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

Chapter 2

Coetzee's Freedom

In the 1980s, when it seemed that the situation in South Africa would never improve, debate raged about the responsibility of South African novelists to act as witnesses to and opponents of apartheid. Some believed that white writers, especially, should use their privileged position in the fight. Nadine Gordimer was prominent among those who felt it was essential to be, in J. M. Coetzee's words, a “stripper-away of convenient illusions and unmasker of colonial bad faith” (“Awakening” 7) in the realist convention, rather than a spinner of postmodern metafictions.

Gordimer, born in 1923, was by then already a major figure on the world literary scene. Her first book was published in 1949, and by 1980, she had produced seven novels and nine volumes of short stories. She had won the Booker Prize in 1974 for The Conservationist. Coetzee, born in 1940, was a relative newcomer. His first novel, Dusklands, was published in 1974, and his first Booker win came in 1983 for his fourth, Life & Times of Michael K. Reviewing the novel in the New York Review, Gordimer complained that “while it is implicitly and highly