“AN AESTHETICS—OR ETHICS—OF INCOMPLETION”: J.M. COETZEE’S NOVELS AS WORKS OF ETHICAL MOURNING
Humanities
LTEL 190a Memory, History, Trauma
South African novelist J.M. Coetzee’s novels In the Heart of the Country (1977), Life & and Times of Michael K (1983), and Foe (1986) are postcolonial narratives that depict, whether literally or allegorically, a state of apartheid and how this state psychologically affects individuals and communities. Furthermore, these are not simply postcolonial narratives, but also trauma narratives in that they represent the trauma of apartheid and how this trauma is registered and conveyed through language. Within these narratives, it is on the level of language, and in the narratives’ indication of language’s own flaws and insufficiencies—the disconnects, the gaps, the silences—that the trauma of apartheid is reflected. Additionally, these narratives are works of mourning and they utilize language’s and narrative’s failure, especially the futility of speech and communication, to call for an ethical form of mourning that does not merely seek to move past and forget apartheid’s trauma, but additionally engenders the sense of an ethical imperative that attempts to prevent the perpetuation and the reoccurance of an apartheid system.
