This paper presents a reading of J. M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians (1980) which explores the author’s struggle with the question of how art might remember suffering without forgetting it. Against claims that he “abstains” from or “holds himself clear” of history, I argue that Coetzee does engage with history in his work, albeit not in any straightforward manner. Waiting for the Barbarians does not recover history as a fully narratable subject, but bears witness to it by refusing to translate the suffering engendered by colonial oppression into historical discourse. The barbarian girl with whom the novel’s protagonist becomes involved is a figure of alterity that embodies a material, unverbalizable history of suffering. Rather than attempting to gain imaginative access to the experience of the other and thereby reducing the other to the same, Coetzee insists on the need to respect the irreducible otherness of the other. Only by opening itself up to a radical experience of abjection, of becoming other, can the self truly witness the suffering of the other.

While Waiting for the Barbarians offers little in the way of resolution or redemption, the text does seem to me to affirm the ground of a certain solidarity. The antihistoricist ethics of remembrance which Coetzee’s novel can be seen to embrace points towards the creation of a more inclusive collectivity, a community that would not be dependent on the affirmation of identity or sameness but founded on a recognition of our infinite difference. This desire to redraw the boundaries of community aligns Coetzee’s novel with the ethico-political project undertaken by Giorgio Agamben in the Homo Sacer series. I will consider Waiting for the Barbarians in the light of Agamben’s analysis of the contemporary biopolitical conditions of existence, which the novel graphically dramatizes, and of his account of testimony as a quintessentially ethical practice in relentless opposition to sovereign power’s reduction of human life to bare life.

The events of September 11, 2001 caused a rupture not only in the normal order of things, but also, and perhaps especially, in the signifying systems underwriting that order. The Naudet brothers’ remarkable 9/11 documentary, which aired on CBS on March 10, 2002 and on TV stations around the world on the first anniversary of the attacks, seeks to re-institute the authority of the conventions and constructions of a culture whose limits the events of September 11 had painfully exposed. The film – entitled 9/11 – is marked by a fundamental tension between the revelation of an abysmal crisis of meaning on the one hand and the desire to bring this crisis under control on the other. The film-makers attempt to mitigate the traumatic potential of their unique atrocity footage by sanitizing it and integrating it into a Hollywood-style coming-of-age drama tracing a probationary firefighter’s perilous journey from innocence to experience. Thus, the focus shifts from a disorienting and overwhelming sense of loss to comforting, ideologically charged notions of heroism and community which perpetuate an idealized national self-image and come to function as a moral justification for retaliation. In its drive to obtain mastery over trauma by rendering it legible in terms of existing cultural codes, 9/11 appears to disregard what Cathy Caruth calls “the event’s essential incomprehensibility, the force of its affront to understanding” (154). Yet, for all its investment in a classical realist aesthetic, the film remains haunted by a traumatic history that exceeds and breaks down accustomed habits of thought, narration and visualization.

Criticism of British postmodern realist fiction has long been marked by an almost total disregard for ethics. The reason why critics investigating the anti-representational strategies characterizing the work of such writers as Peter Ackroyd, Martin Amis, Julian Barnes and Graham Swift have for the most part remained silent about its ethical status is the widespread belief that ethics is incompatible with a questioning stance towards representation. The few academic critics who (claim to) have discovered some sort of ethical value in the self-reflexive, theoretically sophisticated fictions produced by these writers are liberal-humanists working in the Arnoldian-Leavisite tradition, who, in their search for moral truths, appear to be oblivious to specifically postmodern textual practices that block easy access to meaning. Taking its cue from the deconstructive type of ethical criticism that came to the fore in the 1990s, this article suggests an alternative to both the textualist neglect and the liberal-humanist misrecognition of the ethics of British postmodern realism. Through a reading of Graham Swift’s 1992 novel Ever After, it shows that postmodern realist fiction has an ethical dimension qua postmodern realist fiction; an ethical dimension that cannot be reduced to the promulgation of traditional moral values but rather has to be conceived as the elaboration of a post-humanist, non-foundational ethics of alterity.

Graham Swift’s writing space may be described as the liminal zone between modernity, with its now-discredited grand narratives, and a tentative and tantalizing postmodernity, to be created out of the debris of the past. Out of this World, Swift’s fourth novel, reflects on the part (to be) played by photographic and textual representation in mediating this critical transition. The aim of this article is to analyse this mediating process and to assess its ethical import at this particular historical juncture. It argues that the novel reveals the widely-held belief in the demystifying function of both photography and fiction to be complicitous with a dubious evasion of ethical responsibility, and that it puts forward the arduous and painful process of working through a traumatic reality as a precondition for the creation of a future which would be truly otherwise, not a stale repetition of the past but something radically new and as yet unimaginable.

Graham Swift’s debut novel The Sweet Shop Owner recounts the final day in the life of an ageing shopkeeper whose wife has died and who is estranged from his daughter. It diagnoses the demise of a way of life based on the principles of predictability, immobility and economic circularity. In my reading, the impasse in the narrative present is accounted for by the characters’ failure seriously to engage with trauma. The mechanisms of denial to which they take recourse prove inimical to life, and yet remain in place right until the end of the novel. Tantalizing flashes of an alternative modus vivendi are offered through the rebellion of the protagonist’s daughter against the oppressive regime imposed by her parents, but the suggestion that there is no possibility of achieving real change is at least equally prominent in the text. Envisaging the possibility of genuine renewal appears to be a deeply problematic undertaking. In exposing the ravages wreaked by a determined evasion of a catastrophic history, The Sweet Shop Owner inaugurates Swift’s search for a way of coming to terms with trauma that would create the conditions for the invention of a more humane, just and less destructive future, a quest which is taken up and doggedly pursued in the author’s later novels.

This article investigates different feminist positions on the contentious question of women’s autobiography through a critical reading of two key autobiographical texts from the interwar period, namely Jean Rhys’s novel Voyage in the Dark and Virginia Woolf’s memoir “A Sketch of the Past.” Whereas liberal-humanist feminists tend to regard autobiographical writing as an indispensable part of feminism’s emancipatory project, whose interests it allegedly furthers by inspiring a sense of female identification and solidarity, poststructuralist theorists accuse women’s autobiographies of harming the feminist cause by uncritically reiterating the patriarchal ideology of subjectivity-as-truth. My reading of Rhys’s and Woolf’s texts points up the need to negotiate a position in between the liberal-feminist and the poststructuralist stance on autobiography. A preliminary outline of such a position, which would avoid the twin pitfalls of voluntarism and determinism, is provided in the work of Rita Felski.