J.M. Coetzee and the Power of Narrative By Gillian Dooley

own work. His discomfort at being thought a powerful writer was evident in his interview with Tony Morphet in 1987: “ ‘Successful author’ is a barbed phrase, here, a highly barbed phrase.… In this interview, I am being installed in a position of power—power, in this case, over my own text” (Morphet 462). Foe and Master of Petersburg engage quite directly with the dangers of authorial power; Slow Man and Diary of a Bad Year, perhaps, deal more with its limits: the writing personae in the later novels, although eminent, have not achieved the pinnacle of success and recognition in the same way Coetzee has. But the kind of power that I have in mind is not the power that an author arrogates to himself, but the power that emanates from writing like Coetzee's. The strength and force of his vision compels the reader to face squarely whatever he presents, however appalling, knowing that the writer is also appalled but that he has nevertheless resisted the temptation to avert his eyes or to find consolation in ideology or theory.

In the following seven chapters, I have tried several approaches to Coetzee's narratives. Chapter 2 examines the type of resistance to be found in his work, a resistance which seems to have little basis in a political belief or a rational philosophy of justice. I chart the evolution of Coetzee's public position on politics and writing and look at how his reluctance to claim power or to place trust in political solutions has been manifested in his books. In chapter 3, I trace the effects of Coetzee's choice of point of view in each of his books: how it interacts with questions of complicity and impressions of realism, how it relates to the subject matter and characters he is dealing with in each case. I consider aspects like the sex of the various narrators and the level of identification which is possible between Coetzee and his alter egos, as well as the simple distinction between first- and third-person narrators and the rhetorical position of each book.

Chapter 4 is an exploration of the place of the comic arts in Coetzee's work. This is a subject which has routinely been dismissed by critics who have failed to discern any humor in the novels. My contention is that a sense of the ridiculous and absurd is implicit in much of Coetzee's narrative prose and can be seen in the underlying structure of all his books.