Abstract
This chapter examines the male idealisation of the female figure that we find in many of J. M. Coetzee’s works, together with their depiction of male-female relationships as characterised by a constant conflict between the real and the ideal, imagination and physicality. Arguing that this conflict owes much to Don Quixote’s relation to Dulcinea, to which Coetzee’s texts repeatedly turn, López analyses the ways in which Coetzee’s texts explore the complexities and ambivalent ethical consequences of passion and desire, which are often presented as undecidable forces exceeding the subject’s choice and control, but for which characters must take responsibility in social, ethical and legal terms.
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Notes
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Coetzee’s interest in and familiarity with Girard’s theories is made clear in his 1980 article, ‘Triangular Structures of Desire in Advertising,’ and in the repeated references to them in Giving Offense (1996).
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I have elsewhere (López, 2013) argued that Cervantine influence is also central to understanding Coetzee’s depiction of the conflict between imagination and reality, the novel and history, together with the traits of some of his characters such as the use of ‘foolish speech’ (Coetzee, 1992a: 78), doggedness and inflexibility, or the reading of reality through the lens of literature.
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As put by Jolly, this fictional memoir juxtaposes ‘the ecstasy of desire with the tawdry reality of the proto-artist’s attempt to fulfil those desires’ (102).
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This amounts to a crucial difference between Cervantes and Coetzee. Whereas ‘tragic complications and serious consequences’ are completely lacking in Cervantes’s depiction of Don Quixote’s madness and nonsense (Auerbach, 2005: 48), Coetzee constantly highlights the possibly dramatic and even violent consequences of his characters’ unsuitable desires and passions.
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Critics have generally pointed to how Lurie uses a falsifying Romantic tradition to justify his desire and his taking possession of Melanie’s body (Attridge, 2000: 117; Cooper, 2005: 25; Peterson, 2012: 121). What they have failed to say, however, is to what extent this is a quintessentially quixotic motif, as I have elsewhere analysed.
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López, M.J. (2019). ‘God Knows Whether There Is a Dulcinea in This World or Not’: Idealised Passion and Undecidable Desire in J. M. Coetzee. In: Kossew, S., Harvey, M. (eds) Reading Coetzee's Women. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19777-3_10
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