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Searching for the Self in JM Coetzee's Autobiographical Fiction

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Searching for the Self in JM Coetzee's Autobiographical Fiction Displaced Romanticism: Searching for the Self in J.M. Coetzee's Autobiographical Fiction Eckard Smuts Town Cape of Thesis Presented for the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in theUniversity Department of English Language and Literature UNIVERSITY OF CAPE TOWN February 2014 The copyright of this thesis vests in the author. No quotation from it or information derived from it is to be published without full acknowledgementTown of the source. The thesis is to be used for private study or non- commercial research purposes only. Cape Published by the University ofof Cape Town (UCT) in terms of the non-exclusive license granted to UCT by the author. University The completion of this thesis was made possible by financial support from the Harry Crossley Foundation, the National Research Foundation and the UCT Postgraduate Funding Office. All opinions expressed and conclusions arrived at are my own, and should not necessarily be attributed to those institutions. ABSTRACT This thesis is a literary critical investigation into the strategies of self-definition at work in the autobiographical fiction of J.M. Coetzee. My focus falls on those of his novels that have a more-or- less explicit autobiographical resonance (Boyhood, Youth, Elizabeth Costello, Diary of a Bad Year, Summertime), with supplementary forays into two additional books (Age of Iron and The Childhood of Jesus). My argument centres on the observation that Coetzee’s work derives its affective force from the conflict he stages, time and again, between the desire for a transcendent sense of being, Romantic in origin, and the realization that being derives its co-ordinates from the discursive formations – ideological, socio-historical, philosophical, linguistic – that provide the structure of meaning for self-expression in writing. I introduce my argument by situating Coetzee’s work according to a poststructuralist critical framework that emphasizes his strategies of subjective displacement. Our reading of his work, I then suggest, might benefit from a more considered evaluation of the persistent influence of a Romantic ideal concerning the primacy of subjective experience. In the first chapter I explore the conceptual tension that derives from these contrasting points of view by considering Coetzee's engagement with the tradition of confessional writing, arguing that he foregrounds the textual subject as the locus in which the truth of the self is to be sought. The second chapter examines the central role of the Karoo farm in the formation of the autobiographical subject in Coetzee's writing, and links it to a Romantic model of identification between the self and nature. In the third chapter I argue that Coetzee's awareness of socio-political realities inhibits the Romantic yearning for an authentic sense of self, even while he reformulates the idea of authentic voice as the expression of a politically and historically compromised subjectivity. Finally, in the last chapter I turn my attention to the authorial imprint that derives from the consistency of Coetzee's depiction of conflict between transcendent and contextual realities, and conclude by tracing the afterlife of this dynamic in his most recent novel, The Childhood of Jesus. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS My academic supervisors, Carrol Clarkson and Peter Anderson, have been unfailing in their support and extremely generous with their time for the duration of my project. Their guidance has been instrumental in the preparation of my thesis, and I am deeply grateful to both of them. The Coetzee Collective provided regular inspiration in the form of presentations and lively discussions around Coetzee’s work, and afforded me a number of opportunities to sound out my own ideas. I am indebted to its many members, both locally and abroad. Thanks are also due to the broader postgraduate community in the English Department at UCT, for innumerable colloquiums, workshops, casual conversations and general camaraderie. To Simon van Schalkwyk and Donald Powers, who were there from the start, I am especially grateful. A final word of thanks goes to my family, friends and loved ones – people without whom I would have faltered in my intellectual pursuits a long time ago. TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction: Vatic Speaking and the Question of Authority.........................................................1 1. The Return of the Author......................................................................................................1 2. Coetzee and Barthes...............................................................................................................7 3. A Close Reading of Authority..............................................................................................16 4. Conflicting Sources of the Self.............................................................................................31 5. A Word on Method...............................................................................................................38 Chapter One: The Subject of Confession.......................................................................................42 1. Coetzee, Rousseau and the Problem of the Self.................................................................42 2. Shameful Incidents...............................................................................................................47 3. The Subjective Dynamics of Confession.............................................................................51 4. “Quaquaqua”........................................................................................................................66 5. His Heart Begins to Throb...................................................................................................71 Chapter Two: The Karoo Farm.......................................................................................................80 1. The Sacral Space of the Farm.............................................................................................80 2. Wollstonecraft, Wordsworth and the Natural Subject of the Romantics........................84 3. “Tree-names but no trees yet”.............................................................................................96 4. A Detour in the Country of Baboons................................................................................102 5. The Earth Speaks Its Silence.............................................................................................111 Chapter Three: Politics, Voice and the Self..................................................................................118 1. The Soiled Condition..........................................................................................................118 2. Echoes of Negative Capability...........................................................................................126 3. Age of Iron and the Question of Voice..............................................................................134 4. The Sympathetic Imagination...........................................................................................150 Conclusion: Conflicted Relations..................................................................................................155 1. A Thread of Conflict...........................................................................................................155 2. Erotic Encounters...............................................................................................................157 3. The Seduction of Music......................................................................................................166 4. Reality Check: The Childhood of Jesus............................................................................172 Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………………....181 1 INTRODUCTION: VATIC SPEAKING AND THE QUESTION OF AUTHORITY 1. The Return of the Author In the first part of J.M. Coetzee's Diary of a Bad Year – the part containing the so-called “Strong Opinions” – in a section entitled “On authority in fiction”, JC, the author-protagonist, makes a pronouncement that strikes the reader as somewhat disingenuous. “Announcements of the death of the author and of authorship made by Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault a quarter of a century ago,” he says, “came down to the claim that the authority of the author has never amounted to anything more than a bagful of rhetorical tricks” (Coetzee, Diary of a Bad Year 149). By situating these claims about the death of the author squarely in a historical context (“a quarter of a century ago”), JC appears to be suggesting that their time has passed. That this is indeed his opinion is confirmed when he carries on: “Now that the dust has settled, the mystery of Tolstoy's authority, and of the authority of the other great writers, remains untouched” (150). Despite the best efforts of the poststructuralists (and before them the Russian formalists) to expose the figure of the author as a myth, the masters of realism have emerged with their authority intact, and JC continues to read them with “shamefaced absorption” (150). This is an unusual sentiment to emerge from the pages of a writer who is so clearly indebted to the intellectual tradition that is being discredited here. Ever since the appearance in the late 1980s of the first book-length study of Coetzee's fiction (Teresa Dovey's The Novels of J.M. Coetzee: Lacanian Allegories), the prevailing opinion among critics has been that Coetzee is, in the first place, an author who is finely attuned to
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