This essay is concerned with the workings of hospitality towards the other in J.M. Coetzee’s novel Slow Man. The reading proposed here is that the bicycle accident which befalls protagonist Paul Rayment on the novel’s first page, costing him his leg and a large portion of his previous vitality, renders him momentarily “unstrung,” understood here as a state of passive openness to the unknown, of absolute  responsiveness or hospitality towards the other. The other is here defined as that which is—more or less—ungraspable in the self, in another being or in an unexpected event. A key argument put forward is that the accident also accentuates Paul Rayment’s enduring sense of unhomedness, his alienation in relation to body, language and self. The desire for home or belonging with other people brings about deliberate acts of hospitality on his part, as he tries to find a home for himself by inviting others in. The essay examines how these two strands of ideas—being unhomed and being unstrung—intersect in moments of hospitality in Slow Man, and reflects on how hospitality can and cannot succeed in creating a home for the subject. Theories of hospitality by Jacques Derrida, Derek Attridge and Mike Marais are discussed and serve as inspiration to the reading.

In Elizabeth Costello (2003) and Slow Man (2005), J. M. Coetzee stages a doubling of voices in a number of ways on both fictional and meta-fictional levels. It occurs between one novel and the other, co-opting ¡§lectures¡¨ from yet a third work of his (The Lives of Animals, 1999) into the sequence to further complicate this practice of doubling. It also happens between characters that cross over from one work into another, between Elizabeth Costello who visits herself on Paul, in Slow Man, as the latter¡¦s ¡§author¡¨ and saving angel, and Paul, the slow man himself who tries to wean himself from such abstruse claims. Such a joint motif of crossing-over, resistance, and further attempts at claiming control makes a strong case against the integrity of generic and identity boundaries ¡V boundaries that traditional novels mostly adhere to in their stories. Together, in the sequence, however, these acts of transgression tend to double back upon one another, so much so that doubling practically becomes the main plot. This thesis examines how such a motif of doubling enhances the volume of voices that are too often muffled behind the loud insistence on limits and identity. It looks into the ¡§debates¡¨ between the generic forms in which the novels are written, namely narratives, essays, lectures and letters. Taking these debates into account, this thesis asks the fundamental question of how the characters ¡§communicate,¡¨ and what the value of ¡§communication¡¨ is when it produces only the effect of ¡§the hazard of language.¡¨ This may well be exactly the ultimate ¡§value¡¨ of the motif of doubling in this sequence, namely that by rubbing one voice against another, these novels succeed in giving shape and body to the ¡§countervoices¡¨ that lie checked under the human ethical bond of language. It takes a he and a she, a man who is looking for care and a writer who thinks she has the right cure to offer in writing, to construe the real conflicts between one man¡¦s cure and a woman¡¦s offer of care. Between the search for cure and the offer of care, there lies the true gap of beings that cannot be bridged. They can be crossed and crossed over at best, and it is the purpose of this thesis to count, to illustrate and to fathom some of these gaps of beings, and, as Coetzee tries to do, albeit in his typical self-reflexive mode of writing, to imagine the imaginary with which a cross-over is possible by way of writing.

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / In three of J. M. Coetzee’s recent novels, Disgrace (1999), Elizabeth Costello (2003), and Slow Man (2005), the South African author explores notions of authorship and challenges the possibilities of the sympathetic imagination. The notion of the sympathetic imagination has roots in Romanticism, and it connotes inhabiting another in order to understand or interpret. Romantic poet John Keats described the poet as “continually in for [sic] and filling some other body” (Letter to Richard Woodhouse), and Coetzee addresses the notion of the sympathetic imagination in his work. There are two facets of the sympathetic imagination: that which governs social relations and that which authors and creative minds attempt to claim as a driving force behind their work. It is important not to conflate the two separate facets of the sympathetic imagination. The social facet encourages good citizenship and allows humankind to behave in humane ways. It counters one’s private desire for mastery and balances self-interest with self-sacrifice; the sympathetic imagination helps others attain their goals and places others’ needs alongside one’s own selfishness. A sympathetic imagination is an essential quality in society, yet it will always yield only partial success. It cannot achieve complete success because truly inhabiting and embodying another living person is simply impossible, but in fiction, Coetzee explores the possibilities and limits of the sympathetic imagination at the level of language and metaphor. The other facet of the sympathetic imagination is often claimed by authors, poets, and artists to allow them to inhabit the subjects of their creativity. Coetzee tests the limits of authorial claims that writing is accomplished by applying a sympathetic imagination. In doing so, he creates metaphysical frames in which his own author-characters interact with other characters to reveal that some characters resist being written. In these metaphysical frames of fiction, Coetzee suggests that an author’s sympathetic imagination will never have total success; he sets forth a notion of partial success that helps address what is gained when the sympathetic imagination runs up against limits. My argument is that the authors and characters in these three novels attempt acts of sympathetic imagination and recurrently encounter limits. Coetzee questions perceived notions of authorship and the possibilities of the sympathetic imagination without offering alternatives. He critiques common notions of authorship and character writing but offers no real solutions.