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ALICE BRITTAN Grace is a coin with more than two sides. Anne Carson, Economy of the Unlost J. M. Coetzee's novels are filled with people who tend toward the ecstatic: they tumble into oblivion, edge toward absence, thin into evanescence. As a group, these men and women are so loosely fastened to themselves that they frequently wander away and get lost, particularly when they attempt to imagine the thoughts and experiences of other human beings. It is often the case in Coetzee's fiction that the practiced suppleness of mind that allows us to come into contact with the individual sentience of others gives way to states of delirium, hallucination, or blank stupefaction.1 At once incapable of imagining and unimaginable by others, these characters inhabit a stalled and paradoxical "ecstasy of selfabsorption" (Heart 142), the same paradox that structures Coet- 1. In addition to David Lurie (Disgrace), Magda (In the Heart of the Country), the Magistrate (Waiting for the Barbarians), and Michael K (Life & Times of Michael K) are the clearest illustrations of this phenomenon, in which forms of delirium or unconsciousness substitute for intersubjective imagination. Friday (Foe) and Dostoevsky (The Master of Petersburg) are also given to
Contemporary Literature – University of Wisconsin Press
Published: Jan 14, 2010
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