Incipient Thoughts on Slow Man

I recently found myself in the heat of a workshop on J.M Coetzee's most recent novel, Slow Man. The workshop was headed by foremost literary critic Derek Attridge (cf. "The Singularity of Literature") who among others offered an account of the text that inspired subsequent study on my part. From a theoretical perspective, Slow Man is exciting because it begins rather conventionally, and suddenly trails off into a theory-themed bazaar, showcasing with seeming ease devices such as metafiction and free indirect discourse. But the real excitement here is that Coetzee has creatively spun these themes in such a way as to give them new and enhanced meaning.

Slow Man tells the story of Paul Rayment, an aging (but by no means decrepit) man who suffers a serious bicycle accident and must cope with the amputation of a leg. For assistance in the early stages of recovery, he hires a series of house nurses, until, of course, he desperately falls in love with one of them. The shocker comes when the reader determines (maybe here, maybe there) that in fact Paul is a character in another character's fictional story. That is, Elizabeth Costello literally writes Paul and his drama into existence. More, she places herself in her own narrative, so that within Paul's world she randomly shows up and refuses to go away. The result is an imbroglio of metafiction and confusion. An unnamed narrator tells the story of Paul and Elizabeth; Elizabeth tells the story of Paul; Coetzee tells the story of Elizabeth and co.

But what is possibly more appealing than this house of mirrors is that Paul (who never realizes his own artificiality) perpetually ostracizes Elizabeth by telling her that she is an outsider, and that she should go away. In this sense, Slow Man is more than metafictional; it is metacritical. Characters themselves literally seek to banish their author. In so doing, they argue for some bizarre notion of autonomy. At the same time, it is Elizabeth who is authoring these character sentiments (and noting her disagreement with them). In these ways, this kind of metafiction seems a step up from, say, the metafiction of Nabokov. There (in Lolita, for instance), metafiction worked to rupture narrative structure and truth-orientation; now it works masochistically: Elizabeth writes about her own self-willed exile, and disparate character responses to her own story; J.M. Coetzee writes more enigmatically about the punishment of the author by his own characters. We are thus left with a plethora of high-stake questions.

It is frequently asked if authors owe, or are responsible, for the actions of their characters. Ought we hold authors responsible for the ethics of their characters? Slow Man effectively reverses this arrangement. Ought we to hold characters responsible for authorial actions? Do characters have an ethics of their own, that is always at odds with the author's? When authors often say characters merely 'came to them', what is meant by this? Is possession or divine intervention exempt from the logic of responsibility? Are some authors just fated to be wed to certain characters, to certain themes, like a bad habit?

Hopefully these questions will initiate more.