J.M.
Coetzee
Slow Man
Knopf, $45 hb, 266 pp, 1741660688
SLOW
MAN begins with an accident. Paul
Rayment is cycling along an Adelaide
street when he is struck by a car. When
he emerges from a daze of doctors and
painkillers, he discovers his life has
been transformed by this random event.
His crushed leg is amputated above the
knee. From now on, he will require the
attention of a full-time nurse to help
with life’s most basic chores;
his limited mobility will mean he is
rarely able to venture forth from his
small flat.
The first third of Slow Man takes
the reader through the aftermath of
the accident. It is a disciplined and
quite masterful piece of psychological
realism. Coetzee’s prose is, as
always, a model of clarity and understatement;
its rhythms are carefully measured but
insistent. Paul struggles to be reconciled
to his new, unwished-for existence.
His bitterness and anger gradually give
way to loneliness, which in turn begins
to manifest itself in the form of an
increasing infatuation with his carer,
a sensible and efficient Croatian woman
named Marijana.
There is just a hint of Beckettian allegory
behind the realism. Paul’s symbolic
emasculation and his immobility are
accompanied by an awareness of the physical
world closing in. On this level, Slow
Man begins as a novel about the tribulations
of ageing; more specifically, it sets
out to ex-plore the psychology of an
ageing male sexuality. This theme has
made a notable appearance in Coetzee’s
previous work. In Disgrace (1999),
the university professor David Lurie
— like Paul Rayment a gentleman
of a certain age — believes he
has ‘solved the problem of sex
rather well’, only to embark upon
an ill-judged affair with a student,
which destroys his career. In Slow
Man, the emphasis is on Paul’s
under-lying frustration, the quiet desperation
behind which we might detect the unappeasable
spectre of death, and the way this dimly
understood anxiety can lead a man to
act foolishly. There is a sense in which
Paul’s awkward sexuality becomes
an expression of a kind of absurdism:
a longing for connection and release
that only serves to underscore his inevitable
isolation and decline. Coetzee’s
debt to Samuel Beckett has often been
noted; I believe it was Beckett who
observed that a man’s sexual longing
never really goes away, it just becomes
less and less appropriate.
Curiously, the first third of Slow
Man turns out to be something of
a red herring. There is the subtlest
hint of what is to come when Paul, divorced
and childless, reflects on a life that
now feels to him like a missed opportunity.
‘If none is left to pass judgement
on such a life,’ he thinks, ‘if
the Great Judge of All has given up
judging and with-drawn to pare his nails,
then he will pronounce it himself: A
wasted chance.’ The clue is in
the line’s allusion to James Joyce.
In A Portrait of the Artist as a
Young Man (1916), Joyce’s fictional
alter ego, Stephen Dedalus, argues that
the artist, ‘like the God of creation,
remains within or behind or beyond or
above his handiwork, invisible, refined
out of existence, indifferent, paring
his fingernails’. As high-literary
allusions tend to do, this knowing echo
points to the tension between the novel’s
realism and its carefully crafted formality.
Paul’s suggestion that there is
no overarching moral purpose to his
life paradoxically draws attention to
the very thing it is denying: the fact
that his fate is in the hands of an
invisible, controlling, authorial power.
However purposeless his existence may
feel, the narrative of his life is unavoidably
encumbered with significance.
The definitive rupture in Paul’s
narrative occurs with the appearance
on his doorstep of Elizabeth Costello,
the heroine of Coetzee’s previous
novel. Admirers of Elizabeth Costello
(2003) will recall that its title character
is an elderly writer whose most famous
book, The House on Eccles Street,
is a reworking of Joyce’s Ulysses
(1922). Her forceful personality swiftly
imposes itself upon Paul. Though they
have not met previously, she seems to
know a great deal about him already.
She begins explaining his thoughts and
feelings to him as if she knows him
better than he knows himself. She badgers
him about being lacklustre and uninteresting.
She appropriates Paul’s story,
demanding he take action to give his
life a more purposeful and dramatic
shape.
‘The Costello woman’, as Paul
comes to think of her, is not simply
a disruptive influence in Paul’s
life; she tears up the fabric of the
novel. Her overbearing presence gives
Slow Man a metafictional jolt
that affects its entire structure. The
novel ceases to be fiction and becomes,
suddenly, many fictions. The writing
itself becomes more overtly ‘literary’,
as all the potentially meaningful, symbolic
elements of the narrative, which were
previously submerged, are dragged to
the surface. In one strange and fascinating
scene, stage-managed by Costello, Paul
is visited by a blind woman named Marianna.
The scene is full of allusions, particularly
to Shakespeare: Marianna not only represents
a Shakespearean doubling of Marijana,
her name and her narrative function
are an obvious reference to the character
of Mariana in Measure for Measure. Costello’s
purpose in bringing the couple together
is seemingly to draw out correspondences
and create symbolic moments that make
Paul’s life more comprehensible
and thus push along his sense of self-awareness.
She has, in effect, come uninvited into
Paul’s life to give him the moral
structure that he felt was lacking.
This, she argues, is something literature
provides. ‘Nothing that happens
in our lives is without a meaning, Paul,’
she says, ‘as any child can tell
you. That is one of the lessons stories
teach us, one of the many lessons.’
Elizabeth Costello is right in a sense.
As any literary critic can tell you,
nothing happens in a story that is not
meaningful. There are no accidents in
fiction; if a detail is mentioned, however
inconsequential it may seem, it is axiomatic
that it is mentioned for a reason. But
it is in this way that fiction is not
like life, which is experienced as a
flow of irrelevant detail. The transubstantiation
of shapeless existence into narrative
is the overriding subject of Slow
Man, and the motivation behind the
sometimes heavy-handed meta-fictional
games it plays. The name of God is often
invoked in the novel, but read through
a Joycean lens this is a God conflated
with the idea of the creating, controlling
author. There is a religious —
or rather quasi-religious — aspect
to narrative. It shapes experience and
gives it purpose, but it also falsifies
reality in the process. The archetypal
patterns and echoes, which are an inevitable
part of any narrative, are seen to be
a symptom of the existential dilemma
of being a rational creature in an irrational
universe.
Slow Man is a compelling but
occasionally ungainly attempt to confront
this paradox in the way we understand
the world. The question is one of authority,
in every sense: the fact that meaning
is something created. Paul has a collection
of historical photographs, which he
treasures as an authentic record, an
embodiment of the past. ‘The camera,
with its power of taking in light and
turning it into substance,’ we
are told, ‘has always seemed to
him more a metaphysical than a mechanical
device.’ But the novel also suggests
there is something illusory about this
belief in authenticity. Paul is horrified
when Marijana’s son, Drago, alters
one of his precious images using a computer.
Marijana, however, is less concerned.
‘Original is copy already,’
she shrugs. ‘Each becomes a new
thing, a new real, new in the world,
a new original.’
Metafiction is, ultimately, a snake
that swallows its own tail. Recently,
however, the American novelist David
Foster Wallace has pursued the connection
between metafiction and metaphysics
with an Ahab-like intensity that, through
its sheer intellectual energy, begins
to crack the artifice and reveal the
despairing human subject beneath. Wallace’s
garrulous style is drastically unlike
Coetzee’s austere fiction, but
there is a thematic affinity evident
in Elizabeth Costello and, now, Slow
Man. Elizabeth Costello defines writing
as ‘second thoughts to the power
of n’. The act of writing, in other
words, is a form of self-awareness that
admits no final resting point. The logic
of narrative must constantly undermine
its own order if it is to retain its
capacity to examine the human condition.
The manner in which these ideas are
explored in Slow Man is lugubriously
ironic. There is an argument run-ning
through the novel between Paul and Elizabeth
Costello about genre. Costello insists
that Paul’s life is a comedy. ‘Losing
any part of the body that sticks out,’
she asserts, ‘is comic.’ Of
course, she gets her way in the end.
It is even implied, as the novel approaches
its resolution, that the entire exercise
has been a joke at Paul’s expense.
Costello cautions him about taking everything
so seriously. When she delivers a passionate
speech urging Paul to live more like
a hero, she advises him to sally forth
courageously like Don Quixote. It is
an odd choice of role model: Quixote
is, after all, insane. Later, when Paul,
in a Freudian moment, suggests that
jokes have a relationship to the unconscious,
Costello replies in kind that ‘sometimes
a joke is just a joke’.
There is something parodic about Elizabeth
Costello’s moralising, which is
heavily ironised by the book’s
multi-layered structure. Elizabeth
Costello attracted some criticism
for being under-fictionalised, the suggestion
being that the title character was a
vehicle for Coetzee’s opinions
which allowed him to evade moral responsibility.
It would be a brave critic to so casually
conflate Coetzee and Costello after
reading Slow Man. In a sense,
this consciously over-fictionalised
novel might be read as a retort to those
critics: a reminder that the morality
of fiction is itself ironic.
When a novel begins drawing attention
to its fictional qualities, openly discussing
philosophical questions about representative
art and canvassing the options for its
own resolution, it is often at the price
of a certain formal awkwardness. Slow
Man is a flawed novel, but one that
is fascinatingly flawed. It is a work
that has been deliberately and calmly
disfigured by its creator as a way of
exploring the ethics of its own narrative
practices. For there is, significantly,
another level to Slow Man. ‘Silence
can be full of meaning,’ as Paul
tells Marijana, and there is a telling
silence at the heart of the novel. Ultimately,
it is necessary to take a step back
and remind ourselves that the author
of Paul Rayment’s fate is not Elizabeth
Costello but J.M. Coetzee, who is everywhere
and nowhere in this book. He is, like
the God of creation, refined out of
existence, invisible, paring his fingernails.
