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.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:NSYSU/oai:NSYSU:etd-0825111-011955 |
| Date | 25 August 2011 |
| Creators | Huang, Shu-ping |
| Contributors | Liang, Sun-chieh, Rudolphus Teeuwen, Luo, Ting-yao |
| Publisher | NSYSU |
| Source Sets | NSYSU Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Archive |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | http://etd.lib.nsysu.edu.tw/ETD-db/ETD-search/view_etd?URN=etd-0825111-011955 |
| Rights | unrestricted, Copyright information available at source archive |
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