Emigration and photography in J.M. Coetzee’s Slow Man

Abstract

This article examines how photographs in J.M. Coetzee’s novel Slow Man focus questions about the muteness and mutability of the historical record, particularly in the context of migrancy, while elaborating the metafictional dynamic between the protagonist Paul Rayment and his nominal author Elizabeth Costello. Drawing on the work on photography of Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes and Susan Sontag, the article argues that the dispute among the characters over Drago’s “forgery” of one of Rayment’s Fauchery photographs foregrounds how the past, in the retrievable form of a static photographic image, is available for reinterpretation and reconfiguring in the present. Whereas in the novels of a writer like W.G. Sebald black-and-white photographs are included as a sign of the silence around personal histories touched by communal trauma, in Slow Man colourless photographs function as a thematic motif to highlight such silences, and more centrally to emphasize how a personal history can be as readily assimilated to a collective history as superimposed over it.

Keywords:

• emigration
• photography
• authenticity
• collective history
• metafiction
• J.M. Coetzee

Notes

1. In White Writing (1988) Coetzee writes about the silence around black African labour in novels in the English and Afrikaans tradition of the farm novel (see in particular 71–72).

2. According to Benjamin, the camera has the power of evoking what he calls “the optical unconscious”, by which he means a deep structural choreography of objects invisible to the naked human eye (37).

3. See Wittenberg on the publication history of Dusklands.