J. M. Coetzee’s Hidden Heart

Abstract

AbstractChapter 5 argues that J. M. Coetzee’s fiction is characterized by emotional deliberations that advance the modernist aspiration to develop new forms for articulating affective experience. The reading of Coetzee’s early masterpiece, Waiting for the Barbarians (1980), shows how its innovative use of first-person present-tense narration places readers closer to the immediate feelings and desires of its protagonist than prior narrative modes—a closeness made acutely troubling by our protagonist’s erotic fascination with a young woman’s torture-scarred body. Synthesizing the focalizing affordances of free indirect discourse and the unmediated proximity of stream-of-consciousness narration whilst paring back their epistemic pretensions, Coetzee’s prose exhibits an acutely ambivalent relation to the modernist forms it so artfully exploits. Against the critical consensus that the novel charts the narrator’s gradual recognition that his desire makes him complicit in the woman’s torture, the chapter demonstrates how Coetzee’s affective descriptions provocatively refuse ethically conclusive rearticulations of this kind. The most far-reaching implication of this insight is to challenge political interpretations that ally Coetzee’s fiction with an ethics of alterity. By contrast, the chapter argues that Coetzee’s novel, even as it insists on the potential unknowableness of certain feelings and desires, rebuffs the sanctification of ineffability to an intersubjective ethical ideal. In doing so, it recalibrates our understanding not merely of politically challenging uses of modernist narratorial techniques, but of the ethically fraught dynamics inherent to the techniques themselves, exemplifying a mode of writing which takes modernist forms into the most contested terrain.