The postmodern truths of J. M. Coetzee

On being awarded the 2003 Nobel Prize, the Swedish Academy called J.M. Coetzee a “Truth and Reconciliation Commission on [his] own.” This was a contentious label, especially in light of the controversy that has surrounded some of Coetzee’s fiction, with a number of critics questioning the author’s political commitment to challenging the realities of South African life, both during and after apartheid. In this chapter I examine these controversies and the political focus of Coetzee’s apartheid-era writing, before considering how Coetzee’s writing has changed post-apartheid. Taking the Nobel Prize as a departure point, I consider how Coetzee’s post-conflict writing enacts some of the realities and interrogates some of the procedures of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). This is especially the case in Diary of a Bad Year (2007) in which Coetzee routinely denies the authority of his authorship via a burgeoning postmodernism, with the aesthetics of the novel attempting to access a higher realm of truth, one that emerges from questions that exceed the factual veracity of realism.