“I Am Not a Herald of Community:” Communities of Contagion and Touching in The Letters of J.M. Coetzee

Abstract

The concept of community is not usually present in the discussion of J.M. Coetzee’s fictional and non-fictional production. One of the reasons must be that communities—in the widely accepted sense of a group of individuals with common interests, characteristics or goals—are generally absent in Coetzee’s works, or appear only in the background, as in the case of the unnamed political regime in Life & Times of Michael K, the Afrikaner community in Age of Iron or the academic community in Elizabeth Costello. Instead, the focus tends to be on the isolated individual or the Beckettian pair of characters. A different but related reason must lie in J.M. Coetzee’s known refusal, as opposed to other South African writers, to explicitly endorse either group identification, or nationalist and political—and hence, communitarian—agendas.