Text and Hinterland: J. M. Coetzee and the South African Novel

Abstract

There is a certain paradox in placing a writer in a national or regional context, especially a writer like J. M. Coetzee who has distanced himself from such a reading. However, as much as his novels and scholarly criticism range well beyond a South African terrain, they also track this course—at times—quite deliberately. Think only of ‘The Narrative of Jacobus Coetzee’ in the second half of Dusklands or his collection of essays, White Writing. This article will explore the ambivalent space of Coetzee's fiction with particular reference to Life & Times of Michael K and Age of Iron. His novels retreat and roam; like Michael K, they root themselves ‘nowhere’. But the South African base is there—in the Cape, from which his stories emigrate. As such, Coetzee's oeuvre might be seen as a series of ‘travelling texts’ which reinscribes, by dislocation, a South African topography. Indeed, Coetzee's work carries a double tendency towards the South African landscape: one which is concurrently removed and engaged. If ...