J. M. 쿳시의 소설과 서사윤리: 『야만인을 기다리며』와 『수치』

J. M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians and Disgrace explore the relationship between history and fiction, criticizing colonialism and probing potentiality of ethics in South Africa. These two works embody two conceptions as their themes: “undecidability,” which means that a subject of responsibility for others ought to experience an aporia between singularity and generality, and “alterity,” which exceeds us and puts itself forward by its visage. This paper examines the ethical aspect and the relation between ‘the ethics of the Other’ and colonial South Africa in both of the two works. Waiting for the Barbarians suggests that the modern system of representation has the risk of depriving the repressed of their own voice. Thereafter, the concern shifts to the issue of law and justice, through which this work questions about the authority of the Empire’s law and exposes the invalidity and illegitimacy of its domination. Disgrace depicts an aporia, the prerequisite of responsibility a subject of ethics in a true sense of the word cannot escape. The unknowable and incomprehensible others to us also are embodied in this work. These themes propound the ethics of the Other to South Africa where the turmoil of colonialism still prevails.