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A slow redemption

2005; Elsevier BV; Volume: 366; Issue: 9501 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1016/s0140-6736(05)67773-2

1474-547X

Terry Eagleton,

Most novels deal in subtle states of consciousness, but this one opens with a state of unconsciousness. Paul Rayment, the childless, solitary, unfulfilled 60-year-old protagonist, is knocked off his bicycle by a car and has one leg amputated above the knee. A series of reconstructive operations, with a success rate of less than 50%, just isn't considered worth it for a man of his age. All this is portrayed in the spare, exactingly honest prose we have come to associate with the Nobel Prize winning South African novelist J M Coetzee. Rayment refuses a prosthesis, and his author's literary style has no need of such elaborately artificial aids either. But Rayment is crippled enough already. He is a kind of spiritual amputee who has been "missing himself" all his life, adrift between life and death. Three times exiled, and now living in that vast refugee camp known as Australia, he is a foreigner to human existence, with all the sardonic, self-ironising detachment of the literary artist. If this emotionally mutilated émigré has done no harm in his desultory existence, neither has he done any good. He is an "after-man", like the after-images with which, as an expert photographer, he is professionally familiar. The first part of Slow Man, which depicts hospital treatment from the viewpoint of an exceedingly astute patient, should be compulsory reading for every medic. Rayment is less stricken by the sudden loss of his limb than deeply outraged, as though he has just been robbed of something unutterably precious by a total stranger. With slowly shattering dignity, he endures the infantilising patronage of a nurse with a "bouncy, cheerful voice" who calls a bedpan a potty and his penis his willy. His healing stump reminds him first of cured ham, then of some sightless deep-water fish. When he is naked before the unbearably bouncy nurse, he averts his eyes so that she will see he does not see her seeing him. Once reinstalled in his Adelaide home, the newly lopsided Rayment falls touchingly, ridiculously in love with the strapping Croatian nurse, Marijuana, assigned to his care. We are meant to see the pathos of this great passion for a woman who sexually speaking doesn't give a toss for him, but also to see it as a symptom of some subterranean spiritual rebirth. Like most men and women unaccustomed to handling emotion, Rayment grows tipsy on the tiniest sip of the stuff. Rayment's love for Marijuana, while authentic enough, takes the form of paternal fantasies of protecting her and her family; and like all well meaning middle-class liberals who take to conscientious meddling in the lives of their social inferiors, he very nearly comes to grief. This, then, would seem to confirm the hero's earlier thin-blooded dissociation from those around him: if you get involved, you get hurt. Those who aren't used to human emotional involvement will make a particular hash of it if they get sucked in, rather as erstwhile celibates may turn out to be the greatest philanderers. Rayment wants to bless Marijuana's family and make them thrive; but is this the stirrings of saintliness in him, or a self-serving illusion of Godlike omnipotence? Nothing in this superbly intricate fiction is as unambiguous as it seems. Rayment's self-indulgent meddling is also a genuine desire to do some selfless deed before his morally shabby existence stumbles to a close. As the narrative unfolds, we are invited to reflect on whether there can really be a disinterested love. Rayment's adolescent fixation on Marijuana is scarcely that, ridden as it is with delusion and pious self-deception; so perhaps nursing, or medical ministration in general, may serve as an image of a kind of love that sees its object dispassionately for what it is. If this is so, then what it resembles most closely is art, which at its finest is also a delusion-free zone. Yet if medics are to tend their patients effectively, they must be as dispassionate as artists; and this is not the kind of love which Rayment is seeking. Does genuine altruism involve basically not caring? And does passionately caring invariably involve a warping self-interest? Not long after Slow Man gets into gear, it shifts from being a realist novel to being a modernist one, with the entry into Rayment's dingy existence of the celebrated Australian novelist Elizabeth Costello. Elizabeth Costello, as Coetzee fans will be aware, is the title of his last-published work of fiction, so that Costello has strayed out of one literary text into another. Quite what she is doing here is tantalisingly enigmatic. She is part lover, part therapist, part fixer or go-between, part just a sick rootless old woman who holds up an unflattering mirror to Rayment of himself. But she is also a secret emissary of the author himself, and like Coetzee appears to be writing a story in which Rayment figures as the central character. It isn't surprising that she tends to speak like a book. Is Rayment, then, just an unreal creation of Costello, who is in turn a figment of Coetzee's imagination? And if characters are just figments of writers, is it not also true that writers are in a sense creatures of their own creations? Introducing the author/character relationship into a novel is hardly an original device, but it is a powerful image of the vexed relation between freedom and determinism. Can Rayment really make ethical decisions, or is he already rigorously scripted by his author? If so, is the same true of us non-fictional types, out here in the real world? Perhaps, like characters in fiction, we have freedom to act, but only within the severe limits set upon us. Most novelists feel that their characters come to assume an autonomous life of their own, behaving with surprising unpredictability and slipping rebelliously from their control; and this is certainly true of Rayment, who resents Costello's intervening in his life. Yet wouldn't "freedom" for a fictional character mean simply disappearing into thin air? Rayment can indeed shuck off Elizabeth—but only (like a successfully cured psychoanalytic patient) if he sheds his erotic fantasies about Marijuana, confronts the truth about himself, takes control of his own existence, and thus renders his "author" redundant. Elizabeth wants to "bring him to life", which is what all writers want to do to their characters; but he can be restored to life only by bringing life to another. And this, in a magnificent final scene, he does not by extravagantly giving, but by the rather more arduous act of receiving. This, then, is a novel about redemption, as Rayment learns that he has to be worthy of being a fictional hero by bringing his heart out of hiding. Like the rest of us, he has to become a more engaging character than he actually is—which means viewing himself with something of the starkly demystified honesty with which his author dissects him. Perhaps, then, that nasty crash on the road, as in classical tragedy, was the seed of a mysterious renewal. It has put Rayment in touch with his flesh, in more senses than one; and he ends the novel by refusing to settle for anything less than love. Slow Man may be a grimly disenchanted narrative; but it is detached enough from its own bleakness to reflect at one point that there is something curiously comic about losing any part of the body—especially, Rayment adds with his steely lack of self-pity, "one that sticks out".