Abstract: | In this article the author argues that the familiar ambivalence surrounding the vagrant, the tramp, the picaresque hero, the traveller, informs two of J.M. Coetzee's most overtly 'political' novels, and provides a useful frame within which to read them not only as reflections on the South African situation but also, as often in Coetzee's work, as exercises in genre and its relation to subject. The vagrants Michael K in 'Life and times of Michael K' (1983) and Vercueil in 'Age of iron' (1990) both occupy spaces peripheral to the South African historical situation (Michael K as a wanderer in the desolate landscape of the Karoo, and Vercueil as an urban vagrant), but they inhabit different genres: Michael K's vagrancy is allegorical, a fable, whereas Vercueil's is in the realist mode. This difference affects the register of every encounter with the two vagrants. Through foregrounding and accommodating the marginalized Coetzee negotiates the tricky questions facing also the writer in a troubled regime in which all meanings are written back to political meaning, and in which the writer too must somehow be accommodated in the house of fiction. Bibliogr., notes. |