Abstract:
This Article investigates John Maxwell Coetzee’s three well known novels, Foe (1986), Disgrace (1999) and Life and Times of Michael K (1983) to analyze the colonial pattern of the marginal characters. The theoretical framework is based on Bhabha and Spivak concentrating on the economy of the male identity in post-colonial context. From Bhabha, notions like mimicry, hybridity and change and from Spivak the subaltern’s inaudibility of voice are appropriated. Derrida’s idea of iterability is also applied. The intention is to follow the instances of mimicry and examine if Coetzee’s literature manages to have political and ethical significance, as Spivak believes. It was concluded that resistance in Coetzee’s novels is an iterative moment signifying through recurring role reversions in the colonial discourse. Coetzee’s novels do not conclude with actualization of political betterment, yet the iterative quality of his significations invites us to reread his novels and reconsider the political and ethical questions. The ultimate meanings of his novels in the mind of the reader is inviting him to make political decisions, though seemingly metaphorical and apolitical. Keywords:Coetzee, Mimicry, Iterability, Bhabha, Spivak.
Machine summary:
Iterative Mimicry as Writing Back: Role Reversion in Coetzee’s Foe, Disgrace and Life and Times of Michael K1 Elham Naeej*2 Received: 2016/03/15 | Revision: 2016/09/01 | Accepted: 2017/05/03 Abstract This Article investigates John Maxwell Coetzee’s three well known novels, Foe (1986), Disgrace (1999) and Life and Times of Michael K (1983) to analyze the colonial pattern of the marginal characters.
Bhabha, introduces central concepts such as hybridity, mimicry, ambivalence, difference and sly civility into the post-colonial discourse to ad- dress the path to resistance against cultural imperialism.
Three years later, Coetzee writes Foe which is an inventive re-writing of The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719) which is about the experience of the shipwrecked eponymous protagonist in an island over which he attempts to dominate and gain mastery.
In the following section, a brief review of the related literature on Coetzee will be presented to discuss the main argument of the article which is on the political significance of Coetzee’s novels.
M. Coetzee and the Idea of the Public Intellectual (2006,a) points to the inherent ambiguous tension in the white woman’s position (Susan) who is simultaneously a colonizer and a colonized, another famous critic of Coetzee, Attwell, discusses the inability of the silenced black (Friday) to communicate (1993, p.
The first time David meets him, Petrus introduces himself as “the dog-man” (Coetzee, 1999, p.
Later in the novel, we notice that it is Petrus who orders David (in case of plumbing for instance) what to do and what not to do (Coetzee, 1999, p.