Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Derek Wright

SOURCE: "Fiction as Foe: The Novels of J. M. Coetzee," in International Fiction Review, Vol. 16, No. 2, Summer, 1989, pp. 113-18.

In the following essay, Wright examines Coetzee's fiction as representative of a hostile colonial act in itself.

The settings of J. M. Coetzee's five novels are, at first glance, unusual for a contemporary South-African writer. They are, respectively, the United States, undefined parts of the South-African hinterland of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the frontier of an unnamed country on "the roof of the world," a war-ravaged Cape Town and Karoo of the future, and the fictional-cum-metafictional territory of the Robinson Crusoe fable. In fact, each of the novels is, not surprisingly, a fictional extrapolation from South Africa's current historical crisis. In these fictional projections, however, the very fictional properties of myth, ideology, and history—and finally fiction itself—are themselves targeted as a principal source of hostility to human...
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