| The first four novels of J. M. Coetzee are often judged by how well they seem to represent current conditions in South Africa. But they can be regarded more objectively as pieces of surreal, or reflexive, fiction, which turn from everyday reality to a mythic world of masters and slaves who often conform to Oedipal or Biblical patterns.Dusklands ties Eugene Dawn, an American intellectual, to the Oedipal myth in one novella, while its other novella links Jacobus Coetzee, an eighteenth-century Afrikaner explorer, to the Canaan myth of Israel's dominating the Promised Land. Symbolically, both characters cross the twilit boundary between the sun of masterhood and the darkness of slavery.In the Heart of the Country presents the protagonist, Magda, as an Oedipal hero (ine) who constructs reflexive fictions as an escape from the dreary reality of life on a South African desert farm. She cannot elude the basic pattern of master/slave relationships, even in those daydreams. Moreover, when she returns to reality, the bleakness itself remains master.Waiting for the Barbarians is set in a surreal world bestrided by a dying empire, one of whose magistrates finds himself seeking a third, ethical position apart from the strictly-defined roles of masterhood and slavery. His failure to do so nevertheless represents a triumph of the striving human spirit.In Life and Times of Michael K a slavelike title character's experience in South Africa follows a naturalistic downward spiral. Metaphorically, he lives as a slave-animal in a mythic Caanan, where any attempted escape from the master-slave dichotomy is futile, leading to privation, and perhaps to death.Although Foe, Coetzee's recent fifth novel, is beyond the scope of this dissertation, we notice that it also centers on the master/slave theme. A reflexive retelling of Robinson Crusoe, it uses Cruso and Friday as master and slave respectively, with the impossible third position represented by Susan Barton, a character missing from the original. Coetzee's novels thus have a broader scope than present-day concerns in South Africa, and therefore may qualify as classics. |
