Introduction

Abstract

‘I don’t think or act in sweeps’, says Coetzee to David Attwell in one of the interviews in Doubling the Point. ‘I tend to be rather slow and painstaking and myopic in my thinking’ (Coetzee, Doubling the Point 246). A cursory perusal of the titles of some of Coetzee’s critical essays bears testimony to the measure of his statement: ‘The Manuscript Revisions of Beckett’s Watt’; ‘The First Sentence of Yvonne Burgess’ The Strike’; ‘The Rhetoric of the Passive in English’; ‘The Agentless Sentence as Rhetorical Device’; ‘Time, Tense and Aspect in Kafka’s “The Burrow”’…These linguistic analyses may not at first seem pertinent to the deeply ethical concerns that have attracted the interest of much Coetzee scholarship, yet one of my leading arguments is that sustained attention to Coetzee’s preoccupation with a grammar that limits linguistic and aesthetic choices provides a way of appreciating the complexity of Coetzee’s ethical engagements. Clearly, I am using the term ‘grammar’ in a slightly special sense here — in the sense of what the structures of language within a work of literature enable the writer to say.¹ More specifically, my discussion throughout the book constitutes an extended thinking through of the ethics and aesthetics of literary address: that is to say, in what ways do seemingly innocent linguistic choices on the part of the writer have ethical consequences for the position of the speaking or writing self in relation to those whom one addresses, or in relation to those on whose behalf one speaks, or in relation to a world one attempts to represent or create in writing?