Coming into Being: J. M. Coetzee’s Slow Man and the Aesthetic of Hospitality

While much of his critical work on J. M. Coetzee’s writing is informed by a sophisticated understanding of Derridean hospitality, Derek Attridge has seldom used this term himself—the exception being his insightful reading of The Master of Petersburg (J. M. Coetzee 122–24). In fact, very little criticism to date has examined Coetzee’s use of the metaphor of hospitality in his writing. Focusing principally on Age of Iron, I briefly explore, in the first part of this essay, the incidence of this trope in this writer’s earlier fiction. Thereafter, I trace his deployment of the language of hospitality in Slow Man, arguing that this metaphorical vocabulary inscribes a disjunction between the novel’s medium and the kind of hospitality of which it attempts to speak. Coetzee’s use of the trope of hospitality, I contend, in fact stages language’s inability to achieve what this metaphor insists it must achieve. Although I do consider some of the points of intersection between his engagement with the idea of hospitality and that of thinkers such as Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida, my purpose is not to speculate on Coetzee’s philosophical allegiances but to consider his understanding of the implications of the ethic of hospitality for the writing and reading of narrative fiction.

Coetzee’s concern with hospitality is evident in his extensive use in his fiction of the trope of the arrival of the stranger who precipitates change in the host who receives her. One thinks here of the medical officer’s reception of Michael K in Life & Times of Michael K, part of which, similarly to Slow Man, is set in a hospital of sorts. Another example would be Mrs. Curren’s response to Vercueil who, in the opening chapter of Age of Iron, arrives unannounced outside her house. Throughout this latter novel, Mrs. Curren associates Vercueil with an angel, and his visit, accordingly, evokes the Pauline injunction to hospitality: “Be not forgetful to entertain strangers: for thereby some have entertained angels unawares” (Heb. 13.2). In fact, in this work, Coetzee draws on Leo Tolstoy’s “What Men Live By,” a story about a poor shoemaker who provides sustenance to a naked stranger who turns out to be an angel.¹ In Tolstoy’s story, the angel’s encounter with the shoemaker teaches him that “though it seems to men that they live by care for themselves, in truth it is love alone by which they live” (81). The allusions to this short story in Coetzee’s novel establish a contrast between Tolstoy’s shoemaker’s selfless generosity and Mrs. Curren’s grudging charity in their respective encounters with a stranger. In her dealings with Vercueil, Mrs. Curren seems unable to love and care unconditionally. Unlike the house in Tolstoy’s story, which “tremble[s]...with angelic chanting” (Coetzee, Age of Iron 13), Mrs. Curren’s is without love.

Here, already, it is clear that Age of Iron points to a form of love or care that surpasses the self’s concern with itself. Tellingly, in this regard, Coetzee’s subsequent development of Mrs. Curren’s relationship with Vercueil suggests that, despite her various reservations about him and the degree to which they limit her generosity (see, for example, page 17), she is in fact deeply affected and therefore changed by her encounter with him. While her initial hospitality may be conditional, it becomes unconditional.

Before I pursue this discussion of the nature of the change that Mrs. Curren undergoes as a result of her contact with Vercueil, it is necessary briefly to adumbrate Derrida’s distinction, already evident in Levinas’s ethics, between conditional and unconditional hospitality. At stake here are the ethical implications of the ways in which the subject constructs itself in relation to other identities. The distinction is between a form of subjectivity constituted through a hostile process of inclusion and exclusion and one that comes into being in the self’s pre-reflective and traumatic exposure, without inhibition, to otherness. In Derrida’s argument, conditional hospitality involves...