The Inheritance of the Unrepresentable: from J. M. Coetzee to Zoë Wicomb

At the narrative core of both J. M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians and Zoë Wicomb’s David’s Story lies women’s tortured bodies. The literary and aesthetic representation of women’s tortured bodies raises the ethical and political questions inherent in the representation of the other--that is, how to represent the other without subsuming the voice of the other under the representer’s language and/or without fixating the historical meaning of the other on the narrator’s partial perspective. In this precise sense, the two novels’ representation of women’s tortured body not only makes it the prominent theme in South Africa’s recent literary tradition but also demands our responses and reflections on the political and ethical nature of the representation of the other. While the two novels respectively adopt Kantian/ethical approach and Hegelian/political stance towards the tortured woman’s body, this paper argues that these two seemingly disparate and even oppositional approaches should be read complementary and collaborative as to collectively form the historical inheritance of the unrepresentable in South-African literary landscape.