“Form follows dysfunction”: Coetzee’s Narrative Ethics of Disability

The article seeks to demonstrate the extent to which J. M. Coetzee’s post-rational ethics of embodied understanding is compatible with dismodernism, which champions subjectivity as predicated on dependence, malleability, and difference. In proposing that ethics in Coetzee’s work is to a large extent a function of the formal qualities of his writing, the article measures modernism against dismodernism, concepts that are heavily dependent on fragmentation, disruption, and estrangement for their operation. Taking on board the structural confluence of ethics and form, the argument is that narrative ambiguity approximates the logic of disability in its reliance on the metaphysics of lack. This hypothesis is tested on fictionalizations of bodily dysfunctions in Coetzee’s first novel Dusklands (1974).