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.
2 comments:
Joanne,
I agreed with your thoughts regarding the relationship similarities between Paul (Slow Man) and David Lurie (Disgrace), especially regarding the observation of the "paternal gestures" as you so nicely put it. Both men have this urge to take a stronger role in their lives in a fatherly way. I had not really looked at the paternal desire or need for either or these characters. Mostly, I just saw them both as needing someone else. Very nice observation! It changes my perspective in a way, as I see them both as fathers first now (even though Paul attempts to play this role with Drago)- whereas before I saw them as two men with their own version of a disability, either physical or otherwise (emotional, economically etc.)
Thank you!
-Christine van Eyck
You mention that through the insertion of Costello as the “author” of Paul Rayment’s life, “Coetzee shatters the reader’s belief in [his] reality.” The totality of her role is as mystifying to the reader as it is to Paul. It is interesting to note that while Costello not only knows everything about Paul, she also knows everything about the other characters surrounding Paul’s current life. It is, however, only Paul that is concerned with how and why she has all her information.
Another facet of this “Costello situation” that I find fascinating is her rejection by Paul at the end. What does this signify? It somehow seems synonymous with the idea/fact that it is the winner, or at least always someone else, who writes one’s story and therefore history. It also seems didactic in nature, urging the rejection ideological illusions for the pursuit of some sort of heart and truth.
One other thought I have is related to this idea, but more directly concerns Paul’s collection of photographs. While he claims that they will be donated in order to preserve the history of others, it seems strange that he wishes to wait until he dies to do so. By waiting, by leaving them in his will, he is structuring his own final line in his personal narration, thereby placing the weight of importance more heavily on his own story than on the story/history that his collection will provide for the others he wants remembered.
~Kelley
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