Disgraceful Metafiction: Intertextuality in the Postcolony‪.‬

Summary My aim in this paper is to examine J.M. Coetzee's use of intertextuality in Disgrace (2002a), partly because many commentators have said something about some of the intertexts utilised in the novel, but nobody has made an attempt at a thoroughgoing analysis, particularly in terms of what intertextuality, or indeed postmodernism, means in postcolonialism today. I want to make the claim against those who see Disgrace as primarily a realist text that merely provides an avenue into discussing sociological issues in "the new South Africa" and that to read it in this way is to do a disservice to the novel, to Coetzee's views on the value of literature and the imagination, and perhaps even to the relationship between literature and the nation. Disgrace is an ostensibly realist text that consists of a chain of provocations tempting the reader into realist interpretations, but a more careful reading of the novel shows how intertextual it is, and how subtle its analysis of cultural history is. This metafictional component then asks the question that Coetzee has been grappling with in his entire oeuvre, which is the question of the valency of complexity within sociohistorical contexts that tend to reduce complexity, sometimes to the extent of viewing it as an indulgence or even dangerous distraction within the new nation.