In “The Novel Today,” J. M. Coetzee famously writes of the distinction between novels that “rival” history and those that “supplement” them.1 In arguing strongly against the “powerful tendency, perhaps even dominant tendency, to subsume the novel under history,” he suggests that readers accord superior moral integrity and “greater truth” to “supplementary” novels not least because they engage with the “facts” of history (NT, 2). The “today” of the essay title marks a very specific period in South Africa, a time in which the moral and political purpose of literature was strongly debated. It refers to the tumultuous years of the second State of Emergency (1985–89) prior to the release of Nelson Mandela in 1990 and the final abolition of the Nationalist Government, and apartheid regime, in 1994. At this time, the political demands made of South African writers who did not support the racist regime were substantial: their role was to bear witness to real events and, in doing so, expose and oppose the truth of the apartheid state.2

Not surprisingly, given his tendency to shun straightforward realism in his own fiction, Coetzee forcefully advocates in the essay not simply fiction’s difference from historical narratives but the novel’s ability to rival them. He thus overtly challenges the negative assessment of critics who suggested that in his characteristic stress on consciousness and interiority, he “betray[s] an idealist rather than materialist stance,” one in which, as Teresa Dovey puts it, he gets “his history all wrong.” Against such reasoning, Coetzee argues that the novel “occup[ies] an autonomous place” outside the discourse of history; “it operates in terms of its own procedures and issues in its own conclusions that are not checkable by history” and, as a result, it is able to “show up the mythic status of history” (NT, 2–3). Similarly, the novel’s reader is called upon to do more than perform what Peter McDonald calls an “instrumentalized reading” of narrative “facts” (PI, 53). Certainly, metafictional “play” that alerts readers not just to the fabricated untruths of realist writing but also to their own roles in the creation of meaning — in fiction and history — is a hallmark of Coetzee’s writing (and one of the bugbears of his detractors).