“From the opening of the chapter, from the incident on Magill Road to the present, he has not behaved well, has not risen to the occasion: that much is clear to him” (15).
Slow Man, for the first third of the novel or so, lulls us into that familiar sense of suspended disbelief – the unreflective (well, as much as one can be unreflective – and unsuspicious – when reading anything by Coetzee) state of mind that can be associated with the traditional, realist novel. There is a man. He loses his leg. He’s unhappy and resentful, but complex enough to be “believable”. The plot is sufficiently interesting. Like in Disgrace, the text is almost immediately dialogic, even as an apparently realist narrative. We read through Paul Rayment’s third person perspective, but we have questions, we do not trust our narrative blindly (or is that just my automatic repose having now read through so many of Coetzee’s works? I do not trust Coetzee very much, apparently.).
And then, suddenly, without warning (or so it would seem), the narrative drops the floor out from under us. “‘Mr. Rayment?’ says the voice on the entryphone. ‘Elizabeth Costello here. May I speak with you?'” The way in which Costello enters the text is dramatic as a device, but stylistically, this introduction is as flat as we would expect of Coetzee, which makes her entrance all the more startling. The rules of the game have shifted, and it’s as if Coetzee is standing there shrugging his shoulders and muttering, “What did you expect?”
And so the text – suddenly – becomes another kind of metafiction, another Elizabeth Costello. Costello (of Slow Man) is the same woman – the same writer – as the woman and writer in Elizabeth Costello and The Lives of Animals. But she is also different. She enter the text and she intercedes in it; the text becomes suddenly self-conscious. She begins to write the text.
And yet, in familiar Coetzee style, there are clues that there is more going on in this novel that meets the eye from nearly the first moment. Shortly after Paul gets out of surgery, the “narrator” (whoever that is – ha!) “says”, “From the opening of the chapter, from the incident on Margil Road tot he present, he has not behaved well, has not risen to the occasion: that much is clear to him” (15).
From the opening of the chapter. That’s more than a turn of phrase, referring to some sort of beginning. It’s the text being self-conscious. And the words are something like Costello might tell him – “take charge” (100), “live like a hero” (229). So, then, is Costello intervening in the text even before she walks through Paul’s door? She can quote the first line of the novel – is she writing the text? Is Slow Man her text, at least within the (meta)fictional confines of the text’s (for lack of a better word) reality?