“Do You Love Him yet?”: The Aesthetics of Post-Traumatic Recuperation and the Fiction of J. M. Coetzee

This article uses a reading of three works by J. M. Coetzee to argue for a literature of recuperation. Much of trauma theory has debated the "unspeakableness" of trauma, and the near impossibility of a therapeutic literature. Coetzee's Disgrace, Elizabeth Costello and Slow Man present a literature which can have a therapeutic function. The article uses Aristotle's rhetoric, Hegel's dialectic, and psychoanalysis as the basis for a therapeutic literature. Hegelian dialectic and his notion of aufhebung (sublation) can be a bridge between idealist and materialist conceptions of art and its efficacy as an instrument of healing. The protagonists in both Disgrace and Slow Man must undergo the equivalent of a spiritual/psychological journey which includes this sublation, a step toward Hegel's "Nothing," in order to reach a state of "Becoming." More importantly, the texts themselves enact the same kind of journey, in which the reader, like Aristotle's audience at a tragedy, must necessarily share.