Abstract
South African novelist J.M. Coetzee has often been accused of refusing to engage with socio-political conflicts that mark his society. This paper will frame and analyse representation and conceptualization of history in Coetzee’s post-apartheid novels—Disgrace (2000) and Elizabeth Costello (2003). The central argument will be that, far from ignoring historical struggles and developments, Coetzee’s work engages with and encodes the same by using the grammar of novelistic discourse, which it positions as a rival to normative modern historical discourse.
Highlights
In his talk ‘The Novel Today’, delivered in 1987 at the Weekly Mail Book Week, declared, In times of intense ideological pressure like the present, when the space in which the novel and history normally coexist like two cows on the same pasture, each minding its own business, is squeezed to almost nothing, the novel, it seems to me, has only two options: supplementarity or rivalry. (Quoted in Attwell 1990: 286)
He stressed that supplementarity would require the novel 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” (Quoted in Atwell 1990: 286)
Engl. stud. 24 (2016): 89-101 would lead to a novel that operates in terms of its own procedures and issues in its own conclusions, not one that operates in terms of the procedures of history and eventuates in conclusions that are checkable by history
Summary
(Quoted in Attwell 1990: 286) He stressed that supplementarity would require the novel 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” (Quoted in Atwell 1990: 286). This paper will argue that Coetzee’s work is not impervious to—or deliberately non-cognizant of—historical experience. He posits novelistic discourse as an alternative form of discursive engagement with history, rivalling modern historical discourse. This paper will focus on two of Coetzee’s post-apartheid novels, Disgrace (2000) and Elizabeth Costello (2003), and will examine their representation and understanding of historical experience, as well as their methodologies for encoding the same in the form of novelistic discourse
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