Strange Intimacies: Autre-biography, Failure and the Body in J.M. Coetzee and Paul Auster
Amy Louise Parish
A thesis in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
School of the Arts and Media Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences
June 2017
Surname or Family name Purish
First name Amy O'hcr n.:irne's Lo.i1sc Abbreviation for degree as given In the University calendar:
School: Arts and Media Faculty· Artsand Social Sciences Title: Strange �ntlmacies: Autre-blography, Failure and the Body in J.M. Coetzee and Paul Auster
Abstract 350 words maximum: (PLEASE TYPE)
Following the recent publication of J.M. Coetzee's and Paul Auster's book of epistolary exchanges, Horo and Now, this t�esis makes the case for considering Coetzee's and Auster's writing in a dialogue with one another. More specifically, this thesis considers therelationship between Coetzee's and Auster's contributions to the genre of life writing, and through comparing their works which have variously been described as memoir, autobiography and fictionalised autobiography, it argues that bothCoetzee and Auster writeau/re-biography, a term that Coetzee coined, but a style to which Auster has also made contributions. Importantly, this thesis rejects the notion that the use of autre-biography, which may eschew theuse of first-person narration and insert fictionalising and distancing strategies into its self-representation, is a style that precludes the work from inclusion in the genre of life writing, and denies the text any sense of truth value or intimacy. Rather, this thesis suggests that autre-blography is a style of life writing that recognises the inevitable "ontological gap" between the writing and experiencing self in the form of the text itself, as well as other limits and challenges which scholars have identified with autobiography. These include the problems of narcissism and triumphalism in the genre, and the tendency of Western autobiography to marginalise and exclude the body in its representation of self. It also argues that both Coetzee and Auster subvertmany of the conventions often associated with autobiography in order to inscribe vulnerability in their works, which may, ironically, facilitate confessional moments in their autre-biography. Drawing on life writing scholarship, this thesis argues that autre-biography engages with the dialogic potential of life writing and reflects a shift away from product to process in the representation of selves, and reflects the increasing potential of life writing to comment on the processes and limits of self-representation within the representation itself. In doing so, it suggests that Coetzee andAuster recognise the tensions of intimacy and alienation, the "self-defeating dialectic" of a desire to represent the truth of self within their autre-biography, creating unexpected moments of candour and immediacy in their work.
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Acknowledgements
Firstly, I would like to thank the academic and professional staff at the School of Arts and Media at UNSW Sydney who have encouraged me throughout my doctoral studies. Thank you to Bill Ashcroft and Julian Murphet for the detailed and constructive feedback they provided each year on my annual review panel. I would especially like to thank Chris Danta, who was a kind and patient supervisor from the very early stages of this project. I could not have completed this thesis without his guidance and generosity.
To my friend, Helen Rydstrand, for helping to proofread this thesis and writing little encouraging notes to boost my morale along the way.
To my family and friends, who supported me through some challenging times, learnt to stop asking me about my thesis and excused me as I disappeared into my study or to UNSW for too many a sunny weekend over the last few years.
Finally, to my husband Ian Zucker, who was endlessly encouraging and generous, especially in the final stages of my candidature. I would not be have got this far in the project without his unconditional support.
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Table of Contents Introduction ...... 5 Paul Auster and J.M. Coetzee’s Here and Now ...... 5 Reality, Fiction and “Fictional Truths” in Coetzee and Auster ...... 10 Auster, Coetzee and the Limits of Autobiography ...... 22 Late Style ...... 34 Autre-biography ...... 38 Chapter 1: Breaking the ‘pact’? Questions of truth, process and intimacy in Coetzee and Auster’s autre-biography ...... 45 The “Autobiographical Pact” ...... 47 Unnatural narration and autobiographical “tricks” ...... 49 Coetzee’s and Auster’s unusual autobiographies ...... 52 Autobiography and the Dialogic ...... 57 Autres and autre-biography ...... 65 Coetzee’s autre-biography ...... 73 The autres of Paul Auster ...... 102 Concluding thoughts ...... 121 Chapter 2: “A willingness to fail and fail again”: Vulnerability, failure and autre- biography in Coetzee and Auster ...... 123 Autobiography as ‘Advertisement’ ...... 124 Why failure? ...... 131 The rhetoric of failure in autobiography ...... 135 Coetzee’s Youth and Summertime ...... 144 Auster’s Hand to Mouth and Report from the Interior ...... 171 Concluding thoughts ...... 188 Chapter 3: Embodiment and autre-biography: Coetzee’s Summertime and Auster’s Winter Journal ...... 189 Life Writing and the Body ...... 191 Coetzee and the Body ...... 201 Auster and the Body ...... 206 The body, the self and language ...... 208 The body, dependence and decrepitude ...... 225 Dependence in Auster ...... 237 “Embodied Souls” ...... 241 Concluding thoughts ...... 246 Conclusion ...... 248 Bibliography ...... 254
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Introduction
Paul Auster and J.M. Coetzee’s Here and Now
The publication of Here and Now (2013) by J.M. Coetzee and Paul Auster was in many ways a surprising event. Firstly, it was surprising because both men seem to occupy very different literary and cultural milieus, with Brooklyn born, French speaking Auster well known amongst circles of artists and filmmakers in America and France (Falconer 2013). Coetzee, on the other hand, born and raised in South Africa, now living in Adelaide, South Australia (as he puts it in
Here and Now, “on the fringes of the known universe” (2013: 173)) is an author strongly associated with post-colonialism and the political situation in his birth country, and who has a strong academic following. Both authors are also received quite differently, with Auster, a New
York Times bestseller, considered a more popular author, and Coetzee, a Nobel Laureate, an author whose reputation has been made on novels of “high literary seriousness” (Falconer
2013). Furthermore, Coetzee has been famous for his privacy, his reticence to give speeches and interviews, his reluctance to attend awards ceremonies and participate in the other conventions that accompany being a successful author. As Rita Barnard observes, the reputation Coetzee has amongst his fans and critics is “for being crusty, reticent and elusive”
(Barnard 2013: 442). It thus seems in some ways out of character for Coetzee to publish a book that involves such directness and autobiographical exposure. Satirising the seeming incongruity of a work like Here and Now being published by an author so famed for reticence,
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Richard Polak writes in his acerbic review, “[a]nd so the Prince of Darkness strides into the light… What’s next(?) [from Coetzee] daily V-blog updates?” (2013). Finally, it is an interesting and perhaps anachronistic move to publish a book of epistolary exchanges in a culture and a literary climate in which letter-writing is very much on the decline (Day 2013).
There are also many ways in which Auster and Coetzee’s interest in writing to one another should not be surprising, as these authors perhaps have more in common than it would initially seem. Despite the very different worlds they occupy, Auster and Coetzee have long had some striking similarities in their fictional, critical and autobiographical work, which I detail in this introduction. Both men are notorious for a certain brand of “postmodern chicanery” (Laing
2013) in their fiction, in which, as Olivia Laing puts it, “Paul Austers and J.M. Coetzees proliferate, gleefully undermining the house of realism” (2013). Secondly, as the book cover notes, a friendship has recently emerged between the two men which the book chronicles.
Though Coetzee and Auster “had been reading each other’s books for years,”1 the two men only met for the first time in 2008 and Here and Now is an attempt to capture the burgeoning friendship between them.2 Furthermore, in their essays and interviews, both Coetzee and
Auster have made some strikingly similar observations about the writing process, the dialogic and the relationship between reality and fiction, which I further explore in this introduction.
They have also demonstrated a long-time fascination with, and a degree of ambivalence towards, the genre of autobiography, and continue to be interested by its limits and possibilities. Both men are relatively prolific writers of what has variously been described as memoir, autobiography and fictionalised autobiography.
1 Dustjacket to U.S. hardcover edition of Here and Now. 2 Ibid. 6
In this thesis, I largely examine Coetzee’s and Auster’s life writing works, also considering pertinent aspects of their fiction and critical writing, to consider some of their shared ideas and aesthetics of self-representation, a project which has not yet been undertaken as a sustained, scholarly investigation. Many scholars, including Derek Attridge (1999), Jean Sévry (2000),
Sheila Collingwood-Whittick (2001), Margaret Lenta (2003), Hermoine Lee (2005), Carrol
Clarkson (2009, 2016), Robert Kusek, (2010, 2012), Sue Kossew (2011), Sam Cardoen (2014),
Alice Hall (2014), Donald Powers (2016), Elleke Boehmer (2016) and Paul Sheehan (2016) have written on Coetzee’s autobiography, or autre-biography, and several have argued that
Coetzee makes important contributions to the genre of life writing. While drawing on and contributing to this recently emerging body of scholarship, I also argue that Auster contributes to the subgenre, autre-biography, a point that has been made by Boehmer in a recently published essay. Boehmer writes that “Coetzee has himself coined the term ‘autre-biography’ to describe [the] mode of third person fictional-yet-part-autobiographical writing that he has helped develop, and that writers such as Paul Auster have more recently contributed to – in
Auster’s case in the second person” (2016: 437-438). Boehmer’s comments suggest that
Coetzee is not the sole proprietor of autre-biography, and that it is a mode of writing he has
“helped develop” with the contributions of others, a sentiment with which I strongly agree and further substantiate in this thesis. Similarly, Hall has suggested that Coetzee’s essays on autobiography, and his term autre-biography, provide an important “critical vocabulary” through which the work of other authors can be explored (2014: 289).3 In this thesis, I examine closely Auster’s contributions to autre-biography, considering some of the points of
3 Hall makes this argument in relation to Philip Roth in her essay “Aging and Autobiography” Roth’s Exit Ghost and Coetzee’s Diary of a Bad Year. 7 similarity and difference which emerge in his and Coetzee’s autre-biography, as well as the comments that both men have made in interviews about the processes of being or becoming another which are an inevitable part of narrativising one’s life story.
In my comparative examination of Coetzee’s and Auster’s autre-biography, I argue that there are several tensions that go to the heart of autobiography which Coetzee and Auster both engage with, and which they respond to in the style and subject matter of their autre- biography, as well as their critical writing and interviews on the subject of autobiography and confession. One of the central tensions is what Rita Felski has described as the “dialectic of intimacy and alienation” that is an inevitable part of confession. Despite their awareness of the impossibility of confession and autobiography, which I explore further in this introduction, both Coetzee and Auster continually return to the genre and test its limits and potentialities.
Felski writes of the “self-defeating dialectic” that accompanies any compulsion to write confession in the following terms:
The goal of confession is to strip away the superficial layers of convention and to expose an authentic core of self, of meaning as fully present to itself. Yet the more frantically this true subjectivity is pursued, the more elusive it appears; the greater the desire for intimacy and spontaneity, the more clearly the act of writing is revealed as the most alienated of activities. (1989: 108)
For Felski, autobiography has an “ambivalence” (1989: 112) which accounts for the contemporary fascination with the genre, as it is paradoxically perceived as “both the ultimate truth of one’s life and as a mere simulacrum” (1989: 112). She suggests that the desire for intimacy, spontaneity and immediacy through writing confession is a desire which is short circuited by the self-consciousness of the act itself. Felski writes that “[l]ife itself is revealed as literary material awaiting processing by the author, who begins to experience her own life self-
8 consciously as a text” (1989: 113). The more doggedly the author might try to avoid the self- consciousness of the enterprise and pursue immediacy and spontaneity to disclose “the truth of her life” (1989: 113), the more overtly “the confessional work reveals itself to be caught up in contradictions and paradoxes which undermine any such project” (1989: 113). As I seek to demonstrate in this thesis, while Coetzee and Auster don’t always use the terms “dialectic”,
“contradiction” and “paradox” to describe the unique challenges that face the writer when he or she attempts to access and represent a truth of self in autobiography, they have described very similar conundrums when it comes to the compulsion to write one’s own story in an intimate and candid way, whilst simultaneously being aware that to do so inevitably results in fictions about oneself, fraught intimacies and a sense of alienation.
Despite their mutual hesitations about the truth value of autobiography, and their seeming understanding of the very dialectic which Felski describes above, both Coetzee and Auster, as I have mentioned, constantly engage with the genre. As I outline in this introduction, and then further substantiate in the chapters that follow, Coetzee and Auster seek out strategies in their autre-biography which recognise this dialectic in the form and style of the text. Both authors write what Susanna Egan has described as autobiography which emphasises “process” over
“product” (1999: 2), and experiment with narration in such a way as to recognise and explore the role of fiction in the truth-making process, and the heteroglossic possibilities of selfhood.
Far from being narrative tricks which might be otherwise associated with two authors famed for their “postmodern chicanery” (Laing 2013), I suggest that these strategies may in fact be an attempt to navigate the difficult path to self-representation in a candid and self-reflexive way.
As I explore in this thesis, through deploying styles of narration most commonly associated with fiction, Coetzee and Auster are able to create some moments of immediacy and 9 autobiographical intimacy, whilst not denying or concealing the inevitable moments of alienation and the falsehoods that emerge in any representation of self.
As two authors who have been in published dialogue with one another, who, we are told, have long been reading each other’s work and who have recently become friends, it is fitting and timely that their autre-biographical works should be brought into dialogue with one another, and this is what this thesis does. As I move through significant points of comparison between
Coetzee and Auster, I bring their works into conversation, focusing most specifically on the ways both authors address the various challenges of writing self and representing one’s own life in their work. It is for this reason that I discuss both authors in each of my three chapters rather than having discrete chapters on the work of each, using what might be described as a dialogical format.
Reality, Fiction and “Fictional Truths” in Coetzee and Auster
To explore Coetzee’s and Auster’s interventions into the genre of autobiography, and their shared contributions to autre-biography, it is necessary to outline the recurring question of the relationship between reality and fiction in their fictional and critical works, as well as their published interviews and letters. In her review of Here and Now, which I previously cited, Laing draws attention to the fact that both Coetzee and Auster have experimented with alter egos who bear the authors’ own names in their fiction, hence encouraging us to read any work claiming to be autobiographical, intimate or self-revelatory with some scepticism (2013).
Indeed, as she suggests, J.M. Coetzees and Paul Austers do abound in these two authors’ ostensibly fictional works, destabilising traditional distinctions between truth and fiction, 10 autobiography and the novel, and author and character. In Coetzee’s debut novel Dusklands
(1974) “Coetzee” is the name of the initial narrator, Eugene Dawn’s boss and the name of its
18th century Boer frontiersman, “Jacobus Coetzee”. The story of Jacobus Coetzee is also translated and edited by several “Coetzees”, including a J.M. Coetzee and a late “Dr S.J.
Coetzee”, who is presented as the author’s father. The only “Coetzee” of these three of whom there is a historical-biographical account is the author J.M. Coetzee. Similarly, in the much more recently published Diary of a Bad Year (2007), one of the protagonists and narrators is an aging South African novelist called “J.C.”, who published a book called Waiting for the
Barbarians (1980) and whose book of “Strong Opinions” contains many essay which articulate lines of argument that Coetzee has expressed elsewhere. Similarly, Auster commonly inserts his name and biographical details into his novels: in the City of Glass (1985), Paul Auster is a character who the focaliser, Quinn, impersonates, while in Timbuktu (1999), the secondary character Willie has a college roommate called "Anster, [or] Omster" (64-65) (Willie can’t quite remember his name) a writer who, like Auster, studied at Columbia and lived abroad in France.
In John Crace’s “digested read” (2013) of Here and Now, featured in The Guardian, Crace presents a 700-word parodic summary of the correspondence between Auster and Coetzee. In the following excerpt, Crace mocks Auster and Coetzee’s discussion of the frustrations of having one’s novels read as a “secret autobiography” (Coetzee and Auster 2013: 175).
Dear John…The reviews of my novel have been generally favorable, though I am increasingly irritated by those who insist on linking my own identity to that of my characters. How can they so fail to appreciate the imagination of the artist?
Dear Paul, The paucity of the critic in the modern age is lamentable. I am also tired of my work being subjected to that conflationary scrutiny. It is not as if either you or I have ever written books in which the characters have been named after ourselves or are in any way autobiographical. Ah well, such is the lot of genius, I suppose. 11
Crace here is suggesting that throughout Here and Now, both men seek to repudiate claims that their fictional works are autobiographical, whilst paradoxically encouraging autobiographical readings of their works – through writing fiction in which characters share the author’s name, and through writing autobiography.4 As I will further discuss in this introduction, it does seem that both men are palpably aware of this paradox and have discussed it in essays and interviews. Crace’s digested read is an amusing take on the way these two authors demonstrate an ambivalence about representing self in writing in their fictional and non-fictional works, and points to further similarities in the work of the two seemingly very different authors, their use of avatars, their refusal of easy definition and their shared interest in the philosophy of writing
(Falconer 2013).
This is something that Auster himself comments on in Here and Now: “[a]nd then too, we have both used ourselves as characters in novels (Summertime, City of Glass), even if those selves are not precise representations of who we are outside the pages of those books” (2013: 189, emphasis in original). Indeed, the relationship between imagination and reality, between fiction and truth, is a conversation which is given quite a lot of space in Here and Now. Of Philip Roth’s
Exit Ghost (2007), a novel which Coetzee does not regard as highly as Roth’s previous works,
Coetzee reflects on the contempt for critics which Roth has famously expressed in his novels.
Coetzee writes that Roth’s protagonist, and possibly Roth:
[C]learly feels nothing but contempt for the mixture of moralizing and biographical reductionism that passes for criticism in your cultural organs (ours too). (By biographical reductionism I mean treating fiction as a form of self-disguise practiced by
4 This is, however, not exactly what Coetzee and Auster are discussing in this section of the text. The comments that most resemble those that Crace mocks are actually made in relation to Philip Roth (2013: 172), and the men are discussing Roth’s (2007) palpable anger at critics in Exit Ghost. 12
writers: the task of the critic is to strip away the disguise and reveal the “truth” behind it). (2013: 172)
Coetzee reflects on the futility of Roth’s diatribes, writing, “[t]he more he fulminates, the more the [critic villains] of the world…lick their lips” (2013: 172-173). In response to Coetzee’s letter, Auster is mostly sympathetic to (Coetzee’s paraphrasing) of Roth’s arguments, writing:
Americans seem to have lost contact with the essence of fiction – which is to say, have lost the ability to understand the imagination – and therefore they find it difficult to believe that a novelist can ‘make things up’. Every novel is turned into a hidden autobiography, a roman a clef. No need to elaborate on how impoverished this view is. (2013: 175)
Both authors seem quite candidly divided and unsure about the relationship between the real and the imagined. Thus the “truth” of Crace’s previously cited “digested read” is that the relationship between reality and fiction presents a problem and often has a paradoxical relationship in both Auster’s and Coetzee’s work. Both authors can be said to encourage a conflation between reality and their fiction, whilst also at times disavowing such connections.
Later in Here and Now Coetzee and Auster both agree on a paradox about the writing of characters and the relationship between imagination and reality. Coetzee writes, “I must say I prefer making up characters from scratch. It feels more like the real thing that way” (2013:
187), to which Auster replies “I’m with you: making up people from scratch feels more like the real thing” (2013: 187). In The Good Story, Coetzee’s recently published book of exchanges on
“truth, fiction and psychoanalysis” with psychologist Arabella Kurtz, Coetzee writes of the relationship between imagination and reality, again addressing some of the questions he initially raised with Auster. He writes to Kurtz, “I am as divided, undecided and confused as can be. By profession I have been a trader in fictions. From what I write it must be evident to you that I don’t have much respect for reality. I think of myself as using rather than reflecting reality in my fiction. If the world of my fictions is a recognisable world, that is because (I say to myself) 13 it is easier to use the world at hand than to make up a new one” (2015: 69). The candidness of
Coetzee’s words on his process here implies that far from attempting to consciously obfuscate the relationship between fiction and reality in his work, Coetzee often remains uncertain as to how tensions between fiction and reality might be resolved.
Both the questions and problems presented, and the sentiments agreed upon in Here and Now reflect the kinds of ideas about reality and illusion that Auster and Coetzee have expressed throughout their careers as novelists, and when writing about autobiography. Both authors return to questions about the interplay of truth and fiction, and the notion that as fictions inevitably emerge when attempting to represent “truth”, so too can truths emerge in the writing of fiction. Furthermore, both Auster and Coetzee are authors who have long been interested in the processes of writing, the notion that consciousness, ideas about the self and truths may emerge only in the process of writing, the tendency of writing “to acquire a life of its own” (Auster in Wood 2013: 145), and of words “to call up other words” (Coetzee 1992d:
18). Thus, to acknowledge and draw attention to the process may in turn constitute a kind of truth about what it means to reflect on and represent autobiographical selves.
As suggested above, both Coetzee and Auster have in interviews presented the relationship between reality and fiction or imagination as a dialectic, which interacts in both fictional and autobiographical writing to provide some version of truth. This is a notion that has been extensively argued by life writing scholars such as Paul John Eakin, who insists that “[f]ictions and the fiction-making process are a central constituent of the truth of any life as it is lived and of any art devoted to the presentation of that life” (1985: 5). Nonetheless, it is interesting how frequently this tension is taken up by both Coetzee and Auster in interviews and essays, 14 especially with regards to autobiographical writing. In Doubling the Point, Coetzee introduced his aphorism, which is “now… quoted as general truth” (Attwell 2014: 31), “all writing is autobiography: everything you write, including criticism and fiction, writes you as you write it”
(1992d: 17), presenting the self of writing as an ever evolving and textualised entity rather than a fixed or a priori truth. Coetzee then presents what he believes to be the “real question” about autobiographical writing, asking:
This massive autobiographical writing-enterprise that fills a life, this enterprise of self- construction… does it yield only fictions? Or rather, among the fictions of the self, the versions of the self, that it yields, are there any that are truer than others? How do I know when I have the truth about myself? (1992d: 17)
As a kind of response to this question, but one that further unsettles any notion of a fixed truth, Coetzee suggests that “we should distinguish two kinds of truth, the first truth to fact, the second something beyond that… we should take truth to fact for granted and concentrate on the more vexing question of a ‘higher’ truth” (1992d: 17). In all writing, including “straight” autobiographical writing, Coetzee says that writing involves “an automatism built into language: the tendency of words to call up other words, to fall into patterns that keep propagating themselves. Out of that interplay there emerges, if you are lucky, what you recognize or hope to recognize as the true” (1992d: 18). Several years later, Coetzee again took up the idea of the dialectic between fiction and reality, and the notion of different kinds of
“truths” in an opinion piece originally titled “Fictions of the Truth”, a paradox that captures the recurring question of authority and authenticity in autobiography throughout Coetzee’s body of work. He writes that in autobiography, “the best you can hope for will not be the history of yourself, but a story about yourself, a story that will not be the truth but may have
15 some truth value of a mixed kind – some historical truth, some poetic truth5 – a fiction of the truth” (1999a). Thus Coetzee suggests that any insights into self can come only through the process of narrating that self, undermining the notion that one can use the writer’s historical or biographical details to affirm or deny the veracity of selves represented in autobiography. Most recently in The Good Story, Coetzee has taken this idea further still discussing the relationships that “fictions of the truth” have in conceiving of self and in facilitating sympathetic identification with the other. In dialogue with Kurtz, he suggests, “I would contend that our sympathetic identifications have a fiction-like status, and that our sympathetic intuitions can be relied on only to yield fictional truths” (2015: 134). For Coetzee, any identification with others, or even with our own nascent selves, is a fictional identification, a way of imagining ourselves into the experience of the other. Our fictions of the self can only ever interact with the fictions of the self of others. He writes, “[t]o my mind, it will be enough if we can settle on fictions of ourselves which we can inhabit more or less comfortably, fictions that interact sans friction with the fictions of those around us” (2015: 177). For Coetzee, the notion that we can only ever engage our own fictions of self with those of others is not cause for existential despair.
Rather, he suggests that the exchange between fiction and truth which is an inevitable part of all interactions may provide “glimpses of the truth” (2015: 142). As Coetzee’s language implies, these fictions may indeed be necessary to catch the “glimpses” of what we might recognise as truth. Coetzee writes:
I think we can entertain the notion that we are continually engaging with constructions (fictions) of others, rather than with their ‘real’ selves, without feeling we are at the edge of an abyss. We can also entertain the more plausible (and more interesting) notion that our engagements are with a constantly changing interplay between shadows (fictions) and glimpses of the real. (2015: 142)
5 In The Good Story Coetzee defines “poetic truth” as “a matter of reflecting the world accurately (‘truthfully’), but also in part a matter of internal consistency, elegance, and so forth – in other words, a matter of satisfying autonomous aesthetic criteria” (2015: 7-8).
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A “constantly changing interplay between shadows (fictions) and glimpses of the real” could aptly describe Coetzee’s fictional and autobiographical enterprise, and harks back to his earlier remarks in Doubling the Point that out of the interplay of language and narrative construction, there emerges, “if you are lucky, what you recognize or hope to recognize as the true” (1992d:
18). Coetzee has thus long defended, and continues to defend, not only the inevitability of fiction in the truth-making process, but also its value.
Though his comments have a great deal less attention from critics, and no one has yet compared the interviews and critical writing of the two men with regards to the question of self-representation, Auster has on a number of occasions expressed sentiments similar to
Coetzee’s, and has similarly contemplated the dialectic between reality and fiction, particularly with regards to writing the self, that has so vexed and fascinated Coetzee. Auster has said: “[a]ll writers draw on their lives to write their books; to a greater or lesser degree, every novel is autobiographical. What is interesting, however, is how the work of the imagination intersects with reality” (in McCaffery and Gregory 2013: 17). In an interview with Michael Wood in
2003, Auster writes of his attraction to books that “double back”,6 suggesting that by disrupting the conventional form of realism and drawing attention to their own artifice, these kinds of texts may in fact have a higher “truth” value and further implicate and involve the reader.
I was always drawn to books that doubled back on themselves, that brought you into the world of the book even as the book was taking you into the world… They posit the world as an illusion, which more traditional forms of narrative don’t – and once you accept the ‘unreality’ of the enterprise, it paradoxically enhances the truth of the
6 He also incidentally in this collection lists Coetzee as an author he is currently reading and influenced by (Wood 2013: 146) 17
story. The words aren’t written in stone by an invisible author-god. They represent the efforts of a flesh-and-blood human being and this is very compelling. The reader becomes a participant in the unfolding of the story – not a detached observer. (Wood 2013: 132)
Auster’s comments here about how the truth of a story may paradoxically be enhanced by strategies of anti-illusionism are of particular interest in this thesis, as are his comments about the way that such texts position the reader as participant and hence make the work more interactive. In this thesis, especially in Chapter 1, I will examine how Coetzee and Auster undermine many traditional values of autobiography through foregrounding the process of the text’s own creation and moving away from the notion that “truth to fact” (Coetzee 1992d: 18) is the most valuable claim to truth in autobiography.
It could be argued that the sentiments Auster expresses above, about how self-reflexive texts may in fact have a higher “truth” value, and Coetzee’s comments about the impossibility of ever accessing a singular truth of self, are evidence of the both authors’ postmodern tendencies. Despite their reputation as gamesmen, both Auster and Coetzee have repudiated a straightforward characterisation of their work as postmodern, and have expressed ambivalence towards the label postmodernism/postmodern. In his introduction to Doubling the Point,
Attwell describes the meaning of the collection’s title, and Coetzee’s relationship to postmodernism by explaining:
“Doubling the point” refers, more broadly, to the reflexive self-consciousness which characterizes all Coetzee’s work… For although Coetzee might well be described as working within the culture of postmodernism, he certainly does not do so in the spirit of abandonment that seems to typify much of what goes under the name. (1992: 3)
As Attwell suggests, the “anti-illusionism” of “reflexive consciousness” is a position that
Coetzee is “comfortable with” (1992d: 27), however, it is also, in Coetzee’s words, an 18
“impasse” (1992d: 27). Coetzee says, “[a]nti-illusionism – displaying the tricks you are using instead of hiding them – is a common ploy of postmodernism. But it the end there is only so much mileage to be got out of the ploy” (1992d: 27). Hence what Coetzee calls “anti- illusionism” might be seen as a response to the doubts and uncertainties about writing and questions about authenticity and who has authority to speak, however, it is by no means an answer to these concerns. As he playfully and humorously writes to Kurtz in The Good Story,
“[a]lthough, like most well brought up people nowadays, I am careful to avoid the impolite locution ‘transcendent truth’, I confess that privately I continue to distinguish between things that really happened in the past and things that did not really happen” (2015: 74). Coetzee is only too aware of the need to adhere to the aesthetic demands of postmodernism and that terms like “transcendent truth” are not politically correct in criticism and philosophy since the advent of postmodernism, but is also aware of its limits, and seems to be mocking its excesses in this exchange.
It can be argued that Coetzee’s formal experimentation and the many ambiguities and paradoxes that emerge in his work may not be in the spirit of postmodern abandonment and trickery, but rather the efforts of an author grappling with and unsure about what it is he is trying to say. As Peter Shillingsburg argues, it is possible that Coetzee includes puzzles, questions and ambiguities in his fiction not because he is trying to ‘trick’ the reader, but because he doesn’t have the answer to all of the questions that he poses (2006: 16). As Coetzee himself suggests, he is “as divided, undecided and confused as can be” (Coetzee and Kurtz
2015: 69). Shillingsburg writes that Coetzee’s method is to show that “he is groping for answers rather than hiding his answers or teasing us” (2006: 16). Shillingsburg gives the example of the eponymous character in Elizabeth Costello, whose views are often equated with 19
Coetzee’s. He argues that Elizabeth, both as a person and a writer, seems frequently “ill at ease because she is at a loss to say exactly how she feels or what she thinks” (2006: 14). Like the
Elizabeth character in Elizabeth Costello, Coetzee and the selves he depicts in his autobiographies are often uncertain and often struggle to communicate exactly what they think and feel. Coetzee’s purpose in presenting questions, problems and paradoxes that do not have clear answers, according to Shillingsburg, encourages “greater freedom and personal responsibility” amongst his readers (2006: 14). In disavowing his own authority and the unity of his authorial voice and autobiographical self, Coetzee insists on greater involvement and responsibility on the part of his reader.
Similarly, Auster has said that he does not necessarily perceive his work as postmodern, and that he feels that his reputation as a trickster or a gamesman is misplaced. In an interview with
Michael Silverblatt, Auster said that “the idea that I am some cold, calculating gamesman… is something that I hear quite often about my work and it surprises me” (austerologist 2009). In a
2003 interview with Carole Burns, Auster repudiated the common classification of his work as postmodern, saying:
As for the postmodern question, it’s a term that doesn’t mean anything to me. People keep using it, but I don’t truly understand what it means. And I don’t put labels on what I do. If other people want to do that, that’s their privilege, but I’m not interested in looking at myself from the outside. I admire Pynchon and Barth, but I don’t feel my work has much to do with theirs. (2013: 131)
Whilst Coetzee, in his fiction writing, is “groping for answers” (Shillingsburg 2006: 16), Auster has described his writing process as “slowly blundering [his] way towards consciousness”
(Wood 2013: 145), suggesting that what may be perceived as narrative tricks in his writing is rather his attempt at illustrating or exposing the way he grapples to find what it is he wants to
20 say, emphasising process over product in his writing, or as he describes it, breaking down the walls of the text to “expose the plumbing” (1997b: 308).
Perhaps it is this shared publicly avowed ambivalence towards truth, reality, illusionism and anti-illusionism that has seen Coetzee and Auster interested in firstly, writing to each other, and secondly, publishing this correspondence. As I mentioned earlier in this introduction,
Coetzee and Auster have throughout their careers been interested in autobiography. Though
Coetzee did not publish his first full ostensible autobiography until 1997 with Boyhood, he discussed the genre in great detail with Attwell in Doubling the Point (Coetzee 1992d: 17), a volume which also republished his 1985 essay “Confessional and Double Thoughts: Tolstoy,
Rousseau, Dostoyevsky” (1992c). Doubling the Point also includes the 1984 autobiographical fragment “Remembering Texas” (1992g). In 2002 Coetzee published his sequel to Boyhood,
Youth and in 2009, Summertime. These three texts were then republished in 2011 as a “trilogy” of “fictionalized memoir”7 with the title Scenes from Provincial Life. Since then, Coetzee has also published the previously discussed correspondences with Auster (2013) and Kurtz (2015).
Auster, similarly, has a career-long interest in the genre, with his first published piece of prose being The Invention of Solitude in 1982, a non-fictional book written in response to and about the death of his father. He published his second autobiography Hand to Mouth in 1997, and most recently published Winter Journal (2012), and its companion volume, Report from the Interior
(2013). It is possible that the recognition of their shared philosophical attraction to writing the self, with all its possibilities and limitations, is one of the reasons Coetzee and Auster participated in and published an autobiographical exercise like Here and Now.
7 Dustjacket for U.K. hardcover edition. 21
Auster, Coetzee and the Limits of Autobiography
As I have suggested, not only do Coetzee and Auster share an interest in autobiography, but there are many parallels in the way they approach the genre, which is the primary subject of this thesis. While both authors obviously see autobiography as a valuable and important exercise, as demonstrated through their return to the form, both are aware of its limitations and the problems of writing self, and have expressed some similar ideas about the distance that emerges between the self of writing and the historical or biographical self.
The limits and problems of autobiography as a genre have been well represented in criticism.
The first problem haranguing the genre is the perceived narcissism of the enterprise. “Self- absorption, we are told, is the principal preoccupation of our age,” writes William Gass in his essay on autobiography in an age of narcissism (1994: 43). To write autobiography is an inherently narcissistic exercise, according to Gass, as “[t]he autobiographer thinks of himself as having led a life so important it needs celebration, and of himself as sufficiently skilled in rendering as to render it rightly” (1994: 45). He writes that “[t]he autobiographer tends to do partials, to skip the dull parts and circle the pits of embarrassment. Autobiographers flush before examining their stools” (1994: 45).
As Gass’s comments strongly suggest, the genre of autobiography is thought to have such inherent ontological limitation that any self-respecting writer who chooses to write about him or herself in the autobiographical mode must not only be aware of these limitations, but must also express their awareness of these limitations in the writing of the said autobiography. Paul
22
Sheehan has argued that the impulse to write autobiography is inevitably accompanied by immodesty, egocentrism and a need for self-justification and understanding (2016: 452).
In addition to the traps and lures of egocentrism, the process of writing self, as several critics have noted, is one which becomes overwhelmed by knowledge of the very inauthenticity of that written self, and as I discussed earlier in this introduction, a self-defeating dialectic of alienation inevitably accompanies any desire to represent oneself autobiographically (Felski
1989: 108). Gertrude Stein has observed of the writing of autobiography: “you do not really believe yourself,” things “never sound right” and that in autobiography “you are of course never yourself” (in Smith and Watson 2010: 21). Furthermore, writing autobiography, especially from the position of celebrity author, as Auster and Coetzee most certainly are, brings a corresponding publicness to any enunciations of self. As Thomas Nagel has commented in his collection essays on concealment and disclosure: “[t]he public gaze is inhibiting because… it brings into effect expressive constraints and requirements of self- presentation that are strongly incompatible with the natural expression of strong or intimate feelings” (2002: 17-18). The publicness of authorial autobiography and the doubling or schism of self that may occur in the writing of such texts could be perceived as one of the many limitations of the genre, leading to a perceived inauthenticity. Loren Glass has argued that
“autobiographies of celebrated authors explicitly dwell on the tension between private creation and public appropriation” (2004: 7), reflecting on the paradox of the author who must market his or her personal life to a public audience. Similarly, Mutlu Konuk Blassing has written that authorial autobiography “represents a self-examination that is at the same time public and private…the hero of autobiography is the paradoxical private-person-as-public-hero” (1977: xv). 23
The impossibility of writing an authentic self is one that Brian McHale (2004: 200) finds best illustrated in Jorge Luis Borges’ “Borges and I”. In Borges short story, “the inauthenticity of the self that emerges in and through writing” (McHale 2004: 200) is represented through a strained relationship between the first-person narrator and “Borges” the famous writer, a figure who the narrator both is and is not. The doing and experiencing “I” becomes a separate self from the self of writing, and the private and living self emerges as different from the public self. The “I” character comments on the increasing distance he feels from Borges when he comments, “I recognize myself less in his books than in many others or in the laborious strumming of a guitar” (1962: 246). In his 2002 Nobel Prize address, entitled “He and His
Man”, Coetzee presents a similar metaphor, perhaps finding inspiration in Borges, for the vast differences that emerge between the experiencing, private self and the public, writerly self. In this highly figurative address, Coetzee “reflects on the spaces of intimacy and distance between the self-of-writing and the writer’s historical-biographical being” (Attwell 2010: 218), using the characters of Robinson Crusoe and Daniel Defoe, figures he had appropriated in his earlier novel, Foe (1986). Coetzee describes the ‘self of writing’, the Crusoe figure, and the historical being of the writer (the Defoe figure) as being like:
[D]eckhands toiling in the rigging, the one on a ship sailing west, the other on a ship sailing east. Their ships pass close, close enough to hail. But the seas are rough, the weather is stormy: their eyes lashed by the spray, their hands burned by the cordage, they pass each other by, too busy even to wave. (2002a)
This simile seems to suggest an unbridgeable divide between the ‘man’ represented in writing, and the ‘he’ who authors the text, reflecting Coetzee’s self-conscious relationship with life writing and the life and self it claims to represent. Coetzee’s insights also reflect the views of prominent life writing critics like James Olney, who recognises the limits imposed on any 24 claims to represent an intimate or authentic self, when he writes that autobiography can only ever bear a “synecdochic relationship” to the whole life and the self (1972: 118).
The gap between the self of writing and the experiencing self is perhaps further exacerbated by the public nature of celebrity authorship, as the public persona of the “author” acquires its own industry which may have less and less to do with the personhood of the author. As Hanna
Kyllonen argues, “[a]s celebrity autobiographies must negotiate between the public face and the ‘real’ self, they can never describe the person as a whole, unified being” (2012: 46). As previously mentioned, Coetzee is famous for his reticence, has a reputation for privacy, for not giving interviews and for not turning up to receive awards. Barnard argues there is a paradox at the core of Coetzee’s public image, as even his reticence and elusiveness has become part of his public image. The reading public’s “knowing” of things like Coetzee’s reputation for privacy means that in some sense this desire for privacy ceases to be an entirely private matter and rather becomes part of his public image (Barnard 2013: 442), and even perhaps contributes to an increased interest in his personal life, suggesting that the more well-known an author is, the more difficult it may be to control or manage one’s privacy and public image, as a desire for privacy may paradoxically come to constitute the public’s perception of a personality.8
Interestingly, Coetzee makes reference to his own public reputation in Here and Now, writing to
Auster: “[i]nterrogation is not a medium I do well in. I am too brief in my responses where
8 Moran argues a “meet the author” culture is symptomatic of contemporary capitalism (2000: 79) and those authors known for privacy and being reclusive often attract a higher value to their rare moments of public exposure. Lorraine Mary York argues, “[t]he celebrity of the reclusive author is entirely in keeping with the logic of monopoly capitalism” (2007: 125). It is a function and symptom of capitalism, she argues, because it provides another example “of the increasing value of scarce commodities” (2007: 125). The celebrity of reclusive authors also reflects what Bourdieu has called an “interest in disinterest” (1993: 40), which could certainly be said of Coetzee, whose refusal to come to conferences, award ceremonies and to give interviews often “delight, rather than disappoints” his fans (Barnard 2013: 442).
25 brevity (clippedness) is all too easily misread as a sign of irritation or anger” (2013: 211). If we consider Shillingsburg’s suggestion that in Coetzee’s fiction, he often includes ambiguities not because he is trying to trick his audience but because he is groping for answers (2006: 14), it is perhaps possible to read uncertainty or apprehension, rather than hostility, in Coetzee’s often terse and/or elusive comments in interviews and public appearances. Indeed, Coetzee seems to be suggesting this in Here and Now: that, like Elizabeth Costello, he is not necessarily hiding or evading, but ill at ease, “at a loss to say exactly how [he] feels or what [he] thinks”
(Shillingsburg 2006: 14).
Coetzee has made reference to the culture of celebrity in Summertime and Elizabeth Costello. In
Summertime and in Elizabeth Costello, the questions of celebrity and the expectation of public performance of private experience and private consciousness form a large part of the conflict in the narrative. A weary, jet-lagged Elizabeth Costello arrives in Williamstown, Pennsylvania to receive a large literary prize that has been awarded to her. “What exactly do they want from me?” (2003: 2) Costello asks her son, before lamenting, “I should have asked them to forget the ceremony and send the cheque in the mail”, to which her son replies, “[i]t doesn’t work that way… If you accept the money, you have to go through with the show” (2003: 3). For
Elizabeth Costello, indulging the small critical industry that surrounds through interviews and public appearances is par for the course of being a celebrity novelist. A similar notion is raised in Summertime when Coetzee’s fictional biographer Mr Vincent asks, “[i]sn’t a well-known public figure in our common cultural life not to some extent, public property?” (2009: 5), reiterating Nagel’s contention that in our culture, a lack of privacy is and the expectation of public performance and is perceived as part of the lot of fame (2002: 3).
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Similar sentiments can be found in Auster’s interviews and writing, as he also shares an awareness of the limits of intimate exposure in writing and the possibility of conveying an authentic self. Though Auster does not have the same reputation for reticence that Coetzee has, he speaks of interviews and public appearances as an obligation in which he would prefer not to engage. In conversation with Wood, Auster says, “I would prefer not to say a word to anybody. But I do feel an obligation to my publisher to cooperate on a small scale… But I try to keep it to the absolute minimum” (in Wood 2013: 130). Despite his feelings about interviews, Auster has spoken quite candidly about his thoughts about writing, his readership and his relation to the public. He too feels highly self-conscious about the practice of writing and the constant thought of his reading public. Auster says, “there must be something in me that feels like sitting down to write my thoughts about something is somehow public property”
(in Contat 2013: 66), and has said of the discomfort he feels keeping a diary, “I have never kept a diary, for example, I have never been able to. I have always felt a very strange sense of self-consciousness about trying to write a diary” (in Contat 2013: 65). As I discuss in detail in
Chapter 1, Auster reflects in Report from the Interior on the way that it was only through writing letters that he was able to keep a journal as a young man, suggesting a sense of audience and purpose, and an externalising other, is necessary to his project of writing self. As I go on to discuss in this introduction and the following chapter, this sense of an externalising other and a dialogue between the biographical and writerly self is written in to the very style and form of
Auster’s Winter Journal and Report from the Interior, through the second-person address to self in each of these later works.
The tension between the self that writes and the self that lives, and the impact of a sense of audience on intimations of self is also explored by Auster in his fiction and in his discussions 27 of his fiction. When asked why he introduces the possibility that his audience read City of Glass as a disguised autobiography, and why he plays with the relationship between fiction and reality in an overt way, Auster responds:
I think it stemmed from a desire to implicate myself in the machinery of the book. I don’t mean my autobiographical self, I mean my author self, that mysterious other who lives inside me and puts my name on the covers of books. What I was hoping to do, in effect was take my name off the cover and put it inside the story. I wanted to open up the process, to break down walls, to expose the plumbing. There’s a strange kind of trickery involved in the writing and reading of novels, after all. You see Leo Tolstoy’s name on the cover of War and Peace, but once you open the book, Leo Tolstoy disappears. It’s as though no one has really written the words you’re reading. I find this “no one” terribly fascinating – for there’s finally a profound truth to it, it has everything to do with how stories are written. For the author of a novel can never be sure where any of it comes from. The self that exists in the world – the self whose name appears on the covers of books – is finally not the same self who writes the book. (McCaffery and Gregory 2013: 27-28)
Auster’s notion of a difference between the “self who lives in the world” and the “self who writes the book” has strong parallels with Coetzee’s notion of “He” and “His man”, as well as the “Borges and I” of Borges’ story of that name. Auster also clearly feels an ambivalence towards the nameless “no one” of writing. On the one hand, he sees that there is a “profound truth” to it. On the other hand, he deliberately circumvents it by implicating himself within the machinery of many of his books. The schism between the writerly self and the self of the world, the public and the private self, and the ambivalent feelings that might emerge towards the two selves is one that James Meek suggests bears strong parallels to Dostoyevsky’s short novel The Double, where the clerk Golyadkin finds himself outshone and overshadowed by a man who looks exactly like him, but is confident, popular and assertive, his exact opposite in temperament, which Meek suggests might be allegorical for “the writer standing back and watching the grotesque spectacle of himself being successful in public, him and yet not him”
(2009). This idea of a spectacle of self, doubling, doppelgängers, impostors and doubts about
28 the ways one can access and represent truths about self all emerge and re-emerge throughout the corpus of both Auster’s and Coetzee’s work. It is also something they discuss in Here and
Now, as both men become victims of a man who publishes false interviews with celebrity authors on his website (2013: 138-145)9. In Auster’s The Locked Room (1988), the narrator, a successful widely published author receives some unpublished manuscripts from the wife of his estranged childhood friend, the reclusive author Fanshawe, who has been missing for several months and is presumed dead. The narrator realises the genius of Fanshawe’s work and goes on to publish them. They receive great popular and literary acclaim and Fanshawe becomes posthumously famous. Several weeks later, the narrator receives a letter from
Fanshawe, thanking him for his success, but threatening to kill him should he ever try to contact him again. The narrator does not heed this warning, but rather addicted to the
Fanshawe industry he has created, resolves to find his old friend and kill him so that he might continue to push the Fanshawe bandwagon that he has created. “There was never any question of telling the truth” (1988: 291), he says, “Fanshawe had to be dead, or else the book would make no sense” (1988: 291). The narrator who constantly wants to “impress people with empty signs of (his ambition)” becomes fascinated with the reclusive Fanshawe, who seems to be effortlessly brilliant, but who never has any desire for fame and does not need the attention of the public to motivate him to write. The narrator becomes haunted by thoughts of
Fanshawe’s superiority as a writer and becomes intensely insecure in his own celebrity.
Fanshawe, who never releases a word about himself to the general public, has his private self
9 Auster and Coetzee discuss in their letters, dated April 7 2010 and April 17 2010 respectively, both being victims of one Tommaso Debenedetti, an Italian man who was discovered to have been publishing falsified interviews with well-known authors. Of this revelation Coetzee writes, “we live in an era in which it is really only the law of libel that holds back would-be writers like Debenedetti from turning us… into characters in their fictions… If projects such as this flourish, then ultimately the pseudoselves that have been created for us… will come to reign in the public consciousness, while our “real” selves and our “true” selves will be known only to a few friends. The triumph of the simulacra” (2013: 143). 29 constructed and disseminated by the publishing industry. Both writers are trapped and cannot escape their public selves nor contain their private selves.
In The Brooklyn Follies, the protagonist Nathan Glass comments that “[a]ll men contain several men inside them, and most of us bounce from one self to another without ever knowing who we are” (2005: 122-3), commenting on the unstable and non-continuous nature of self that is constituted through language. This insight is one which Helen Buss has argued is central to poststructuralist understandings of self. “The self has no existence outside of language,” Buss writes, and because of the slipperiness of language, no real or individual face is possible (1991:
2). Furthermore, in his first autobiography, The Invention of Solitude, Auster comments on the synecdochal nature of the self created in and through life writing and the limits placed on any form of confession when he writes: “[t]he pen will never be able to move fast enough to write down every word discovered in the space of memory. Some things have been lost forever”
(1982: 139). Again in The Locked Room, the third novella in his New York Trilogy, the narrator similarly explores a tension between public and private authorship, saying that “[e]very life is inexplicable… No matter how many facts are told, no matter how many details are given, the essential thing resists telling…” (1988: 247). This “essential thing” which we can read as a core or intimate truth that defies definition thus becomes to the protagonist as evasive as the core truth of self in another person. Like Coetzee’s metaphor of the two selves as “deckhands” passing each other by on a rough and choppy sea, Auster’s protagonist recognises the difficulty of constructing an authentic self in writing: “[a]s our lives go on, we become more and more opaque to ourselves” (1988: 249), the narrator reflects. The idea of the author protagonist becoming increasingly opaque to himself goes against the notion that autobiography is a literature of self-discovery. Rather it illustrates what Paul Jay has identified as an ever-present 30
“ontological gap” between the self who is writing and the self-reflexive protagonist of the autobiographical work (1984: 29). As Jaroslaw Hetman argues:
It seems that to Auster, the mechanism of fictionalizing his own life is the same as telling any other story; biographical accounts are told indirectly, much like his fictional writers tell other people’s stories. Auster is aware of this indirectness; the gap that opens up between the self and the other helps to understand Auster’s notion of being consciously immersed in other people’s stories. (2016: 131)
The very presence of an ontological gap in writing self perhaps necessitates an indirectness in the way this self is represented in writing, and as Hetman suggests, this may involve using fictional styles and structures to convey biographical details. Furthermore, despite the inevitability of an ontological gap in any attempt to write a life, both Auster and Coetzee still believe the writing life does not preclude any possibility for truth or intimacy to occur. Rather, they explore and expose these gaps through reflecting them in the style and structure of their life writing, mirroring the notion that, as Coetzee suggests, “our engagements [in fiction, life and life writing] are with a constantly changing interplay between shadows (fictions) and glimpses of the real” (Coetzee and Kurtz 2015: 142).
The notion of an ontological gap emerging in the process of confession resonates with
Derrida’s notion of “otobiography”. For Derrida, the ‘auto’ of ‘autobiography’ is deliberately transformed into ‘oto’– the ear. By this he means the necessary passage through the ear which occurs in any autobiographical discourse, as it is by way of the ear that the teller and scripter of autobiographical writing hears oneself speak (Derrida 1985: 49). In writing autobiography, or rather ‘otobiography’, Derrida argues that “I speak myself to myself in a certain manner, and my ear is thus immediately plugged into my discourse and my writing” (1985: 49). In this process of listening to oneself, however, the self that “hears” becomes the other and “it is the
31 ear of the other that signs” (1985: 51). Derrida hence argues that “the ear of the other says me to me and constitutes the autos of my autobiography” (1985: 51). Derrida’s contention that the autos of autobiography is circulated through the ear of the other has strong implications for the notion of a relationship and a dialogue between not only the different selves that constitute the autos of autobiography, but also the writer and his or her imagined reader.
Both Auster and Coetzee have spoken of the kinds of interactions with the other that take place in the processes of reading and writing. According to Auster, books are:
[P]robably the most intimate place where two human beings can meet… It’s the only time we really go into the mind of a stranger, and we find our common humanity doing this. So the book doesn’t only belong to the writer, it belongs to the reader as well, and the two of you make the book together. (Capen 1996: 103)
Similarly, despite his hesitations about ever accessing the truth of oneself or the truth of another, and his insistence that the best we can hope for is the interactions of fictions from which glimpses of the real may occur (Coetzee and Kurtz 2015: 142), Coetzee believes that writing can be a powerful and intimate dialogue between reader and writer. In The Good Story, he differentiates between “dead” reading, in which one is reading begrudgingly and in an unengaged manner, with “living reading”, which he argues:
[I]nvolves finding one’s way into the voice that speaks from the page, the voice of the Other, and inhabiting that voice, so that you speak to yourself (your self) from outside yourself. The process is thus a dialogue of sorts, though an interior one. The art of the writer, an art that is nowhere to be studied though it can be picked up, lies in creating a shape (a phantasm capable of speech), and an entry point that will allow the reader to inhabit the phantasm. (Analogous to the dialogue between the reader and the reader’s fiction of the writer, in living reading, is the dialogue between the writer and the writer’s fiction of the reader that belongs to the experience of writing. That is to say, someone, some phantasm of the reader, is spoken to and speaks back as the words go down on the page. (2015: 179)
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Coetzee’s observations here about the reading and writing process in many ways mirror
Derrida’s understanding of the autos of autobiography being circulated through the ear of the other, in which some projection or phantasm of a listener is necessary to give an account of self an aesthetic shape. Coetzee is, however, talking about the act of reading, and imagines it similarly as finding one’s way into the voice of the other, speaking to oneself from outside of the self. Though Coetzee perceives the reader/writer relationship as another interaction of projected fictions (what Booth (1983) has called an “implied author” and Iser (1974) the
“implied reader”), it nonetheless has the capacity to be quite a powerful dialogue which enables one to “inhabit” other voices and speak to oneself from outside oneself (Coetzee and Kurtz
2015: 179). In this exchange, the reader is an ever-important interlocutor in the exchange of meaning, and the craft of the writer is the test of how effectively they might create a space in which the reader can enter the “phantasm”. In Auster’s depiction of reading as an “intimate” place, and one in which we find our “common humanity” (in Capen 2013: 103), he expresses his belief that reading is a dialogue in which the sense of the other and access to this other helps consolidate meaning. Coetzee is not willing to use terms like “common humanity”, rather he imagines the selves which engage as “phantasms” or projected “fictions” (2015: 179).
Nonetheless, he does share with Auster the belief that reading and writing involve an engagement with the other, and that the writer must create a shape that will enable the reader to engage in this dialogue. It thus appears that both authors view the act of writing and the act of reading as a space in which complex engagements with an other (or a projection of the other) occur. In this thesis (especially in Chapter 1), I explore this notion further and consider the ways that this engagement is reflected in the style of autre-biography.
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Late Style
As the majority of the works considered in this thesis are situated later in Coetzee and Auster’s oeuvre, the question of a “late style” is in many ways pertinent to my analysis. The term “late style” was coined by Adorno, who in his discussion of Beethoven’s late works observed:
The power of subjectivity in the late works of art is the irascible gesture with which it takes leave of the works themselves. It breaks their bonds, not in order to express itself, but in order, expressionless, to cast off the appearance of art. Of the works themselves it leaves only fragments behind, and communicates itself, like a cipher, only through the blank spaces from which it has disengaged itself. Touched by death, the hand of the master sets free the masses of material he used to form; its tears and fissures, witnesses to the finite powerlessness of the I confronted with Being. (2002: 566)
As Edward Said notes in his essay on Adorno, Beethoven’s late style for Adorno was defined by “its episodic character, its apparent disregard for its own continuity” (2006: 10). Following
Adorno, Said explores late style as a “kind of self-imposed exile from what is generally acceptable” (2006: 16), a “non-harmonious, non-serene tension, and above all, a sort of deliberately unproductive productiveness going against” (2006: 7, emphasis in original).
In Here and Now, Coetzee and Auster discuss the notion of “Late Style” and Said’s book on the subject, as well as Adorno’s preceding essay. Coetzee writes, “[i]t is not uncommon for writers, as they age, to get impatient with the so-called poetry of language and go for a more stripped- down style (“late style”)” (2013: 88). When Auster asks Coetzee to explain the notion of late style to him, Coetzee writes in reply:
In the case of literature, late style, to me, starts with an ideal of a simple, subdued, unornamented language and a concentration on questions of real import, even questions of life and death. Of course once you get beyond that starting point the writing itself takes over and leads you where it will. What you end up with may be anything but simple, anything but subdued. (2013: 97) 34
Coetzee’s understanding of “late style” suggests that playfulness becomes less pertinent in later works which involve themselves with questions of “real import” which may not weigh so heavily upon earlier works. Julian Murphet argues that Coetzee’s “late style” is a literature that exposes the fissures, the process of writing, in an open and often unresolved manner (2011:
86), containing what Adorno calls “irascible” gestures (2002: 566). Murphet argues it is a literature more corporeal, a literature “touched by death, and intimately so” (2011: 86), in which bodily disintegration mirrors a disintegration of the novel form. Despite their tendency towards anti-illusionism, Murphet suggests that Coetzee’s late works cannot be dismissed as mere metafiction, but rather have “a steely authorial resolve not to charm via synthesis and integration” (2011: 88). As Coetzee suggests to Auster, an author’s late style involves itself with questions of “real import... life and death” (2013: 97). Thus, while Coetzee’s late works could be considered metafictional, these works are arguably a metafiction to which quite weighty and humanist concerns are central. Murphet writes of Elizabeth Costello, Slow Man and Diary of a Bad
Year in his article, but suggests that Scenes from Provincial Life may also be considered as symptomatic of Coetzee’s late style, as in the final instalment, Summertime, “the dismantlement of the narrative discourse into a range of competing stances and voices further complicates the relative “closure” of the previous two works in that series” (2011: 89-90). Joshua Billings suggests that “deferred self-reflexivity” characterises Coetzee’s late style, “with the result that
Coetzee’s novels hesitate on the brink of narrative, unwilling – or unable – to cohere” (2009).
Part of Coetzee and Auster’s respective “late style” also appears to be a move towards more domestic, interpersonal, intersubjective subject matter. There is a sense of a shifting role of the artist, away from highly finished, resolved literature divorced from and critical of the masses
35 and the ordinary, towards a style that is more fragmentary, open, in which the domestic and the ordinary prevail.
Within Coetzee’s work itself, the idea of a “late style” is discussed. In Diary of a Bad Year, the protagonist J.C. – whom we are encouraged to think of as a fictional alter ego for John
Coetzee – reflects on his shifting perceptions about the role of art, the relationship between art and the masses, and the “questions of real import” that Coetzee suggests to Auster are symptomatic of late style (2013: 97).
As a young man, I never for a moment allowed myself to doubt that only from a self disengaged from the mass and critical of the mass could true art emerge. Whatever art has come from my hand has in one way or another expressed and even glorified in this disengagement. But what sort of art has that been, in the end? Art that is not great- souled, as the Russians would say, fails to celebrate life, lacks love. (2007: 138)
J.C.’s comments in this essay reflect Adorno’s and Said’s arguments that an author or artist, in the latter stage of his or her career, might be concerned less with a sense of formal and aesthetic coherence, mastery and continuity, and the sense of textual integrity that might perhaps be associated with “true art… disengaged from the mass” (2007: 138). Rather, authors in their late works might direct their attention toward questions of life and death. J.C. again raises the question of late style later in Diary, writing:
Growing detachment from the world is of course the experience of many writers as they grow older, grow cooler or colder. The texture of their prose becomes thinner, their treatment of character and action more schematic. The syndrome is usually ascribed to a waning of creative power; it is no doubt connected with the attenuation of physical powers, above all the power of desire… Yet, from inside the same development may bear quite a different interpretation: as a liberation, a clearing of the mind to take on more important tasks. (2007: 193)
As J.C. suggests, there is a sense in which the eschewing of convention and aesthetic expectations associated with later style might also be a source of freedom, a pass to explore 36 more vexing and imperative questions. J.C. suggests that Tolstoy, writing in old age, “must have felt he was ridding himself of the shackles that had enslaved him to appearances, enabling him to face directly the one question that truly engage his soul: how to live” (2007: 193).
Some reviewers have also commented on what might constitute Auster’s own “late style”, which could also be described as touched by mortality and exposing its own process, its fissures. “Auster is an author famed for devising complex literary structures that deliver moments of bedazzlement”, comments Lilian Pizzichini in her review of Winter Journal, commenting that there seems to be a change in his narrative intent (2012). She comments that
Auster’s “inventive capacities have paled” and that instead he “focuses on domestic relationships” (2012). As early as 2004, Auster commented that he felt gripped by a “sudden sense of encroaching mortality” and that this was reflected in his tendency to write about
“debilitated men” (O’Hagan 2004). Whilst it is a comparison of Auster’s and Coetzee’s ostensibly autobiographical/ autre-biographical works which is the subject of this thesis, the fact that the majority of the works analysed (Youth, Summertime, Winter Journal, Report from the
Interior) could be described as being “late” works within the respective author’s oeuvres means that the thematic and formal aspects of “late style” will be considered in relation to these words, most notably in Chapter 1 with regards to the lack of formal resolution in some of
Coetzee’s and Auster’s later autre-biographical works (Summertime, Report from the Interior) as well as in my discussion of the thematic concerns of mortality and the body in Chapter 3.
37
Autre-biography
Philippe Lejeune argues in his widely cited and highly influential essay “The Autobiographical
Pact” that for trust and a sense of disclosure to occur between the writer and reader of autobiography, the work must adhere to the tacit understanding that the author, narrator and subject of an autobiographical work are identical, as signified by the signature which should belong to the author and protagonist (1989: 5) and most often the use of the first-person pronoun which suggests that the author, subject and narrator are one and the same (1989: 25).
Though as I argue in detail in my first chapter, the first-person narrative voice which has become synonymous with “straight” (Coetzee 1992d: 17) autobiography, or autobiography which adheres more faithfully to the autobiographical pact, can itself be said to be a fiction, as it conceals and attempts to unify the multiple and often conflicting discourses of self in autobiography.
Perhaps the most famous critic of Lejeune, Paul de Man, challenges any notion that the signature on autobiography can be positioned as “contractual” and the reader positioned as the
“judge” of an autobiography’s veracity. De Man suggests rather, that selves become disfigured and defaced in the writing of autobiography, arguing that the rhetorical device of prosopopoeia is the most illustrative way to describe autobiography, since the act of writing autobiography – using language to construct the self – is ultimately an act of debasement, which entails the
“taking away of faces, with face and deface, figure, figuration and disfiguration” (1979: 926)
For de Man, any attempt to convey the self autobiographically will ultimately result in substitutions for that self (1979: 921). More recently, Linda Anderson has described 38 autobiography in the light of Lacan’s mirror stage in which “[t]he subject, through autobiography, strives towards the false symmetry of the mirror, unified self which can only ever be a fiction” (2011: 66). The notion that any unity of self that may be constructed in an autobiography is a fiction, and that all selves have a narrative construction, informs Coetzee’s claim that the best that can be hoped for in autobiography is a “fiction of the truth” (1999a).
As Boehmer argues, “[t]he ‘real self’ must be created through contrivance; truth becomes a product of story” (2016: 447).
As the above discussion suggests, it is well established that there is a definitive split between the self who lives, the self who tells and the self who writes autobiographical confession, and that there are necessary “fictions of truth” that emerge in this exchange. For Auster and
Coetzee, the schism of self that occurs through the process of writing autobiography does not mean that representing this self is impossible, rather that more inventive and process-oriented forms must be found. The writer must find “a shape” and an “entry point” in which the reader can enter the kinds of interior dialogues which reading might facilitate (Coetzee 2015: 179). In this thesis, I suggest that both Coetzee and Auster write autre-biography, to use Coetzee’s term and that autre-biography is a useful shape or entry point through which readers can access the interior dialogues that the process of writing self entails. In an interview with Attwell in 2006,
Attwell says to Coetzee:
Your own autobiographical practice would seem to confirm an aspect of de Man’s argument, in which he points out that when one tries to put the historical self into writing, what emerges, inevitably, is a substitute for that self. Would you agree at a basic representational level, all autobiography is, in fact, autre-biography? If so, is your decision to write autobiography in the third person a case of making this process explicit? (2006: 216, emphasis in original)
39
To this, Coetzee replies, “[y]es, all autobiography is autre-biography, but what is more important is where one goes from there” (2006: 216). All autobiography is autre-biography for
Coetzee, because of the necessary “substitute for self” that emerges in writing one’s life. It is what the author does in terms of form and style to acknowledge this substitution which is, however, of interest.
As I suggested earlier in this introduction, Auster’s own trilogy of works on the self, The
Invention of Solitude, Winter Journal and Report from the Interior, as well as his 1997 künstlerroman,
Hand to Mouth, might also be considered autre-biographies (Boehmer 2016: 437-438) which explicitly draw attention to their own process. Because of the publicly avowed appreciation of each other’s work, their similarly expressed sentiments about the schism between the self that writes and the self that lives, the role that fiction has within autobiographical enterprise and their shared eschewal of third-person narration, there is substantial cause to include Auster’s interventions into the life writing genre as autre-biography. Furthermore, as I have mentioned previously, it is timely and important that Auster and Coetzee’s autre-biography be studied in dialogue with one another to explore the manifold ways in which writing about oneself as an other might be enacted. There has not yet been a thesis or monograph which examines the two authors’ life writing works in dialogue with one another, making the discussions that follow in the subsequent chapters both timely and original.
Autre-biography is a form of life writing which makes the process of writing a life part of the story of that life, and emphasises a sense of the dialogic and the use of a sense of the other to focalise and articulate the self. As I mentioned previously, representing the self in this way has
40 been often perceived as intending to deceive the reader in some ways, and to obfuscate the autobiographical self. John Sutherland suggests that autre-biography is a:
[B]ent genre in which, like alloy, the elements of personal biography and impersonal fiction are so artfully intermingled that they defy disentangling. Is it a dead end [?] An interesting dead end in my view, but one should never underestimate novelists’ ingenuity in escaping the traps they set themselves. Like the magician, their next trick is always impossible. (2012: 730)
I disagree with Sutherland’s contention that autre-biography is a dead end, and suggest that
“tricks” and “traps” do not aptly describe the very process-orientated nature of the form. Both
Coetzee and Auster have emphasised their interest in exposing and exploring the process of their writing in their writing. Coetzee writes his early notebooks: “[a]fter writing 36 pages, I have come absolutely to the end of my ability to keep up with the charade. I have no interest in telling stories; it is the process of storytelling that interests me” (in Sheehan 2016: 454). Auster, meanwhile, says, “I find the book in the process of writing it” (in Wood 2013: 130) and that works which expose their own process in their construction position the reader as “a participant in the unfolding of the story – not a detached observer” (in Wood 2013: 132).
Auster also insists on the necessity of the other in focalising the self when he says “[y]ou find your essence only in relation to others. That’s the great paradox” (in Prime 2013: 109). In Here and Now, Coetzee writes to Auster, “I must say that I get impatient with fiction that doesn’t try something that hasn’t been tried before, preferably with the medium itself” (2013: 165). It is possible to claim that autre-biography is an attempt to do something new with the medium of life writing/autobiography. Though it is not a style without precursors,10 it is clear that in their autre-biography both Coetzee and Auster make efforts to do something new with the medium,
10 Many have identified precursors to Coetzee’s autre-biography. Coetzee himself offers up Roland Barthes (Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes) while several have compared it to James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Yeoh 2010, Lenta 2003, Sheehan 2016). 41 to explore different ways of conveying and foregrounding the process that is often veiled within the autobiographical enterprise.
In this thesis, I draw largely on life writing scholarship and consider how the insights and contributions of this field resonate in relation to Coetzee’s and Auster’s own writing and interviews on the subject, as well as their autre-biographical works. I argue that autre- biography is a process-oriented means of writing self, which acknowledges the limits of autobiography and seeks to acknowledge these limits in its style and form. I suggest that autre- biography, whilst being autobiography at a distance, is not necessarily a postmodern narrative game or a trick, but rather a style and an approach which seeks to involve the reader as an
“active participant” (Auster in Wood 2013: 132) in the writing of self, creating opportunities for intimate connection with the selves being presented.
In Chapter 1, I argue (as have several before me) that the conflation between the first-person narrative voice and a perception of truth, honesty and intimacy in autobiography is a misconception. I suggest that whilst Auster’s and Coetzee’s autre-biographies consciously subvert the conventions associated with “straight” autobiography (Coetzee 1992d: 18), this does not deny the texts’ status as confessional or their having any kind of truth value. Coetzee and Auster have both drawn attention to the dialogic potential of autobiographical writing, and
I would suggest that rather than being perceived as tricks or games, the inevitable points of view that emerge on the self might, in some instances, be better realised and articulated through third and second-person narration. Egan rightly argues that a dialogic style in self- revelation does not necessarily detract from the candour of the revelation, but rather reflects a
“deflection of attention from product to process in autobiographical writing” (1999: 2). As 42
Auster suggests, this emphasis on process over product may create a more active role for the reader, thus may in turn provide potential for feelings of closeness and immediacy (in Wood
2013: 132). The disavowal of the “I” in autobiography also can construct an authorial self that is less autonomous, more assailable and vulnerable in its division, eschewing the sense of authority and unity traditionally associated with the first-person autobiographical self. As Chris
Danta writes, “[h]ow does one write without authority? In a sense it is by writing autobiography, by othering oneself through writing, by writing in the third rather than first person” (2011: xix).
In Chapter 2, I argue that narcissism and exhibitionism are common charges levelled against writers of autobiography, and that failure, as Sheehan suggests, may be “a way of negating, or at least dampening, the triumphalist reflexes of the genre” (2016: 457). I also argue that the theme of failure in Coetzee’s and Auster’s autre-biographical work mirrors the idea of the failures or limits of the autobiographical form. Failure and self-erasure in Youth, Summertime,
Hand to Mouth and Report from the Interior also act as means to further challenge the authority of the authorial, autobiographical voice.
In Chapter 3, I explore how Coetzee and Auster both use the body in their autre-biography
(most specifically Winter Journal and Summertime) to further dethrone the author and emphasise the distance between “the internal and external manifestations of the writing self” (Egan 1999:
2). Through emphasising the body in their works, I argue that Coetzee and Auster seek to challenge the idea of the autonomous, unified and unassailable self most typically associated with Western, masculine autobiography. Furthermore, I suggest that the presence of the body in these works is a means to further inscribe vulnerability into the texts. It also works to 43 remind the reader of the complex relationship between a life and writing through exposing and exploring the distance between language and experience, and the selves that exist in the world with the selves that exist in the text.
Whilst these authors have engaged in a dialogue with one another and published it as Here and
Now, as I suggested earlier in this introduction, there is not yet a comparative scholarly study of the two authors’ auto/autre-biographical writing. It is my hope that by bringing Coetzee and
Auster’s autre-biographical texts into dialogue with one another, this thesis will illustrate some of their shared autobiographical aesthetics and their approach to writing fiction, non-fiction and that which falls in between. As I cited at the beginning of this introduction, the dustjacket of the U.S. hardcover edition of Here and Now claims that Coetzee and Auster have been reading each other’s books for years. This thesis makes the claim that there is a mutual influence between the two authors, which can be observed in the thematic and formal similarities in their writing, especially their autre-biographical works. In doing so, it is my hope that this thesis makes important contributions to the study of life writing, and to Coetzee and
Auster studies respectively.
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Chapter 1: Breaking the ‘pact’? Questions of truth, process and intimacy in Coetzee and Auster’s autre-biography
Coetzee and Auster have both attracted the attention of critics for their use of second person, third person and split narration in their life writing works. Coetzee has used the neologism autre-biography to describe the process of writing about oneself as an other, and critics have subsequently used this term to describe his Scenes from Provincial Life trilogy, wherein the protagonist “John Coetzee” is represented to the reader in the third person and in present continuous tense. As I proposed in my introduction, autre-biography is a term that could also be applied to several of Auster’s works, which use autres to challenge the use of the first-person singular, most notably The Invention of Solitude, Winter Journal and Report from the Interior. Both authors have had their choices for narrating their life stories called into question. Arguably, much of the cynicism levelled towards Auster’s and Coetzee’s autobiographical writing reflects the privileging of the first-person signifier in autobiographical writing, a linguistic choice most commonly associated with the genre, as outlined in Lejeune’s seminal “The Autobiographical
Pact” (1989). In rejecting the first-person voice and in using different modes of narration in autobiography, Auster and Coetzee attempt to fracture the unity between the experiencing and narrating subject and create a distance with their past selves. Rather than being devices of
“trickery” that deny the possibility of confession and truth, however, I argue there is potential for a different kind of confession to be created by this distance. This, I argue, is developed through Auster’s and Coetzee’s transparency and reflexivity regarding the autobiographical process, through which their works subvert and transcend the notion that autobiographical
45 truth is mere fidelity to fact. As I suggest in my introduction, Felski’s notion of a “dialectic of intimacy and alienation” (1989: 108) in any project of autobiographical representation might mean that more established modes associated with confession might not represent the complexity and difficulty of trying to capture self and feeling in writing confession. In these discussions, I draw on the work of Egan in arguing that writing which highlights rather than conceals its own dialogism can create greater opportunities for the reader to emotionally invest in the text. Whilst Sidonie Smith has argued that ‘“[a]utobiography’ no longer makes sense culturally. Its structural, rhetorical and imagistic rigidities have been fractured by the heteroglossic possibilities inherent in new ideologies of selfhood” (1987: 174-175), Egan suggests that in autobiographies that embrace these heteroglossic possibilities, narration “takes the form of dialogue; it becomes interactive, and (auto)biographical identification becomes reciprocal, adaptive, corrective, affirmative, as is also common in life among people who are close to each other” (1999: 7). Rather than emphasising the finished product of self, such autobiographies emphasise the importance of process and reflecting this process in the narrative and thematic structures of the text. Such texts “do not reflect life so much as they reflect (upon) their own processes of making meaning out of life” (Egan 1999: 8). This approach can enable a greater sense of immediacy, as Egan argues:
Ironically, because these works foreground the strategy of their own composition, this sense of immediacy provides a simultaneous illusion of unmediated reality. Autobiographers who, within one text, are both subject and object of speech and regard, becoming in turn self and other for each other, play out the politics of lived experience as a realistic trope for exploring, defining and expressing just who they are. (1999: 8)
In the discussions of Coetzee and Auster in this chapter, I argue that the emphasis on dialogism and process in their styles of autre-biography has the possibility to create the feeling of a greater immediacy of experience, to reflect a dialectic of intimacy and to create possibilities 46 for feelings of closeness and emotional depth through the interactive and reciprocal structures that are deployed.
The “Autobiographical Pact”
The use of the first person is, according to Eakin, autobiography’s “dominant key” (1999: ix).
This convention represents not only the perceived unity of the speaking and experiencing subject, but also the presence of the confessional voice, with its corresponding assumptions of truth and intimacy. As Eakin argues, the use of first person “compounds our sense of being in full command of ourselves and stories; it not only conveniently bridges the gaps between who we were once and who we are today, but it tends to make our self in any present moment seem more unified and organized than it possibly could be” (1999: ix). The use of first person, it is also assumed, should be accompanied with past tense narration.
In “The Autobiographical Pact”, Lejeune postulates that for a text to be classified as an autobiography, the narrator, author and the principal character must be identical (1989: 5) and the narrative must have a retrospective point of view (1989: 4). The identity and unity of this narrator and principal character are, according to Lejeune “most often marked by use of the first person… what Gerard Genette calls ‘autodiegetic’ narration” (Lejeune 1989: 5). Whilst
Lejeune makes reference to autobiographies written in the third person, and acknowledges that forms of narration other than the first person are possible (1989: 29), he argues towards the end of his chapter that the first person is “an enunciation, which, itself, remains authentic”
(1989: 25). He describes authenticity as “that inner relationship characteristic of the first person in the personal narrative” (1989: 25), a quality that is distinct from the “identity” of the 47 subject which is indicated to the audience through the use of the shared proper name between author and subject, or “resemblance” between author and subject, “which assumes a judgment of similitude between two different images, made by a third person” (Lejeune 1989: 25). Hence while first-person narration is not essential for a text to be classified and read as autobiography, its absence for Lejeune suggests a fracture in the authenticity of the enunciation, drawing attention to the difference that exists between the voice that speaks and the subject of the enunciation.
It has been argued that the “authenticity” of this autobiographical enunciation is necessary for the reader to feel a sense of intimacy with the autobiographical subject, and subsequently with the autobiographer. In his 2011 article on autobiographical intimacy and voice, Thomas R.
Smith describes intimacy as “a sense of deep familiarity… a perception of innerness, a feeling of having gained authentic access to the inside of another’s psyche” (2011: 900). Smith’s definition here suggests an intrinsic association among readers of autobiography between intimacy, authenticity and a sense of “interiority”, which one may assume is facilitated by the unity of the author, the narrator and the subject. This assumption is highlighted in the epigraph of Smith’s article, a quote taken from memoirist Patricia Hampl, that suggests a reader’s love for autobiography can be attributed to the “hankering for the intimacy of this first-person voice, the deeply satisfying sense of being spoken to privately” (in Smith 2011: 900). Hampl suggests that “more than a story”, readers of autobiography “want a voice speaking softly, urgently” in their ear (in Smith 2011: 900). It would seem thus that the first person is a convention assumed central to an autobiographical voice that facilitates interiority and feelings of closeness, or intimacy, between author and reader, and is associated with a directness and immediacy in the confessional voice. 48
According to Smith, the readers’ experience of intimacy in autobiographical writing can be defined as a:
Temporary feeling of closeness, familiarity, and acceptance of a protagonist’s outlook, facilitated by the Lejeunian conditions under which autobiography is produced and consumed: that is, that the writer is understood by both writer and reader to be identical to the narrator and that the events the narrator relates are true and theoretically verifiable. (2011: 902)
Whilst Smith recognises later in this article that the use of first person is not necessary in establishing an authentic voice with which the reader might feel a sense of intimacy, the implicit association of first-person narration with a “feeling of closeness” in autobiography and an adherence to the “Lejeunian conditions under which autobiography is produced and consumed” (2011: 902) reflects the privileged status that homodiegetic narration has as the natural mode of narration in autobiographical writing. “Natural narrative is”, according to
Monika Fludernik “[a] term that has come to define ‘naturally occurring’ storytelling… mainly, spontaneous, conversational storytelling” (1996: 10). First-person narration thus might be situated as the normal or “natural” mode of narration in autobiographical writing because of the privileged relationship the “I” signifier has when speaking of the self.
Unnatural narration and autobiographical “tricks”
The criticism of autobiographical modes that do not adhere to what might be considered natural or conventional modes of storytelling illustrates the discomfort of non-first-person narration in autobiography. Third-person autobiography is, of course, not a new phenomenon, with authors like Gertrude Stein, Henry Adams and James Joyce choosing the third-person
49 voice for their representations of self since the early part of the twentieth century (Sheehan
2016: 46). Lejeune acknowledged in a 1977 article on “Autobiography in the Third Person” that there have been attempts at autobiography which stray from the convention of first- person narration and experiment with other modes, in which the author pretends “to speak about himself as someone else might, by using the third person, or by inventing a fictive narrator to present the author’s point of view” (1977: 27). He describes these cases as
“marginal, somewhat exceptional situations” recognising, however, that in the postmodern era these cases were becoming more common (1977: 27). Lejeune’s dislike or distrust of these kinds of “sophisticated games”, to use his words, is palpable. For him, these kinds of autobiographies are “revealing kinds of borderline cases” (1977: 27) designed largely to express
“identity problems” or “charm readers” (1977: 27). For Lejeune, such works constitute a kind of postmodern chicanery that cannot, and should not, be taken seriously as interventions into the genre of autobiography.
Lejeune did worry, however, that these cases might reveal a further weakening of the generic strictures of autobiography. Lejeune uses Genette’s terms again to describe the process through which the “autodiegetic” or first-person narrator (Lejeune 1977: 33) traditionally associated with the autobiographical form might be replaced with a “heterodiegetic”, or third- person narrator (Lejeune 1977: 38). Whilst the autodiegetic narrator may represent a “fictive unity” of self, heterodiegetic narration in autobiography presents further problems for Lejeune, as he believes “the articulation of two truly different points of view concerning a single individual cannot truly be achieved in an autobiography” (Lejeune 1977: 41). For Lejeune, the appearance of unity, singularity and a relatively monological voice is important to the autobiographical agreement between author and reader. Attempts at heterodiegetic or split 50 narration in autobiography may, according to Lejeune “correspond either to a triumphant narcissism” or to the “torments of a paranoiac searching for an identity” (1977: 41). Lejeune suggests that to write in such a manner may constitute a “cunning form of self-hagiography which neutralizes or forestalls criticism” (1977: 43), and thus does not create the desired narrative conditions for self-exposure and intimate expression. For Lejeune, the emergence of heterodiegetic autobiography reflects the increasing influence of the novel and novelistic features, and constitutes a form of novelistic trickery and game playing, charges which have often been made against both Coetzee and Auster, which I detail in this chapter. This influence seems to imply a further collapsing of the distinction between autobiography and the novel, and perhaps a further weakening of the genre from the inside out.
There have been many challenges to Lejeune’s perception of autobiographical as “contractual”.
De Man’s criticisms in “Autobiography as De-facement” are perhaps the most famous. He suggests that conceiving of autobiography as a contract positions the reader as a “judge”, and that this judicial model cannot work, as ultimately any attempt to convey the self autobiographically will result in substitutions for that self (1979: 921). Felski has drawn attention to the diverse ways autobiography is read and has argued “Lejeune’s statement that autobiography is a question of all or nothing is excessively rigid and unable to deal with variations in actual reading practices” (1989: 91). Drawing on de Man and Felski’s challenges to some of Lejeune’s definitions, I argue in this chapter that Lejeune’s attempt to position autobiography as a quasi-legal contract in many ways neglects the complex and diverse ways that authors explore the challenges of writing self, and the role that fiction has in the truth- making process. As this process is so fraught and challenging, perhaps it is indeed possible that less conventional modes of autobiography might be useful in reflecting the myriads of ways 51 autobiographies conceive and construct, and readers access and respond to, autobiographical selves.
Coetzee’s and Auster’s unusual autobiographies
Heterodiegetic narration and the use of novelistic conventions have been a hallmark of both
Coetzee’s and Auster’s contributions to the genre of autobiography. Coetzee’s Youth and
Boyhood have perplexed some readers and critics with regards to the genre of the texts and their truth value, because of his sustained use of third-person limited narration and present continuous tense. Though Boyhood and Youth are now largely accepted to be memoirs, readers and critics were initially uncertain as to how to read and categorise the texts, largely owing to
Coetzee’s aforementioned linguistic choices. Coetzee’s use of third person and present continuous tense led reviewer Peter Porter (2002: 22), to conclude that Youth was a novel while
William Deresiewicz (2002) describes Coetzee’s decision to write in the third person and in present continuous tense as “bizarre choices” which “mean that Coetzee has turned his back on the entire autobiographical tradition”. Hermoine Lee writes of Youth: “if this is an autobiography, it is one that is at pains to demolish the pact which autobiography is meant to establish between writer and reader” (2005: 168). Furthermore, Derek Attridge argued in an article published soon after the release of Boyhood, that though the work can be seen as a confession, it is a confession that lacks any overt sense of responsibility, and lacks the “sense of intimacy that we gain from confessional autobiography of a more orthodox sort” (1999: 79).
Through these comments, it can be seen that an author’s use of what might be called
“seemingly innocuous linguistic choices” (Clarkson 2013: 1) can have a profound impact on the way that a work is read, received and categorised. These comments may also serve as 52 evidence that Lejeune’s notion of autobiography as a pact or contract, which necessitates that a text subscribes to certain conventions, still has a strong influence on the way autobiography is received. Coetzee’s most recent autobiographical instalment, Summertime, has perhaps pushed the limits of autobiography further through invoking novelistic conventions and this has again led reviewers to draw attention to its narrative “tricks” and fictional elements. In Summertime, not only is there evidence of the third person and continuous present tense deployed in
Boyhood and Youth, but Coetzee also uses multiple narrators (assumedly fictional). Furthermore, the premise of the text is a fiction, the novelist J.M. Coetzee, we are told, is dead and a young biographer is working on a biography of his years as a burgeoning writer through interviewing those who knew him at the time. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson suggest that Summertime
“blurs any easy distinction between the fictional and the autobiographical” (2010: 14). They argue that Summertime presents an “intriguing riff” on the “relationship between the autobiographical signature and the narrator of the story” (2010:15). This “riff” occurs as
Coetzee is both the author whose name is presented on the cover, and the object of biographical representation within the text, and “[t]hus Lejeune’s concept of the autobiographical pact as the negotiated relationship of author, reader and publisher is fractured” (2010: 15).
Given that the most basic “fact” of Coetzee’s life has been changed, whether he is alive or dead, reviewer Thomas Jones (2009) argues that “readers have no grounds for believing that anything else they are told about the character John Coetzee necessarily holds true for his eponymous creator”. For Jones, Coetzee seems to be making a “farce” of the whole notion of life writing, of autobiography, and encouraging the reader not to “trust” anything he says.
Summertime, according to Jones, is an “anti-autobiography” (2009, my emphasis). This is a 53 sentiment shared by Justin Neuman who argues that “the book reminds us time and time again that Coetzee is a ‘fictioneer’ whom we cannot ‘trust’” (2011: 128, my emphasis), as the book
“holds a counterfactual premise as its founding axiom” (2011: 128). Cartwright appreciates that this work might still be a memoir, but writes that it is a “very tricksy memoir” (2009).
The very emotive language used to describe Coetzee’s relationship with his readership is revealing. The recurring ideas that emerge in reviews and articles on Coetzee’s work are of his trickery, his repudiation of the autobiographical pact, and his rejection of the feelings of trust, access to truth and intimacy that one might expect to feel in reading the memoirs of a great and famous author. One wonders why Coetzee has dedicated a great deal of his critical work to the subject of autobiography and confession, in addition to publishing a trilogy of ostensibly autobiographical works, if his purpose were to make a farce of the genre and to trick and play sophisticated games with his readers. It seems unwarranted that an author so careful and considered in his writing – as he puts it, “slow and painstakingly myopic in [his] thinking”
(1992e: 246) – and so committed to the relationship between literature and ethics, should have his contributions to the life writing genre dismissed as an exercise in postmodern trickery. In this chapter, I will show that Coetzee’s narrative choices in his autre-biography are not merely tricks designed to charm readers, intentionally obfuscating autobiographical meaning and denying any possibility for confession and intimacy. Rather, I suggest that Coetzee’s works can be considered as more complex than narrative games, and that his unconventional and seemingly obfuscating strategies may in fact be read as an attempt to convey many of the difficulties in narrating one’s life and the tensions of intimacy and alienation in writing confession. Furthermore, I suggest that Coetzee’s narrative choices acknowledge and awaken the heteroglossic possibilities of selfhood (Smith 1987: 174-75) and reflect the importance of 54 process over product in conveying selves in writing, representing a “dialogue of the self with its own doubt” (1992c: 291).
The ways that the first-person signifier and use of past tense have been privileged in life writing may also be considered in the work of Auster, a prolific writer of autobiography (or as
I argue, autre-biography) who has chosen to write about himself in the present tense, in third person (The Invention of Solitude) and in second person (Winter Journal and Report from the Interior).
While Auster’s works have been accepted as autobiographies, not as fiction or narrative tricks, there has been some critical discussion of his choice of modes of narration. It is Auster’s shift into second-person narration, first in Winter Journal and more recently in Report from the Interior, that has been perceived by some critics as somehow inauthentic. Whilst the shift from first person to third person in The Invention of Solitude was largely accepted as a way of exploring the complexities of grief and memory, the second-person voice used in his later two autobiographies has been described by some as doodling, forced and narcissistic. In an interview with Auster, Wayne Gooderham (2012) describes the criticism levelled at Auster for
Winter Journal and argues that “[a] large part of this criticism stems from the fact that Auster has chosen to write Winter Journal in the second person, eliciting accusations of egomania”.
Auster himself states in this interview that the second person tends to “alarm or offend” reviewers of Winter Journal (2012). Thornton McCamish (2012) describes the unusual nature of
Auster’s narration, writing in his review “[i]t’s odd, this second-person address… you’re not sure if you’re being spoken to, or merely witnessing an author haranguing himself in the mirror”. These responses to Auster’s narrative choices could reflect the status second-person narration has, as whilst it is not strictly heterodiegetic, it might be considered an ‘unnatural’ mode of storytelling. In “The Autobiographical Pact”, Lejeune (1989: 7) notes that an 55 autobiography in the second person “would show clearly at the level of enunciation, the difference between the subject of the enunciation and the subject of the utterance, treated as an addressee of the narrative”. Lejeune does observe, however, that such an enunciation is
“rare” and almost entirely absent in autobiography (1989: 7). Jarmila Mildorf suggests that perhaps the reason second person is so infrequent in literary texts is because it is associated with a certain “unnaturalness” (2012: 76). It could also be argued that second-person narration fractures or unsettles the position of the reader as it is a mode of narration that encourages
“multiple positionings” (Phelan 1996: 153). As suggested in the review of Winter Journal cited above, the reader of second-person narration may be uncertain as to whether they are the
“you” of the address, or if this enunciation excludes the reader, as in the third person. Brian
Richardson suggests that the second-person voice presents the reader with an “irreducible oscillation” between the “intimate voice of a ‘first-person’ narration limited in the breadth of knowledge it can have access to” and the distant, omniscient voice of a “third-person” narration, simultaneously “inviting and precluding identification with other pronominal voices”
(Richardson 1991: 311). Irene Kacandes similarly describes the positionality involved by second-person narration as multiple and complex, referring to the rhetorical figure of apostrophe to capture the way that second-person narratives are directed toward two addressees: a direct recipient who is meant to react emotionally to the apostrophe and a secondary listener or “witness,” that is, someone overhearing what has been said (1994: 343).
Second-person narration in autobiography, thus, might be said to be a mode of address that not only fractures the unity of the autobiographical subject, but also complicates and multiplies the way that the reader is positioned.
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In the next part of this chapter, I discuss what Coetzee and Auster have argued about the dialogical potential of autobiographical writing, and hope to establish that rather than being tricks, games or “unnatural”, the inevitable multiple points of view about the self might, in some instances, be better realised and articulated through third and second-person narration.
In his J.M. Coetzee and the Life of Writing, Attwell (2014: 27) cites Orhan Pamuk’s essay on Greek poet C.P. Cavafy, in which Pamuk quotes Cavafy’s claim that “‘[g]reat poets can tell their own stories without once saying “I”, and in doing so, lend their voice to all of humanity’”. Attwell notes that Coetzee has long followed Cavafy, and suggests that what is so beautiful about this quote is that it helps us understand “how the self is written into the work and then written out, leaving its imprint as a shadowy presence” (2014: 27).
Autobiography and the Dialogic
Whilst Lejeune believes “the articulation of two truly different points of view concerning a single individual cannot truly be achieved in an autobiography” (1977: 41), Auster and Coetzee have suggested otherwise in their critical writing, and have considered whether autobiography might indeed have dialogical potential in which different points of view about the self might be reflected and actualised. Auster’s and Coetzee’s views on the dialogical potential of self are reiterated by life writing scholars such as Egan, who uses the metaphor of “mirror talk” in her monograph of the same name (1999) to describe the dialogue that occurs when writing the self and writing about the other in autobiography. Egan quotes earlier scholars such as Shirley
Neuman, who argued that the imaginative act is “double” as the autobiographer examines her own life from outside herself in order to make the reader believe her experience (in Egan
1999: 2). Egan also discusses Steven Spender’s “great problem” of autobiography, which is that 57 an autobiographer is really “writing two lives… his life as it appears to himself… and his life as it appears from the outside in the minds of others” (Egan 1999: 2). A dialogic approach in life writing, for Egan, does not detract from the candour or value of the revelations contained in this dialogue, but rather reflects the “deflection of attention from product to process” in autobiographical writing and in autobiographical theory (1999: 2). In such texts, the question becomes not whether autobiography can achieve a “truth of self”, but rather how do autobiographers negotiate the complexity of subjectivity and writing self? And how are these processes mirrored in the form and style of the text? I argue that this emphasis on process over product in the work of Coetzee and Auster has the effect of creating greater space for the reader in the text, and thus has potential to create feelings of closeness and engagement on the part of the reader. As Coetzee writes in The Good Story, engaging, “living reading” involves
“finding one’s way into the voice that speaks from the page, the voice of the Other, and inhabiting that voice, so that you speak to yourself (your self) from outside yourself”
(2015: 179). The challenge for, and art of, the writer, according to Coetzee, is to “creat[e] a shape (a phantasm capable of speech), and an entry point that will allow the reader to inhabit the phantasm” (2015: 179). For Auster, as I have also cited previously, the challenge is similarly to create structures that enable the reader to “inhabit” the text (Auster 1995: 111).
Egan argues that many contemporary autobiographies have proliferated in which:
Writing…becomes a matter not only of intense involvement of narrator with subject or self-recognition in terms of the imagined perceptions of others, but also of co- respondence, in which two or more voices encounter one another or interact. (1999: 3)
The claim of an audience on a text, according to Egan, “already splits the internal and external manifestations of the writing self” (1999: 2), and as such a dialogue occurs between the split subject of the autobiographer as subject and as writer. According to Smith and Watson, Egan’s 58 notion of “‘mirror talk’ captures the refractive interplay of such dialogic exchange between life narrator and reader (or viewer)” (2010:16). Rather than creating a fictionalised distance with the subjects of autobiographical writing, Egan suggests that autobiographies which foreground the “process”, rather than the “product”, of writing self create possibilities for intimacy with the reader, as:
Parallels between text and life become even closer when both subjects are involved in the preparation of the text. Narration then takes the form of dialogue; it becomes reciprocal, adaptive, corrective, affirmative as is common in life among people who are close to each other. (1999: 7, my emphasis)
Egan suggests that in such cases, because no single “authorial I” controls perception, the reader may be more fully implicated in the text than before (1999: 3). She also suggests that in autobiographical texts where the singular “I” is absent, that the absence of historical depth when it comes to the subject of the autobiography may be compensated, or more than compensated for, with a freshness and immediacy of experience (1999: 3). Whilst Egan argues that “[n]either the person nor the text can reveal any single or final truth”, she makes the convincing point that “both can provide activities of interpretation in which the reader is compelled to join” (1999: 326). As Smith and Watson argue, “(t)he multifacetedness inherent in autobiographical writing produces a polyphonic site of indeterminacy rather than a single, stable truth” (2010: 16). Contrary to the traditionally held belief previously discussed, that first- person narration is a gesture that facilitates truth and a sense of unity of experience, Paul Smith suggests that the autobiographical “I” is in a way a kind of third-person pronoun, “supposedly having full objective possession of that which it views” (in Egan 1999: 105). By this logic, modes of narration that facilitate a greater sense of dialogism between the multiple voices that constitute the autobiographical self, such as second-person and third-person narration, might constitute a more transparent, if not more “honest”, reflection of the way fictions of self and 59 fictions of the truth are conceived and constructed in autobiographical work. In this chapter, I argue that for both Coetzee and Auster, these alternative modes of autobiographical narration engender the division and dialogic relationship between autobiographical selves in the very style of the narration. This is a process that is perhaps best captured by Mr Vincent’s description of Coetzee as “not a liar” but a “fictioneer” in Summertime (2009 p.225-226). In the autre-biographies by Coetzee and Auster I examine in this chapter, “fictioneer(ing)” is an integral part of representing self.
Egan’s (1999) and Smith and Watson’s (2010) arguments about the dialogical potential of autobiography, and what Smith calls the “heteroglossic possibilities inherent in new ideologies of selfhood” (1987: 174- 175) reflect the profound impact Mikhail Bakhtin has had on contemporary life writing scholarship. In The Dialogic Imagination, Bakhtin introduces the notion of heteroglossia, which he describes as “another’s speech in another’s language, serving to express authorial intentions but in a refracted way” (1981: 324). Such speech, he argues,
“constitutes a special type of double-voiced discourse. It serves two speakers at the same time and expresses simultaneously two different intentions: the direct intention of the character who is speaking, and the refracted intention of the author” (1981: 324). For Bakhtin, all prose, but most of all the prose of the novel, offers rich opportunity for dialogism, since:
Authorial speech, the speeches of narrators, inserted genres, the speech of characters are merely those fundamental compositional unities with whose help heteroglossia… can enter the novel; each of them permits a multiplicity of social voices and a wide variety of their links and interrelationships (always more or less dialogized). (1981: 263)
To work with the dialogic potential of the prose and the quality of heteroglossia was desirable, according to Bakhtin, whilst to resist this possibility might result in a sense of inauthenticity.
For Bakhtin, the prose author who purges his work of “speech diversity” insists on the 60
“obtusely stubborn unity of a smooth, pure single-voiced language” (1981: 327). He suggests that in novels without this kind of speech diversity, authorial language “inevitably ends up in the awkward and absurd position of the language of stage directions in plays” (1981: 327).
Conversely, he insists on the rich possibilities of “speech diversity” (1981: 272) and “double- voiced discourse” (1981:324) which are the “prerequisite for authentic novelistic prose” (1981:
264).
In his later essay on “The Author and the Hero in Aesthetic Activity” (1990), Bakhtin takes up a different question about the subject who speaks in work of prose. His questions and observations in this essay have more obvious implications for autobiography. In reflecting on the distance and relationship between an author and a hero in an aesthetic work, Bakhtin observes that human beings are always limited in their narration of self, and in their ability to
“vivify” (1990: 33) this self in language because an experiencing, human subject is incapable of perceiving and representing himself in a unified and finished outward whole (1990: 35). Just as it is difficult to access the inner life of the other, it is almost impossible to perceive oneself as an aesthetically whole and finished entity. One cannot, as Bakhtin suggests, be the author of one’s value just as one cannot lift oneself by one’s own hair (1990: 55). For Bakhtin, the human subject lacks self-sufficiency, and the body of oneself and the body of the other both limits and delimits one’s capacity for self-representation and “sympathetic co-experiencing”
(1990: 81). Bakhtin suggests that to perceive oneself as a whole might only be possible through inhabiting or adopting the perspective of the other. He writes, “it is only in a life perceived in the category of the other that my body can become aesthetically valid” (1990: 59) and suggests that in order to access this category, one may have to yield their sense of inner selfhood (1990:
69). He argues that in efforts to regard oneself and one’s body, one ceases to be a solitary and 61 unified self, as it becomes necessary to view oneself from the externalising perspective of the other. He writes, “I am no longer alone, when I attempt to contemplate the whole of my own life in the mirror of history, just as I am not alone when I contemplate my own exterior in a mirror” (1990: 105). As Bakhtin suggests, the very act of regarding and assessing oneself necessarily requires one to engage with the images and perceptions of oneself held by the other. To begin to assess and author oneself becomes a necessarily dialogic process, involving conversation and negotiation between the inner and outward projections and phantasms of oneself. Not only is a sense of the other necessary to conveying a relatively finished and outwardly whole portrait of self, but this is also important to the affective dimensions of one’s own story. As Bakhtin suggests, accessing “emotional-volitional tones” in one’s life, and the story of one’s life, “are possible only in relation to the existence of another” (1990: 105).
Bakhtin’s observations about the chasm between the self who experiences and the self who perceives and narrates experience further undermines the assumed unity and sovereignty of the autobiographical self.
Daphna Erdinast-Vulcan draws on Bakhtin’s writings on narrative identity and aesthetics to make claims about the dialogical possibility and potential of life writing. As Erdinast-Vulcan argues, the work of de Man, Derrida and Bakhtin have established that the autobiographical subject lacks sovereignty and completion, as “the human [autobiographical] subject’s sense of self is always confined to a partial ‘inside’ perspective” (2008: 4). Selves are created as they are told and we are, as Erdinast-Vulcan puts it, “‘authored’, configured by an internalised other much in the same way as a hero is authored by the writer of fictional narratives” (2008: 4).
In light of Bakhtin’s arguments about the autobiographical subject’s lack of sovereignty (1990:
35-36), several writers and critics have drawn attention to the impossibility of autobiography. 62
For example, John Sturrock (1993: 36) and Erdinast-Vulcan (2008: 5) argue that Jean-Paul
Sartre’s Words is a text which exposes the “bad faith” in which autobiography is written, as the fragmentation, fictionalisation and incompletion of narrating the self exemplified in this text is unavoidable in any narration of incomplete selves. Importantly, however, Erdinast-Vulcan argues that Sartre’s exposure of his own “bad faith” in Words does not invalidate the autobiographical project itself (2008: 5), a case that could more broadly apply to other writers of reflexive autobiography. In Words, Erdinast-Vulcan argues, the subject is still “ineluctably present as the subject who asks the question ‘who am I?’” (2008: 5), whether exposing their own “bad faith” or not.11 Bakhtin established a distinction between the first-person perspective
(I for myself) and the third-person perspective (I for another) and argued that the external perspective was the only way to achieve a sense of aesthetic wholeness and coherence
(1990: 35-36). Bakhtin thus implicitly puts forward a case for using the third person (or non homodiegetic modes of narration) to more honestly capture the “aesthetic wholeness” and coherence of the self. As Erdinast-Vulcan argues, “[b]eing ‘aesthetically real’ or ‘valid,’ for
Bakhtin, entails a sense of form and clear-cut boundary-lines, which can only be produced through the transgredient perspective of an other, the third-person perspective which enables the normative configuration of one’s life” (2008: 6-7). Through engaging the dialogic possibility of narrating the self and engaging the voice of another, the self might be more wholly realised or actualised.
11 In his Being and Nothingness, Sartre himself outlines a distinction that is central to his account of selfhood: en-soi, being-in-itself are and pour-soi, consciousness for itself or being-for-itself. “Being-in-itself is neither possible or impossible”, he writes, “It is” (1992: 29), while being-for-itself “must refer to a primary relation between my consciousness and the Other’s” (1992: 341). It is here that Sartre outlines his doctrine of the “bad faith” of consciousness (1992: 87), a form of posturing motivated by a delusion for a substantial self (Erdinast-Vulcan 2008: 5). For Sartre, as for Bakhtin, the other plays a critical role in overcoming “bad faith” and understanding the truth of our own being, for the other “holds a secret – the secret of what I am” (1992: 475). 63
As Egan’s (1999), Smith and Watson’s (2010) and Erdinast-Vulcan’s (2008) works suggest, multiple perspectives on the self may not only be achievable in autobiography, but might be necessary for more honestly exploring the process through which selves are created and configured through external perspectives. Autobiography might not be compromised, but enabled, through a dialogical approach which makes use of a conversation between multiple perspectives on the self. And contrary to Lejeune’s (1977) arguments that multiple perspectives on the self and third-person narration might compromise the authenticity of autobiographical enunciations, it may be possible to write explicitly dialogic autobiography that is not only authentic, but offers opportunities for autobiographical intimacy. This closeness may be brought about as readers are engaged not only with the product of the self which is created, but also with the processes in which this self is conceived of and constituted in autobiographical writing. This might provide a more transparent representation of the way multiple discourses and perspectives on the self engage with one another, and with the reader, in autobiographical writing. As Smith and Watson argue, if we approach self-referential life writing “as an intersubjective process that occurs within a dialogic exchange between writer and reader/viewer”, rather than something that needs to be proved or falsified, “the emphasis of reading shifts from assessing and verifying knowledge to observing processes of communicative exchange and understanding” (2010: 16-17).
When considering autobiography as an “intersubjective mode”, it must then reside outside of the “logical or judicial model of truth and falsehood” (Smith and Watson 2007:17) exemplified by Lejeune’s notions of autobiography as a “pact” or “contract” (1989). Perhaps rather, writing in a manner that reflects the intersubjective and dialogic nature of representing the self may enable the autobiographer to get closer to what Coetzee has argued about authenticity in 64
Doubling the Point, namely that it does “not demand that language reproduce a reality” but rather
“demands that language manifest its ‘own’ truth” (1992c: 268). For Coetzee, truth of self and
“poetic” truths (2015: 7-8) emerge through language and through a dialogic exchange between the selves of writing and the reader and writer. These truths do not necessarily correspond with a biographical/historical reality, making the judicial model of assessing authenticity in autobiography inadequate. Furthermore, as Felski and Richard Sennet have suggested, there is a dialectic at the heart of confessional writing with regards to questions of “intimacy” and
“authenticity”. As I discussed in my introduction and the opening section of this chapter, the very nature of confession engenders a dialectic which, as Felski argues, means:
The act of confession can potentially exacerbate rather than alleviate problems of self- identity, engendering a dialectic in which the production of ever more writing as a means to defining a center of meaning merely serves to underscore the alienation of the subject even as it seeks to overcome it. (1989: 108)
The search for intimacy and authenticity in self-expression leads to a frustrating experience in which, in Auster’s phrase, the “essential thing” resists telling (1988: 247). As Sennet writes,
“[e]xpression is made contingent upon authentic feeling, but one is always plunged into the narcissistic problem of never being able to crystallize what is authentic in one’s feelings.” (in
Felski 1989: 88-89). With authenticity and intimacy established as an elusive thing in all autobiography, we might consider how the very problem or challenge of this quest, this dialectic, might be written into the form and linguistic choices of the autobiography itself.
Autres and autre-biography
Both Coetzee and Auster have discussed the ways that writing, and more specifically writing autobiography, is a dialogical process that involves interaction between the self and the autre, the self that is given form through the perspective of the other. Both authors describe the ways 65 that they engage multiple perspectives on the self in their autobiography, not as a means of play, or trickery, but rather as a means of perhaps more authentically reflecting the complexity of the autobiographical subject and his relationship with the authorial self. For both Auster and Coetzee, these multiple perspectives on the self have been reflected through the rejection of first-person narration, which would seem to imply the singularity, unity and coherence of the autobiographical self.
In Coetzee’s most widely read and quoted collection of critical works, Doubling the Point, autobiography is the topic on which the volume both begins and concludes. In the concluding interview in Doubling the Point, Attwell asks Coetzee to reflect on “moments of crystallization, or breaks in continuities” that their dialogue has raised with regards to autobiographical activity
(1992a: 391). Coetzee outlines his earlier essay on “Confession and Double Thoughts” as a
“pivotal” moment in understanding the process of autobiography. Reflecting on the essay, originally published in 1985, he observes that “a submerged dialogue [takes place] between two persons” (1992a: 392). He describes the two persons in the following terms: “[o]ne is a person
I desired to be and was feeling my way toward. The other is more shadowy, let us call him the person I then was, though he may be the person I still am” (1992a: 392). Given that Coetzee had claimed earlier in Doubling the Point that “all writing is autobiography” (1992d: 17),
Coetzee’s reflections on this essay might be said to describe the experience of writing autobiographically, and affirm Robert Lyon’s claim that “[autobiographical] writing is not really a monologue but a special kind of dialogue with the other party located in the writer’s own head” (1977: 84). This is further reinforced by the fact that the subject matter of the writing in question is the subject of confession and autobiography. In his closing dialogue with Attwell in
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Doubling the Point, Coetzee goes on to describe the impossibility of accessing an ultimate truth in autobiography, arguing:
There is no ultimate truth about oneself, there is no point trying to reach it, what we call the truth is only a shifting self-appraisal whose function is to make one feel good, or as good as possible under the circumstances… The only sure truth in autobiography is that one’s self interest will be located at one’s blind spot. (1992a: 392)
The best that can be hoped for, according to Coetzee, is some glimmer of truth or recognition of self that occurs through the process of writing. He argues that to write is to invoke the
“countervoices” within oneself, resisting the position of authority to rather engage with the questions and contradictions that emerge in the examination of self. He writes in Doubling the
Point:
There is a true sense in which writing is dialogic: a matter of awakening the countervoices in oneself and embarking upon speech with them. It is some measure of a writer’s seriousness whether he does evoke/invoke these countervoices in himself, that is, step down from the position of what Lacan calls “the subject supposed to know”. (1992f: 65)
As Carrol Clarkson argues in a very recently published essay, all writing is autobiographical for
Coetzee because “writing demands a style, a way of presenting the here and now which grounds the author as value creator” (2016: 432). Clarkson insists that style is thus “not reducible to a question of technical proficiency, writing exposes and tests your spiritual verve”
(2016: 432). As she astutely argues, for Coetzee style is the point of autobiographical enunciation, and glimmers of autobiographical truths, if they will emerge at all, will emerge in the style of one’s writing. Coetzee’s meditations on autobiographical writing, thus, from the time of Doubling the Point, have foregrounded the importance of the process of writing the self, over the product of that self. As cited in my introduction, Coetzee wrote in his notebooks,
“I have no interest in telling stories; it is the process of storytelling that interests me” (in
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Sheehan 2016: 454), reiterating this very notion of his interest and commitment to the
“process” of writing and storytelling. I argue that the “process of storytelling” with regards to narratives of self is written into the very form, style and structure of Coetzee’s autobiographical writing, very much as the process of storytelling is written into his fiction.
In his essay on “Autobiography and Confession” in Doubling the Point, Coetzee presents arguments in opposition to the reflexive voice of hindsight that is central to first-person autobiography, arguing that “[o]ne is in danger of not being oneself when one lives at a reflective distance from oneself”, which he says is a “revealing reversal” of the values of autobiography (1992c: 268). Here Coetzee reflects other famous criticisms of the genre, such as William Gass’s claim that autobiography involves a “division of the self into the-one-who- was and the-one-who-is”, in which “[t]he-one-who-is has the advantage of having been the- one-who-was” (1994: 45). Through this process, Gass argues, “[e]very moment a bit of the self slides away toward its station in the past, where it will be remembered partially, if at all; with distortions, if at all; and then rendered even more incompletely, with graver omissions and twists to the plot by the play of the pen” (1994: 45). Despite being accepted as a convention in autobiography, both Coetzee’s and Gass’s claims about the reflective distance of hindsight suggest this is an autobiographical position which results in a certain inauthenticity. As I mentioned earlier in this chapter, Coetzee also undermines the commonly accepted notion that autobiographical intimacy involves unravelling and exposing pre-existing truths, and rather he argues that “[a]uthenticity does not demand that language reproduce a reality; instead it demands that language manifest its ‘own’ truth” (1992c: 268).
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In the absence of the first-person narrator who lives at a reflective distance from his or herself, it could be argued that Coetzee’s notion of a more authentic voice in autobiography is one that brings the “submerged dialogue” between the multiple personas of autobiography to the forefront, whilst avoiding fixed ideas or notions of an “ultimate truth” about the self from “the subject supposed to know” (Lacan in Coetzee 1992f: 65). An approach which draws attention to its own dialogism enables contradictory ideas about the self to emerge. Thus, rather than the autobiographical narrator being the final determiner of the “ultimate truth”, the reader becomes more actively involved, engaging with the multiple truths of self created and with the process of truth creation. This approach is not only evident in Coetzee’s autre-biographical representations, but also in several works by Auster, which, as I mention in my introduction, were written at time when both authors were reading each other’s work.
It is later in the final interview of Doubling the Point that Coetzee introduces the central term for this thesis: autre-biography, a neologism that has been taken to describe the practice of writing about one’s self as an other, in the present tense, and in the third-person (1992a: 394). Autre- biography could be described as an overtly dialogical style of writing about the self, in which the stylistic devices often associated with fictional writing are used to represent competing ideas about the self, and to multiply the points of identification between author, character, narrator and reader. As I cite in my introduction, in a more recent interview with Attwell
Coetzee argued that “all autobiography is autre-biography” (2006: 216), suggesting perhaps that his neologism autre-biography was not just a term that applied to his own style of writing autobiography, but that it more broadly describes the inevitable schism and doubling of self that inevitably occurs when trying to write one’s own life. The term autre-biography might also capture the complex dynamics of detachment and intimacy that occur in this dialogue between 69 selves, and describe the way that writers of autobiography might make this process more
“explicit” through the forms and features they choose (Attwell 2006: 216). Autre-biography might also be a useful term for understanding the role that style plays in revealing some notion of truth of self in autobiographical enunciations (Clarkson 2016: 432), as language comes to manifest its “own truth” (Coetzee 1992c: 268).
While Coetzee’s use of the term autre-biography and his use of autre-biographical forms have been discussed and debated in Coetzee scholarship, less discussed in Auster scholarship is the fact that Auster has also used similar language to describe the narration of his own experience, suggesting that Auster too writes autre-biography. In an interview with Larry McCaffery and
Sinda Gregory in 1989, Auster said that “of all the theories of the novel, Bakhtin’s [The Dialogic
Imagination] strikes me as the most brilliant, the one that comes closest to understanding the complexity and magic of the form” (2013: 25). He also says, “[l]ike everyone else, I am a multiple being, I embody a whole range of attitudes and responses to the world. Writing prose allows me to include all these responses” (McCaffery and Gregory 2013: 25). In Auster’s The
Red Notebook, he writes of the process of writing self as a process of doubling, not dissimilar to
Coetzee’s images of the two selves who emerge in autobiography. He reflects:
The astonishing thing, I think, is that at the moment when you are most truly alone, when you truly enter a state of solitude, that is when you are not alone anymore, when you start to feel your connection with others. I believe I even quote Rimbaud in that book, ‘Je est un autre’- I is another – and I take that sentence quite literally. In the process of writing or thinking about yourself, you actually become someone else. (Auster 1995: 107)
In an interview about Winter Journal and Report from the Interior (Schmidt-Madsen 2013), Auster discusses in quite some detail the reasons for his narrative choices in this autobiographical work. Auster states that he avoids the first person in Winter Journal because he feels “that the 70 first person, the ‘I’ was too exclusionary” (Schmidt-Madsen 2013). Assumedly, Auster is reflecting here on the way that first-person narration may give an artificial sense of unity and coherence to the selves of autobiography, ignoring or excluding the process through which one may “become another” when writing autobiography. Of his choice to use the second rather than third person, he writes that in the case of Winter Journal, “the third person would have seemed too distant” for him (Schmidt-Madsen 2013). In an interview with Paul
Holdengräber (2012), Auster mentions Coetzee’s three autobiographical works written in the third person. Whilst he acknowledges third person as a strategy that he had used previously (in his The Invention of Solitude), he says again of Winter Journal that “in this case, third person would have been too distancing” (Holdengräber 2012). Auster elaborates that second-person narration allows him “a kind of intimacy, but at the same time a kind of distance, as if addressing myself but also entering into a dialogue with myself” (Holdengräber 2012). Auster describes his intention in using the second-person narration as setting “up a little space between myself and myself”, saying “I can look at myself and address myself as if I am an other… and enter into a kind of intimate dialogue” (Schmidt-Madsen 2013).
As it is for Coetzee, autobiographical writing for Auster is dialogical. One insight that Auster offers in the above discussion which is particularly revealing, and which I hope to demonstrate offers some insight into Coetzee’s processes, is the idea that by creating distance between the selves, intimacy may be created and the exchange that occurs between the two selves might be an “intimate dialogue” (Schmidt-Madsen 2013). This goes against the kind of conventional wisdom on autobiography offered by Lejeune, which suggests that the creation of distance between narrator and subject in autobiography might undermine the sense of authenticity or
71 closeness that the autobiography offers. Auster elaborates on this idea elsewhere, in his interview with Wayne Gooderham (2012) he says of Winter Journal:
[The] second person seemed ideal because it conveys a certain intimacy and yet a certain kind of separation between writer and subject. In a sense I am able to interrogate myself, address myself from that slight distance and enter a kind of dialogical relationship with myself.
Auster believes that not only is it possible to engage in an “intimate dialogue” with oneself when oneself is addressed as another, but that this process of writing dialogically has the effect of further drawing in or involving the reader. He argues that “The you also has the effect, I think, of drawing in the reader… as if the reader were being addressed as well” (Schmidt-
Maden 2013, my emphasis). When asked by an interviewer whether his choice of pronoun might be considered “solipsistic”, Auster claims “not at all. That displacement from the I to the You I hope allows the reader to enter the book in a very full way” (Holdengräber 2012, my emphasis). For Auster, the second person further implicates the reader emotionally through including and addressing them, and enhancing the sense that they too may be part of this intimate dialogue. In an interview about Winter Journal on the Brian Lehrer Show, Auster suggests that through his narrative choices “the reader feels as if it is about him or her as well”
(Lehrer 2012). Again, Auster’s claims here challenge those cited at the beginning of this chapter, primarily that multiple perspectives on the self cannot be conveyed in autobiography, that the intimacy and immediacy of experience in autobiography is best facilitated through the use of the first-person voice, and that first-person narration is a more authentic and natural voice in autobiographical writing. Rather, as is evident in Coetzee’s works, Auster suggests that modes which emphasise rather than conceal the plural nature of the autobiographical self may create a more immediate and compelling experience for the reader.
72
Coetzee’s autre-biography
Whilst Coetzee’s experimentation with different modes of narration in autobiography has been received by some as evidence of narrative tricks and of fictionalisation, some critics have defended Coetzee’s style of autre-biography and suggested that the interventions he makes into the genre of life writing are both effective and revealing. As Sheehan writes of Summertime,
“[t]he author… perpetrates an act of self-displacement that offers new resources for the genre, even as it forecloses on some of the genre’s most establish conventions” (2016: 464). Through my discussion of Coetzee’s autre-biographical works, I hope to build on the insights on
Coetzee’s autre-biography offered by Kusek (2010), Clarkson (2013), Attridge (2004), Lenta
(2003) and Sheehan (2016). I also argue that the autre-biographical strategies offered by
Coetzee in Boyhood, Youth and Summertime not only make useful interventions into the life writing genre, but also use the slight distance offered by the autre to engage the self in a dialogue, and offer possibilities for intimacy and what Egan (1999) and Attridge (2004) have described as an immediacy of experience.
Robert Kusek argues that despite Coetzee’s hesitations about the truth-value of autobiography, rather than abandoning the life writing genre, Coetzee has brought about a “radical change of the life writing formula” through “revisiting the form and playing with the many potentialities it offers” (2010: 166). Part of this potential involves revisiting autobiography as a dialogic, or polyvocal rather than monologic or monovocal form. In J.M. Coetzee: Countervoices, Clarkson suggests that Coetzee invokes “countervoices” in his autobiography, which involves “playing up the dialogical potential of writing, instead of trying to suppress it” meaning that “[a]n ultimate and unitary authorial voice is thus no longer assured” (2013: 8). According to 73
Clarkson, Coetzee’s “predilection for not saying ‘I’…opens up onto Coetzee’s sustained interrogation of the authority who writes” (2013: 21). As Kusek (2010) and Sheehan (2016) argue, Coetzee’s experimentation with form and engagement with the dialogical potential of autobiography through the resistance of first person are evidence of his ethical engagement with, not abandonment of, the genre of life writing.
It is interesting to note that Attridge (2004) revised some of his ideas about Coetzee’s autre- biography after the publication of Youth. In a chapter entitled “Confessing in the Third
Person: Boyhood and Youth” in his J.M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading, Attridge made the important contention that Boyhood and Youth are indeed confessional texts, and closely compared the style and content of the two texts with many of the understandings of
“Confession” and “Truth” outlined in Coetzee’s essay on “Confession and Double Thoughts”
(Coetzee 1992c: 251-94). Whilst Attridge recognises that the notion of autobiographical truth is particularly problematic in the case of Boyhood and Youth, he encourages his reader to perceive the “he” of the third-person texts as Coetzee the writer (2004: 161). This association is essential, Attridge claims, for any reading of Boyhood and Youth as confessional texts, as “the power of this exposure of the self, of this drive for truth, can only be felt if the author of the works is identified as the ‘he’ of the narrative” (2004: 161). Attridge further amends his previous claims that Coetzee’s autre-biography lacks the “intimacy” of more traditional confession (1999: 79) by arguing that the “power of self-exposure” in Boyhood and Youth “is not reduced by the indismissible possibility that Coetzee has woven fictional episodes into a framework of autobiography” (2004: 161). Attridge’s claims are important to my argument here, as I too contend that the moments of fictionalisation in Coetzee’s autre-biography are not incompatible with the revelation of strong emotions and sense of autobiographical 74 intimacy offered in moments of self-exposure.
Margaret Lenta (2003) has also written a compelling defence of Coetzee’s style and approach in writing autre-biography, challenging critics who argue that these works should be considered fiction rather than autobiography. According to Lenta, Coetzee has not abandoned the genre of autobiography; rather he has experimented with form to achieve a “complex relationship of intimacy and detachment” (2003: 157). Writing in the third person allows an articulation of the complex and often contradictory feelings towards the self, the co-presence of multiple selves, and according to Lenta, provides a compelling reading experience that leads the reader to experience contradictory feelings towards the protagonist (2003: 158). The use of the third person in Coetzee’s autre-biography also facilitates the co-presence of the two selves which emerge in writing. According to Lenta, the use of detachment of author and protagonist through third-person narration and present continuous tense works to preserve the
“everyman” quality present in both Boyhood and Youth (2003: 161). For Lenta (2003), the affective power of Coetzee’s autobiography is also in his use of free indirect discourse and immanent voice, strategies that work to make the text less monovocal and more polyvocal, a feature that Smith (2011) and Lyons (1977) have argued enhances the authenticity and potency of the autobiographical voice, and subsequently the presence of autobiographical intimacy in the text.
Free indirect discourse is “not only the co-presence of two voices but also that of the narrator’s voice and the character’s pre-verbal perception or feeling” (Rimmon-Kenan 2002:
114). “[I]t superimposes the primary speaker’s voice and the secondary speaker’s voice; or rather, the primary speaker’s voice and the secondary speaker’s words” (Guiraud in Flavin 75
1987: 138-139). Louise Flavin has argued that the presence of free indirect discourse can create
“greater psychological depth” in the novel and in the movement away from dialogue toward internal views, can result in “a more penetrating view of character” (1987: 137). I contend that
Flavin’s arguments about the polyvocal potential of free indirect discourse might equally apply to Coetzee’s autre-biography, and that there is an intimacy or closeness, and a “penetrating view of character” that is created in this dialogue (1987: 137).
Throughout Youth perception and feeling emerge through the co-presence of narrator and focaliser, as free indirect discourse works to enhance “the bivocality or polyvocality of the text by bringing into play a plurality of speakers and attitudes” (Rimmon-Kenan 2002: 117).
Immanent voice also operates as a negative form that draws the reader further into the text, and further into the character. This “immanent voice” lets the reader know, without direct authorial intervention, that they are to read beyond the words on the page (Lenta 2003: 166).
In Boyhood and Youth, but to an extent also in Summertime, “inadequacy and misunderstanding in the protagonist’s responses have to be supplemented by the reader’s understanding” (Lenta
2003: 166). Thus the reader becomes an active agent in an “intersubjective process that occurs within a dialogic exchange between writer and reader/viewer” (Smith and Watson 2010: 16-
17). The reader is brought into the dialogue between the two co-present voices, character and narrator, and must supplement the text with their knowledge of the difference and distance between these two voices.
The ways that Coetzee invokes a polyvocal voice, which encourages a dialogue between author and subject, and also with the reader who has to supplement the text with their own understanding, is well illustrated through Coetzee’s representation of the naïve child narrator in 76
Boyhood, the hubris, wrongheadedness and arrogance of the young man in Youth, and in the
“polyphonic” structure (Sheehan 2016: 460) of the most recent instalment, Summertime. As
Clarkson argues, Coetzee’s “rather unusual grammatical combination” of the third person and present tense sets up the sense “of a dialogic interface between writing and written selves”
(2013: 39). “[T]he protean ‘he’ of Boyhood, Youth and several of [Coetzee’s] interviews”,
Clarkson argues, “emerges as a plural interlocutor in a dialogically refracted discourse of selves” (2013: 42). This dialogue between selves helps to reflect on and mirror process in writing one’s life, as the use of the third person draws attention “to a heightened sense of the difficult relation between narrating voice and narrating consciousness” (Clarkson 2013: 3). The
“unusual grammatical combinations” (Clarkson 2009: 39) deployed in Coetzee’s autre- biographies also helps facilitate his representation of fraught and complicated intimacies, such as those which emerge between the self of writing and the experiencing self, the selves of autobiography and the reader of autobiography, and the complicated intimacies represented in the texts themselves.
Boyhood has been received as a “haunting” and “affecting”12 portrait of growing up in Apartheid era South Africa, a regime that Coetzee has said caused a “deformed and stunted inner life”
(Coetzee 1992b: 98) for those who lived through it, and more generally of the socialisation of the young child, the experience of “boyhood” and of learning to “be a man” in the 1940s and
1950s. The protagonist, John, is an anxious and sometimes overly analytical young man with whom the reader, and indeed the author, seems to experience a “love/hate relationship”
(Lenta 2003: 168). John is very much an anti-hero figure, but is also a very vulnerable subject, whose actions often have the capacity to invoke both disgust and sympathy. Coetzee’s use of
12 “Praise for Boyhood”, first page of Penguin paperback edition, 1997. 77 heterodiegetic narration, present tense and immanent voice in Boyhood helps facilitate mature meditations on complex intimacies, whilst recreating the experience and naivety of childhood with a fresh immediacy.
Many of the most affectively complex moments in Boyhood focus on the relationship between the boy and his mother, representations which Attwell describes as “tangled and painful”
(2014: 165). In these moments, Coetzee refuses authorial intervention and the benefit of hindsight, yet provides a distance between the narrator and the protagonist through using third-person narration and present-continuous tense, which facilitates a dialogue between the experiencing and narrating selves. Throughout Boyhood, Coetzee’s dialogical, autre-biographical style and use of immanent voice present some very affective portraits, where the distance and dialogue enabled by this style allow the reader to register complex and often ambivalent feelings of familial love, and their often corresponding feelings of shame and guilt.
In the first chapter of Boyhood, Coetzee represents the relationship between the entitled, spoilt boy and his protective and doting mother in such a way that the reader feels pathos towards the mother. The reader also gains insight into the boy’s behaviour without having such behaviour defended or justified. We also get a sense of the narrating voice’s shame at the actions of his younger self, the narrated consciousness, without this being explicitly stated. The first chapter also provides the reader with a vivid portrait of sexism in the domestic sphere in a way that makes the reader uncomfortable, without the author having to directly point out, or comment on, its presence. In the first chapter John’s mother buys a bicycle with the hope of having the freedom of her own transport, and being able to leave the family farm while the children are at school. John’s father mocks her and discourages her, but she is persistent. John 78 is initially supportive of his mother having a bike, but eventually buys into the taunts of his father:
At first he thought it splendid that his mother should have her own bicycle. He has even pictured the three of them riding together down Poplar Avenue, she and he and his brother. But now, as he listens to his father’s jokes, which his mother can meet only with dogged silence, he begins to waiver. Women don’t ride bicycles: what if his father is right? ... His heart turns against her. That evening he joins in with his father’s jeering. He is well aware of what a betrayal this is. (1997: 3)
Despite the jeering of the man and boy, John’s mother persists in learning how to ride the bicycle. John only catches a glimpse of her on one of her expeditions into town once; she is
“wearing a white blouse and a dark skirt… coming down Poplar Avenue toward the house”
(1997: 3). His mother’s “hair streams in the wind” and “she looks young, like a girl, young and fresh and mysterious” (1997: 3), reminding John that his mother had a life before him and suggesting the troubling notion of a world in which he does not exist. The jeering of John’s father continues, and then “one day, without explanation, she stops riding the bicycle. Soon afterwards the bicycle disappears” (1997: 4). In a sentence that is truly affecting, Coetzee writes
“[n]o one says a word, but he knows she has been defeated, put in her place, and he knows that he must bear part of the blame” (1997: 4). As Sue Kossew argues, this passage is especially confessional because “[t]he childish notion of taking sides, ganging up with the men against the woman to keep her in her place, is counterbalanced by a sophisticated awareness of the way this behaviour has defeated her and he ‘must bear part of the blame’” (2011: 13).
The co-presence of the two voices engaged in a dialogue between the “writing and written sel[f]”, between childhood naivety and sophisticated awareness (Clarkson 2013: 39), heightens the pathos and the confessional nature of this scene. The chapter closes with the “memory of his mother on her bicycle on Poplar Avenue”, a memory that “does not leave him” (1997: 4). 79
She pedals away up Poplar Avenue, escaping from him, escaping towards her own desire. He does not want her to go. He does not want her to have a desire of her own. He wants her always to be in the house, waiting for him when he comes home. He does not often gang up with his father against her: his whole inclination is to gang up with her against his father. But in this case he belongs with the men. (1997: 4)
This moment in the opening chapter is so affecting, firstly because of its contradictory feelings of shame and guilt on the one hand at John’s having so readily joined in with the sexist jeering that denies women freedom and desire (described as a “betrayal”). But it is also the sense of fear and anxiety that John feels at the prospect of losing his mother, albeit this manifests through the selfish entitlement and possessiveness of the child (“He does not want her to go.
He does not want her to have a desire of her own”) (1997: 4). He is also anxious and deeply troubled by the thought of his mother having a life and desires that do not involve him, and the prospect of a world in which he is absent. It is also moving because it is rendered with the immediacy of the present tense (“he belongs with the men”) (1997: 4), and without the interrupting voice of the “converted narrator” (Spengemann in Coetzee 1992c: 260) who might instruct the reader on how to interpret the experience and actions of the protagonist. As
Lenta has argued, the “access offered to the protagonist’s thought processes is closely related to his personality as it is portrayed” (2003: 160), creating a voice that is authentic in its lack of self-reflexivity and self-analysis. Clarkson has argued that “the use of the third person in narrative prose affirms the identity of an authorial voice” (2009: 77), in this case it could be suggested that the detachment Coetzee has from his protagonist enables him to better reflect on the consciousness and idiosyncrasies of his character, and represent him in a way that seems more authentic because of the absence of overt self-justification. As Lenta observes in a later article on Boyhood and Summertime, “Boyhood is a narrative in which, although we are given extensive access to the consciousness of the child protagonist who forms its principal subject,
80 he never addresses his readers” (2011: 5). Direct address is not necessary in Boyhood, however, because as Clarkson suggests, use of third person in Boyhood “sets the protagonist and his words apart from the time of narration, despite the fact that [it] is written in the present tense.
The feelings expressed… are in keeping with the uninhabited intensity of a child’s view” (2009:
26).
The fact that this subject never addresses his readers strengthens and affirms his distinctive identity, as well as the identity of the narrator, and maintains, as Clarkson suggests, the emotional intensity of the subject. That the narrator is not overtly interpreting and analysing the subject is one of the strengths of Coetzee’s autre-biography and reflects his own “forensic investigation into the complex pathology of confessional writing” (Collingwood-Whittick
2001: 18) in his essays and interviews. Sheila Collingwood-Whittick suggests that Coetzee’s philosophy on the writing of confession is that “the vain and sterile soul-searching which… results in the act of truth-tellings’s being endlessly deferred, is unlikely to be eliminated unless the discursive, self-appraising, narcissistic ‘I’ of the writing consciousness itself disappears from autobiographical narration” (2001: 18). The elimination of the “I” is thus both aesthetically and philosophically central to the type of confession Coetzee is attempting in Boyhood. To rewrite
Boyhood in first person (Clarkson rewrites key passages to illustrate her point) would situate
“both narrating and narrated consciousness in the present of the utterance – and the effect… is one of phoniness”13 (Clarkson 2009: 26).
As Clarkson argues:
13 Interestingly, Kafka, a literary hero and precursor of both Auster and Coetzee, also began his notes for several of his manuscripts in the first person and then shifted to the third (Gray, Gross et al 2005: 99). As Clarkson (2013: 19) also explores, “Not I” was the name of one of Beckett’s famous monologues, in which the third person is used to destabilise any “easy assumption” that the protagonist Mouth “is the subject of her own discourse” (2013: 19). 81
Even though Coetzee uses the present tense, the use of third person enables him to effect two different time frames, separating the narrated and narrating consciousness, but without the intervention of respective adult commentary we usually associate with a first-person narrative. (2009: 26-27)
In the passage from Boyhood that I cited above, third-person narration and immanent voice enables Coetzee to explore the process through which men become socialised into sexist practice, and begin to replicate such ideas through their own behaviour, without explicitly stating this. It also suggests more subtlety that this behaviour, in the case of John, reflects his childish insecurity. The reader is aware that the events took place in the past, and that the actions of the protagonist and his father are shameful. As Clarkson observes, “the effect of the third person is to set the narrated consciousness in a time prior to that of the narration, to suggest that the feelings held by the protagonist are no longer the narrator’s own” (2009: 27).
To be overtly told this through an adult commentary might, however, undermine the authenticity of the scene, as this would begin to feel like a narrator artificially “imposing on the past the order of the present” (Weintraub 1975: 826).
His mother’s lack of a witty rebuttal to his father’s jeering leads him to question, “[w]omen don’t ride bicycles: what if his father is right?” (1997: 3). As Lee comments, Coetzee provides critical insight into the cruel sexism that men of this time grew up with and grew into (2002:
15). The implied dialogue between the adult narrator, who is aware of these power structures, with the child character beginning to experience and learn the ways of sexism and the patriarchal economy, creates an intriguing dialectic between innocence and guilt, and youth and
82 experience, enabling Coetzee to “wrestle”14 between “self and other, present and past, self and self” (Clarkson 2013: 39)
Coetzee’s use of immanent voice and heterodiegetic narration is particularly powerful in exploring, in a self-conscious way, the relationship between youth, vulnerability and memory.
This is most notable in an excerpt from Boyhood where the young John, in a moment of
“reckless intimacy”, challenges his friends Greenburg and Goldstein to remember and recount their first memories. John tells a story about leaning outside a window in Johannesburg and witnessing a small dog being hit by a car and dragging itself away paralysed and squealing in pain. John is pleased at how much this story “trumps” the efforts of his friends, yet he himself does not trust the story and believe that it is true, he wonders “[i]s it possible that he saw nothing but a dog dragging its hindquarters and made up the car and the driver and the rest of the story?” (1997: 30)
In this shift from confident narration to aporia, Coetzee is able to vividly articulate and recreate the processes through which memory and the failures of memory can undermine the possibility of fidelity to fact in autobiography. Through Coetzee’s use of present tense and limited narration the event is rendered with immediacy and insight into the motivations and insecurity of the young protagonist. Yet the use of third person provides a slight detachment from the character that enables the reader to observe the process through which he doubts, exaggerates and fabricates memory to impress his friends. Collingwood-Whittick also suggests
14 Clarkson notes in Countervoices that “wrestling” is “one of Coetzee’s favorite words when it comes to talking about the difficulty of writing” (2013: 39). 83 that this episode signifies “the selective nature of memory and the fictionalising action it is likely to undergo when processed for external consumption” (2001: 16).
It is then revealed that “there is another first memory that he trusts more fully, but would never repeat, certainly not to Greenberg and Goldstein, who would trumpet it around the school and turn him into a laughing stock” (1997: 30). The more authentic memory, which he trusts is closer to the truth, is kept a secret from his friends because it is childish and lacks the violence and impact of the story about the dog. The second story involves the very young John in “red woollen leggings and a woollen cap with a bobble” sitting next to his mother on a bus, and letting a sweet wrapper fly out of the bus window and into “the grim abyss of the pass, ringed with cold mountain peaks” (1997: 31). Of this “secret” memory, the reader is told: “[h]e thinks all the time of the scrap of paper, alone in all that vastness, that he abandoned when he should not have abandoned it” (1997: 31). Through divulging this secret, more infantile and perhaps more poignant memory with the reader using a narrative voice that the reader is both somewhat detached from, yet also involved with, Coetzee manages to engage the reader with the processes through which “fact” can be difficult to ascertain when retelling memory. In addition, he is able to have an affective impact on the reader who is audience to John’s
“secret” story of infantile vulnerability and anxiety. This story also clearly conveys what
Coetzee has argued is an inevitability in all human interactions, namely that “fictions of the self” interact with the projected fictions of others (2015: 177).
In Youth, third person and immanent voice is again vital to what Lenta calls the “complex relationship of both intimacy and detachment” (2003: 157) between J.M. Coetzee, the protagonist “John” and the reader. As Dirk Klopper eloquently argues, Coetzee’s use of third 84 person and present-tense narration constructs a “contradictory simultaneity of intimacy and distance, directness of observation and emotional detachment, access to the textured impressions of consciousness and its ironic displacement” (Klopper 2006: 30). The third person, through the simultaneous effects of textured consciousness and distance in impersonality, is very effective in reflecting the dialectic of intimacy and alienation which is an inevitable part of all confession (Felski 1989: 108). It also facilitates the doubled, ironic perspective which contributes to the appeal of the work. The John of Youth, like the younger
John of Boyhood, is a flawed character who nonetheless has an irresistible “everyman” (Lenta
2003: 163) quality about him. Youth is perhaps more comedic than Boyhood, as the arrogant young protagonist is often ridiculed for his arrogance, naivety and lofty ideas. As Clarkson argues, “the third person in Youth makes for a tone of ironic double perspective, which is one of the sources of humour in the book” (2009: 27). It is the “double perspective” provided in
Youth that allows the reader to laugh or cringe at John’s folly, but also empathise with the experience of youthful naivety, insecurity and wrongheadedness that this autobiographical character embodies. Arguably, the prose would lose “depth and levity” (Clarkson 2013: 28) if this character were presented to the reader in the first person.
Attridge argues that the third person and present tense deployed in Coetzee’s autre-biography
“denies the text any retrospection, any place from which the writer can reflect on and express regret about (or approval of) the acts and attitudes described” (2005: 143). The third person, autre-biographical style is so important to Youth because it facilitates a dual autobiographical consciousness, without the intrusive, sometimes inauthentic and authoritative voice of the converted, knowing, adult narrator. Jean Sévry suggests that Coetzee’s third person creates an
“absence within a presence” which “enables him to treat his own veracity tactfully and to avoid 85 voyeurism or exhibitionism” (2000: 15). It is a strategy which facilitates a continuity between the voice and subject of enunciation whilst still maintaining a distance. As Clarkson argues:
[B]oth Boyhood and Youth are devoid of explicit retrospective commentary or value judgements, but the use of the third person enables the writer to disaggregate the narrated consciousness from the time of the utterance, and hence from the narrated consciousness, in a way that the first person does not. (2009: 27)
This disaggregation of the narrated consciousness from the time of the utterance works in
Youth to separate the views of the narrator from the subject, John, in a way that maintains the idiosyncratic nature of John’s voice. For example, in the following passage, John contemplates his fascination with the Italian actress Monica Vitti, and the ‘angst’ that John believes she embodies.
The anguish with which Monica Vitti and other of Antonioni’s characters are burdened is a kind he is quite unfamiliar with. In fact, it is not anguish at all but something more profound. He would like to have a taste of Angst, if only to know what it is like. But, try though he may, he cannot find anything in his heart that he can recognise as Angst. Angst seems to be a European, a properly European, thing; it has yet to find its way to England, to say nothing of England’s colonies. (2002b: 49)
This “disaggregation” of narrating voice and narrated consciousness is especially effective in this passage as the reader is able to simultaneously understand John’s insecurities as well as his wrongheadedness. The idea that “[a]ngst seems to be a European, a properly European, thing” is consistent with John’s idiosyncratic and naive way of thinking throughout the text, as he perceives his colonial origins, rather than his youth and inexperience, as the source of his gaucherie (2002b: 49). John’s lofty, naive and overly self-conscious sentiments about what constitutes the “profound” and worthy of art is tragi-comic because of the way the voices in the text are disaggregated and brought into dialogue. His essentialist ideas about European
“angst” are humourous and revealed to be the product of youthful naivety, insecurity and lofty aspirations in a way that would perhaps not be as effective in the first person. 86
The use of the third person in Youth is also critical to Coetzee’s representation of John’s shame, and his ambivalent feelings about his home country. Such experiences could not be represented in such detail in the first person, as the commenting and qualifying adult narrator, which would be necessary to indicate that these musings are in the past and differ from the narrating consciousness, would undermine the immediacy and rhythm of the narrated consciousness, and as Bakhtin suggests lead to the adoption of “awkward and absurd” positions akin to “stage directions” in a play (1990: 327). For example, in the following passage
John muses about his desire to become British, to be accepted as British and to escape his
South African upbringing. He reflects on the various ways that one might come to live in a country not initially one’s own, as he thinks of the European refugees who have settled in
London.
But their situation is different to his. He is not a refugee; or rather, a claim on his part to be a refugee will get him nowhere with the Home Office. Who is oppressing you, the Home Office will say? From what are you fleeing? From boredom, he will reply. From philistinism. From atrophy of the moral life. From shame. (2002b: 104)
In this passage, the distance established between the narrated and narrating consciousness is vital to the droll humour as well as the immediacy of the insight into the young protagonist.
The line “or rather, a claim on his part to be a refugee will get him nowhere with the Home
Office” suggests some presence of the older narrating consciousness, where the qualifier “or rather” suggests that the younger narrated consciousness may have actually considered himself a refugee fleeing “boredom” and “philistinism” (2002b: 104). Through avoiding the overtly self-reflexive voice of the converted adult narrator, a greater and more immediate access is provided to the consciousness of the young protagonist. Should Coetzee have framed this mediation in the first person, it would have had a quality of “phoniness” (Clarkson 2013: 26) 87 owing to the qualifying and authoritative phrases of hindsight that would be necessary to show that this occurred in the past. Rather, there is a multiplicity of voices that emerges here within the utterance, the narrated consciousness of the young protagonist John, and the narrating consciousness which we assume is Coetzee. The dialogical relationship that is evident between the narrated and narrating consciousness facilitates the irony in the passage, as well as the sense of the adult narrator remembering and representing earlier thoughts and feelings about nationhood, culture, identity and shame with both a degree of ironic distance, whilst also authentically recreating how such experiences manifest in the consciousness of the younger protagonist.
Summertime, the final instalment of Scenes from Provincial Life, takes the dialogical potential of autre-biography further with the inclusion of fictional narrators who comment on the self that is constructed. In Summertime, Coetzee seems to be literalising Bakhtin’s notion of integrating external perspectives into autobiography to give the subject a sense of narrative coherence
(Bakhtin in Erdinast-Vulcan 2008: 6). Summertime is a text that more radically questions the self- sufficiency of the autobiographical subject: rather, the self is circulated through others. Danta argues that “[l]ike Coetzee’s other two fictionalised memoirs, Summertime makes the point in sometimes brutal terms that literary authority does not reside in the life or being of the author”
(2011: xviii). For Benjamin Kunkler, Summertime undermines the “autos” of autobiography
(2014). The ‘autos’ is replaced with a series of autres who contribute to the construction of
“John Coetzee”. As discussed earlier in the chapter, Summertime has been read as “fictional” and “tricksy” because of the narrative choices that Coetzee makes, and the distancing strategies he uses are said to mean that we cannot “trust” him as an autobiographer and take the confessions evident in Summertime at face value. 88
As I suggested earlier in this chapter, I wish to take a different approach to Summertime, in line with what Clarkson and Lenta have argued about Boyhood and Youth, and suggest that the style and structure of Summertime does not undermine its capacity to produce affecting autre- biographical portraits, and that rather, autobiographical intimacy can be established in the dialogical exchanges in the text, even where it seems that the autobiographical subject is further removed from the reader. This illustrates Clarkson’s contention that the stylistic features of a text might “render authorial subjectivity in more intimate and powerful ways”
(2016: 429). There is sense in Summertime, like in the other autre-biographical texts, of a simultaneous intimacy and distance, of both presence and absence. As Sam Cardoen eloquently puts it:
The use of the third person, which also allows “Coetzee” to introduce a layer of irony into his texts, has a distancing effect. The use of the present tense creates an unsettling sense of nearness. Combined these two elements serve to impress upon the reader the idea that he has been given access to an interior life marked by a desire to remain at a remove from an everyday reality which it must nevertheless confront. (2014: 103-104)
In Summertime, the novelist J.M. Coetzee, author of Disgrace and Waiting for the Barbarians, is dead and a young English academic (known only to the reader as ‘Mr Vincent’) is working on a biography of Coetzee using fragments of the late author’s notebooks, as well as interviews with five people who the biographer believed were important to the author. The book is presented as the transcript of these interviews, bookended with the said fragments from Coetzee’s notebooks, written in the third person and present continuous style that characterises Boyhood and Youth. H. Porter Abbot argues that “Coetzee is not a paratext but a ghostly presence”
(2011: 197), whilst the four female, and one male, interviewees recount what they remember and care to share of their relationship with him to the biographer. Donald Power argues that in 89
Summertime, “John is less a discrete character than an embodied memory, a composite textual
figure shuffled together from John’s entries in his notebooks and the remarks of the five individuals interviewed by the biographer Mr Vincent” (2016: 2). As Powers argues, through the “self-estrangement” and “intersubjective distance” created through the way Coetzee constructs and narrates the text, “‘John Coetzee’ emerges less as an autonomous character than a textual field, a palimpsest” (2016: 5). Though as I hope to demonstrate, these gestures of self- estrangement and distance also have the capacity to facilitate uncanny feelings of nearness and the presence of the confession.
Through seemingly omitting his authorial voice and replacing it with the voice of the other,
Coetzee seems to be suggesting that we do not in fact own our own stories. Perhaps we are not the most qualified to speak of ourselves. The literal “death of the author” that occurs in
Summertime alludes to Roland Barthes (1977), whose famous essay by that name suggested that readers, not authors, were responsible for generating meaning in texts.15 In adopting the seemingly unusual strategies used in Summertime to narrate his life, Coetzee seems to be acknowledging that the human subject is always confined to a partial outsider perspective when narrating his or her life. As Barthes writes in the preface to his Critical Essays: “to write is
… to become someone to whom the last word is denied; to write is to offer others, from the start, that last word” (1972: xi). Danta has noted that not being autonomous, or dependency, is a theme that runs deep in Coetzee. He writes that “Coetzee’s novels are like so many nets cast out to catch (out) the self-deceiving autonomous subject” and suggests that “one of Coetzee’s
15 As Attwell notes, Coetzee writes of the influence of Barthes on his aesthetic of autobiography, and claimed that Barthes wrote the kind of autobiography that he wanted to write (2014: 28). Clarkson also notes that Coetzee has spoken in interviews of Barthes “as a source of literary-critical inspiration” (2013: 6). Similarly, Powers (2016) and Sheehan (2016) also discuss the impact of Barthes’ critical and auto-fictive writing on Coetzee’s Scenes from Provicial Life, especially the open, and “fragmentary quality” of the narrative in Summertime (Powers 2016: 3). 90 key gestures – a philosophical gesture, if you like, that he builds his stories out of – is to introduce dependence where before there might have been autonomy” (2011: 2). Summertime comments on the essential dependency of the writer, of the subject of auto/biography and indeed of us all. As Arabella Kurtz writes to Coetzee in The Good Story, “we can only know and understand ourselves fully through others – through the way we experience others and ourselves in relation to others, and the way others experience us. This is what I read your book
Summertime to be about” (2015: 11).
The silence and lack of agency ensued by death, the “counterfactual” axiom (Cartwright 2009:
128) upon which Summertime is based, is the ultimate example of how the subject loses his autonomy, and in this text Coetzee seems to be exaggerating dependency as a means to emphasise the significance of the other in narrating our life stories. According to Hall,
Coetzee’s later novels deal with the central ethical question “of how life can best be lived once we have recognised dependency as a likely condition of all lives” (2012: 134, emphasis in original).
The idea of dependency not only undermines the autonomy of the self, but also the unity of the first-person “I”, which Nancy K. Miller has claimed “is autobiography’s deepest fiction of
‘masculine’ truth” (1992: 13), a self-sufficient and narratively coherent subject who is not only responsible for his own failures and achievements, but is wholly qualified to report on the self, using the authoritative first-person address. Cardoen comments that in the absence of first- person narration, Coetzee challenges the idea of an author who reports on his or her life experiences in an authoritative and self-reflexive way, rather, a “much more ambiguous relationship of association and dissociation is at play in ‘Coetzee’s’ texts, which also 91 undermines a traditional conception of the author as one who writes from a position of distance and authority” (2014: 98). Coetzee eschews the idea of the author who controls his life narrative from a retrospective distance through writing in the third person and in present continuous tense. He also disavows literary authority through focalising the story through other characters (Danta 2011: xix).
The portraits given of these other characters in the interviews, and the portraits provided of
Coetzee through these transcripts, are a reminder to readers both that lives are never lived in isolation from one another, and that selves cannot exist in an original and cohesive unity that we can access through literary and/or autobiographical texts. The picture of “Coetzee” and the other characters we are given is one that is not confined by the usual temporal, spatial and narrative conventions of autobiography. It is narrated at different times from various parts of the world by narrators who remind us implicitly, as Julia (the first interviewee) does explicitly, that “this tale I’m telling is mine, I am the protagonist. John Coetzee (the subject of the biographer’s enquiries) is, and only ever has been, a secondary or even tertiary character”
(2009: 43) and also one of whom the interviewees largely do not have fond memories. Julia tells the biographer, “I am perfectly aware it is John you want to hear about, not me. But the only story involving John that I can tell, or the only one I am prepared to tell, is this one, namely the story of my life and his part in it, which is different, quite different, from the story of his life and my part in it” (2009: 43).
Through the assumedly fictional character’s construction of John Coetzee, and her diminishment of his importance to her, the autres of autre-biography are multiplied, and given names and distinct identities. The distance provided by these multiple autres allows Coetzee to 92 explore moments of vulnerability and strained and complicated intimacy, without the discomfort or inauthenticity that might have ensued had the same autobiographical vignettes been written by a singular narrator in the first person. It also allows Coetzee to reflect the processes of autre-biography, the “submerged dialogue” he has described between selves
(1992a: 391), and the impossibility of ever coming to a truth of self in his writing. Following
Attridge’s arguments about Boyhood and Youth (2004: 161), I argue that the fact that Coetzee has woven fictional episodes into Summertime, that he has departed from known biographical
“facts” and that the very premise of the framing device is fictional, does not discount the text’s status as auto or autre-biography (2004: 161). It also does not stop us from experiencing the text as an intimate dialogue. As James Meek suggests in his Guardian review of the text,
Coetzee “seems to be taking less interest in the storytelling keel of his books and is inviting us instead to listen into an intimate conversation he is having with himself in the form of multiple alter egos” (2009). Meeks observations here suggest that Summertime exemplifies the kinds of
“tears” and “fissures” associated with Coetzee’s late style, in which the process of writing is explored in an open and sometimes unresolved manner (Murphet 2011: 86), a subject to which
I will return later in this chapter.
One of the most revealing instances in Summertime of the ways that distance, doubling and dialogue can be used to reflect the processes of autobiography and narrativising lives, and create a sense of autobiographical intimacy, is in Mr Vincent’s interview with John Coetzee’s cousin, Margot. With Margot’s permission, Mr Vincent “recast[s]” his interview with Margot
“as a narrative” (2009: 91). This seemingly distances the reader from the subject in manifold ways. It is an interview about John Coetzee with his cousin Margot, told to Mr Vincent the third-party mediator, which is then turned by Vincent into a narrative, and read back to Margot 93 so that she can check and/or approve its content. Vincent tells Margot “I did something fairly radical. I cut my prompts and questions and fixed up the prose to read as an uninterrupted narrative spoken in your voice” which he says is “dramatized here and there, letting people speak in their own voices” (2009: 87). What is more is that Vincent recasts Margot’s narrative in the third person, present continuous tense that has come to define Coetzee’s autre- biographical style. He tells her, “the she I use it like I but is not I” (2009: 89). Margot intervenes throughout, questioning Vincent’s choice of words, how much and what he reveals about certain characters, and the way he reworks things that she says. Through Margot and Vincent’s dialogue, Coetzee explores the difficulties in narrativising experience and the inevitable fictions or half-truths that may be perceived when attempting to give lives a narrative coherence.
Margot says to Vincent, “When I spoke to you, I was under the impression you were simply going to transcribe our interview and leave it at that. I had no idea you were going to rewrite it completely” (2009: 91), to which Vincent replies: “[t]hat’s not entirely fair. I have not rewritten it, I have simply recast it as a narrative. Changing the form should have no effect on the content” (2009: 91). Margot responds, “I don’t know, something sounds wrong, but I can’t put my finger on it” (2009: 91). Powers argues of this particular passage in Summertime:
Contrary to Vincent’s claim, his modification of first to third person certainly does have a significant effect on the way Margot’s account is interpreted. It is possible to argue that the flat simplicity of Vincent’s comment that “[c]hanging the form should have no effect on the content” is due less to his intellectual naivety than his desire to put to rest Margot’s concerns about his trustworthiness as a biographer. Nevertheless, it strikes a dissonant note both in the context of the other acts of language translation involved in Vincent’s project and in the broader context of Coetzee’s literary criticism, which is marked by Coetzee’s scrupulous attention to the linguistic aspect of narrative, particularly in the act of translating between languages. (2016: 9)
As Powers suggests, the notion that “changing the form should have no impact on the content” seems radically incongruous within the work of an author who pays such close
94 attention to the nuances of language and the ways this might impact on meaning. Clarkson suggests that within Coetzee’s oeuvre, style is central to meaning and subjectivity. She suggests that “style is expressive of one’s subjective engagement with the world, writing is part of that self-expression, not something else (2016: 431, emphasis in original). In this moment of the text, Margot’s discomfort with the changed style of her account expresses part of Coetzee’s philosophy of the relationship between writing and subjectivity (Clarkson 2016: 429). It is unclear whether Vincent has taken liberties with Margot’s story, or whether Margot is anxious about her sister Carol reacting to the unflattering representation of her in the narrative. What unsettles Margot is that the style has been changed, and she no longer sees or hears herself within the story. The reader has no way of knowing whose account is more “truthful”, but is instead presented with another symbolic example of how fiction and truth are not always decipherable in autobiography, much like the memory of the small dog being hit by a car in
Boyhood. Both these examples illustrate how something that is ostensibly “true” might sound wrong, and conversely perhaps how something that is ostensibly fictional might sound right, and the importance of style in the construction of convincing or authentic identities in writing.
Through Margot and Vincent’s interaction, Coetzee provides a more process-orientated reflection on the ways that truths and selves are constructed, and the “acts of language translation” (Powers 2016: 9) that are integral to and an inevitable part of this construction, reflecting on the ways that linguistic choices may impact profoundly on how meaning about self is conveyed and received. This passage is another example of the ways that “Coetzee’s writing of the self-as-other obsessively draws attention to the generic conventions of writing a life and the ethical implications of such writing” (Kossew 2011: 9).
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Through Margot’s story, many interesting ideas about the John Coetzee character are revealed.
This distanced story presents quite a detailed portrait of the subject of the autre-biography, though it is mirrored and refracted through several other speakers, and cannot be assumed to reliably line up with biographical fact. This narrative demonstrates the way Coetzee has used autres in his writing to focalise and give a narrative coherence to the writer’s autobiographical selves. It also demonstrates how the distance provided by autre figures and third-person narration enables a representation of intimate or confessional material in a way that is not challenged or weakened by the reflexive distance of hindsight that Coetzee has described as self-deceiving in Doubling the Point (1992c: 291). In Margot’s story, Margot and John’s interaction has the appearance of being awkward, yet candid and intimate. They broach the topic of his father’s depression (2009: 94), the realisation of love (2009: 97) and John’s relationship to South Africa and the Karoo in language that is unusually direct and emotive for
Coetzee’s prose. Furthermore, it provides a rare instance of the John Coetzee character using the first person “I”, because it is recounted and refracted through Margot and Vincent. “This place wrenches my heart”, John says to Margot, “[i]t wrenched my heart when I was a child and I have never been right since” (2009: 97). The repeated verb “wrenched” puts greater emphasis on its unusually direct emotionality. Margot’s story (told by Vincent) also provides a rare instance of John speaking directly on the issue of his parents, describing his father as
“depressed” and saying to Margot, “[a]s you must know, he and my mother did not have a happy marriage. Even so, after her death he went into decline” (2009: 94). What is also notable about Margot’s story is how her narrative about John and his relation to emotion differs so vastly from portraits provided in Youth, Boyhood and elsewhere in Summertime, which have depicted him as “frozen” (2002b: 168), “cold” (2002b: 168), “[having] a heart of stone” (1997:
123) and “autistic” (2009: 53). Margot suggests that like other Coetzees in their family, John 96 has “a heart”, “[t]oo much heart, in fact, sometimes” (2009: 102). The sense of John “having a heart” is especially evident in the closing “Notebook Fragments”, in which a highly poignant and touching portrait of John Coetzee’s father Jack is painted. Coetzee uses a series of objective correlatives – symbols and events, which illustrate, rather than tell, the feelings of guilt and regret felt about his relationship with his father. The first page of the “Updated
Fragments” of Coetzee’s notebook which constitutes the final chapter of Summertime is a heart- wrenching portrait of his father and the guilty feelings the narrator feels in relation to him.
This is established through a very ordinary scene of an old man and his adult son going to a rugby game.
He goes with his father to Newlands because sport – rugby in winter, cricket in summer – is the strongest surviving bond between them, and because it went through his heart like a knife, the first Sunday after his return to the country, to see his father put his coat on and without a word go off to Newlands like a lonely child. (2009: 245)
The imagery here provides a picture that is in stark contrast to the cold, stiff, emotionless “man of wood” (2009: 201) Coetzee is described as in earlier sections of the text. As Kossew observes, “the compassion of the son for the father’s loneliness and the way it pierces his heart speaks more about the man and his emotional life than anything the reader has encountered previously” (2011: 19). Whilst at the game, the third-person narrator (John Coetzee) laments his own lack of empathy and wonders whether this is to blame for their silent, strained relationship.
His father does not care who wins, Gardens or Union or the man in the moon. In fact, he finds it hard to detect what his father cares about, in rugby or anything else. If he could solve the mystery of what in the world his father wants, he might perhaps be a better son. (2009: 247)
Jack Coetzee, John’s father, has not received a very sympathetic treatment in Coetzee’s earlier autre-biographies, so it is significant that Summertime, the final book in the Scenes from Provincial 97
Life trilogy, concludes with a melancholic, sympathetic portrait of him. As Attwell suggests, the fact that Summertime finishes on the “act of reparation” (2014: 184) with Jack Coetzee signals the “end of John’s being the child” (2014: 177), overturns the Oedipal tensions of the earlier books and suggests “[t]he phase of blaming the father is at an end” (2014: 178). In this closing fragment, “[t]he poignancy of Jack’s life overwhelms the earlier bitterness” (2014: 184). Whilst the father remains elusive, there are strong affects of tenderness and guilt expressed in these closing fragments. Whilst there is no reflexive authorial voice which comments on the son’s changing feelings towards his father, the reader experiences with a sense of immediacy the guilt and regret John feels about his estranged relationship with his father as the older man approaches the threshold of death. Perhaps the most intimate and heart-breaking moment in
Summertime occurs when John accidently finds an answered Yes-No quiz titled “Your Personal
Satisfaction Index” which his father has left lying around the house (2009: 251) and reports
“[o]f a possible twenty, his father scores six. A score of fifteen or above, says the creator of the index…means that the respondent has lived a fulfilled life” (2009: 251).
The absence of Jack Coetzee’s voice in these exchanges means he remains elusive, and also works to foreground the co-presence of the two voices created through the third-person, present-tense narration – the narrating voice and the narrated consciousness. As neither voice has an answer about what Jack wants or feels, the accumulation of tragic details about him makes these scenes highly affecting. The feelings of intimacy, estrangement and detachment established through the absence of Jack’s voice and the co-presence of the narrated and narrating consciousness in these closing fragments are incredibly complex, contributing to a sense of an “authenticity” which may not necessarily “reproduce a reality” but rather
“manifest[s] its own truth” (Coetzee 1992c: 268). 98
There is an overwhelming of things not being resolved in Summertime, further drawing attention to the incomplete nature of the autobiographical form, which purports to represent a life, but can only do this in a fragmented or incomplete manner. It perhaps also reflects the way that writing the self is what Felski has described as an “alienated” act (1989 :108), and is another example of the extent to which Summertime as an autre-biography emphasises process over any sense of a cohesive or finished product, a property of those life writing texts which emphasise the dialogical manner in which selves are created and narrated (Egan 1999). Arguably, this sense of incompleteness is deliberate in its attempt to evoke countervoices, to further undermine the “autos” of his autobiography, and engage in, as Coetzee puts it, a “dialogue of self with its own doubt” (1992c: 291). This could especially be said of the italicised notes in the notebook fragments from the end of the text, of about which Vincent says to Julia: “Coetzee wrote them himself. They are memos to himself, written in 1999 or 2000 when he was thinking of adapting these particular entries for a book” (2009: 20, emphasis in original). In her preface to the paperback edition of Countervoices, Clarkson suggests that “John’s notebook entries, written in the third person, with italicised ‘notes to self’, seem to demand an entire essay of their own”, revealing
“putative written and writing selves, standing in slippery relation to their author” (2013: xii).
The italicised notes to self in Summertime serve several functions. They both undermine and cast aspersions on the truth and confessional value of what has been written in the notebooks above (often in an acerbic and humorous way, e.g. “Caution: Avoid pushing his interest in Jesus too far and turning this into a conversion narrative” (2009: 13 italics in original). They also imply a sense of incompleteness, encouraging the reader to speculate and extrapolate based on the threads provided, such as “[t]heme to carry further: his father and why he lives with him. The reaction of the women 99 in his life (bafflement)” (2009: 252). There is also the sense of Coetzee “reading himself [as
Barthes does] as if he were a character, subject or text” (Sheehan 2016: 458), such as in the note “[f]eatures of his character that emerge from the story: (a) integrity (he declines to read the will as she wants him to): (b) naiveté (he misses a chance to make some money)” (2009: 12). As demonstrated in the example above, not only is the ostensibly autobiographical self of the notebook commented on as though he were a fictional character, but these comments also wrestle with one another, suggesting two alternate (though not mutually exclusive) readings of the story about John, who in this particular section of the text is hired to interpret a dead man’s will by his bereaved widow.
These fragments and the italicised notes to self are also intriguing in this autre-biography because they seem to simultaneously emphasis the text’s status as “memoir”, attributing a certain quality of verisimilitude which one might associate with the “found” manuscripts or notebooks of an author, as well as drawing our attention to its fictional and constructed qualities, with its metafictional commentary on the way aspects of a life become narrativised.
This reflects, perhaps, what Coetzee has said about the way that elements of the real and the fictional might interact in a dialectic, producing “fictions of the truth” (1999a) and fictions of the self (2015: 177). It also further suggests that whilst elements of the text are undeniably, and overtly, fictionalised, that there are still moments of the text which give the sense of an insight into the writer’s processes and ways of viewing and representing himself and others. As
Sheehan observes, these fragments illustrate the way that John’s life becomes “textualised”, as
“[t]he notebook and diary fragments that bookend these ‘witness testimonies’ highlight the composite nature of the narrative, scattered and multi-focal” (2016: 462).
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Mr Vincent’s notes – as the biographer, translator of stories, and manipulator of form – are also italicised, drawing some continuities between the voice of “Coetzee” and the voice of “Mr
Vincent”. In his interview with Sophie, Mr Vincent says of Coetzee’s letters and diaries:
What Coetzee writes there cannot be trusted, not as a factual record – not because he was a liar but because he was a fictioneer. In his letters he is making up a fiction of himself for his correspondents, in his diaries he is doing much the same for his own eyes… [i]f you want the truth you have to go beyond the fictions they elaborate and hear from the people who knew him directly, in the flesh. (2009: 225-226)
In response to this, Sophie reminds Mr Vincent that “we are all fictioneers” (2009: 226), debunking his notion that people “in the flesh” might provide a truer picture of self than an author’s writing. Here Sophie’s arguments closely anticipate the claims Coetzee would later make in dialogue with Arabella Kurtz that “I believe most exchanges between human beings to be exchanges between projected fictions” (2015: 50), suggesting there is nothing “truer” about the way that Vincent goes about forming life-narratives than there is in the notebook fragments, the notes to self and the overt acts of “fictioneering”.
The italics used in both sets of metafictional interventions – “Coetzee’s” and Mr Vincent’s – perhaps encourage us to conflate Mr Vincent and Coetzee, and suggest that those claims made in relation to Coetzee and his storytelling may also hold true for Mr Vincent, and vice versa.
This suggests perhaps that they are both “fictioneers”, not to be trusted, or conversely, that whilst both manipulate form and “recast” recounts and memories as narratives, that this does not preclude the possibility that “fictions of the truth” (1999a) or “fictions of self” (2015) might emerge in this exchange.
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The open and fragmented nature of the notebooks, and the presence of the “notes to self” might also be read as not merely metafiction, but also as an “irascible gesture” associated with
“late style”, a means in which the “fissures” of the text are exposed (Adorno 2002: 566) in what Murphet describes as “the weary shrug of the shoulders” associated with Coetzee’s late style which “shows all the seams and fissures, the failures of integration, which would hitherto have been smoothed over in a determinate movement of formal resolution” (2011: 86).
Perhaps rather than gestures of postmodern trickery and indeterminacy, these notes to self expose the “power of subjectivity” (Adorno 2002: 566) in late works. It could be argued that the fragments and the notes to self are another example of the way Coetzee shows the reader that he is “groping for answers” rather than “hiding” or “teasing us” (Shillingsburg 2006: 16).
In this case, the answers he seems to be “groping” for are how to best communicate the often- conflicting fictions of self (2015: 177) in writing, so that one might create what could best be described as a “fiction of the truth” (1999a).
In the examples provided above, it can be observed that through refracting autobiographical vignettes through the perspectives of multiple autres, Coetzee finds an autre-biographical space in which some sense of the confessional is possible. This undermines perceptions of the text as merely a sophisticated, fictionalised narrative “trick”, and Lejeune’s notion that the directness and unity of the autobiographical utterance is the source of its authenticity and intimacy.
The autres of Paul Auster
In the next part of this chapter, I continue discussing the dialogical potential of auto or autre- biography through an examination of Paul Auster’s Invention of Solitude, Winter Journal and Report 102 from the Interior. Auster is a writer famed for postmodern experimentation, as discussed in the introduction to this thesis. Like Coetzee, Auster has been known to insert autobiographical aspects into his fictional work, and use fictionalising strategies in his autobiography. As Evija
Trofilmova observes, the majority of Auster critics “have commented on Auster’s tendency to inscribe himself in his texts by obliterating the borders between fact and fiction” (2014: 4).
According to Brendan Martin, Auster’s work exhibits the classic traits of postmodern fiction such as “an indeterminate and ironic relationship between character and author; an ambiguous narrative voice; the blurring of fact and fiction; and doppelgängers as a central theme”
(2008: 1). As I cited earlier, Auster has claimed that his purpose in placing himself within his books is to deconstruct the writing process, “to open up the process, to break down the walls, to expose the plumbing” (McCaffery and Gregory 2013: 28).
Auster has described his body of writing to date as “the book of my life so far, a multi-faceted picture of who I am” (1997b: 296). Despite his frequent blurring of some of the generic boundaries between autobiographical and fictional prose, Auster has asserted on many occasions that his autobiography is to be read as autobiography and his fiction as fiction. And despite his reputation as a postmodernist known for trickery and authorial game-playing, he has on many occasions used very humanist terms like “truth”, “honest[y]” and “intimacy” to describe his autobiographical works (Auster 1995: 207; 2013). In an interview with Michael
Silverblatt, he went as far as to claim “the idea that I am some cold, calculating gamesman… is something that I hear quite often about my work and it surprises me… every book has come out of great emotional turmoil and is about feeling in one sense or another” (austerologist
2009). Hence despite his reputation sometimes as one of the “gamesmen” of postmodernism,
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Auster sees his work as primarily about “tenderness” and “compassion” and the “sadness and poignancy of being a human being” (austerologist 2009).
In his scathing article about Auster in The New Yorker, James Wood (2009) writes, “Auster is a peculiar kind of postmodernist. Or is he a postmodernist at all?”, ultimately calling Auster “the least ironic of contemporary writers”. Though Auster himself felt “mugged” by James Wood’s damning review of his work (Auster and Coetzee 2013: 119), he himself, as I argue above, has felt on several occasions that his classification as a postmodernist and a trickster is misplaced
(austerologist 2009; Auster and Coetzee 2013: 175). As Brendan Martin has commented, though Auster is “continually involved in the duplicitous art of self-invention” (2008: 100), he has questioned “his inclusion in within the corpus of postmodern authors” (2008: 99).
According to Adriana Neagu, Auster’s autobiographical poetics draw on “[t]he Beckettian struggle to articulate the nonword” and “struggle to express the inexpressible” (2013). It is this struggle that has informed Auster’s experimentation with fictionalising and self-reflexive devices according to Neagu, rather than “the stereotypical postmodern game of narcissistic self-mirroring” (2013). Neagu writes that, “[w]hile his ethic is one of dialogism and plurality,
Auster’s poeticity is the effect of an at times singular, disconcerting simplicity, the substance of ethereality” (2013). As Trofilmova observes, “[t]he empirical author, Paul Auster… in spite of his zeal for postmodern literary games, is equally (increasingly) being recognized as an existential-humanist writer” (2014: 2).
As the above quotes suggest, though Auster is, in many ways, a postmodern author known for duplicity and self-reflexivity, he is also one who espouses quite humanist values and sentiments. Martin argues that Auster “strives for authenticity” (2008: 17) in his writing, a 104 claim that Auster himself makes in a discussion of the narrative voice and structure used in The
Invention of Solitude (1982: 139). Auster has been described as an “unpostmodernist postmodernist” (Dow 1998: 276). William Dow has argued:
If Jean-Francois Lyotard is right in concluding that ‘enlightenment’ values (truth, progress, virtue, homogeneity) are no longer applicable in a postmodern epoch… Invention, in its reflection on the human condition and emphasis on the ethical component of the intellect, it at once a postmodernist extension and contravention. (1998: 273)
According to Dow, Auster’s first autobiography, The Invention of Solitude, “questions the postmodern topos” of presenting humanism and rationalism as serving “only to hide irreconcilable and indeterminate meanings” (1998: 273). Rather, in Invention, Auster appears comfortable with the idea of “truth” and “authenticity” emerging in his autobiographical representation, though perhaps as in Coetzee’s autre-biography, the authenticity created is more poetic and less referential. As I have argued earlier, Auster’s choice to use third and second-person autres in his autobiographical works is not merely a desire to inscribe postmodern indeterminacy onto his representation of self, but rather, a means to explore the inherently dialogical nature of writing autobiography, to enter into a “dialogue” with himself (Holdengräber 2012). As I suggested in my introduction, there are some interesting parallels between the reception of Auster’s work and the way that Coetzee is read and positioned. Like Auster, Coetzee’s works deploy postmodern aesthetics and self-reflexivity, but depart from postmodern aesthetics. In these parallels, we might read or understand some of the reasons for Coetzee’s and Auster’s shared interest in each other’s work. As discussed earlier in the chapter, Auster is unabashed in using words like “honesty” and “exposure” to describe his autobiographical writing, and
105 has claimed that facilitating a slight distance in his autobiography between the narrated and narrating consciousness facilitates greater “intimacy” (Gooderham 2012).
In an interview about The Invention of Solitude that is included in The Red Notebook, Auster responds to a question about the different style, structure and use of narrative voice in “The
Book of Memory”. In “The Book of Memory”, the second “book” of the Invention of Solitude,
Auster shifts from using homodiegetic narration and consistent past tense in the first part,
“Portrait of an Invisible Man”, to heterodiegetic narration and shifting tense in “The Book of
Memory”. In justifying his decision to write in this way for the second book, Auster has said:
The point was to be as honest as possible in every sentence. I wanted to write a work that was completely exposed. I didn’t want to hide anything. I wanted to break down for myself the boundary between living and writing as much as I could. (Mallia 1987: 7)
It is interesting that although Auster uses the third person and refers to himself using the synecdochic “A.” in the “The Book of Memory”, he claims that it is this latter half of the work that he feels is “completely exposed”, and that it is the third-person pronoun that helps to break down the “boundary between living and writing” (Mallia 1987: 7), a claim that would appear to be a reversal of the traditional Lejeunian conditions under which autobiography has historically been written and received. In an interview with Jonathan Letham, Auster said that his purpose as a writer is to make his writing “transparent” so that the “reader is simply inside the voice”, which enables him to “explore the deepest emotional questions [he knows] about, love and death, human suffering, human joy” (2005). This certainly challenges Lejeune’s (1989) understanding of the autobiographical pact and the role that heterodiegetic narration plays in autobiography, as well as much of the accepted understanding about the role that voice and narration play in establishing autobiographical intimacy. In The Invention of Solitude, Auster
106 engages the author with his attempts to understand the nature of his memories, and his relationship with his recently deceased father. Though the second half of the book reads as fragmented, non-linear and as though we are detached from the author through his use of third-person, heterodiegetic narration, Auster intends to emulate the doubling and fragmentation that occur in the process of remembering and writing the self. This is what he means when he speaks in an interview with Joseph Mallia of his desire to break down the
“boundary between living and writing” (1987: 7). This claim also reminds us of Coetzee’s arguments in Doubling the Point that “one is in danger of not being oneself when one lives at a reflexive distance from oneself”, which he observes is a revealing reversal of the values of autobiography (1992c: 268). Both Coetzee and Auster use strategies to reduce the sense of reflective distance, and enhance the sense of the dialogic. The third person, Auster has claimed, helped to free him from the writer’s block he felt after beginning The Invention of
Solitude in the first person. He says to Letham that “by shifting into the third person, I managed to get a certain distance from myself, which in turn made it possible for me to write the book” (2005). He also engages with the notion, as Coetzee (1992a) suggests, that one might write in order to find out what they wanted to say in the first place, emphasising the importance of process over product in autobiographical writing, when he says, “I find the book in the process of writing it” (in Wood 2013: 130). Through autobiographical writing, one may stray from “truth to fact”, and a “poetic” truth of self, or “fictions of the truth” (Coetzee
1999a) may evolve from the process of writing. In The Invention of Solitude, Auster considers the way that our experience and memories are in many ways themselves structured like a language, and considers the parallels between words and experiences. He writes:
[T]he world is not just the sum of things that are in it. It is the infinitely complex network of connections among them. As in the meanings of words, things take on meaning only in relation to each other… it is possible for events in one’s life to rhyme 107
as well… The rhyme they create when looked at together alters the reality of each. The grammar of existence includes all the features of language itself: simile, metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche – so that each thing encountered in the world is actually many things, which in turn give way to many other things, depending on what these things are next to, contained by, or removed from. (1982: 161-162)
In this moment of the text, Auster is not only metafictively engaging with the way that the processes of memory inscribe a narrative coherence and meaning to experience, but he is also reflecting the notion, as Coetzee has claimed, that “our engagements are with a constantly changing interplay between shadows (fictions) and glimpses of the real” (2015: 142) and that these “glimpses” might only emerge in and through the very process of writing life narratives.
He also argues that all experience (not just that conveyed in autobiography) is subject to narrativisation and the structures of language, further revealing how his perceptions of the interplay between fiction and reality is complex and indeterminate.
Martin claims that in The Invention of Solitude, Auster reflects on and makes evident the ways in which “involuntary distortions result in newly invented truths” (2008: 16). These claims about
Invention also suggest that like Coetzee’s autre-biographical works, Auster’s are very much process orientated texts, and as Clarkson suggests (in relation to Coetzee), that style itself might become part of the way in which subjectivity is expressed and autobiographical “truths” are formed (2016: 429). In Auster, as in Coetzee, truths about self emerge in the process of writing and telling stories about oneself, rather than from fixed notions of historical or biographical truths of self. In The Art of Hunger, Auster justifies his style of autobiographical narration in the second book of The Invention of Solitude, writing that “I had to objectify myself in order to explore my own subjectivity . . . The moment I think about the fact that I’m saying
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‘I‘, I‘m actually saying ‘he’. It’s the mirror of self-consciousness, a way of watching yourself think“ (McCaffery and Gregory 2013: 35).
Auster’s claim that his form and style in The Invention of Solitude act as a means to watch himself think is also suggested through the fact that several of the central themes of ideas in the memoir are also reflected in the modes of narration that he chooses. The themes of solitude, silence and invisibility reflect not only Auster’s initial intention in Invention, to discover his elusive father posthumously, but also the way he narrates the text, shifting from first-person to third-person narration, exposing the fissures of his own writing and opting for a ghostly, unresolved style which exposes the manner in which the act of writing might be considered the
“most alienated of activities” (Felski 1989: 108). In trying to discover his father, Auster only discovers the impenetrable solitude that removed him from all others. He writes, “[h]e saw me only through the mists of his solitude, as if at several removes from himself” (1982: 24).
Furthermore, this reflects back onto the subject/narrator relationship, as the narrator begins to narrate his own experience “at several removes from himself”, perhaps also “through the mists of his own solitude” (1982: 24).
In the first book, “Portrait of an Invisible Man” , Auster attempts to understand the mystery of the “invisible” Sam Auster, a man who was “invisible to others, and most likely invisible to himself as well” (1982: 7). He describes his father as “impenetrable” (1982: 62) and “absent”
(1982: 17) and comments on his inability to connect intimately with people, place or self.
Auster writes, “[i]t was as though his inner life eluded even him” (1982: 20) and “[i]t was never possible for him to be where he was. For as long as he lived, he was somewhere else, between here and there” (1982: 19). Auster’s quest to know his father and enter his “solitude” proves 109 unsuccessful as he begins to realise, “[i]f it is true that we can ever come to know another human being, even to a small degree, it is only to the extent that he is willing to make himself known” (1982: 6). Auster begins to lament what he perceives as the impasse of his first-person meditations, musing “the vanity of trying to say anything about anyone” (1982: 62), writing towards the end of the first section, “the closer I come to the end of what I am able to say, the more reluctant I am to say anything” (1982: 63) and earlier, “the words have come very slowly so far” (1982: 32). The authorative “I” that wants to define itself and come to an answer about the relationship between the subject and his father proves unproductive in producing such knowledge. The implication is that the first-person attempt to “know” oneself and “know” another subject has proven difficult. Auster experiences frustration in trying to find the truth of his father’s life and subsequently part of his own life, illustrating the ways that writing (in particular writing self) can become an alienated and alienating activity (Felski 1989: 108). In the second book, Auster moves towards a style that is closer to his two later autobiographies, a style in which memory is represented as more fragmented and episodic, and in which the singular “I” of autobiographical discourse is erased. Auster has suggested that for one to ever be “truly present among his surroundings, he must be not thinking of himself, but of what he sees. He must forget himself in order to be there” (1982: 137-138). If this statement is applied to autobiography, the unity of the “I” reflected in the first book of Solitude may be said to be counterproductive to the task of writing self, as one’s attention is focused inwards, detracting attention from the external world that might provide an aesthetic shape for this self. If applied to autobiography, this statement also suggests that the writer might find knowledge about self without direct self-analysis and the stifling and inhibitive reflexive voice of hindsight. Rather, through free indirect writing, “newly invented truths” might be able to reveal themselves
(Martin 2003: 16). 110
In “The Book of Memory”, the third-person narrator, who calls himself A., turns his attention to fragments of memory, dreams, things that he has read, metafictional reflections, his thoughts on Descartes, Pascal and Oppen (amongst others), and his memories of living in
Amsterdam and Paris. The impulse to know and understand his relationship with his father seems to give way to looser aporetic musings. He returns to the subject of his father and their relationship when narrating his friendship with “S.”, an eccentric and impoverished older man who A. meets by chance in a café and visits on a regular basis. The episode of S., and A.’s fondness for him, begins to give form to his feelings of alienation from his own father: “he realised that what drew him continually to these meetings with S. was that they allowed him to experience, for the first time, what it felt like to have a father” (1982: 91). He writes, “[i]f A.’s father, in his strange, self-enclosed manner of being in the world, had made A. feel superfluous to his life, as if nothing he did could ever have an effect on him, S., in his vulnerability and destitution, allowed A. to become necessary to him” (1982: 92). These kinds of decisive insights about the relationship between A. and his father seem be revealed throughout “The
Book of Memory”, through Auster’s third-person accounts of indirectly related characters, anecdotes and ideas. Like in Summertime, where the third-person narrative voice of the notebook fragments at the texts’ close facilitates complicated and painful intimacies, in these more open and less linear moments of the text quite poignant insights about the autobiographical persona’s relationship with his father emerge.
The shift between A.’s perception of himself as son, to perceiving himself as father, is mediated in a similarly indirect manner. While translating some of Mallarmé’s work, A. becomes acquainted with a number of passages that Mallarmé wrote at the bedside of his dying 111 son. The act of translating the passages leads A. to relive a moment of panic he had described in his previous chapter, where he and his wife had to take their son to an emergency ward. It is in that moment that he feels “the full scope of his own fatherhood: the boy’s life meant more to him than his own” and “it was therefore only in that moment of fear, that he had become, once and for all, the father of his son” (1982: 109). The fragmented, episodic third-person style of the text allows Auster to move between flashbacks, seeming digressions and reflections on what it means to be a father. Through holding a “mirror” up to these experiences, and using third person to create a “dialogue” with himself, Auster is able to create revealing confessional and autobiographical moments. The spaces of distance and ambiguity offered through Auster’s use of the autre A. are portrayed as enabling the kind of insight he could not achieve in the first book, in which the fixed, unwavering and self-conscious “I” results in a stunted confession
(“the vanity of trying to say anything about anyone” (1982: 62); “the closer I come to the end of what I am able to say, the more reluctant I am to say anything” (1982: 63); “the words have come very slowly so far” (1982: 32)). It could be argued that the futility of Auster’s initial first person search for the absent father, and his search for an authentic sense of self, signifies the alienation that accompanies the confessional act. Felski has described this alienation in the following terms: “[t]he more frantic the search for an inner self… the more clearly subjectivity is revealed to be permeated by and dependent upon those very symbolic constraints from which it seeks to liberate itself” (1989: 104). Sennet argues that: “[t]he more a person concentrates upon feeling genuinely, rather than on the objective content of what is felt, the more subjectivity becomes an end in itself, the less expressive he can be. Under conditions of self-absorption the momentary disclosures of self become amorphous” (in Felski 1989: 104).
By attempting to erase the self and disavow the language and conventions traditionally associated with expressing the “inner self” and intimate self-revelation, and rather representing 112 the self at a kind of distance, Auster attempts to navigate out of some of the trappings and limitations of traditional confession. Rather, through “exposing the plumbing” of his writing process and through watching himself “think” (in McCaffery and Gregory 2013: 28-35) Auster is able to enter into an autre-biographical exchange in which newly realised or invented insights into the self and into others might emerge.
In his much later works, Winter Journal (2012) and Report from the Interior (2014), Auster again avoids the first-person address, opting rather for a second-person “dialogue” between self and autre. Whilst Winter Journal takes the body as its subject matter and presents a “catalogue of sensory data, a phenomenology of breathing” (2012: 1) reported to (or from) the body, Report from the Interior presents itself as a report on the realisation of consciousness, as though narrated from within the mind.
Arguably, the episodic, stream-of-consciousness style that Auster deploys in these two works would not have worked as effectively in the first person. The somewhat external vantage point offered by the second-person pronoun and the dialogical style gives the self represented in these texts its identity. Auster’s tendency towards cataloguing or listing experience would have sounded meandering and unformed in the first person. For example:
Physical pleasures and physical pains…the pleasures of food and drink, of lying naked in a hot bath, of scratching an itch, of sneezing and farting, of spending an extra hour in bed, or turning your face toward the sun on a mild afternoon in late spring or early summer and feeling the warmth settle upon your skin. (2012: 2)
The “catalogue of sensory data” (2012: 1) listed above would be far less effective in the first person as the reader would not necessarily feel directly addressed, and would not feel implicated in these everyday sensory experiences. The imagined dialogue between the two 113 selves, may indeed, as Auster claims, have the effect of “drawing the reader in” (Schmidt-
Maden 2013) as the reader is situated as listener in a conversation between narrating and narrated consciousness. The reader may also feel further implicated through the second-person address, which may read as though it is addressed to them, as the second-person address creates complex and “multiple positionings” (Phelan 1996: 153). The dialogue may also bring the self into sharper focus, as the externalising perspective of the autre whom the second- person addresses is brought into focus by the narrator’s observation. There is also a space for ambiguity and indirectness that is facilitated through the second-person address, as it is often unclear as to whom the narrating voice belongs to, and who is being addressed through the use of the second-person pronoun.
Winter Journal, as I discuss in greater depth in my third chapter, is a meditation on aging and the body written as Auster reaches his sixty-fourth year. The text opens with a statement, presented in Auster’s characteristic second-person address, which is at once both universalising and affecting:
You think it will never happen to you, that it cannot happen to you, that you are the only person in the world to whom none of these things will ever happen, and then, one by one, they all begin to happen to you, in the same way they happened to everyone else. (2012: 1)
Auster’s second-person prose here might establish an intimate connection with the reader, who is included in the generalising claims suggested through the implicative “you”. This reflects what Kacandes describes as multiple and complex positionality invoked by second- person narration, as the reader is positioned as both direct recipient and secondary “witness”
(1994: 343). The ambiguity of the terms “it” and “these things” encourages the reader to come to their own conclusions about what Auster is referring to here (sickness, death, aging) and 114 the openness of the passage encourages the reader to not only identify parallels between their own life and Auster’s, but also situate them in such a way that they are prepared for a confessional interaction.
Several pages later, a series of autobiographical vignettes are presented in Winter Journal, centralised around the scars on the face of the addressee.
An inventory of your scars, in particular the ones on your face, which are visible to you each morning when you look into the bathroom mirror… You seldom think about them, but whenever you do, you understand that they are marks of life. (2012: 5)
And so, these “marks of life” observed in the mirror are each described with the corresponding story of how that scar came to be. Auster here seems to be literalising Egan’s notion of “mirror talk” (1999), his own notion of autobiographical writing as “holding up a mirror” to the self (McCaffery and Gregory 2013: 35), and Bakhtin’s claim that “I am not alone when I contemplate my own exterior in the mirror” (1990: 105). His observation of his scars in the mirror reveals a “secret alphabet” of self to the reader. There is one scar that cannot be remembered or explained, that his mother cannot explain to him. He writes that
“you find it odd… that this permanent line was engraved on your chin by what can only be called an invisible hand, that your body is the site of events that have been expunged from history” (2012: 8, emphasis in original). As in Coetzee’s literal “death of the author” in
Summertime, in this comment, Auster reminds us of the lack of self-sufficiency that the autobiographical subject has, the lack of “autos”, reiterating that the authority and knowledge to tell of the self does not always reside in the self. Indeed, in this case, the source of the scar is seemingly unknown to anyone. This awareness is essential to Auster’s dialogical style in his life
115 writing, as writing in a dialogical manner requires an eschewing of an authoritative certainty, and a willingness to evoke and reveal the “countervoices” within (Coetzee 1992f: 62).
In Report from the Interior, Auster uses a dialogical style again to return to the theme of his father, the subject he had found so difficult in The Invention of Solitude. Here, the second-person address and the dialogical style of the narrative facilitates affecting moments between father and son, as the distance facilitated through the absence of the authorial “I” enables Auster to present some moments that are absent from Invention. While reflecting on the topic of “heroes”, the second- person narrator says to the addressee “like all small boys, you wanted your father to be a hero, but your notion of heroism was too narrowly defined to grant your father a place in the pantheon” (2013: 32). The narrator tells the addressee that “in your mind, heroism had to do with courage in battle” (2013: 32) and because his father had not fought in the war like the fathers of his friends, he was exempted from consideration. The narrator then portrays a moment when the addressee’s father “concoct[s] a ruse” (2013: 33) to elevate himself to the status of a hero in the eyes of his son, sneaking into his room when he thinks his son is asleep to place “worn out specimens of military gear” (2013: 33) around the room. He tells his son that these are pieces dug up from the war, but the narrator tells the addressee that “you knew in your heart of hearts that those things have never belonged to him, that he had bought them the previous afternoon at an army surplus store” (2013: 34). The vulnerability with which
Auster’s father is represented in this moment is much more pronounced through this exchange than it ever is in the first-person accounts of Sam Auster’s “silence” and “impenetrability” in
Invention. The pitiable and sympathetic portrait of a father desperate for his son’s approval seemingly contradicts Auster’s earlier portrayal of a man who never needed anything from his son. The indirect, dialogical address of the second-person narrator to the addressee enables 116
Auster to actualise “newly invented truths” about his father and his relationship with his father
(Martin 2008: 16). Auster writes, “[y]ou hated your father for lying to you like that. Now, all these years later, you feel only pity” (2013: 33). In the closing fragments of Coetzee’s
Summertime, the representations of Jack and John Coetzee contrasts starkly with earlier portraits of the two men in the Scenes from Provincial Life trilogy. Similarly, in Auster’s series of autobiographical works, ideas about key figures and about Auster himself are commonly revisited and repudiated, recognising that the autobiographical project is never finished and selves and never fixed or complete.
The other notable and interesting aspect of Report to the Interior, which illustrate the arguments of this chapter, occurs in the later part of the text. Auster details how he receives a request from his ex-wife, Lydia Davis, to review some letters he wrote to her as a young man. We are told Davis intended to allow the letters to form part of her archives, and wanted to give Auster the opportunity to read through them first. Prior to receiving the letters, Auster had lamented his inability to keep a journal as a young man, writing, “[y]ou tried to start a journal when you were eighteen, but you stopped after just two days, feeling uncomfortable, self-conscious”
(2013: 178). The problem with writing a journal, to Auster, seemed a problem of audience and purpose. He writes how he felt that to write a journal addressed to oneself in the first person felt “strange and perplexing”. He writes:
The problem with the journal was that you didn’t know what person you were supposed to be addressing, whether you were talking to yourself or to someone else, and if it was yourself, how strange and perplexing that seemed, for why bother to tell yourself things you already knew, why take the trouble to revisit things you had just experienced, and if it was someone else, then who was that person and how could addressing someone else be construed as a journal? (2013: 179)
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Auster’s choice to include this description at the discomfort he felt at writing a journal, in the conventional sense, works to illustrate the feelings of ill ease and doubt he expressed earlier in
The Invention of Solitude about writing about oneself in the first person. In this later text, Auster’s anecdote serves to illustrate the problem of conflating the narrating voice with the narrated consciousness in autobiography, and the sense of insecurity he experienced in trying to write a self without a clear sense of what Erdinast-Vulcan has described as an “external vantage point”
(2008: 4). Despite feeling deeply uncomfortable with keeping a journal as a young man, Auster does lament the loss of information from this period in his life. When Davis sends him the aforementioned letters, he feels like he is able to access the information lost to him during those years of not keeping a journal. He writes, “[a]s you slowly digested the material and put it in chronological order, you understand that this massive pile of paper was the journal you hadn’t been able to write when you were eighteen” (2013: 181). It is the externalising perspective of the other, the sense of a clear audience that enables Auster to write a journal, and as such, write autobiography as a younger man. Arguably, this realisation has informed
Auster’s auto/autre-biographical style, and the way he implements narrative strategies in many of his texts to “create a distance” between the narrating and experiencing self to allow an
“intimate dialogue” (Auster in Schmidt-Madsen 2013) to occur perhaps originates from this early experience of only feeling free and able to write autobiography when it is addressed to another.
Another interesting aspect of this later section of Report to the Interior is the way that Auster represents his younger self, and his feelings towards his younger self. He reflects on the extent to which he feels the words of his younger self are like “reading the words of a stranger”. He writes, “so distant was that person to you now, so alien, so unformed” (2013: 180). Auster’s 118 observations here echo the kinds of reflections about the relationship between past and present selves when writing autobiography. In his seminal Metaphors of Self, James Olney explains that “for most of us our own past selves are less real to us in experience… even than the present selves of other individuals; that is to say, not real at all” (Olney 1972: 24). Scholars such as Lenta (2003) have noted that this logic also lies behind Coetzee’s autre-biographical style, as to write the self as an other is to acknowledge the way the selves of our past can be as distant to us as strangers. This idea of his adolescent self as a “stranger” is repeated on several occasions in Auster’s text, as he writes, “the strangeness and unknowability of that young man interests you” (2013: 253). He elaborates elsewhere:
It is the stranger who intrigues you, the floundering boy-man who writes letters from his mother’s apartment in Newark… you have lost contact with that person, and as you listen to him speak on the page, you scarcely recognise him anymore. (2013: 182)
To acknowledge how different and “unknowable” this younger self is, and also to write in an
“autre-biographical”, dialogic or process-orientated mode of autobiography, Auster chooses to reprint several of the letters verbatim, rather than reporting on their content, paraphrasing and/or providing retrospective commentary. He writes, “you will let them stand, for that is what you wrote at the time, and a time capsule must never be tampered with” (2013: 272). As
Auster continued writing the letters over a course of several years, he starts to observe a self in the later letters who is more recognisable to him “as a fledgling incarnation of the person [he is] now” (2013: 181). It is interesting that this shift between stranger and this self occurs at a similar age when Coetzee writes in Doubling the Point of “Remembering Texas”, as he reflects on how as the self he speaks of becomes more recognisable: “autre-biography shades back in to autobiography” (Coetzee 1992a: 392). These moments where the stranger self begins to morph or evolve into a more recognisable version of self suggest that the processes of autre-
119 biography do not lead to fixed notions of self, but to notions of self that shift, reflecting
Olney’s observations that selfhood is not only fragmented, but also “not continuous”
(1972: 24).
The final feature of Auster’s Report from the Interior which makes it an interesting and poignant exercise in process-orientated autre-biography occurs in the closing pages of the text, called
“Album”. In this “Album”, Auster prints stock photographs with lines from the text of Report from the Interior as captions below. The pictures include pictures of famous baseball players, advertisements, front pages of newspapers, photographs of actors and musicians and other publicly available images. Auster writes earlier in the text that he has very few photographs of his early life, and this device could be a means to further demonstrate this. It could also be interpreted as a means of further exploring the idea of oneself as another, making connections between personal and public experience to illustrate how inextricable these experiences are.
Through printing these public images with captions detailing personal memories, the reader is given quite a tangible representation of an autobiographer trying to piece together his memories, place them in a chronology and relay his personal memories/truths with public records. By ending the text in this way, Auster illustrates for the reader the process he engages in through his autre-biography, of creating a distance between the self narrating and the self being narrated, bringing these selves into dialogue. The final sections of Report from the Interior – the stock photos which point to absences and gaps in Auster’s personal records, the reprints of the early letters, often so awkward and uncomfortable in their youthful self-consciousness – is an example of the way Auster, like Coetzee, exposes the tears and the fissures of his work, a sense of incompleteness and resignation, which according to Adorno (2002), Said (2006) and
Murphet (2011) are characteristic of “late style”. Like Coetzee, Auster seems to be exposing his 120 process, the gaps and absences in the artifacts that document his life, not merely as a gesture of metafictional play and abandon, but as a means of writing the many questions and ambiguities which emerge through the writing of self in the form and story fabric of the text. The letters and the stock images are a gesture which enact autre-biography. Though this is different to the way Coetzee creates distance and space for meditation between the two selves, Auster’s refusal to paraphrase and the notion that stock, generic images might serve as a substitute for absences in his own personal records presents an idiosyncratic gesture of autre-biography. The images of the other used to represent oneself and Auster’s refusal to rewrite, edit or paraphrase his adolescent letters in some ways parallels Coetzee’s refusal to conflate the self of the past with the self of the present, and impose the linearising, authoratitive discourse of hindsight.
Concluding thoughts
Through an examination of Coetzee and Auster’s autre-biography it becomes evident that
Lejeune’s (1977) suggestion that first-person address in autobiography presents a more
“authentic” and “intimate” enunciation can be questioned. Though Coetzee and Auster have both been criticised for their autobiographical choices, it is evident that both authors take the challenge of confession and truth with great seriousness, and opt for a measured, autobiographical style in which the first-person, homodiegetic address is avoided to allow greater possibility for dialogue between the narrated and narrating consciousness, or experiencing and narrating self. Through the distance and dialogue offered through these narrative choices, Coetzee and Auster are able to evoke an immediacy of experience that is not undermined by the presence of an intrusive, self-reflexive narrator. They are also able to meditate on the complexities of autobiographical intimacy. Through these narrative choices,
121 both authors are similarly able to recreate and reflect on the processes engaged in when writing autobiography. Through their use of a dialogue between autres, Coetzee and Auster write autre- biography in which the distance between self and autre opens up, rather than precludes, possibilities for the possibilities for the reader to emotionally engage with the text and its subjects.
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Chapter 2: “A willingness to fail and fail again”: Vulnerability, failure and autre- biography in Coetzee and Auster
In my previous chapter, I argued that Coetzee’s and Auster’s experimentation with non- traditional modes of narration is an example of the ways that both authors prioritise and emphasise process over product in their autre-biographies, responding to some generic limits or problems associated with the demand for truth and the notion of a singularity of self in autobiographical writing. I also argued this emphasis on “process” creates a dialogic space in the autobiographies which may facilitate a sense of vulnerability and intimacy. In this chapter, I consider how both Coetzee and Auster respond to other limitations of the genre of autobiography by thematising failure in Youth, Summertime, Hand to Mouth and Report from the
Interior. I argue that the theme of failure in the autre-biographies of these two authors is used in an attempt to circumvent the problems of narcissism, self-fashioning and a celebration of achievement which have been perceived as structural and aesthetic problems in autobiography.
I also suggest that the thematisation of failure in these texts is used to mirror and reflect on some of the formal failures of autobiography outlined in Chapter 1.
Coetzee’s Youth and Auster’s Hand to Mouth are the works in Coetzee’s and Auster’s respective autre-biographies that could also be described as künstlerromans, texts that focus primarily on the process of becoming an artist. In this chapter, I will examine the ways narcissism, self- fashioning and a celebration of achievement have been perceived as structural and aesthetic problems in all autobiography, but most pronouncedly in autobiographies by well-known
123 authors, and more specifically the künstlerroman which self-reflexively represents the quest to become an artist. It will consider the ways in which failure might be read, as Sheehan suggests,
“[a]s a way of negating, or at least of dampening, the triumphalist reflexes of the genre” (2016:
457). It will examine how Auster and Coetzee thematically perform failure in their künstlerromans, and use it to reflect on the problems of memory, confession and conveying a singular truth of self in autobiography. I will also discuss how Coetzee and Auster incorporate the idea of failure in the form and generic structures of their other autre-biographical works, most notably Summertime and Report from the Interior. Through both thematising failure and embedding it in the style and structure of the works, I argue that Coetzee and Auster present vulnerable auto/autre-biographical subjects who create affective experiences of humiliation and defeat, and that in doing so, avoid some of the traps of exhibitionism that have become associated with confessional writing. I also propose that failure is another means to draw attention the challenges of representing self through language and the tensions of intimacy and alienation which emerge in confessional writing (Felski 1989: 108).
Autobiography as ‘Advertisement’
Is his widely-quoted essay on “Confession and Double Thoughts”, Coetzee writes that one of the ultimate goals of self-revelation is winning “love and acceptance” (1992c: 267). Though
Coetzee writes specifically of Rousseau’s Confessions in this instance, his comments here highlight the perceived power that confessional modes, such as autobiography, can have in the promotion of private selves for public consumption and the inherently solipsistic nature of autobiography. In an interview with David Attwell also published in Doubling the Point, Coetzee describes “autobiography… [as] dominated by self-interest” (1992a: 392). He suggests that
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“[i]n an abstract way one may be aware of that self-interest, but ultimately one cannot bring it into full focus” (1992a: 392). He continues, “the only sure truth in autobiography is that one’s self-interest will be located at one’s blind spot” (1992a: 392).
Coetzee’s scepticism towards the genre of autobiography reflects other famous critiques of the genre. Paul de Man has famously suggested that the aesthetic value of autobiography suffers in comparison to other genres because “it always looks slightly disreputable and self-indulgent”
(1979: 919). Similarly, William Gass has proclaimed: “to have written an autobiography is already to have made yourself a monster [of narcissism]” (Gass 1994: 45) as “[t]he autobiographer thinks of himself as having led a life so important it needs celebration, and of himself as sufficiently skilled in rendering as to render it rightly” (1994: 45). Gass asks, “[a]re there any motives for the enterprise that aren’t tainted with conceit or a desire for revenge or a wish for justification? To halo a sinner’s head? To puff an ego already inflated past safety?
(1994: 45)
According to writer Dave Eggers, fiction is “‘interactive’… encouraging the readers’ narcissism; autobiography is auratic, performing the autobiographer’s narcissism and commanding the reader’s attention” (in Gardner 2008: 22). Autobiography’s goal of locating and narrating the self who writes makes it a genre in which the personhood and personality of the autobiographer is seemingly of greater important than that of the reader who responds to the words on the page. In a recently published article on failure in Coetzee’s Scenes from
Provincial Life, Sheehan suggests that:
The need for self-justification, for understanding and, ultimately, for acceptance – all accessories to the autobiographical arts… exposes the self-writer not just to the lures of egocentrism, but also the more dangerous opiate of solipsism… and that patent immodesty that accompanies the desire for self-revelation. (2016: 452) 125
Sheehan also argues that “triumphalism” is an unavoidable generic imposition of autobiography, as a “teleology of achievement” (2016: 451) is always explicitly or implicitly affirmed. This is because the story-logic that underpins autobiography insists that the life and the events that constitute the life must lead somewhere (Sheehan 2016: 451). This logic is often reiterated through the dramatic irony created in the gap that may emerge between the narrator’s “inauspicious” beginnings and the triumph and progress at the end of the narrative
(Sheehan 2016: 453). Gass’s (1994) and Sheehan’s (2016) comments reveal that there is a perception that writing autobiography, by its very nature, is a narcissistic and triumphalist enterprise. As such, triumphalism is not a temptation to which the weak-willed autobiographer will yield and which the strong-willed might avoid, but rather a reflex which is “woven into the very fabric of life writing” (Sheehan 2016: 453).
If solipsism and triumphalism are woven into the very fabric of all life writing, then those autobiographies written by successful authors, one would suspect, might do this in a most overt way, as the mere publication of the work and the paratext surrounding it would affirm a narrative of success and achievement, as well as the autobiographer’s belief that his or her own life story is more worthy of a public readership than the many other stories which could have been told by the author autobiographer. Authorial autobiographies have very much come to be considered as part of the advertisement of authors to their reading public. Nathan Glass positions “authorial self-fashioning” as central to “mass cultural models of fame” (2004: 4).
Glass further explains the way that self-fashioning is made visible in autobiographies written by authors, as in authorial autobiography, “we witness the author explicitly attempting to reappropriate the public discourse that determines the authorial career” (2004: 7). As Hega 126
Lenart-Cheng has argued, because of autobiography’s power to act as “advertisement”, many autobiographies – especially those written by celebrity figures – act as a means of image grooming by the autobiographer, since “an autobiographer can manage, manipulate, or even correct his [or her] own public image through autobiographical writing” (2003: 117). The process through which autobiography might act to groom or fashion one’s own public image is also highlighted by Linda Anderson when she suggests that this form has both cognitive and performative dimensions (2011: 46). The cognitive element of autobiography is that which aims to “tell” and narrativise, whereas the performative aspects of autobiography are those that seek to excuse the subject (2011: 46), making the subject, as Coetzee has suggested, more readily “loved” and “accepted” (1992c: 267).
The association of authorial autobiography with an increased self-consciousness, perhaps bordering at times on narcissistic self-fashioning, is similarly reiterated in what scholars have written about the künstlerroman, the novel or autobiography of artistic development, which
Linda Hutcheon famously described as “narcissistic” form of narrative (1980: 12-13) due to how interiorised interpretation becomes in such narratives, in which action becomes replaced with personality, and more specifically, the artistic personality, whose sense of self-fashioning is more likely to be heightened (1980: 11-12). For Steven G. Kellmen, künstlerroman is not only narcissistic but “self-begetting”, a “fantasy of Narcissus become autogamous” (1980: 3).
As S. J. Caterson has written, because of the “extreme self-consciousness allowed by the künstlerroman, aesthetic distance is foreshortened” (1997: 88). Ultimately, he argues that the artist’s quest for self-realisation is driven by a “narcissistic impulse” (1997: 89), meaning the language, content and style of the künstlerroman is extremely important to how the author 127 character/narrator is represented and perceived. The challenge for the author is to find a mode in which to explore the self in a way that engages the reader with the selves represented, without appearing monumentally egotistic, and to create a character who may be excessive, but
“whose excesses have a claim on our lives” (Altieri 1981: 397). Because of the inherently narcissistic nature of this enterprise, the author of a künstlerroman must be highly judicious in the way they present their life story and their artistic development. According to Roy Pascal, writers of autobiography need to find a “balance between the self and the world, the subjective and the objective” (1960: 180-181). Autobiographers who focus too much on the objective risk obscuring or concealing the self. According to Jerome Hamilton Buckley, autobiographers who assume a subjective approach “may render the sensation or emotion with sudden fresh immediacy” (1984: 125). The risk of a such an approach, however, is what might be perceived as a “mere shedding of private sickness or an intricate exercise in self-justification” (Buckley
1984: 125). It would seem that all autobiographers, but especially author autobiographers and writers of künstlerroman, must be conscious of the balance between the subjective and objective, and the tendency of these forms of narrative towards narcissism and a celebration of achievement.
A celebrity novelist who appears to have not achieved this balance, and who has subsequently attracted a hostile reception to the publication of his autobiography is Salman Rushdie, a contemporary of Coetzee’s and Auster’s (and, incidentally, a friend of Auster). Rushdie, who claimed that one of his aims in writing his memoir, Joseph Anton, was to be “‘tougher’ on himself ‘than on anybody else’” (Heller 2012), has been roundly criticised for the hubris and self-importance evident in his non-fictional account of his youth, family, rise to literary fame and life under the infamous fatwā declared on him after the publication of The Satanic Verses 128
(1988). Though Rushdie does not entirely omit moments of shortcomings and failure, these are quite fleeting moments in a narrative that fundamentally celebrates the talent and success of the writer.
Rushdie attracted a scathing review from fellow novelist Zoë Heller for failing, quite dramatically, to meet his own goals. Heller’s review of Rushdie’s memoir has been dubbed the literary “hatchet job” of 2012 (Moss 2012). Heller even won a “hatchet” prize for her work – suggesting that fellow writers and critics shared her sentiments about Rushdie’s work. Heller’s review charges Rushdie with unbearable bombast and solipsism. She draws attention to “the lordly nonchalance with which Rushdie places himself alongside Lawrence, Joyce, and
Nabokov in the ranks of literary merit” (Heller 2012). She hoped in reading Rushdie’s memoir that “he might bring some ironic detachment to bear on his own bombast” (Heller 2012). She laments, however: “[h]indsight, alas, has had no sobering effect on Rushdie’s magisterial amour propre. An unembarrassed sense of what he is owed as an embattled, literary immortal-in- waiting pervades his book” (Heller 2012). A.N. Wilson recounts in his similarly unfavourable review of Joseph Anton, “[t]here is a particularly strange scene in a Hampstead bookshop in which Rushdie recounts without irony how well he read aloud and how much the audience adored him” (2012). In his article in the Daily Mail, which followed the release of Rushdie’s memoir, Geoffrey Levy writes:
No one has ever written a memoir of their own fatwa before… If they had, one is entitled to wonder if, like balding, 65-year-old Rushdie, they would have gone out of their way to infuse into such a dramatic narrative boastful reminders of just how successful he is with the ladies? (2012)
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Levy also comments, “[t]oday, many of Rushdie’s fellow British authors hold him in open distaste, regarding him as a self-serving figure of unrivalled pomposity who can never drink his fill of celebrity” (2012).
Through Wilson’s (2012), Heller’s (2012) and Levy’s (2012) comments on Rushdie’s texts, we can make several conclusions about the way celebrity authors are expected to perform self in autobiography. As is evident in the reviews, bombast, pomposity, self-promotion, open acknowledgements of fame and the adoration of audiences and readerships (represented without irony) can invoke disgust from the reader/reviewer, serving as a reminder of what
Russell West has described as the “habitual narcissism of masculine autobiography” (1999:
302). Inversely, it can also be argued that authors are expected to have a sense of irony and distance when reporting on their own success. Inflections of failure, embarrassment, shame and humiliation might temper the narcissism and self-importance of the authorial autobiography or künstlerroman. Authors, we can conclude, are expected to downplay their achievements and their literary stature in the name of aesthetic dignity and humility. Overt
“image grooming” and a lack of balance in the way the subject is represented in his or her world may estrange a reader from a text.
Conversely, the presence of failure and the practice of self-erasure and self-deprecation in a text might act as a rhetorical device that encourages readers to be more open to the selves performed and narrated in celebrity autobiographical confessions. In this chapter, I argue that
Coetzee’s and Auster’s approach differs vastly from the example given of Rushdie, and that this has the potential to positively impact on the way readers of these autobiographies respond to the selves represented. 130
Why failure?
“Embracing”, “accepting” or celebrating failure has become a widely-touted idea in popular culture, the corporate or managerial world, the arts and cultural studies in the last decade. In
2005, historian Scott A. Sandage published his Born Losers: A History of Failure in America, a book that claims to tell “the story of America’s unsung losers: men who failed in a nation that worships success” (2005: 3). Several years later, influential cultural studies theorist Judith (Jack)
Halberstam16 published The Queer Art of Failure in which he argues “that success in a heteronormative, capitalist society equates too easily to specific forms of reproductive maturity combined with wealth accumulation” (2013: 2). He argues that such standards of “success”, however, “have come under serious pressure recently with the collapse of financial markets and rising divorce rates” suggesting that the “boom and bust years of the late twentieth century and early twenty-first century have demonstrated the need for healthy critiques of static models of success and failure” (2013: 2). Professional business coach Michelle Duval and scholar
Brene Brown have spoken and written of the “power” and “strength” that may arise for leaders from appearing as vulnerable and exposing one’s own failures in an appropriately controlled fashion (in Oakes-Ash 2014). Success, it seems, has been overemphasised for too long and to develop as individuals and a society we should be looking to examples and experiences of failure to teach us how to lose, embrace vulnerability and learn of our own limitations. As Duval comments “vulnerability makes us approachable, human, humble and honest” (in Oakes-Ash 2014). There is always a confessional dimension to publicly evoking one’s failure, as failure is often positioned as a private narrative, one which is often silenced,
16 Though Halberstam published this work as ‘Judith’, he has transitioned gender and is now known as ‘Jack’. I therefore use the masculine pronoun to refer to Halberstam’s work. 131 and which exists in contrast with public narratives of success. To share these stories constitutes a type of vulnerability, which according to Duval and Brown, better enables empathetic identification with the confessant (Oakes-Ash 2014).
The notion that failure can be “celebrated” is of course not a new phenomenon. In literary studies, a “rhetoric of failure” is most synonymous with the works and authorial reputation of
Samuel Beckett, whose ringingly anaphoric words in Worstward Ho (1984), “[e]ver tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better”, have become an oft quoted mantra. In his
The Long Sonata of the Dead: A Study of Samuel Beckett, Michael Robinson argues in his chapter
“Poetics of Failure” that Beckett was driven by a sense of “creative futility” (1969: 33). Beckett was known to be reclusive, reticent to give interviews and in one widely quoted interview with
Israel Shenker (1956), described himself as an artist “working with impotence, ignorance”. For
Beckett failure was central to his philosophy of writing and was creatively liberating. He wrote that “I tried until 1946 to discover a kind of knowledge that would permit me to act. Then I realised that I was on the wrong track. But perhaps there are only wrong tracks. You must nevertheless find the wrong track that suits you” (Beckett in Yeoh 2010: 4). David Ball has argued that failure was a common rhetorical strategy for modernist authors and often stood in as a “familiar heroization of tragic artist ambition and romantic genius theory” (2007: 9), suggesting that in many cases the modernists’ use of a rhetoric of failure might “make claims for literary superiority, to establish a coterie audience in contradistinction to popular appeal”
(2007: 9), often reiterating “an elite and lofty view of art” that was inescapably masculine.17
17 Halberstam also acknowledges that failure and “stupidity” are “profoundly gendered” (2013: 55). In After the Great Divide, Andreas Huyssen (1986) has argued that Modernist discourses of the author are hypermasculinised and sought to position the author as above and beyond the culture of the market, mass consumption and its demands of financial success, ambition, marriage and reproduction. 132
Arguably, the sense of failure in Coetzee’s and Auster’s autobiographical work borrows on some of the tropes and rhetoric of failure associated with the modernists and, in particular, their shared literary forbear, Beckett. Part of the failure experienced in the texts that deal with the struggle to become an artist are about the ways the protagonists are unable to fulfil their own lofty ideals of being a tragic artist/romantic genius and this is often the source of their bathetic humour. Secondly, there is a strongly affective dimension to the failure experienced by the protagonists in both Auster’s and Coetzee’s autre-biography, which emphasise the feelings of inadequacy, vulnerability and uncertainty in their subjects. Sheehan has argued that failure in
Coetzee’s Scenes from Provincial Life departs from the work of modernist precursors like Beckett
(2016: 457).
Coetzeean failure is neither a consequence of overreaching, of striving for the unattainable, as it was for many modernists, in their struggles to reinvent literary form; nor is it (as in Beckett) a corporeal deficit that indentures the self to the world of matter. In other words, it is not a metaphysics of failure that beleaguers Coetzee’s protagonists… but a failure of knowledge – of not knowing how to behave, how to think, even how to feel. (2016: 457, my emphasis)
The notion of not knowing how to feel, think and behave is a central theme in Coetzee’s autre- biography, but as I argue in this chapter, it emerges in Auster’s autre-biography as well.
Furthermore, these feelings and experiences of everyday and ordinary failures have been discussed between Coetzee and Auster. In their epistolary exchange, Here and Now, Coetzee and Auster both represent themselves in a way that foregrounds vulnerability, feelings of defeat and self-depreciation. Coetzee refers to himself as “thin-skinned” when it comes to everyday dealings. There are several letters that deal with the “sting” Auster (2013: 119) feels from a famously scathing review of his work by The Guardian’s James Wood (2009). Later,
Auster acknowledges the very critical reception he has received from not just Wood, but many reviewers when he writes that his work “has been kicked around far more than I wish to 133 remember” (2013: 174). As I cited in my introduction, in one of the final letters in Here and
Now, Coetzee recounts to Auster his experiences at the Jaipur Writer’s Festival, commenting,
“I don’t think I distinguished myself at the festival… Interrogation is not a medium I do well in. I am too brief in my responses where brevity (clippedness) is all too easily misread as a sign of irritation or anger” (2013: 211), an interesting and very personal insight into his own public reputation for being short and reticent in public appearances. In his account of his trip to India for the Jaipur Writer’s Festival, Coetzee describes his own “inadequacy” as a travel writer, an inadequacy which he believes signals a failure on his part to respond to the “beauty and generosity of the world” (2013: 213).
Furthermore, throughout the book both men philosophise about their shared interest in sport, and come to similar conclusions that the thing that attracts them to sport is the recurrence and inevitability of losing, making explicit their mutual philosophical attraction to failure. Coetzee writes to Auster that “[s]port teaches us more about losing than about winning simply because so many of us don’t win. What it teaches above all is that it is OK to lose” (2013: 163). Auster remarks that “[o]ne of the reasons why I remain so attached to baseball after all these years is the very thing you write about in your letter: the frequency of losing, the inevitability of failure” (2013: 166). Losing is clearly a theme that interests both Coetzee and Auster, and it can be argued that through openly engaging with their own weaknesses, vulnerabilities and failures in Here and Now that the notion that it is “OK to lose” (2013: 163) applies not only to sport but to autobiographical discourse as well.
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The rhetoric of failure in autobiography
George Orwell began his scathing review of Salvador Dali’s autobiography by arguing:
“Autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful. A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats” (2014: 293). Of Dali’s “narcissistic” memoir, Orwell distrusts the way not only “the humiliation but the persistent ordinariness of everyday life has been cut out” and “his autobiography is simply a strip-tease act conducted in pink limelight” (2014: 293, emphasis in original). Whilst Dali’s memoir does not omit details of his life that might be considered shameful or scandalous, Orwell argues that the exhibitionistic delight with which Dali reveals these details, and excludes the more mundane, crushing failure of everyday life and the experience of humiliation is the reason why Dali’s autobiography is not to be “trusted”.
Coetzee also finds similar problems with confession, suggesting that it may entail “a potentially infinite regression of self-recognition and self-abasement in which the self-satisfied candour of each level of confession of impure motive becomes a new source of shame and each twinge of shame a new source of self-congratulation” (Coetzee 1992c: 282). Thus, as Orwell and Coetzee suggest, the exposure of shame or shameful acts does not make the confessional act trustworthy or sincere, as the exhibitionistic pleasure that may be derived from exposing such acts and their impure motives may in itself be a narcissistic act from which a perverse sense of self-congratulation may be derived.
How is one to reveal something “disgraceful” to earn the trust of one’s reader without being accused of rampant exhibitionism? Rushdie seems to have failed in earning his readership’s trust through the celebration of his own success and celebrity, whilst Orwell is suspicious of 135
Dali who seems to enjoy shocking and scandalising his audience through proudly displaying his violent and amoral actions. This seems to reveal, as Sheehan argues, “the vanity and egotism, the patent immodesty that accompanies the desire for self-revelation and for self- exhibitionism that lies at the heart of the autobiographical impulse” (2016: 452-453), and
Rushdie and Dali respectively seem to have done nothing with the form or content of their memoirs to counteract the impulses of the genre.
According to Clark Blaise, autobiographies use “[t]actlessness and delicacy, humiliation and embarrassment, [as] precious deconstructive tools” for engaging intimately with the reader and erasing the self and ego of the autobiographer (1996: 201). Failure and its associated affective conditions – embarrassment, humiliation and shame – are used by autobiographers to give an authenticity and verisimilitude to their autobiographical identities. According to Blaise, while
“biography is… a celebration of, and identification with, achievement”, “[p]aradoxically autobiography is an act of self-destruction” (1996: 201) and a genre of failure. Blaise argues that “[t]rue autobiography (from which he excludes the ‘autobiographies’ of film stars, generals, and politicians, which he argues are really ghost-written self-biographies) is a denial of celebrity” and that the power of an autobiography rests in its ability to convince the reader of the autobiographer’s commonness (1996: 202). This is in seeming contrast to what Sheehan
(2016) has observed as some of the formal pressures of autobiography, its solipsistic and triumphalist impulses. But Blaise (1996: 201) is here describing what he perceives as an ideal form of autobiography (as evident in his contrast between “self-biographies” and “true” autobiography).
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In contrast to biography, which Blaise perceives as somewhat sycophantic in its tendencies,
“[a]utobiography celebrates only consciousness, and it can arrive at that goal only by deconstructive acts, a series of self-erasures” (1996: 201). Acts of self-erasure may involve inserting figures of vulnerability into the text, such as self-depreciation, presenting the self as fragmented, multiple and contradictory and focusing on failures. Blaise summarises the autobiographer’s challenge as “[t]o convince you to read my book, I must convince you of my uniqueness, but to resolve the book, I must conclude with a vision of my lowest common humanity” (1996: 203). The challenge for the celebrity novelist autobiographer is then to use their celebrity to market the book, but undermine or disavow this celebrity within the book’s covers. Blaise reveals something that I too wish to explore through my readings of Coetzee’s
Youth and Summertime, and Auster’s Hand to Mouth and Report from the Interior, which is the link between failure, vulnerability and pathos, and how through the depictions of one’s “lowest common humanity” (1996: 203) in autobiography, an autobiographer may successfully draw the reader further into the text, creating autobiographical modes that work towards being
“‘interactive’”, rather than merely “auratic” (Eggars in Gardner 2008: 22).
The autobiographical subject who appears vulnerable and flawed is one who might facilitate a greater sense of autobiographical intimacy. The process of making the subject vulnerable and
“performing” failure as means of finding less authoritative or didactic modes of representation is a strategy that has been acknowledged in the autobiographical writings of Derrida, and in critical writings on Coetzee. Zelia Gregoriou has highlighted the ways that Derrida has inserted
“autobiographical figures of bodily vulnerability and exposure” (1995: 320) into his critical writing, bestowing an “autobiographical rhetoric” of vulnerability in his critical writings (1995:
319), which include “Circumfession” (1993) and Memories (For Paul de Man) (1988). Attridge has 137 suggested a relationship between confession and failure, writing, “the urge to confess may itself distort the representation of the past, producing an exaggeration of one’s failings” (2004: 161).
Perhaps it is these types of confession which, as Blaise suggests, will work to deconstruct the subject and challenge or undermine the ego of the autobiographer, “dampening” some of the triumphalist impulses of the genre (Sheehan 2016: 457).
This “autobiographical rhetoric” which sees the subject represented as less powerful, and the representation as more personal and intimate, also has echoes in Coetzee’s work. According to
Jane Poyner, Coetzee has always tested “how far one’s innermost thoughts and feelings can be brought acceptably into the public sphere” and into the medium of critical writing (2004). The critic who is also a confessant, according to Coetzee, exists in a state of “hyperconsciousness”
(1992c: 275) and “double thoughts”, a process that involves endless self-awareness and endless self-abnegation. This abnegation involves making the speaking subject less powerful and more vulnerable, as to do so reflects Coetzee’s unique challenge in writing, described by Attwell as
“finding a place outside of power relations from which to speak” (Coetzee 1992a: 392). As we have seen, Coetzee famously claimed that “all writing is autobiographical” (1992a: 391) and more recently “all writing is autre-biographical” (in Attwell 2006: 216). The sense of vulnerability Coetzee has used to imbue his critical writing with an autobiographical rhetoric is well captured in the description of him, the speaker and critic, in Doubling the Point as “blind… disabled, disqualified” (1992a: 392) by virtue of being a white South African man in the latter half of the twentieth century. This logic when applied to autobiographical writing perhaps necessitates a greater sense of frailty and self-erasure when speaking of the self, as autobiography itself is a genre of exposure, confession and vulnerability.
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“Losing” and “failing”, are also affective experiences that are common to writers and the business of writing, where feelings of success are often not clearly measured and defined. The feeling of “failing” in writerly pursuits is a clear and recurring theme in both Auster and
Coetzee. In The Red Notebook, Auster writes, “[w]henever I complete a book, I’m filled with a feeling of immense disgust and disappointment…. I’m so disappointed by my feeble efforts that I can’t believe I’ve actually spent so much time and accomplished so little” (1995: 114). In an interview with Ashton Applewhite, Auster says of the writing process “you suffer a lot, you feel inadequate, the sense of failure is enormous” (2013: 98). Such meditations on failure and the experience of failure in writing, are multifaceted in Auster, and have, according to
Chrysavgi Papayianni, led critics to reject Auster’s work. Papayianni (2011) finds in Auster “an overriding sense of failure and nothingness”, a comment that could have as easily been applied to Kafka, Beckett, or indeed, Coetzee. The rhetoric of failure and vulnerability can be found throughout the autobiographical and fictional oeuvres of Coetzee. Though Coetzee doesn’t represent himself as a critically derided author in the same way Auster does, he does often question his writerly talent. A comment from Summertime suggests insecurities and anxieties about talent that are not entirely dissimilar from sentiments expressed by Auster, though these are spoken by the fictional interviewee, Sophie. She comments of John Coetzee: “his work lacks ambition. Control over the elements of fiction is too tight. You do not sense you are in the presence of a writer who is deforming his medium in order to say what has never been said before, which to me is the mark of great writing” (2009: 242). For both Auster and Coetzee, these kinds of comments stand in opposition to their high book sales and celebrity author status, and may be read cynically as insincere self-deprecation performed in an act of vanity.
Such examples do demonstrate, however, the recurrence of failure as rhetoric across their
139 autobiographical writing, and the notion of failure as an affective experience felt acutely by writers, even those who experience commercial and literary success.
As well as being autre-biographies, both Auster’s Hand to Mouth18 and Coetzee’s Youth are künstlerromans. According to Clotilde Landais, one of the main themes of the kunstlerroman̈ is the artist’s quest for self, and as such “the conflict between life and art that every artist has to face” (2009: 241). Often this conflict between “life and art” involves the representation of early failure; struggles to exist financially, the experience of being “minor” and the struggle to be taken seriously as an artist. Whilst traditionally this struggle has been romanticised, and considered part of the burden but also the blessing of being an artist, several contemporary authors have parodied the pretensions of the author who sees himself as separate or above ordinary life, and have drawn attention to the failures of traditional models of being-artist. In
The Good Story, Coetzee has strongly criticised the Romantic discourse of the “the artist, successor to the priest” (2015: 59) and the notion that the artist is a “diagnostician of the age”
(2015: 60). He writes “[o]ne of the master myths of Romanticism is of the artist and their wound. The wound is what keeps the artist awake, restless, in pain; the art they produce may simply be intended to cure the wound” (2015: 59). For Coetzee, artists are no different to ordinary people, and any claims to the contrary (usually made by artists) constitute “much self- aggrandizement” (2015: 60).
In the preface to Portraits of the Artist in Contemporary Fiction, Lee T. Lemon observes a distinct shift in the representation of artists between pre- and post-World War Two novels (1985: xvi).
18 Whilst Hand to Mouth is written in the first person, I include it in this thesis on autre-biography because of its focus on failure, and its self-reflexive devices (which I discuss later in this chapter). 140
According to Lemon, the author of pre-World War Two künstlerromans typically fits the mould of the “Byronic” model of the artist, an artist perceived and represented “as a kind of John the
Baptist preparing the way for the coming of Truth and Beauty” (1985: x). This artist has within him a vision that he must express, “if not for his own sake, then for the sake of pulling the world from the quagmire in which it rots” (1985: x). This artist positions himself as a visionary in contrast to, and conflict with the mundane. Lemon describes the Byronic artist-hero ironically as a kind of “Nietzchean Ubermensch” whose sworn enemy is the philistine, the “rule follower”, who “establishes the schools that try to force the artist into mindless conformity”
(1985: x). In Ivory Towers and Sacred Founts Maurice Beebe (1964) identifies a “Sacred Fount” and an “Ivory Tower” tradition in the fictional representations of artists from Goethe to Joyce.
The artist in the “Sacred Fount” tradition is cut from a similar mould to the Byronic artist described by Lemon. Maurice Beebe claims that the “Sacred Fount” tradition tends to equate art with experience, and “assumes that the true artist is one who lives not less, but more fully and intensely than others” (1964: 13). The “Ivory Tower” tradition, on the other hand, “exalts art above life and insists that the artist can make use of life only if he stands aloof … [equating] art with religion rather than experience” (1964: 13). The question of whether the artist must
“live” or “stand aloof” is a question, Beebe claims, has been central to discourses about being and becoming an artist in many classic, Victorian and early modernist künstlerromans.
The “Wordsworthian” artist is the trope that Lemon argues dominated the künstlerroman in the forty years between the end of World War Two and the publication of his book in 1985. The
Wordsworthian artist, according to Lemon, is different kind of character altogether. The
Wordsworthian artist is “primarily an ordinary human being trying to live in a world peopled with individuals as important as himself” (Lemon 1985: xiii) Like the “anti-hero” of novels 141 written after World War Two, künstlerromans of this period often depict what Lemon calls an
“anti-artist” (1985: xiv). This perception is shared by Landais, who notes that the fall of the artist as hero in Philip Roth’s Zuckerman series, reflects the process through which “[b]etween the eighteenth and the twenty-first centuries, the fictionally represented artist then evolves from hero to anti-hero” (2009: 242). The artist anti-hero is not only morally ambiguous, but is a fragmented, vulnerable subject who stands in stark contrast to the self-possessed, unified and unassailable ideal presented by the Sacred Font and Ivory Tower models.
The discourses of being and becoming an artist are everywhere in Auster and Coetzee, but are perhaps most pronounced in Youth and Hand to Mouth, which are works that explicitly focus on the project of becoming, or trying to become, an artist. They are also works written after the authors have found commercial and literary success about the time in their lives before they were able to make a living as a writer. Whilst the young author characters in these works have moments of aspiring to Byronic ideals, and of sentiments associated with the “Sacred Fount”, they do emerge as artist “anti-heroes” or “anti-artists”, ordinary human beings living alongside ordinary people more or less important than themselves, and often struggling to do so. Joyce’s
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man ([1916] 1994) is perhaps the epitome of this style of künstlerroman. Joyce’s artist anti-hero, Stephen Dedalus, is an ordinary young man who experiences failure and humiliation, and expresses a youthful, ignorant wrongheadedness. As
Gilbert Yeoh argues, however, Stephen’s growth from failure and ignorance to success and worldliness forms the narrative arc of Portrait, and is one of the central transitions in his künstlerroman. Yeoh argues, “Joyce implies a progression from Stephen’s immature, blind consciousness to a consciousness that, far from being flawed, can heroically embody the world” (2010: 2). 142
In their respective künstlerromans, Auster’s and Coetzee’s model of “the artist” is one that draws on aspects of different discourses about the writer, especially the Wordsworthian tradition epitomised by Joyce. Rather than “progress” from ignorance to wisdom, failure to success,
Auster and Coetzee present representations of their younger selves, or the artist as a young man, in a way that emphasise failures, stupidities, vulnerabilities and impasses as the way to becoming an artist. Through their representations of their early obscurity, Coetzee and Auster exercise failure to present and parody ideas about what it means to become an artist, and engage their readers in interactive autobiographical experiences, in which we are affectively drawn to the failed subjects and their experiences of humiliation and ordinariness. In their earlier works and künstlerromans, Coetzee and Auster engage with ideas about being/becoming an artist and a failure to know how to act and how to be. In their later works, Summertime and
Report from the Interior, Coetzee and Auster respectively both represent failure as something that continues to afflict the grown protagonist, and also mirror formal failure with metatextual reflections on the failures and limits of autobiography and confession. In this chapter, I first discuss the two Coetzee texts before considering the Auster texts and the points of similarity and difference in the two authors’ poetics of failure. This enables me to examine the position of failure in both the earlier and more recent works of both authors, and consider the ways that thematic failure pre-empts and gives way to questions of formal failure in these works. As such, I continue several of the arguments from my last chapter about the ways that Coetzee and Auster write process-orientated autre-biography which enables them to reflect on the processes through which selves are conceived of and written in the very form of the text itself.
It also enables both authors, as I discussed in Chapter 1, to explore the dialectic of intimacy and alienation which emerges as an inevitable tension in all confession (Felski 1989: 101). 143
Coetzee’s Youth and Summertime
J.M. Coetzee’s Youth is a relentlessly self-excoriating memoir that spares no details in its representation of the failure of its young protagonist. A review in the New York Times Book
Review (2002) describes the book as detailing “that period of a man’s life when he is most repulsive to himself and everybody else”, the end of one’s teens and beginning of one’s adulthood. Coetzee, the summary continues, “a snob, prude and mama’s boy, devoted immense efforts to becoming a lover and an artist, with results so disappointing at the time he has seen fit to write this memoir in the third person”. Youth is written with such comical self- derision it has been described as a “self-parody” (Lee 2002: 15).
Youth is narrated in Coetzee’s trademark mode of autobiographical writing, autre-biography, defined by third-person narration and present-continuous tense (as discussed in detail in the previous chapter). The central character of this book, and assumedly the young Coetzee, is called “John”. We assume John is Coetzee, because not only do they share a first name and many biographical facts, but Youth has been published as a “memoir” in the USA, and a sequel to Boyhood in the USA, the UK and Australia. The young John is immature, a snob, a misogynist and an idealist whose romantic ideas of escaping the colonies of South Africa and being transformed into an artist in London are misguided and amusing. As Lenta has noted, and as I have discussed in my previous chapter, Coetzee makes use of the immanent voice through his use of third person autre-biography and free indirect discourse, which involves a co-presence of voices and a complex sense of pre-verbal perception or feeling (Rimmon-
Kenan 2002: 114). Throughout Youth perception and feeling emerge through the co-presence of narrator and focaliser, as free indirect discourse works to bring into to play a multitude of 144 voices, attitudes and speakers (Rimmon-Kenan 2002: 117). Immanent voice also operates as a negative form that draws the reader further into the text, and further into the character.
As I discussed in my first chapter, the use of immanent voice, which is central to Coetzee’s autre-biography, lets the reader know, without direct authorial intervention, that they are to read beyond the words on the page (Lenta 2003: 166). In Youth, as in Boyhood, “inadequacy and misunderstanding in the protagonist’s responses have to be supplemented by the reader’s understanding” (Lenta 2003: 166). As such, we can almost pre-empt John’s failure based on his unreasonably high expectations of women, of London and of the artistic and spiritual transformation he expects to receive from merely being in Europe. As Lenta puts it, “the reader is often made aware of [John’s] youthful naïveté by the young man’s excessive seriousness”
(2003: 166). For example, in the context of John’s meditations on why he should go to London to pursue his career as a lover and a poet, Coetzee writes:
There are two, perhaps three places in the world where life can be lived at its fullest intensity: London, Paris, perhaps Vienna. Paris comes first: city of love, city of art. But to live in Paris one must have gone to the kind of upper class school that teaches French. As for Vienna, Vienna is for Jews coming back to reclaim their birthright: logical positivism, twelve-tone music, psychoanalysis. That leaves London, where South Africans do not need to carry papers and where people speak English. (2002b: 41)
This passage demonstrates a recurring feature of Coetzee’s prose, where present tense assertions are made in the third person and put before the reader without direct authorial intervention. His views are childish and naïve, but written with a matter-of-fact directness that signals to the audience that the words on the page are to be read ironically, even though this is not explicitly stated. The reader is made aware of the excessive seriousness and wrongheadedness in this statement, however, as they read beyond the words on the page to
145 register the youthful naivety of John’s notion that life can be lived with more intensity in
London, Paris and Vienna. The seriousness and matter-of-factness of John’s wrongheaded thoughts creates a sense of droll comedy. Lars Engle describes this strategy as:
[T]ransferring the implied convictions of an author, convictions often set down in past tense and often in first person, into a globalising third-person present that makes eternalising claims, claims which can be both ringingly eloquent and also put before the reader to be sceptically scrutinized. (2006: 33-34)
As Engle (2006) highlights, this is a recurring feature of not only Coetzee’s creative, but also critical work. It is a feature that effectively facilitates the rhetoric of failure in Coetzee’s work, through allowing for irony and juxtaposition without authorial intrusion. As Attridge argues, the present tense deployed in Coetzee’s autre-biography “denies the text any retrospection, any place from which the writer can reflect on and express regret about (or approval of) the acts and attitudes described” (2004: 143). It is a mode of self-representation that best facilitates what Lenta (2003: 168) has described as the “love/hate” relationship that the reader develops with John. This love/hate relationship positions the subject as vulnerable, and his vulnerability draws us to him. Though in many ways he is highly unlikeable, his failures and follies are recognisable to many and in some way come to be forgiven or excused because of the immediacy and intenseness through which we experience the life and peculiarities of John.
Sévry also suggests (in relation to Boyhood) that the distance established by Coetzee’s third- person narration allows him to avoid the traps of voyeurism or exhibitionism, and “treat his own veracity tactfully” (2000: 15).
Failure operates several ways in Youth. Firstly, there is John’s failure to live up to his own lofty expectations of being an artist, in a parody of youthful notions of being “literary” (Engle
2006). Youth is laced with a constant, comedic bathos in which Coetzee juxtaposes the lofty 146 and the ridiculous to try to illustrate the inflated self-perception of youth. A bathetic structure is used, in which Coetzee’s free indirect discourse presents a hyperbolised version of the
“Byronic” and “Sacred Fount” tropes of the artist, which then starkly contrast with the unglamorous, ordinary, and occasionally comically ridiculous realities of John’s life. This is established from very early on in the text, where one of John’s earliest mediations on becoming an artist are that “being dull and odd looking are part of a purgatory he must pass through to emerge, one day, into the light: the light of love, the light of art” (2002b: 3). John’s thoughts about the purgatory of being an artist, and the “light” provided by art are followed immediately by a comedic description of his sandals which “cost two shillings and sixpence a pair” (2002b: 3), which he sometimes has to stop to recapture in the rain after they slip free. In this moment, Coetzee encourages us to both laugh at John and feel for him in his moments of false hubris and insecurity. The pathos for, and parody of, John is further heightened by the description of “the fat burghers of Cape Town” who John imagines “are chuckling as they pass in the comfort of their cars” (2002b: 4). “Laugh!” John thinks, “Soon I will be gone!”
(2002b: 4). The comedic melodrama of the scene encourages the reader to both laugh at John and pity him. Such tragic-comic scenes of failure have led Yeoh (2010) to describe Youth as a
“droll representation of the folly of the artist in his youth”.
There is also a constant juxtaposition throughout Youth of John’s delusions of grandeur, and his acute self-consciousness and self-awareness, which works to further reiterate the reader’s love/hate relationship with him. Moments after arrogantly considering his diet “of simple common sense” as one that “Rousseau would approve of, or Plato” (2002b: 3), John is overcome with a crippling “sense of how odd he looks”. He is described as “[n]ot eccentric
(there is some distinction in looking eccentric), just odd”, “slim and loose-limbed, yet at the 147 same time flabby” with “[s]omething of the baby” still lingering in him (2002b: 3). Despite the comedic comparison of his diet of cheese and sausages to the philosophies of Plato and
Rousseau, and the self-importance implied in this statement, the reader is quickly drawn into sympathy and pity for John, whose painful self-consciousness and moments of despair and insecurity are the affective conditions of youth experienced by many. As Engle remarks, “John in Youth strives… to embed his vision of the artist’s life in his own experience, but continually fails” (2006: 43). Yeoh sees this constant failure to achieve romantic ideals of transfiguration, and the constant return to ignorance and non-knowing as “constituting the self’s fundamental condition” (2011: 3). This reflects what Sheehan has described as a failure to know how to think, feel and behave, which constantly vexes Coetzee’s autre-biographical personas (2016:
457).
Coetzee constantly details John’s snobbery, but then follows this snobbery with sometimes humorous, sometimes quite touching accounts of John’s insecurities and perceived failures.
Many of these revolve around his feelings of inadequacy in being a colonial in England, and of not being able to meet the standards he has constructed, through his reading of a few “great” artists, of what one needs to achieve to become a great artist and intellectual. The young protagonist tries to escape South Africa and the alienation and backwardness he associates with the colonies, and become a cosmopolitan lover and artist (he conflates the two). He finds, however, that his personality issues, anxiety and paranoia, very much remain (Vanouse 2003).
As Donald Vanouse argues, “[t]he youth’s efforts to identify this ‘something essential’ that is missing from his personality is one of the major issues throughout the memoir” (2003).
As Dan Cryer has astutely put it, Coetzee’s negative form, use of aporia and rhetorical distance perfectly capture the uncertainty and insecurity associated with youth: 148
Coetzee‘s prose, precise and laconic, subtly conveys all the roiling emotions of youth. A third-person narration provides a modicum of distance from events, even as the rhetorical technique of framing matters in question form evokes a young person’s bewilderment in the face of uncertainties. (2002)
John’s misguided assumptions about what will “transform” him are humorous, yet often touching, as again snobbery and lofty ideals clash with realities of failure and shortcomings.
For example, John takes a list of “recommendations” from Ezra Pound about what constitutes great literature and follows them as a “disciple” (2002b: 22). After detailing John’s passion for
Pound in Chapter Two, Coetzee writes, “[h]e would be more secure in his discipleship to
Pound if he could actually read French” (2002b: 22). As Engle remarks of this particular sentence, “[o]nce again, as with the two-shilling sandals, the opening sentence of the next paragraph brings one crashing comically down out of the realm of aesthetic judgment and into the particular difficulties of being John” (2006: 36). Likewise, this can be observed when John tries to emulate the diet of the people of Provence, who Ford Madox Ford says owe their lightness and gait to a diet of fish, olive oil and garlic. “In his new lodgings in Highgate, out of deference to Ford, he buys fish fingers instead of sausages, fries them in olive oil instead of butter, sprinkles garlic salt over them” (2002b: 136). Again, lofty fantasies are inflected with comedic, quotidian detail, and a bathetic logic is used to undermine the pretensions of the young artist. John’s desire to imagine himself in a life and a world more glamourous and literary than the one he lives in is similarly demonstrated when he observes a couple walking on a heath, in the midst of his momentary fixation on all things Russian. He is sure they are
Russian because “[t]he man is tall and bearded, the woman has long blond hair casually swept back”, however, “when he gets close enough to eavesdrop they turn out to be English; they are talking about the price of furniture at Heals” (2002b: 77). John’s fantasy of living in a city where glamorous Europeans wander about whilst discussing high philosophy and literature are 149 again shattered by the comedic juxtaposition with the banality of the everyday and of life as a young colonial in London. Youth can thus be read “as a piece of sustained irony at the youthful application of an idea about the literary”, an irony that is established and reiterated through
“the ill fit between the grandeur of the youthful John’s idea of the literary and his actual life and times as reported in the work’s present tense narrative” (Engle 2006: 30).
The immanent voice is also used to demonstrate to the reader how John’s high ambitions are not always followed with the due commitment and diligence of obtaining such a goal, a hallmark of youth/adolescence and a type of failure that most readers of the autre-biography would in some way identify with. There is an amusing episode in which John’s ambitions as a musician are compared to his more clubbable friend, Paul. Whilst Paul is content to play “the same little gigues and minuets” on the piano, John, we are told, has “far larger” ambitions as a musician (2002b: 15). John believes that he can skip the step-by-step methods of his piano teacher, and forego simpler pieces by Czerny and Mozart, and rather jump straight to complex pieces like the Busoni transcription of Bach’s D minor Chaconne. He believes that through teaching himself the notes through unremitting repetition he will be able to master these impressive, complex pieces without having to learn the simpler pieces he believes are childish and below him. He finds, however, “that as he tries to progress from very very slow to merely very slow, his wrists grow tense and lock, his finger joints stiffen, and soon he cannot play at all” (2002b: 16). John’s experience of trying to play Bach before he has learnt the simpler
“gigues and minuets” serves as a metaphor for his misassumptions about the path to becoming an artist and his snobbery, as well as his wrongheaded assumptions about moving to the continent of the great artists as the path to becoming a writer. This anecdote very much illustrates the ways that becoming an artist for John is bound up in myths and misassumptions 150 that are informed by his desire to model himself on the greats. Yet, in parodying John and his foolish assumptions about the path to becoming an artist, there is a degree of pathos felt for him and a recognition in these moments of the profound insecurity and uncertainty of youth.
Another way that John’s failure to embody the Byronic ideal of the author is expressed is in his utter failure to experience sex and desire with the passion he feels is required as an artist.
Boehmer has described John as being on a “quest of desire” (2005: 228) throughout Youth, a desire which is never fulfilled, but remains endlessly deferred. The love/hate relationship that is established between John and the reader is perhaps most strained when it comes to his relationships with and treatment of women, as John expresses some wildly misogynist views about women’s creative capacities and their bodies. Youth is full of sexist maxims such as:
“women love artists because they burn with an inner flame, a flame that consumes yet paradoxically renews all that it touches” (2002b: 30), “women who flock after artists… cannot wholly be trusted… the woman who yearns to be licked by tongues of flame will at the same time do her best to quench the fever and bring down the artist to common ground” (2002b:
31). These reflect the sexist positioning of women as merely muses or mistresses prevalent in the early 1960’s context that Youth reflects (Cryer 2002).
As Boehmer argues, though John desires sex throughout Youth, the sex that he has is
“unsatisfactory, degrading, uncomfortable, most obviously when it involves encounter with seepages and effluvia of a woman” (2005: 228). John’s notion of beauty is a non-corporeal, non-gendered ideal, and throughout the memoir sexual relations and women’s bodies continue to repulse him. John “believes in passionate love and its transfiguring power. His experience, however, is that amatory relations devour his time, exhaust him, and cripple his work” (2002b: 151
78). John is repulsed by the thought of the blood and seepage coming from the body of his girlfriend who has an abortion (2002b: 34). He is perennially annoyed by a woman who moves in with him, describing listening to her speak as “the price” he must pay for having “had the pleasure of her” (2002b: 14), and he is disgusted when his cousin’s friend bleeds during intercourse: “the vision comes to him distastefully… (they have been) wallowing in blood like pigs” (2002b: 129).
John’s misogyny (and the offence he takes at the corporeal realities of women) is an example of one of his many stupid behaviours (Pollard 2013: 106), which can in some ways be attributed to his youthful folly but which is many ways also seem to be symptomatic of a broader inability to connect intimately with those around him. The notion that John has a hard heart, a cold stoniness and a meanness of spirit is a motif throughout Youth that is explicitly linked to his cruelty and mistreatment of women. Lamenting his awkward inability to express appreciation for, and return a gesture of kindness to his upstairs neighbours who invite him around for a meal, John grows increasingly frustrated with his coldness and stupid behaviour:
“[w]hat is wrong with him? Why does he make the most ordinary things so hard for himself?”
(2002b: 95), reflecting the notion that failure in Coetzee is a deficit or ignorance in knowing how to behave, think and feel in seemingly ordinary situations (Sheehan 2016: 457). Coetzee writes that this inability to reciprocate a kind gesture “feels like a sickness, a moral sickness: meanness, poverty of spirit, no different in its essence from his coldness with women” (2002b:
95). John’s stupid behaviours and failures to intimately connect inflict him like a “disease”, despite his awareness of them. Later Coetzee writes that John has become as “hard as stone”
(2002b: 113). As Natalie Pollard has remarked, “[a]cross Coetzee’s novels and published
152 writings, ethical interactions with stupid behaviours take shape as a succession of fraught intimacies” (2013: 100).
John is “cold” (2002b: 168), “frozen” (2002b: 168), like “a stone” (2002b: 114) when he desires to be warm, hot and passionate – as he feels an artist should be. This constant juxtaposition of the icy, stony demeanour of the protagonist and his ideals about the “flame” of art and poetry pre-empts the character’s most resounding insecurity – that his failure as a lover signals the end of his dreams of being a poet. “Is sex the measure of all things?” he asks himself, “[i]f he fails in sex, does he fail the whole test of life” (2002b: 133), before later concluding, “[h]e is well aware that his failure as a writer and his failure as a lover are so closely paralleled that they might as well be the same thing” (2002b: 167). John’s total inability to feel connected to his body and to others also reflects a recurring trope across Coetzee’s oeuvre, that of the intellect who fails in the realm of the intimate, and in the realm of the everyday (Pollard 2013: 93).
As Pollard has argued, “stupid” behaviours are not celebrated within Coetzee, and are awkward, shameful and callous, yet stupid behaviours can give way to “stupidity”, which enables uncertainty and a transfiguration of values. Pollard writes:
[I]n the grip of stupidity, understandings and values are slippery, uncertainly on the move. In this state of mutual uncertainty, one encounters characters exhibiting comically and pitiably shared struggles, uncertainties and perplexities, changeable and changed relations. The stupid, stonily rigid protagonist who finds himself exhibiting stupidity is in the grip of a previously unimagined affective state. (2013: 85, emphasis in original)
As Halberstam has suggested, “stupidity” or “not knowing” can give way to alternative forms of knowledge (2013). In the case of Youth, John’s stupid behaviours and stupidity lead him to question his lofty, antiquated ideas about art, culture and class, and question his own 153 importance and significance as artist and “genius”. It also makes him a vulnerable subject with whom the audience might experience “pitiably shared struggles” (Pollard 2013: 85). Rather than flourishing and finding the intensity and passion that John desires, he becomes smaller, less invisible and less ambitious. John is described as “insect”-like, a “bachelor” (2002b: 68), a description that reminds the reader of Kafka’s most famous solitary bachelor, Gregor Samsa.
The bachelor and the insect in Kafka’s oeuvre signify the ultimate descent into failure and insignificance, the point of complete self-erasure. The imagery of being mastered, beaten and chastened recurs throughout the second half of Youth. First, we are told that John “has not mastered London. If there is any mastering going on, it is London that has mastered him”
(2002b: 63). Later, John ruminates about the increasing poverty of his ambition, which is beginning to match that of the Londoners around him, “London is proving to be a great chastener. Already his ambitions are more modest that they used to be… Each day the city chastens him, chastises him; like a beaten dog” (2002: 113). Even John’s handwriting, we are told, becomes smaller, as though he is disappearing into the grim monotony of his work as a computer programmer and life in London. Unsurprisingly, this does not stimulate great writing, and John finds himself frustrated by his failure to be inspired. “He hates these confrontations with the blank page, hates them to the extent of beginning to avoid them. He cannot bear the weight of despair that descends at the end of each fruitless session, the realisation that again he has failed” (2002b: 166). Affecting though it is, there is a sense in some respect that John needed to be “beaten” and “defeated” in this way, because of the snobbery and lofty ideals he upholds. Though we have sympathy for him in these moments, we realise that this experience of failure is necessary to temper the hubris of young John. Youth is thus a work that very much sullies the idea of the artistic “calling” that Carl D. Malmgren has identified as a convention of the künstlerroman (1987: 11). In Youth, rather than a “calling”, we 154 get a portrait of a young man who has expectations and opinions of himself that are too high, who needs to be “chastised” by failure rather than “called” to be an artist. It is also a portrait of a young man who has misguided understandings about the way to become an artist, and his failure to be transformed by high culture and the metropolis signifies that seeking this out is not necessarily the right path to creative productivity and success.
Though not represented as comically, there is also a continued juxtaposition between the High
Modernist, European aspirations of John and the reality of his South African heritage and upbringing. There is a sense that in being colonial, and as such, “graceless” (2002b: 86) and
“handicap[ped]” (2002b: 62) that he cannot compete or even survive in Europe. He wonders,
“how long will he have to live in England before he has become the real thing, become
English? Will getting a British passport be enough, or does an odd-sounding foreign name mean that he will be shut out for ever?” (2002b: 103). When in the home of his girlfriend
Astrid’s employer, he reads the coldness of Astrid’s mistress as a signal that “[the English] do not want forlorn South African whites cluttering their doorstep like orphans in search of parents” (2002b: 87). South Africa is associated with a failure to meet his own aspirations, something he believes might forever mark him as ordinary, provincial and minor. John laments how “South Africa was a bad start, a handicap, an undistinguished rural family, bad schooling, the Afrikaans language” (2002b: 62). The influence and mark of South Africa is later figuratively described as “like an albatross around his neck” (2002b: 101). Furthermore, his impossibly high standards of what constitutes “civilisation” and being literary set him up for failure, as he worries that “unless he learns Chinese and Persian and Arabic, or at least enough of the languages to read their classics with a crib, he might as well be a barbarian. Where will he find the time?” (2002b: 26). The wrongheadedness, as well as the profound vulnerability 155 expressed in this anxious question draws the reader towards John, as he seems to be in need of both sympathy and reassurance. The absence of the intervening adult voice of hindsight makes the reader more intimately connected with the young John, who appears immediate and present. He is not mediated to us by the adult “parent” voice, but rather appears raw, vulnerable and like an orphan within the text.
Another aspect of the colonial panic and feelings of failure and insecurity that John experiences throughout Youth are expressed through the themes of belatedness and anachronism. When considering the possibilities for a new literary hero, John seems afflicted with feelings of being out of date because many of his best options are long dead and belong to a different world. “James belongs to the past, by the time he himself was born, James Joyce was still alive, though only by a whisker” (2002b: 67). This has links not only with other texts in Coetzee’s fictional oeuvre, but also to his critical writing. In Stranger Shores, Coetzee wrote,
“[t]he feeling of being out of date, of having been born into too late an epoch… This is a not uncommon sense of the self among colonials” (2001: 6). Coetzee writes that to such young people (like himself), “the high culture of the metropolis may arrive in the form of powerful experiences which cannot, however, be embedded in their lives in any obvious way… In extreme cases, they are led to blame their environment for not living up to art” (2001: 6-7).
The parallels between Coetzee’s observations about the situation of young colonials, and the experiences that John has both before and after his move to London are very closely paralleled. John initially sees South Africa as to blame for his inability to write the kind of poetry he wants to write, but after moving to London, fails to experience the intensity and the transformation for which he had hoped. He thus comes to realise that there are issues of personality that are keeping him from his idealised version of self. 156
There is also the notion in Youth that stupidity and being wrong are things that the artist must accept, and the idea that failure and accepting failure can become an alternative vision for the artist – one that is bound up in Beckett’s “rhetoric of failure”. In Youth, the usual trajectory of mastery and succession in the künstlerroman is challenged. Epiphanies, if they happen at all, are accidental, and come by chance – they are ultimately not “something he sought” but
“something that happened to him” (Engle 2006: 44). Epiphany does not come about through prescribed notions of what constitutes literariness, like the exhaustive lists about what constitutes worthy art as presented in the first half of the memoir. In a reading room at the
British Library John picks up some books about South African history, when he is bored and exhausted with pouring over Pound and Ford (2002b: 137). John is captivated and moved by the accounts of “his country, the country of his heart” (2002b: 137), the allusion in this quote recognisable to any reader familiar with Coetzee’s fictional oeuvre, as it is this history that ultimately led to the publication and success of one of his first novels, In the Heart of the Country
(1977). As Engle has observed, Goethe’s aphorism that is used as the epigraph of Youth “‘Wer den Dichter will verstehen, muss in Dichters lande gehen’ [If you want to understand the poet/ You have to go to the Poet’s home] cuts two ways” in the memoir (2006: 45). As Engle argues,
The young John read it as an imperative to go to London, one of the places where poets live. But the poet John really wishes to catch or understand is himself. And to do that he will be required to go back to his own land. (2006: 45)
For John, this means accepting and revisiting his home land, which he has considered for the large part of this memoir as a “bad start” (2002b: 62), a “handicap” (2002b: 62), an “albatross”
(2002b: 101) and the source of his failure.
What John initially perceives as the “wrong tracks” to becoming an artist ultimately turn out to 157 be those that suit him. Part of the point of Youth is that, if you want to be a writer and be literary, “the wrong place can turn out to be the right place, and the wrong way can turn out to be the right one” (Engle 2006: 47-48). This recognition of negativity and the “wrong way” as the right way is best captured when John picks up a copy of Beckett’s Watt (1953) in a second- hand bookshop. Unsure about the contents or quality of the book, as it is published by a printing press known for publishing pornography, John returns to his abode and starts reading the “chunky little book” (2002b: 155). From the “first page he knows he has hit on something”
(2002b: 155), and wonders, “[h]ow could he have imagined he wanted to write in the manner of Ford when Beckett was around all the time?” (2002b: 155) Though Beckett doesn’t feature on the exhaustive lists John has drawn up in the early part of the memoir as the prerequisite reading for a serious artist, it becomes clear that John’s reading of Beckett is the closest thing to an epiphany that occurs in Youth.
According to Yeoh, the artist’s ironic epiphany in Youth is that “a recognition of inevitable negativity that would paradoxically allow him to act”, a sentiment appropriated from Beckett who advised that “you have to find the wrong track that suits you” (in Yeoh 2010). John realises that an acceptance of failure is necessary to becoming an artist, “a stupid insensitive doggedness” and “a willingness to fail and fail again” (2002b: 167). While John “kills time” and lives in an “impasse” while he waits for destiny to visit him (2002b: 165), it is ultimately this act of killing time, impasse and gradually learning to accept failure that lead to any kind of artistic success. It is this aesthetics of failure, stupidity and impasse, heavily influenced by Beckett, that come to shape Coetzee’s aesthetics of negativity and the rhetoric of failure that continues throughout both his autobiographical and literary works. Yeoh (2010) observes that “[w]hile
John constantly thinks in terms of a transfiguration that transcends his circumstances, what 158
Coetzee posits as his actual condition is that of the impasse in which ‘there are only wrong tracks’”.
As Yeoh also argues, Coetzee departs from the progression to genius and mastery embodied in
Joyce’s classic künstlerroman and in contrast with Joyce, Coetzee is “sceptical that the flawed nature of consciousness can ever be overcome and, far from transcending any form of wrongheadedness, the self merely meanders from one form of wrongheadedness to other forms of wrongheadedness” (2010). Yeoh’s observation of a meandering self moving from one form of wrongheadedness to another can very much be observed in Summertime, in which the autobiographical self represented is an adult in his mid-thirties, and in which many of the same personality deficits represented in Youth re-emerge in a different context, as well as some new ones. Furthermore, Yeoh argues, “Coetzee’s bleaker view of an inevitably flawed consciousness which has no possibility of a maturation that transcends its wrongheadedness ultimately finds it source in Samuel Beckett” (2010). The rejection of eventual epiphany and mastery is also captured in the book’s closing pages. The book ends on a note of profound negativity, with the character resigning to failure in a dark and tragic-comic meditation on the way bookishness and education do not translate into success in life and success as an artist. He imagines his workmate, Ganapathy (who despite his M.Sc. in Computer Science fails to care for himself and lives on only bananas) being carried out of his flat by ambulance men on a stretcher with a sheet over his face. Coetzee’s bleak concluding lines, “[w]hen they have fetched Ganapathy they might as well come and fetch him too” (2002b: 16), exemplifies the way Coetzee has used the immanent voice to portray and parody the melodrama of the young man and the youth that he represents. Here youth ceases to be a time of promise, of forward thinking and of optimism as Franco Moretti has described it (2000: 5). Mirroring Beckett’s 159 aesthetics of “impotence, ignorance” (Shenker 1956), “Coetzee conceptualizes… states of ignorance and non-knowing as constituting the self’s fundamental condition” (Yeoh 2010). It is John’s acceptance of this that brings him closer to being an artist than any of the other pursuits or quests in Youth. Ending on such a tone of negativity, resignation and failure tempers the triumphalist reflexes (Sheehan 2016: 457) of autobiography and resists the usual trajectories of mastery and succession associated with the künstlerroman. As I argue later in this chapter, Auster also ends his künstlerroman on a similar tone of flat and ironic negativity.
The kinds of failures and the spirit of relentless self-parody and self-excoriation that resound in
Youth are continued (and even amplified) in the third and final installation of the Scenes from
Provincial Life trilogy, Summertime. In this autre-biography, which focuses on the years 1972-1975 when Coetzee was “finding his feet” as a writer (Coetzee 2009: 225), Coetzee omits those details from his biography which might be associated with artistic success, and success in a capitalist society (being married, having children, having an academic position) and emphasises those which might traditionally be associated with failure (bachelorhood, economic poverty/dependency and precarious employment). Throughout the text, the third-person present tense narrator of John’s notebooks, as well as the interviewees with whom the biographer (Mr. Vincent) speaks, present an image of John Coetzee as a man who has failed to make an impact on the lives of those around him, a man who has failed in achieving domestic and capitalistic success, and a man, most significantly who has failed with women and failed to meet the aspirations outlined in Youth of being a lover and an artist in the mode of Byron or
Henry Miller.
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On first meeting him in a Tokai supermarket, Julia, the first interviewee describes John as having “an air of seediness about him… an air of failure” (2009: 21). Julia emphasises this image of his “seediness” and “failure” through her visual and olfactory descriptions of the house John shares with his father, which smells like “potato peels”, “male sweat” and “damp towels”; it is “primitive” with ceilings so low Julia fears she will “suffocate” (2009: 79). Living with his father, as John concedes in the “Notebooks: (1972-1975)” and in conversation with
Julia in the first interview means he is “a child” (2009: 14) and “back to being a son” (2009:
31). The imagery of John’s squalid home, his economic and sexual failure in living with his father and being “back to being a son” establishes an image of John as not fulfilling any of the accepted and/or valourised modes of masculinity in 1970’s South Africa. The third interviewee, Adriana, describes John as “soft” (2009: 171), comparing him, unfavourably, to her late husband, who had “experience behind him to test his manhood and teach him about life” (2009: 171). John, in contrast, is described as “not a man… [but] still a boy” (2009: 171).
The third-person limited narrator of the “Notebooks: (1972-1975)” wonders whether John’s chosen path as an intellectual is one which has ensured a lifetime of poverty and failure. In this section, John runs into a classmate from high school, a boy who struggled academically but now is a successful marketer, and married with children. Coetzee writes, “[s]o David Truscott, who did not understand x and y, is a flourishing marketer or marketeer, while he, who has no trouble… is an unemployed intellectual” (2009: 14). He suggests, with a droll and comic irony
“that understanding things is a waste of time; that 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 but just add up the numbers” (2009: 14).
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As in the David Truscott example above, intellectuals in Coetzee’s oeuvre (like Coetzee’s autres) always finish last in a tragi-comic way in a world where their skills and knowledge are impractical, inexpedient and/or obsolete and the intellectual is ill-equipped to fend for themselves in an economy that only values and rewards certain kinds of knowledge. A notable example of this dynamic is in Diary of a Bad Year, where the unscrupulous investment banker
Alan installs spyware on J. C.’s computer with the intent of stealing his money (2007: 123).
Such characters are not merely victims of capitalist expediency and anti-intellectualism, they also fail and offend by not adhering to the practical demands of ordinary life. The most
“vicious outrage” in Coetzee’s oeuvre, Pollard argues, is “prompted by intellectuals who appear divorced from their bodies” (2013: 93). Pollard writes that Coetzee’s characters fail and offend by “neglecting the corporeality of everyday practical, and sensual, life” (2013: 93). John of the Scenes from Provincial Life series is especially guilty of this. In Youth, as I previously discussed, the young John’s clumsy and awkward interactions with those around him draw outrage from others and are a source of John’s own self-loathing. In Summertime this outrage at
John for his “intellectual abstraction” and “disembodiment” (Pollard 2013: 94) and his failure to subscribe to the practical and social norms of everyday life is strongly focalised by the first three female interviewees.
Sensual, corporeal and sexual failure, and failure to connect intimately are resounding themes throughout Summertime, as they are in Youth. Julia says of John (after first meeting him) that “he had no sexual presence whatsoever. It was as though he had been sprayed from head to toe with a neutralizing spray” (2009: 24). Of John and his father, Julia observes that “[t]hey were both loners. Socially inept. Repressed, in the wider sense of the word” (2009: 20). To Adriana,
John “seemed ill at ease, itching to get away” (2009: 160) and as “célibataire”, by which she 162 means “not just unmarried but also not suited to marriage, like a man who has spent his life in the priesthood and lost his manhood and become incompetent with women” (2009: 160),
Adriana later describes John as “[s]olitary. Not made for conjugal life. Not made for the company of women” (2009: 171). The descriptions of John as asexual and disembodied echo
Elizabeth Costello’s descriptions of Kafka, and his hybrid bachelor creation, Red Peter, as
“sterile” (2003: 75), “[i]t is as hard to imagine the child of Red Peter as to imagine the child of
Franz Kafka himself” Costello says in her lecture (2003: 74). This further suggests that
Coetzee’s self-characterisation as célibataire, failing with women and failing to reproduce, has its basis in Kafka’s solitary bachelor creations, and indeed with Kafka’s own characterisation of himself as a bachelor in his diaries (1964). As Reiner Stach argues, Kafka was “not even thirty when he projected the image of the old bachelor onto himself” (2005: 47). For Kafka, the bachelor was a figure of failure, who in not marrying or reproducing was reduced to solitude and indignity (1964: 117). He is characterised an incompetent, peripheral figure who would perpetually have difficulty connecting with those around him,19 much like John in Summertime who constantly struggles to connect intimately with those around him, and whose status as a childless, emasculated bachelor is a constant source of humiliation.
There are three episodes in the novel where John’s attempts to connect end up in tragi-comic episodes of failure, as he fails to connect on an emotional or sensual level, and fails in an everyday practical way, to the outrage of others involved and to the discredit of his
19 Kafka writes in his diaries from 1911: “It seems so dreadful to stay a bachelor, to become an old man struggling to keep one’s dignity while begging for an invitation whenever one wants to spend an evening in company, to lie ill gazing for weeks into an empty room where one’s bed is, always having to say good night at the front door, never to run up a stairway beside one’s wife, to have only side doors into one’s room leading into other people’s living rooms, having to carry one’s supper home in one’s hand, having to admire other people’s children and not even being allowed to go on saying: ‘I have none myself’, modelling oneself in appearance and behavior on one or two bachelors remembered from one’s youth” (1964: 117). 163 competency and masculinity in a world that values men’s practicality. As Julia observes, John is
“[a] figure of comedy. Dour comedy” (2009: 63) and it is these three episodes which perhaps best illustrate the kind of self-excoriating, mordant, tragi-comic humour for which Coetzee is renowned. Yet all of these episodes, as I hope to demonstrate, are also quite affecting in their portrait of solitary bachelor, and a man who tries to enact his visions and connect to others yet fails and fails again.
The first, which is one of the more humorous episodes from Summertime, is when John rushes excitedly to Julia’s house, with a Schubert cassette in hand, to suggest that they coordinate their lovemaking to the slow-movement of the string quartet. Julia describes the whole episode as
“forced” and “ridiculous” (2009: 69) and “far from arousing”, adding to which she cannot
“shake off the image on the box containing the tape: Franz Schubert looking not like a god of music but like a harried Viennese clerk with a head-cold” (2009: 68-69). Like many of the examples from Youth discussed earlier, this is an example of John trying to live life with intensity, embedding his vision of what it might mean to be an artist into his own experience and failing (Engle 2006: 43). Beyond the more awkward, cringe-worthy and humorous aspects of John Coetzee’s “erotic experiment” is what he later reveals to Julia as his purpose, which is to access kinds of feelings that had flourished in Schubert’s time but were now dead, proving that “[f]eelings had natural histories of their own” (2009: 69). John wants to re-experience the feelings of post-Bonaparte Austria, a notion that Julia finds equally as absurd. Thus, not only does this episode serve as another example of the relationship between John’s sexual failures and his inability to connect intimately and emotionally (2009: 82), but also the feelings of being out of date and out of time as outlined in Stranger Shores (2001: 6), the colonial’s sense of
164 constantly desiring the intensity and passion of a time and place they consider to be greater and more significant than their own.
The second episode of failure and impracticality occurs in the interview with Margot, John’s favourite cousin and one of the only members of his extended family sympathetic to him. John convinces Margot to accompany him to visit a farm he is thinking of purchasing in a remote town in the Karoo. The truck he takes is unreliable, largely owing to his insistence on doing his own mechanical repairs (2009: 111), and the adult cousins break down at night time with nobody to call and nowhere open and within walking distance to seek help. His cousin is careful not to express her rage, allowing herself only “a single acid moment” to suggest when they get back to civilisation, that he takes the truck to a mechanic to be properly fixed (2009:
111). It is when the cousins must settle and try to pass time before sleep in the truck without any food, water or blankets that John proves himself grossly incompetent in not only practical matters, but in providing any comfort to his cousin stranded with him shivering in the cold of the veld. Though Margot has defended John from the family’s claims that he is supercilious and inept, this is exactly what he proves himself to be when she requests that he tell her a story. His response is “Given the existence of a personal God…with a white beard quaquaquaqua outside time without extensions who from the heights of divine apathia quaquaquaqua with some exceptions…quaquaquaqua” (2009: 112), an allusion to Lucky’s speech in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (1954),20 which as they are in Beckett, are a combination of scholarly and theological terminology (the Latin “qua”), but repeated in such a way that they become nonsensical and a parody of the very language modes which they use. Needless to say,
20 “… A personal God quaquaquaqua with white beard quaquaquaqua outside time without extension who from the heights of divine apathia divine athambia divine aphasia loves us dearly with some exceptions …” (Beckett 1954: 1.639) 165 that are of no use, meaning or interest to Margot who is stranded on a cold night in the middle of the veld. John’s nonsense words here act as an exaggeration and parody of the haughty intellectualism and deep impracticality for which John is continuously criticised throughout
Summertime (an irony given the character’s philosophical obsession/commitment with doing his own manual labour, which I discuss in more detail in Chapter 3). As Pollard argues, Margot’s embarrassment at being stranded in this situation leads her to cast “him in her imagination as a parody of the abstracted writer; a figure locked into the attitude of cliché: affect-less, anachronistic, ‘lightweight’, effete: ‘rattling a pencil between his teeth’” (Pollard 2013: 93), the kind of person who often becomes the subject of ridicule within Coetzee’s oeuvre.
The third episode of practical failure and the bachelor’s failure to impress or connect in the way that he hopes to is in the third interview, with Adriana, who recounts an unflattering memory of John inviting her and her two daughters for a picnic in the mountains with him and his father. Soon after arriving and building a fire, it begins to pour. With no shelter, the three women must sit in the truck whilst John and his father huddle under a tree (2009: 167) The rain does not pass, they are unable to light a fire to cook the meet, and the picnic is rendered
(by Adriana) an embarrassment and a disaster. She says, “I had never seen a more miserable sight than those two Dutchmen, the father and the son, sitting together side by side under a tree trying to pretend they were not cold and wet. A miserable sight, but funny too” (2009:
167). Of the episode, Adriana says to her daughter “it is winter and intelligent people, people with their feet on the ground, don’t go out on picnics in the middle of winter” (2009: 167). It is an episode that is pitiable and pathetic, in which the affects of humiliation and the sense of failure and defeat are palpable in the “miserable” but “funny” sight of the two men huddled together in the rain. His attempt to, assumedly, “make a good impression” on Adriana utterly 166 fails, as she describes him as “this poet who could not even make a fire” (2009: 168). Whilst it is his incompetency in building a literal fire here, it is also suggestive of the figurative “fire”
John used in describing his Plato-inspired philosophy of teaching (2009: 163) and the “fire” of art that John so desperately wants to experience in Youth. Towards the end of Youth John resigns to accepting his “notable lack of fire” (2002b: 136). As in Youth, John in Summertime fails not only in being impractical, but he also appears as damp and cold, there is no “fire” associated with him, be it the fire of passion/sensuality, art, or the literal fire that he fails to keep alight.
John’s personal failings in Youth and in Summertime in many ways can be read as reflecting the idea of the failure and limitations of writing, and perhaps the limitations and failures of confession and autobiography. As discussed earlier in the chapter, John is constantly drawing the reader’s attention to how his perceived failings as a lover and his failures as an artist are connected. There are also two episodes in Youth where John explicitly draws the reader’s attention to the connections between personal and personality failures and artistic failure, and to the limitations, difficulties and failures of confession. The first example, in Chapter 7, is
John’s reaction to T.S. Eliot’s maxim that poetry is “an escape” from emotion and personality, but that one must have emotion and personality to “know what it means to escape from these things” (in Coetzee 2002b: 61). John fears that, given Eliot’s advice and his insecurity and doubt about both his personality and his capacity to experience life and emotions intensely, that he is not suited to writing poetry and should stick to writing prose. Coetzee writes: “[h]e has a horror of spilling mere emotion on to the page. Once it has begun to spill out he would not know how to stop it. It would be like severing an artery and watching one’s lifeblood gush out” (2002b: 61). Prose, in contrast, he suggests is “like a flat, tranquil sheet of water on which 167 one can tack about at one’s leisure, making patterns on the surface” (2002b: 61). In this passage, one could read the juxtaposition between the simile of poetry as a severed artery with one’s “lifeblood” gushing out and prose as a “flat, tranquil sheet of water” as representing the reasons and choices for Coetzee’s autre-biographical style, which through providing the veneer and aesthetics of prose circumvents the spilling of “mere emotion” onto the page. What is interesting here, however, is how choice of literary form and style is inextricably linked with personality, and more so here with a perceived failure of personality. This suggests that failure is not just a thematic concern in Coetzee’s autre-biography, but that it is written into its very form and style.
John’s desire to express himself through writing, but his horror and disgust at “spilling” out emotion and not knowing how to “stop it” (2002b: 61) could be read as symbolic of Felski’s
“dialectic of intimacy and alienation” (Felski 1989: 108) in confession which I discuss in both my introduction and Chapter 1. Though I discuss Felski at length in my introduction, it is worth revisiting her description of the tension of intimacy and alienation faced when writing confession because of how palpably this is reflected both thematically in the failures to feel, think and act in Youth and Summertime, but also in the way these challenges are mirrored in the formal failures of autobiography and confession. Writing on the ambivalence and difficulty of confession, Felski argues:
The unconditional demand for intimacy, confronted with the intolerable reality of alienation and lack, reverts back into anxiety and self-hatred. The goal of confession is to strip way the superficial layers of convention and to expose an authentic core of self, of meaning as fully present to itself. Yet the more frantically this true subjectivity is pursued, the more elusive it appears; the greater the desire for intimacy and spontaneity, the more clearly the act of writing is revealed as the most alienated of activities. (Felski 1989: 108)
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This dialectic, I would argue, is evident not only in the characters, plot and themes in Coetzee’s autre-biography, most notably in Youth and Summertime, but also in the style and conventions of his autre-biographical works. Throughout both Youth and Summertime there is a recurring desire to connect from the main character, John, yet the more intently he pursues intimate connections with others, the more self-loathing and alienated he becomes. This challenges the notion that Coetzee is playing games or intentionally obfuscating his life story for readers by exaggerating his failures and the distance between the author and character through the third person,21 and rather suggests that the style he deploys reflects the tension between the demand for intimacy and confession in autobiography, as well as the reality of writing as an alienated act and the formal pressures and restrictions that autobiography imposes.
The relationship between the failure to connect, failures of personality and the challenges, limitations and failures of autobiography is also explored earlier in Youth, when John’s girlfriend, Jacqueline, reads his diary and as such, reads his feelings of resentment about living with her. Now that John’s “first try at living with a woman has ended in failure, in ignominy”
(2002b: 10), Coetzee writes:
The question of what should be permitted to go into his diary and what should be kept forever shrouded goes to the heart of all his writing. If he is to censor himself from expressing ignoble emotions – resentment at having his flat invaded, or shame at his own failures as a lover – how will these emotions ever be transfigured and turned into poetry? … Besides, who is to say that the feelings he writes in his diary are his true feelings? Who is to say that at each moment while the pen moves he is truly himself? At one moment he might be himself, at another he might simply be making things up. How can he know for sure? Why should he even want to know for sure? 2002b: 10, emphasis in original)
21 See reviews of Scenes from Provincial Life in first chapter. 169
Here, John’s questions about the truth value of any confession, and the very real problem of self-deception in confession and autobiography strongly echo Coetzee’s arguments and uncertainties about the genre in Doubling the Point. Furthermore, the wrongheadedness that is part of the self’s fundamental condition (Yeoh 2010) and the persona’s perceived personal failings and failures must be reflected in a failure in writing that self. As the self cannot truly know itself, and risks at any point deceiving itself, how can any autobiographical account of that self claim to be an absolute truth?
John’s personal failures are again used to cast aspersions on the validity and truth value of his writing in Summertime by the first interviewee, Julia. She asks Mr. Vincent to consider:
Here we have a man who, in the most intimate of human relationships, cannot connect, or can connect only briefly, intermittently. Yet how does he make his living? He makes his living writing reports, expert reports on intimate human experience. Because that is what novels are about isn’t it? intimate experience. (2009: 82)
John’s attempts, and failures, to connect intimately throughout Summertime perhaps act as a metaphor for the questions and problems of veracity and writing self in autobiography, and the
“dialectic of intimacy and alienation” in writing confession (Felski 1989: 108). It could perhaps then be argued that the failure to intimately connect that recurs throughout Youth and again in
Summertime has parallels with the formal failure of autobiography, and the challenges in writing self and intimately connecting with a readership. Hence there is a poetic coincidence between form and content. As Sheehan argues, failure in Coetzee’s “auto-fictions” both “has powerful thematic resonances” and is “formal or generic”, which (citing Max Saunders) represents the
“story of autobiography as the failure to tell its story” (2016: 455), which Saunders describes as the “failure to write the self into the textual space it has hollowed out for itself” (2010: 142).
As I move into my discussion of failure in Auster’s autre-biography, I argue that what begins 170 as thematic representations of failure in Auster’s work also shifts into an examination of the formal limits of autobiography and the inevitable alienation that emerges as one seeks to access and represent truths of self.
Auster’s Hand to Mouth and Report from the Interior
Failure is the thematic focus, and indeed subtitle, of Auster’s, Hand to Mouth: A Chronicle of
Early Failure (1997a). The memoir opens with the lines: “[i]n my late twenties and early thirties
I went through a period of several years where everything I touched turned to failure. My marriage ended in divorce, my work as a writer foundered, and I was overwhelmed by money problems” (1997a: 1). Hand to Mouth is marketed and described as a “book about money – and what it means to not have it” (Faber & Faber n.d.), but it becomes evident quite early in the text that it is about the many misconceptions that exist about what constitutes success, as well as the experience of failure. Hand to Mouth is very much a künstlerroman, in that its focus is the quest of the central character (who in this case is also author and narrator) to “become” a writer. As in Coetzee’s Youth, however, Auster also resists many of the conventions of the künstlerroman, and through his focus on non-intuitive modes of knowledge – failure, impasse, negativity, not-knowing and stupidity – he resists the centrality of progress and development to the trajectory of his work.
Though revisiting earlier periods in one’s life usually signals a desire to understand and make sense of one’s earlier self and earlier experiences, Auster has claimed that this was not his intention in authoring Hand to Mouth. Speaking with Michael Wood about Hand to Mouth in
1997, Auster claimed that part of the compulsion to write Hand to Mouth was not to gain 171 greater self-understanding, but rather to revisit those things that he still didn’t understand. He told Wood, “[i]t’s the things that we don’t understand that stay with us” (Auster in 1997b).
Throughout Hand to Mouth it is apparent that Auster’s interest in failure as a subject matter is very heavily interwoven with his obsession with chance. He has written an essay on chance in
The Art of Hunger, and his preoccupation with coincidence, chance and the unexpected can be found in his fiction, autobiography and in his letters to Coetzee in Here and Now. In The Art of
Hunger, Auster writes that “[c]hance is a part of reality: we are continually shaped by the forces of coincidence, the unexpected occurs with almost numbing regularity in all our lives” (1997b:
269). Auster’s obsession with chance, as Hetman argues, is another means of admonishing the authority of the author, through emphasising chance and luck over notions of free-will and self-determination (2015: 122). “Failure” and “success” constitute two forces of coincidence which Auster is interested in Hand to Mouth. Challenging the capitalist notion of “merit”,
Auster presents an array of characters who have not found fame or recognition, not for want of talent or ability, but through the operations of chance. One example of such a character is a dishwasher named Frank that Auster worked with at a summer camp in upstate New York.
Though Auster’s first impressions of Frank are of “a grim, surly guy with a serious drinking problem” (1997a: 14), his conversations after work with Frank reveal that he was a “highly intelligent, well-read man” who has worked as an insurance agent in Springfield, Massachusetts
“and until the bottle got the better of him… had lived the life of a productive, tax-paying citizen” (1997a: 14). Auster learns of the series of events that had “done him in”, writing, “[i]n the space of sixteen months… every person who had meant anything to him died” (1997a: 14).
Frank tells the young Auster that after that he just gave up, not caring what happened to him anymore. Frank is one of the several victims of circumstance throughout Hand to Mouth that illustrate the mysteries of life and fate that have continued to fascinate Auster throughout his 172 writing career. The notion of chance remains an unanswered question for Auster, as it does in
The Art of Hunger: “Chance? Destiny? Or simple mathematics, an example of probability theory at work? It doesn’t matter what you call it. Life is full of such events” (1997b: 270). As a self- proclaimed narrative of that which cannot be understood, Hand to Mouth hints at an alternate narrative of poverty and obscurity which may have been Auster’s lot had chance not favoured him. Both Youth and Hand to Mouth thematise economic failure as well as the failure to be an artist in the mould each protagonist has prescribed for himself. While Youth is more centrally concerned with the latter type of failure, in Hand to Mouth Auster is obsessed with money, the threshold of poverty and how easily one’s life can turn to failure because of economic circumstances.
Though most künstlerromans end on some note of transformation, positivity and success, Hand to Mouth, like Youth, is quite remarkable for the dry, flat negativity with which it ends. At the end of the time period covered in Hand to Mouth, Auster felt that his career as a writer had ended, a sentiment which is very evident in the book, which according to Wood, begins by presenting an aspiring writer, and is ended by an “ex-writer” (1997). In the closing pages,
Auster describes in exhaustive detail the tedious process of finding a publisher for the detective novel he wrote during the timespan covered in Hand to Mouth. It is presented as a fruitless process, one that doesn’t seem as though it will lead anywhere. The first publisher drags out the production of his novel for close to two years, and by the time it is printed, his publisher “had lost his distributer, had no money left, and to all intents and purposes was dead as a publisher” (1997a: 124). Most of the edition ends up “in cardboard boxes, gathering dust on the floor of a warehouse somewhere in Brooklyn” (1997a: 124). Auster then makes one last bid attempt to “conclude” the publication of his novel once and for all, seeking out paperback
173 houses to publish the book (“since the novel [had] been ‘published’, a hardcover edition was no longer possible” (1997a: 124)). Auster manages to find a paperback publisher and receives an advance of two thousand dollars. He concludes the book with the following words:
After spitting the advance with the original publisher (as per contract), I was left with one thousand dollars. Deduct the ten percent agent’s commission, and I wound up making a grand total of nine hundred dollars. So much for writing books for money. So much for selling out. (1997a: 125)
The wry and ironic concluding lines “[s]o much for selling out” allude to the earlier artistic pretensions Auster upholds and his sense that writing paperback was a compromise of his aesthetic principles, albeit one that would pay off financially.
Auster as narrator sounds exhausted with the business of writing, his constant rejection and the “constant, grinding, almost suffocating” sense of failure that defined his early career (1997a: 1). Without the paratextual detail: the dust jacket, the marketing of the book and Auster’s then status as celebrity author, the reader could assume from reading Hand to Mouth that Auster never went on to experience success or make money from working as an author.
Furthermore, Auster details all of the failed projects he invested a significant amount of time and energy into – three plays, the detective fiction novel mentioned in the previous paragraph and an action baseball game he invents and tries to market unsuccessfully – and publishes these projects in a 300-page appendix, which the dust- jacket of the British hardcover edition describes as “three of the longest footnotes in literary history” (1997a). Publishing these works, which would never have found a wide audience otherwise, and which we know had failed spectacularly when Auster attempted to bring them to an audience previously, encourages us to read the “failed”
174 works as the end point of the narrative, rather than reading Hand to Mouth as journey from obscurity to success.
Through detailing the pain and humiliation experienced from the failure of the works included in the appendix, Auster reminds the reader that failure is an unavoidable affective experience for the writer, and that these feelings can and should shape and remain with the writer in his later life. One of these humiliating and humbling anecdotes that Auster retells is of his experience trying to find a distributer for the
“Action Baseball” card game he had designed as a kid, and revisited as a possible “get rich” scheme during the personal financial crisis that is retold in Hand to Mouth.
Through a connection of his stepfather, Auster makes a meeting with the president of a toy company at a toy fair with the intention of selling the game on which he had worked so hard. Once walking into the fair, Auster is prepared for failure on seeing how colourful and elaborate all the other displays are, yet he is not prepared for quite how degrading and humiliating the severity of the man’s rejection will be, writing “he did it in such a chilling way, with so little regard for human decency that is still causes me pain to think about it today” (1997a: 11). He describes the man as a “Nazi”, and describes how “contempt flickered in his eyes” as though Auster “had just handed him a dog turd and asked him to smell it” (1997a: 112). The man stops Auster mid- spiel, and asks him to leave, giving him ninety seconds to pack his game back into the cigarette box. It is the moment that Auster considers himself as having “hit rock bottom”, a moment he considered “the low point” of his life (1997a: 112). The narrative space and time Auster gives this “low-point”, as opposed to other seemingly significant milestones like his marriage and the birth of his son, are testament to the 175 extent Auster wishes to focus on failure in Hand to Mouth, and the way he wishes to revisit and have the reader experience the emotions felt as a result of an acute experience of failure.
In addition to resisting the künstlerroman’s focus on eventual success and progress,
Hand to Mouth, like Youth, subverts the idea of transformation, epiphany and the
“calling” which has traditionally featured in the künstlerroman. In the first half of Hand to Mouth, Auster writes “[a]rt was holy, and to follow its call meant making any sacrifice that was demanded of you, maintaining your purity of purpose to the end”
(1997a: 26), exemplifying the Sacred Fount trope of the artist, or the notion of the artist as a “successor” to the priest (Coetzee 2015: 59). In an interview with Michel
Contat, Auster speaks of “being intoxicated by a certain kind of modernism” as a youth, which made him feel “loaded with so much baggage” as a result of “taking literature [too] seriously” (2013: 72). As in Youth, as the memoir progresses, it becomes clear that taking literature too seriously and the belief in the sacredness of art that is present in many künstlerromans is a fiction that does not actualise in the path to becoming an artist. The engagement with the künstlerroman as a genre, and the subversion of many of its characteristics is made explicit with Auster’s reference to
Joyce early on in Hand to Mouth. Auster cites Joyce as one of his earliest literary influences (Wood 1997), and in the memoir, makes a pilgrimage to Dublin “for reasons that had everything to do with James Joyce and Ulysses” (1997a: 19-20). As
John in Youth seeks to be transformed into an artist by travelling to the world of his literary “pantheons” (2002b: 67), Paul in Hand to Mouth seeks artistic awakening through merely being in the city of his literary idol. This assumption is very much a 176 trope in the genre of the künstlerroman. As I mentioned in my discussion of Youth, the writer of one of the earliest examples of the künstlerroman, Goethe, wrote that “If you want to understand the poet / You have to go to the Poet’s home” (Engle 2006: 45).
As in Youth, the notion that a quest to the land of a literary hero can deliver some kind of higher insight or inspiration is also parodied and subverted in Hand to Mouth.
Auster writes of his visit to Dublin that “[m]y only purpose in going was to be there, and I figured the rest would take care of itself” (1997a: 20). Though Auster is by no means a snob to the same extent that John is, he still has some wrongheaded notions about what will “make him” an artist, and this is one of them. In a moment of bathetic humour, similar to that which runs throughout Youth, Auster acquires an unfortunate and comical injury, which makes his experience of Dublin fall radically short of the romantic expectations he has of the city through his heroisation of James
Joyce. He develops an ingrown toenail, writing that “[i]t felt as if the tip of a knife had been lodged in my big toe”, and though this turns walking “into a trial”, Auster does
“little else but walk, hobbling around Dublin in [his] too tight, disintegrating shoes”
(1997a: 20), too afraid to set foot in a pub, scarcely talking to another living soul, his toenail driving him “ever further into [him]self”, erasing him “as a social being”
(1997a: 20). Rather than treat the infection, Auster continues to limp and hobble around Dublin by himself. It is a moment of bathos (with an emphasis on an abject foot) reminiscent of John losing his sandals in the rain in Youth (2002b: 3), a scene in which Romantic notions about the path to becoming an artist are undermined by everyday, corporeal realities and deficits. He does not achieve the artistic inspiration he seeks through immersion in the homeland of Joyce. He does, however, achieve 177 another kind of an epiphany, his first encounter with acute loneliness and solitude, a theme that runs throughout his fictional and non-fictional works. In concluding the section on Dublin, Auster writes that “[s]omething important had happened to me there… Something terrible, I think, some mesmerizing encounter with my own depths, as if in the loneliness of those days I had looked into the darkness and seen myself for the first time” (1997a: 23). Moments like this illustrate the similar poetics of failure in Auster and Coetzee, where tragic-comic bathetic moments provide intimate and affecting portraits of loneliness and early failure and unexpected artistic inspiration.
Like John in Youth, Auster finds that many of the “wrong tracks” to being an artist turn out to be right tracks. Whilst John’s “wrong tracks” involve relaxing his prescriptive list about what constitutes worthy art and, and losing his strong feelings of cultural cringe, Auster’s “wrong tracks” involve his willingness to write about and be inspired by Brooklyn, rather than Paris and Dublin, and his interest in “low brow” detective fiction which ultimately led to his success in publishing The New York Trilogy. In his 1997 interview with Wood, Auster makes explicit reference to the way that accepting failure is a necessary to being an artist, claiming that “to be an artist is to fail”, a sentiment he comes to appreciate through his interest in Beckett. Auster goes on to say that Beckett had “a deep and lasting impression on him” and that through his own experience, he found Beckett to be “right”, time and time again (in Wood 1997). When questioned by Wood about the preoccupation with failure in Hand to Mouth, Auster presents his own playful, Beckett-like failure paradox, stating “failure is not as easy as it looks”, implying that not only is failure something that the artist must experience, but that failure itself is an art form (in Wood 1997). As an art form, failure is especially difficult to execute, and Hand to 178
Mouth abounds with self-reflexive, self-conscious gestures of failure that vary in their effectiveness as art form.
Throughout Hand to Mouth, Auster creates colourful characters who not only experience failure, but work to make failure “an art”. One of these is the eccentric, homeless man “Doc” who, Auster realises shortly after meeting him, is the legendary H.L. Humes, one of the original founders of the Paris Review and “a living example of failed promise and blighted literary fortune” (1997a: 37). His nervous system damaged from electroshock therapy and unable to write, Doc gives up on his literary aspirations and instead spends his days handing out money (his inheritance from his father) to strangers in the streets of New York, in an attempt to convince people of the worthlessness of money and disenchant the spell it has over the collective mind (1997a: 40). While full of admiration for Doc and his wit and intelligence,
Auster describes Doc’s act as “more in the spirit of a wacko performance piece than a genuine political act” (1997a: 40). Nevertheless, Auster describes it as an act in which he himself gets caught up. Throughout Hand to Mouth, failure becomes performative, an act and something conscious and staged.
Two of his other favourite personalities are a duo called Casey and Teddy. Auster meets Casey and Teddy when working as a groundskeeper for a hotel in upstate New York, and describes them as two best friends travelling around together finding ad hoc work, “classic American drifters, latter-day hoboes who seemed to have stepped forth from the pages of a Steinbeck novel” (1997a: 26). Auster comments that the spirit of Laurel and Hardy, of vaudeville and silent film lived on in these men, and describes their attitude to failing, drifting and their brand of drunken buffoonery in theatrical terms, commenting that although they “weren’t confined 179 by the constraints of show business”, “they were part of the real world, and they performed their act on the stage of life” (1997a: 26).
Central to Auster’s aesthetics of failure is a romantic heroisation of working class characters,
‘stupidity’ and a lack of ambition that is associated with resistance to capitalistic notions of success. In a more recent interview with Wood in the Paris Review, Auster outlines some of his intentions in writing and publishing Hand to Mouth after some fifteen years as a successful writer of fiction:
The book wasn’t only about myself. I saw it as an opportunity to write about some of the colourful characters I’d met when I was young, to give these people their due… I gravitated toward more humble kinds of work, and that gave me a chance to spend time with people who weren’t like me. People who hadn’t gone to college; people who hadn’t read a lot of books. In this country, we tend to underestimate the intelligence of working-class people… I found most of them to be just as smart as the people who run the world. They simply aren’t as ambitious – that’s all. But their talk is a lot funnier. Everywhere I went, I had to struggle to keep up with them. I’d spent too much time with my nose buried in books and most of my co-workers could talk circles around me. (Wood 2013: 141-142)
Auster plays into some familiar tropes about the honesty and integrity of working class people, as well as a romanticisation of an economic and class-based failure that he does not himself entirely embrace, as his experience of working class life is portrayed as temporary and positioned as a learning experience in his personal and artistic development. Auster is also in many ways self-conscious of his own sanctification of failure, and is interested in the ways that failure-based personas are deliberately and strategically crafted as “an art form”, as well as inherent problems and contradictions that emerge in the self-consciously “playing” with failure. It is Auster’s own attempt at self-consciously celebrating failure that is the most unsuccessful attempt to make failure an art form in this memoir. Auster describes how as a college senior at Columbia he contributed a piece to the Columbia Review about the “lost poet” 180
Christopher Smart, who Auster admires for shunning “the easy glory that awaited him as an inventor of rhymed couplets… for a life of drunkenness, insanity, religious fanaticism, and prophetic writing” (1997a: 36). Auster’s article praises Christopher Smart, writing “in excess he found his true path, in rejecting the early promise he showed to the academic poets of
England, he realised his true greatness” (1997a: 36). In his piece, Auster “launches” the first annual Christopher Smart award, the object of the competition he describes as to “reward failure. Not common, everyday setbacks and stumbles, but monumental falls, gargantuan acts of self-sabotage” (1997a: 36), failure that is so deliberate and excessive that it constitutes an art form. Contestants were asked to submit a fifty-word description of their failure or the failure of someone they knew. To no one but Auster’s surprise, he writes, not one entry was submitted (1997a: 36).
Reflecting on this experience 25 years later, Auster doesn’t see his actions as funny, but rather as symptomatic of something darker and more disturbing. It is not merely the compulsion to sanctify failure that he sees as disturbing, but his own “mocking, arrogant tone” and “know-it- all posturing” (1997a: 37). His older narrator describes the philosophy of his younger self as a
“means of ducking the blows that life had in store for me” (1997a: 37). Auster writes, “[t]o lose was to win, and therefore even if the worst came to pass, I would be able to claim a small moral victory” (1997a: 37). He criticises the celebration of failure for failure’s sake he practiced as a young man, and the kind of sanctification of failure exercised by the Beat poets and his own literary hero, Beckett. Auster’s attempt to capture the complexity of an anxiety and fear that is masked by cynicism and arrogance is quite interesting. This is one of the many moments where Auster deploys “what William C. Spengemann might call the ‘converted narrator’”
(Coetzee 1992c: 260) – an older more experienced narrator commenting authoritatively on the 181 feelings and experiences of his younger self, an autobiographical strategy that Coetzee avoids in Youth. Auster’s purpose in doing this seems to be to encourage the reader to question the false bravado of this young, privileged man in making a mockery or jest of failure, whilst also establishing his feelings of vulnerability and uncertainty. “Rather than bring my fear out into the open, I buried it under an avalanche of wisecracks and sarcasm” (1997a: 37), he writes.
It is interesting that in a memoir that uses failure as its subtitle and central theme, Auster positions this anecdote of failing to represent failure so early on in the text. This reads like a self-reflexive doubling strategy, where Auster pre-empts the potential for readers to perceive arrogance and posturing in his own act of writing a memoir of failure. In other words, Auster is reflecting on the very thing that he is doing, staging failure, and representing it as a problematic approach. The Christopher Smart anecdote acts as a self-depreciating device that anticipates and forestalls possible criticism. Although Hand to Mouth reads as a much more straightforward memoir than Youth, or indeed any of Coetzee’s or Auster’s other autobiographical works, these moments of self-reflexivity do work to complement the rhetoric of failure in the text, and undermine the authoritative discourse sometimes associated with more conventional autobiography.
Another moment where Auster creates complexity and ambiguity in an otherwise straight autobiographical narrative is when he recounts a short-term job he has helping the writer, Jerzy
Kosinski, edit one of his books. Here Auster remarks:
When Kosinski told me these stories, he presented them as facts, real events from his life. Did he know the difference? I can’t be sure, I can’t even begin to guess, but if I had to give an answer, I would say that he did… The common theme in his stories was deception, after all, playing people for fools. (1997a: 95)
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Auster himself is known for blurring the boundaries between his life and fiction and inserting aspects of his biography repetitively into his fictional texts. This seems to serve as a similar kind of warning to readers that Coetzee provides in Youth when he writes: “who is to say that at each moment while the pen moves he is truly himself? (2002b: 10). As Aliki Varvogli remarks of the Kosinski episode, “one is compelled to ask whether this is a warning to his
[Auster’s] own readers” (2001: 8). This anecdote serves to remind us that, although Hand to
Mouth is fairly conventional in its style and structure (aside from its 300-page appendix), Auster is a highly self-reflexive autobiographer, and Hand to Mouth is in many ways not a straight autobiography (hence my justification for including it in this thesis on autre-biography). Auster wants to engage the reader with the possible representational problems and mistruths in his memoir, to engage us with the notions of failure and not knowing that are so important to the memoir’s thematic structure. As in Youth, this continued emphasis on “not-knowing” reflects the notion that failure and ignorance are constitutive of the self’s fundamental condition (in
Yeoh 2010), and as such are constitutive of autobiography as the story of this self.
Elsewhere in Auster’s autre-biographical works he similarly draws the reader’s attention to the generic limits of autobiography. Most famously, towards the end of the first section of The
Invention of Solitude he writes, “[t]he closer I come to the end of what I am able to say, the more reluctant I am to say anything” (1982: 64), before switching to the third person in the second section, where he refers to himself as “A.”. In this section, he also writes:
[H]is life is so fragmented that each time he sees a connection between two fragments he is tempted to look for a meaning in that connection. The connection exists, but to give it a meaning, to look beyond the bare fact of its existence would be to build an imaginary world outside the real world, and he knows that would not stand. (1982: 147)
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In this section of Solitude, Auster is acknowledging a similar conundrum to that faced by John in Youth, when he doubts that even he can know what is truth in his diary and what is not.
Auster is commenting on the ways that an attempt to impose meaning and narrative coherence to experience and memory often results in fictions of the self, “imaginary worlds” (1982: 147).
Auster mirrors this philosophy of self in the form and style of his autre-biographical works, which are presented as fragmented, and episodic (The Invention of Solitude and Report from the
Interior), often include appendixes (Hand to Mouth and Report from the Interior) and sometimes give the appearance of incompleteness, as in The Invention of Solitude in which he writes things like
“[f]urther instalments to follow” and “[p]ossible epigraph” (1982: 78; 80). As Mark Rudman has argued, for Auster the fragment “exists alone, with no before or after. Things remain on the cusp of knowing, of becoming” (1994: 44).
Another central way that Auster foregrounds a theme that also has formal and stylistic resonances is in his recurring motif of shrinking, disappearing and being absent. In The Invention of Solitude, Auster writes that “he must make himself absent in order to find himself” (1982:
154), reflecting Blaise’s claim that autobiography paradoxically involves acts of “self-erasure” and “self-destruction” (1996: 201). Self-erasure and self-destruction are also central to Kafka’s self-representation in his diaries and letters, which as Roger J. Porter observes, present disappearing and “obliterating” selves (2002: 104). This also resonates with the kinds of self- erasures that are staged in Coetzee: the eschewing of the first person “I”, John’s death in
Summertime and the Kafkaesque motifs of becoming insect, shrinking and bachelorhood which
I have discussed earlier in this chapter. These gestures of becoming absent are reflected in the form and style of Invention, narrated in the third person, commonly using aporias and
184 paradoxes like those cited above, and using ekphrastic moments where the artworks, films and writings of others are used to try to erase, and subsequently find, the self.
In his most recent autre-biographical work, Report from the Interior, Auster again suggests a relationship between personal failures and vulnerabilities and the limitations of confession and the autobiographical form. As I mentioned in Chapter 1, ekphrasis is a common device in
Auster’s autre-biographical writing. It is also a device that is heavily drawn on in his fictional writing, as Hetman details in his recent monograph (2015). In an interview with Letham,
Auster says that “I show books and the experience of reading as part of the world. And the same goes for film. Why not describe movies?” (2005). Ekphrasis allows Auster to use fictional stories about others to mirror or refract ideas about his own life and the challenges and limitations of representing one’s life. In Invention, Auster writes, ‘[n]othing but pictures.
Because, at a certain point, the words lead one to conclude that it is no longer possible to speak” (1982: 98). As Françoise Sammarcelli observes, “the inadequacy of language to the world, pervades Auster’s writings” (2014: 32) and ekphrastic moments, especially those involving descriptions of visual texts, are used to explore the notion that language can often fail to represent the truth of self. Ekphrasis in Auster’s work also marks another act of self- erasure and self-destruction, as further suggested by the plot of the film he writes extensively about in Report from the Interior (2013).
As a writer involved in and influenced by cinema, it follows that many of Auster’s ekphrastic moments in his autobiography involve detailed accounts of cinematic texts, especially films contemporaneous to his formative years. In Report from the Interior Auster dedicates twenty pages to a detailed plot description and reflections on his reactions to the 1957 Universal 185
Pictures Film, The Incredible Shrinking Man. The film details the demise of a man, Robert Scott
Carey, who after being sprayed by a mysterious mist whilst sunbaking on the deck of a cruise on the Pacific, begins inexplicably shrinking. Despite the efforts of doctors, his shrinking continues to the point where he loses his job, his wife and becomes so tiny that he is vulnerable to household spiders and cats. Auster describes the film as one that “turns [him] inside out” and “drastically alters the way [he] think[s] about the universe” (2013: 106). Of the reason the film has such a powerful effect on him, Auster writes that “[y]ou… hope that some scientific mastermind will step in and figure out a way to arrest the shrinking of the shrinking man, for by now Scott Carey is no longer just a character in a film, Scott Carey is you” (2013:
108, my emphasis). It is tempting to think of Auster’s ekphrasis in this section of Report from the
Interior as a metaphor for the self-erasure that paradoxically must accompany the writing of self, and indeed of all writing. This is suggested by his previously cited claim in Invention of
Solitude: “[i]f a man is to be truly present among his surroundings, he must be thinking not of himself but of what he sees. He must forget himself in order to be there” (1982: 137-138) and
“he must make himself absent in order to find himself” (1982: 154). There are echoes here of
Blanchot’s claims that the writer “must become no one” (1982: 215-216), and his notion of the essential solitude of literature, through which the writer “surrender[s] to the interminable”, and who in consenting to sustain writing’s essence, “loses the power to say ‘I’” (1982: 27).22 Similar to Blanchot’s understanding of literature, Tom Theobald argues that “Auster’s conception of literature… relates to the domain of absence, fragmentation, solitude and nothingness” (2010:
191). The notion of disappearing and becoming absent is another move by Auster to write
22 It is worth noting that Auster’s first wife Lydia Davis, who features strongly in Report from the Interior, has been a prolific translator of Blanchot. 186 against some of the triumphalist and narcissistic impulses which are associated with the genre of autobiography.
Carey, the shrinking man, no longer able to exist as husband and wage earner in the conventional sense, is presented with the option of selling his story to make a living (2013:
112-13). The film, as Auster recounts it, begins and ends with Carey’s voice over, making it tempting to consider the film as authored by Carey, his autobiography. This is reiterated when
Auster writes of Carey that “[h]is sole activity is writing, writing a book about his experiences”
(2013: 114), and of his own reaction to the film: “[y]ou cling to that view of Carey’s fate because of the voice-over narration, because the hero of the story is continuing to tell his story to the audience and now that he is writing his book, you assume the words he is speaking are identical to the ones he has written. In your mind, the book has already been published (why else would he be using the past tense?)” (2013: 120). Auster’s detailed description of and obvious investment in Carey’s plight through this ekphrasitic vignette represents both the failure of more conventional autobiography to communicate the self, as he uses a recount of a fictional text about another to represent and refract his own fears and anxieties. Auster also uses Carey as a kind of symbol for the writer who disappears in the text, and the feelings of failure, futility and insignificance that Auster has claimed constantly harangue him as a writer
(in Applewhite 2013: 98). Through using ekphastic moments to explore anxieties about shrinking, failure and insignificance, Auster also perhaps moves towards a more inactive mode of autobiography – autre-biography – through lessening the auratic focus on the autobiographer. Auster’s ekphrasis has some parallels with Coetzee’s refraction of self through
Mr. Vincent’s interviews with fictional characters in Summertime. Both gestures seem to make the point that truths of self are not fixed and a priori, waiting to be uncovered by the 187 autobiographer, but rather may emerge in a complex interplay between fiction and truth and self and other, an interplay I would argue the reader becomes more involved in than in
“straight” (Coetzee 1992d: 18) or conventional autobiography.
Concluding thoughts
Throughout both Youth and Hand to Mouth, Coetzee and Auster model an autobiographical rhetoric of failure that challenges the insistence on mastery and progression typically found in künstlerromans. Steering away from narcissistic narratives of progression and self-improvement,
Coetzee and Auster attempt to challenge the trajectory of mastery, success and the individual typically found in autobiographical künstlerromans. This helps them construct autobiographical personas that, through their flaws, failures and vulnerabilities, may be more appealing to the reader. The reader may be drawn further into texts through the affective experiences of embarrassment and humiliation, and through their encounter with “pitiably shared struggles”
(Pollard 2013: 85) and contradictory feelings of “intimacy and alienation” (Felski 1989: 61).
Through self-consciously exploring failure as the route to becoming an artist, and as an art form itself, Coetzee and Auster draw on Beckett and Kafka, but depart from them too, to fashion their own failure based authorial persons for their contemporary audiences.
Furthermore, “failure” becomes embedded into the story fabric of Youth and Hand to Mouth, as well as the later works Summertime and Report from the Interior, as Coetzee and Auster mirror thematic failures in their texts with the formal and aesthetic limits of autobiography, reflecting the challenges of representing the self through language.
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Chapter 3: Embodiment and autre- biography: Coetzee’s Summertime and Auster’s Winter Journal
In Chapter 1, I argued that Auster and Coetzee deploy narrative strategies in their autre- biographical works that separate the narrating voice from the narrated subject. I also showed that rather than creating an affective distance with the reader, Coetzee’s and Auster’s style of autre-biography in some instances has the effect of creating an affective closeness through evoking the immediacy of the memories conveyed and created, and exposing the mechanics of life writing, effectively allowing “room” for the reader to “inhabit” the text (Auster 1995: 111).
In Chapter 2, I argued that failure and self-erasure work in autre-biographical texts to mirror the formal limits and failures of autobiography and challenge the authority of the autobiographical subject. Another way that Coetzee and Auster engage in writing practices that make the distance between “the internal and external manifestations of the writing self” (Egan
1999: 2) observable is through the presence of the physical body and descriptions of the body in autre-biographical works, and it is this I wish to explore further in this chapter. The most pronouncedly bodily autre-biography is Auster’s Winter Journal, presented as a series of personal essays in the second person that focus on the way that the body shapes and gives meaning to experience. The body and its relationship with language, “truth”, experience and the notion of a “soul” is a re-emerging theme throughout Coetzee’s oeuvre which is revisited in Summertime.
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In this chapter, I wish to explore the ways that Auster and Coetzee have written the body into their life writing to explore the relationship between the different filaments of the self and the relationship between the body and language, challenging the idea of the autonomous, unified and unassailable self most typically associated with Western, masculine autobiography. In both texts, the body is presented as having a truth or authority, reiterating the inescapably embodied nature of subjectivity. Sometimes (especially in Coetzee) it is the body of the other, or the animal body, that signifies the truth of embodiment and suffering. Despite the “truth” of the body and the embodied nature of subjectivity, however, there emerges an inevitable discontinuity in the exchange, often a disjuncture between subject and meaning, which further illustrates some of the problems and complexities of self-representation explored in Chapter 1, and works to further unsettle or destabilise the authority of the author in these texts. Whilst there are many thematic parallels between Coetzee’s and Auster’s approach to the body, there are significant affective differences. Whilst the bodies in both texts are subject to the imminence of death, suffering and finitude, the body in Coetzee’s text is far more bound up and implicated in feelings of shame (Tremaine 2003). Furthermore, the body in Coetzee’s
Summertime is used to explore anxieties about obsoleteness and finitude, concerns that are similarly important throughout his other works. The presence of the body in Auster’s work, on the other hand, demonstrates the continuing obsession with themes of chance and cyclicality.
In their similarities and differences, the presence of the body in these works also serves to remind the reader of the complex relationship between a life and writing, and the challenges of life writing, through exposing and exploring the distance between language and experience, and the selves that exist in the world with the selves that exist in the text.
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Life Writing and the Body
The body has traditionally been marginalised within Western, masculine models of selfhood and subjectivity, and thus has historically not been foregrounded in many works constitutive of the literary canon. This, it can be argued, is especially true of autobiography, which is often said to subscribe to a Platonic or Cartesian model of selfhood that stands in opposition to the corporeal (Neuman 1991: 137). Bertrand Russell wrote of Descartes’ model of selfhood that
“[t]he soul, therefore, is wholly distinct from the body and easier to know than the body; it would be what it is, even if there were no body” (1996: 517). This is a view that shaped
Western conceptions of selfhood for centuries, and resulted in the exaltation of the life of the mind over the body in Western autobiography, as the search for the “soul” of the autobiographer who subscribes to this model of selfhood must transcend or erase the body in the pursuit of a higher truth of self. As Christopher Stuart argues in his introduction to New
Essays on Life Writing and the Body, “the white, male literary canon of autobiography in the West seems to make bodies disappear or turn into manikins by virtue of its narrow focus on the life of the spirit or the mind as self” (2009: 7). This is a sentiment reiterated by Shirley Neuman, who contends that “most autobiographies… almost completely efface the bodies in which the lives they describe were lived” (1991: 137).
I would argue that the dominance of the singular “I” in autobiography, which I discussed at length in my first chapter, works to further erase the body of the autobiographer. As I quote in
Chapter 1, Miller has suggested that “perhaps the ‘I’ of an autonomous and separate self is autobiography’s deepest fiction of ‘masculine’ truth” (1992: 13). The distinctly disembodied nature of this “I” in much Western autobiography, particularly those autobiographies written
191 by men, acts to reinforce the idea of an autonomous self in which the mind is both superior to and independent from the body. The absence of the body in autobiography is reflective of the
Western cultural practices that exalt the mind, which is assumed to be analogous with masculinity and culture, but subjugates and regulates the body, which is associated with
“femininity, and ‘nature’” (Neuman 1991: 138). Judith Butler has argued:
Masculine disembodiment is only possible on the condition that women occupy their bodies as their essential and enslaving identities.
[…]
By defining women as “Other”, men are able through the short-cut of definition to dispose of their bodies, to make themselves other than their bodies… From this belief that the body is Other, it is not a far leap to the conclusion that others are their bodies, while the masculine “I” is a non-corporeal soul. (1985: 509, emphasis in original)
The condition of embodiment as a feminine attribute, and disembodied, non-corporeality as a masculine attribute speaks to the ways that the feminine has historically been marginalised in autobiography. The separation of the life of the mind from the body in autobiography reflects the cultural practice of constructing male subjects as rational and independent beings whose achievements and very existence are attributed to the intrinsic strength, will and autonomy of that being. The use of the first person in autobiography can often consolidate such constructions of self. As Eakin argues, “autobiography promotes an illusion of self- determination: I write my story; I say who I am; I create my life” (1999: 43, emphasis in original). This fiercely self-determined first-person voice may often be reluctant to describe the body in which the life being narrated was lived, and rather give preference to an interior consciousness that is presented as autonomous from the body that hosts it. As the first person assumes a voice that begins internally, and projects externally, the body may be and often is ignored or intentionally excluded (Eakin 1999: 43). As Bakhtin contends, the human subject
192 tends to transcend their own body in their own definition of selfhood. He points out that the sense of “inner world-exceeding activity” (1990: 40) in the formation of human selfhood means that the human body is useful for delimiting the other, but not for consummating one’s own sense of oneself (1990: 39). For Bakhtin, because human subjectivity is so essentially inward, “because I experience myself essentially by encompassing any boundaries, any body, by extending myself beyond any bounds”, this sense of self-consciousness overwhelms and destroys the “plastic convincingness” that any image of self made tangible through the body might have (1990: 40).
Neuman emphasises autobiography’s roots in the Christian practice of confession (1991: 137) in which the triumph of the mind or spirit over the body is the ultimate goal, and from which matters of the flesh are not only absent, but actively subjugated, as “[t]he ultimate goal of these confessional practices remained, however, the transcendence, through regulation, of the corporeal” (Neuman 1991: 137). Coetzee himself writes that autobiography is “bound up with soul-searching and the confession of sins” (1999a). Matters of the corporeal and the flesh embody that which must be overcome through the kind of spiritual and moral purgation that confession claims to enable. This is especially pronounced in the public genre of the autobiography, as opposed to other forms of life writing. As Neuman explains:
Confession, whether practised in the church or by means of one of its avatars in childrearing, tutoring, or medical consultation, remains an intimate and private discourse, one of the aims of which, as Foucault has shown, is to manage the body, to make it conform with public and cultural values. In the traditions of life writing, therefore, bodies, in all their aches and illnesses, as sites of unease, and, more modestly and fleetingly, in their beauties or their desires, are far more apt to make an appearance in the private genre of the diary than in the avowedly public and cultural genre of the autobiography. (1991: 138)
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Following the postcolonial, psychoanalytic and feminist interest in bodies as a site where meaning is both produced and inscribed, Timothy Dow Adams (2009) and Stuart (2009) argue that in recent years more literature with a strong component of body consciousness has emerged. This is could especially be said to be the case in life writing, in which the determined exclusion of the body has more recently been met with its deliberate and conscious inclusion.
As Adams argues, “[w]hile the human body was once notably absent from Western life writing for most of its history, in recent years the opposite situation has begun to prevail” (2009: xii).
In her Mirror Talk, which I discuss in detail in Chapter 1, Egan contends that a feature of contemporary life writing is its “foregrounding and emphatic presence of the body” (1999: 5).
She points out that of recent there has been a “cultural paradigm shift that revalorises the body as a significant component of identity” (Egan 1999: 5).
The value of the body for configuring subjectivity and selfhood in life writing seems clear. As
Roman Silvani argues, “[t]he beginning of the subject is in fact first and foremost corporeal, since we are all subject to living in a body, which makes great demands on us: it desires, it hurts, and it dies. It is thus an absolute limit” (2011: 6). Drawing on Kohler’s arguments that the literal and figurative use of the body can be used to subvert male self-representation and sovereignty, Silvani further suggests that the body has representational power (2011: 8) and “is powerful because it is undeniable and inescapable” (Silvani 2011: 11). As Dirk Klopper (2004) argues, the very idea of a psyche, which is so integral to life writing, is bound up in the physicality of the body. He argues: “the psyche is not an abstract concept, a disembodied mental and emotional life. Its pulsations are those of the blood-beat and lymphatic flow of the materiality of which it is constituted” (2004: 90). It is the idea of the “pulsations” of the body
194 that writers of embodied autobiography need to attempt to grapple with, reflecting the importance of the body not only as subject matter in the structure and style of the text.
Life writers with a strong bodily presence in their work use the body not only as a metaphor for experience, in which “our sense of self is often connected to both body image and body function” (Adams 2009: ix), but also as the site from which personal inscribing begins (Egan
1999: 6). Both Auster and Coetzee explore the relationship between the body and language, and the way that the body is culturally and linguistically constructed. As Silvani (2011: 8-0) argues, to overcome the Cartesian dualism that has dominated Western representations of subjects, authors must link the body with language, “the subject must be conceived of as corporeal, while the body must be conceived of as a historical and cultural construct” (Köhler in Silvani 2011: 9). Klopper has written that “the body is present in writing not as substance but as a system of articulation” (2004: 85). The body becomes a useful figure of articulating selfhood, which is bound in its historical and cultural conditioning. Whilst Bakhtin suggests the body may be incomplete in its delimitation of selfhood (1990: 40), it can nonetheless be useful for mediating the relationship between self and the world.
Stuart argues that the body is useful in defining and delimiting selfhood, as “the body is that intimate thing which both is and is not oneself… our material selves figure and disfigure what is not there and what is” (2009: 8). This is reflective of the way the autobiographical self has been conceptualised, which as I discussed in Chapter 1, is often described as bearing a synecdochal relationship to self (Olney 1972: 10). There are distinctive and useful parallels between the selves that one creates in life writing, and the relationship one has with one’s body. Though we may describe both the body we live in and the selves of our life writing using 195 possessive and personal pronouns (“my childhood”, “my leg”) when looking upon oneself in writing and upon one’s own body it is invariably at the kind of reflexive distance constitutive of autre-biography. According to Paul Ricoeur (1992: 3), when writing about oneself one writes as “another”. He similarly argued that the body has a dual status in conceptualising selfhood, as a fragment of one’s experience with the world, enabling it to provide a “limiting reference point” (in Egan 1999: 6). As the body is the limit between the self and the world, it is a useful focal point for life writers who wish to explicitly represent the space between language and experience. It also provides a means for the self to be “spatialised”, or “made into an object” so that a “possessive dimension” to the self may be achieved (Elbaz 1987: 154).
Because of how inextricably linked the ‘I’ of autobiography is to the myth of an autonomous and disembodied self (Eakin 1999; Miller 1992), it follows that those authors who seek to undermine the Cartesian dualisms that define selfhood as disembodied and autonomous may also play with or undermine the illusion of the autobiographical “I”. Other writers, both male and female, have been experimenting with and subverting the conventions of autobiography in such ways for decades (Eakin 1999; Egan 1999), and what Coetzee and Auster have achieved is in no way exclusive or new. It does, however, suggest a case for reciprocal influence between these two authors, and provides further evidence of their shared poetics and aesthetics, especially as it pertains to the relationship between reality and fiction and the representation of self/selves in autre-biography. It also illustrates the ways Coetzee and Auster often use the architecture of postmodern experimentation, but to explore quite earnest, affective and distinctly unpostmodern sentiments (Dow 1998: 276). I am also interested in this chapter in the ways that Coetzee and Auster have explored the relationship between a self that is embodied and a self that is dependent, reflecting the influence of feminist, poststructuralist and life writing 196 scholarship on their autre-biographical representations. I also discuss how the kinds of alternative modes of narration which I examined in Chapter 1 help to facilitate these representations.
Despite, or perhaps due to, the intimately corporeal nature of subjectivity and of the psyche, the processes of bodily writing and embodied language and the relationship between the body and language is not always straightforward. Rather, as Klopper argues, “there is an unavoidable disjunction between the naming of the body and the significance of the body, a slippage between word and meaning, and the sense of an unconscious determination at work that words can only indirectly and partially grasp” (2004: 88). The presence of the body often serves to remind both authors of the disjuncture between words and meaning, between representation and the world, something Auster describes as a “rift between world and word”
(2012: 223). The body, for Bakhtin, must be “translated into the language of my inner sensations” (1990: 42), a process he argues can often fail. This disjuncture in the exchange between subject and meaning is also very much explored in both Auster’s and Coetzee’s autre- biography. In Winter Journal, and Summertime, as well as elsewhere in Auster’s and Coetzee’s respective oeuvres, discontinuity in the exchange between subject and meaning is often explored and articulated using the body as a metaphor. My claim is that the relationship between the body and the language is used to conceptualise and construct a sense of self in these texts. Furthermore, I argue that by using the body in this way, Auster and Coetzee make evident the processes of understanding and representing the self. This reflects Coetzee’s tendency as an author to double back on his own creation and Auster’s continued interest in openly exploring the process and mechanics of writing (McCaffery and Gregory 2013: 28). In both Coetzee and Auster, the body works as an important rhetorical device for undermining 197 the traditional author figure. Foregrounding the body in a literary work may challenge the privileging of mind over body that has historically positioned the author figure as an “Author-
God” who propagates theological meaning (Barthes 1977: 146). Rather, the focus on the body of authors that occurs in both texts could be said to further unsettle the authority of the authorial voice.
The significance of the body to life writing is further reinforced by the way one’s identity develops and changes in relation to one’s material body. Adams describes bios as the “course of a life seen as a process” (2009: x). He continues, “[t]he course of our lives is naturally complicated by the fact that everyone’s body changes as we age, so that in effect all body- centred autobiographies can be characterized as attempts at reconciling one’s sense of self with one’s constantly changing body” (2009: x). The usefulness of the body as a metaphor for shifting subjectivity and the attempt to reconcile the changing nature of the self is central to
Auster’s Winter Journal. This autre-biography takes the author’s changing body as its central symbol, addressing it in the second person and past tense, a kind of bodily cartography, or
“corporeal topography” (Nuttell in Klopper 2004: 89), which traces the various scars, sensations and memories inscribed on the body to chart and map the process of that life and the author’s constantly shifting sense of self. In Summertime, different representations of the body and bodily experience are used to represent different perspectives on “John Coetzee”.
As strongly explored in the essays of Diary of a Bad Year, which foreground the aging and disabled body to explore the dependent nature of selfhood (Danta 2014), the frailty, permeability and relational nature of the self is also reflected in the presence of the body in life writing. This is also explored in Summertime and Auster’s Winter Journal. As I discussed in the 198 previous chapter, vulnerability and a sense of interdependence can be perceived as integral to the creation of autobiographical intimacy in life writing. The body is a powerful metaphor for the relational and interdependent nature of selfhood and the insufficiency of the human subject in perceiving and narrating itself. As Bakhtin writes, “the outward aspect [of one’s own body]… is fragmentary and fails to attain independence and completeness” (1990: 47). He insists that, “the body is not something self-sufficient: it needs the Other, needs his recognition and his form-giving activity” (1990: 51). As Egan contends, “[t]he permeability of the body challenges notions of autonomy or entity” (1999: 6). Furthermore, as Eakin has argued, “[a]ll selfhood is relational” (1999: 50) and whilst feminist authors and critics have long recognised this in their writing, historically life writing by men has often negated the relational nature of this self. My second major argument in this chapter is that both Coetzee and Auster not only thematise the dependent nature of selfhood in Summertime and Winter Journal respectively, but that this dependency is written into and reflected in the form and structure of the texts. As such, I argue that autre-biography is a mode of writing in which the interdependent and intersubjective nature of selfhood is thematically and stylistically central.
Additionally, Auster and Coetzee use the dependent body as a figure to explore ideas and anxieties about mortality, decrepitude and finitude. In both Summertime and Winter Journal, the suffering and decaying parental/grandparental body is a site of psychic wounding, what
Barthes has described as a “punctum” (1981: 26-27). Again the suffering parental body in
Summertime is associated with feelings of shame in a way that it is not in Auster. Nonetheless, throughout their autre-biographical works both Coetzee and Auster have explored complex and ambivalent feelings towards their parents, and more specifically, the death of their parents.
Another recurring theme in Coetzee, that is in some ways present but less pronounced in 199
Auster, is the constant juxtaposition between the non-sensual body of the intellect, and the sensual, youthful and intuitive body of the other. Whilst this juxtaposition is at the heart of many of Coetzee’s works, and is both present and explicitly referred to in Summertime, this separation or juxtaposition of bodies in Coetzee’s autre-biographical works, especially with regards to his own body, is not as pronounced in Auster’s work. Auster seems to be more interested in a bodily phenomenology, an experience of embodiment that is universalising.
This seems appropriate to Auster’s perspective on Winter Journal, as he says in a Time Out interview: “I see myself as anybody, as everybody; I’m not just telling the story of my life to give the reader a picture of who I am. What I [am] trying to do was show our commonality”
(Gooderham 2012). A difference that emerges here between Auster and Coetzee is that Auster sees his own life story as having something to offer in terms of showing his “commonality” with others (the reader especially), whereas Coetzee sees his stories as serving only self-interest.
As I mentioned previously, Coetzee is cynical about the notion of the artist as “diagnostician of the age”, an idea in which he finds too much “self-aggrandizement” (2015: 60). He writes,
“my inclination is to regard the stories artists tell about themselves as much like the stories the rest of us tell about ourselves: they serve our own interests, or what we imagine are our interests” (2015: 60).
My third argument in this chapter is that while Descartes argues that the soul “is wholly distinct” and “easier to know” than the body, Coetzee and to a lesser extent, Auster, put forward a case in Summertime and Winter Journal, as well as in their other works, for the idea of an “embodied soul” or a “body soul”. The animal body in Coetzee, and again to some extent in Auster, is a figure that helps to understand the embodied nature of the soul. Furthermore, in both texts the animal body helps to protagonist to understand death. While Auster’s text 200 addresses this with a sense of innocence, non-complicity and a faith in the natural cycle of life and death, in Coetzee’s text the animal body and animal deaths are often, if not always, associated with a legacy of shame and complicity. Before exploring how these commonalities and differences in Coetzee and Auster’s bodily writing are illustrative of their respective autre- biographical aesthetics, I first wish to examine some of the claims each author has made about the body in interviews, as well as review some of the literature that examines the primacy of the body in each author’s oeuvre.
Coetzee and the Body
Coetzee has himself made clear his interest in the body in his fiction. In Doubling the Point, he spoke to Attwell of the role of the body in his fiction written to date, observing:
If I look back over my own fiction, I see… the body. Whatever else, the body is not “that which is not,” and the proof that it “is” is the pain it feels. The body with its pain becomes a counter to the endless trials of doubt… its power is undeniable. (1992e: 248)
For Coetzee, the body is that undeniable entity that contrasts with epistemological uncertainty, the “endless trials of doubt” that emerge in his deeply philosophical novels. The “suffering body” has an authority that is “undeniable”, the pain it feels is its “truth” (Coetzee 1992e: 248).
In many of Coetzee’s novels, the suffering body is the figure that all narrative action revolves around, and which presents a kind of philosophical anchor within novels of scepticism and uncertainty of the “truth” of experience. Alena Dvorakova has argued that “Coetzee engages in a critique of the Cartesian ego”, especially the way that the Cartesian subject posits “‘I think’ as the foundation of epistemic and existential certainty” (2010: 368). Rather, in Coetzee’s fiction “[i]t is the body that is granted if not an ontological, at least an affective primacy” which
“in turn leads to doubts about the power of written fiction” (2010: 368). As Dvorakova rightly 201 suggests, the body is a figure in Coetzee’s fiction that is used to contrast and usurp not only the power and authority of the thinking, rational self, but which also undermines the power and authority of fiction itself and subsequently its author. Kusek has observed that it is authority and the problem of authority that constitutes the most frequently recurring concern in Coetzee’s oeuvre, writing:
Coetzee’s extraordinary body of works shows an undying fascination with exposing and probing the paradoxes that govern the question of authority in works of literature. Though interest in authority in fiction is one of the major concerns of postmodernism, Coetzee’s methods of addressing the issue are unique and highly idiosyncratic. (2012: 98)
The interest in and focus on the body is one of the ways that Coetzee has idiosyncratically addressed this concern. The emphasis on the significance of the body is one means of usurping the power and authority of the author, as the corporeal which connects us all undermines notions of the genius, exceptionalism and authority of the author.
Furthermore, as Dvorakova argues, it is the body that offers “affective primacy” in Coetzee’s novels (2010: 68). Though the presence of the body may undermine the power and authority of fiction, it does also facilitate and signify the presence of undeniable truths and experiences within the texts as well. As Tremaine argues of the representation of suffering bodies in
Coetzee’s fiction, “the ironic, sceptical, tautly cerebral voice in which Coetzee treats textuality grows silent and we hear emerging instead a voice that insists, with a more visceral urgency, on the direct, factual and compelling reality of bodily suffering and death, the threat of shame, and the desire for salvation” (2003: 589). Within the postmodern framework of Coetzee’s fiction, and the endless doubt and doubling back, the body signifies the power and truth of suffering and death, and the possibilities for sympathy, salvation and the notion of a “soul”. Hence the examination of the body in Coetzee is centrally important to a consideration of the way that 202 his writing engages with humanist and often spiritual concerns, somewhat paradoxically deploying the tools and aesthetics of postmodern experimentation to do so. Perhaps Coetzee suggests that authority can exist in a literary text, but that this authority resides not in the author who speaks, but in the body.
Scholars such as Brian May (2001) and Roman Silvani (2011) have taken inspiration from
Coetzee’s words about the body being a “counter to the endless trials of doubt” (1992e: 248) and have looked closely at the role bodies have played in the construction of meaning in his work. In his widely cited “J.M. Coetzee and the Question of the Body”, May notes that the body in Coetzee’s fiction is “[w]orthy of characterization in its own right” and is not merely
“that which defies the mind” (2001: 393). May also observes that “the body in Coetzee is also, potentially, a friend to the mind – a force in its own right, and one that may impose its own auspicious and peculiar meaning on that same imperial mind and self” (2001: 393). In doing so,
May argues that Coetzee is “attacking the entire complex Western tradition of transcendent vision” that would deny the material facts of the body (2001: 393). For May, Coetzee rejects the “long Western tradition of transcendent vision, a tradition that too often deals with the body, when it deals with it at all… [as] typically… cast off or at least partially exalted” (2001:
404). For Coetzee, any ideas of epiphany or realisation are often located in the body, a feature that separates him from the “long Western tradition” or Cartesian dualisms and notions of transcendence. May’s insights here can be usefully applied to Coetzee’s autre-biographical works, as it would follow that the material facts of the body also have a significant role to play in self-representation.
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Roman Silvani’s monograph Political Bodies and the Body Politic in the Novels of J.M. Coetzee examines the way Coetzee’s novels act as a meditation on “how [the body of] the other can be represented without depriving him/her/it of his/her/its otherness” (2011: 1), and more specifically the relationship between bodies in crisis and the South African body politic. Silvani provides a useful examination of the relationship between bodies, language and identity, exploring how “the body is central to subjectivity/selfhood” as an “absolute limit” that defines the subject (2011: 6). Silvani examines a range of Coetzee’s novels and contends that the body is an important metaphor in Coetzee’s fiction for negotiating the relationship between self, other and the world.
Louis Tremaine has written in his article, “The Embodied Soul: Animal Being in the Work of
J.M. Coetzee”, on the place of the animal body in Coetzee’s fiction, examining how the representation of animal bodies in Coetzee’s fiction bears importantly “on human experience, on the human condition of ‘embodiedness’” (2003: 598, emphasis in original). His article gives a compelling analysis of how the recurring presence of animal bodies in Coetzee’s fiction helps the protagonists come to terms with the realities of death and suffering, but also helps the reader understand the embodied nature of our knowledge, and the embodied nature of the
“soul”. Tremaine’s insights are valuable in understanding Coetzee’s ethics of embodiment, and the relationship between animal and human bodies in his fiction. Shadi S. Neimneh has continued this line of analysis in “Coetzee’s Postmodern Bodies: Disgrace Between Animal and
Human Bodies” (2014) in which he argues that Coetzee’s interest in bodies in his fiction speaks to his postmodern tendencies, and that Coetzee takes this further by breaking down distinctions between animal and human bodies, animal and human suffering and animal and human death, an argument he supports through his reading of both Disgrace and Waiting for the 204
Barbarians.
These works which examine the relationship between animal and human bodies in Coetzee’s fiction, as well as those who examine the role of the human body specifically lay important theoretical groundwork for understanding Coetzee’s approach to the body in his autre- biography. They also help to understand what certain bodily and animal tropes in his work might symbolise within the context of Coetzee’s larger oeuvre. Furthermore, Alice Hall’s recently published article on “Aging and Autobiography” considers the aging body in
Coetzee’s Diary of a Bad Year and Roth’s Exit Ghost. She considers the “self-abnegating mode of autre-biography” (a mode she suggests Roth also contributes to) as a style to which the body is thematically and formally central. She suggests that the “playful metatextuality and striking formal inventiveness of [both texts] are fundamentally connected to the material conditions of writing and the aging bodies and minds of the fictionalized author figures they depict” (2014: 297). Hall suggests that in both Coetzee and Roth, the “stereotypical trope of the forgetful, senile old man” is used to make a “wider point about the necessarily fictional nature of any self-representation” (2014: 298, emphasis in original). Hall’s argument here, about the ways that the self-abnegating form of autre-biography is metaphorically linked to the aging corporeality of its author characters, is important in informing my arguments about the role that the body plays in Coetzee’s and Auster’s autre-biography. There is not, as yet, scholarship that focuses specifically on the body in Coetzee’s Summertime. This chapter aims to fill that gap, drawing on relevant scholarship on the body in Coetzee’s work, with scholarship that examines the role of the body in life writing more generally. It also contends that much can be revealed about Coetzee’s bodily ethics and poetics by considering these in dialogue with his friend, colleague, and fellow writer of autre-biography, Paul Auster. 205
Auster and the Body
Auster has also been clear in interviews about his interest in the body in his writing. In an interview with Gérard de Cortanze, he said: “‘[l]e monde est dans ma tête, mon corps est dans le monde’… ‘[t]he world is in my head, my body is in the world’” (in Abecassis 2014: 1036).
This chiastic statement reiterates Auster’s firm belief in the role the body has in negotiating and defining one’s self and one’s relationship with the world, recognizing the role that the body plays as the “absolute limit” of subjectivity (Silvani 2011: 7). Furthermore, Auster has said in an interview with Wood in the Paris Review that writing itself is a highly physicalised and embodied experience for him; describing why he prefers to write with a pen he says: “[y]ou feel that the words are coming out of your body and then you dig the words into the page. Writing has always had that tactile quality for me. It’s a physical experience” (2013: 132). For Auster, like Coetzee, the body acts a source of inspiration and a means of articulation. For Auster, writing itself is an embodied act and as such, his writing deliberately reflects and emulates bodily rhythms and experiences. Where Auster differs from Coetzee is that his relationship with the body is more focused on the aesthetic and sensory, and the presence of the body in his work is treated as part of his artistry and self-articulation, rather than as a figure with strongly ethical and political implications. Though the two are inextricably related, Auster’s meditations on the body are more explicitly about conceptualising the idea of self, whilst
Coetzee’s interest focuses more on the body of the other and how the unfathomability of the body speaks to the limits of sympathy in the face of suffering (Coetzee 1992e: 248). As I will explore in my analysis of the body in the two authors’ autre-biography, there is also a recurring affect of shame that accompanies Coetzee’s representations of bodies that is not as
206 pronounced in Auster’s work. The presence of shame with relation to the body in Coetzee’s work often brings about a kind of disembodied quality to the writing, despite the fact that the work is so centrally configured around the body. This quite starkly contrasts with Auster’s bodily writing, which has a flowingly embodied and musical, rhythmic quality, writing that perceives itself, as I will discuss later in the chapter, as a “lesser form of dance” (Auster 2012:
225), a “writerly stylization of the body-in-movement” (Abecassis 2014: 1037). The body in
Auster’s work is another means of exploring his ongoing obsession with the themes of chance and luck, as far from being autonomous beings with control over our destinies, Auster portrays himself, and thus all of us, as embodied beings, subject to the luck, loss, pleasure and pain experienced by the very fact of living in a body.
Despite the emerging body of scholarship that examines Auster’s life writing, the body remains relatively unexplored terrain, with the exception of “Montaigne in Brooklyn: Paul Auster’s
Body Writing” by Jack I. Abecassis (2014). In his article, Abecassis traces Auster’s interest and use of the body as a means of conceiving of and representing the self and the world. He writes that in Auster’s Winter Journal, Auster takes inspiration from Montaigne’s essays in his representation of:
[T]he physical body as a source of sense, the essayistic and writerly stylization of the body-in-movement as a dynamic and ever-changing principle, its ‘swerve’ as it were, the rhythmic and oral writing style and the new dynamic subjectivity that results from this writing of the experience of the swerve, the immanent conception of the world, including its randomness and radical contingency, the thorough skepticism about reason and knowledge, the permanent sense of loss, from the loss of a beloved friend or the loss of old teeth, the physical pain of aging and disease. (2014: 1037)
Abecassis reads Winter Journal as a “condensed phenomenology of physical pain and pleasure always set against the specter of death, a striking phenomenology of movement, from breathing to walking to dancing” (2014: 1037). In this chapter I draw on many of the insights 207
Abecassis provides into the role of the body in Auster’s work, whilst focusing more on the ways that the centrality of the body in Winter Journal gives greater insight into Auster’s autobiographical aesthetics, and his complex negotiation of the spaces of intimacy and distance between self and other. In an interview with McCaffery and Gregory, Auster reflects on the difference between the self of living and the self of writing, commenting that “the self that exists in the world – the self whose name appears on the cover of the book – is finally not the same self who writes the book” (2013: 28). As I mentioned in my introduction, this reflects
Borges’ famous meditation in “Borges and I” that “I recognize myself less in his books than in many others” (1962: 246). As I also suggested in my introduction, part of Auster’s second- person dialogue with his body in Winter Journal is a way of engaging these two selves, the
“head” in which the fictional world exists, and the “body” that exists in that world.
The body, the self and language
In both autre-biographies, the authors represent the body as a peculiar but undeniable symbol of how subjects negotiate a living and evolving relationship with their sense of self and world.
The body acts as a metaphor for articulating what Auster (2012: 223) has described as the slippage between word and meaning. The also body acts as a means of what Coetzee (2007:
49) has described as the “dividing up [of] experience”, providing a space and a figure with which to explore the inevitable disjuncture between experience and representation. In Here and
Now, Coetzee and Auster discuss the concept for Auster’s Winter Journal, which was at that point a work in process. Coetzee writes to Auster, “[s]o you have completed a two-hundred- page history of your body. What an interesting idea, and how I envy you for not only having the idea but also giving it flesh” (2013: 242), before posing a question to Auster about the
208 relationship that human beings have with their bodies, and the relationship between the body and self-representation, which he contrasts with that of animals. Coetzee writes:
I’ve always found it interesting that whereas we human beings think of our bodies as having parts – arms, legs, and so forth – animals don’t. In fact, I doubt that animals think of themselves as “having” bodies at all. They just are their bodies. (2013: 242)
Disappointingly, Auster doesn’t really engage with the question in Here and Now, though he does engage with a similar question elsewhere which I will explore in this chapter. Coetzee’s question is one that he had before posed to his readers, albeit through the voice of “J.C.” the fictional character who shares many of Coetzee’s biographical details in Diary of a Bad Year. In an essay on the question of the body in Diary of a Bad Year, “J.C” writes on the different ways that the body is conceptualized by animals and humans, as in the quote above he is intrigued by the difference between “having” bodies, and “being” bodies.
We speak of the dog with the sore foot or the bird with the broken wing. But the dog does not think of itself in those terms, or the bird. To the dog, when it tries to walk, there is simply I am pain, to the bird, when it launches itself into flight, simply I cannot.
With us it seems to be different. The fact that such common locutions as “my leg”, “my eye”, “my brain”, and even “my body” exist suggests that we believe there is some non-material, perhaps fictive, entity that stands in relation of possessor to possessed to the body’s “parts” and even to the whole body. Or else the existence of such locutions shows that language cannot get purchase, cannot get going, until it has split up the unity of experience. (2007: 49, emphasis in original)
Coetzee’s observations about the difference between an animal’s relationship with its body, and a human’s relationship, reflects Bakhtin’s contention that in the formation of human subjectivity, the body is perceived largely for how we inwardly experience it (1990: 42-43). The sense of this inner self as a “possessor” of the body is, however, for Coetzee a fictive entity
(2007: 49). Coetzee’s observations also suggest that language begins in the body as the place where the “unity of experience” is divided (2007: 49). Coetzee also engages here with the way
209 that humans relate to their bodies, and the process of “splitting up” that occurs between the possessor of the body and the body that is possessed, reflecting the process through which language divides, in order to make sense of, language and experience. These insights reflect the processes through which lives are written about, in which the subject of enunciation is often removed from the voice of enunciation. In these two examples, the body is the place where language is conceived, where the unity of experience is divided and where subjectivity and identity (as the relationship of the possessor to the possessed body part) begins. The animal body by contrast, in its unity, signifies the embodied truth of experience. Thus, the animal body is important in Coetzee in understanding (as a point of contrast) the human relationship to the body, a point which I explore further later in this chapter.
Auster has similarly written on the division between man and his body, using not the figure of the animal but the figure of the dead man and the dead body. In The Invention of Solitude, he writes:
Death takes a man’s body away from him. In life, a man and his body are synonymous; in death, there is the man and there is his body. We say, “This is the body of X”, as if this body, which had once been the man himself, not something that represented him or belonged to him, but the very man called X, were suddenly of no importance. When a man walks into a room and you shake hands with him, you do not feel you are shaking hands with his hand, or shaking hands with his body, you are shaking hands with him. Death changes that. This is the body of X, not this is X. The syntax is entirely different. Now we are talking about two things instead of one, implying that the man continues to exist, but only as an idea, a cluster of images and memories in the minds of other people. As for the body, it is no more than flesh and bones, a heap of pure matter. (1982: 14, emphasis in original)
Whilst Auster’s here and Coetzee’s arguments discussed above are different, they both provide evidence of a philosophical interest in bodies and their relationship to subjectivity and language. Coetzee suggests that our experience as humans is “divided” up by a “fictive entity”,
210 in which the human mind seems to be what both separates us from our bodies, and stands in an (imagined) possession of it. Auster, on the other hand, puts forth an argument for a unity of experience that is in fact undone by death through his suggestion that there is a “man” and there is “his body”. These two passages give insight into both the similar and dissimilar aspects of the body in Coetzee and Auster’s work. On the one hand, the passages are so similar in the ways they philosophise the relationship between being, the body, language and experience.
Both authors demonstrate an acute awareness of how the language we use to speak of the self is so deeply embodied. The syntax and logic of the two passages is undeniably similar. Both use the collective “we” to interrogate the assumptions behind the common locutions about the self and the body. Yet ultimately what both authors are arguing in these passages is fundamentally different. Coetzee argues that the human relationship with the body is defined by the idea of possessing the body, whereas Auster argues the relationship the human has with the body (until the moment of death) is one of being, wherein the person and the body are indistinguishable until death disrupts this unity. Whereas Coetzee here sees the human relationship to the body as one that exists at a (fictive) distance, when compared to animals who are their bodies, Auster sees the human relationship with the body (in life) as being one of greater unity and integration.
There are two very notable scenes, the first in Summertime and the second in Winter Journal where the relationship between the self, the body and language is explored through the symbolism, or synecdoche, of dance. Dancing in both texts is an action that is used to juxtapose ideas about embodied and non-embodied expression. In Summertime, the theme of dancing is introduced by Adriana, an interviewee whom John (unsuccessfully) pursues romantically. Adriana recounts to Mr. Vincent a memory she has of John, in which he signed 211 up for dance lessons she taught at a local studio as a means of getting closer to her. In another example of the book’s mordant humour and its relentless self-parody, Adriana provides a humorous and entirely unflattering description of John’s dancing ability (or lack thereof), telling Mr. Vincent, “[h]e moved as though his body were a horse that he was riding, a horse that did not like its rider and was resisting” (2009: 183), and “[i]t was if he was naked: a man dancing naked who did not know how to dance” (2009: 184). John’s inability to dance is further evidence to Adriana of John’s lack of greatness, to which Mr. Vincent retorts “there have been many great men who were not good dancers. If you must be a good dancer before you can be a great man, then Gandhi was not a great man, Tolstoy was not a great man” (2009:
198). Adriana defends her argument, contending that the ability to dance indicates bodily knowledge and bodily wisdom. She asserts the primacy of the body over the mind, suggesting that the body has an intuition, a “body soul”.
Dance is incarnation. In dance, it is not the puppet-master in the head that leads and the body that follows, it is the body itself that leads, the body with its soul, its body soul. Because the body knows! It knows! When the body feels the rhythm inside it, it does not need to think. That is how we are if we are human… You know the word disembodied? This man was disembodied. He was divorced from his body. To him, the body was like one of those wooden puppets that you move with strings. You pull this string and the left arm moves, you pull that string and the right leg moves, you pull that string and the right leg moves. And the real self sits up above, where you cannot see him, like the puppet-master pulling the strings. (2009: 199)
Here Coetzee is presenting another representation of the failures of the cerebral, disembodied intellectual who fails to make truth from experience. While the John character, according to
Adriana, sees his body at a distance, as possessor to possessed, Adriana by contrast sees the self as embodied, as bound and inseparable from bodily experience. It is Adriana who articulates the contentions Coetzee makes in “Lesson 3: The Lives of Animals: The
Philosophers and the Animals” (albeit through the voice of Elizabeth Costello), that “[t]he
212 knowledge we have is not abstract but embodied” and “to be alive is to be a living soul. An animal – and we are all animals – is an embodied soul” (2003: 33). Coetzee uses Adriana to articulate his philosophy of the body, though in typical Coetzeean fashion this is at a very reflective and ironic distance, with Adriana telling the reader that John Coetzee sees the body as a “puppet” which the real self can sit above and control with “strings” (2009: 199).
In revalorising the body and its role in the expression of self and engagement with the world, and repudiating the idea that the “self” can sit above the body, “a puppet-master pulling the strings” (2009: 199), Adriana undermines those masculine, Cartesian dualisms that have celebrated the life of the mind and omitted the body, as well as the notions of male “genius”,
“greatness” and “unity” that such discourses have reinforced. She insists on the wisdom and intelligibility of the body, and its inseparable relationship with the soul, presenting a direct challenge to Descartes’ notion of a soul wholly distinct from the body (Dvorakova 2010: 367-
68). Coetzee ventriloquises his views about the body as a site of authority and truth, and uses the imagined voice of the other, in this case a Brazilian woman, to call into question his writerly authority, and the authority of the fictional biographer, Mr. Vincent. For Coetzee, truth resides not in art but in the body. The insufficiency of the disembodied mind here challenges the kinds of non-corporeal representations of male “genius” that are privileged by
Mr. Vincent, and which have been historically privileged in Western culture. This reiterates the way that the primacy of the body in Coetzee’s work “leads to doubts about the power of written fiction” (Dvorakova 2010: 368) and I would argue, the power and authority of the autobiographical voice also. This is because the authority of autobiographical discourse, as I have discussed in Chapter 1, traditionally relies on a perceived unity between the autobiographical subject and the voice of enunciation, the self as a “puppet master” (2009: 213
199). Through parodying and ironising this idea, however, Coetzee uses the body and its relations to the self to signify the gap or distance between experience and language that emerges in writing.
Auster, an author also known for his postmodern doubling of authorial figures and voices, also uses the body in Winter Journal to challenge the ontological distinctions between mind/body that have historically privileged authors as epitomes of authority and wisdom. This is illustrated in a story Auster recounts having heard about James Joyce in Paris in the 1920’s:
[S]tanding around at a party… when a woman walked up to him and asked if she could shake the hand that wrote Ulysses. Instead of offering her his right hand, Joyce lifted it into the air, studied it for a few moments and said: “Let me remind you, madam, that this hand has done many other things as well.” No details given… all the more effective because he left everything to the woman’s imagination. (2012: 165)
Auster’s anecdotal use of Joyce’s words and actions serves to make a point about the cult of authorial genius and how it relies on quite a disembodied understanding of the writing process.
Conversely, Auster reflects on the uses the hands of the author, and the implication of the many everyday and potentially “disgusting” (2012: 165) activities they perform, to convey ideas about the physicality of writing and how as an act, it is not and cannot be disembodied.
This idea is taken up again later in Winter Journal, in a scene where Auster, like Coetzee, also uses dancing to focus ideas about the relationship between the body, language and the subject.
For Auster, he has an experience of watching dancers which is “a scalding, epiphanic, moment of clarity that pushed [him] through a crack in the universe” (2012: 220, emphasis in original), setting him
“on a new course as a writer” (Macmillan Publisher n.d.). Following what Auster describes as the “darkest moment of [his] life” (2012: 220), Auster accompanies a friend, who is dating a
214 choreographer, to a dance rehearsal in a high school gym. Auster here has an epiphany which for him captures the relationship between bodies and writing. He describes, “[b]odies in motion, bodies in space, bodies leaping and twisting through empty, unimpeded air” (2012:
220) and reflects on the experience of watching people dance skilfully without musical accompaniment.
The first thing that struck you was that there was no musical accompaniment. The possibility had never occurred to you – dancing to silence rather than to music – for music had always seemed essential to dance, inseparable from dance, not only because it sets the rhythm and speed of the performance, but because it establishes an emotional tone for the spectator, giving a narrative coherence to what would otherwise be entirely abstract, but in this case the dancers’ bodies were responsible for establishing the rhythm and tone of the piece, and once you began to settle into it, you found the absence of music wholly invigorating. (2012: 222)
Bodies create the meaning; bodies create the narrative. Echoing Adriana’s reflections on dancing in Summertime, this silent dancing in Winter Journal captures a moment where the body leads and the head follows. It also captures and assets the incompleteness of disembodied subjectivity. It is an epiphany that starkly contrasts with the kinds of Enlightenment dualisms that have been observed historically in male autobiography (Stuart 2009). The idea of the epiphany as bodily challenges the Cartesian ideas about genius and the autonomous life of the mind and “soul”; Auster’s writerly epiphany is located in the silently dancing body of the other.
According to Abercassis, this epiphany signifies a moment where enunciation is purely embodied and “the distinction between the act of enunciation and the enounced (the énoncé)” (2014:
1040) momentarily disappears. It is the knowledge and memory of this moment that enables
Auster to write, now he has “discovered that movement and rhythm are in fact constituent of
‘meaning’” (Abercassis 2014: 1040).
215
The second significant aspect of this epiphany is that Auster has a moment where he reflects on the chasm between bodily experience and language, as he listens to the choreographer,
Nina W., explain her purpose and intention. He writes:
after six or seven minutes, the dancers stopped. Nina W. stepped forward to explain to the audience what they had witnessed, and the more she talked, the more earnestly and passionately she tried to articulate the movements and patterns of the dance, the less you understood what she was saying… her words were utterly useless, inadequate to the task of describing the wordless performance you had just seen, for no words could convey the fullness and brute physicality of what the dancers had just done. (2012: 223)
Further juxtaposing the power of the dancers’ movements with the inadequacy of Nina’s words, Auster writes “bodies in motion, followed by meaningless noise, joy followed by boredom” (2012: 223). Rather than undo the epiphanic experience and joy of watching the dancers, Auster finds that the contrast between the movement of the dancers’ and Nina’s
“meaningless” words, helps to “open up” something inside of him (2012: 223). He finds himself:
Falling through the rift between world and word, the chasm that divides human life from our experience to understand or express the truth of human life, and for reasons that still confound you, this sudden fall through the empty, unbounded air filled you with a sensation of freedom and happiness, and by the time the performance was over, you were no longer blocked, no longer burdened by the doubts that had been weighing down on you for the past year. (2012: 223-224)
Not only is Auster inspired by the image of purely embodied enunciation that the dancers represent, but he is also inspired by the realisation of the inadequacy of words to describe his experience. The vision of the dancers and the chasm between world and word is Yeatsian, reflecting Yeats’ final line of “Among School Children”, “[h]ow can we know the dancer from the dance?” (1931). This question for Jerry H. Gill presents a “potential paradigm for the general problem of meaning in the arts. For meaning, or significance, always seems to transcend the empirical particulars that comprise it, but in a way which systematically eludes 216 definition” (1975: 125). The synecdoche of dance as a way to articulate the profound limitations of language in describing the complexity and nuance of life is represented as freeing for Auster, assumedly because he had witnessed the failure and limitation of language to capture this experience, he too realises the limitations of all writing and thus, paradoxically, is freed and comforted by this knowledge. He writes, “[w]riting begins in the body, it is the music of the body, and even if the words have meaning, can sometimes have meaning, the music of words is where the meanings begin” (2012: 224-225), before describing writing “as a lesser form of dance” (2012: 225). The privileging of dance over writing clearly reflects the embodied aesthetic that Auster strives for in Winter Journal, which he describes at the beginning of the text as “a catalogue of sensory data… a phenomenology of breathing” (2012: 1). The allegory of the silent dancers, positioned towards the end of the text, serves to illustrate Auster’s purpose in writing this autobiography and in writing more generally, to begin with the body and reflect the movements of the body in the sounds of his language. As Varvogli writes:
Peter Kirkegaard compares Auster’s notions on language with Roman Jakobson’s definition of ‘poeticity’… the word is felt as a word and not a mere presentation of the object being named or an outburst of emotion, when words and their composition, their meaning, their external and internal form, acquire a weight and a value of their own instead of referring to reality. (2001: 132)
For Auster, “poeticity” begins in embodied awareness, not abstract thought, an idea that resonates in Adriana’s description of “[d]ance as incarnation” in Summertime. Varvogli and
Kirkegaard’s understanding of Auster’s “poeticity” also acts a reminder that for Auster, language is often perceived as having its own truth, as truths (which depart from an external reality) may emerge in the style and rhythm of language, a phenomenon not dissimilar to what
Coetzee describes as “poetic truth” (2015: 7-8). Both Coetzee and Auster also use the synecdoche of dance in their texts to explore the inadequacy and incompleteness of
217 disembodied expression, departing from the “non-corporeal soul[s]” (Butler 1985: 509) that have prevailed historically in autobiography, as well as to foreground the role that the body plays in establishing “poeticity” or “poetic truth”.
There are of course, notable differences between the ways both authors approach the idea of embodied expression through dancing. Coetzee’s ideas about embodiment, embodied expression and “body souls” are importantly vocalised and refracted through the voice of
Adriana, so though the ideas are reminiscent of things Coetzee has said elsewhere, this scene, like so much of Coetzee’s writing, is highly reflexive. Furthermore, “John Coetzee” is presented as not embodying the very aesthetics/ethics of embodiment he has articulated elsewhere, suggesting (ironically) that embodiment is more of an ideal for John than an organic, lived reality. Later in the text, the final interviewee, Sophie Denouel, describes a philosophy John has of dance, music and the body, which seems to share many parallels with the philosophy of the “body soul” that Adriana earlier articulated to Mr. Vincent. After commenting that “the ease of others made him [John] ill at ease”, Sophie elaborates:
He thought of Africans as embodied, in a way that had been lost long ago in Europe… In Africa, he used to say, body and soul were indistinguishable, the body was the soul. He has a whole philosophy of the body, of music and dance which I can’t reproduce, but which seemed to me… unhelpful. Politically unhelpful. (2009: 231)
Sophie “cannot reproduce” John’s philosophy of the body, music and dance but the reader might assume it is a derived from, if not informed by Adriana and her notion of the “body soul”. This assumption is strengthened by Sophie’s comment, “[h]e approved of Brazil and
Brazilians” (2009: 233). That Sophie feels John’s position boils down to “old-fashioned
Romantic primitivism” (2009: 231) demonstrates Coetzee’s acute awareness of how his representation of Adriana and her philosophy of the body soul and its intuition might be 218 received. As such, Coetzee’s representation of dance as embodied expression must be regarded carefully and not too literally, reminding us of the complexity of Coetzee’s position as a white,
South African author and the ever-presence of shame in Coetzee’s representations of bodies, which I explore later in this chapter, and serving as a reminder that representations of bodies are always deeply implicated in notions of place.
Auster’s representation of the dancers and his epiphany is far easier to ascribe meaning to. He presents his experience of embodied expression as epiphanic, in allowing him to realise the difference between “word and world”; he realises the role the body has in negotiating this space. Dancing acts as a metaphor for the notion of “poeticity” (Kirkegaard in Varvogli 2001:
132) or “poetic truth” (Coetzee and Kurtz 2015: 7-8) and the way, for Auster, this is accessed through bodily rhythms. This reminds the reader of his earlier claim in an interview that
“‘[t]he world is in my head, my body is in the world’” (in Abecassis 2014: 1036). For him, the musicality and poeticity of language begins in the rhythms of the body, so it is the experience of the body “being in the world” in which writing begins. For Auster, it is walking which enables this. Walking is a recurring motif in Auster’s work. Quinn walks endlessly in the City of
Glass (1985), Anna Blume walks In the Country of Last Things (1987), both characters walk to lose themselves in the anonymity of the city and are subsequently able to think and create. In The
Invention of Solitude, Auster writes that “what we are really doing when we walk through the city is thinking, and thinking in such a way that pure thoughts compose a journey, and this journey is no more or less than the steps we have taken” (1982: 122). For Auster, the walker in the city is able to lose himself in his solitude, and through the process of walking, body and mind become palpably unified. In Winter Journal, walking also figures as a motif that consolidates a sense of selfhood. He writes, “that is how you see yourself whenever you stop to think about 219 who you are: a man who walks, a man who has spent his life walking through the streets of cities” (2012: 59). There are obvious connections here with Michel de Certeau’s The Practice of
Everyday Life. De Certeau writes:
The ordinary practitioners of the city live “down below”, below the thresholds at which visibility begins. They walk… they are walkers… whose bodies follow the thicks and thins of an urban “text” they write without being able to read it… [they] make use of spaces that cannot be seen; their knowledge of them is as blind as that of lovers in each other’s arms. The paths that correspond in this intertwining, unrecognized poems in which each body is an element signed by many others, elude legibility. (1988: 93)
For de Certeau, as for Auster, walking is a creative process in which body and city, and body and words are interconnected. In Auster, walking and writing are inextricably connected, as the rhythm of walking mirrors the rhythm of words, and the practice of walking around the city generates what de Certeau calls an “urban text” which for Auster is constitutive of his creative process. For Auster, walking provides a state of being nowhere, which in turn facilitates the experience of being a body. The anonymity of walking in the city, as well as the experience of being “down below” means that walking in Auster’s oeuvre can be seen as a motif that represents a state of embodiment, which in turn is the state where writing can begin. In Winter
Journal, he writes:
In order to do what you do, you need to walk. Walking is what brings the words to you, what allows you to hear the rhythms of the words as you write them in your head. One foot forward, and then the other foot forward, the double drumbeat of your heart. Two eyes, two ears, two arms, two feet. This, and then that. That, and then this. Writing begins in the body. (2012: 224)
One thing that is notable about the trope of walking in Auster’s oeuvre is his success in being a body. Auster positions himself as one who is able to lose himself in the bodily experience of the city. This is reflected in the anaphoric “[t]wo eyes, two ears, two arms, two feet” of the above passage, the repetition of which reflects the bodily rhythm of walking and thus seems to
220 reaffirm his claims that walking allows him to “hear the rhythms of the words as [he writes] them in [his] head” (2012: 224). The interconnectedness of walking and writing are further reiterated in the chiastic “[t]his, and then that. That, and then this” (2012: 224). The relative ease of embodiment and embodied writing in Auster’s work as signified through the recurrence of author characters as walkers perhaps reflects his experience of being a city dweller, a New Yorker, an “ordinary practitioner” of the city, one of those whose primary functions includes being a “body” and a “walker” (de Certeau: 1988: 93).
The ease of embodiment and the way the bodily rhythms of walking are reflected in Auster’s prose contrasts quite starkly with the recurring lack of ease for Summertime’s “John Coetzee”.
Throughout the text, the interviewees are often commenting on John’s lack of ease, both with others and within his own body. Sophie Denoel comments that John “was not at ease among people who were at ease. The ease of others made him ill at ease” (2009: 231). Similarly, the third interviewee, Adriana, describes him as “not as ease in his body”, telling the interviewer
Mr. Vincent that she “could see that from the first moment, from the way he walked” (2009:
183).
One trope in Summertime which could be compared to the recurring references to walking in
Auster’s oeuvre, in particular Winter Journal, is the constant reference to manual labour.
Throughout Summertime, John’s insistence on doing his own manual labour is referred to by two interviewees, and is also mentioned in the opening “Notebook Fragments”. Manual labour, like walking, is another means by which one becomes a body. It involves becoming at one with the physicality of one’s environment. This action also has distinct political implications, both within John’s South Africa and within world history and philosophy. 221
Manual labour within the texts works metonymically, to remind the reader of centuries old hierarchies in which the ruling classes have been celebrated for their “intelligence”, while the ruled classes have been relegated to body-work which functions primarily to serve those in power. As Laura Doyle argues, at the core of Greek, Jewish and Chinese tradition is “a metaphysical hierarchy of head over body”, which “provides a metaphor and a rationale for a hierarchy of labor and power” (1994: 29). Doyle argues that within such systems of thought, a
“celebration of intelligence” (1994: 28) functions to reinforce an “ideological practice whereby metaphysical assumptions – of spirit over matter, idea over thing, mind over body – function to uphold social divisions between master and slave, owner and worker, light-skinned and dark, man and woman” (1994: 28). In Western racial patriarchy, perceived metaphysical differences “justify a division of power and labor by which ‘handworkers’ serve
‘brainworkers’” (Doyle 1994: 28). Coetzee’s attempt to position writing as indistinct from other “hand” crafts, thus challenging this division of power and labour, is reflected in Elizabeth
Costello, when Elizabeth reflects, “[i]f… she believes in her books… it is belief only in the sense that a carpenter believes in a sturdy table or a cooper in a stout barrel” (2003: 208).
Not only is Coetzee palpably aware of these metaphysical distinctions which have served to reinforce the power and privilege of his class, but John in Summertime is also acutely aware of such dynamics, which are further intensified through the texts’ apartheid era setting. John makes a point about doing his own manual labour, “his own dirty work… what people like him should have been doing ever since 1652” (2009: 7). John’s fixation on manual labour is a means to pay back a debt for the sins of apartheid by doing the “handwork” or body-work typically performed by the ruled and subjugated (Doyle 1994: 28). Attwell describes John’s
222 commitment to manual labour as “a form of penance” (1992e: 289), an attempt to punish the white subject by subjecting it to the physical toil suffered by those disempowered by apartheid.
The subject engaging in manual labour also feels the pain and suffering of the body subject to physically taxing work. To “become a body” is perceived as a resistance to the dynamics of apartheid. Describing the impact of the physical work on John, Coetzee’s third-person narrator writes that “[h]is back hurts, his arms and wrists are so stiff that he can barely hold a pen.
Above all, the labour bores him. Yet he is not unhappy” (2009: 7). Echoing the claims Coetzee made in Doubling the Point (1992e) and which I quoted earlier, that the “suffering body” provides the only tangible expressions of “truth”, John’s attraction to manual labour in
Summertime is portrayed as a means of resisting the power structures of apartheid, demonstrating the political potential of the body as a site of truth and resistance. The body acts as a site of trying to resolve a legacy of colonial guilt and shame. Through the emphasis on physical, bodily labour and his attempts to “overthrow the taboo on manual labour” (2009:
61), John, and perhaps by proxy Coetzee, seeks to interrogate colonial dichotomies that would align the coloniser with the work and life of the mind, and the colonised with the physical work and life of the body.
The idea that John’s “penance” is to be found through the body, through subjecting himself to the toil and hardship of physical labour that his class have not historically done themselves, suggests that any possibility for penance and redemption might be located in the suffering body, through subjecting oneself to the pain and “truth” of the physical body. Coetzee’s ethics of the body again differ to Auster’s, as Auster’s representation of the body does not seem to have the same religious dimensions, but rather pertains to the material and existential 223 conditions of embodiment. The notion of the body as a place where penance might be located challenges the idea of what Butler calls the “non-corporeal soul” (1985: 509) of Western masculinity, as it suggests a possibility of penance, and thus of a soul, is deeply linked to embodied experience. This is suggestive of the notion of an “embodied soul”, the soul that
Coetzee has said connects our living being as humans to that of animals (2003: 33). The affects of shame and the ideas of complicity evident in the passage about manual labour above are strongly suggestive of the confessional genre. Yet through the visible and integral role that the body plays in the “soul-searching” (Coetzee 1999a) that confessional entails, Coetzee rejects the idea of confession through “transcendence… of the corporeal” (Neuman 1991: 137).
Unlike Auster, who feels able to lose himself in the cityscape – to become a body – Coetzee fails to truly detach himself. His actions are too symbolic, too connected to a legacy of exploitation.
His insistence on doing his own manual labour is regarded cynically by the other interviewees, who represent them as forced, lofty and sanctimonious. In response to John’s claims that he is
“trying to break the taboo on manual labour” (2009: 112) because of white South Africa’s
“long history of making other people do [their] work for [them] while [they] sit in the shade and watch” (2009: 111), his cousin Margot, perhaps the most sympathetic of his relatives, retorts “[w]hat nonsense you talk! That is simply not true! It’s just anti-white prejudice!” (2009:
112). Julia describes John “launching into another one of his speeches about the need to overthrow the taboo on manual labour” (2009: 61) before commenting to Mr. Vincent,
“I wondered whether there might not be some criticism of myself hanging in the air: that the paid labour of my black domestic set me free to have idle affairs with strange men” (2009: 61).
She subsequently dismisses his philosophy of manual labour as a crude understanding of economics, claiming, “if we all insisted on spinning our own thread and milking our own 224 cows… we would be stuck for ever in the Stone Age” (2009: 61). Margot and Julia’s comments about John’s manual labour are used to double back on John’s theories about manual labour.
The relative ease of embodiment, and of accessing the space between the body and writing which seem to come so easily to Auster remains a challenge for John in Summertime, and perhaps by association, for Coetzee too. This lack of ease can undoubtedly be attributed to
Coetzee’s sense of historical complicity as a child and young man growing up in apartheid
South Africa, a theme strongly explored in Boyhood and Youth, as well as other fictional works like Disgrace (1999b) and Age of Iron (1990). Whilst Auster accesses the experience of being nowhere and being a body, a flâneur in the city of New York, Coetzee’s attempts to be and become a body separate from the historical realities of place prove much more complicated and difficult.
The body, dependence and decrepitude
In both Winter Journal and Summertime, Auster and Coetzee respectively use the body as a figure to challenge the notion of the sovereign and autonomous self historically associated with life writing. As Egan has argued, and as I quoted previously, the body and its permeable boundaries challenge notions of autonomy or entity (1999: 6). As such, the body can work as a powerful site for exploring the relational and interdependent nature of selfhood. In the next section of this chapter, I argue that Coetzee and Auster not only thematise the dependent and vulnerable nature of selfhood in Summertime and Winter Journal respectively, but that this dependency is written into and reflected in the form and structure of the texts; that autre- biography is a mode of writing in which the interdependent and intersubjective nature of selfhood is thematically and stylistically central.
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In Summertime, John constantly strives for an autonomy that cannot be attained. Margot tells
Mr. Vincent that John’s father would say “you know how John is… always very independent” (2009:
131, emphasis in original). Margot questions “[i]ndependent: what did that mean? Not without reason, the Coetzees took it to mean he had disowned his country, his family, his very parents”
(2009: 131, emphasis in original). John’s desire for “independence” is perhaps demonstrated in his constant insistence on doing his own manual labour as a political gesture, as I discussed above. In Summertime, the insufficiency and dependency of white South Africans is constantly referenced. In conversation with Mr. Vincent, Julia emasculates and infantilises white South
Africans in her description of them as “babes in the woods… a tribe of babies looked after by slaves” (2009: 54). John’s failure to achieve the autonomy he desires is perhaps best illustrated in the interview with Margot, where John takes her for a drive to the remote town of
Merweville on the Karoo (an episode which I also discuss in Chapter 2). The intention of
John’s visit is to show Margot a house he is intending to buy for his father, so that his father, who is approaching retirement age without any substantial savings or pension, might be able to live by himself where the cost of living is lower. Because of John’s previously discussed insistence on doing his own repairs and manual work, the car breaks down on a deserted road and the cousins have no means of contacting anyone for help. In this moment, John recognises, “I try to do things myself when I ought really to leave them to more competent hands” (2009: 111). To which Margot reflects (albeit filtered through Mr. Vincent’s narration),
“[s]o that is the reason why they are here in the cold and the dark waiting for some passer-by to rescue them. To make a point, namely that white folk should do their own car repair. How comical” (2009: 111). Ultimately, John and Margot are rescued by Hendrik, a labourer from
Margot’s brother’s farm Voëlfontein. John returns to Voëlfontein as “Jack’s errant son, dirty and sunburnt and chastened” (2009: 123), suggesting that not only has John failed in his bid to 226 lift the taboo on manual labour, but that he too belongs to “the tribe of babies looked after by slaves” (2009: 54).
Furthermore, John’s desire to liberate himself from the co-dependent relationship with his father, which is referenced when he says to Julia, “I have a father who lives with me. Or with whom I live’” (2009: 31), also ultimately ends in failure. Whilst John portrays himself as “back to being a son” and in conversation with a school acquaintance, David Truscott as “a child” who “live[s] with [his] father” (2009: 14), his father’s dependence on him is also constantly reiterated. Again, in conversation with David Truscott, John says, “[m]y father is getting on in years. He needs looking after” (2009: 14). Later, John says of his father to Julia “[m]en of his generation were brought up helpless. If there isn’t some woman on hand to cook and care for them, they simply fade away. If I hadn’t offered my father a home he would have starved to death” (2009: 95).
As Chris Danta argues, subjects who are reminded of their own lack of autonomy are everywhere in Coetzee. Danta suggests, “it is possible to define Coetzee’s entire oeuvre as a kind of fictional argument against autonomy. Coetzee’s novels are like so many nets cast out to catch (out) the self-deceiving autonomous subject” (2014). Often this dependent character is also a writer and this dependency is used to undermine the authority of both the author character, and the author Coetzee himself, as Hall argues, and as I cited previously, “[w]hen all the layers of meta-textual playfulness and linguistic substitution are stripped away, the author is depicted not as a figure of god-like independence, but rather of embodied vulnerability” (2014:
300).
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The themes of dependence, decrepitude and morality can be found throughout Coetzee’s work. In Diary of a Bad Year (2007), J.C. suffers from what is speculated to be Parkinson’s by another character, but which is never named. He is unable to type his own work and becomes dependent on his young typist to meet deadlines from the German publishers of his “Strong
Opinions”. In Age of Iron (1990), where Mrs Curren suffers from terminal cancer, her and the homeless Vercueil have an unspoken and reciprocal relationship of care. In Slow Man (2005),
Paul Rayment is left paralysed and dependent on care after a cycling accident, relying on a series of carers, but primarily Marijana Jokic. In fact, so recurring is the trope of the disabled, dying or incapacitated white person finding themselves needing to be cared for (usually by a younger person of less social privilege) that this kind of scenario has been described by William
Deresiewicz as “typically Coetzeean”. Deresiewicz describes the “typical Coetzeean situation” in the following terms:
[A] a white person, privileged but vulnerable (through age or disability or isolation), comes to rely on a person of color, a dependent or inferior of some kind, for sustenance and safety. The scenario, like the prose, is mercilessly spare: two wills face to face, scraping together like metal against metal. In the normal course of things, the white protagonist is inexorably stripped of every comfort and dignity, the bare bones of the human situation exposed with an allegorical directness reminiscent of Beckett. (2008)
In these scenarios, the health, liveliness and competency of the younger, often less socially privileged person is juxtaposed with the frailty and looming mortality of the older, white, academic middle-class person. Arguably, the younger person serves as an exemplar of the physical powers of the body in health and in youth, while the older person raises questions about the value and virtue of pursuits of the mind, and social and economic privilege in the face of death and decrepitude.
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In Diary of a Bad Year, Anya describes her relationship with ‘Señor C’ or ‘J.C.’:
[I am] just his typist, his tipitista, his clackadackia. He dictates great thoughts into his machine, then hands over the tapes to me, plus a sheaf of paper in his half-blind scrawl, with the difficult words written out in careful block letters. I take away the tapes and listen to them on my earphones and solemnly type them out… he is supposed to be the big writer and I just the little Filipina. (2007: 26)
The relationship between a writer and a typist is one that is undoubtedly imbued with unequal power relations, indeed it is quite a literal representation of the way in which the ruling classes have historically been celebrated for their brain work whilst the marginalised or disempowered serve as “handworkers” (Doyle 1994: 28). The irony of this passage, an irony that is not lost on
Anya, is that for these “great thoughts” to be in any way intelligible, they must first come through her, the translator of his “half-blind scrawl”. Her awareness about the irony of the scenario, in which he the “great writer”, in ailing heath and with waning physical capacities, is dependent on her as the “typist… the little Filipina” is demonstrated through her use of the qualifier “supposed”.
Anya’s body is constantly contrasted with the aging, frail body of ‘J.C’. While J.C. is “seventy- two and losing fine muscle control and presumably pees in his pants” (2007: 133), Anya:
[H]as black hair, shapely bones. A certain golden glow to her skin, lambent might be the word… As I watched her an ache, a metaphysical ache, crept over me that I did nothing to stem. And in an intuitive way she knew about it, knew that in the old man in the plastic chair in the corner there was something personal going on, something to do with age and regret and the tears of things. (2007: 7)
Señor C’s “metaphysical yearning” it seems is a longing for the youth, “freshness” (2007: 7) and vitality that Anya signifies. Significantly, towards the end of the book it is Anya who accompanies J.C. to the threshold of death and promises to carry out the tasks he can no longer complete when he is dead, namely the publication of his book of “Strong Opinions” 229
(2007: 177). Hence whilst “J.C.” is the wealthy, celebrated and privileged author, Coetzee makes it clear that he is utterly dependent on Anya. This has parallels with Summertime in the way Coetzee constantly reframes hierarchical power relations, in which the mind is privileged over the body and as such the work of “brainworkers” is privileged over “handworkers”, as relationships of dependence, in which the privileged “brainworkers” are utterly dependent on and helpless without the service and care of the “handworkers” (Doyle 1994: 28). This dynamic seems to be mirrored in the very structure of the text, as the story of “John Coetzee”, the great writer, becomes entirely dependent on the accounts of other people, some of them seemingly quite peripheral to John Coetzee’s life.
The interrelationship between death, morality and dependence is also highlighted through the dynamic between Anya and J.C. in Diary of a Bad Year. As Danta argues, “[d]eath is the ultimate example of how the subject loses its autonomy” (2014). As J.C.’s physical powers wane, he increasingly struggles to separate mind and body. Despite his insistence that “all old folks become Cartesians in the end” (2007: 181), the essays in the second section of Diary, his “Soft
Opinions”, reveal that his bids for independence and a Cartesian separation of mind and body is becoming increasingly futile in the face of mortality and increasing decrepitude. As Murphet argues, this a text “touched by death, and intimately so” in a mode characteristic of Coetzee’s late style (2011: 86). The beginning of J.C.’s “Soft Opinions” describes a dream he has in which J.C.’s deteriorating body serves as a powerful omen of the presence and imminence of death.
In the dream I lived through the first day of my death, listening carefully for signs that my dead body was faltering… On the second day, as I was urinating, I saw the stream turn from yellow to red… A little later, as if standing outside my body, I heard myself say “I can’t eat this pasta”… the interpretation I put on my words was that my internal organs were decaying irremediably. (2007: 130) 230
He then has an idea “to write a novel from the perspective of a man who has died, who knows he has two days before he that is, his body caves in and begins to fester and smell” (2007: 130).
The man becomes trapped in the corporeal, his decaying body overwhelming and consuming any notion of a self that is independent from the embodied self. The abject nature of the body permeates and contaminates the limits between “self” and “other”, the smell of the body becomes a source of discomfort to those who surround the man. Coetzee’s thematic preoccupation with bodily decay and decrepitude is deeply bound with his obsession with dependence and losing autonomy. As the body decays and ages, the subject loses any sense of being contained, independent and having agency. J.C. writes in his “Soft Opinions”, “[t]he story of Eurydice reminds us that as of the moment of death we lose all power to elect our companions. We are whirled away to our allotted fate; by whose side we get to pass eternity”
(2007: 159). Coetzee’s novels are full of such examples of people on the threshold of death, in the company of strangers, or people from whom they are emotionally estranged. The lack of autonomy generated by the decaying, dying body works to create an uncanny intimacy between strangers, or those estranged, brought together by the imminence of death. In Diary of a Bad
Year, Anya promises to be with J.C. at his moment of death, in Age of Iron (1990) it is the homeless Vercueil who is present with the terminally ill Mrs Curren. In Summertime, Jack’s cancer diagnosis creates what Attwell (2012: 286) describes as a “claustrophobic” intimacy between Jack and John, who, as I discuss in Chapter 1, are portrayed as deeply estranged in the previous autre-biographical volumes, Boyhood (1997) and Youth (2002b).
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In Summertime, a scenario which William Deresiewicz (2008) might describe as a “typically
Coetzeean” is foreshadowed through his description of a film in the opening “Notebook
Fragments”.
At the Empire Cinema in Muizenberg last night, an early film of Kurosawa’s To Live. A stodgy bureaucrat learns that he has cancer and only has months to live. He is stunned, does not know what to do with himself, where to turn. He takes his secretary, a bubbly but mindless young woman, out to tea. When she tries to leave her holds her back, gripping her arm. “I want to be like you!” he says. “But I don’t know how!” She is repelled by the nakedness of his appeal. (2009: 9)
Again, like in the Anya and J.C. interactions in Diary of a Bad Year, the youthful body (again female) is juxtaposed with the aging body of the older (male) character. Again, the example is underpinned by the labour hierarchies in which the aging male is the employer, the
“brainworker” and the woman is the employee or “handworker”. The desperation of the bureaucrats’ appeal is presumably for the youth, and “mindless” vitality of the woman.
Interestingly, the scene in the film prompts the John Coetzee to question in his italicised, authorial aside, “[h]ow would he react if his father were to grip his arm like that?” (2009: 7), suggesting in the context of Summertime it is not Coetzee’s alter ego “John” who is immediately facing death, but rather the parental figure, Jack Coetzee. Throughout Summertime, John struggles to understand his father Jack, finding “it hard to detect what his father cares about” (2009: 247).
Jack’s silent unreadability leads John to project his own thoughts and anxieties onto Jack, which illustrates how the “typically Coetzeean” scenario of decrepitude, dependence and longing for youth is very much present in Summertime, through the way John projects onto his father.
This is especially apparent later in Summertime, in the closing “Notebooks: Updated
Fragments”, where Coetzee contrasts the aging, soon-to-be sick body of his father with the 232 body of Mrs Noerdien, a young woman “who wears a headscarf and is presumably Muslim”
(2009: 259) who works as Jack Coetzee’s assistant. John describes his first encounter with Mrs
Noerdien and his father at their workplace Acme, “[h]is father is hunched over his desk. There is a second presence in the cubicle, a woman, young, gazelle eyed, softly curved, in the act of putting on her raincoat” (2009: 258).
The presence of Mrs Noredein in the cubical with Jack Coetzee prompts the third-person narrative voice to question:
What does it do to the heart of a lonely man… to be sitting side by side, day after day, with a woman who is not only as good at her job and as meticulous as Mrs Noerdien, but also as feminine…coming face to face, in the wintertime of his life, with beauty such as he has not known before and can never hope to possess. (2009: 259)
That John is projecting his own feelings and fears onto his father in this moment is made clear in the italicised “notes to self”, where he queries, “[w]hy say that his father is in love with Mrs
Noerdien when he has so obviously fallen for her himself?” (2009: 260, emphasis in original). Hence while “John Coetzee” himself never appears as an aging man in the clutches of illness and decrepitude, the closing fragments of Summertime reveal how this is still a very central concern for Coetzee and how the anxieties about such concerns are played out through John’s projections onto the father character. It is important to remember that the “Notebook
Fragments” are said by Vincent to be dating from around 1972-1975, yet they are published in
2009, when John Coetzee would have been around the same age as his father was in the 1972-
1975 fragments. This suggests that John’s projections onto Jack mirror Coetzee’s own ideas about aging, as have been expressed elsewhere.
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This might also explain the irony in the title Summertime, a seasonal metaphor which suggests abundance, promise and becoming. In “As A Woman Grows Older” (2004), Coetzee’s short story published in The New York Review of Books, Elizabeth Costello re-emerges and uses seasonal imagery to impart the following thoughts on aging to her children with whom she is playing cards:
As we age, every part of the body deteriorates or suffers entropy, down to the very cells. That what aging means, from a material point of view. Even in cases when they are still healthy, old cells are touched with the colors of autumn (a metaphor, I concede, but a dash of metaphor here and there does not add up to metaphysics). This goes for the many, many cells of the brain too. Just as spring is the season that looks forward to summer, so autumn is the season that looks back. The desires conceived by autumnal brain cells are autumnal desires, nostalgic, layered in memory. They no longer have the heat of summer; what intensity they have is multivalent, complex, turned more toward the past than toward the future. (2004)
The seasonal metaphor in Coetzee’s title, Summertime, appears to allude to this period of intensity, a time of youth, promise and becoming that “looks forward” with the “heat of summer”. Mr Vincent looks upon this time, 1972-1977, as the time when “he was finding his feet as a writer”, a portrait of the artist on the brink of success. Nowhere is this sense of “heat” and becoming evident in Summertime. Rather, there are constant descriptions of John as “a cold fish” (2009: 47), “made of wood” (2009: 200), “disembodied” (2009: 198) and Coetzee’s achievements as a writer are radically underplayed throughout the memoir. Furthermore,
Summertime is deeply concerned with themes of decrepitude and mortality, and ends with Jack
Coetzee “in the wintertime of his life” at the threshold of death. A volume that “begins and ends with death” (Attwell 2012: 284), Summertime opens with the slaughter of South African refugees by Afrikaners in blackface and ends with the death of Jack Coetzee. Despite the positive associations of the title, which “suggests a flowering in which the novelistic career is finally launched” (Attwell 2012: 283), it is entirely inconsistent with the content of the text
234 itself which not only does not reinforce a sense of arrival (Attwell 2012: 283), but focuses on moribund concerns, finitude and decrepitude rather than growth, actualisation and hope. John finds himself not on the brink of promise, of realisation of his artistic aspirations, but forced to choose between pursuing his creative projects, or being a nurse to his father in his final days.
The closing notebook fragments with Jack Coetzee are perhaps the most affectively powerful in Summertime. The description of Jack Coetzee’s diagnosis and admittance for surgery for laryngectomy strongly juxtaposes John’s healthy body with the sick and deteriorating body of his father, serving as a reminder that “our embodiedness lays us open to the constant possibility of pain and to the certainty of death” (Tremaine 2003: 598). While his father is described as looking “like a bird, all skin and bone” (2009: 262) and “like a corpse, the corpse of an old man” (2009: 263), John is described as “[walking] fast, conscious of the vigour in his limbs, the steadiness of his heartbeat. The air of the hospital is still in his lungs, he must expel it, get rid of it” (2009: 264). Jack’s illness and decrepitude serves to emphasise John’s own youth and health, as well as his father’s dependence on him and his feelings of guilt about their emotionally estranged relationship.
As it is elsewhere in Coetzee’s work, the dependence of a person on the threshold of death is emphasised, while the essential solitude of death itself is stressed. Jack commences “the next and final phase of his life, during which he will depend for his daily bread on the charity of the
Automotive Industry Benefit Fund, of the South African state through its Department of
Pensions, and of his surviving family” (2009: 264).
He could stretch out and take his father’s hand and hold it, to comfort him, to convey to him that he is not alone, that he is loved and cherished. But he does no such thing. Save in the case of small children, not yet old enough to be formed, it is not the 235
practice in their family for one person to reach out and touch another… If on this one extreme occasion he were to ignore family practice and grasp his father’s hand, would what the gesture implied be true? Is his father loved and cherished? Is his father truly not alone? (2009: 262-263)
John is confronted by the corporeality of Jack’s wounds, “I can’t do this”, he says to the ambulance man who shrugs at him. Kossew (2014) suggests that the final notebook fragments of Summertime can be read as a moment of what Barthes would call a “punctum”, which Barthes describes as “some piercing or wounding in the viewer”, a “sting, speck, cut, little hole… that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me)” (1981: 26-27). Kossew
(2014) suggests that Barthes’ notion of the punctum, applied to literary texts, can be used to describe “a moment when the writer perhaps seems to lay bare an emotion so that the reader, like Barthes’ viewer, appears to have direct access to a vulnerability, a piercing or wounding, a moment of shared intimacy, perhaps even of confession”. Kossew argues that the closing fragments of Summertime evoke a punctum in the reader, quoting the line “it went through his heart life a knife, the first Saturday after his return to the country, to see his father put on his coat and without a word go off to Newlands (the rugby and cricket field) like a lonely child”
(2014, my emphasis), as the image of pricking or stabbing to represent filial guilt is deeply suggestive of the wounding that Barthes suggests constitutes the punctum (1981: 27-28).23 I would argue that Jack’s wound, which so confronts John towards the end of Summertime, could also be read as symbolic of the punctum, the confronting and arresting wounding that we as an audience feel in this moment where the narrator is presented with a stark image of his father’s imminent mortality. As Kossew argues elsewhere about this section of Summertime, it is
23 Barthes describes the “punctum” as “the element which rises from the scene [of a photograph], shoots out of it like an arrow and pierces me… I I shall therefore call punctum; for punctum is also: sting, speck, cut, little hole - and also a cast of the dice. A photograph’s punctum is that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me)” (1981: 26-27).
236 significant also as the father is rendered “forever wordless”, and “[t]he son’s inability to interpret his father’s needs is even more tragic now” (2011: 20). Attwell proposes that Jack’s body, and more specifically his wound, work to metonymically connect Jack with the fatherland (2012: 285). He posits that Jack’s “‘nasty suppurating wound’” might signify
Coetzee’s ambivalent relationship which South Africa (Attwell 2012: 285), reflecting what
Coetzee has described as the ‘‘deformed and stunted relations between human beings” which were “exacerbated” under apartheid (1992b: 98). Attwell more recently has contended that the closing fragments of Summertime signal a resolution of the father/son relationship and the
“intense Oedipal struggle” (2014: 178) present in the earlier volumes. For Attwell, Summertime also signals “that John has overcome most of his resentment towards his father” (2014: 182) and that “[t]he phase of blaming the father is at an end” (2014: 182). Following Attwell, I would suggest that the use of Jack’s body, more specifically his wound, in these closing fragments is also intended as a site to explore and resolve intimate and autobiographical concerns and as Kossew suggests, projecting “more deeply personal and emotional material that centres on the father/son relationship” (2011: 19).
Dependence in Auster
Auster similarly explores the relationship between the body, language and dependence to challenge to challenge the idea of autonomy in Winter Journal. Auster’s obsession with the body in his life writing reflects his broader preoccupation with the theme of chance, which I discussed in detail in Chapter 2. The body is subject to chance and is inscribed by chance encounters, and so many of the chance things that happen to the body have large implications for one’s life and story. He identifies the body as the site in which life, language, and as such
237 the story of one’s self begins, writing “that is where the story begins, in your body, and everything will end in the body as well” (2012: 12). In Winter Journal, scars are used as narrative device to chart the different stories and experiences inscribed on the body in a “corporeal topography” (Nuttell in Klopper 2004: 90). Auster writes:
The inventory of your scars, in particular the ones on your face, which are visible to you each morning when you look into the bathroom mirror to shave or comb your hair… you understand that they are marks of life, that the assorted jagged lines etched into the skin of your face are letters from the secret alphabet that tells the story of who you are. (2012: 5)
Auster’s description of his scars as “letters” from a “secret alphabet” overtly identifies the notion of the “body as a text”, and of the “text as a body”, a phrase Kristeva has used in her the description of the relationship between the body and writing (Klopper 2004: 90). Here
Auster engages with the way that the body is both inscribed, and inscribes (Silvani 2011). What is interesting about Auster’s relationship with this “secret alphabet” is that its symbols are not always fathomable to him, the mere fact that the body is “his” does not mean that its language is always intelligible. Auster describes “[a]nother scar… origin unknown” (2012: 7) and writes:
No story accompanies this scar, your mother never talked about it (at least not that you can recall), and you find it odd, if not downright perplexing, that this permanent line was engraved on your chin by what can only be called an invisible hand, that your body is the site of events that have been expunged from history. (2012: 8, emphasis in original)
Here Auster reflects on the sometimes unintelligibility of the body, which whilst being a site of language, sometimes resists interpretation. He uses the scars imprinted on the body that have no corresponding story or narrative to explore the potential dissolution that can occur
“between inner topography and external topography, and by extension, between subject and object, self and other” (Klopper 2004: 90). The scars which do not meaningfully tell a story
238 signify the distance that Auster has identified in interviews between the body that lives in the world, and the self that writes.
The scars, and the fact that Auster does not know the origins of them also reinforces the dependent and non-autonomous nature of selfhood, a notion that is not addressed as consistently in Auster’s work as in Coetzee’s, but which nonetheless emerges in Winter Journal.
The many accounts of near death experiences throughout Winter Journal reinforce the idea of luck, chance and most importantly, dependence. Auster describes in detail a car accident he has with his family, an accident for which he as driver feels responsible. Upon collecting belongings from the wreckage of the car, Auster says to the junkyard worker “[w]e should all be dead now” (2012: 168) to which the man replies to him “[y]ou were supposed to die yesterday, but then an angel stretched out his hand and pulled you back into the world” (2012:
168). Auster then writes, “[h]e delivered these words with such serenity and conviction, that you almost believed him” (2012: 168).
Towards the end of Winter Journal, Auster writes that “[y]ou mustn’t neglect to mention that you nearly choked to death on a fish bone” (2012: 216) and continues to tell the story of eating fish in Paris and accidently swallowing a bone so large that swallowing becomes extremely painful. Auster arrives at the hospital, where the nurses “had no idea what to do with [him]”
(2012: 218) when hours later the night-time emergency doctor, comes on duty, “and lo and behold, this young doctor, who couldn’t have been more than four or five years older than you were, turned out to be an ear, nose and throat specialist” (2012: 218). Auster describes in detail the process through which the doctor removes the bone, with his “impressive array” of
“tweezers of every possible size and configuration”, before holding the large bone up in front 239 of his face and saying to him “[y]ou’re lucky… This one easily could have killed you” (2012:
218). The way Auster presents the story reiterates the idea of chance and dependence, as
Auster puts great emphasis on his luck in having this man as his doctor, and his utter dependence on his care and expertise. He concludes that “every life is marked by a number of close calls, that everyone who manages to reach the age that you are now has already wriggled out of a number of potentially absurd, nonsensical deaths” (2012: 217).
Like Coetzee, Auster connects the theme of dependence to the notion of imminent death and decrepitude. Towards the end of Winter Journal, Auster quotes a line from Joubert that particularly resonates with him, “The end of life is bitter… [o]ne must die lovable (if one can)” (2012:
215, emphasis in original). Auster writes that he is especially moved by this sentence, particularly by the words in parentheses, which:
[D]emonstrate a rare sensitivity of spirit, you feel, a hard-won understanding of how difficult it is to be loveable, especially for someone who is old, who is sinking into decrepitude and must be cared for by others. If one can. There is probably no greater human achievement than to be loveable at the end, whether that end is bitter or not. Fouling the death bed with piss and shit and drool. We are all going there, you tell yourself, and the question is to what degree a person can remain human while hanging on in a state of helplessness and degradation… If one can. (2012: 215-216, emphasis in original)
Auster’s repetition of the lines in italics, “If one can”, the parenthetical comment that especially moves him, reflects his understanding of the disempowering nature of aging and corporeal decay (2012: 215). This is reinforced through his emphasis on “piss and shit and drool”, which strengthens the idea of imminent bodily decay and the abjection of aging, which he describes as a “state of helplessness and degradation” (2012: 216). Whilst Coetzee’s descriptions of aging and mortality in Summertime and Diary of a Bad Year suggest a complete lack of autonomy in the face of death, Auster implies a limited autonomy, one should be loveable “if one can”. This 240 phrase captures the limited degree of choice one has one in the threshold of death, but insists on the possibility of perhaps some choice.
Like Coetzee, Auster uses seasonal metaphors to explore central ideas of finitude and mortality. His text is called Winter Journal because, we are told, he writes it during winter. It is made clear, however, especially on the final page of the book, that the “winter” to which he refers in the title also reflects aging and finitude. The final worlds of Winter Journal read:
Your bare feet on the cold floor as you climb out if bed and walk to the window. You are sixty-four years old. Outside, the air is gray, almost white, with no sun visible. You ask yourself: How many mornings are left?
A door has closed. Another door has opened.
You have entered the winter of your life. (2012: 230)
The imagery of grey, white and coldness in this closing chapter signifies the sense of imminence and mortality, of a fading of physical power. It is a poignant closing line in a text that deals so intimately with the question of death and the attenuating power of the physical body.
“Embodied Souls”
Both Coetzee and Auster have explored relations with the animal body as a means of articulating ideas about embodiment, subjectivity and the other. Both Coetzee and Auster have elsewhere in their oeuvre used the animal as a figure to conceptualise the corporeal nature of the soul. Animals and the example that they provide are integral to Coetzee’s notion of the soul as embodied. In “Lesson 3: The Lives of Animals: The Philosophers and the Animals”, he writes: 241
The knowledge we have is not abstract… but embodied… “Embodiedness” connects our living being as humans to that of animals. To be alive is to be a living soul. An animal – and we are all animals – is an embodied soul. (2003: 33)
Towards the end of Elizabeth Costello, Elizabeth has a vision which we as an audience presume is her purgatory, an eerie place with a “mise en scène” that she describes as “Kafkaesque” (2003:
209). Elizabeth is called on by the judges to give her statement of belief so that she can pass through the gate. The judges are unhappy with her first statement, that she is “a writer, a trader in fictions” who can “maintain beliefs only provisionally” as “fixed beliefs would stand in [her] way” (2003: 195). Informed by one of her fellow petitioners that what is required is “passion”, a word that she herself has a distaste for, Elizabeth presents her second statement of “belief” to the judges. This time, she presents an “impassioned” appeal about the little frogs who live on the Dulgannon mudflats of her childhood, “I believe in the little frogs”, she says, “the frogs are real. They exist whether or not I tell you about them, whether or not I believe in them”
(2003: 217). She continues, “[i]t is because of the indifference of these little frogs to my belief… that I believe in them” (2003: 217). Her second statement is Elizabeth’s attempt to convince the judges that she has “belief”, that she has, we might assume, a “soul” and is worthy of admission to “the gate”.
It is one of many examples in Coetzee’s work where the animal body serves as the only reference point for the real, and where animals operate as a reminder that “the knowledge we have is not abstract but embodied” and that “embodiedness” “connects our living being as humans to that of animals” (2003: 33). The connection between the body that connects our being as humans with that of animals, and the notion of the soul being “embodied” and as
242 such not something exclusive to humans, is reiterated through the vision that Elizabeth has when she actually arrives at the gate.
She has a vision of the gate, the far side of the gate, the side she is denied. At the foot of the gate, blocking the way, lies stretched out a dog, an old dog, his lion coloured hide scarred from innumerable manglings. His eyes are closed, he is resting, snoozing. Beyond him is nothing but a desert of sand and stone, to infinity. It is her first vision in a long while, and she does not trust it, does not trust in particular the anagram GOD DOG. Too literary, she thinks again. A curse on literature! (2003: 224-225, emphasis in original)
Costello’s vision of God as a mangy dog is of course hyperbolic, but serves as another example of the ways that animals, the corporeal, the notion of the soul and intimations of death are all inextricably linked in Coetzee’s work.
In Auster’s 1999 novel Timbuktu, Willie G Christmas relays a similar anagram to the one that troubles Costello at the gate when he contemplates his dog, Mr. Bones. Unlike Elizabeth
Costello, he doesn’t regard this cynically, but rather that the “lowest being contained within his name the power of the highest being” (1999: 36). Willie considers:
It wasn’t just that he knew that Mr. Bones had a soul. He knew that soul to be better than other souls, the more he saw of it, the more refinement and nobility of spirit he found there. Was Mr. Bones an angel trapped in the flesh of a dog? Willie thought so… How else to interpret the celestial pun that echoed in his mind night and day? To decode the message, all you had to do was hold it up to a mirror. Could anything be more obvious? Just turn around the letters of the word, dog, and what do you have? The truth, that’s what. The lowest being contained within his name the power of the highest being. The almighty artificer of all things. (1999: 36)
That both Auster and Coetzee present moments in which the canine and the celestial are conflated suggests that both authors have explored the possibility of animal souls in their works. While Auster suggests it may be possible for the animal to have a soul, Coetzee takes this one step further in suggesting that the soul itself is embodied. As Tremaine argues, “[f[or
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Elizabeth, as for Coetzee, there is no soul apart from the body” (2003: 601). Not only this, but the soul on occasion is connected with the animal body and sympathy for the suffering of the animal body. For example, Elizabeth describes her vegetarianism as a “desire to save her soul”
(2003: 43) and it is her passionate appeal about the frogs of the Dulgannon mudflats that constitute her “statement of belief” at the end of Elizabeth Costello. Tremaine argues that passages on animals in Coetzee bear “more importantly on human experience, on the human condition of ‘embodiedness’” (2003: 598, emphasis in original). He argues that Coetzee’s works serve to remind his readers that “[o]ur embodiedness lays us open to the constant possibility of pain and the certainty of death” (Tremaine 2003: 598).
In Summertime, like elsewhere in Coetzee’s oeuvre, animals are figures through which protagonists are confronted with embodiedness, suffering and death. As Tremaine argues, characters who pull the wings off insects are a recurring motif in Coetzee’s work (2003: 589), as are protagonists who try to “imagine animal consciousness at the moment of death” (2003:
589). In Mr. Vincent’s interview with John’s cousin Margot in Summertime, both of these
Coetzeean tropes resurface to signify the development of John’s empathetic capabilities.
Having mentioned the locusts, she wishes she hadn’t. For she has remembered the fate of the locusts, or of one of them. Out of the bottle in which they had trapped it John took the insect and, while she watched, pulled steadily at a long rear leg until it came off the body, dryly, without blood or whatever counts as blood among locusts. Then he released it and they watched. Each time it tried to launch itself into flight it toppled to one side, its wings scrabbling in the dust, the remaining rear leg jerking ineffectively. Kill it! she screamed at him. But he did not kill it, just walked away, looking disgusted. (2009: 96, emphasis in original)
Reflecting on this moment of childhood cruelty, John says to Margot “I remember it every day of my life”; “Every day I ask the poor thing’s forgiveness” (2009: 96). Though John pulls the legs off the insect here, not the wings, this moment serves the same purpose, to confront the 244 protagonists with animal death and animal suffering. It reminds them of the embodiedness that they share in common with the suffering animal and makes us aware of “the constant possibility of pain and to the certainty of death” (Tremaine 2003: 598). This is reiterated by
John’s subsequent comment to Margot, in which he describes a book by Eugene Marais about the year he spent observing a baboon troop. “He writes that at nightfall, when the troop stopped foraging and watched the sun go down, he could detect in the eyes of the older baboons the stirrings of melancholy, the birth of a first awareness of their own mortality”
(2009: 96-97). These kinds of reflections on “animal consciousness at the moment of death”
(Tremaine 2003: 589) and the reflections on the embodiment and mortality that connects human existence to animal experience, serves to remind the reader that our living being is connected to animals through our shared embodiment, and that “An animal – and we are all animals – is an embodied soul” (Coetzee 2003: 33).
In Winter Journal, Auster too uses moments of animal death to reflect on the moment that he as a child came to understand the grave reality of death. He recounts his adventures in his backyard as a child with his childhood friend, writing “[s]pring was heralded by the appearance of the first robin… You would count the robins after that, taking note of the second one, the third one, the fourth one, adding more robins to the tally each day, and by the time you stopped counting them, the weather would be warm” (2012: 186-187). The robins become metonymically linked with the change of seasons, and Auster has used the symbolism of seasons to explore ideas about life and death. This perhaps foreshadows that as the robins have come to signify life that they may also signify the child’s awareness of death. He writes:
The next spring, you spent every afternoon combing through the bushes together, looking for dead birds… who must have fallen out of their nests and could not make their way back home. You buried them in a patch of dirt that ran along the side of your 245
house – intensely solemn rituals accompanied by made-up prayers and long moments of silence. You had both discovered death by then, and you knew that it was a serious business, something that did not allow for any jokes. (2012: 187-188)
Auster then goes on to describe his first encounters with human death, reminding us as readers that the reality of embodiment that we share with animals “lays us open… to the constant possibility of death” (Tremaine 2003: 598). Whilst both writers use animals to explore the connection between embodiment and death, and childhood intimations of mortality, Auster’s passage is more concerned with ideas about the cycles of life and death, as reinforced by the seasonal metaphors used throughout the text and the part that the robins play within this metaphor. Coetzee’s representation of the locust, on the other hand, is tinged with feelings of guilt, shame and complicity. Whereas Auster is merely a witness to the death of the robins,
John Coetzee in Summertime is directly responsible for the suffering of the locust. As Tremaine has argued, “[t]he linkage between knowledge of suffering and death and the experience of shame abound in Coetzee’s fiction” (2003: 599). As in Coetzee’s representation of the suffering parental body in Summertime, the sense of shame and complicity that accompanies his torture of the locust as a child perhaps signifies the link between the suffering and violence inflicted on an individual level and the violence and suffering inflicted on the body of the other under apartheid.
Concluding thoughts
The body serves as an important figure in both Auster’s and Coetzee’s work, which simultaneously undermines traditional hierarchies associated with authorship, whilst representing some of the undeniable “truths” of existence. Both Auster and Coetzee exemplify the ways in which “the body is present in writing not as substance but as a system of 246 articulation” (Klopper 2004: 85) and is a useful figure of articulating selfhood, which is bound in its historical and cultural conditioning. The affective prominence of shame in Coetzee’s representations of the body, which is not as prominent in Auster’s representation, serves to remind the reader that the body is indeed historically and culturally conditioned, and that the body in Coetzee is inseparable from the history of apartheid from which he writes.
Nonetheless, the body operates as an important figure in establishing and sustaining the complex dynamic of intimacy and distance that both Coetzee and Auster achieve in their autre- biography. In the work of both authors, the body’s representational power lies in the fact that it is the “intimate thing which both is and is not oneself” (Stuart 2009: 8). As such, the body in
Coetzee’s and Auster’s autre-biographical writing enables both to explore the most intimate of autobiographical concerns, such as mortality, dependence and notion of a soul. The distance the body signifies, however, between the narrating and experiencing self further enables these concerns to be explored at an autre-biographical distance. Through the body, Coetzee and
Auster are both able to explore quite intimate concerns that are prominent elsewhere in their oeuvre, such as mortality, decrepitude and the space between representation and experience.
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Conclusion
This thesis has examined the contributions of life writing scholarship to understanding different senses of truth, intimacy and self-representation, and has argued that life writing has a dialogic potential which is not necessarily best represented by the first-person pronoun.
Through examining Coetzee’s and Auster’s own scholarly writing and interviews on their writing process, I argue that these two writers subscribe to an understanding of writing that is
“dialogic”. Furthermore, I suggest that both writers apply this understanding to their life writing, and participate in a dialogic form of life writing which Coetzee has called autre- biography. I argue that autre-biography is a process-oriented means of writing self which acknowledges the limits of autobiography and seeks to acknowledge and embed these limits in its own style and form. Through an examination of Coetzee’s and Auster’s autre-biography, it becomes evident that Lejeune’s (1977) suggestion that first-person address in autobiography presents a more “authentic” and “intimate” enunciation can be questioned. Whilst being autobiography at a distance, autre-biography is not necessarily a postmodern narrative game, but a style and an approach which seeks to involve the reader as an “active participant” (Auster in Wood 2013: 132). As such, autre-biography does create opportunities for autobiographical intimacy with the selves represented, and may convey some “poetic truth” of self or “fictions of the truth” (Coetzee 1999a). I also suggest that these forms of autre-biography might facilitate some of the fraught and complex intimacies that are an inevitable consequence of any attempt to represent self (Felski 1989: 108). It is also a mode which captures the ambivalent status of autobiography as both the “ultimate truth” of one’s life and a “mere simulacrum” of that life (Felski 1989: 112). I argue that both Coetzee and Auster’s autre-biographies
248 foreground failure as part of their “fictions of the truth”, using failure to dampen some of the
“triumphalist reflexes” of the genre of autobiography (Sheehan 2016: 457). I also argue that failure is another means of drawing attention to the generic limits of autobiography and the challenges of representing the self through language, including Felski’s notion of a “dialectic of intimacy and alienation in confession” (1989: 108) in which any attempt to expose or reveal intimate truths of self are undermined by the realisation of the difficulty, and sometimes impossibility, or capturing the self in writing. Finally, I suggest that both Auster’s and
Coetzee’s autre-biography use the body as a “system of articulation” (Klopper 2004: 85) which works to explore the distance between the narrating and experiencing subject, as the body is the “intimate thing which both is and is not oneself” (Stuart 2009: 8). Through using the body in this way, Coetzee and Auster are able both to recognise and mirror the generic limits of autobiography, yet engage with intimate concerns like mortality, aging and anxieties about obsolescence, reiterating how their autre-biography does not constitute sophisticated games which attempt to obfuscate autobiographical truths, but rather a “transparent” (Auster in
Letham 2005: 161) reflection of the processes, questions and problems one encounters when conceiving of and representing the self.
In doing so, I believe I have made some vital contributions to life writing scholarship, through claiming that autre-biography may be a response to the challenge of writing autobiography which is self-reflexive and dialogic. Most importantly, however, I believe I have made important contributions to Coetzee and Auster scholarship respectively. As I stated in my introduction, there is not yet a scholarly work which compares Auster’s and Coetzee’ life writing and their approaches to autobiography. Given the relatively recent publication of Here and Now, it is important that these two authors’ works be considered in a dialogue with one 249 another, especially their auto/autre-biographical works, which as I establish have so many formal and thematic similarities. This suggests the possibility for some new directions in both
Coetzee and Auster studies, as whilst these two authors have been studied extensively in their own right, as they suggest through the publication of Here and Now, conversation between authors is also valuable in gaining new insights into shared ideas and poetics, and approaches to writing.
There are of course, many areas for further investigation which were not addressed within the limits of this study. Both Coetzee and Auster have written essays on Kafka and Beckett, and have spoken of them as shared heroes and influences (Coetzee 1992, Auster 1995). As I note in Chapter 1, Kafka and Beckett are important literary precursors for the substitution of first person with other modes of narration. They are also both important precursors with regards to
Auster’s and Coetzee’s shared poetics of failure. David Ball’s recently published monograph on the rhetoric of failure in modernism (2015) illustrates a contemporary interest in this line of enquiry which might aptly be further explored in the work of these two contemporary authors who are strongly influenced by modernists like Beckett and Kafka. Paul Sheehan’s recently published article on Coetzee, failure and autobiography (2016) further suggests that a rhetoric of failure which is derived from, but departs from Beckett, has an important role in understanding the ways that failure in Coetzee’s autre-biography is a way of responding to the generic limits and impositions of autobiography. Michael Springer’s doctoral thesis on
Beckettian irony in the work of Auster, Coetzee and John Banville (2014) considers how
Auster, Coetzee and Banville “respond to and negotiate” Beckett’s irony in their own fictional work, the different ways they deploy his aesthetics and the different epistemological and existential conclusions they come to (2014: iii). Alys Moody’s doctoral thesis on hunger, 250 modernism and aesthetics in Samuel Beckett, Paul Auster and J.M. Coetzee (2013) examines the trope of hunger in literary modernism as a focal point for modernism’s relationship to aesthetic autonomy, and considers how this has impacted Coetzee and Auster as modernist- influenced contemporary authors. The recent publication of the former two works suggests a growing interest in a rhetoric of failure, its modernist roots and influences and its relevance in contemporary literature and culture, whilst the submission of the latter two works suggests that there is a growing interest in examining Coetzee’s and Auster’s fiction in a comparative manner, considering the influence, primarily of Beckett, but also other modernists like Kafka and Melville, on these two contemporary writers.
There are also other authors whose work might also be described as “autre-biography”, and I would imagine that in coming years more scholarly works will emerge which consider not only
Coetzee’s autre-biography, but also the contributions other authors, both contemporary authors and those who might be considered precursors, have made to the ways authors use distancing and fictionalising strategies in their representations of self, to foreground and reflect on the very process of representing that self. In the early stages of this project, I had also included Philip Roth as another contemporary writer of autre-biography. Following the publication of Here and Now, I decided to focus exclusively on the relationship between
Coetzee and Auster as writers of autre-biography. Both Coetzee and Auster are readers of
Roth’s work (Coetzee and Auster 2013: 172-75) and Roth’s 1987 The Facts: A Novelist’s
Autobiography is perhaps a quintessential example of autre-biography in which the process of writing self is strongly engendered within the work itself. In this autre-biography, Roth presents his memoir, his desire to explore and reveal the “facts” of his life, as a draft which he sends to his fictional character, Nathan Zuckerman, for proofreading and comment. The book, 251 of course, concludes with Zuckerman’s criticisms of Roth’s autobiography – charging him with narcissism, self-delusion and misrepresenting “the facts”. In a recently published article which
I have previously cited, Hall examines Roth’s Exit Ghost (2007) and Coetzee’s Diary of a Bad
Year (2007) and argues that Coetzee’s essay on autobiography as autre-biography “provides a critical vocabulary through which the complexities of Roth’s later auto/biographical fiction can be explored” (2014: 289). Furthermore, she suggests that both Coetzee and Roth “have contributed to a wider generic category of semiautobiographical fiction, written in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, that engages issues of life writing, aging, and identity through experimental new fiction forms” (2014: 289). It is not difficult to foresee the publication of further scholarly works, like Hall’s article, which also consider Roth’s contributions to autre-biography, considering the formal similarities and differences between his “autre-biography” and that written by Coetzee, and perhaps even Auster.
Furthermore, this thesis only touches on Roland Barthes’ influence on the notion of autobiography as “autre-biography”, and the relationship between Barthes, Coetzee and Auster could in itself be the subject of further critical studies. As Attwell notes, Coetzee writes of the influence of Barthes on his aesthetic of autobiography, and claimed that Barthes wrote the kind of autobiography that he wanted to write (2014: 28). Clarkson also notes that Coetzee has spoken in interviews of Barthes “as a source of literary-critical inspiration” (2013: 6). Similarly,
Powers (2016) and Sheehan (2016) also discuss the impact of Barthes’ critical and auto-fictive writing on Coetzee’s Scenes from Provincial Life, especially the open, and “fragmentary quality” of the narrative in Summertime (Powers 2016: 3), a quality that could also aptly describe Auster’s later autre-biographical works, Winter Journal and Report from the Interior.
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Finally, a great deal more work could be done on exploring the themes of the body, aging, finitude, mortality, self-erasure, dependence/autonomy, and failure in the fictional works of
Auster and Coetzee. These themes have been explored in scholarly works on the fictional writings of each author, including Alex Hobb’s discussion of Auster’s The Brooklyn Follies
(2005) in his monograph Aging Masculinity in the American Novel (2016), and Hall’s aforementioned essay on aging and autre-biography in Diary of a Bad Year (2014). I would suggest, however, that these two novels, published around within a reasonably similar time frame and both representing an aging man on the threshold of death, and his interactions with a younger, unlikely companion, might also provide some interesting points of comparison for further understanding some of the shared anxieties and concerns about aging and the body that emerge when bringing Coetzee and Auster’s work into dialogue.
Indeed, with so many formal and thematic similarities, and a publicly recognised interest in each other’s work, I would imagine that many rich and interesting comparative studies of
Auster and Coetzee will emerge in coming years.
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