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Writing Out of All the Camps: J.M. Coetzee's Narratives of Displacement (Studies in Major Literary Authors)

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Laura Wright's study is an interdisciplinary examination - combining ethical, postcolonial, performance, gender-based, and environmental theory - of the ways that 2003 Nobel Prize winning South African novelist J. M. Coetzee, primarily through his voicing of a female subject position and his presentation of a voiceless subjectivity, the animal, displaces both the narrative and authorial voice in his works of fiction. Coetzee's work remains outside of conventional notions of genre by virtue of the free indirect discourse that characterizes many of his third-person narrated texts that feature male protagonists (Life & Times of Michael K, The Master of Petersburg, and Disgrace), various and differing first-person narrative accounts of the same story (Dusklands, In the Heart of the Country), the use of female narrators and female narrative personas (Age of Iron, The Lives of Animals), and unlocatable, ahistorical contexts (Waiting for the Barbarians). She argues that via such displacement Coetzee writes dialogically, in the Bahktinian sense, as an author whose work performs various positions rather than maintains an internal, controlling, and monologic subjectivity. Therefore, Coetzee's texts, like his character of Michael K, position themselves "out of all the camps at the same time." Such destabilization opens up a space for my examination of the metafictional and postmodern nature of Coetzee's writing as performative narratives that allow for interplay between character, audience, and author. If there is any unifying aspect of Coetzee's writing, she argues, it is his relentless examination - and his characters' continuous pursuit - of imagined identification with the other, in the form of not only the black characters who are often silent in his texts and the white women who often narrate, but also in the form of animals, an issue he pursues most overtly in is 1997-98 Princeton Tanner Lectures, The Lives of Animals.

I'm currently writing my disseration on J. M. Coetzee, and I found Dr. Wright's book to be an invaluable resource. This text is particularly useful in terms of its discussions of animals in Coetzee's works and with regard to Coetzee's female narrators -- I would classify this research as environmental, animal-rights, feminist, and postcolonial. All in all, a thorough study and a pleasure to read: her writing is scholarly, but it's also lyrical and accessible.