Ethically valuable failure? : confession, sacrifice, and ethical responsibility in three novels by J.M. Coetzee : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in English, Massey University, Manawatū, New Zealand
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2024
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Massey University
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This thesis explores impulses and resistances to confession in three novels by J.M. Coetzee: Waiting for the Barbarians (1980), Disgrace (1999), and The Schooldays of Jesus (2016). Specifically, it takes as its point of departure the apparent tension between confession and ethics in these novels, and in Coetzee’s oeuvre generally. I find that, despite his repeated return in fiction to the ethically valuable experience of being impinged upon by the other, and his repeated representation of flawed and sexually violent male characters, Coetzee seems, in both his fictional and critical work, to rule out the possibility that confession might possess any ethical valences. I analyse Coetzee’s apparent disregard for confession’s ethical value by reference to Michel Foucault, who from the mid-1970s developed a thoroughgoing critique of the role of confession in the power-knowledge nexus so central to his genealogies. I suggest that both rue confession’s role in maintaining established power dynamics, particularly in judicial settings, as well as its potential to encourage a harmful relationship of the self to itself. This latter concern is explored by way of the sacrifice Foucault claims is entailed in confession, a concern I argue is borne out in Disgrace and The Schooldays of Jesus. Judith Butler’s Giving an Account of Oneself (2005) provides a useful intervention into Coetzee’s and Foucault’s concerns. Drawing extensively from Foucault’s account of subjectivation, and yet departing from his almost wholesale condemnation of the role played by confession in Western society, Butler finds in the inevitable failure of accounting for one’s actions and who one is – and the experience of dispossession therein – grounds for the establishment of ethical responsibility. The dispossessing experience of giving an account, challenging as it does the idea of a sovereign subject, is thus seemingly intolerable to Foucault, but generative and foundational for Butler. In applying Butler’s work on giving an account to the three novels under consideration, I suggest that not only is failure inevitable when one attempts to confess, but that, far from constituting a reason to resist the interminable process of secular confession – interminability being a key concern in Waiting for the Barbarians – it may well be a source of ethical responsibility.