The Language of Silence: Textual and Political Resistance in J.M. Coetzee's Work

As a novelist with a strong background in linguistics, Coetzee has often dealt with issues related to language also in his narrative production, focussing on the way language can create meaning and become an instrument of power constructing (or deconstructing) an individual’s identity. Because of this, his characters’ rejection of certain categories such as the ‘I’ and the ‘Other’, and their rebellion against the language of authority which creates these categories and imposes them as natural, can be read in many ways: as the attempt to evade language as such, as an effort to disrupt the language of authority to which the characters themselves are subjected and as the refusal of both the fixed identity that language tries to impose upon the individual, and of the fixed and ‘true’ meaning that supposedly lies at the heart of every narrative, the ‘elementary structure of signification’ Greimas described in 1966. It is precisely this notion that Coetzee tries, throughout his career as a writer, to invalidate, by creating narratives which, because of the spirit of resistance with which they are imbued, cannot be accounted for in terms of this fundamental narrative structure. Because he tries metafictionally to represent this resistance in his texts, some of Coetzee’s characters become the very personification of the textual resistance which prevents readers from unveiling the fundamental ‘truth’ of the novels themselves. The aim of this article is therefore to analyse the way in which his characters – despite important differences – become the ‘texts’ which both “intra” and “extra” diegetic readers try to ‘explain’, and the strategies they adopt in order to oppose this forced reading.