‘A road that may lead nowhere’: Coetzee, Welsh and Becoming
Introduction
In The History of Sexuality, Foucault relates a theory of confession— ‘those procedures by which the subject is incited to produce a discourse of truth about his sexuality which is capable of having effects on the subject himself.’[1] In the colonial context, we might say that the coloniser employs confession in order to truly ‘know’ the colonised subject, to integrate them into colonial discourse and thus establish power over them. Fanon argues that the coloniser’s claims to “know” the colonised betray ‘a determination to objectify, to confine, to imprison,’ and these are the ‘effects’ that confession produces in the subject.[2] J. M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians stages such a confession, as the Magistrate engages in a quasi-sexual relationship with a barbarian girl in attempt to make her body speak and thus discern an essential truth about her people. Meanwhile, Irvine Welsh’s Marabou Stork Nightmares tells the story of the violent, hypermasculine Roy Strang. Welsh describes Roy’s comatose dreams and recollections of childhood trauma, tempting us into a Freudian interpretation of his neurotic behaviour. Foucault sees Freudian psychoanalysis as an integration of confession into science, and thus, like the Magistrate, Welsh’s reader interrogates their subject in order to uncover repressed truths.[3] This essay will examine how Coetzee and Welsh’s depictions of confession point to the limits of colonial structures of thought and how they explore the alternative structures— centred on the Deleuzian-Guattarian notion of ‘becoming’— that the authors seem to propose.
Confession and the Colonial Subject
In Waiting for the Barbarians, the Magistrate of a colonial outpost invites a barbarian girl— a blind, mutilated victim of torture at the hands of Colonel Joll— to live with him. Immediately, the Magistrate begins a ‘ritual’ that, although not explicitly sexual, is akin to Foucauldian confession.[4] He washes the girl’s body and asks about her wounds, noting, for example, the ‘ridges under the skin’ of her ‘buttocks.’[5] The ritual’s function becomes apparent when the Magistrate declares: ‘until the marks on this girl’s body are deciphered and understood I cannot let go of her.’[6] To ‘decipher’ connotes the translation of an obscure text into a familiar language, and so it is clear that the Magistrate hopes to transform the inscrutable signifier that is the Other’s body into comprehensible discourse.
Coetzee analogises this process through the Magistrate’s hobby of excavating the nearby ruins, in which he discovers a number of wooden slips covered in characters of an unknown language.[7] The Magistrate collects these slips ‘in the hope of deciphering the script,’ and Coetzee’s use of ‘deciphering’ cataphorically references his later treatment of the girl.[8] In his Deleuzian reading of Coetzee, Hamilton argues that this linguistic equivalence suggests an equivalence between archaeology and interrogatory confession as ‘arborescent’[9] pursuits of truth.[10] In both ‘the essential quality of an object is revealed’ only through the ‘invasive act of breaking the surface,’[11] In this way, though the Magistrate does not penetrate the girl sexually, the ‘entry’ that he seeks into ‘the secret body of the other,’ is even more invasive, targeting her ontological essence.[12] Coetzee employs the archaeology metaphor to show that this process is intended to fix the girl’s essence, writing of how the Magistrate would lay out the slips in various ‘combinations,’ trying to find the ‘right arrangement’ to reveal ‘a representation of a lost pantheon.’[13] For Hamilton, this betrays an adherence to the ‘architecture’ of colonial thought, in which objects of study can be fixed in their correct location and made to divulge their ‘internal nature.’[14]
The Magistrate implores the girl to confess her secrets, and yet, according to Eckstein, he has no intention of allowing her to speak. Coetzee explicitly equates the Magistrate and Joll’s interrogations, as the former wonders: “Is this how her torturers felt hunting their secret […]?”[15] As such, Eckstein employs Scarry’s definition of torture in her analysis of the Magistrate’s actions. For Scarry, ‘torturers do not even intend to elicit the truth,’ instead their goal is to ‘destroy’ the prisoner’s voice.[16] Indeed, the Magistrate admits to himself that he is ‘trying to […] obliterate the girl’— or rather her subjectivity.[17] Foucault notes that in psychoanalytical interpretation, ‘the truth [does] not reside solely in the subject who, by confessing would reveal it wholly formed,’ instead, but primarily in the analyst who, in their ‘decipherment’ of the analysand, would ‘verify this obscure truth.’[18] Likewise, in the Magistrate’s attempts to decipher the girl’s scars, any truths he might ‘verify’ originate with him and preclude the potential for her to speak. In Fanon’s terms, this form of ‘knowing’ objectifies the girl, reducing her to a static signifier, a voiceless body.
Given that the confession itself emanates from the authority figure rather than the confessor, Hamilton argues that interrogation can only ‘reproduce a preconceived state truth.’[19] If interrogation seeks, in Laue’s terms, to ‘situate’ the Other’s body in ‘a network of words,’ this network is the established discourse of colonial history, premised on an opposition between civilised self and barbarian Other.[20] This is epitomised when Joll leads a group of prisoners into the outpost, connected to one another by a ‘loop of wire’ that ‘runs through the flesh in each man’s hands and through holes in his cheeks,’ intended to make them “think of nothing but how to keep very still.”[21] Joll makes the barbarians kneel, then writes the word ‘ENEMY’ on their backs.[22] In this scene, the discursive effects of interrogation are manifested physically, as the colonial preconception of the barbarians is inscribed on them— their identity is rendered static (“very still”); their capacity to speak or even think for themselves (“think of nothing”) is eradicated, and with it their subjectivity. Like the barbarian girl, the prisoners are (in Foucauldian terms) turned into ‘objects of knowledge,’[23] and, as Fanon suggests, this ‘imprisons’ them within an identity that facilitates further violence. Hamilton notes that, in this way, the Magistrate’s interrogation of the girl’s body does uncover a genuine truth: her ‘scars… are evidence of the ‘secret’ history of barbarity that accompanies the progress of ‘civilisation’ itself.’[24] Perhaps it is for this reason that the Magistrate fails to ‘recover an image’ of the girl before her mutilation[25]— the Other is always already marked as enemy, a discursive violence embodied by her wounds. Thus, Hamilton insists, the ‘scars on the girl’s body serve to reinstate the Empire as the subject of every interrogation of the Other.’[26] Coetzee demonstrates that the invasive method of confession/ interrogation not only enacts discursive and legitimises physical violence against the colonised, but also necessarily fails in its attempts to truly know them. Indeed, the Magistrate makes similar admissions when looking with the brutalised prisoners and mutilated girl: ‘words’ ‘fail’ and ‘elude’ him respectively.[27] Evidently this failure of language represents the failure of the arborescent, archaeological modes of thought that his interrogative words have operated in service of, and the near indescribable suffering this failure has caused.
Marabou Stork Nightmares asks us to engage in a similar confessionary interrogation of a colonised subject, as Welsh presents us with both the ‘manifest content’ of Roy’s dreams, and the ‘latent’ trauma displaced in them, placing us in the position of Freudian analyst.[28] Roy wonders whether ‘the pursuit of the Marabou is about […] the pursuit of the truth,’ deciding that he’ll ‘have to go deeper to find out,’ though it seems the latter statement equally concerns the reader.[29] Like the Magistrate, we are tasked with an archaeological (‘deeper’) interrogation and decipherment of Roy’s truth.
Roy’s trauma stems in large part from his impoverished upbringing in a dilapidated Edinburgh housing scheme. Whyte notes that Roy falls under the category of ‘hard man’ (‘I fancied myself a hard cunt’[30]), a recurring figure in late 20th century Scottish fiction, characterised by a resolute desire to be ‘absolutely masculine’ that is at odds with his status as ‘victim and loser […] that oddly ‘feminises” him.[31] Whyte suggests that due to the ‘widespread perception of the Scottish middle classes as “denationalised’ […] in terms of speech and social practice,’ ‘Scottishness’ itself has come to be associated with this simultaneously hyper and hypomasculine figure.[32] Miller suggests Roy frames his marginalisation as a ‘latently racial phenomenon’: ‘Scottish ‘sectarianism,” the discrimination of largely working class Catholics of Irish descent by ‘ethnically’ Scottish Protestants.[33] Roy even compares sectarianism to Apartheid, ‘the only difference was that the Kaffirs were white and called schemies.’[34] Thus, we might understand Roy in terms of Curry’s notion of the ‘man-not.’[35] Since ‘maleness [… is] synonymous with power and patriarchy, and racially codified as white,’ he uses the term Man-not to encapsulate how ‘the Black male […] is denied maleness and is ascribed as feminine in relation to white masculinity.’[36]
Whether or not Roy is as oppressed as a Black South African, is relatively unimportant. What matters is that he believes he is, and that this motivates his behaviour. Whyte describes the hard man’s hypermasculinity as ‘a performance […] whether the audience be imagined as external or merely consisting in the character’s appraisal of himself,’ and both audiences motivate Roy.[37] The ‘external’ audience is a middle class, pseudo-British, Protestant patriarchy whose estimation of him (we presume), he imagines to correspond to Curry’s description of ‘racist accounts of Black males’ that depict them as ‘deficient men who compensate for their lack of manhood through deviance and violence.’[38] Roy’s feminised self-perception as ‘fucked-up’ reflects his internalisation of these imagined views, while his antithetical refrain: “Ah’m fuckin Roy Strang,”[39] indicates how his sexual violence results from this internalisation. He is a ‘fucked-up’ male, so he compensates by fucking others, as he feels he is expected to do.
Freud writes that ‘a dream is a disguised fulfilment of a […] repressed wish,’ and Roy’s wish is for a non-defective masculinity.[40] This wish is fulfilled first by the Strangs’ relocation to South Africa, which Roy describes as ‘sort of a paradise.’[41] As we have seen, Roy believes ‘Edinburgh had the same politics as Johannesburg,’ but, significantly: ‘we were on the other side.’[42] Having briefed him on Johannesburg’s racial politics, Roy’s Uncle Gordon declares: “You’re a true Scotsman, Roy! A real Afrikaaner!”[43] The conflation of these terms is telling, as it reflects how the societal power inherent in white Afrikaaner status allows Roy to feel like a true Scot— as opposed to an Irish Catholic— and, accordingly, a true man. Having experienced this ‘full’ masculine power, regaining this status becomes Roy’s dream on his return to Scotland. His comatose dreams provide the opportunity of wish-fulfilment, taking the form of a Rider Haggard-esque African colonial romp which allows Roy to perform masculinity. Rider Haggard dedicated King Solomon’s Mines to ‘all the big and little boys who read it,’ indicating the appeal of such colonial narratives to those, such as Roy, that aspire to an idealised masculinity.[44] As such, Roy performs the Alan Quartermain (Rider Haggard’s game hunting protagonist) role to perfection, even down to his lofty dialect. Lacan calls the phallus the ‘privileged signifier of [the] mark in which the role of Logos [(language)] is wedded to the advent of desire.’[45] The phallus/ non-phallus distinction is the first of the endless chain of differences that structures language (and by extension, desire), and so difficulties with language can be interpreted as a symbolic castration in psychoanalytical readings. Thus, Roy’s shift from his native Scots, a non-standard language in Britain, to received pronunciation English epitomises his desire for a properly phallic masculinity.
Roy’s dream mediates between the disguised fulfilment and continued repression of his wish. Jackson and Maley write that ‘the tension between’ the real-life and dream ‘narratives dramatises Roy’s struggle […] to strike a balance between’ this repression and fulfilment.[46] These tensions are encapsulated when Roy’s dream is interrupted by a pair of doctors whom he calls ‘Middle-class English cunt One [… and] Two.’[47] Roy’s thoughts on this interruption are elucidating:
just you keep that up ya cunt, because if I do come out the first thing ah’m gaunny fuckin well dae is tae rip yer fuckin queer English face apart... But fuck, naw man, naw... Ah’m getting too fuckin close tae the surface.[48]
His reaction indicates two reasons why repression is necessary to the dream. First, Roy evidently hates the English masculinity the doctors represent, and yet on the previous page he had emulated a similar performance, asking his hunting companion in upper-class register: “What’s your opinion of Johnny Stork, Sandy old man?”[49] Roy simultaneously resents and desires the masculine power that the doctors hold in sectarian Scotland, but his displacement of this desire into the sufficiently distinct context of colonial Africa allows these sentiments to coexist— he fulfils his desire without confronting it. Second, it is clear in his derision of the doctor as ‘queer’ that Roy hates English masculinity because it wields power without the hypermasculine violence he threatens them with. Roy’s adoption of heavy Scots slang reasserts the fact that this violence compensates for what Schoene-Harwood calls the ‘systemic emasculation’ of his upbringing.[50] As such, his hypermasculine behaviour is a manifestation of emasculated identity, so it is necessary to repress this it in order to keep the dream of self-assured masculinity intact. His horrified announcement that he is getting too close to the surface indicates that violence brings him too close to his past identity as a hard man, which he is ‘averse to.’[51]
Roy consciously hates Middle-class English cunts, so his unconscious wish can only be fulfilled through dream-displacement into the colonial fantasy world. In Schoene-Harwood’s terms, ‘fantasies of individual male desire are forever subject to […] ideological remote control’ and so Roy’s assertion that ‘they’— presumably the ‘queer’ doctors— ‘can’t get to [him…] deep in the realms of his own consciousness,’[52] is a ‘sad illusion.’[53] As symbols of the societal power that Roy desires, ‘they’ occupy his unconscious mind. However, the apparent queerness of the doctors indicates how Roy’s desire is itself an illusion: there is no singular, essential masculinity to aspire towards. Despite their obvious power, Roy’s belief that the doctors are queer makes him reject their performance of masculinity, forcing him to look elsewhere. We might expect the protagonists of boys’ stories to offer Roy the object he desires, but even this proves problematic, as Welsh draws out the well-documented homoeroticism present in such stories.[54] Roy takes Vaseline from his pocket as Sandy emerges ‘naked’ from a river, telling Roy: “one could think of other uses for that.”[55] Roy represses this incursion (‘Sandy and I urnae like that’[56]), but his perfect image of masculinity has already been disrupted. Whyte explains the wider significance of this disruption for the ‘power base of traditional masculinity’: ‘as long as masculinity was conceived of in unitary terms, it could function as [… a] target which all males could reach.’[57] In recognising that some men—even some that hold societal power— have the ostensibly emasculating trait of homosexuality, one is forced to acknowledge that ‘masculinity is not single, but multiple.’[58] Accordingly, men are ‘forced to seek a new legitimation […] one no longer structured around a binary opposition’ between male and female.[59]
I will examine what this legitimation might be shortly. For now, having explored why Roy’s pursuit of masculinity cannot be succesful, I will show how Welsh makes clear that it should not be succesful. Jackson and Maley argue that Welsh ‘seeks to understand and explain the cycles of violence which underpin a particular construction of masculinity in a colonised society,’ and, more than its illusory nature, it is these cycles that condemn this construction.[60] Roy’s desire for colonial masculinity is the result of the symbolic violence done to him by classism, sectarianism, and patriarchy in an ambiguously post-colonial Scottish society. The reciprocal violence inherent in this desire is inflicted on natives throughout Roy’s dreams. Dawson, a colonial landowner, attempts to rape a native boy, telling Sandy and Roy, who wait their turn: “it’s only through resistance that one can sense one’s own power.”[61] Evidently, colonial masculinity requires an emasculated Man-not against whom it can prove its vigour. This is underscored by an earlier scene, in which Roy mutilates the genitals of a ‘young native boy.’[62] If Roy’s upbringing constituted a systemic castration, then it seems the castration of others is a prerequisite for him to fulfil his dream by framing himself as ‘intact.’ Just as the hypermasculinity of hard men relies on physical violence, the self-assured masculinity of those that possess racial and class privileges is dependent on the systemic emasculation of those that do not. When Roy calls his dreamscape the ‘dark continent,’ he refers equally to his unconscious and to colonial understandings of Africa.[63] The oppressive coloniser/ colonised binary epitomised by colonial Africa mirrors the masculine/ feminine binary that is so foundational to the formation of male subjectivity in psychanalytical thought. Welsh’s depiction of colonial cycles of violence, then, constitutes a wider criticism of binaristic structures of thought, including psychoanalytical ontologies centred on the phallus, castration, and emasculation.
However, a major and resounding criticism of the text is its supposed inability to provide a solution to the problems Welsh identifies. This criticism is centred on the novel’s conclusion, in which Kirsty, the victim of a gang rape orchestrated by Roy, cuts off his penis and chokes him with it:
I can feel her knife hacking into my genitals, thrashing into my chest, digging, trying to find me…[64]
Kirsty takes revenge for her emasculating trauma by castrating Roy, and his response encapsulates the problem: ‘I understand her […] it just goes round and round, the hurt.’[65] That Roy describes her violence as ‘digging, trying to find me,’ suggests the paramount role that archaelogical, essentialist structures of thought play in perpetuating this cycle. Schoene-Harwood insists the castration is ‘clearly marked as feminist justice,’ but that it actually consolidates the ‘phallocentric principle of exploitative domination,’ as ‘Welsh’s woman can only fight back […] by learning how to act like a man.’[66] As such, ‘Welsh denies himself the opportunity to conceive of an alternative, feminine response to violence.’[67] Indeed, Jones asserts that ‘the lacuna of female agency […] becomes an eradication of sexual difference,’[68] while Jackson and Maley write that Welsh ‘offers us no […] position’ from which to end the violence, suggesting a general critical consensus on this point.[69] This consensus demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of Welsh’s authorial intent that is not supported by textual evidence. Schoene-Harwood focuses on Roy’s assertion in response to Kirsty’s violence that ‘it takes an exceptionally strong person to say: no more.’[70] In his reading, this violence represents a newfound masculine strength to say, ‘no more’ to her victimisation, demonstrating Welsh’s ‘androcentric perspective.’[71] This interpretation does not hold up to scrutiny as Roy explicitly states that neither he nor Kirsty are ‘exceptionally strong’ people, they are ‘just ordinary.’[72] The ‘no more’ does not allude to a vengeful ‘feminist justice’ that continues the cycle, but rather the possibility of becoming exceptional to this cycle. Ironically, it is in the midst of Kirsty’s perpetuation of the cycle that Welsh provides the ‘emancipatory vision’ critics have thus far failed to recognise.[73]
Becoming
In ‘Becoming-Woman,’ Guattari describes society in the same terms as Welsh: it is ‘phallocratic’ and ‘dichotomize[s] all values— the oppositions strong/ weak, rich/ poor […] etc.’, though most significantly, ‘black-white, male-female’[74] Given that ‘the man/ woman operation serves as a foundation to the social order, before class and caste conflicts intervene […] whatever breaks from the established order, is related to […] a becoming-woman.’[75] This becoming-woman is a rejection of the masculine power that comes from an oppressive, binaristic system, and so it is the ‘escape route from the repressive socius,’ that critics have found lacking in Welsh’s novel.[76]
But it is not lacking— in fact, the only happiness Roy feels stems from moments of becoming-woman. Roy moves to Manchester and falls in with the rave scene, trying MDMA for the first time. He insists: ‘something opened up in me […] I was the Silver Surfer,’ and afterwards realises the absurdity of being ‘embarrassed about expressing emotion.’[77] Here, the drug allows Roy to open himself up to the stereotypically feminine emotions he has repressed for so long, initiating a fundamental transformation. That this transformation is a becoming-woman is apparent at the novel’s conclusion when, having been castrated, Roy declares: ‘aw what the fuck, the Silver Surfer never had a cock and the cunt seemed to get by… that’s all I ask.’[78] The motif of the Silver Surfer is hugely significant, as it links Roy’s capacity to ‘understand’ Kirsty’s pain to the empathy he experienced on MDMA.[79] But more than this, it echoes Guattari’s insistence that ‘a man who detaches himself from the phallic types inherent in all powerful nations will enter […] a becoming-woman [… and] it is only on this condition […] that he will be able to become animal, cosmos’ (my emphasis).[80] The Silver Surfer is a non-phallic man whom (in the Marvel comics) possesses the ‘power cosmic,’ and so Roy’s humble request to ‘get by’ is really a newfound desire to reject binaristic power systems and engage in a becoming-woman-cosmic. Thus, although Roy’s death prevents him from achieving it, in the Silver Surfer, Welsh provides a vision of feminine emancipation. As Guattari makes clear, this should not be understood in binary terms, as the notion of ‘becoming’ implies an acknowledgment that ‘there is no such thing as woman, no maternal pole, no eternal feminine.’[81] Instead, femininity becomes empathy that resists the trauma-repressing violence brought about by binaristic, patriarchal-colonial structures of thought.
Returning, finally, to Waiting for the Barbarians, we can see that Coetzee proposes a similar means of transcending colonial structures of thought. Hamilton suggests that ‘the Magistrate,’ through contact with the barbarian girl, ‘undergoes a metamorphosis […] informed by a ‘becoming-nomad,’ involving a departure from State thought and towards rhizomatic thought.’[82] The first step in this metamorphosis is an acceptance of what Glissant terms ‘opacity.’[83] Glissant argues that “understanding,” in Western thought, demands ‘transparency,’ hoping to see ‘absolute truths’ in the colonised Other.[84] By contrast, opacity makes one ‘sensitive to the limits of every method’ of truth production that spreads ‘overarching general ideas or [hangs] on to the concrete.’[85] Opacity accepts that the Other ‘cannot be reduced,’ to an essential identity.[86] Though she does not reference Glissant, Laue reads opacity in the barbarian girl, whom ‘establishes her partial blindness as a legitimate way of looking.’[87] The Magistrate asks her to look at him, to which she responds: “this is how I look,” later explaining that there is ‘a blur in the middle of everything,’ and so she can ‘see only around the edges.’[88] Laue argues that her way of looking ‘acknowledges the […] obscured fragments of an individual’; she is ‘not deceived by the illusory belief of totally understanding another.’[89] This mode of vision comes to influence the Magistrate when he imagines her perspective, saying: ‘when she does not look at me I am a grey form moving about unpredictably […] when she looks at me I am a blur.’[90] Here, Laue continues, he ‘negate[s] his own comprehending, totalising vision’ epitomised by the confessionary ritual, and enters ‘a mode of seeing that […] must accept an uncertainty […] in everything’— his own unpredictable movements rejecting fixity.[91] For Laue, this culminates in the Magistrate’s exclamation: “I am blind!” after being hit in the face by a soldier.[92]
Laue notes that the effects of this blindness are manifest in the Magistrate’s altered approach to deciphering the wood slips.[93] Joll assumes that the slips “contain messages passed between” the Magistrate and the barbarians, a projection of his binaristic preconception that the barbarians are conspiring to attack the Empire.[94] The Magistrate, Hamilton explains, ‘offers a counter-thought to State thinking,’ saying of one slip:[95]
It is the barbarian character /war, / but it […] can stand for /vengeance, /and […] can be made to read /justice. / There is no knowing which sense is intended.[96]
If archaeological interrogation seeks to essentialise and then integrate the colonised into the discourse of colonial history, then the Magistrate’s ambiguous reading of these barbarian symbols necessarily resists such endeavours. In Hamilton’s terms, ‘the Magistrate’s reading of history is one of […] multiple narratives,’ that exposes the ‘singular quality ascribed to State history’ as an ‘artificial construct.’[97] Crucially, the Magistrate applies this mode of thought to the girl, admitting that ‘of [her] there is nothing I can say with certainty.’[98] Like Roy, who recognises that the fixed, stationary dream of full masculinity is an illusion, the Magistrate understands that there is no ‘true’ barbarian to objectify and fix. Glissant writes that the West labels as ‘barbarism’ that which it cannot ‘understand,’ but that in reality ‘widespread consent to specific opacities is the most straightforward equivalent of non-barbarism.’[99] In the Magistrate’s adoption of the girl’s way of looking, he concurs that the essentialising act of labelling a people ‘barbarian’ is more barbaric than the people themselves could ever be.
Conclusion
In conclusion, Waiting for the Barbarians and Marabou Stork Nightmares stage instances of colonial confession, failed attempts at producing essential truth about the colonised that merely reproduce binaries. The Magistrate’s confessionary ritual reveals only the violence that interrogation inflicts upon the colonised, while our Freudian interpretation of Roy culminates in a realisation that his neurotic violence is the result of a phallocentrism that characterises psychoanalysis. Hamilton argues that ‘the State privileges point over path,’ seeking to arrive at a stationary location from which to build a stable structure of power.’[100] Conversely, ‘the nomad thinks of each point in terms of transition.’[101] This imaginative geography visualises the distinction between the archaeological, arborescent thought of colonial confession, and the rhizomatic, transitory notions of becoming that transcend it. Quoting Deleuze and Guattari, Hamilton notes that the Magistrate’s admission that he ‘presses on along a road that may lead nowhere,’[102] shows a determination to reject State thought in favour of “ the liberated or regained forces of a deterritorialised Cosmos.”[103] Roy’s desire to be ‘the Silver Surfer,’ and ‘[zap] across the universe a few times,’ must be understood in the same way.[104] Only through a becoming-woman-nomad-cosmic can the colonised, and indeed the coloniser, be liberated from the violence of colonial thought.
Endnotes
[1] Michel Foucault, Power/ Knowledge ed. by Colin Gordon (Brighton: The Harvester Press Limited, 1980), 215-216.
[2] Frantz Fanon, Toward the African Revolution, trans. by Haakon Chevalier (New York: Grove Press, 1967), 34-35.
[3] Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality Volume 1: An Introduction, trans. by Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978), 66.
[4] J. M. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians (London: Penguin, 1982), 22.
[5] Coetzee, 20, 23.
[6] Coetzee, 23.
[7] Coetzee, 11.
[8] Coetzee, 11.
[9] Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. by Brian Massumi, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 8.
[10] Grant Hamilton, On Representation: Deleuze and Coetzee on the Colonized Subject (New York: Rodopi, 2011), 60.
[11] Hamilton, 53.
[12] Coetzee, 31.
[13] Coetzee, 12.
[14] Hamilton, 80-81.
[15] Coetzee, 31.
[16] Elaine Scarry, ‘The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World, quoted in Barbara Eckstein, ‘The Body, the Word, and the State: J. M. Coetzee's ‘Waiting for the Barbarians,” NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, 22, 2 (1989): 175-198. 182.
[17] Coetzee, 33.
[18] Foucault, History, 66-67.
[19] Hamilton, 60-61.
[20] Kharys Ateh Laue, “This Is How I Look’: Surveillance and Unexpected Guidance in the Panoptic Empire of Waiting for the Barbarians,’ Scrutiny2, 23, 2 (2018): 28-41. 35.
[21] Coetzee, 72.
[22] Coetzee, 74.
[23] Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, trans. by Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1977), 28 [My emphasis].
[24] Hamilton, 62-63.
[25] Coetzee, 24.
[26] Hamilton. 62-63.
[27] Coetzee, 75, 23.
[28] Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. by James Strachey, volume 4: The Interpretation of Dreams (FIRST PART) (London: Hogarth Press, 1910), 308.
[29] Irvine Welsh, Marabou Stork Nightmares (London: Vintage Books, 2004), 36.
[30] Welsh, 140.
[31] Christopher Whyte, ‘Masculinities in Contemporary Scottish Fiction,’ Forum for Modern Language Studies, 34, 3 (1998): 274–285. 274.
[32] Whyte, 275.
[33] Gavin Miller, ‘Welsh and Identity Politics,’ in The Edinburgh Companion to Irvine Welsh, ed. by Berthold Schoene (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), 90-91.
[34] Welsh, 80.
[35] Tommy J. Curry, The Man-Not (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2017), 6.
[36] Curry, 6.
[37] Whyte, 275.
[38] Curry, 3-4.
[39] Welsh, 141.
[40] Freud, Interpretation, 160.
[41] Welsh, 75.
[42] Welsh, 80.
[43] Welsh, 65.
[44] Henry Rider Haggard, King Solomon’s Mines, Gutenburg, last modified May 11, 2021, https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/2166/pg2166-images.html.
[45] Jacques Lacan, Écrits, trans. by Bruce Fink (London: W. W. Norton & Company, 2006), 581.
[46] Ellen-Raïsa Jackson and Willy Maley, ‘Birds Of A Feather?: A Postcolonial Reading of Irvine Welsh’s Marabou Stork Nightmares,’ Revista Canaria de Estudios Ingleses, 41 (2000): 187-196.
[47] Welsh, 57.
[48] Welsh, 57.
[49] Welsh, 56.
[50] Berthold Schoene-Harwood, Writing Men: Literary Masculinities from Frankenstein to the New Man (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020), 152.
[51] Welsh, 4.
[52] Welsh, 7.
[53] Schoene-Harwood, 154.
[54] See Melissa Knox, ‘Rider Haggard’s Queer Geographies: Colonizing Sheba,’ The Psychoanalytic Review, 93, 6 (2006).
[55] Welsh, 56-57.
[56] Welsh, 57.
[57] Whyte, 281.
[58] Whyte, 281-282.
[59] Whyte, 282.
[60] Jackson and Maley, 189.
[61] Welsh, 219.
[62] Welsh, 203.
[63] Welsh, 37.
[64] Welsh, 262.
[65] Welsh, 264.
[66] Schoene-Harwood, 155-156.
[67] Schoene-Harwood, 156.
[68] Carole Jones, ‘Welsh and Gender,’ in The Edinburgh Companion to Irvine Welsh, ed. by Berthold Schoene (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), 54-64. 57
[69] Jackson and Maley, 195.
[70] Welsh, 264.
[71] Schoene-Harwood, 156.
[72] Welsh, 264.
[73] Schoene-Harwood, 155-156.
[74] Felix Guattari, ‘Becoming-Woman,’ in Hatred of Capitalism, ed. by Chris Kraus and Sylvere Lotringer (New York: Semiotext(e), 2001), 355-362. 356-357.
[75] Guattari, 357.
[76] Guattari, 357.
[77] Welsh, 237, 239.
[78] Welsh, 263.
[79] Welsh, 239, 264.
[80] Guattari, 356.
[81] Guattari, 357.
[82] Hamilton, 54.
[83] Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, trans. by Betsy Wing (Ann Arbour, MI: The University of Michigan Press, 1997), 189.
[84] Glissant, 189-190, 192.
[85] Glissant, 192.
[86] Glissant, 191.
[87] Laue, 36.
[88] Coetzee, 19, 30.
[89] Laue, 36.
[90] Coetzee, 21.
[91] Laue, 38-39.
[92] Coetzee, 76.
[93] Laue, 39.
[94] Coetzee, 77.
[95] Hamilton, 82.
[96] Coetzee, 78-79.
[97] Hamilton, 82-83.
[98] Coetzee, 31.
[99] Glissant, 189, 194.
[100] Hamilton, 84-85.
[101] Hamilton, 84-85.
[102] Coetzee, 109.
[103] Deleuze and Guattari, 326.
[104] Welsh, 237.
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