The Story of Orpheus and Eurydice in Coetzee and Rilke

J. M. Coetzee’s The Master of Petersburg (1994) is a text about a father (Dostoevsky) mourning the death of his son. I am interested in the presence and meaning of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice in the novel, compared to the meaning of the myth in R. M. Rilke’s poem “Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes.” (1904). I read the unaccomplished encounter between Orpheus and Eurydice as a story that portrays the failed intersubjectity plot of Coetzee’s novel(s). Following Blanchot’s reading of the myth, I examine the contrasting Orphean and Eurydicean conducts – Orpheus desiring but, at the same time, destroying the other and Eurydice declining the other’s approach. I argue that Orpheus’s and Eurydice’s contrasting behaviours can be looked at as manifestations of a failure of love, one for its violence, the other for its neglect, and thus the presence of the myth in The Master of Petersburg is meaningful in what it says about the theme of intersubjectivity in Coetzee’s oeuvre.