TEXT AND HINTERLAND - COETZEE,J.M. AND THE SOUTH-AFRICAN NOVEL

There is a certain paradox in placing a writer in a national or region al context, especially a writer like J. M. Coetzee who has distanced h imself from such a reading. However, as much as his novels and scholar ly criticism range well beyond a South African terrain, they also trac k this course-at times-quite deliberately. Think only of 'The Narrativ e of Jacobus Coetzee' in the second half of Dusklands or his collectio n of essays, White Writing. This article will explore the ambivalent s pace 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 oeuvr e might be seen as a series of 'travelling texts' which reinscribes, b y dislocation, a South African topography. Indeed, Coetzee's work carr ies a double tendency towards the South African landscape: one which i s concurrently removed and engaged If it draws heavily from a European tradition, it also drifts in and out of a local one. The question I w ish to pose is this: Is there a way to discuss Coetzee's narratives as 'South African' without reducing his novels to a reading of the 'nati on'? Or to phrase it differently, can his novels be read as 'national' texts precisely for their fragmented South Africaness-a 'nationality' which presupposes diversity and a mingling of cultures and forms? The discussion which follows makes use of a dispersal of spatial terms. T hey are not, in any way, meant to contain Coetzee's fiction in a South African context, nor to imply that his fiction is self-containing. Ra ther, it will be argued that-perhaps against all intentions-his novels offer a new kind of mapmaking which opens up the space of South Afric an fiction.