A related goal in writing is one of enumeration. Anything and anyone can be the subject of a book (in fact this is also more generally true of art); however, the more ordinary the subject, the harder it is to write a book about it. For example, a theme like longing and alienation in a foreign country is easier to write about than one that is based upon the inactivity and enervation that accompany a dead-end job; the reason is partly because it is easier to degenerate into literality when confronted with the latter (theme). Authors usually settle for an easier theme and use arbitrarily abstruse symbolism to avoid becoming too direct (This is also perhaps why most stories are about falling in and out of love.) The latter option, one of writing about a difficult theme, is rarely chosen.
Except in Slow Man. The story -- Paul Rayment, 58, loses his leg in a skirmish with a car and is forever consigned to the ministrations of various nurses. He abruptly falls in love with his third one (after firing the first two), Marijana, and is forced to deal with his inability to present a masculine enough disposition to be of any interest to her. There is also the matter of age; Paul is a few decades older than M., and is confronted with the conflicting emotions of paternal and coeval love. He redirects his fatherly feelings towards M.'s children (offering even to pay for her son's education); his love for Marijana, however, is one that appears destined to be unrequited and (worse) inexpressible.
So far, pretty standard fare. Here's what changes everything -- the intervention of a vague (godlike?) figure named Elizabeth Costello, who tells Paul that he 'came to her', and summarizes, in an incongruous conversation, the state of his feelings towards Marijana. The fact that Paul has never seen this person before occurs to both himself and us, and for a time we wonder if Coetzee has placed God himself in the book, for whatever reason. This feeling is strengthened as Elizabeth continues to tell Paul things that he thought were only known to himself. We become wary of an impending gimmick.
However, Elizabeth becomes more ordinary as the book progresses, almost as if taking on Paul's own diffidence. She begins to talk more like a human being and less like someone from up on high, even remarking once that she would die of the cold if Paul threw her out of the house. She begins to exhort Paul to action, telling him that he must obey his whims but at the same time showing him how his brand of love is quite common, how the situation he finds himself in is itself quite common. Meanwhile Paul has confessed to Marijana that he loves her, but that his love is pure (something that he knows isn't true).
(There are a lot of other things that happen too; this is a novel densely populated with ideas and themes, and I could go on and on about the other kinds of symbolism in the novel, but I do also have to get up in the morning tomorrow.)
The answer, as it comes to us by degrees, is that it is not God who is in the book, it is the author. Elizabeth represents Coetzee; she is his alter-ego in some sense, like Philip Roth's Nathan Zuckerman. Unlike Zuckerman, however, she is aware that she is in a story, and tries to make the story hers. She tries to change Paul's commonplace sentiment into something more plot-worthy, something with more passion. Towards the end of the novel, she tells him:
Remember, Paul, it is passion that makes the world go around. You're not analphabetic, you must know that.
and:
I merely plead that you look into your heart and see whether you cannot find within your tortoise variety of passion to accelerate your wooing of Marijana.
and:
Come on. Do something. Do anything. Surprise me.
Her efforts, however, are in vain; Paul is destined for a bathetic non-ending, with his situation quite the same as it was before. There is no last-minute passion, no happy lovers uniting, no revelations of a lurid nature. Paul simply continues to be what he is: lonely, old, handicapped, and incapable of action.
The role of Elizabeth, when seen this way, becomes clear: she represents the author's eternal longing for drama counteracting with the indifference of real life. Because we as human beings spend our days chained to the static of the everyday, because we have a natural affinity towards the certain, because we like to have a metaphorical roof over our heads, we are boring to the tyro artist; our lives cannot be placed in a plot with an artificially satisfying ending. An artist's response to this is to change himself; he understands that his characters need to be more real, and that endings must not (for example) contain easy solutions to difficult situations. He begins to understand that problems must be (as Roger Ebert says) dealt with and not solved. He undergoes a transformation.
Slow Man is also about this transformation. The change in Elizabeth from a pseudo-godlike entity who appears to dictate Paul's life into a person who is more or less like Paul is similar to the change an author undergoes during his maturation, when he realizes that he has no control over his characters, and that the only thing he can do is observe them as they behave in ways that are dictated by who they are, rather than who he (the author) deems they should be.
Which brings me to one final observation: Elizabeth is in fact not Coetzee, is not an alter-ego. We can think of her as such for the purposes of our argument, but in fact Coetzee is a much better author than Elizabeth can ever hope to be, because he understands something that E. does not; that he is not God.
PS: Wrote this in a hurry. Will come back and edit possibly tomorrow.
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