The Dialectic of the Unhappy Consciousness in J.M. Coetzee's Fiction

This study provides a dialectical alternative to poststructuralist and postmodernist readings of J. M. Coetzee’s fiction, on one hand, and Levinasian interpretations of his works, on the other. Drawing on Hegel and Adorno, I explore the subject position of the Unhappy Consciousness in three of Coetzee’s novels: Foe, Age of Iron, and Elizabeth Costello. Specifically, I argue that the women characters in these novels can be understood through the lens of the Unhappy Consciousness, that is, the “dual” consciousness of mastery and slavery. As such, they are obsessed with questions of freedom (mastery and slavery), forgiveness, love, salvation, and evil, among others. Women who bear the wounds of history, I believe, occupy the ideal subject position as mediators through which we can relate to the suffering of the other, including the animal others, without assimilating the other’s difference. This study attempts to understand the nature of this relation with the other without sacrificing “nonidentity” to the language of mastery. Susan Barton in Foe is a white woman whose voice has been silenced by white men and the literary canon. She locates herself as the master to Friday and the slave to Cruso, who is replaced by Foe later in the novel. Mrs. Curren in Age of Iron, likewise, is an ailing white woman situated in late-apartheid South Africa and as such she occupies the position of mastery with regards to the black population and a position of slavery with regards to men in general. Elizabeth Costello is both animal and human and as such mediates our relation with what she calls our “slave populations,” i.e., animals (104). As I show, all three novels can be read as adhering to but at the same time writing back to and revising the Hegelian Unhappy Consciousness. Drawing on Adorno, I regard the primacy of the bodily and the somatic, i.e. physical suffering, to be central to the dialectic of the Unhappy Consciousness in these novels. Ultimately, animals and nonhuman others appear as figures of “nonidentity” crawling through the surface of Coetzee’s fiction, plaguing the consciousness of his works and their breeding ground, i.e. culture.