J.M.Coetzee’s work is imbued with a preoccupation with individual freedom that is inextricable from a concern for ethical and historical responsibility which often evolves into fictional aporias, unfathomable conditions of uncompromising and crystallized isolation. The paper aims at exploring a specific aspect of Coetzee’s fictional (and critical) exploration of the semantic import of freedom by analyzing the role of the body in his recent novel Slow Man (2005).
Postcolonial literature and criticism have widely explored the body as cultural construct, ideologically and historically determined reality and primary site of power mostly focalizing on the repressed and violated colonial Other and on the female body. This is also the case in Foe and Disgrace, whereas Slow Man seems to probe more radically into another idea of the body which amounts to the very narrative locus of the text: here the male, white, middle aged protagonist, an anomalous postcolonial subject (three times an émigré, “a foreigner by nature”, intimately displaced) refuses a prosthetic limb after losing part of one leg in an accident and remains self-absorbed in his voluntary, though helpless condition of isolation. The novel thus thematizes the “body in pain” as a maimed body and the refusal of an artificial compensation amounts to an obdurate vindication of freedom as a troubled acceptance of loss and renounce, which are parts of the encumbering heritage of the (post)colonial subject. The body thus figures as a liminal, border-like site where an irretrievable loss/lack and an anguished attempt at self-determination come together into a thought-provoking ambivalence.