柯慈《慢人》裡的失能主體、移民歸屬感與小說增補空間

The Disabled Subject, the Sense of Migrant Belonging and the Novelistic Prosthetic Space in J. M. Coetzee’s Slow Man

柯慈執筆至今的作品，給予失能角色相當程度的重視。然而，在《慢人》之前，柯慈往往賦予失能者客體的角色，為的是突顯殖民主義或南非種族隔離體制之下的龐大噤聲機制。本文指出，《慢人》是柯慈首度呈現其筆下失能角色積極追求主體地位的一本重要創作。該書少了柯慈前期作品中顯著的強、弱對比關係，反倒是將健能者與失能者、敘述者與被敘述者、以及不同的移民者放在同一平台上進行對話。該書獨特的小說形式在於它弔詭地以「失」作為小說中諸多「增補空間」的元素。而以「失」作為組構《慢人》的形式更「體現」了作家對於其權力／能力之缺的高度自覺。《慢人》透過保羅‧ 雷蒙特三方面的失去──失根（多次移民經驗）與失能（包括失去行走的能力，與失去的敘述權利）──以及他對「義肢／增補」的反思、對移民議題的重新理解、對自己「被論述」之人生的反抗，得以成型。失能經驗與移民情境於小說中的相輔相成提供了身份認同這一主題一個得以深究的方向。

Throughout his writing career, Coetzee has paid close attention to his disabled characters. However, he portrayed these characters in his novels before Slow Man as disabled objects that reflect the immense silencing mechanism of colonialism or of Apartheid in South Africa. This paper shows that Slow Man was a major watershed in the writer’s career for being the first-time he presented a disabled character actively searching for his subjectivity. Instead of presenting the imbalanced power relations between strong and weak sides as in Coetzee’s earlier pieces, Slow Man examines dialogues among the abled and the disabled, the author and the authored, and migrants from different places. The unique form of the book lies in its paradoxical employment of “loss” as the element of multilayered prosthetic space in the novel. This gesture of constituting a novel in terms of loss embodies the writer’s sharp consciousness of authorial destitution. Formed by Paul Rayment’s three folds of loss— uprootedness (repeated migrations) and disability (amputation of one leg and deprivation of the ability to narrate one’s own life)—and his reflection upon prosthesis, his reconsideration of migration issues and his resistance of being authored, Slow Man comes into being. The complementarity between disability and migrant experiences in the novel gives us a new direction concerning the thorny question of identity.