Writing Slowness in J. M. Coetzee’s Slow Man

Abstract

Using literary semiotics and narratology as the only criteria, and starting from the hypothesis according to which J. M. Coetzee writes slowness in Slow Man, the article shows how Slow Man is made weighty, and why it evolves sluggishly. With an actant character saddled with the epithet “Slow Man”, a designation embodying slowness, Slow Man claims to be a slow novel generated by retardation devices like speech acts narrative, polyglotism, fragmentation, epistolarity, and narrative embeddednesss. Those roadblocks prevent flashy reading, promote “slow reading”, a leisurely and innovative reading by which the reader is brought to become a textual cooperator in the actualization process of Slow Man’s meaning.