Lewis. Trauma and Recovery. New York, NY: Basic, 1992. Print.

Van Der Kolk, Bessel A. "The Intrusive Past: The Flexibility of Memory and the Engraving of Trauma." Trauma: Explorations in Memory. By Cathy Caruth. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1995. 158-82. Print.