The most important of all rights is the right to life,
and I cannot foresee a day when domesticated animals will be granted that right
in law. -- J.
M. COETZEE
The winner of the Nobel Prize in literature in the year 2003, J. M. Coetzee is a man of his own kind, an engineer with his own tools. His novels
were wedded with the real world until he wrote ‘Disgrace.’ With ‘Disgrace,’ he became
the first writer to pocket the Booker Prize twice.
Then came his novels
Elizabeth Costello (2003) and Slow Man (2005), the neat fiction. ‘Slow Man’
tries to draw a line between fiction and reality. In ‘Slow Man’ the subject
matter flows like a wide waterway. Here Coetzee tries defining the region
wherein both fiction and reality live side-by-side, having common entrance
and exit doors.
The story starts with a great fall and then turns into a
river, taking us over to the distant regions. A man, Paul Rayment, age 60,
alone after divorce, childless, and an Australian, is not a man of
peaceful temper. Nor is he a man of satiated desires.
After an accident that
has made him fly in the air, he is bedridden with one leg amputated. But
the accident, the flying from his bicycle seat, and the subsequent fall have not
made him dreamless. He thinks about his life to come, though not with the same
speed as before. He conjures up a new life.
 |
J. M. Coetzee signing at the
Penguin Random House Grupo Editorial
booth at the Buenos Aires Book Fair. |
Keeping his middle-aged nurse, Marijana Jokic, in the center, he conjures
up a family with her and her young son, Drago. Paul craves living with Marijana and her good-shaped calves and even desires his extension
through the Drago.
Though in order to remain alive after his death, he has
another contingent plan, too. He wants to donate a collection of his old and
rare photographs to a library and remain alive through those photographs.
COETZEE’S MAGICAL RELATIONSHIP WITH THE READERS
THEME: SHAPE OUT THE LATER YEARS OF YOUR LIFE, MEN!
Such a spell of emptiness is
agonizing, especially in the later phase of our life journey. The traveller
finds the road ahead darkening. Literature provides us with some light in
the darkness.
The great thinkers, and their writings, have upgraded the
literature to the level of religion in the secularized section of people.
Keeping pace with this movement for providing primal education, Coetzee has
carved out a striking statement in Slow Man. He has scripted a message, the
message about the art of living.
Circumstances do not allow him to do what he likes. Everything changes in a
strange way when a stranger’s finger rings his doorbell.
Here enters Elizabeth
Costello, a fictional character from Coetzee’s previous novel of the same name.
She wants to make out a character from the material on the bed, Paul’s reduced
life. His life is ending in installments, the amputation of the leg being
the first one.
Unusual dialogues are bartered between Paul
and Elizabeth. You occurred to me—a man with a bad leg and an unsuitable
passion: that is what Elizabeth says to him. He neglects Costello in every
possible way. But he keeps on pursuing Marijana, offering a scholarship to
Drago for the study he is dreaming to undergo.
Marijana and her husband, Mr. Jokic, a Croatian refugee, turn down the offer.
Whereas they reject Paul’s advancement for being Drago’s foster father, they
avoid being thankless people.
Drago, with active help from all of his
family members, repairs Paul’s devastated bicycle. He turns the bicycle into a
Paul Rayment, an amputee, friendly vehicle.
The satiric sentences, the unusual response by Paul to have no prosthesis, and
Marijana’s caring presence are sufficient materials to make us turn two
hundred and odd pages weightlessly.
But J. M. Coetzee, seemingly a writer
of the straight-lined stories, till the day surprises us when a character
from his earlier novel forcefully enters Paul Rayment, the Slow Man’s life.
Elizabeth Costello, a fictional entity, is not a simple woman. Nor has she come
to behave sophisticatedly with Paul, a patient by orthopedic definition.
On knowing that the Costello woman would be making a story out of his sorry
state, Paul wants to drive her out of his home.
He unequivocally tells her his
mind, too: "You treat me like a puppet... You treat everyone like a
puppet. You make up stories and bully us into playing them out for you."
He considers himself an ordinary man and is quite reluctant to become the
center of a story. Here Coetzee’s narration is so pictorial that a reader would feel like they were sitting in the middle of the room where these characters run into each
other.
Growing under the apartheid regime of South Africa and addicted to writing
in allegorical ways, Coetzee always deals with the subject matter in
non-traditional ways.
The manner in which he transacts with our hearts is in no
way a conventional one. He acts like a wild cat sitting on the chest of its
prey. And many a time, the cat leaves us spilling blood.
However, when the
‘Barbarians Are Coming’ or the shadows of ‘Disgrace’ are hovering over the
characters, he endeavors to search for a possible way out.
In Slow Man, the writer-character Costello tries hard to connect herself
with ‘the character’ Paul Rayment, but she fails on several occasions.
The
scuffle due to the gap between a writer’s demand from the character and the
character’s denial to obey generates bitter conversations. The stage set for the
ongoing wrestle entertains us on the first count.
Secondly, the situation in which both the movers of the story are put into compels us to think on several
unattended subjects. It induces us to think about the exact relationship
between literature and mankind.
Writers who have insight into human minds and who hold immense sympathy for
mankind would hardly resist the urge for choosing one or another set of ethics.
Though in his unique pattern, Coetzee, too, does so in Slow Man. Paul Rayment
is a retired photographer who should lead a comfortable old age, a life
without astonishing events.
But even after being reduced to a one-legged life, this man of aging flesh, Paul, thinks about his nurses’ soft skin and shapely
calves. The art of growing older is, perhaps, missing from us, the humans.
We tally our bank balances; we pay our bills in time, more or less;
but we fail to address the issues of vital importance to our life, especially life after retirement—a period that could be the most beautiful spell in
one’s life.
At this stage, one must have a clear-cut account of what has been
achieved and what remains yet to be achieved. Here the question crops up of
‘what’ should really be done. Coetzee winks at that area.
The protagonist of Slow Man tries to find meaning in his life. He thinks
about becoming the foster father of her nurse’s son, Drago.
He loves to love
Marijana’s children; he is even ready to accommodate her husband in his life.
Marijana’s imposing presence, and her occasional non-attendance, exposes him to
his inner emptiness.
He yearns for filling the gaps in his life.
THE END
Image courtesy Mariusz
Kubik, http://www.mariuszkubik.pl/, CC
BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Frodar,
CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
