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Abstract

This chapter explores the ethics and aesthetics of literary address — a field of enquiry that invites attention throughout Coetzee’s oeuvre. Complex situations of address, and human encounters in a variety of forms, constitute a recurrent motif in the novels themselves. One thinks immediately of the playing-out of precarious and difficult ’I-you’ relations within the fiction: the nuanced intensity of Magda’s attempts to find a reciprocal language in In the Heart of the Country; the Medical Officer’s fraught second-person address to Michael K in the middle section of Life & Times of Michael K; Mrs Curren’s letter to her daughter, intended to be read after her own death, which comprises the entire text of Age of Iron. The striking portrayal of scenes of address in Coetzee’s fiction, often cast in Coetzee scholarship as the relation of self to other — or a relation to ‘alterity’, in the sense that Continental philosopher, Emmanuel Levinas, uses the term — has attracted much critical attention in recent years.¹