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

Chapter 2:

Coetzee's Freedom

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he describes himself in the context of the anti-imperialist struggle of his youth:

The picture of myself marching to the fray—I, with my craving for privacy, my distaste for crowds, for slogans, my almost physical revulsion against obeying orders, I who by dint of utterly uncharacteristic, single-minded cunning had got through four years of high school without doing military drill—the picture was simply comic. (DP 337)

From this remarkable piece of introspection, we might conclude that the debate, though no doubt an irritant, had little effect on him as a writer. His personality—antiauthoritarian and fastidious—was formed long before he gave any thought to a writer's duties and responsibilities.

The debate itself no doubt continues at some level, but in 1997, when Joanna Scott asked him about the “angry divisions” in South Africa “between social realism and modernist or experimental fiction,” Coetzee replied that “the particularly strident polemic you mention between social realism and so called experimental or modernist or even postmodernist fiction is largely obsolete now.… Thankfully, the debate has shifted into a more nuanced and complex mode” (Scott 98). For her part, Gordimer wrote the preface to Critical Perspectives on J. M. Coetzee in 1996, and she seems to have revised her judgment on Michael K. While in her 1984 review, she implied that he was not sufficiently representative of “the black people of South Africa,” she now says, “Michael K was one of them, all of them.”She points out that despite that fact that some of Coetzee's fiction does not make explicit mention of South Africa, it “could not have come from anywhere else in the world,” and further, that his fiction makes the “demand on intellect, morals and mores” which is the only proof of any fiction's worth, “with rare authority” (Preface xi). It would be too dramatic to say a truce has been declared, but the debate is clearly no longer significant to either Gordimer or Coetzee.

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