CHAPTER EIGHT PLAYING WITH PERSONAL HISTORY J. M. COETZEE AND THE CHALLENGE OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY GIULIANA IANNACCARO What is it that I and other writers are doing, I want to ask, when, as people making our own history or people living out of the history of our time or people enmired in history or people undergoing the nightmare of history, depending on how one sees it, we write these long prose works that we call novels? Are we trying to escape historical reality, or, on the contrary, are we engaging with historical reality in a particular way, a way that may require some explanation and some defence? (Coetzee 1988, 2) Needless to say, the question is rhetorical. The forty-seven year old John Maxwell Coetzee, invited to give a talk at the 1987 Weekly Mail Book Week in Cape Town, was not there to dismiss the writing of literature as an escapist pastime for people who do not have the backbone to confront history. The talk, later published as a review article under the title “The Novel Today” (1988), was delivered towards the end of an extremely hard decade for South Africa: those were the years that saw the increase of state-sanctioned violence, of censorship exercised with all possible means, and of a hard economic crisis, partially due to international sanctions. It was during the 1980s that South Africa witnessed the fiercest black reaction to apartheid, a reaction that brought the nation to the brink of a civil war and gave the government of P. W. Botha the opportunity to declare a state of emergency extended to the whole country. Coetzee, in his typically concise and at the same time dense literary style, contends that novel writing can be used as a tool to confront the mystifications of the discourse of history; far from providing a mere diversion, or a mere “copy” of reality (depicting the living conditions of the people subjected to the “nightmare of history”), the novel