| Abstrakt: |
J.M. Coetzee's Slow Man: a Novel interests itself in early (and so mostly French) instances of photography. In some ways the Coetzee text operates as though it were itself a verbal instantiation of this early photography (as later slowly but also not so slowly understood by early theorists of culture like Walter Benjamin and major poets like Paul Valéry, for instance): the product of machinery in one sense, the result of a finely tuned Coetzee assembly line subject to multiple acts of inspection (procedure resulting in twenty-five textual versions this time), but also the product of that which in photography exceeds mechanics, that which frees photography from bondage to documentary verisimilitude. For Paul Rayment, the eponymous Slow Man and sometime migrant from France, the camera has always seemed "more a metaphysical than a mechanical device." For Benjamin, photography can give access to an optical unconscious. For his part, Valéry came to believe that-by taking on much of the historical burden of verisimilitude-photography helped literature pursue its true paths, one being "the perfecting of language that constructs or expounds abstract thought," and another being literary exploration of "all the variety of poetic patterns and resonances." In order to express abstract thought, writes Valéry, "we avail ourselves of a whole visual [and auditory] rhetoric." Thinking thus in the concrete abstract, and doubling as some kind of migrant in another country his own, early-South African-childhood interest in the photographically visual, Coetzee, at this time already an Oldish, and therefore, Slowish Man, collaboratively recreates-by thematically and structurally re-doubling Samuel Beckett-the Slow Man novel as an opera for doubled actor-voices and dancers, supplemented especially in the beginning with cinematography by Wojciech Puś and- principal collaborative doubling-with the magnificent score of Belgian composer Nicholas Lens. In order to pay concrete attention to the abstract thought shaping the opera's translation of Slow Man into new meanings, and by proceeding through a practice that pursues Nietzsche's "slow reading," this article follows in some detail the cinematography that begins a migration of images towards new, enriched, and revisited meaning in the opera. Along the way, references will be made to the most deeply engrained of Coetzee's writerly antecedents, Samuel Beckett, and to work from Coetzee's fellow artist and countryman, William Kentridge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
