Coetzee’s Schreiner, Schreiner’s Coetzee: Provincialising Allegory

Speaking to the poet Stephen Watson in 1978, JM Coetzee shared his conviction that South Africa’s was ‘not a great literature’, that ‘there are no really gigantic figures in it’, and that he had little interest in writers ‘who are classed as gigantic, say Schreiner and Campbell’. Yet two decades after this dismissal, in a 1998 interview (only published in Korean), Coetzee would claim that amongst South African writers only Schreiner had ‘meant a great deal’ to him. Coetzee’s qualification (‘of all South African writers’) is worth noting, as is the fact that he has often disavowed the influence of writers from the country of his birth (in a lecture at UC Berkeley in 1991, he suggested that when he first looked for writing models there simply were none in South Africa). Yet, this chapter argues, it nonetheless remains worth asking quite what Schreiner has ‘meant’ to Coetzee. This query is pursued through parallel readings of Schreiner’s allegorical novella, Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland (1897) and Coetzee’s first novel, Dusklands (1974).