J.M. Coetzee and the Limits of Language

In this article, with particular reference to Waiting for the Barbarians ([1980] 2000) and Disgrace (1999), I explore the ways in which Coetzee's texts confront the difficulty of bringing meaningfully into linguistic range that which appears without precedent in given language. The irruption caused by the not-yet-said has the capacity to disturb the assumption that a meaningful language, recognised and shared by addressor and addressee, is being spoken at all. Yet the enquiries set up in the worlds of Coetzee's fiction never end with the first thought that something may be beyond discursive limits, even in the recognition that the effect of subsuming difference under the homogenising effect of a dominant discourse can be just as ethically fraught. In the course of the article I suggest a link between Coetzee's ethical enquiry about the limits of language, and that of Holocaust writer, Jean Amery, in his book, At the Mind's Limits ([1966] 1980).