1 Silence as Heterotopia in Coetzee’s Fiction Bill Ashcroft from Chris Danta, Sue Kossew and Julian Murphet (eds.) Strong Opinions: J.M. Coetzee and the Authority of Contemporary Fiction London: Continuum, 2011: 141- 157. In Diary of a Bad Year the protagonist tells Anya why he no longer writes novels. Writing a novel he says is like carrying the world around on your back for three years. The weight of Coetzee’s novels comes not from their structural demands, the need for an interesting narrative, the need to say something. It comes from the novelist’s exhausting need to relinquish authority. We get a glimpse of this in the chapter ‘The Gate’ in Elizabeth Costello. When Elizabeth Costello is asked to articulate her beliefs before she can pass through she says: “I am a writer… It is not my profession to believe, just to write. Not my business. I do imitations, as Aristotle would have said.” (2003: 194) What must it be like to have no beliefs? Surely Coetzee believes that people should not mistreat, slaughter and eat animals? Doesn’t Diary of a Bad Year itself express opinions about the state of the world that may well come from beliefs? Despite the Kafkaesque dystopianism of “The Gate,” then, Elizabeth Costello’s position as a secretary of the invisible, her rigorous refusal to have beliefs of her own, is what I would call utopian. We might say that she occupies a space of possibility, a silence that, paradoxically, the writer can only achieve in the writing. This silence is, on one hand, the silence of the author ceding authority to his fiction, and on the other the horizon of that fiction’s possibilities. In a curious way this absence of opinions is the strongest opinion possible about the authority of the text. Elizabeth Costello might appear to signify a change of direction taken by Coetzee in Australia. But she is in fact an extension of the agonism that pervades his writing. Coetzee has always resisted the temptation to be the dictator, resisted the authority of the author, although it begins to take real shape from the writing of Foe. My argument here is that this is an extension of the anti-imperial critique of his writing – he resists what may be the ultimate imperialism, the empire of the author’s voice. The form this takes in his later writing is the abjection of the narrative voice, which might be said to be, particularly in the ‘autobiographical novels,’ the voice of the author. But it occurs most significantly in the spaces of silence. Silence in Coetzee