Enigma of the Ultimate Silence: Reading J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace and Life and Times of Michael K from a Buddhist Perspective

The paper attempts to contextualize J.M. Coetzee’s notion of life within a Buddhist perspective. In a Buddhist vein, Coetzee shows that the entire domain of human mental world centring around the notion of an integrated self is a false construction of language while the entrapment of all lives within a state of suffering and impermanence constitute the only reality. The paper, with a special focus on Coetzee’s Disgrace and Life and Times of Michael K, shows how in Coetzee’s works the characters’ loss of ego due to suffering and humiliation leads to breakdown of subject-object division and to emergence of true compassion. The paper explores human notion of time which is closely connected to construction of human subjectivity and shows how the focus on the immediate present ‘now’ within Coetzee’s works, in a vein similar to Buddhist mindfulness meditation, challenges the temporal foundation of human idea of self. The deep anti-philosophical nature of Coetzee’s works is akin to the anti-doctrinal position of Madhyamika school of Buddhism and the radicalness of Coetzee is reflected in his desire to push language towards its own cessation, that is, in his realization of the need for the logical mind to surrender to the ultimate silence beyond language as path to the deepest ontological truth.