"Little enough, less than little: nothing": Ethics, Engagement, and Change in the Fiction of J.M. Coetzee

Abstract

It seems logical to assume that substantive changes in history should lead to shifts in emphasis in the preoccupations of politically engaged literature. After all, such literature usually erects history as an a priori structure. For this reason forms of social realism have usually been favored by politically engaged fiction writers in the South African context. During the apartheid period, Nadine Gordimer treated with suspicion the "disestablishment from the temporal" that results from the modernist attempt to "transform the world by style"; she concluded that the "essential gesture" of the white South African writer "can be fulfilled only in the integrity Chekhov demanded: 'to describe a situation so truthfully [. . .] that the reader can no longer evade it'" (248-50). A body of writing whose understanding of the relation between text and history is informed by a correspondence theory of truth must of necessity alter [End Page 159] its objectives and, perhaps, transform its perception of its social function altogether once the changes for which it has agitated have been achieved. Thus, for instance, André Brink postulates a new role for socially engaged literature in the postapartheid period when he emphasizes the need for postapartheid writing to imagine and so rehabilitate what has previously been repressed by nationalist historical discourse (17-23). So, while historical engagement is still possible and even desirable, its telos must be redefined. Interestingly, Brink's redefined telos maintains history as an a priori system, even though it initially seems to question history's apparently causal relation to literature. Hence the contradictory nature of his argument: although it proceeds from an understanding of "history itself as text and as narrative" (17), it expresses confidence in the ability of literature to recover marginalized histories.