2 - Scenes and Settings: Foe, Boyhood, Youth, Slow Man

Summary

This chapter explicates the ways in which setting matters in Coetzee’s writing. The settings assembled in its mises en scène are vital to narrative world-making; at the same time, they perform an indexical function that invests these narratives with ‘worldly weight’, thus establishing a relation to the real that is simultaneously fictitious and true. Tracking a movement from the insular and segregated state of apartheid South Africa, through the provincial-metropolitan axis and along the southern latitudes in Foe, Boyhood, Youth, and Slow Man, the chapter shows how these settings indicate a sustained and deepening sense of situatedness that is both informed by and larger than the national contexts of South Africa and Australia. Chafing against the national frame, the settings of these works elaborate the category of the provincial and then redirect it to that of ‘the South’. They function as neither tromp l’oeil nor exotic local colour, neither blank screen nor empty frame, but instead convey the substance of the ‘real South’ while locating it as alternative centre of gravity that generates its own deictic markers.