Criticism

Volume 53 | Issue 1 Article 6

2011 Unexpected Cosmopolitans: Media and Diaspora in J. M. Coetzee's Summertime Justin Neuman Yale University, [email protected]

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Recommended Citation Neuman, Justin (2011) "Unexpected Cosmopolitans: Media and Diaspora in J. M. Coetzee's Summertime," Criticism: Vol. 53: Iss. 1, Article 6. Available at: http://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/criticism/vol53/iss1/6 Unexpected South African politics and society in the 1970s are subjects conspicu- Cosmopolitans: ously avoided and everywhere Media and implicit in J. M. Coetzee’s fiction Diaspora in of the decade. A curious debut J. M. Coetzee’s by any standard, his first novel, Summertime Dusklands, was published in 1974 by Peter Randall’s antiapartheid Justin Neuman Ravan Press, a publisher based in Johannesburg that printed books Summertime: Scenes from targeting the nation’s white minor- Provincial Life III by J. M. ity. In three years, Randall’s civil Coetzee. London: Vintage, 2010. rights would be suspended by the Pp. 272. £7.99 cloth; $15.00 paper. state for his antiapartheid activities; it would take eight years for Dusk- lands to be reprinted by a London press, Seeker and Warburg, and nine for Coetzee to publish a novel, Life and Times of Michael K (1983), set in a recognizable, contemporary South Africa. The opening gambit of Coetzee’s Summertime (2009), in contrast, pitches the reader a short series of notebook fragments dated 1972–75 that are as saturated with the gritty details of South African politics, people, and places as the newspapers they frequently ref- erence. Through this constricted spatiotemporal aperture, Coetzee’s most recent work offers an occasion to investigate the way reflections on the specific geotemporal loca- tion of South Africa in the 1970s unexpectedly reveal the nuanced and conditional nature of Coetzee’s globalism. For a novel that promises in its subtitle, Scenes from Provin- cial Life, to complete his auto­ biographical trilogy, Summertime

Criticism Winter 2011, Vol. 53, No. 1, pp. 127–136. ISSN 0011-1589. 127 ©2011 by Wayne State University Press Detroit, Michigan 48201-1309 128 Justin Neuman is an abrupt departure. The third- that the reader is encouraged to fol- person voice cultivated in Boyhood low the literary and historical leads (1997) and Youth (2002), which that cast us out along geographic begin in equally laconic fashion and intertextual trajectories that with the lines “They live on a hous- belie John Coetzee’s South African ing estate. . . .” and “He lives in a confinement. one-room flat,” respectively, has Summertime is, as Coetzee’s been replaced by a new distanc- wound-be biographer Mr. Vincent ing technique: in Summertime, claims, a work that turns our gaze readers are told that the writer (not to mention Coetzee’s own) back J. M. Coetzee has died.1 Coetzee’s to the years in South Africa during “death of the author” is less a play which he finished Dusklands and on Roland Barthes than a thought conceived much of his early work. experiment of the kind that gave But this curiously rewarding fic- us the character Elizabeth Costello tion succeeds not because of the ac- or a novel like Dusklands, with its curacy of Vincent’s instinct that the apocryphal Dutch and Afrikaner years 1971–77 are, as he puts it, “an archive purportedly by eighteenth- important period of his [Coetzee’s] century Boer colonist Jacobus Coe- life . . . a period when he was still tzee. Summertime contains a set finding his feet as a writer” (225), of interviews and elaborations al- but rather because of a more dia- legedly collected by a young Brit- chronic shuttling across times and ish academic, Mr. Vincent, framed worlds brought into relief by Sum- by notebook fragments. Through mertime as prose fiction. In part, this material we develop compel- this essay takes seriously Coetzee’s ling, selectively counterfactual, ver- many encouragements to look to sions of Coetzee’s life that cut close written work rather than sniff trails to the autobiographical bone. The from bodies of text to those of writ- impression we absorb as readers ers by situating Summertime inter- of Vincent’s interviews and tran- textually; to do otherwise would be scripts is of the young Coetzee as to ignore the sound advice given to a scraggly failed romantic, a man Vincent by one of Coetzee’s former whose overly cerebral awkward- colleagues: “I repeat, it seems to me ness clashes with his ambitions to strange to be doing the biography be a physically gifted sexual partner of a writer while ignoring his writ- and manual laborer. It is in part be- ing” (218). More precisely, the ruse cause the book reminds us time and of the posthumous biography— time again that Coetzee is a “fic- here poorly conceived by Mr. Vin- tioneer” whom we cannot trust (the cent—encourages readers to think book, after all, holds a counterfac- in the mode of proleptic eulogy tual premise as its founding axiom) about the phases of Coetzee’s career On coetzee’s Summertime 129 as a novelist and about his status inwit” (4). The jarring final sen- within the canon. tence is both Coetzee’s clever sim- Summertime is, after all, a far ulacrum of juvenilia—the overly more complex media artifact than literary tone of an aspiring writer’s Coetzee’s early works, one that notes—and a cagy novelist’s bid to rewards a materialist approach to send critics scurrying for their dic- its intertextuality, publication, dis- tionaries (4). Those with the erudi- tribution, and nascent reception tion, diligence, or technologies to history even as its formal experi- navigate Coetzee’s referential web ments with the genres of interview will recognize that this particular and journal fragment invite a liter- archaism for the remorse of con- ary historical approach to Coetzee science is an unattributed quotation as a prose stylist. If Coetzee had from Joyce’s Ulysses. In Ulysses the managed to publish a book-length phrase belongs to Stephen Dedalus work of such starkly personal and —another portrait of the artist as a political content in the early 1970s, young man—who turns it over in even if it had been cloaked in the his mind while thinking about his trappings of fiction, it would have responsibility for his impoverished been received primarily as a politi- younger sister, a person he wants cal act within a local horizon. More both to help and to abandon, in the than three decades later and in full “Wandering Rocks” chapter. “She knowledge of its counterfactuality, is drowning,” Stephen reflects, the mimetic, media-saturated de- “Agenbite. Save her . . . Agenbite tails about South Africa that com- of inwit. Inwit’s agenbite. Misery! prise the novel’s opening pages be- Misery!”2 Appearing in Summer- come something else entirely: good time right before John Coetzee’s fiction. first speech to his father, the phrase Summertime opens with a jour- speaks to the young man’s vexed nal entry, dated 22 August 1972, relationship with apartheid South in which Coetzee records, in char- Africa: John is pondering how to acteristic third-person prose, his “escape the filth” after reading of ­response to news of covert kill- covert killings of ANC members ings of African National Congress by South African security forces (4). (ANC) members by the security Rare words, Coetzee asserts in state, which flatly denies respon- his dissertation, The English Fic- sibility. Coetzee “reads the reports tion of Samuel Beckett: An Essay in and feels soiled,” wondering, Stylistic Analysis, defended in 1969 “How to escape the filth: not a new at University of Texas–Austin, “are question. An old rat-question that points of stylistic density.”3 When will not let go, that leaves its nasty, young John Coetzee draws on Ste- suppurating wound. Agenbite of phen Dedalus’s lament to voice the 130 Justin Neuman pricks of his own conscience re- British imperialist Joe Chamber- garding his abject response to the lain, an occasion on which he was injustices of life in apartheid-era nearly arrested. South Africa, he activates a rich The rather self-aggrandizing intertextual and historical link be- comparisons the young John Coe- tween Irish and South African po- tzee summons by aligning himself litical culture. If for Coetzee, Joyce with Stephen Dedalus stand in (like his onetime protégé Samuel stark contrast with Coetzee’s infa- Beckett) offers a mirror and a site mous discomfort with celebrity. In of self-recognition, by a similar Summertime, this modesty erupts logic, events in South Africa—in in repeated narrative acts of self- particular the Anglo-Boer war of abasement, generally centering 1899–1902—catalyzed Irish resis- around (self-)reported failures as a tance to the British rule and Joyce’s lover (“This man was disembod- reflections on nationalism. Joyce ied” is one variant of a refrain [198]), makes extensive reference to the and in a scrupulous underreporting Anglo-Boer War in Ulysses, where of his success as an author taking Irish animosity toward the British the form of claims that “Coetzee made common cause between Irish was never a popular writer” (235). Catholics and Dutch Protestants. From a Nobel Laureate, such self- Such connections to distant events mortifications are dubious forms underscore complex global entan- of doing penance: the well-oiled glements at work on the periphery distribution and marketing re- of empire. Haines, the British in- gimes that publish and mediate truder at Martello Tower, is a di- Coetzee’s novel provide ample rect beneficiary of the war: “His old evidence for viewing them with fellow made his tin by selling jalap skepticism. Summertime is a book to Zulus or some bloody swindle trying both, I suspect, to capital- or other,” Buck Mulligan reports.4 ize on a marquee franchise and to Molly’s first love dies in South Af- encourage readers to reflect on lit- rica during his service in the British erary genres and the book form in army, and she reflects that her cur- more engaged terms. Our encoun- rent lover, Blazes Boylan, “could ter with the book is highly medi- buy me a nice present up in bel- ated by a paratextual apparatus fast” because “his father made his involving the market potentials, money over selling horses for the press releases, reviews, and short- cavalry” in the First Anglo-Boer listings attendant on the release of war.5 Most importantly, Bloom a Nobel Laureate’s newest book. himself recollects participating in a Coetzee’s fictional death and infa- pro-Boer demonstration protesting mous reclusiveness ironically call the award of an honorary degree to attention to these sites of celebrity. On coetzee’s Summertime 131

Fame literally frames the novel in in July 2009.6 Scrupulous care, how- the U.S. edition, where the top and ever, is apparent in Coetzee’s titling, bottom lines of text tout Coetzee’s with its invocation of the blues and star status as a Nobel Prize winner race; the book’s subtitle, mean- and the author of Disgrace (1999) while, Scenes from Provincial Life, and provide generic guidance by insists upon its status as a sequel. categorizing Summertime as “fic- Coetzee’s publisher, the Harvill tion.” With its bold chiaroscuro of Secker imprint of Random House, black-and-white text echoed in the heir to the group that brought out image of a symbolically resonant Coetzee’s early work in Britain, is anonymous male form, the U.S. keen to perpetuate the concept of cover trades on the gravitas of the Summertime as the completion of a Nobel and seeks to capitalize on trilogy. These elements serve as po- the synergy of Summertime’s pub- tent reminders that Summertime is lication just after the release of the not Mr. Vincent’s book, or at least it 2008 film of Disgrace (dir. Steven is not the book he describes himself Jacobs, starring John Malkovich). as writing: “a serious book, a seri- The UK edition deploys a more ously intended biography . . . on mimetic image of the Karoo, evoc- the years from Coetzee’s return to ative of the scene in Margot’s narra- South Africa . . . when he was still tive where she and her cousin John finding his feet as a writer”—a Coetzee spend a night stranded in book for which the transcribed in- his broken-down Datsun pickup terviews we read would constitute before being rescued by Hendrick, raw material (225). a resident colored laborer, who Within the interviews, Vincent passes by with a donkey cart. emerges as an untrustworthy cus- Coetzee’s “death” is an artful todian at best of stories about Coe- dodge to the question of whether tzee. He rewrites one interview as a responsibility for the book’s narrative in the subject’s voice (an branding and preening within intervention he describes as “fairly global Anglophone prize/com- radical”) and then reads it back to modity culture lies with author her while recording her protesta- or publisher. Summertime was tions and disapproval (87). Vincent released in October in Britain (to is an academic of mediocre creativ- capitalize on market synergy of its ity, a younger man who has never Man-Booker shortlisting) and De- met Coetzee; he ignores repeated cember in the United States (where rejections of his methodology, in- it coincided fortuitously with the cluding the suspicion that his work holiday book-buying season) after won’t amount to “anything more the prerelease of sample materials than women’s gossip,” as one of in the New York Review of Books Coetzee’s academic colleagues puts 132 Justin Neuman it (218). Coetzee’s handling of Mr. Magda, Michael K, and the bar- Vincent as a framing device is deft, barian girl, since the 1980s the however, especially when it comes characters Coetzee depicts have to mapping mobility. Vincent tended to be those whose displace- traverses the globe from North- ments foster unexpected cosmo- ern England to Paris, São Paulo, politan connections and are drawn Ontario, South Africa, and back from the broad middle zone be- (Australia and the United States tween abject refugee and empow- are notably absent from the list), ered members of a global elite. In gathering material and interview- the last decade in particular, Coe- ing Coetzee’s sexual partners, a tzee’s most fascinating characters female cousin, and two academic have been his minor exiles: Mari- colleagues. jana Jokic and her Croatian family Clever narrative conceit that to whom Paul Rayment becomes he is, Vincent’s seemingly infi- attached in Slow Man (2005) after nite travel budget may strain the they have fled the Balkan war, for bounds of verisimilitude, but it example, or Anya, the sexy Fili- does an excellent job of mapping pina who Coetzee imagines as the the sheer range of diasporic trajec- amanuensis of his “Strong Opin- tories traveled by onetime white ions” in Diary of a Bad Year (2007). South Africans. The book’s insis- In Summertime, the most in- tent geographic mobility reminds triguing voices belong to two such us of the myriad routes and modes unexpected cosmopolitans: Julia of interconnection and displace- Kis, the daughter of a Hungarian ment that constitute Coetzee’s Jew who takes Coetzee as a lover global world, which overlaps and and whom Vincent interviews at diverges from those of his increas- her home in Kingston, Ontario; ingly international readership. and Adriana Nascimento, a Bra- Simultaneously, from its suppos- zilian who found her way to South edly posthumous vantage point, Africa from Angola and who Summertime reminds us of the makes no effort to hide her loath- persistence with which Coetzee ing for Coetzee. On the one hand, has been drawn to the effects of Coetzee remains consistent in his displacement and homelessness belief that the private life of a writer in his novels, where migrations could and probably should be dis- cook up a rich brew of longing, missed as irrelevant information: “I uncertainty, and necessity. While am not concerned in this essay with his early novels were often drawn the views of the historical Samuel to explore limit conditions of suf- Beckett,” Coetzee explains to his fering and oppression through readers at the outset of his disserta- characters like Jacobus Coetzee, tion, before pressing into what he On coetzee’s Summertime 133 terms a “stylistic” analysis that uses eschew the world’s major metropo- computer science and a quantita- les and follow oblique trajectories tive, statistical approach to analyze through nations, regions, religions, literary works.7 Coetzee’s career and languages. would take an obvious and inten- In Summertime, the young tional turn away from this early, Coetzee’s rather shameful return clunky investment in what has be- to South Africa and his father’s come the digital humanities, but home becomes legible in terms like forty years later, the notion that the those of Stephen Dedalus’s failed writer’s life is of “only biographical telemachia as Coetzee invokes the interest,” as the young Coetzee puts self-imposed exiles of modernists it, remains a guiding star in his aes- like Joyce and Beckett. Coetzee’s thetics.8 The taxonomic imagina- alternate take on the old chestnut of tion that inspires Coetzee’s disser- center and periphery recalls his un- tation, however, has transformed in settling position as a former white his fiction into a series of complex South African not easily assimila- systems that explore relationships ble to the disciplinary boundaries of between author, text, and character. postcolonial studies. As Coetzee’s By 1972, Coetzee had himself work has grown in readership and completed a circuit of the Anglo- migrated from the “provinces” of Atlantic world that spanned most his boyhood to the university cen- of a decade, beginning with his ter, Coetzee’s globalism helps call northward migration to Britain as attention to the issue that much of a computer programmer and fol- what goes under the heading of lowed by stints in Austin, Texas, postcolonial theory is oppositional and Buffalo, New York, as a grad- allegory that generates, more often uate student and young professor, than not, reductive readings. That respectively. While his own mi- Coetzee legitimately belongs on the grations, including his emigration syllabi of courses in postcolonial lit- to Adelaide, Australia, in 2002, erature, the Australian novel, and circulate within the Anglophone philosophy of mind testifies to Coe- world and the former settler colo- tzee’s status as arguably the most nies, his characters take readers important voice in Anglophone through travels in the pull of no literature. Writers like Coetzee and obvious gravitational center either characters like Julia Kis and Adri- linguistically or geographically. ana Nascimento, moreover, remind Whereas a postcolony/metropolis academics that the most important axis dominates much of the post- contribution of postcolonial studies colonial canon from Tayeb Salih to may be the way it directs attention Salman Rushdie and Zadie Smith, to power, sovereignty, and identity Coetzee’s cosmopolitans tend to in diverse places, texts, and lives. 134 Justin Neuman

Coetzee’s work registers deep Cape Town that was Coetzee’s at ambivalence with the nation-state, the time—Martin claims that both which is under pressure simulta- he and John Coetzee shared an neously from tentative universals “attitude toward South Africa . . . (all suffering beings), nonstatist [that] our presence . . . was legal collectivities (ethnicity, religion, but illegitimate . . . grounded in a language), and substatist regional crime, namely colonial conquest, affinities. In Summertime, Coetzee perpetuated by apartheid” (209). juxtaposes attachments fostered While his novels tend to avoid overt by geographic mobility and un- racial signifiers—consider Michael expected cosmopolitan networks K and Melanie Isaacs, ambiguous with what I have been describing as nonwhites in a race-mad culture— a Homeric longing for nostos, here Summertime carefully records the identified with Coetzee’s regional stratifications of apartheid society: affinities to the Karoo and West- its police state killings, “temporary ern Cape regions of South Africa. white” racial designations, and In the intertextual register through criminal bureaucracy. which Summertime filters apart- As Coetzee argues in the essays heid, we can see Coetzee simulta- of White Writing: On the Culture neously as Stephen and as Bloom; of Letters in South Africa (1988), as Oedipus, whose unintentional the claims of racial justice quickly crimes have polluted his homeland; expose white South Africans’ and as Lear, who has given up his identification with an unpeopled kingdom to wander in his old age. landscape as a nostalgic veneer. And there’s the rub: Summertime But rising to a challenge that is vividly depicts the way homeless- both ethical and generic, Coetzee ness and apartness are conditions frequently addresses his fiction to Coetzee sees as his fate and birth- longings for homeland and home- right as a white South African of coming. Skipping across this par- a certain generation, tainted by a ticular thematic archipelago from complicit relationship to apartheid Summertime to his 1977 novel In that fosters a guilt his fiction and the Heart of the Country yields a prose consistently describe in reli- fugue on embodied and spiritual gious terms. Summertime’s Martin ties to landscape. “I want to be bur- puts it more legalistically, in word- ied here,” Coetzee’s cousin Margot ing conditioned by the endless tele- remembers him saying in Vincent’s vised inquiries of the Truth and “dramatized” version of her in- Reconciliation Commission. As terview in Summertime (87). John Coetzee’s double—in Summertime Coetzee’s slightly morbid claim Martin has obtained the teaching evokes Lucy Lurie’s more deter- appointment at the University of mined subsistence in Disgrace on On coetzee’s Summertime 135 the land in the Eastern Cape, where Beckett, filter Coetzee’s perceptions she sustains a postapartheid ad hoc of political histories at an existential existence with Petrus, her former rather than causal level. It is at this black tenant. Lucy’s solution to conjunction between a symbolic the problem of how to live “in this approach to narrative and a theo- time and this place, this place being logical reading of politics that I see South Africa” harkens back to the Coetzee’s interest in religion cohere similar negotiations in the differ- throughout his career. A journal ent time and place of Michael K’s entry dated 31 May 1975, around subsistence on the veldt.9 Casting the time Coetzee was at work on further back, Michael K is staged In the Heart of the Country, shows against the unstable preapartheid the aspiring novelist playing the race relations that govern Magda’s confident theologian: grim frontier life in In the Heart of the Country. Being at home in If Jesus had stooped to play the Karoo, feeling that the land- politics he might have be- scape “touches one’s soul” (as John come a key man in Roman Coetzee puts it to Margot in Sum- Judea, a big operator. It was mertime), is similarly consonant because he was indifferent with the Coetzee of Boyhood, who to politics, and made his in- loved “every stone . . . every bush, difference clear, that he was every blade of grass” of Voëlfon- liquidated. How to live one’s tein, his grandfather’s farm.10 Cut- life outside politics, and one’s ting across race and time, Coetzee’s death too: that was the exam- work captures characters whose re- ple he set for his followers. lationships to their times and places Odd to find himself contem- bear the paradoxical brands of for- plating Jesus as a guide. But sakenness and consecration. where should he search for a If Coetzee’s political response to better one? (12–13) apartheid in Summertime can be described as oppositional but qui- Coetzee’s reading of Christian- etist, his aesthetic response tends ity avoids ritual and theology in toward abstraction. For John Coe- favor of thinking narratively and tzee, apartheid brings Beckett to structurally about plot, characters, mind: John’s fragments record frus- and actions. Reading in this way tration with how “the whole sorry, is both abstract—in that it tends to murderous show . . . [of apartheid generate functional equivalences has] moved into the endgame, and between Roman Judea and apart- everyone knows it” (12). Sum- heid South Africa, between Christ mertime thus encodes the way fic- and John Coetzee—and histori- tions, especially those of Joyce and cally specific. In 1975 as much as 136 Justin Neuman in 2009, Coetzee speaks of religion Justin Neuman is Assistant Professor of from outside its organizations and English Literature at Yale University. His current book project, “Novel Faiths: with trepidation; an undated note ­Religion, Secularism, and World Litera- following the aforementioned ture,” investigates the resurgence of religion fragment discussed shows Coetzee in novels that take the global as a central theme and ultimate frame of reference. admonishing himself to “[a]void pushing his interest in Jesus too far and turning this into a conversion Notes narrative” (13). In Summertime’s coda of un- 1. In this sentence I quote from the first dated fragments, however, famil- sentences of both Boyhood and Youth to highlight the novelty of Summertime ial rather than political bonds are (J. M. Coetzee, Boyhood: Scenes from drawn to the core of the project. Provincial Life I [New York: Penguin, Summertime’s emotional energy 1998), page 1, line 1; and Youth: Scenes inheres in the dynamic of father from Provincial Life II [New York: Penguin, 2003], page 1, line 1). and son and more specifically 2. James Joyce, Ulysses, Gabler Edition in the question of what kind of (New York: Vintage, 1986), page 200, care is owed to the suffering be- lines 875–80. ings brought close to us by right 3. John Maxwell Coetzee, “The English of birth or accidental encounter. Fiction of Samuel Beckett: An Essay in Like Aiden Phillips of Elizabeth Stylistic Analysis” (PhD diss., Univer- Costello (2003), Coetzee’s father sity of Texas at Austin, January 1969). in Summertime is diagnosed with 4. Joyce, Ulysses, page 1, lines 156–57. cancer and undergoes a laryngec- 5. Ibid., page 18, lines 403–4. tomy. Whereas for Elizabeth the 6. J. M. Coetzee, “From ‘Summertime’: proximity of death produces an ‘Undated Fragments,’” New York opportunity for physical caritas, Review of Books, 16 July 2009. Summertime closes with the young 7. Coetzee, “English Fiction of Samuel Beckett,” 3. John Coetzee faced with a decision: whether to “abandon some of his 8. Ibid. personal projects and be a nurse” 9. J. M. Coetzee, Disgrace (New York: or to announce to his dying father Penguin, 2000), 112. “I am going to abandon you. Good- 10. J. M. Coetzee, Boyhood, 80. bye” (265–66, original italics). For the Coetzee of Summertime, there is no question: for John Coetzee the agenbite of inwit is primarily rhe- torical; he will undoubtedly refuse to play Antigone to his father’s Oe- dipus, or even Kent to his father’s Lear.