The Good Story: Exchanges on Truth, Fiction and Psychotherapy by JM Coetzee & Arabella Kurtz, book review

Nobel-prize winning novelist JM Coetzee interrogates the integrity of fiction and how it intersects with psychoanalysis

Natural justice in great fiction: Author JM Coetzee (Getty)

This book, comprised of a series of exchanges between JM Coetzee and psychologist Arabella Kurtz, explores the possibility that the practices of psychoanalysis and novel-writing might have something useful to say to each other. Both, after all, are concerned with the potency of stories – the patients' personal story established through the therapeutic process, and the novelist's imaginative fiction. What, Coetzee wonders, is the role of truth in either of these story-making processes?

It is the Man Booker prize-winning novelist's agenda that drives the absorbing discussions of this book. Kurtz's pieces are replies to Coetzee's questions, and as such are insightful for both disciplines. Coetzee's anxieties seem to stem from the apparent self-indulgence of the writerly enterprise: "It must be evident to you that I don't have much respect for reality … If the world of my fictions is a recognisable world, that is because (I say to myself) it is easier to use the world at hand than to make up a new one."

At first his concerns are to do with the aesthetics of narrative and the extent to which it is permissible to use rhetorical devices to give dramatic emphasis to an autobiographical story. Should he instead use a neutral, objective tone that might meet the criteria of a courtroom? He goes further – supposing one tells a false story about oneself in order to heighten one's self esteem – would that be morally acceptable?

In the psychoanalytic realm he wonders whether it is preferable to have patients confront the truth about themselves, rather than collaborating with the therapist on an empowering fiction that would make them feel better.

It seems surprising that Coetzee is so preoccupied with the notion of an absolute truth which fiction can either accurately reflect or distort. It is Kurtz who questions the idea of this kind of courtroom truth. The facts of anyone's life are limited and rare. Psychoanalysis, says Kurtz, can sometimes be described as the process of setting free the narrative or autobiographical imagination. The truth is contingent upon viewpoint and context. If the goal of therapy is to set the patient free, is truth the only avenue to freedom?

There are, of course, many different kinds of truth – emotional, poetic, fictional, mathematical and so on. Coetzee is concerned by the idea of a separate, absolute truth outside and beyond the realm of the poem or the story, against which it can be tested. If so, then it is not something that seems to be recognised by the psychotherapeutic process.

Novelists who draw heavily on their own life experiences for the making of fiction soon encounter the dilemma of how far they can alter the truth of a memory in order to create a more aesthetically pleasing narrative. If one's life is seen as a vast repository of memories, too many to include in a single story, novelists must inevitably pick and choose which to describe, and therefore construct a past that fits a favourable view of themselves. And the same must be true of psychoanalysis. But is this acceptable, should we be free to make up our pasts, can we simply be who we like to think we are? Is there an external truth and does it matter?

These questions take the discussion into the area of memory itself. Coetzee remains bothered by a responsibility to the truthfulness of memories. What if one chooses to repress memories that are troubling? He cites people who have committed vile crimes and have repressed the memories so that they can live with themselves. Will not this repression lead to psychological damage? Eventually the cries of the victims will come through in the torturers' dreams, destroying their happy relationship with their family. It transpires that Coetzee is concerned with a specific notion of natural justice, a trope that recurs repeatedly in the plotlines of great fiction – the Mayor of Casterbridge or the tragedy of Oedipus Rex, for example. Bad deeds committed in the past and successfully repressed return to redress the balance in favour of the truth. What happens to justice, Coetzee asks, if we are free to repress the truth in order to protect the psyche?

The discussion navigates a path through the works of morally engaged novelists such as Dostoyevsky and Hawthorne, and the theories of Melanie Klein, Hannah Segal and others, before gradually moving away from its foundations in literary practice, towards a consideration of storytelling on a wider scale. How far are the narratives told by groups, societies and nations responsible to an objective truth?

As a writer brought up in South Africa and now resident in Australia, Coetzee has long been preoccupied with the potencies of colonial narratives. Our forefathers were brutal and inhumane in their treatment of indigenous populations, he remarks, yet they themselves felt justified by their own story. And today we seem able to square respect for our ancestors with an acknowledgment of their inhumane behaviour. How can this be? In decades to come, will our descendants be equally horrified by our treatment of immigrants?

The discussion returns to its literary parameters with a chapter on the work of WG Sebald. The character of Austerlitz exemplifies for Coetzee the type of identity conflict that is essential for fiction: "The character who is, from beginning to end, comfortably sustained by fictions, is not a suitable character for a novel, cannot, in fact, be written about." It is, in the end, the broken or wounded narrative, suppressed and repressed, to re-emerge and do battle with the established fiction, that produces the dynamic energy of a good story.

Gerard Woodward's latest novel, 'Vanishing', is out in paperback (Picador)