Coetzee, by contrast, abjured this compact between world and word. Speaking in the context of his 1987 Jerusalem Prize, he characterized South African writing as "a literature in bondage," born of a situation in which there was "too much truth for art to hold, truth by the bucketful, truth that overwhelms and swamps every act of the imagination." Faced with what he would later depict as a choice between writing that, in its reliance on truth-telling and fact, sought a supplementary status to history, and writing that sought instead to itself rival the discourse of history, Coetzee proclaimed himself obliged to choose the latter. In a 1988 essay titled "The Novel Today," he argues that storytelling ("more venerable than history, as ancient as the cockroach") represents an altogether different "mode of thinking," one with its own rules and imperatives, "its own paradigms and myths." In what he calls "a parable, a mode favoured by marginal groups,"

Coetzee goes on to catalogue the similarities between stories and cockroaches. Both are consumable, colonizable, catalogueable, ineradicable, even instrumentalizable as the stuff of revolutions. "You can even, if you wish, dry them and powder them and mix them with high explosives and make bombs of them. You can even make up stories about them, as Kafka did, although this is quite hard". Though Coetzee refers here specifically to cockroaches, the ironic disdain of his tone perfectly captures his broader reservations about the political use of literature. In a striking assertion of the distinctiveness and autonomy of literary discourse he concludes that ultimately, "there is still the difference between a cockroach and a story, and the difference remains everything." Coetzee implies that storytelling's difference emerges at precisely the point where the play of discourse resists interpretative efforts to corral and catch it in a set of allegorical equivalences as imprisoning as the carapace that Gregor Samsa wakes one day to inhabit. If Gordimer's model was Chekovian realism in the service of political change, Coetzee preferred the more Kafkaesque form of a narrative that does not record historical truth but instead offers a surreal, distorted, destabilizing version of its own—a version whose literary form exceeds its political purposes.

Though Coetzee and Gordimer have customarily been understood to mark opposite poles of a writers' debate on the place of art in politics, for the purposes of this essay I want to emphasize a relatively minor but potentially significant commonality. In the examples I have discussed, both Coetzee and Gordimer reach beyond the borders of their own national literary tradition in order to represent the unavoidable national meanings of literary expression in the 1980s.

Coetzee's Kafka and Gordimer's Chekov are thus the signs not only of a particular crisis point in the history of one nation and its national literature, but also of a broader transnational system that, as Goethe foresaw, links nations and texts together across geopolitical and cultural divides. The existence of such a "world system" creates a context in which any attempt to think the national cannot help but simultaneously route itself through some version of the global. Whether

in Goethe’s model of the cosmopolitan exchange of the great works of world literature or in the more recent paradigm of the literary encounter of colonial texts and postcolonial responses,9 both comparative literature and postcolonial studies can be seen to offer a version of what I will call literary transnationalism. The remainder of this essay explores this transnationalism at work in three South African texts: Coetzee's 1986 Foe, Dangor's 1997 Kafka's Curse, and Coetzee's 1998 Disgrace. Tracing the migratory patterns of various literary references, I reveal intertextuality to be the modality in which literary transnationalism is written. (In other words, intertextuality provides the formal expression of a geopolitical condition of modernity shaped by bordercrossing). I do not mean to suggest that transnational form is simply layered onto a uniform national archive. Indeed, as the South African case makes abundantly clear with its richly polyglot, racially and culturally diverse population, it is the very internal difference of national identity that seeks out, perhaps even requires, the external form of an intertextual transnationalism. To write South Africa in the texts considered here, it also becomes necessary to write the world.

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