Abstract
This chapter explores how Summertime (2009), Diary of a Bad Year (2007), and Dusklands (1974) address the difficulty of autobiographical writing. The chapter makes use of the theoretical work of Mikhail Bakhtin and Judith Butler to argue for a dialogism in Coetzee’s work that is fundamentally ethical and to reconsider accounts of works at the boundary of fact and fiction in autobiography theory. The chapter reads Coetzee’s employment of explicitly autobiographical author surrogates as a means of rendering himself accountable as writer. Metalepsis, in these texts, serves to emphasize that storyworlds and reality are distinct but linked, that in writing the author creates a fiction but that this fiction has real-world consequences, and that these are outside the author’s control but that he nonetheless holds responsibility for them.
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Notes
- 1.
Boyhood, Youth, and Summertime were published together as Scenes from Provincial Life in 2011. Boyhood (1997) narrates the young John’s childhood in South Africa, Youth (2002) describes his move to London toward the end of his graduate studies, and Summertime (2009) focuses on a period of his life in the 1970s, when Coetzee had returned to South Africa after having lived in the United States. They had previously appeared separately, with the subtitle “Scenes from Provincial Life” only in Boyhood and Summertime.
- 2.
See Laura Marcus’s Auto/biographical Discourses: Theory, Criticism, Practice for a detailed discussion of the historical development of the field of autobiography criticism.
- 3.
Thomas Claviez notes that, if the autonomy of the self is challenged—as it is in the Levinasian ethical relation—this has consequences for the author of a life story and for the unity of this story, and that thinkers such as Paul Ricoeur and Alasdair MacIntyre therefore conceive authorship of one’s life as co-authorship (222–224). Marcus gives an account of how increased attention to life-writing by women, working-class people, or ethnic minorities has led to definitions of autobiography as relational and collective (219–222). Paul John Eakin, for example, argues that “all identity is relational” (44), and Smith and Watson claim that “relationality characterizes all autobiographical writing” (297).
- 4.
See Max Saunders for a discussion of definitions of the term life-writing (4–5).
- 5.
See Marcus (283–284), Saunders (511–515), and Smith and Watson (57–58, 214) for a discussion of how Butler’s concept of performativity informs autobiography criticism.
- 6.
See, for example, Smith and Watson’s definition of autofiction (260).
- 7.
While Coetzee refers to his exchanges with Kurtz, a focus on the ethical dimension of truth is present throughout his oeuvre.
- 8.
Coetzee gestures toward such a position of higher vantage at the end of Boyhood, when the protagonist, the young John, “for an interval […] can see the world as it really is. He sees himself […]: not a child, not what a passer-by would call a child, too big for that now, too big to use that excuse, yet still as stupid and self-enclosed as a child: childish; dumb; ignorant; retarded,” and he sees “his father and his mother too, from above, without anger: not as two grey and formless weights seating themselves on his shoulders, plotting his misery day and night, but as a man and a woman living dull and trouble-filled lives of their own” (Boyhood 160–161). The moment of clarity, the vision of truth, does not last, however; the protagonist, and perhaps also the author, returns to the story he tells himself about himself: “The sky opens, he sees the world as it is, then the sky closes and he is himself again, living the only story he will admit, the story of himself” (161).
- 9.
See Butler (Giving an Account of Oneself 31–40) for a detailed account of the reasons for this opacity. Briefly summarized, the self can never fully know itself and give a full account of itself because: (1) its corporeality is constituted by a bodily exposure that no narrative can fully capture (Butler takes this concept of exposure from the philosopher Adriana Cavarero); (2) primary relations from childhood form the self but are outside its knowledge (an understanding of the constitution of the self in psychoanalysis); (3) the self comes to know and narrate itself within norms that are not of its own making (a poststructuralist argument about being caught in discursive structures); (4) part of the self’s emergence is a historical past outside the self’s temporality; and (5) an account of the self is addressed to someone else, which means that the self, in giving the account, gives itself over to this other.
- 10.
Butler’s understanding of our relationality is similar to the Levinasian face-to-face relation, describing a pre-verbal level of address that constitutes our responsibility to the other. Butler herself draws this link. The self, she writes, breaks down “in front of the other or, to anticipate Levinas, in the face of the Other […] or, indeed, by virtue of the Other’s face, voice, or silent presence” (Giving an Account of Oneself 69).
- 11.
See Michael Eskin (43–44) for an account of how Bakhtin’s theory of language as dialogic and of consciousness as socially constituted builds on a Levinasian understanding of the formation of the self. See Eskin (Chap. 2) for a detailed account of Bakhtin’s linguistically grounded ethics and Clarkson (J. M. Coetzee [particularly chapters two and three]) for a discussion of Bakhtin’s theory of address and response in relation to Coetzee’s critical and fictional writing.
- 12.
Bakhtin develops these claims based on Dostoevsky’s novels. In Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (1929), he describes how Dostoevsky realizes the ideal of the polyphonic novel in which we find multiple equally valid voices and perspectives that are not subordinated to an authorial voice.
- 13.
Coetzee provides this definition of dialogism with the qualification that the concept is being used in critical discourse in a way that, as Coetzee believes, neglects the specifically religious meaning that Bakhtin attached to it (“The Sympathetic Imagination” 44).
- 14.
For a detailed analysis of Coetzee’s use of the comic, see Hayes’s account, in J. M. Coetzee and the Novel: Writing and Politics After Beckett, of what he terms Coetzee’s “jocoserious style.”
- 15.
See Clarkson (J. M. Coetzee 85–86) for an account of how JC’s syntax functions to deflect agency. Clarkson notes that JC’s voice is very different from Coetzee’s own outside his fiction, describing Coetzee’s critical essays as a “rich conversation […] rather than a monologic thesis […] written by one person” (“Coetzee’s Criticism” 229) and suggesting that his critical writing is “best read as a palimpsestic writing-in-response to other writers” (231).
- 16.
The juxtaposition of personal story and public voice can be read as a form of personal criticism , a term associated with Mary Ann Caws and Nancy K. Miller. Personal criticism stresses its origin in an individual subject at a specific time and place, thereby avoiding claims to objectivity and instead inviting dialogue with others. Personal criticism aims, in Caws’s words, at “soliciting, quietly or openly, the reader’s own views” (2).
- 17.
For a more reserved reading of how Bakhtinian dialogism is at play in Diary of a Bad Year, see Julian Murphet. He argues that, while devices that Bakhtin valued in Dostoevsky’s novels can be found in Diary of a Bad Year, in this work Coetzee also veers toward Tolstoy’s style, in his later work, where he expresses his own views directly through his characters.
- 18.
The issue of complicity is central in many of Coetzee’s novels. Elizabeth Costello is confronted with questions of historical complicity by her judges “At the Gate”; in Disgrace, David Lurie and Lucy grapple with such questions in their attempts to negotiate a position for themselves in post-apartheid South Africa; in Age of Iron, Mrs. Curren does the same during the violent struggle against apartheid in the late 1980s; for Magda, in In the Heart of the Country , complicity prevents communion with her black workers; in Waiting for the Barbarians, the Magistrate tries, without avail, to escape complicity with the Empire; and Dusklands forms part of Coetzee’s own autobiographical engagement with historical complicity.
- 19.
Clarkson reads the shift from JC’s strong to the soft opinions as a consequence of “a responsiveness to perspectives articulated by other voices” (J. M. Coetzee 99). According to Attwell, JC’s reflections in the second part of Diary of a Bad Year are “unreservedly autobiographical on Coetzee’s part” (“Mastering Authority” 215).
- 20.
In “Remembering Texas,” Coetzee describes the beginnings of Dusklands as “a memoir of a kind that went on growing till it had been absorbed into a first novel” (52).
- 21.
This statement, made by Attwell in 1991, is still pertinent for the corpus as it has developed from then on. While there are no more first-person narrators (with the exception of the embedded narratives in Diary of a Bad Year), several of Coetzee’s protagonists (e.g. David Lurie, in Disgrace, John, in Youth and Summertime, and JC, in Diary of a Bad Year) fit Attwell’s description of a subject that is “not one of the primary agents of colonization, but who lives in the historical circumstances created by such figures, and who suffers and has to endure the subjectivity which such a position entails” (“‘The Labyrinth of My History’” 27).
- 22.
See, for example, Peter Knox-Shaw’s “Dusklands: A Metaphysics of Violence.” Knox-Shaw claims that the deposition is “authentic” (108) and that the text we find in Dusklands is “a translation by the author” (188 n1). For an account of how the deposition in Dusklands differs from the original version and from a translation by E. E. Mossop in 1935, see Anthony Uhlmann (404–407).
- 23.
For a different reading of the effect of the self-reflexivity in the second part of Dusklands, see Zimbler. He argues that, “while there is clearly scope for mystification in every re-telling, […] the reader may feel rightly confident in the possibility of getting behind the obfuscation to the story’s truth, encouraged in this by the implied authorial or narrative consciousness that occupies a position above or behind its various surrogates, subtly betraying them and exposing them to irony, if not always parody” (J. M. Coetzee and the Politics of Style 32).
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Effe, A. (2017). Author and Self: Accounting for Voices and Worlds. In: J. M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Narrative Transgression. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-60101-4_4
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