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

later in the same interview, he was asked about the apparent conflict between aesthetic approaches to literature and politics in South Africa, “as if literature was something the European writer could afford, whereas the non-European couldn't.” His response was blunt:

In 1987 came the “Novel Today” talk, where he envisaged history and fiction, in a vivid metaphor, as existing side by side “like two cows on the same pasture, each minding its own business,” but which were by the present exigencies of South Africa being squeezed together so that fiction was left with “only two options: supplementarity or rivalry.” Does this imply a change of attitude? Is revolutionary literature necessarily the type of “supplementary” literature he describes, which “aims to provide the reader with vicarious first-hand experience of living in a certain historical time, embodying contending forces in contending characters and filling our experience with a certain density of observation,” and thus incompatible with “aesthetic exploration” after all (“Novel” 3)? In uncharacteristically dramatic language, he described the relationship between history, with its subdiscourse of politics, on the one hand, and storytelling on the other, as “a battlefield” (“Novel” 3).

Only a few years later, in the interviews with David Attwell published in Doubling the Point in 1992, Coetzee is more introspective, partly because of the different context—the difference between a public speech and a conversation with a colleague—but also reflecting a change in the situation. He still complains that the “discourse about what people are writing in South Africa slides so easily nowadays into discourse about what people ought to be writing. It's an arid discourse that I take no joy in, particularly when it sideslips into polemics.” But the stirring rhetoric of battlefields is absent, and his diffidence is reinforced by the way