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Media and Diaspora in JM Coetzee's Summertime

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Media and Diaspora in JM Coetzee's Summertime 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] Follow this and additional works at: http://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/criticism 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.
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