Natural World Art

For Coetzee, the novel is a sphere of various discourse competition rather than a dominant narrative of a paradigm unfolded. He is concerned that history and reality are constructed by discourse, but he does not think that there is a discourse which can evade examination and questioning, regardless of history (discourse) or literary criticism, which are both likely to breed a system of power, and to restrict the ability of reflection and creative freedom of the writer. His novels usually explore possible worlds, in which he treats the world as possible situations. In his view, reality is merely possible and so is the history. Only through digging out those uncovered and repressed possibilities can we restore the multiple maps of truth.Coetzee adopts a kind of performative fiction, and often constructs other types of discourses such as history narrative and first-person confessional writing in his novels, so as to establish a mediation to reveal the productive mechanism of the dogmatic discourse and inherent blind spots, suggesting the possibility of space for free expression. He establishes ideological structure of history as the antithesis of the free fiction creation, and explores the narrative mode shared by history and realistic novels through intertextual relationship. Such a mode, the shelter and exclusion mechanism is included in the pursuit of representation. Meanwhile, he adopts a linguistic perspective to probe those self-myth and national myth constructed by characters. He also treats self-consciousness of literary criticism in a mimetic way through character's confessional writing, which reveals the dimension of subjectivity of literary criticism. His novels have thus obtained a theoretical function.In short, Coetzee goes deep into the interaction of reality with history and literature as well as other texts, in order to weave a fiction of productive discourse, and to make the theme neutral through performative fiction, so that the novel has maintained an indirect relationship with South African history, reality and academic criticism.