Jeff Rubard
2010-02-03 22:08:23 UTC
Telling It Slant: On J.M. Coetzee By Joanna Scott
*The Nation* January 28, 2010
In his memoir Boyhood: Scenes from Provincial Life, published in the
United States in 1997, John Coetzee is a young boy living on a housing
estate outside the town of Worcester in South Africa. To his
impressionable mind the world is a cruel place where those in
authority take sadistic pleasure in the beatings they dole out. He
watches a teacher fly into a rage and whip a student who can't keep up
with his schoolwork. He watches a white man thrash a colored boy who
has tried to run away from his chores. John is appalled by the
brutality around him. Coming of age in provincial South Africa in the
1950s, he decides that childhood is "a time of gritting the teeth and
enduring." He grows ever more inward and solitary. His earliest memory
is of watching his mother release a scrap of paper out the window of a
bus. For years he thinks of the scrap of paper, "alone in all that
vastness." He dreams of the day when he will find the paper and rescue
it.
Summertime
by J.M. Coetzee
Buy this book
..In Youth, published in 2002, John Coetzee is a young man working as
a programmer at IBM in London. Though he has focused his university
studies on mathematics, his real love is literature. He discovers Ezra
Pound and T.S. Eliot and learns from them that "he must be prepared to
endure all that life has stored up for him, even if that means exile,
obscure labour, and obloquy." He follows Pound's recommendations for
reading. The more he reads, the more confident he is in his tastes. He
prefers Chaucer, who "keeps a nice ironic distance from his
authorities," to Shakespeare, who gets "into a froth about things." He
is suspicious of the "easy sentiment" in the Romantics and Victorians,
and he considers Joyce "too bound up with Ireland and Irish affairs."
He reads all of Ford Madox Ford--a writer known for mixing fiction and
autobiography--because Pound "promoted Ford as the sole heir in
England of Henry James and Flaubert."
He carries a book of poetry to read on the train, in hopes that an
"exceptional girl will appreciate what he is reading and recognize in
him an exceptional spirit too." He fantasizes about going to bed with
Emma Bovary. Women, John believes, will be his inspiration. "In a
perfect world he would sleep only with perfect women, women of perfect
femininity yet with a certain darkness at their core that will respond
to his own darker self." It turns out to be easy enough for him to
find women to sleep with, but "the perfect woman" eludes him. He grows
more isolated and at the same time more idealistic about the
importance of literary expression. He longs to write poetry and looks
for the right mistress who, "by means of an instinctive faculty," will
perceive the "sacred fire" burning in him. He's hopeful that sex,
along with those other two worthy subjects for a poet--madness and
suffering--will give him something to write about.
It's convenient for this aspiring writer that women, at least as he
understands them, do not have what it takes to be legitimate artists.
And because women "do not have the sacred fire" of artistic creativity
(he names Sappho and Emily Brontë as exceptions), they seek it in male
artists and "give themselves to them." During this period, when John
Coetzee is in his larval stage as a writer, he develops a rather
elaborate mystical system around this notion: "In their lovemaking
artists and their mistresses experience briefly, tantalizingly, the
life of gods. From such lovemaking the artist returns to his work
enriched and strengthened, the woman to her life transfigured." But at
least within the pages of Youth, John is never treated to this divine
inspiration. He ends on a note of despair, admitting that he is afraid
of women, writing and failure.
By the time we meet up with John Coetzee in Summertime, he is dead
(the main character is survived by the author, the real J.M. Coetzee).
But John has lived long enough to distinguish himself as a writer and
earn a place for himself as "public property." Summertime, which is
described on the cover as "fiction," is cast within its pages as "a
seriously intended biography" that concentrates, the biographer
explains, "on the years from Coetzee's return to South Africa in
1971/72 until his first public recognition in 1977...an important
period of his life, important yet neglected, a period when he was
still finding his feet as a writer."
The novel opens and closes with short fragments from John Coetzee's
notebooks, but the bulk of the narrative is organized around a set of
interviews conducted by the biographer, Mr. Vincent, with five people
who knew John during the years when he was back in South Africa after
doing graduate work in the United States. Unconvinced by conventional
methods of literary biography, Mr. Vincent prefers to construct a
portrait made up of a range of perspectives. Among the four women he
speaks with, two are John's former lovers, one is a woman who was
repulsed by his advances and one is his cousin. The only man Mr.
Vincent interviews is John's former colleague at the University of
Cape Town.
In this "important yet neglected" period of John Coetzee's life, he is
single and living with his widowed father in a mud-brick house with
walls "so rotten with damp creeping up from the earth that they have
begun to crumble." Hoping to insulate the foundation against further
dampness, he decides to put a belt of concrete around the periphery.
He orders the sand, the stone and the cement, and sets out to follow a
plan in a home improvement guide. He works without assistance--a
gesture that signals his refusal to participate in apartheid's
degrading economic system.
It's an emblematic effort not just because it reveals how even the
most basic action can bear political weight but also because it
involves a new confrontation with failure. At least when it comes to
mixing concrete, John Coetzee is inept. He confuses cubic meters with
square meters; a job that he expected would take a few days threatens
to last for many weeks. But instead of giving up, he persists with the
effort.
The young man who is afraid of failure at the end of Youth seems to be
a little less afraid in Summertime. He's more tenacious, more willing
to risk humiliation in order to finish what he's started. While he
blames himself for his "feeble" response to the moral dilemma posed by
the ruling regime of South Africa, he finds a new satisfaction in
independent labor. It's revealing that once he realizes he has made a
mistake in measuring the materials for the concrete, he applies
himself to the task with renewed energy. He tells himself that the
"slabs he is laying will outlast his tenancy of the house, may even
outlast his spell on earth." He sounds a similar note later, when, in
a conversation with a woman named Julia Frankl, one of his former
lovers, he describes a book as "a gesture of refusal in the face of
time. A bid for immortality." In his determination to produce
something lasting, John is much more willing to face up to a mistake
and get on with his work.
Compiled by Mr. Vincent, the excerpts from the notebooks and the five
interviews offer a fractured portrait of an "unemployed intellectual"
who is ambivalent about his emotional isolation. John is keen on
defending himself against the incursions of society and writes in his
notebook, "if you want to succeed in the world and have a happy family
and a nice home and a BMW you should not try to understand things." On
the other hand, he feels a responsibility to the world. Viewing
himself as an outsider, he is looking for ways to defy taboos.
While there's no description of him at his desk, we learn that he
publishes his first work of fiction, Dusklands, following his return
to South Africa. He is growing up, becoming the man who will one day
be described by his biographer as "a great writer." Yet he still has
more growing to do. One of his lovers from this period reports that
there was "an air of failure" about him. He remains undistinguished as
a lover ("he could perform the male part perfectly adequately," Julia
says). And he still thinks women are all the same, or at least he
gives the different women in his life this impression.
In the first interview, Julia Frankl recounts the details of her
affair with John in South Africa in the early '70s. Isolated in her
own marriage, she spots John shopping in a supermarket. "He was
scrawny," she tells Mr. Vincent. "He looked out of place, like a bird,
one of those flightless birds; or like an abstracted scientist who had
wandered by mistake out of his laboratory." She launches the affair
not because she's attracted to him (she says he "was not easy to take
to, his whole stance toward the world was too wary, too defensive")
but because she is stuck in a bad marriage and needs to prove her
seductive powers. In her most unsettling judgment of John, she
describes Dusklands as "self-administered therapy." With a little
prompting from Mr. Vincent, she expands: "He had decided he was going
to block cruel and violent impulses in every arena of his life--
including his love life, I might say--and channel them into his
writing."
The second woman Mr. Vincent interviews is John's cousin, Margot. Her
interview is recast into narrative form by Mr. Vincent, with Margot
referred to in the third person. (He defends his method by insisting
that "changing the form should have no effect on the content.") Margot
is more forgiving of her cousin than Julia was, describing him as "an
odd character." Of everyone interviewed by Mr. Vincent, she's the one
who gives voice to the ambition that John is too modest or skeptical
to express. She says to him, "You could change your fate tomorrow if
you would just put your mind to it." Most important, she articulates a
clear moral position in the face of apartheid. Reflecting on the
racial designations used to legislate the interactions of South
Africans, she prays, "Let the time come soon, O Lord... when all this
apartheid nonsense will be buried and forgotten."
One of the stories Coetzee tells in this book is about responses to
apartheid and the evolution of strategies of opposition. John has
moved from the position of silent witness in Boyhood to the struggle
to communicate his "rage and despair" in Summertime. It's a story that
has clear moral demarcations and yet, when explored through a series
of lived experiences, is full of entrapping ambiguities. Margot can do
no better than to describe apartheid as "nonsense." In his early years
after his return to South Africa, John can do no better than to shore
up the periphery of his crumbling home on his own. Profound injustice
is as difficult for them to understand as it is to overcome. As the
exhausted Magistrate says toward the end of Coetzee's novel Waiting
for the Barbarians, "I have lived through an eventful year, yet
understand no more of it than a babe in arms."
Through the "summer" of his life, John Coetzee is learning to risk
failure in order to write books that will outlast "the nonsense" of
his time. He is also learning to risk failure in his relationships
with women. This story is prominently developed in the third interview
in the novel--an interview with Adriana, a Brazilian dance teacher
whom John pursues with the same doggedness with which he mixes and
pours the concrete around his house.
When Adriana and John meet, John is working as a tutor at a Catholic
girls' school in Cape Town. Adriana's daughter is one of his students.
Without much prompting from Mr. Vincent, Adriana launches into an
account of John's obsession with her. In a haze of infatuation, he
pursues her during the months when her husband is dying. After she
refuses to meet John alone, he sends her a series of letters, some of
which she doesn't even read. She goes so far as to tell him she
detests him. "He forced me to detest him," she explains to Mr.
Vincent. "He was a little man, an unimportant little man," she
declares. "Was he really a great writer?" she asks. But she can't
answer that question because she has never bothered to read his
books.
As harsh as this assessment is, it's consistent with sentiments
expressed by the other women in the book. To Julia Frankl, John is an
adequate lover who is using his writing as "self-administered
therapy." Margot, who knows John best, finds him odd. Sophie, a French
professor at the University of Cape Town and the last woman Mr.
Vincent interviews, describes John as a tortoise who would withdraw
into his shell when he sensed danger. Regarding his work, she says
that it "lacks ambition": "The control of the elements is too tight.
Nowhere do you get a feeling of a writer deforming his medium in order
to say what has never been said before, which is to me the mark of
great writing." But she, like the others, hasn't read all his books.
She claims to have lost interest.
There's a troubling uniformity to the responses of these women that is
expressed not just through their criticism of John's character but
through their dismissive attitude toward his whole career. While the
communication of their contempt might seem like brave, unsparing self-
assessment on the author's part, their judgments are based, at best,
on partial knowledge. They reveal that they haven't read all his work,
or haven't read it carefully. Two of them, Sophie and Julia, express
surprise or resentment that they hadn't appeared as characters in his
books.
By the time the interviews are being conducted, John has written all
the books he's going to write, among them Boyhood and Youth. He also
has left behind notes for a third memoir. Within his incomplete
autobiographical work, then, he presumably stands by his early theory
of woman-as-muse who ignites "the sacred fire" in the male artist.
Given Coetzee's generally cautious prose, this flimsy metaphor stands
out as deliberately garish. But for the fictional writer who is trying
to turn his artistic yearning into great literature, it remains a
convenient paradigm, and it's reinforced in Summertime by the
structure of the narrative. From one interview to the next, the women
are at the mercy of the biographer, who both asks the questions and
chooses how to arrange the answers. These women may earn our sympathy
with their accounts of their personal struggles, but their access to
the creative process is limited, at best. Only the one man
interviewed, Martin, hints at real engagement with John's literary
work. While using the same qualifiers to describe John's teaching that
Julia uses to describe his performance in bed (Martin calls John a
"perfectly adequate academic"), he worries that the form Mr. Vincent
has devised for his biography may privilege John's personal life "at
the expense of the man's actual achievements as a writer." In a sense
he's right; the form does privilege the personal life. It's only
appropriate, then, that four of the five people interviewed aren't
much interested in the writer's "actual achievements."
While there's obvious overlap, the circumstances of the novel do not
correspond completely with the biographical facts of J.M. Coetzee's
life. During the same years being investigated by Mr. Vincent, the
author was already married and had two children. The history of John's
love affairs and unrequited obsessions might share some aspects with
the actual life, or it might be a complete invention. At any rate, the
disclosures can't be the point, since most readers won't be able to
keep track of the differences between the lived life and the made-up
one. The uncertainties and discrepancies only underscore the premise
of the book: John Coetzee is an invention.
Summertime is presented as an imaginary portrait written by Mr.
Vincent, an impresario in his own right who takes liberties with the
facts. Yet since the fictional John Coetzee is cast as the author of
the books that the real Coetzee has written, it follows that his role
in Summertime is more complex than it initially appears. Perhaps John
isn't just the evasive subject being explored; he might well be the
implied author who has concocted the ruse of this "biography" in order
to observe this period of his life from a remove.
This accomplished writer is reluctant to reflect on the genesis of his
work. Yet over the course of the memoirs, he has been reflecting on
the genesis of his work. He has been explaining how he came to be a
writer. Rather, he has been writing about the impossibility of
explaining how he came to be a writer. As Martin observes, John is
reluctant "to probe the sources of his inspiration, as if being too
self-aware might cripple him." Thanks to the indifference of the women
Mr. Vincent interviews, he doesn't have to probe too deeply.
With all the paraphrases and interruptions and hasty judgments that
fill the interviews of Summertime, Coetzee seems to be leading his
readers farther from the subject he purportedly set out to explore.
Mr. Vincent is supposed to be investigating an important yet neglected
period in the life of a major writer. But what do we end up learning
about this writer? We learn that he is viewed with indifference,
contempt and puzzlement by the same women he'd hoped would inspire
him. He can't tell when they've had enough of him. They can't
recognize his genius.
Yet to the extent that Summertime is self-portraiture, it is permeated
with John's sensibility. Whether or not he is the implied author of
Mr. Vincent's biography, he shares the real author's name. Even if the
book isn't strictly autobiographical, it is by an author named J.M.
Coetzee and at least pretends to be about him. And this connection
raises the specter of motive: why would a writer choose to represent
himself in this fashion, through the unflattering comments of
shortsighted women?
By drawing attention to the choices the author has made, the novel
ends up moving closer to the subject that the character would rather
avoid: his evolution as a writer. He continues to cling to a
restrictive notion formulated in his youth; at the same time, he is
ready to expose the consequences of this position. While this
"biography" is presented as a fiction, the implications are harsh.
Since John can think of using women only for his writing, he fails
repeatedly to develop any satisfying intimacy with them.
I'm reminded of a question posed in another novel that explores a
writer's sources. In Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire, the narrator, who
supposedly is explaining how a poet comes to write his greatest poem,
is asked, "How can you know that all this intimate stuff about your
rather appalling king is true?" The narrator's grand answer is, "the
stuff will be true" once it's transmuted into poetry. It may be an
absurd claim, but as we read on, we find that it isn't entirely
mistaken. As with all artfully elaborate lies, the narrator's hoax
takes on a reality of its own, one that we can read as self-expression
even though it remains defiantly false.
In Summertime, Coetzee follows his fictional self through the early
years of adulthood. This character, we know, goes on to write more
books--books that through ingeniously slanted approaches delve deeper
into the workings of a writer's mind than we ever could have hoped to
go. One of this writer's later inventions, Elizabeth Costello, may
even disprove the claim that women lack what it takes to produce great
art; or perhaps, like Sappho and Brontë, she's one of the exceptions.
But if Coetzee's new novel reinforces a reductive formula for the
creative process, it is his revealing way of examining the effects of
problematic motivations. And it looks forward to the provocative books
that Coetzee will go on to write. He's only just begun to get at the
heart of his work. It's only summer, after all.
------ [!!!!]
For Vera Katz:
CHAPTER SIX
Citizen Versus Ideal City
1: CITY AND CITIZEN
By the end of the sixth century the Hellenic city had begun to take
form; but the form achieved was still rustic, often crude, and the
life it contained was more significant than the container. Until the
fourth century the proudest of Greek cities in Attica, if not in Asia
Minor, was little better than a country town both in street layout and
in buildings. Only when toward the end of the century one raised one's
eye to the Acropolis and beheld the columned peri-style and the
sculptured pediment of the new Parthenon could one believe that
something else waws happening here: mind was dawning once more on
chaos.
The picture of the actual Hellenic city, which comes to us with a
certain amplitude of literary evidence from Athens, contrasts with the
white splendor that J. J. Winckelmann and his successors tended to
read into the whole shene; for the Hellenophiles endowed the physical
town with a marmoreal chastity, a purity and rationality, that was
displayed perhaps in the mathematics of even the sacred quarters of
the ancient polis. Like the much admired Laocoön, these were third-
century virtues. The fifth century contrasts likewise with our own
residual picture of the Greek mind at this period if we over-emphasize
its inner order, its love of abstract perfectio, and forget all the
violent, irrational, tormented aspects of Greek life one finds in the
tragic dramatists
Or in the rude horseplay and farmyard smut one encounters in
Aristophanes. Lewis Mumford, *The City in History* [!!!!]
-------
*Recto verso modernitas*:
"Break-beat": École Normale Supérieure
"Dubstep": ENS
*The Nation* January 28, 2010
In his memoir Boyhood: Scenes from Provincial Life, published in the
United States in 1997, John Coetzee is a young boy living on a housing
estate outside the town of Worcester in South Africa. To his
impressionable mind the world is a cruel place where those in
authority take sadistic pleasure in the beatings they dole out. He
watches a teacher fly into a rage and whip a student who can't keep up
with his schoolwork. He watches a white man thrash a colored boy who
has tried to run away from his chores. John is appalled by the
brutality around him. Coming of age in provincial South Africa in the
1950s, he decides that childhood is "a time of gritting the teeth and
enduring." He grows ever more inward and solitary. His earliest memory
is of watching his mother release a scrap of paper out the window of a
bus. For years he thinks of the scrap of paper, "alone in all that
vastness." He dreams of the day when he will find the paper and rescue
it.
Summertime
by J.M. Coetzee
Buy this book
..In Youth, published in 2002, John Coetzee is a young man working as
a programmer at IBM in London. Though he has focused his university
studies on mathematics, his real love is literature. He discovers Ezra
Pound and T.S. Eliot and learns from them that "he must be prepared to
endure all that life has stored up for him, even if that means exile,
obscure labour, and obloquy." He follows Pound's recommendations for
reading. The more he reads, the more confident he is in his tastes. He
prefers Chaucer, who "keeps a nice ironic distance from his
authorities," to Shakespeare, who gets "into a froth about things." He
is suspicious of the "easy sentiment" in the Romantics and Victorians,
and he considers Joyce "too bound up with Ireland and Irish affairs."
He reads all of Ford Madox Ford--a writer known for mixing fiction and
autobiography--because Pound "promoted Ford as the sole heir in
England of Henry James and Flaubert."
He carries a book of poetry to read on the train, in hopes that an
"exceptional girl will appreciate what he is reading and recognize in
him an exceptional spirit too." He fantasizes about going to bed with
Emma Bovary. Women, John believes, will be his inspiration. "In a
perfect world he would sleep only with perfect women, women of perfect
femininity yet with a certain darkness at their core that will respond
to his own darker self." It turns out to be easy enough for him to
find women to sleep with, but "the perfect woman" eludes him. He grows
more isolated and at the same time more idealistic about the
importance of literary expression. He longs to write poetry and looks
for the right mistress who, "by means of an instinctive faculty," will
perceive the "sacred fire" burning in him. He's hopeful that sex,
along with those other two worthy subjects for a poet--madness and
suffering--will give him something to write about.
It's convenient for this aspiring writer that women, at least as he
understands them, do not have what it takes to be legitimate artists.
And because women "do not have the sacred fire" of artistic creativity
(he names Sappho and Emily Brontë as exceptions), they seek it in male
artists and "give themselves to them." During this period, when John
Coetzee is in his larval stage as a writer, he develops a rather
elaborate mystical system around this notion: "In their lovemaking
artists and their mistresses experience briefly, tantalizingly, the
life of gods. From such lovemaking the artist returns to his work
enriched and strengthened, the woman to her life transfigured." But at
least within the pages of Youth, John is never treated to this divine
inspiration. He ends on a note of despair, admitting that he is afraid
of women, writing and failure.
By the time we meet up with John Coetzee in Summertime, he is dead
(the main character is survived by the author, the real J.M. Coetzee).
But John has lived long enough to distinguish himself as a writer and
earn a place for himself as "public property." Summertime, which is
described on the cover as "fiction," is cast within its pages as "a
seriously intended biography" that concentrates, the biographer
explains, "on the years from Coetzee's return to South Africa in
1971/72 until his first public recognition in 1977...an important
period of his life, important yet neglected, a period when he was
still finding his feet as a writer."
The novel opens and closes with short fragments from John Coetzee's
notebooks, but the bulk of the narrative is organized around a set of
interviews conducted by the biographer, Mr. Vincent, with five people
who knew John during the years when he was back in South Africa after
doing graduate work in the United States. Unconvinced by conventional
methods of literary biography, Mr. Vincent prefers to construct a
portrait made up of a range of perspectives. Among the four women he
speaks with, two are John's former lovers, one is a woman who was
repulsed by his advances and one is his cousin. The only man Mr.
Vincent interviews is John's former colleague at the University of
Cape Town.
In this "important yet neglected" period of John Coetzee's life, he is
single and living with his widowed father in a mud-brick house with
walls "so rotten with damp creeping up from the earth that they have
begun to crumble." Hoping to insulate the foundation against further
dampness, he decides to put a belt of concrete around the periphery.
He orders the sand, the stone and the cement, and sets out to follow a
plan in a home improvement guide. He works without assistance--a
gesture that signals his refusal to participate in apartheid's
degrading economic system.
It's an emblematic effort not just because it reveals how even the
most basic action can bear political weight but also because it
involves a new confrontation with failure. At least when it comes to
mixing concrete, John Coetzee is inept. He confuses cubic meters with
square meters; a job that he expected would take a few days threatens
to last for many weeks. But instead of giving up, he persists with the
effort.
The young man who is afraid of failure at the end of Youth seems to be
a little less afraid in Summertime. He's more tenacious, more willing
to risk humiliation in order to finish what he's started. While he
blames himself for his "feeble" response to the moral dilemma posed by
the ruling regime of South Africa, he finds a new satisfaction in
independent labor. It's revealing that once he realizes he has made a
mistake in measuring the materials for the concrete, he applies
himself to the task with renewed energy. He tells himself that the
"slabs he is laying will outlast his tenancy of the house, may even
outlast his spell on earth." He sounds a similar note later, when, in
a conversation with a woman named Julia Frankl, one of his former
lovers, he describes a book as "a gesture of refusal in the face of
time. A bid for immortality." In his determination to produce
something lasting, John is much more willing to face up to a mistake
and get on with his work.
Compiled by Mr. Vincent, the excerpts from the notebooks and the five
interviews offer a fractured portrait of an "unemployed intellectual"
who is ambivalent about his emotional isolation. John is keen on
defending himself against the incursions of society and writes in his
notebook, "if you want to succeed in the world and have a happy family
and a nice home and a BMW you should not try to understand things." On
the other hand, he feels a responsibility to the world. Viewing
himself as an outsider, he is looking for ways to defy taboos.
While there's no description of him at his desk, we learn that he
publishes his first work of fiction, Dusklands, following his return
to South Africa. He is growing up, becoming the man who will one day
be described by his biographer as "a great writer." Yet he still has
more growing to do. One of his lovers from this period reports that
there was "an air of failure" about him. He remains undistinguished as
a lover ("he could perform the male part perfectly adequately," Julia
says). And he still thinks women are all the same, or at least he
gives the different women in his life this impression.
In the first interview, Julia Frankl recounts the details of her
affair with John in South Africa in the early '70s. Isolated in her
own marriage, she spots John shopping in a supermarket. "He was
scrawny," she tells Mr. Vincent. "He looked out of place, like a bird,
one of those flightless birds; or like an abstracted scientist who had
wandered by mistake out of his laboratory." She launches the affair
not because she's attracted to him (she says he "was not easy to take
to, his whole stance toward the world was too wary, too defensive")
but because she is stuck in a bad marriage and needs to prove her
seductive powers. In her most unsettling judgment of John, she
describes Dusklands as "self-administered therapy." With a little
prompting from Mr. Vincent, she expands: "He had decided he was going
to block cruel and violent impulses in every arena of his life--
including his love life, I might say--and channel them into his
writing."
The second woman Mr. Vincent interviews is John's cousin, Margot. Her
interview is recast into narrative form by Mr. Vincent, with Margot
referred to in the third person. (He defends his method by insisting
that "changing the form should have no effect on the content.") Margot
is more forgiving of her cousin than Julia was, describing him as "an
odd character." Of everyone interviewed by Mr. Vincent, she's the one
who gives voice to the ambition that John is too modest or skeptical
to express. She says to him, "You could change your fate tomorrow if
you would just put your mind to it." Most important, she articulates a
clear moral position in the face of apartheid. Reflecting on the
racial designations used to legislate the interactions of South
Africans, she prays, "Let the time come soon, O Lord... when all this
apartheid nonsense will be buried and forgotten."
One of the stories Coetzee tells in this book is about responses to
apartheid and the evolution of strategies of opposition. John has
moved from the position of silent witness in Boyhood to the struggle
to communicate his "rage and despair" in Summertime. It's a story that
has clear moral demarcations and yet, when explored through a series
of lived experiences, is full of entrapping ambiguities. Margot can do
no better than to describe apartheid as "nonsense." In his early years
after his return to South Africa, John can do no better than to shore
up the periphery of his crumbling home on his own. Profound injustice
is as difficult for them to understand as it is to overcome. As the
exhausted Magistrate says toward the end of Coetzee's novel Waiting
for the Barbarians, "I have lived through an eventful year, yet
understand no more of it than a babe in arms."
Through the "summer" of his life, John Coetzee is learning to risk
failure in order to write books that will outlast "the nonsense" of
his time. He is also learning to risk failure in his relationships
with women. This story is prominently developed in the third interview
in the novel--an interview with Adriana, a Brazilian dance teacher
whom John pursues with the same doggedness with which he mixes and
pours the concrete around his house.
When Adriana and John meet, John is working as a tutor at a Catholic
girls' school in Cape Town. Adriana's daughter is one of his students.
Without much prompting from Mr. Vincent, Adriana launches into an
account of John's obsession with her. In a haze of infatuation, he
pursues her during the months when her husband is dying. After she
refuses to meet John alone, he sends her a series of letters, some of
which she doesn't even read. She goes so far as to tell him she
detests him. "He forced me to detest him," she explains to Mr.
Vincent. "He was a little man, an unimportant little man," she
declares. "Was he really a great writer?" she asks. But she can't
answer that question because she has never bothered to read his
books.
As harsh as this assessment is, it's consistent with sentiments
expressed by the other women in the book. To Julia Frankl, John is an
adequate lover who is using his writing as "self-administered
therapy." Margot, who knows John best, finds him odd. Sophie, a French
professor at the University of Cape Town and the last woman Mr.
Vincent interviews, describes John as a tortoise who would withdraw
into his shell when he sensed danger. Regarding his work, she says
that it "lacks ambition": "The control of the elements is too tight.
Nowhere do you get a feeling of a writer deforming his medium in order
to say what has never been said before, which is to me the mark of
great writing." But she, like the others, hasn't read all his books.
She claims to have lost interest.
There's a troubling uniformity to the responses of these women that is
expressed not just through their criticism of John's character but
through their dismissive attitude toward his whole career. While the
communication of their contempt might seem like brave, unsparing self-
assessment on the author's part, their judgments are based, at best,
on partial knowledge. They reveal that they haven't read all his work,
or haven't read it carefully. Two of them, Sophie and Julia, express
surprise or resentment that they hadn't appeared as characters in his
books.
By the time the interviews are being conducted, John has written all
the books he's going to write, among them Boyhood and Youth. He also
has left behind notes for a third memoir. Within his incomplete
autobiographical work, then, he presumably stands by his early theory
of woman-as-muse who ignites "the sacred fire" in the male artist.
Given Coetzee's generally cautious prose, this flimsy metaphor stands
out as deliberately garish. But for the fictional writer who is trying
to turn his artistic yearning into great literature, it remains a
convenient paradigm, and it's reinforced in Summertime by the
structure of the narrative. From one interview to the next, the women
are at the mercy of the biographer, who both asks the questions and
chooses how to arrange the answers. These women may earn our sympathy
with their accounts of their personal struggles, but their access to
the creative process is limited, at best. Only the one man
interviewed, Martin, hints at real engagement with John's literary
work. While using the same qualifiers to describe John's teaching that
Julia uses to describe his performance in bed (Martin calls John a
"perfectly adequate academic"), he worries that the form Mr. Vincent
has devised for his biography may privilege John's personal life "at
the expense of the man's actual achievements as a writer." In a sense
he's right; the form does privilege the personal life. It's only
appropriate, then, that four of the five people interviewed aren't
much interested in the writer's "actual achievements."
While there's obvious overlap, the circumstances of the novel do not
correspond completely with the biographical facts of J.M. Coetzee's
life. During the same years being investigated by Mr. Vincent, the
author was already married and had two children. The history of John's
love affairs and unrequited obsessions might share some aspects with
the actual life, or it might be a complete invention. At any rate, the
disclosures can't be the point, since most readers won't be able to
keep track of the differences between the lived life and the made-up
one. The uncertainties and discrepancies only underscore the premise
of the book: John Coetzee is an invention.
Summertime is presented as an imaginary portrait written by Mr.
Vincent, an impresario in his own right who takes liberties with the
facts. Yet since the fictional John Coetzee is cast as the author of
the books that the real Coetzee has written, it follows that his role
in Summertime is more complex than it initially appears. Perhaps John
isn't just the evasive subject being explored; he might well be the
implied author who has concocted the ruse of this "biography" in order
to observe this period of his life from a remove.
This accomplished writer is reluctant to reflect on the genesis of his
work. Yet over the course of the memoirs, he has been reflecting on
the genesis of his work. He has been explaining how he came to be a
writer. Rather, he has been writing about the impossibility of
explaining how he came to be a writer. As Martin observes, John is
reluctant "to probe the sources of his inspiration, as if being too
self-aware might cripple him." Thanks to the indifference of the women
Mr. Vincent interviews, he doesn't have to probe too deeply.
With all the paraphrases and interruptions and hasty judgments that
fill the interviews of Summertime, Coetzee seems to be leading his
readers farther from the subject he purportedly set out to explore.
Mr. Vincent is supposed to be investigating an important yet neglected
period in the life of a major writer. But what do we end up learning
about this writer? We learn that he is viewed with indifference,
contempt and puzzlement by the same women he'd hoped would inspire
him. He can't tell when they've had enough of him. They can't
recognize his genius.
Yet to the extent that Summertime is self-portraiture, it is permeated
with John's sensibility. Whether or not he is the implied author of
Mr. Vincent's biography, he shares the real author's name. Even if the
book isn't strictly autobiographical, it is by an author named J.M.
Coetzee and at least pretends to be about him. And this connection
raises the specter of motive: why would a writer choose to represent
himself in this fashion, through the unflattering comments of
shortsighted women?
By drawing attention to the choices the author has made, the novel
ends up moving closer to the subject that the character would rather
avoid: his evolution as a writer. He continues to cling to a
restrictive notion formulated in his youth; at the same time, he is
ready to expose the consequences of this position. While this
"biography" is presented as a fiction, the implications are harsh.
Since John can think of using women only for his writing, he fails
repeatedly to develop any satisfying intimacy with them.
I'm reminded of a question posed in another novel that explores a
writer's sources. In Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire, the narrator, who
supposedly is explaining how a poet comes to write his greatest poem,
is asked, "How can you know that all this intimate stuff about your
rather appalling king is true?" The narrator's grand answer is, "the
stuff will be true" once it's transmuted into poetry. It may be an
absurd claim, but as we read on, we find that it isn't entirely
mistaken. As with all artfully elaborate lies, the narrator's hoax
takes on a reality of its own, one that we can read as self-expression
even though it remains defiantly false.
In Summertime, Coetzee follows his fictional self through the early
years of adulthood. This character, we know, goes on to write more
books--books that through ingeniously slanted approaches delve deeper
into the workings of a writer's mind than we ever could have hoped to
go. One of this writer's later inventions, Elizabeth Costello, may
even disprove the claim that women lack what it takes to produce great
art; or perhaps, like Sappho and Brontë, she's one of the exceptions.
But if Coetzee's new novel reinforces a reductive formula for the
creative process, it is his revealing way of examining the effects of
problematic motivations. And it looks forward to the provocative books
that Coetzee will go on to write. He's only just begun to get at the
heart of his work. It's only summer, after all.
------ [!!!!]
For Vera Katz:
CHAPTER SIX
Citizen Versus Ideal City
1: CITY AND CITIZEN
By the end of the sixth century the Hellenic city had begun to take
form; but the form achieved was still rustic, often crude, and the
life it contained was more significant than the container. Until the
fourth century the proudest of Greek cities in Attica, if not in Asia
Minor, was little better than a country town both in street layout and
in buildings. Only when toward the end of the century one raised one's
eye to the Acropolis and beheld the columned peri-style and the
sculptured pediment of the new Parthenon could one believe that
something else waws happening here: mind was dawning once more on
chaos.
The picture of the actual Hellenic city, which comes to us with a
certain amplitude of literary evidence from Athens, contrasts with the
white splendor that J. J. Winckelmann and his successors tended to
read into the whole shene; for the Hellenophiles endowed the physical
town with a marmoreal chastity, a purity and rationality, that was
displayed perhaps in the mathematics of even the sacred quarters of
the ancient polis. Like the much admired Laocoön, these were third-
century virtues. The fifth century contrasts likewise with our own
residual picture of the Greek mind at this period if we over-emphasize
its inner order, its love of abstract perfectio, and forget all the
violent, irrational, tormented aspects of Greek life one finds in the
tragic dramatists
Or in the rude horseplay and farmyard smut one encounters in
Aristophanes. Lewis Mumford, *The City in History* [!!!!]
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*Recto verso modernitas*:
"Break-beat": École Normale Supérieure
"Dubstep": ENS