AustLit

'In an important 1992 interview with David Attwell, J.M. Coetzee defined writing as involving 'an interplay between the push into the future that takes you to the blank page in the first place, and a resistance. Part of that resistance is psychic, but part is also an automatism built into language: the tendency of words to call up other words, to fall into patterns that keep propagating themselves' ('Interview' 18). While this statement could be read as a commentary on the internal structuring pattern of a Coetzee novel-or an imaginative work, for that matter - I want to explore 'the tendency of words to call up other words' in the context of intertextuality, which in effect functions as an external structuring pattern of many Coetzee novels. While Kafka and Beckett are the guiding influences for Coetzee, other writers also loom large for him: for instance, his 1986 novel, Foe, forms a fascinating dialogue with Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, and his 1999 novel, Disgrace, as this essay will demonstrate, carries on a conversation with the poetry of William Butler Yeats.' (Author's introduction: 3)