The disgraced life in J. M. Coetzee’s Dusklands

Abstract

Through a close reading of J. M. Coetzee’s Dusklands, this paper explores the productive overlap between literature and psychoanalysis, without assimilating one to the other. The author argues that while Coetzee is not in any meaningful sense of the word a “psychological” novelist, nonetheless his work provides a rich source for our understanding of inner narratives. His novels thus overlap, broadly speaking, with the psychoanalytic thinking of Klein, Kristeva, and Bion, among others. In an attempt to draw out the fictionality of the interior life in Coetzee, the essay focuses on anxiety as a type of religious anxiety. In this respect, it argues that colonial violence may be seen as part of a wider discursive formation in which the inner life is haunted by an intolerable nothingness.