‘Their travels were real travels’: History and fiction in J.M. Coetzee’s “The Narrative of Jacobus Coetzee” and in European exploration narratives in Southern Africa
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My aim in this paper is to analyze J.M. Coetzee’s early novella “The Narrative of Jacobus Coetzee,” included in his first book Dusklands (1974), focusing on the way it points to the inextricability between history and fiction in exploration narratives, and to the impossibility of giving an objective account of truth, free from the constraints of discourse and ideology. In order to do so, I will be paying attention to Hayden White’s and Michel de Certeau’s respective theoretical contributions on the writing of history, which indeed have many points in common with Coetzee’s fictional elaboration of this issue, and to primary exploration narratives Coetzee draws upon, such as Jacobus Coetzee’s original 1760 deposition and William Burchell’s Travels in the Interior of Southern Africa (1822, 1824).
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