Chapter 3 - Works I

Summary

This chapter considers Coetzee's first six novels, from Dusklands (1974) to Age of Iron (1990), works written under the shadow of apartheid. In presenting this substantial period of Coetzee's writing as a ‘phase’ I am implicitly proposing an apartheid/post-apartheid dividing line in his career. While this does not obviously register other complicating elements, which I hope my accounts are sensitive to – the unique creative departure that each novel represents, and yet the continuities to be found through the oeuvre – the dividing line does identify an important shift of emphasis that is becoming clearer with hindsight.

This tentative periodization is, thus, more than a matter of organizational convenience. However, given that one of the main and recurring criticisms of Coetzee's work has been his perceived failure to engage directly with historical and political questions, it might seem surprising to propose this overarching sense of political responsiveness. This is not to suggest an overt degree of response or engagement; but the analyses that follow are based on the premise that Coetzee's fictional preoccupations in his first six novels are profoundly determined by, and permeated with, a consciousness of life in South Africa as a constant and inevitable background presence. In these novels the recurring ideas cannot be fully understood in isolation from that context. Coetzee's imagination, from his earliest work, has been haunted by issues pertaining to mastery/slavery, the colonizing psyche, and the problem of complicity.