Writing as exploration and revelation: Experiencing the environment, whether local or global, as envisioned by different role‐players in J. M. Coetzee's latest novels*

Abstract

Summary Coetzee has become famous for his ability to channel any social or political commentary he might intimate through the medium of writing, perhaps more specifically, through the art of story‐telling. In this paper, I intend having a closer look at one aspect of his writing ‐ his choice of characters who, one would presume, are supposed to act as spokespersons for the authorial voice. Although the postmodernist novel, Foe (1986), was labelled by some critics as merely a frivolous, if clever and well‐written, flaunting of poststructuralist theories masking his lack of social responsibility, the representation of Friday (Crusoe's companion on the island) anticipates his channelling of penetrating sociopolitical commentary through a character seemingly at a disadvantage and therefore in need of “upliftment”. In Age of Iron (1990) the social outcast is embodied in a derelict living on the street, as well as by rebelling black youths taking part in the struggle. Helplessness and ineffectuality are at the same time acted out by the first‐person narrator in this novel, an old middle‐class, well‐educated and affluent woman in the last stages of a debilitating terminal disease. The stark reality of “living” with age and illness is continued in The Master of Petersburg (1997), where the identity of the narrator, a fictionalisation of Dostoyevsky trying to come to terms with the unnatural and untimely death of a son, invites a comparison of different countries and landscapes (as it does in Foe), shaping the identity of the characters. Contrasting with all the “helpless” or “pitiable” characters in the former novels, who all shared the characteristic of being “right” on a deeper level and therefore occupying the moral high ground despite being at odds with their environment, the narrator in Disgrace (1999) is ineffectual because of his immorality. And it is through this character, “speaking” all the sins of political incorrectness, from sexual abuse to condescending racism, that Coetzee channels his uncompromising reading of the current South African sociopolitical situation. In all these novels, then, the characters, narrators as well as marginalised figures, enact different views of “culture, literature and man” in a localised space nevertheless ultimately, even if by implication only, subject to the levelling effects of globalisation.