12 - Slow Man (2005)

Summary

Two Events Of Significance preceded the appearance of Coetzee’s novel Slow Man (2005). One was the awarding of the Nobel Prize for Literature to Coetzee at the end of 2003; the other Coetzee’s move from South Africa to Australia in 2002. Both events resonate at different levels of a novel whose setting is Coetzee’s adopted country of Australia. On the one hand, the novel can be read as a set of reflections on a problem that emerges in later life where one’s main accomplishments now lie in the past. For a writer who holds the conviction that, in the final analysis, all writing is autobiography (DP, 391), the question of how to redirect one’s striving, reorient the head and the heart under the insistent pressure of time’s passing without reference to past accomplishments or projects is as urgent for the sixty-year-old protagonist Paul Rayment as it undoubtedly is for the sixty-five-year old Coetzee, who has already reached the zenith of literary achievement. This question becomes even more pointed for a writer who has chosen to leave his homeland late in life — a homeland whose society and landscape have been central to his literary concerns. Coetzee was reported to have said at the time that he did not consider he was moving away from the country of his birth so much as toward his new adopted country. Yet, despite this statement, Coetzee’s thematic concerns in the first novel published after his relocation to Australia bear no South African imprint, nor even a faint afterimage of South Africa. Nor do they display an abiding concern with the new country. Coetzee’s fictional protagonist instead seeks to make common cause with foreigners, with those who have left their home country and experience the manifold levels of displacement wrought by migration. Not even the Australian woman Elizabeth Costello, Rayment’s sometime companion in the novel, offers significant points of alignment with the Australian experience in a way that might temper the focus on the concerns of the migrant: Costello is more alter ego than companion, more a dweller in the mind of the central character than an emissary from the new society of which Rayment is now a part. The character of Elizabeth Costello, in other words, does not deepen the sense of attachment to the new country.