Travelling Concepts in J. M. Coetzee’s Apartheid and Post-apartheid Novels

Abstract

Nobel-prize winner John Maxwell Coetzee is considered one of the most controversial novelists and essayists in South African literature. He witnessed two crucial eras in South Africa: apartheid and post-apartheid. Being a white author put him in a difficult situation when he began expressing his ideas on political and social issues in his country during times of conflict. Critics see that Coetzee’s apartheid novels are evasively indirect when they comment on the prevalence of injustice in South Africa. Coetzee defended his position as a writer who rejected realism as a fixed norm for fictional representation, favouring an allegorical depiction of resistance against oppression. In his post-apartheid novels, however, there seems to be a shift in his mode of writing as he resorts more to realism to comment on the switch of balance and power in South Africa. Moreover, his apartheid allegories experience a similar change where they gain new dimensions and perform different functions in the post-apartheid context. This sudden modification in Coetzee’s novelistic practice has always perplexed his readers and critics as well. He has been accused of being an elusive writer who avoids any specific political orientation. Take as an example his apartheid novel Life and Times of Michael K (1983), which is considered an allegorical representation of resistance against oppression and injustice; where the silence of the colonized protagonist Michael K stands as an allegory of peaceful resistance rather than submission. On the contrary, his post-apartheid novel Disgrace (1999) adopts an opposite novelistic approach where realism stands out clearly, while allegory recedes. The silenced this time is not the colonized but the former colonizer and thus silence becomes an allegory of atonement rather than resistance. Nevertheless, Coetzee’s bewildering and allegedly paradoxical mode of writing can be explained when the two novels are read in the light of his talk ‘The Novel Today’, which is an articulation of the responsibilities of authorship. The aim of the paper is to use Edward Said’s ‘Traveling Theory’ to trace the origins or genesis of Coetzee’s concepts and ideas of authorship, which are expressed in his talk and practiced in his apartheid novel Life and Times of Michael K, and then to follow up the changes and developments that occurred in his mode of writing after these concepts and ideas travel to the new context of the post-apartheid era as manifested in his novel Disgrace. Finally, the paper provides a theoretically-based perspective that establishes Coetzee’s critical consciousness as the norm for his authorship and thus denies the accusations levelled against him of being ambivalent and paradoxical.