AbstractsLanguage, Literature & Linguistics

Writing Survival: Death, Debt and Self in the Works of V. S. Naipaul, Derek Walcott and J. M. Coetzee

by Kai-su Wu




Institution: NSYSU
Department: Foreign Language and Literature
Degree: PhD
Year: 2015
Keywords: death; debt; self; survival; enunciatory subject
Record ID: 1388640
Full text PDF: http://etd.lib.nsysu.edu.tw/ETD-db/ETD-search/view_etd?URN=etd-0104115-125249


Abstract

What does it mean, âwriting survivalâ? In what way does the fact of living after (or living over, or surviving) the significant others relate to writing? In posing these questions, this dissertation is interested in the dynamic convocation in which a writer approaches his legacy while he becomes a writer. In the works of three postcolonial writers, namely V. S. Naipaul, Derek Walcott, and J. M. Coetzee, this project looks into three different manners in which legacy is claimed and employed in the act of writing about oneself. It asks the basic question of what makes it necessary, with each author, to survive by way of writing? How, the query goes on, does writing provide its unique footage for them to deal with death, to turn dead death into living debt, to crack self from past as one cracks salt from earth? With Naipaul, writing survival involves a serial transfiguration of death into debt, and debt further into acts of reckoning that keeps turning the self around and eventually makes him whole. A House for Mr. Biswas (1961) is case in point of how writing is exactly the vocation in which âwriting survivalâ is coterminous with âwriting to survive.â Twenty years later, in âPrologue to an Autobiographyâ (1982), Naipaul reaffirms this aesthetics of transfiguration employed in his fiction with facts dug up from the life and times of his father. Even when this filial linearity of legacy turns somewhat awry when it goes transnational in The Enigma of Arrival (1987), survival in life still hinges around literary legacy for Naipaul. Chapters One and Two of this dissertation look into Naipaulâs take on how the matter of filiation on the personal level is congenial to that of affiliation on the transnational and transcultural level. Chapters Three and Four, on the other hand, study how Walcott takes issue with the conflict involved in both the fact of survival and the act of writing. If, as it is with Naipaul, writing is also the vocation in which the matter of survival is a lived experience, Walcott brings in a different set of factors that lend an elemental, material force to writing. In Another Life (1973), the divided child finds a congenial voice from the sea that promises healing to the heart of the writer who mourns. In Omeros (1990), the transatlantic site gives rise to a convocation of the multiple I in the narrative that, together with the legacy that is invoked and the venues around the seas that are visited, opens up a whole new horizon of reconciliation with the conflicts. The bard is the New World survivor who, with boost from the cosmopolitan ancestry he invokes, writes the vernacular larger than the local, contemporary life it appears to live. Chapter Five examines the many points of fleeing from the fixation with the sense of belonging that haunts Coetzeeâs early life in two of his autobiographical work. Different from Naipaulâs filial piety and Walcottâs transatlantic linkage in his literary affiliation, Coetzeeâs texts understand debt in ways of de-(af)filiation. In Boyhood (1997) John mourns for the life…