Words or Beings?: an enquiry into the treatment of character in JM Coetzee's first five novels

Abstract

The first five novels of JM Coetzee are often seen as anti-realist and their protagonists accordingly often read in terms of psychological or political allegories, or, alternatively, as self-reflexive fictional constructs. But Coetzee’s representation of character can be regarded fruitfully as oscillating between the “realistic” and metafictional, reflecting the dialectic between self-determined (absolute subject position) and determined (relative subject position), and thus resulting in the characters displaying extreme psychological conditions: paranoia, narcissism, sadomasochism, autism and hyperconsciousness. Through close reading of the texts this study shows how the account of subjectivity as unitary, autonomous, transcendent and self-defining is problematised; that the body, far from having metaphysical meaning, is shown to be both a facticity and a textual sign; that the tension between the vivid, objective and plausible portrayal of characters and the self-confession/exposure of their fictionality leads to extreme psychological conditions.