Coetzee and the Real

This essay sets out to investigate the implications for J. M. Coetzee's poetic of his shift from an agonistic if in his case highly mediated settler tradition within South African writing, which is part of his literary and imaginative inheritance, towards a self-consciously acquired Australian mode of realist writing that came with his move to that country in the early 2000s. The larger question which this investigation will raise, by implication if not always directly, is how a shift of national location within the international republic of letters might impinge on a settler or colonial tradition within postcolonial poetics; or whether it is rather the case that such a strand or tradition operates in cross-border, transnational ways, freely making itself available to writers from different postcolonial domains.

A significant number of the postcolonial novelists and poets who have engaged also in postcolonial literary criticism, often apropos of their own practice, Derek Walcott, Salman Rushdie, Seamus Heaney and J.M. Coetzee among them, have commented on the relationship that is reflected in their poetics between their generic and formal choices as writers and their sense of history, especially national history (Walcott, 1998; Heaney, 1980; Rushdie 1991). In Rushdie's case, for example, the mode of postmodernist magic realism which he developed most famously in Midnight's Children (1981), was knowingly composed in order to cut across the oppressive linearity and rationality implied by colonial European historiography, as well as the tradition of nationalist triumphalism which in part emerged from it (Chatterjee, 1983).