Settling for “something less”: J. M. Coetzee’s Slow Man and the Shakespearean Bed-Trick Motif

Abstract

Coetzee’s novel Slow Man contains a puzzling episode in which the disabled protagonist is blindfolded before having a tryst with a blind woman. Afterwards he wonders whether another woman had been substituted during the double-blind encounter. As Zoë Wicomb has suggested, this episode alludes to the bed-trick scene in Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure. However, whereas Wicomb proceeds to read this episode as a metatextual commentary on the nature of substitutions in a fictional universe, we see it as an integral element of the novel’s ethical theme. The ageing protagonist is confronted with the inevitability of accepting substitutes in all domains of his life, including the sexual and familial, and ultimately even in his identity. Comparing the scene to its Shakespearean model, however, also reveals the degree to which Coetzee’s novel questions traditional views of acceptable relations between men and women.