New Voice

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 himself up for his correspondents; in his diaries he is doing much the same for his own eyes, or for posterity.
(Sophie, Summertime, p 224)   

 What if we are all fictioneers…?  

What if we all continually make up the stories of our lives?
(p226) 

Over the past few years JM Coetzee has come in for some stick for abandonning “Realism” and now the question is being asked as to whether or not his latest work, Summertime, should be classified as a novel.  Many reckon that it should be considered a “straight-up” memoir, yet only those who have chosen to pay little or no attention to what Coetzee has written could be bothered to speculate on such an inconsequential matter. 

In Youth, the second of his “fictionalised memoirs” (if reports are accurate, this designation is the publisher’s doing, but who’s to know) the narrator comments on the protagonist’s diary.  What is written there is “true only in the sense that a work of art is true – true to itself, true to its own immanent aims” (p10).    

So, the question then, to this reader’s mind, is not: Did the events depicted in Summertime actually happen and did Coetzee experience the feelings attributed to him?, but rather:  What are the immanent aims of the work itself? 

The novel is ostensibly narrated by a Mr Vincent who is writing a biography of John Coetzee, a dead writer.  For this purpose, he interviews five people who he considers to have played major roles in the deceased author’s life.  Three are former lovers of Coetzee, one, Margot, his cousin and “childhood sweetheart”, while Martin, the only man, was originally an academic rival, then a colleague and later, a friend. 

By using the name John Coetzee, JM Coetzee draws attention to the fact, to which no attention need be drawn: that it is he who is truly making things up, telling us the story, choosing what to put in, what to leave out and how to proceed in so doing.  But this, I feel, is not what Coetzee cares to achieve. 

The manner in which we may revisit events in our own lives, or experience them as they happen, relies as much on what we imagine others to be thinking and seeing, and saying to themselves, as it does on our own opinions, judgements and reflections.  In fact, the former become part, to a greater or lesser extent, of the latter.  Similarly, we do not and cannot know others; we know, or have a vague notion, of how and what we imagine them to be.  Julia, in Summertime, tells Vincent she believes Coetzee “engaged with some erotic image of” her “inside his head” (p52), not with her “in all her reality”.   

In Summertime, as those who “knew” John Coetzee tell their stories of him, giving us depictions of the man as they imagine him to have been, a beatifully contorted tension develops, as his name continually draws the reader back to the certainty that it is JM Coetzee who is telling us the story.  Vincent’s words sometimes act in the same way, as he tells Margot that he “dramatized” what she told him, “letting people speak in their own voices” (p87).  It is somewhat reminiscent of Beckett’s The Unnamable,  and the narrator’s lines which must refer to their author: “he is not far, he is here, it’s he who speaks” (Samuel Beckett Trilogy, Calder, p407). 

A few lines on from that the unnamable is not so sure: “perhaps it’s not he, perhaps it’s a multitude”.  And we are back to Summertime, and reminded that in the book John Coetzee is indeed a multitude, that he exists through the disparate voices of others and of his own writings, and that JM Coetzee, too, is a multitude, a novelist, with the “capacity to imagine” himself “as someone else” (Elizabeth Costello, Secker & Warburg Uncorrected Proof, p79).