Fault Lines of Modernity by Kitty Millet Dorothy Figueira

Author:Kitty Millet,Dorothy Figueira
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA

For Runia, metonymy makes presence manifest regardless of whether it denotes real or fictional, literal or symbolic subjects; what matters is the felt encounter with “presence in absence” that metonymy produces in staging relationships of “continuity and discontinuity.” In other words, metonymy can transmit presence, and therefore experiences of alterity, regardless of the ontological status of its referents or the meaning made of it through interpretive reflection.

In Coetzee’s fiction, the presence of others often confounds the kinds of abstract understandings that characters and readers attempt to bring to bear on their experiences. His characters are disoriented both by the disconnect between their immersive experience of and desires for other bodies, and by their desires to cast nets of meaning on those with whom they come into contact. What they must discover is a sufficiently holistic and adaptive mode of apprehension that does not merely comprehend but responds with immediacy to both the literal and the symbolic, as well as the physical and the metaphysical, dimensions of their encounters with others.

It is a tragic ethical flaw that in his thinking and writing the magistrate consistently falls back into imagining others as either physical presences reassuringly opaque to understanding or as symbolic figures enmeshed in greater networks of ideological significance that conditions the possible forms that interpersonal, social, and political relations may take. At one extreme, the magistrate exhibits a desire to lose himself in the immediacy of the sensation of proximity, and, through the self-forgetting enabled by such sensation, to absolve himself of responsibility for his actions. “‘Wouldn’t you like to do something else?’ she asks. Her foot rests in my lap. I am abstracted, lost in the rhythm of rubbing and kneading ... I shrug it off, smile, try to slip back into my trance.”28 While enjoying this immersion in the sensation of her presence, the magistrate shrugs off any demand for responsiveness.

At the other extreme, he often reflects on the woman as the key to an ethical puzzle that makes significant demands on his attitude toward her body.

It has been growing more and more clear to me that until the marks on this girl’s body are deciphered and understood I cannot let go of her ... (31). While I have not ceased to see her as a body maimed, scarred, harmed, she has perhaps by now grown into and become that new deficient body, feeling no more deformed than a cat feels deformed for having claws instead of fingers. I would do well to take these thoughts seriously (56).

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