Dead Reckoning: On Coetzee's Summertime

Criticism, 2011

Journal of Narrative Theory, 2017

The stories we tell about ourselves may not be true, but they are all we have. J. M. Coetzee, The Good Story Dialogue and Truth in Autobiography, History, and Novels Summertime is the third and most experimental volume in J. M. Coetzee's autobiographical trilogy Scenes from Provincial Life. 1 This autobiographical novel is divided into sections that comprise transcriptions of interviews conducted by the fictional biographer Mr Vincent with acquaintances of the late John Coetzee, a fictional surrogate for J. M. Coetzee. These transcriptions appear in different stages of revision, translation, and narrativization. Notebook entries, allegedly written by John himself, frame the interview sections. The result is a highly fragmented self-representation that continuously transgresses the boundary between real world and storyworld. Summertime's status as autobiography is contentious since the text explicitly links the protagonist to the author but also foregrounds its fictional nature. While, as Coetzee says, "all writing is autobiography" (Doubling the Point 391), Summertime is autobiographical to a higher degree than most novels; at the same time, following Coetzee's dictum that "[a]ll autobiography is storytelling" (391), Summertime is

The trilogy by John Coetzee, a South African Nobel Laureate, begins with Boyhood moves through the political upheaval of Youth and climaxes with Summertime.

In Summertime by the South African Nobel Prize-winning novelist, J.M. Coetzee, an extreme postmodern self-consciousness of writing the self emerges. Coetzee continues to state in an interview that all writing is autobiographical: “everything that you write, including criticism and fiction, writes you as you write it” (Atwell 117). Coetzee, aware of his status as public figure and accomplished writer defamiliarizes fiction and autobiography by allowing five interviewees to reflect on the late fictional John Coetzee as a distant, awkward human with no distinction as writer, lover, teacher or friend. Leigh Gilmore’s “autobiographics” will be applied to Coetzee’s third autobiographical volume to investigate the author’s construction of the self.

This paper connects the notions of confession and interculturality in J. M. Coetzee's autobiographical novel "Summertime". Confession, as both the content and the structure of the novel show, is a search for the truth about the self that can never come to an end. The specific subject of this search in "Summertime", it is argued, is John Coetzee's (as the main character is called) political stance with regard to interculturality in the South Africa of apartheid. John Coetzee is portrayed as struggling with his Afrikaner descent and his place within South African society. The cultural stereotype of the barbarian is used to characterize him, and he is described (since John Coetzee never speaks himself) to have viewed others in the light of stereotypes such as the exotic. In posing the question of closure, Coetzee (the writer) shows his strength as a political writer. The only entity that can claim the authority to end this chain of confession is the suffering body of John Coetzee's (the character's) father, who loses his voice and finally forces him to act.

Mediatropes, 2015

Before the law, the title of a work is a title-deed subject to determinants of place and time (London after the 1710 Statute of Anne, or after the 1988 Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, for example). The work the title undertakes, however, also frames its own architecture, and so must be cognized as a topology as real as the "reality effect" of alpha-numerically simulated topography envisaged by Roland Barthes, must be recognized as a topo-and tropo-logical space built by the tropes which dwell, sound, and turn in the space separating-in a book-the cover from the textual body concealed within. This is in part a question of finding how the title stands, and of discovering what standing the title can be said to have earned, inherited, or proclaimed for itself.

MA thesis, 2015

This thesis attempts to explore the revival of the Kunstlerroman genre in two contemporary works of autobiographical fiction: J. M. Coetzee’s Summertime (2009) and Hisham Matar’s In the Country of Men (2006). The two main goals are to examine how an artist (author) reveals elements that have shaped his childhood in their writing in an attempt to reinvent the self in an artistic framework, and to understand how different genres transgress their boundaries to form hybrid genres that do not conform to the norms and conventions of one specific genre. I also explore the intertwining figures of the author, narrator, and protagonist of a story in an attempt to understand the aesthetics of the relationship between the author of a text and the hero he creates. To explain the term ‘autobiography’ and what it denotes, I refer to several major autobiography theorists such as Philippe Lejeune, Paul John Eakin, and James Olney. Additionally, I resort to an essay by Mikhail Bakhtin to decipher the dynamics of the relationship between the author and the hero. The reinvention of the self is a process requiring reliance on recalling the past through memory, which means all that is remembered is somewhat fictionalized and re-ordered; absolute truth cannot be represented. Coetzee and Matar do not only reinvent the self in writing; they consciously and actively participate in the creation of texts that transcend genres, hence defy definition according to set conventions. The outcome is narratives that reveal the reconstruction of the past in writing and new forms that constantly evolve and never fully belong to one particular genre. While Summertime resists constituting a definitive subject/protagonist, In the Country of Men goes beyond individual life to cover ‘everyman’.

The Quarterly Conversation

The Slow Philosophy of J.M. Coetzee by Jan Wilm. Bloomsbury. 251pp, $108.00. , a strong academic conversation on literature and philosophy has developed around the writings of J.M. Coetzee. As literary scholars and philosophers have approached this nexus, they have confronted questions about what counts as "philosophy" or "literature," and what benefits are afforded by conversing across the disciplines. So, as this dialogue continues moving forward, there may be some benefit in also slowing down, pausing, and looking back at the one monograph to expressly locate Coetzee's writings on a spectrum between literature and philosophy. Although not the most recent publication on the topic, Jan Wilm's The Slow Philosophy of J.M. Coetzee (2016) merits renewed attention for its use of both literary and philosophical tools in explicating how Coetzee's texts act upon their readers' very modes of thinking.

J.M. Coetzee’s Summertime has been widely explored – both for its controversy and merits – as engaging in “acts of genre” where the inscription of an autobiographical narrative simultaneously serves as a metatextual and ideological critique of its form. Similarly, this article is intrigued by generic instability, but our terrain lies further afield, exploring how the narrative lapses from the lofty ideals of romance to the baser “truth” of chick-lit. In Summertime, all the female characters besmirch Mr. Vincent, the biographer, for wanting to cast John Coetzee in the role of a romantic hero. Yet, their resistance results in a series of romantic failures which then situates Summertime in the generic ambit of chick-lit. In embodying a spirit that is as playful as it is critical, we suggest that Coetzee offers an opportunity to cast aside a literary critical tradition of suspicion and, in doing so, passes critical comment on how we approach a popular genre like chick-lit.