| Chapter 2: | Coetzee's Freedom |
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approach he finds necessary for the “fictional enterprise.” As a superb literary critic himself, he knows the enterprise from both sides and is wary of confusing the two roles. The deadening hand of reductionism in reading has its twin in the author's attempt to self-censor or to direct stories towards a moral or political goal rather than letting them “tell themselves.”
One thing that may be missed by readers looking for political “games” or messages in Coetzee's work is “a certain spirit of resistance” which he hopes is “ingrained in my books” (Morphet 464). This resistance to cooption or interpretation is linked to his feelings about freedom, which I take to be absolutely basic to all his work:
The chains that his people have slipped are to a large extent representations imposed on them by others. Derek Attridge points out that
The figures to which Attridge is alluding here are Coetzee's “others”—Michael K, the barbarians, Vercueil in Age of Iron. However, resistance of those characters who might be plausibly identified to some extent with the author himself is no small part of Coetzee's vision, especially in his most recent books. A consistent refusal to be enlisted into civil society on its own terms can be found in Disgrace, Elizabeth Costello, and Slow Man, as well as his three fictional memoirs, Boyhood, Youth, and Summertime.