Allegories of power in the fiction of J.M. Coetzee

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Abstract
It is suggested that allegory is a prominent literary vehicle for political dissent in contemporary literature of dissent, as can be illustrated especially in J.M. Coetzee's novels. This suggestion, however, requires a redefinition of our conventional sense of allegory's nature and purpose. Medieval and renaissance allegory is discussed as the background to the doubleness of the allegorical mode which emerged in the eighteenth and nineteenth century. Allegory has only recently been used for the purpose of explicit social and political criticism, as is indicated in a discussion of Coetzee's novels, as well as references to works of Buzzati, Kafka, Calvino, Borges, Donoso, Allende, Kundera and, within the South African context, Paton and Stockenstrom. It is ironic that allegory has become a mode particularly suited to the novelistic expression of fragmentation and injustice, and has become an effective medium of protest against the simplifications of absolute power.

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