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Life Writing

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Beyond the Death of the Author: Summertime andJ. M. Coetzee's Afterlives

Donald Powers

To cite this article: Donald Powers (2016) Beyond the Death of the Author: Summertime and J. M.Coetzee's Afterlives, Life Writing, 13:3, 323-334, DOI: 10.1080/14484528.2016.1089095

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14484528.2016.1089095

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Beyond the Death of the Author: Summertime andJ. M. Coetzee’s AfterlivesDonald Powers

Independent Scholar

ABSTRACTThis paper begins by exploring via Roland Barthes’s eponymousbook about himself the implications of the premise ofJ. M. Coetzee’s novel Summertime that the author John Coetzee isdead. I show how Summertime’s fragmented structure and echoesfrom Coetzee’s earlier novels undermine the idea of a coherentauthorial subject, and how emigration and acts of translation inthe novel are central to how Coetzee’s personality, life, and workare interpreted. The paper goes on to examine the influence ofNabokov’s work on Coetzee’s later fictions, with an emphasis onthe interplay between Nabokov’s actual and fictionalised struggleswith his biographers. The paper concludes by arguing thatJ. C. Kannemeyer’s biography of Coetzee, notwithstanding itsclaims to objective detachment, cannot but be read as a textscripted in the spirit of Coetzee’s novel.

KEYWORDSDeath of the author;autobiography; biography;emigration

The autobiographical turn in Summertime (2009) is far from Coetzee’s simple backwardlook over episodes from a period in his life, a straightforward art of memory of the kindpractised, for example, by Nabokov in Speak, Memory (1951). Rather, it consists of a deflec-tion or deferral of point of view to characters whose accounts of John Coetzee’s part in theirlives are coloured and complicated by the circumstances in which they came to know him.The complex structure of this book produces disjunctive angles of vision. This is evident asmuch in the third person narrative mode of John’s notebook entries, which attests to hisdesire to distance himself from his place and time, as in the range of the interviewees’points of view, who, bar Margot, reflect on their contact with John in South Africa in the1970s from a distance in time and space as emigrants themselves.

I begin this paper by examining the implications of the premise of Summertime that theauthor John Coetzee is dead. By way of Roland Barthes’s book about himself, RolandBarthes (1975), I argue that in Summertime John emerges less as a discrete characterthan a text constituted and interpreted by others, ranging through the interviewees tothe biographer Mr Vincent. Extending this line of argument, I trace the textualisationof the author at a different level by noting how the autotextual traces in Summertimesupport the idea that the writer’s identity is constituted equally by his work, a consider-ation that highlights the problem with Vincent’s aim of producing a biography ofCoetzee that focuses on the man to the exclusion of his work. I go on to explore issues

© 2015 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group

CONTACT Donald Powers donaldpowers1@gmail.com

LIFE WRITING, 2016VOL. 13, NO. 3, 323–334http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14484528.2016.1089095

relating to emigration and translation, before using the example of Nabokov’s later auto-biographical fictions and his actual struggles with his first biographer as a basis to speakabout J. C. Kannemeyer’s 2012 biography of Coetzee.

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For a novelist as consistently formally inventive as J. M. Coetzee, who in his later fictiondevelops fresh ways of refracting aspects of his self and life into narrative, premising abook on the fact that he is no longer alive seems a radical gesture, but is in a sense redundant.It is redundant because Summertime is no less about ‘this person, this subject,my subject’, asCoetzee refers to himself in the ‘Retrospect’ of Doubling the Point (394), than Boyhood(1997), Youth (2002), or Diary of a Bad Year (2007). The difference is that in SummertimeJohn is less a discrete character than an embodied memory, a composite textual figureshuffled together from John’s entries in his notebooks and the remarks of thefive individualsinterviewed by the biographer Mr Vincent. Casting ‘John Coetzee’ as deceased in Summer-timeCoetzee repeats Barthes’s argument in ‘The Death of the Author’ that where interpret-ation of a literary text is concerned the author is not a supervisory limit to it but an absenceand a silence, always already dead insofar as it is the reader who inherits the text to settle itsmeaning.

In Coetzee’s later fictions the voice and views of the authorial figures are destabilisedeither by the narrator or other characters. In Elizabeth Costello (2003) and Diary of aBad Year this process pivots on Costello’s and JC’s public utterances and highlights theseam between the writer’s life and work, the question of to what extent each accommo-dates and interpenetrates the other. This question is at the heart of Barthes’s own bookabout himself, Roland Barthes, in which he offers insights into his life and work bydrawing about himself, or the idea of himself, a ‘circle of fragments’ (92). In these frag-ments Barthes oscillates between referring to himself as ‘he’ and ‘I’. A book of fragments,then, or a book of oscillations in which Barthes alternates between description and analysisof an idea or some aspect of his personality and work. The effect is of Barthes coming to orat himself aslant in the process of writing about his body and the writing that that body hasproduced. For Barthes, the word ‘aslant’, which titles one of the fragments, summarises themanner of his writing, the significance of which lies ‘in the margins, the interpolations, theparentheses’ (73). In the preface to his biography of Barthes, Louis-Jean Calvet quotes twoof Barthes’s remarks on the genre of biography: that biography is ‘the history of a body andwhat it has produced’ and that every ‘biography is a novel that dares not admit it’ (xiii;Barthes’s italics). The book Roland Barthes is thus not so much about Barthes himself(there is scant anecdotal material) as about the process of self-writing and the problemsthat bedevil it: narcissism, the confessional impulse, sincerity, the hubris of assessingoneself with finality. In the preface to his Critical Essays (1972) Barthes offers a temperedparaphrase of the notion of the author’s demise: ‘Writing must go hand in hand withsilence’ he writes,

to write is in a sense to become ‘still as death,’ to become someone to whom the last word isdenied; to write is to offer others, from the start, that last word. For the meaning of a work (orof a text) cannot be created by the work alone; the author never produces anything but pre-sumptions of meaning, forms, and it is the world which fills them. (xi)

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The sentence in Barthes’s handwriting that serves as the epigraph to Roland Barthesregisters the same point in a way that returns us to the case of Coetzee’s later fictions:‘It must all be considered as if spoken by a character in a novel’ (1). Both Barthes andCoetzee recognise this point in their respective attempts to grapple with the limitationsand deceptions of self-writing, taking themselves and their work as points of reference.Sceptical of the teleological pretensions of biography, Barthes favoured what he calledthe ‘biographeme’, the fragment or shard of a glancing insight into the personality orwork. As Calvet points out, this preference for the biographeme, ‘the short note, thebrief sketch’ (189), is continuous with Barthes’s practice of writing by means of indexcards—a compositional method also used by Nabokov. The fragmentary quality of thenarrative in Summertime attests to Coetzee’s similar resistance to the idea of biographyand autobiography as forms of a settled and seamless history of the individual. Instead,in Summertime, dead or ‘dead’, the authorial self remains in motion with the interpret-ation of his writing by others.

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The matte photograph reproduced on the rear dustcover of the Harvill Secker edition ofSummertime (London, 2009) shows an adult man with dark wavy hair, a dark beard andmoustache, the left half of his face in shadow. The shadow gives a brooding air to thisphotograph of J. M. Coetzee, which previously appeared on the dustcover of the 1983Penguin edition of Life & Times of Michael K. The half-obscured face in this photographcan be taken as a visual warning that the versions of Coetzee that surface in Summertimeare partial and questionable. The versions of John that emerge from the interviewees’accounts raise the question of what is involved in writing the biography of a writer likeCoetzee, so many of whose novels focus on the folds between a writer’s intimate privateexperience and the stories he or she writes, the tension between the inner repertoire ofself-images and the public persona.

Summertime consists of a selection of materials towards a biography of John Coetzeethat an English academic is in the process of preparing. The book begins and ends withfragments drawn from John’s notebooks in the 1970s. From Vincent we learn that thebrief notes at the foot of each notebook fragment were added by Coetzee in 1999 or2000 when he was working on a book he intended as a further instalment in the seriesof autobiographical fictions so far constituted by Boyhood and Youth. Lodged betweenthe two sets of notebook fragments, the body of Summertime consists of transcripts offive interviews conducted by Vincent between September 2007 and June 2008 with indi-viduals whose lives intersected John’s in the 1970s. Youth narrates scenes from John’s lifein the period leading up to and following his flight to England in 1960; Summertime jux-taposes images of John from a similar threshold period of his life, marked out by his returnto South Africa from the United States in 1971 and his first public recognition as a writerin 1977.

In the earlier novel John’s sense of cultural unsettlement or dislocation is limited to hisfeeling that he does not fully belong among his kinfolk in South Africa nor in the literarymetropolis of London; in the later novel ‘unsettled’ takes on a new meaning as John comesmore clearly into view as a textualised figure subject to interpretation. At one level, foca-lised in the third person by the interviewees and in his own notebooks, John emerges as a

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man who has returned to South Africa against his will to resume an uneasy residence inthe country of his birth; in the eyes of his extended family he is a failed emigrant. But atanother level, because he is dead, the acclaimed author John Coetzee is the unsettled quan-tity in Summertime, the story of his life an unfinalised account, variously narrated and nar-ratable by others, including himself. Thus Summertime is as much about the textualisedfigure John Coetzee as it is a critique of the assumptions and procedures of conventionalbiography and autobiography.

In a typical memoir the narrator is presumed to be continuous with the author in recol-lecting personal experiences from his or her life. Summertime is emphatically not amemoir in this tradition. In the one place in the book where one would expect to findJohn’s disclosures about himself in the first person—the notebooks—‘John’ representshimself as ‘he’. John’s notebooks emerge as a space where his personal experiencebecomes readable as if it were another’s. By rendering his thoughts and experiences inthe notebooks in the third person and present tense, John allays the discomfort of hisembeddedness in South Africa by separating out the historical self who is undergoingthe history and the authorial self who reflects upon it in writing, as if he were assumingthe point of view of a stranger in narrating that experience.

In Boyhood and Youth, Coetzee avoids the first person mode of narration in favour ofthe third person and the present tense, which positions John in the contingent midst of hishistory rather than at a reflective distance from it. In a 2002 interview Coetzee agrees withDavid Attwell’s claim that ‘all autobiography is autre-biography’ to the extent that therewill always be a discontinuity between one’s historical self and the remembered self oneprojects in writing (‘All Autobiography’ 216). In Summertime, the self-estrangementevident in the manner in which John represents his thoughts and experiences in his note-books finds a logical extension in Vincent’s interviewees talking about John from the pointof view of their own experience—that is, with the perspective of actual intersubjective dis-tance from him.

In the interviewees’ accounts John is the topic, not strictly the subject: this role isreserved for the person recollecting the ways in which John figured in his or her life.For Julia this is an important point as it forces the biographer to qualify the insightsshe offers into John. She insists that in the story she tells she is the protagonist andJohn a minor character, and hence that ‘a quick manipulation of perspective’ by the bio-grapher who seeks to turn her story into a vignette about her role in John’s life, would be a‘grave error’ (Summertime 44). ‘John Coetzee’ is squarely the subject of Vincent’s biogra-phy, but Vincent’s project is in turn an occasion for Coetzee to police his literary legacy byquestioning the assumptions underpinning the idea of a Life of the Writer and fore-grounding some of the difficulties Coetzee would expect his own biographers to addressin composing his Life.

The consistencies among the five interviewees’ recollections of John sit within a com-partmentalised narrative structure that stresses the multiplicity of perspectives on him.Vincent’s priority is not to present a definitive interpretation of Coetzee and his work,but to tell the story of a period of his life from the point of view of several individualswho knew him at the time (Coetzee Summertime 217). It strikes John’s former academiccolleague Martin as strange that Vincent should be constructing a biography out of indi-viduals’ recollections and opinions of John, while ‘ignoring his writing’ (216). This obser-vation is one of many scattered through the interviews that put in question the method,

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aims, and ethics of the project of biography in general and the biography of a writer inparticular. These observations are especially significant given that they concern a writerwhose fictions consistently raise the question of what of the writer’s life goes into thewriting.

Thus, in the economy of Summertime ‘John Coetzee’ emerges less as an autonomouscharacter than a textual field, a palimpsest. In the interviewees’ accounts, John circulatesas an energy of character; in the notebooks he is the written and the writing subject; themore prominent author-figure in Summertime is the biographer Vincent, whose method,it becomes clear from his second interview with Margot, involves more than simply editingthe interview material and notebook extracts, but weaving them into a coherent narrativeabout John. There is an element of vertiginous self-reflexivity in John’s third person note-book entries in the 1970s being accompanied with endnotes by John in 1999/2000 towardsa nominally uncompleted autobiographical book that effectively surfaces as Summertime.Self-reflexivity is a distinctive feature of Coetzee’s early novels: Joshua Billings suggeststhat ‘deferred self-reflexivity’ characterises Coetzee’s late style. Billings writes that Coet-zee’s later novels

hesitate on the brink of narrative, unwilling—or unable—to cohere.… The problem is notthat he cannot speak coherently, but that he can, and all too well; his authorial power hasbecome too strong, shaping the world around him into a reflection of himself. (Billings)

Conscious of the gravity that has accrued to his name and work, in his later fictionsCoetzee undercuts the trustworthiness of the characters whose experiences and opinionstempt alignment with his own. In Summertime he achieves the effect of ‘deferred self-reflexivity’ by dividing the narration of scenes from his life among different charactersand by blurring the distinction between the human individual John and the textual field‘Coetzee’.

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The impressions of John that emerge from the interviews are focalised by the outlook andpersonal history of each interviewee and the priorities of the biographer Vincent, whoposes the questions that direct the shape and emphasis of the interviewees’ responses.At a deeper level, John’s life is further refracted by the traces of scenes and charactersfrom Coetzee’s other novels that are embedded in the names of characters in Summertimeand in the interviewees’ narratives.

The more obvious traces are evident in the characters’ names. Martin turns out to havethe same initials as Margot Jonker’s, which are Coetzee’s reversed: M. J. The name ‘Martin’is recycled from Dusklands (1974), where it is given to Eugene Dawn’s son. Margot’s sisterCarol, glad emigrant to America, lives in a town in Florida called St Petersburg—an echoof the title of Coetzee’s 1994 novel. Events in Summertime that echo moments in Coetzee’sother novels include the following: Julia Frankl’s husband Mark absconds with their child—an act that recalls Dawn’s abduction of his son Martin in the first part of Dusklands;John and Margot’s return to Voëlfontein following their misadventure in a donkey-cartdriven by Hendrik recalls Magda’s narration of two scenes in In the Heart of theCountry (1977) involving the arrival at the farm of first her father and later Hendrik,each with his new wife; the scene Margot imagines of John sitting on the stoep of his

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Merweville house composing poems on his banjo recalls David Lurie doing the same inDisgrace (1999). But what is the effect of these resonances?

In his 1979 review of Deirdre Bair’s Samuel Beckett: A Biography (1978), Coetzee faultsBair’s book for its ‘reductive psychologizing’ (‘Review’ 87), which in Coetzee’s view arisesfrom Bair’s failure to demonstrate the interfolding between Beckett’s work and life.Coetzee poses a question that can be seen to underpin his own forays in autobiographicalfiction:

By what evasions, what achievements, and above all what paradoxical motions does theheroic opus emerge from the unheroic life? Until he has explored this question to itsdepths, Beckett’s biographer has produced only the life of a man who wrote books, notthe life of the books and the man in each other. (‘Review’ 87)

Attridge has noted how Coetzee’s unflattering self-portrait in Youth is in this respectindebted to Tolstoy’s book of the same title (Attridge 156; fn. 21). But whereas inYouth John is focalised through the critical eye of the narrator whose perspective isimplicitly continuous with that of the mature Coetzee, in Summertime John has the shift-ing status of a person and a text; furthermore, the perspectives offered on him come frommultiple points of view and reveal just as much about John as about those who recall him.

In his 1974 essay on Nabokov’s Pale Fire (1962), Coetzee provides a deft synopsis of the‘planes of reality’ (1) of Nabokov’s novel and the ways they interrelate. He notes thatNabokov’s novel does not ‘escape history’ but pre-empts it by incorporating within itsstructure two stages of its own interpretation. In Coetzee’s reading, Pale Fire anticipatesthe ‘endless exegesis of the meta-myth we call history’ (7). But whereas in the case ofNabokov’s novel the interfolding of the character Charles Kinbote’s life with his workon the poem ‘Pale Fire’ takes place within the pages of a single novel, Pale Fire, in Sum-mertime the interfolding involves the wider field of Coetzee’s fictions. This interfoldinggives an eerie precedence to those of Coetzee’s novels echoed in Summertime, as if thefacts of John’s life, as it is reconstructed in Summertime, lie interred there. From onepoint of view, the episodes from John’s life in the 1970s recalled by the intervieweeshave the status of the germinating experience which John will transmute into scenes inthe novels he will later come to write. From another point of view, these ‘seminal’scenes stitch the interviewees’ narratives about John back into the larger corpus of Coet-zee’s fictions, compelling an interpretation of (the character) John’s life in terms of (theauthor) Coetzee’s fictions. In this way, Summertime foregrounds the interpenetratingrelationship between John’s life and Coetzee’s fictional work, highlighting problems inMr Vincent’s approach of focusing on the man alone.

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I have so far demonstrated that what emerges of John’s personality in Summertime isunderwritten by his status as a text to be written and overwritten by others. Althoughthese others—the interviewees and Mr Vincent—primarily seek to interpret the manJohn Coetzee, their scattered locations and the role of translation in the novel reinforcea fact about reading the work of a writer like Coetzee today, namely that his work andthe name ‘Coetzee’ as shorthand for the work have a transnational life. The intervieweesexpand amply on John’s uneasy relationship to South African politics and society, but it

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becomes clear that each interviewee’s relationship to South Africa, measured in emotionand space, colours the perspectives they offer on John. Of the five individuals Vincentinterviews, Margot Jonker is the only one who still lives in South Africa. At the time oftheir interviews, the other four interview subjects live much further afield: Julia in King-ston, Ontario; Adriana in Săo Paulo, Brazil; Martin in Sheffield, England; Sophie in Paris.In the case of these four characters, the retrospective quality of their accounts is reinforcedby the fact of their distance in space from the sites of the scenes they recall.

The other interviewees’ accounts contain nothing like the strength of negative feelingevident in Adriana’s. Set between the interviews with Martin and Margot, both bornwhite South Africans, Adriana stands out as someone whose perspective on John reflectsher antipathy towards South Africa, a feeling borne out of her experience of losing herhusband to crime and out of her powerlessness there as a foreigner. The only maleamong the interviewees, Martin’s account of John is characterised by reserve, which con-trasts with the impassioned quality of Adriana’s. Whereas Adriana suspects that Vincentmay be using the biography as a pretext for taking liberties in asking her certain questionsabout her private life (Summertime 170), Martin is sceptical of many of the assumptionsunderpinning Vincent’s project. Where Margot conveys the intimacy and strength of herown and John’s feeling for the Karoo landscape, Martin’s remarks on John’s attitudetowards South Africa reveal a longer historical view. ‘Provisionality’ is the word Martinuses to describe the way he and John negotiated their feelings of attachment towardSouth Africa. As with the other interviewees, bar Margot, Martin’s subsequent emigrationfrom South Africa is a key detail that underwrites his account, here giving weight to theviews he expresses about lacking a place to comfortably call his native home.

The title Summertime is ironic when read in the light of John’s notebook extracts, wherea tone of dejection, punctuated with moments of chagrin, predominates. It is ironic to theextent that John’s bleak, gloomy tone is at odds with the notion of him enjoying in histhirties the ‘summertime’ of his adult life. However, the title loses its irony when it isread with reference to Margot’s recollection, narrativised by Vincent, of a particularvisit by herself and John to the family farm Voëlfontein during the 1970s and their con-versation about their auratic childhood experiences there. The book’s title can thus be readat once at an ironic tangent to John’s adult reserve about his attachment to South Africaand, more directly, to the deeply felt pleasure of his December experiences on the farm as achild. The subtitle ‘Scenes from Provincial Life’ sets Summertime in sequence withBoyhood and Youth and implies a distance from South Africa that is as much theauthor Coetzee’s, who in 2002 emigrated to Australia, as it is his international readership’s.

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Despite Coetzee’s assertions to the contrary in Doubling the Point (28), Nabokov’s influ-ence remains pervasive in Coetzee’s later fiction. For one thing, emigration has markedboth writers’ careers. Nabokov’s emigration from Russia to America in 1940 marked adecisive moment in his literary career, for it was in this period that he switched fromwriting his novels in Russian to writing them in English.1 At the level of literary formand substance, there is a direct echo of Nabokov in the title of the book in which JC’sopinions in Diary of a Bad Year are due to be published in Germany—Strong Opinions—which is the title of a collection of interviews with Nabokov and a selection of his

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occasional pieces. The thematic emphasis on literary biography in and the autotextualityof Coetzee’s later fiction finds a particularly strong precursor in Nabokov’s The Real Life ofSebastian Knight (1945), Pale Fire, and Look at the Harlequins! (1974). The Real Life ofSebastian Knight recounts the efforts of a first person narrator, V., to write a juster biogra-phy of his half-brother, Sebastian Knight, than the existing standard account. By the end ofthe novel V. finds he has identified so closely with his subject that he cannot extricate hisown personality from Sebastian Knight’s. Pale Fire, as I mentioned earlier in this paper, is anotable precursor text to Summertime (and Coetzee’s first novel Dusklands) in its drama-tisation of the interpenetrating relationship between the writer’s life and work. Nabokov’sart of parodic self-quotation is most pronounced in Look at the Harlequins!, his last com-pleted novel, which the narrator describes as an ‘oblique autobiography—oblique, becausedealing mainly not with pedestrian history but with the mirages of romantic and literarymatters’ (Look 85). The key word here is ‘mirages’. Through the comically clumsy, con-fused, and delusional narrator Vadim (Boyd 628), Nabokov unsubtly inverts andgarbles the story of his life to produce a book that stands in gross counterpoint to his sty-lishly controlled ‘straight’ autobiography, Speak, Memory.

Nabokov’s most thorough biographer Brian Boyd has detailed how Nabokov wroteLook at the Harlequins! in the grip of acute frustration with the arrogant stubbornnessof his first biographer Andrew Field. Having initially promised Nabokov the last wordon all the factual inaccuracies in his manuscript, Field increasingly came to feel in thewriting of his biography that Nabokov was restricting his ‘artistic independence, hisfreedom to record the facts in his own special way’ (Boyd 612). In a perverse effort toassert his independence from Nabokov’s authority, Field ‘welcomed any piece of evidence,no matter how flimsy or easily invalidated, that came from someone other than Nabokov,especially if Nabokov actually opposed it’ (Boyd 612). In this rebellious spirit, Fieldenacted literally and to an almost parodic degree Barthes’s call for an adversarial criticismdismissive of the writer’s utterances. Nabokov anticipated this wilful defiance in his char-acter Charles Kinbote, the delusional critic cum counter-poet cum exiled King of Zembla,who writes in the Foreword to John Shade’s poem ‘Pale Fire’, ‘To this statement my dearpoet would probably not have subscribed, but for better or worse it is the commentatorwho has the last word’ (25). It was a painful irony for Nabokov that in real life, ratherthan break off cooperation with Field, he went through with the demeaning labour of cor-recting the innumerable errors in Field’s biography with no guarantee that Field wouldaccept his corrections as final. Two quotes could sum up this affair: the first, Nabokovto his publisher: ‘It was not worth living a far from negligible life… only to have a blun-dering ass reinvent it’ (Boyd 616); the second, the critic Clarence Brown’s assessment ofField’s finished product, Nabokov: A Life in Part (1977): ‘Not only a vast compendiumof error but so nauseatingly mannered and self-important as to have a kind of morbidappeal only for those fascinated by literary and scholarly pathology’ (qtd. in Boyd 619).

In Summertime, more interesting than patent inaccuracies of fact about Coetzee’s life arethe inaccuracies of perspective introduced by the biographer’s method. Vincent relies on acolleague to translate the Afrikaans words in Margot’s account into English and uses a pro-fessional translator of Brazilian Portuguese, ‘Senhora Gross’ (irony in the name?), to assisthim in his interview with Adriana. His relative youthfulness is suggested by Julia Frankl’sremark that he is ‘too young’ tounderstandhow inher day one did not hesitate to give a stran-ger a lift in one’s car (22). I have already noted a handful of instances where an interviewee

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takes a sceptical view of Vincent’s method or assumptions, but the most striking insight intoVincent’s procedure comes when he tries to downplay his authorial intervention in turningMargot’s interview remarks into fluent narrative. ‘I have not rewritten it’, Vincent assuresMargot, referring to the written version of their interview, ‘I have simply recast it as narrative.Changing the form should have no effect on the content’ (91).Margot’s discomfort withVin-cent’s narrativised account of their interview conversation derives chiefly fromhis decision tonarrate the account in the third person, replacingMargot’s ‘I’with ‘she’. ‘The she I use is like Ibut is not I’ (91), explains Vincent.

In conversation with Attwell, Coetzee agrees that ‘all autobiography is autre-biography’,and he follows this up by saying that to ‘rewrite Boyhood or Youth with I substituted forhe throughout would leave you with two books only remotely related to their originals’(‘All Autobiography’ 216). Carrol Clarkson picks up on this point and tests it with a carefullychosen passage from each novel. Drawing on Jacobson’s and Benveniste’s insights into therole of deictics in setting up relationships in space, time, and subjectivity in discourse, Clark-son demonstrates how in both extracts Coetzee’s unusual combination of the third person‘he’ and the present tense establishes ‘two different time frames’ and a subtle distancebetween the narrated and narrating consciousnesses, ‘without the intervention of retrospec-tive adult commentary’ (J.M. Coetzee 24–8). In the case ofMargot’s account in Summertime,the effect is somewhat different. The third person narration of her account elides the framingremarks of the interview situation and dispossesses Margot’s voice of narratorial authority.Rather than emphasising her status as a surviving custodian of memories that she verbalisesat Vincent’s prompting, Vincent’s choice of third person narration relegates her to the role ofa supporting character spurring John’s conversation in a past time frame.

Contrary to Vincent’s claim, his modification of first to third person certainly does havea significant effect on the way Margot’s account is interpreted. It is possible to argue thatthe flat simplicity of Vincent’s comment that ‘[c]hanging the form should have no effecton the content’ is due less to his intellectual naivety than his desire to put to rest Margot’sconcerns about his trustworthiness as a biographer. Nevertheless it strikes a dissonant noteboth in the context of the other acts of language translation involved in Vincent’s projectand in the broader context of Coetzee’s literary criticism, which is marked by Coetzee’sscrupulous attention to the linguistic aspect of narrative, particularly in the act of translat-ing between languages. Coetzee ends his essay on Achterberg’s sonnet sequence ‘Balladevan de Gasfitter’ with the observation that ‘all reading is translation, just as all translationis criticism’ (Coetzee 1992: 90). This statement informs many of the essays in whichCoetzee writes about the challenges of translating between languages. In ‘Roads to Trans-lation’ (2005), in which he reflects on the translations to which his own novels have beensubjected, Coetzee distinguishes between, on the one hand, a reader’s idea of what a par-ticular word or phrase in one of his books means or refers to, and, on the other, what he asthe author intended the same word or phrase to signify or evoke (144). While the author‘cannot control the associations [his words] awaken’ in the reader, the translator in con-trast effectively interprets the source material in selecting viable alternative formulations inthe target language (144). For Coetzee, reading is a form of translation to the extent that itinvolves interpreting isolated moments in the narrative and local features of language andsyntax in the light of an overall evaluation of the work’s meaning.

Similarly, the interviewees’ recollections of John situate him firmly in the context oftheir individual histories and in the midst of their personal passions and prejudices.

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That four of the five interviewees recall John’s part in their life with the perspective of dis-tance from the sites of those scenes, foregrounds South Africa as the crucible of John’s for-mation even as it reminds one how his emigrations have structured his relationship to thecountry of his birth. The four interviewees’ distance from South Africa also reminds onehow Coetzee’s work necessarily finds multiple, foreign contexts of reception.2

6

In closing I will relate these points about translation to J. C. Kannemeyer’s biography J. M.Coetzee: A Life in Writing (2012). In her review of this biography, Clarkson highlightssome of the ways in which Kannemeyer’s fact-based account in Afrikaans of Coetzee’s lifeand career opens up new perspectives on Coetzee’s work. She notes how a certain dryhumour in Kannemeyer’s staid, formal prose style is not carried across in Michiel Heyns’sEnglish translation, along with other striking moments of incommensurable exchangefrom Afrikaans to English. Aside from the divergent cultural histories and worldviewsengrained in the vocabulary and syntax of these two languages, Clarkson recalls Coetzee’sinterest in the materiality of words on the page: in his essay on literary influence,‘Homage’ (1993), Coetzee speaks about how no translation of Rilke can convey the ‘brutepresence’ of the words in the German original (Clarkson 267). Clarkson goes on to makethe point that in their material aspect and in their field of connotation, it ‘is not only thepoet’s words, but the novelist’s, and even the biographer’s that are irreplaceable too, andthere are countless words and phrases in Kannemeyer’s biography that animate a translin-gual, transcultural dialogue, a repartee, even, that is entirely lost in the English version’ (268).

Clarkson’s point reminds one how for all Kannemeyer’s stated intentions to produce a‘report’ (Kannemeyer 14) on Coetzee’s life, a methodical and meticulous study consciousof its limitations and the relativity of its perspective, one that does not presume to offerpsychological insight into Coetzee or try to match Coetzee’s self-reflexive manoeuvresin his fiction, it is precisely the ‘modesty and reticence’ (Kannemeyer 14) of Kannemeyer’sstyle that calls for a close reading. Throughout the biography Kannemeyer’s tone isrespectful and self-effacing to the point of reverence; his voice is constantly subordinatedto Coetzee’s—in striking contrast to the struggle for the last word Nabokov suffered withhis first biographer. The Editor’s Note at the end of Kannemeyer’s biography that recordsKannemeyer’s death in 2011 from one point of view strikes one as apt closure to a studythat constitutes the capstone of this biographer’s career. At the same time, it is a fate thatcannot but seem scripted in the spirit of Summertime: not exactly as an inversion of Coet-zee’s novel’s plot—that it is the biographer rather than the novelist who is dead; nor merelythat the plot of the writer’s life alters with the unique perspective of each interpreter; butalso that, whether its tone is humble or hubristic, in attempting to plot a writer’s life a bio-graphy is, as Barthes said, ‘a novel that dares not admit it’ (‘The Death’ 1).

Notes

1. In 1935 and 1937 Nabokov translated two of his novels into English—respectively, Otchaianie(Despair) and Kamera obscura (Laughter in the Dark). In December 1938 through January 1939he composed his first novel in English, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (Connolly 10; fn. 3).

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2. Justin Neuman has also remarked on this feature of Summertime and its recurrence in Coetzee’sother fictions:

The book’s insistent geographic mobility reminds us of the myriad routes and modes ofinterconnection and displacement that constitute Coetzee’s global world, which overlapsand diverges from those of his increasingly international readership… Summertimereminds us of the persistence with which Coetzee has been drawn to the effects of displa-cement and homelessness in his novels. (Neuman 32)

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Donald Powers is an independent scholar. In 2012–13 he was a Humanities Postdoctoral ResearchFellow at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. His other publications include papers on J.M.Coetzee and Cormac McCarthy in Safundi and Journal of Postcolonial Writing.

References

Attridge, Derek. J. M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading: Literature in the Event. Scottsville: U ofKwaZulu-Natal P, 2005.

Barthes, Roland. Critical Essays. Trans. Richard Howard. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1972.Barthes, Roland. Roland Barthes. Trans. Richard Howard. London: Macmillan, 1975.Barthes, Roland. “The Death of the Author.” Image-Music-Text. Trans. Stephen Heath. New York:

Hill, 1977. 142–48.Billings, Joshua. “Puppet and Puppet-Master.” Review of Summertime. The Oxonian Review 10.2

(2009). 31 May 2010 <http://www.oxonianreview.org/wp/puppet-and-puppet-master>.Boyd, Brian. Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1991.Calvet, Louis-Jean. Roland Barthes: A Biography. Trans. Sarah Wykes. Bloomington: Indiana UP,

1995.Clarkson, Carrol. J. M. Coetzee: Countervoices. London: Palgrave, 2009.Clarkson, Carrol. “Review of J. M. Coetzee: ‘n Geskryfde Lewe/J. M. Coetzee: A Life in Writing.” Life

Writing 11.2 (2014): 263–70.Coetzee, J. M. “All Autobiography is Autre-biography.” Interview by David Attwell. Selves in

Question: Interviews on Southern African Auto/biography. Ed. Judith Lütge Coullie et al.Honolulu: U of Hawai’i P, 2006. 213–18.

Coetzee, J. M. Boyhood: Scenes from Provincial Life. London: Vintage, 1998.Coetzee, J. M. Diary of a Bad Year. London: Harvill, 2007.Coetzee, J. M. Disgrace. London: Vintage, 2000.Coetzee, J. M. Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews. Ed. David Attwell. Cambridge, MA:

Harvard UP, 1992.Coetzee, J. M. Dusklands. London: Vintage, 2004.Coetzee, J. M. Elizabeth Costello: Eight Lessons. London: Vintage, 2004.Coetzee, J. M. In the Heart of the Country. London: Vintage, 2004.Coetzee, J. M. “Nabokov’s Pale Fire and the Primacy of Art.” UCT Studies in English 5 (1974): 1–7.Coetzee, J. M. “Review of Samuel Beckett: A Biography, by Deirdre Bair.” UCT Studies in English

9 (1979): 86–89.Coetzee, J. M. “Roads to Translation.” Spec. issue of Meanjin 64.4 (2005): 141–51.Coetzee, J. M. Summertime: Scenes from Provincial Life. London: Harvill, 2009.Coetzee, J. M. Youth. London: Vintage, 2003.

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Connolly, Julian W. “Introduction: Nabokov at 100.” Nabokov and His Fiction: New Perspectives.Ed. Julian W. Connolly. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999. 1–12.

Kannemeyer, J. C. J. M. Coetzee: A Life in Writing. Trans. Michiel Heyns. Johannesburg: JonathanBall, 2012.

Nabokov, Vladimir. Look at the Harlequins! London: Weidenfeld, 1975.Nabokov, Vladimir. Pale Fire. London: Penguin, 2000.Nabokov, Vladimir. Speak, Memory. London: Victor Gollancz, 1951.Nabokov, Vladimir. Strong Opinions. New York: McGraw, 1973.Nabokov, Vladimir. The Real Life of Sebastian Knight. London: Editions Poetry, 1945.Neuman, Justin. “Unexpected Cosmopolitans: Media and Diaspora in J. M. Coetzee’s

Summertime.” Criticism 53.1 (2011): 127–36.

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