Men in Time

Abstract

In this chapter I shall consider aspects of the work of four English-speaking male novelists who made their names in the 1980s. Though I have chosen these particular novels to complement and develop the discussions contained in the earlier chapters, my choice of authors and of texts remains in a sense personal. Similar or at least parallel discussions could have been elaborated on the basis of others, but in the end these are texts which I find interesting, and know from teaching them give rise to productive readings. In different but complementary ways they decipher the instability of the male as sign, and in doing so propose different narratives of masculine liminality. In tracing the movement of its subject, and in renegotiating the boundaries between public and private worlds, each text prompts explicit engagement with the narrative performance and variation of masculinity. At the same time each novel potentially refigures the nature of the community of male readers.

Men or women: complex, mobile, open beings. Admitting the component of the other sex makes them at once much richer, plural, strong, and … very fragile. We invent only on this condition … This does not mean that in order to create you have to be homosexual. But there is no invention possible … without the presence in the inventing subject of an abundance of the other … persons-detached, persons-thought, peoples born of the unconscious, and in each desert, suddenly animated, a springing forth of self one did not know about — our women, our monsters, our jackals, our Arabs, our fellow-creatures, our fears.

(Hélène Cixous, Sorties, in Marks and Courtivron, 1981, p. 97)

I think: ‘I wanted to live outside history. I wanted to live outside the history that the Empire imposes on its subjects, even its lost subjects. I never wished it for the barbarians that they should have the history of empire laid upon them.’

(J. M. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians, Penguin, 1980, p. 154)