Introduction 13its categorization, unified within a single philosophical whole. As
Richardt Grossman explains, “Ontology asks and tries to answer
two related questions. What are the categories of the world? And
what are the laws that govern these categories?”^41 Fred Wilson helps
refine this definition by stressing the importance of “relational-
ity” between categories of existence. He labels this relationality a
“Principle of Acquaintance,” which he sees as a philosophical con-
struct (a metaphilosophy) that organizes all the categories into an
ontological whole.^42 When I describe a character’s “change in ontol-
ogy,” I therefore refer not just to an alteration in attitude (although
this would no doubt attend such a change), but also to a transforma-
tion in the categories of existence that comprise the character’s world
as well as an entirely different configuration of how these categories
correspond to one another. As is illustrated in the second chapter,
such a change occurs to the protagonist of J. M. Coetzee’s Waiting
for the Barbarians.
The term “materiality” is employed in a variety of ways in the
discussion. In the opening chapter, the word “material” is mostly
used in reference to the physical features and configurations of a
given environment or situation in which people live. Any substantial
description of a particular moment in someone’s life must therefore
include at least a general account of these features. In this sense, it
could be used interchangeably with the more metaphysically ori-
ented term “physicalism.”
Perhaps the first concept that comes to mind when the words
“history” and “materiality” are used side by side is Marx’s histori-
cal materialism, which of course places a particular focus on labor
as a major human activity—one that provides “a material founda-
tion” for economically grounded political and social structures.^43
However, whereas Marx’s particular materialist approach to history
has been theoretically influential to this book, it is not a complete
enough framework that can be employed to examine the broad
range of human thoughts, behaviors, and experiences that I found
were represented in the novels under discussion. Indeed, one of the
underlying arguments in the opening chapter is that in a substantial
number of his works, Phillips employs a variety of literary strategies
that problematize the idea of singular interpretive frameworks for