Freedom of expression or the need to speak against oppression in a single voice? Coetzee and Gordimer debate

This 1988 debate between Coetzee and Gordimer (RIP) is eloquent and important, and VERY relevant for current debates in 2014. It’s given a fine overview here. The debate is notable for their focus on the _principles_ at stake; their disagreement was tense but didn’t devolve into personal attacks.

For me these words of Coetzee’s are the most memorable moment:

“There is nothing more inimical to writing than the spirit of fundamentalism. Fundamentalism abhors the play of signs, the endlessness of writing. Fundamentalism means nothing more or less than going back to an origin and staying there. It stands for one founding book and thereafter no more books.

As the various books of the various fundamentalisms, each claiming to be the one true book, fantasize themselves to be signed in fire or engraved in stone, so they aspire to strike dead every rival book, petrifying the sinuous, protean, forward-gliding life of the letters on their pages, turning them into physical objects to be anathematised, things of horror not to be touched, not to be looked upon.”

Rushdie’s own next book, the brilliant little fable Haroun and the Sea of Stories, embodies Coetzee’s truth in story.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/may/23/salman-rushdie-nadine-gordimer-jm-coetzee

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