Coetzee and Face

Continuing with the rather boppy theme of facial mutilation, we are forced to reckon with the ongoing and acutely wonderful canon of the work of J.M. Coetzee. My infatuation for Coetzee began with a hurried reading of Disgrace, the story of an ageing male professor enjoying a bout of uncontrollable lust for the younger members of the female sex. Those of you savvy enough to have read the novel, for which he deservedly received the Booker Prize in 1999, will know that my little synopsis is an extremely poor distillation of a masterwork of contemporary literature.

My sudden, impassioned regard for Coetzee has taken me through many of his earlier works of fiction. Here, chronology deserves our attention. Pineda's Face was published in 1984; Coetzee, as he writes in his foreword, first read the book in 1985, two years after the publication of the novel that first earned him the Booker Prize in 1983, The Life and Times of Michael K, but a year before the publication of his lesser-known re-imagining of Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, simply entitled Foe.

In 2003 the board of Nobel judges for literature, after awarding Coetzee the honor, issued, by way of brief explanation, the following appraisal of his work: “In numerable guises [Coetzee] presents the surprising involvement of the outsider.” The inimitable protagonist of Coetzee's fourth novel, Michael K is a classic outsider figure, shirking society, preferring to live a life of seclusion and self-sufficiency, a combination that proves rather demanding during the chaos of the South African civil war of the seventies and eighties. Setting Michael K apart, however, is his hare lip, "like a snail's foot", which he ardently refuses to have corrected. Coetzee's recognition of the importance of the face, then, is established.

Prior to this, his second novel, In the Heart of the Country tells the story of a female genius living as a housemaid in rural South-Africa, unable to articulate her fears and escape. She is noted for her mannish appearance, enhanced by a single eyebrow that stretches across the base of her forehead. It appears, therefore, that Coetzee's construction of the outward appearances of his protagonists greatly informs our understanding of their social standing. Indeed, during the pivotal set-piece, central to the thematic and narrative arc of Disgrace, our protagonist, David Lurie has his ear badly singed by fire. Facial misconfiguration, therefore, becomes somewhat of an index throughout Coetzee's novels, providing the acid test by which we assess and develop the protagonist at hand.

During his fictional reworking of the writing process behind Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (which, one might convincingly argue, could be labelled 'creative-fiction'), Coetzee takes the character of Friday, Crusoe's loyal manservant, and makes him a mute. How, exactly, Friday lost his tongue remains unclear, and the female protagonist, Susan Barton, struggles continually in her search for the answer. Obviously, unable to speak, Friday cannot explain the cause or the perpetrator that reduced him to such barbarism. Barton describes being positively repulsed by Friday upon learning of his affliction: a very similar repulsion described by the peers of Helio Cara in Face. Friday becomes an object of curiosity, revulsion, and exile. During a moment of speculation and attempted empathy, Barton ponders her lingering sense of disgust.

An aversion that came over me that we feel for all the mutilated. Why is that so, do you think? Because they put us in mind of what we would rather forget. […] Perhaps. But toward you I felt a deeper revulsion. I could not put out of mind the softness of the tongue, its softness and wetness, and the fact that it does not live in the light, also how helpless it is before the knife, once the barrier of the teeth have been passed.

The passage is notable not only for Barton's description, but also because it was written by Coetzee just after his first reading of Face, in 1986. The above examples of facial deformity, taken alongside this erudite, yet powerful exploration of the face's innate attachment to the human condition, lend some insight into Coetzee's obsession with the face, whilst expanding upon yesterday's theory of sameness.