‘Nothing is worse than what we can imagine’: Secrecy and Allegory in J.M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians and Disgrace
Secrecy and the various rhetorical devices that this option entails are major narrative strategies in Coetzee’s fiction and several ramifications of these motifs are recurrently mobilised in many of his texts. Research in clinical psychopathology and psychoanalysis provides us with a framework for a...
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| Veröffentlicht in: | URI:https://journals.openedition.org/ces, |
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| Format: | Article ou chapitre numérique |
| Sprache: | Anglais |
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Commonwealth Essays and Studies
2022
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| Online Zugang: | Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM |
| Zusammenfassung: | Secrecy and the various rhetorical devices that this option entails are major narrative strategies in Coetzee’s fiction and several ramifications of these motifs are recurrently mobilised in many of his texts. Research in clinical psychopathology and psychoanalysis provides us with a framework for an enhanced understanding of why certain things have to be left unsaid or denied, be it torture and mutilation in Waiting for the Barbarians, or rape in Disgrace. Such violent circumstances or events endow human relationships and power relations with a melancholy character. The morbid motifs repeatedly used by the novelist also lead him to probe the limits of the potential to express and narrate. So ultimately the representation of handicap and physical molestation on an imaginary level allows Coetzee to reflect on the nature and position of South African subjects in their complex relation with a crushing history and society. Allegory plays an integral role in Coetzee’s writing of secrecy, if only as a means of calling itself into question. |
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