BODY FETISHISM: J M COETZEE'S DISGRACE AS A REVELATORY STORY

Abstract

Every writer fetishises with some themes; that is to say, some writers pay excessive devotion to certain thematic preoccupations and these are seemingly recurrent in the course of an author's writing which eventual becomes his fetish. For a seasoned writer like John Michael Coetzee, in the course of his expansive writing history, one of his dominant discursive fascination amongst others has been with -the body-human and nonhuman. This paper dismantles and deconstructs the body as handled by Coetzee in Disgrace (1999) under binaries like human/animal body in the throes of pain/pleasure; the body as a signification of freedom/oppression;expression/repression; victim/victimizer, power/powerlessness; self/other; black/white; nor malcy/abnormality; desire/love, male/female, consequently revealing certain societal experiences like black racism and corrective rape in the contemporary South African society. The paper uses Coetzee's Disgrace (1999) focally, to demonstrate a comingling of the novelist's fascination or fetishisms to human and animal bodies to accentuate and reveal diverse intimations of human and animal conditions in South Africa and the world.