Confession and Interculturality in J.M. Coetzee's Summertime

Freie Universität Berlin

Peter Szondi-Institut für allgemeine und

vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft

Hausarbeit Modul Vergleichende Literaturgeschichte

Kurs: Beckett and Coetzee

Prof. Dr. Claudia Olk

Confession and Interculturality in J.M. Coetzee's

Summertime

Josta van Bockxmeer

Matrikelnummer 4668284

[email protected]

Table of Contents

Introduction 3

Chapter One: Confession and Shame 4

1.1.Confession 4

1.2.Shame 6

1.3.The Structure of Summertime 8

Chapter Two: The Questioning of Authority 10

2.1.Imagology 10

2.2.Images of Coetzee: Foreigner and Barbarian 11

2.3.Coetzee's images of Others 14

2.4.Coetzee's Political Attitude 16

Conclusion 19

Bibliography 21

Authority and Confession in J.M. Coetzee's Summertime

Introduction

“What kind of biography are you writing? Is it like Hollywood gossip, like secrets of the rich and

famous?“1 asks Adriana, one of the interviewees whom Mr. Vincent chooses for his biography of

the deceased John Coetzee in Summertime. And indeed, also as an autobiographical novel the book

immediately strikes the reader as very unusual in its genre. John Coetzee, the writer and the subject

of the book, is imagined to be dead, and his fictional biographer only seems to be after shameful

details from his personal life. As Derek Attridge proposed for Boyhood and Youth2 and James Meek

for Summertime3, in this paper it will be argued that the term confession suits the representation of

the self and its problematization in the novel. Confession, as Coetzee defines it, includes both the

aim at telling the truth about the self and the impossibility implicit in that aim. Therefore, calling

the book a confession raises the question of the techniques of representation of the self and how

these are being reflected in the structure of the novel.

Summertime consists of a series of interviews with people who knew Coetzee4 intimately,

thereby presenting the reader with a complicated structure of partly counterfactual accounts. From

these different interviews the reader has to distill his or her own picture of Coetzee. Each of the

interviews as well as the image of Coetzee that is brought forth in the process of reading can be

regarded as confessions. Each of the characters explains their own motives in their dealings with

Coetzee, and, as will be shown below, their sincerity is being questioned in the text. Furthermore,

the technique of representing Coetzee which is being employed in the novel is being explicitly

questioned by metacomments which arise in the characters' conversations with Mr. Vincent.

The second part of the paper will be dedicated to the content of the confession by the writer

Coetzee about his former self, which is embedded in the political and historical context of the South

Africa of apartheid. As Derek Attridge points out, the notion of confession itself is embedded in this

context, since the difficulties in confessing which are analyzed by Coetzee are partly the same

which the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission had to face.5 Through the use of the

1 Coetzee, J.M. Summertime. In Scenes from Provincial Life. Boyhood, Youth, Summertime. Penguin Books, 2012. 414. In order to avoid an explosion of the number of footnotes, further citations from this novel will be followed by the page number in brackets and, if not clear from the context, the specification “Coetzee 2009”.

2 Attridge, Derek. “Confessing in the Third Person. Boyhood and Youth.” In Attridge, Derek. J.M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 2004. 138-161.

3 Meek, James. “All about John.” The Guardian. 05.09.2009. Web. 14.04.2013.4 For the purposes of assessing the structure of the novel and in passages where misunderstandings might be caused,

the character Coetzee in the novel will be called John, Coetzee or John Coetzee, while the writer of the book will be referred to as “the writer Coetzee”.

5 Attridge, Derek. “Confessing in the Third Person. Boyhood and Youth.” In Attridge, Derek. J.M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 2004. 138-161. 142.

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method of imagology the accounts that the characters give of their former selves and of Coetzee at

the time that they knew him will be framed in the light of the political discourse in South Africa.

The main images which will be discussed here will be those of the foreigner and the barbarian, in

connection to John Coetzee's Afrikaner identity. This way the ethical side of Coetzee's writing will

become visible.

Furthermore, a few comments on John Coetzee's political attitude will be analyzed, showing

that this attitude is one of felt shame and dishonor, which is one of the main parts of the confession

in the book. In connection to the problematization of the notion of confession, then, it can be shown

that his way of dealing with this feeling is to theorize about his situation. Since confession calls for

closure, as the writer Coetzee stated in an interview with David Attwell6, the final question asked in

this paper will be if and how this closure is provided in Summertime.

Chapter One: Confession and Shame

Confession

In this chapter it will be argued that it is fruitful to read Summertime as a confession, in order to

understand why the representation of John Coetzee in the novel focuses on certain aspects of him,

while leaving other important ones out (most notably, his written work). The topic of confession is

raised several times throughout the novel. The notebook fragments at the end recall John scratching

his father's famous record – arias by Regina Tebaldi, whom Jack Coetzee learned to adore during

World War II – and states his bitter remorse. The following passage expresses his longing for

confession and forgiveness:

Above all he wanted his father to forgive him. Forgive me! he wanted to say to his father. Forgive you?

Heavens, what is there to forgive? he wanted to hear his father reply. Upon which, if he could summon up the

courage, he would at last make full confession: Forgive me for deliberately and with malice afterthought

scratching your Tebaldi record. And for more besides, so much more that the recital would take all day. For

countless acts of meanness. For the meanness of heart in which those acts originated. In sum, for all I have

done since the day I was born, and with such success, to make your life a misery. [italics in the original]. (473).

After so many years, Coetzee still feels guilty for having scratched his father's record, thereby

taking one of the few thing that brought him pleasure. However, the motif of the record is not what

is actually at stake here. Rather, it is used to reflect upon a broader longing for confession and

forgiveness, forgiveness “for all I have done since the day I was born […] to make your life a

misery.” John Coetzee, it seems in this passage, is suffering under the pressure of all his actions and

6 Coetzee, John; David Attwel. Doubling the Point. Harvard College, 1992. 248.

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their consequences, from the mere fact of being alive and having an impact on the world.

The writer Coetzee is also the author of an important essay on the theme of confession in

literature. He distinguishes the mode of autobiographical writing that he calls the confession from

the memoir on the one hand and the apology on the other. The distinctive characteristic of the

confession is that it contains “an underlying motive to tell an essential truth about the self.”7

Through an analysis of Rousseau's Confessions he identifies the main problem that arises in the

process of telling this essential truth about the self. When explaining his motives behind stealing a

ribbon while being employed as a manservant and subsequently accusing the maidservant of the

theft, Rousseau might be “constructing the intention post-facto to exculpate him”.8 Coetzee

continues:

Yet on the other hand (we may imagine the autobiographer continuing), we must be careful to give the good in

us as much credit as the bad: what is it in me that might wish to minimize good intentions by labeling them

post-facto rationalizations? Yet is a question lime the last one not precisely the kind of question I would be

asking if I were trying to shield myself from the knowledge of the worst in myself? And yet...9

Quoting Paul de Man, Coetzee identifies the “truly shameful” desire in Rousseau's account of the

theft of the ribbon to be the desire to expose himself, and to win love and acceptance through this

exposure. To confess this, in its turn, opens up to a “regression to infinity: “each new stage in the

unveiling of suggests a deeper shame, a greater impossibility to reveal, and a greater satisfaction in

outwitting this possibility.””10

This endless chain of confession and self-doubt calls for closure. As Coetzee states in the

interview with David Attwell that precedes the essay in Doubling the Point, the question of closure

is also a question of power.11 He asks: “is representation to be so robbed of power by the endlessly

skeptical processes of textualization that those represented in/by the text – the feminine subject, the

colonial subject – are to have no power either?”12 He then goes on to explore the power of the body,

as that which does not speak, but that forms “a counter to the endless trials of doubt.”13 According

to Coetzee, the authority of the body can't be denied, the suffering body takes its authority for

7 Coetzee, John. “Confession and Double Thoughts: Tolstoy, Rousseau, Dostoevsky” (1995). In Coetzee, John; David Attwell. Doubling the Point. Harvard College, 1992. 251-293. 252

8 Ibid. 266.9 Ibid. 10 Ibid. 267.11 In “Confession and Double Thoughts”, Coetzee identifies grace to be able to provide the only possible closure,

through an analysis of Dostoevsky. However, this possibility cannot be considered for Summertime, as Coetzee himself is a secular thinker. This paper will therefore follow the lines of a political explanation, as initiated by Coetzee in the interview with David Attwel.

12 Coetzee, John; David Attwel. Doubling the Point. Harvard College, 1992. 248.13 Ibid.

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reasons of power.14 At the end of the next chapter, it will be shown that in Summertime it is possible

to find this kind of closure through the assertion of power by the suffering body on a narrative level.

As becomes apparent from Coetzee's definition of confession, the notion of truth takes a

prominent place in the essay. However, truth is a highly problematic notion in this context (and not

only here), since it is being obscured by the same process of confession that attempts to uncover it.

The endless questioning of the authority of a confession makes it impossible to tell which

confession is the true one, until closure is reached. Coetzee, therefore, defines the truth that he is

looking for as “something that comes in the process of writing, or comes from the process of

writing.”15 This “something” must be a truth that involves the reader as well, as the one who brings

it forth in the process of reading. At this point, however, it becomes very difficult to distinguish

truth from interpretation, since a reading is always one among many. The analysis in this paper can

be seen as one link in the chain that is the aim for the truth, but bringing forth the truth about

Coetzee can only be regarded as a distant goal. Therefore, the focus in this paper will be on the

analysis of discursive and fictional strategies in Summertime, as a tool to uncover the questioning of

authority and identify the aim at the truth embedded in the confession.

Shame

Following Martin's critique of Mr. Vincent's method, which does not include giving a an account of

the written work of the author (449), it can be concluded that it cannot be the aim of the novel to

create a just and realistic representation of John Coetzee. Therefore, an analysis of the

representation of the Coetzee in the novel can only be successful if the aspect under which this

representation is significant is taken into account. Reading Summertime as a confession proves

fruitful because of emphasis that is placed on the notion of shame. What is confessed are the deeds

and the motives for those deeds that somebody is ashamed of. This „self-conscious searching“, in

its turn, provides „a further source of shame; and so on endlessly.“16 When reading Summertime, a

long list of things to be ashamed of presents itself to the reader: John Coetzee's curious relationships

with different women, his inability to connect to his body, his bad performances as a lover, and his

theorizing about this. Furthermore, he appears as sluggishly dressed, foreign in his own country,

awkward (again) in his theorizing about the reasons for this feeling, essentialist in some parts of his

thinking. Last but not least, he is unable to take responsibility for his own father. The writer Coetzee

is clearly representing his former self under a certain aspect, which is that of the shameful parts of

14 Coetzee, John; David Attwel. Doubling the Point. Harvard College, 1992. 248.15 Ibid. 18.16 Coetzee, John. “Confession and Double Thoughts: Tolstoy, Rousseau, Dostoevsky” (1995). In Coetzee, John; David

Attwell. Doubling the Point. Harvard College, 1992. 251-293. 251.

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life.

A further reflection on the notion of shame can be found in another recent novel by Coetzee,

Diary of a Bad Year. When Anya quotes Mr. C., “Dishonor descends upon our shoulders”17, they

plunge into a discussion of the notion of dishonor or shame. According to Mr. C., “when you live in

shameful times shame descends upon you, shame descends upon everyone, and you simply have to

bear it, it is your lot and your punishment.”18 Following this citation, Mr. C. not only addresses the

shame that follows personal sins or wrong ways of behaving, but also the shame he feels he is

bearing on his shoulders because of the politically turbulent situation in which he lives. This kind of

shame cannot be excused or forgiven, “you simply have to bear it.”19 When Anya answers with the

story of her rape20, and Mr. C. insists that, even though she was in the role of the victim, a certain

kind of shame still rests upon her, the moral validity of his opinion becomes very questionable.21 He

answers her story with the pretty but commonplace phrase “no man is an island”, in reaction to

which “she [Anya] looked blank.” The irony of the passage makes clear that the critique of Mr. C's

intellectualistic opinion by contrasting it with 'simpleminded' Anya's story is a rhetorical strategy of

the novel. The question whether there are “different kinds of shame”22 is left open.

Margot provides the reader with a possible explanation of the shame that rests upon John's

shoulders in Summertime. The Coetzee family appears to view his return to South Africa as a sign

of disgrace:

John's presence on the farm is a source of unease. After years spent overseas – so many years it was concluded

that he was gone for good – he has suddenly reappeared among them under some cloud or other, some disgrace.

One story being whispered about is that he has spent time in an American jail (352).

As it appears from Margot's account, the Coetzee family does not believe the story of John's reason

for being expelled from the United States, on the basis of the image that they have created of him.

The news of John's studies in England and North America and of his work as a scientist in England

were shrugged at as mere “stories” (384) by the family, invented by his parents in order to avoid a

bad impression. Even Margot, who is closest to John and the most anxious to excuse him in front of

the family, refers to them as “untruths” (385). From the biographical information that is available

about the writer Coetzee, it is known that these stories correspond with reality.23

17 Coetzee, J.M. Diary of a Bad Year. Harvill Secker, London, 2007. 92.18 Ibid. 96.19 Ibid. 92.20 Ibid. 92-96.21 Ibid. 96. 22 Ibid. 95.23 Coetzee, John; David Attwel. Doubling the Point. Harvard College, 1992. 19; 26.

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Margot herself, as the only family member with a “soft spot” (352) for John, has a different

answer to the question of why coming back to South Africa meant disgrace for him. She confesses

to herself:

“Why is she feeling so bitter towards John […] she feels bitter because she had hoped for much from her

cousin, and he has failed her.

What had she hoped for from him?

That he would redeem the Coetzee men.

Why did she desire the redemption of the Coetzee men?

Because the Coetzee men are so slapgat [slack, spineless].

Why had she placed such high hopes in John in particular?

Because of the Coetzee men he was the one blessed with the best chance. He had a chance and he did

not make use of it. (372).

As it is phrased with a narrative focus on Margot, part of the dishonor that rests upon John

shoulders has to do with a sense of failure, of having had a chance to make something of his life in

America, but having missed it irrevocably by coming back. Since Margot is the only one of the

family who feels close to John and the narrative focus is on her, the reader is prone to assign the

largest authority to her representation of John. Through the use of she instead of I – which Mr.

Vincent merely justifies by remarking that it would look silly to use her name all the time (351) –

the distance between the narrator and the former self (she) is enlarged, while at the same time there

is a greater directness to the content of the story, adding to its credibility. At the same time, the

dramatization undertaken by Mr. Vincent and openly criticized by Margot complicates the question

of credibility, not allowing for a definitive answer. It is here that the questioning of authority of the

different representations of John Coetzee becomes especially clear.

The Structure of Summertime

Before discussing the inner structure of the novel, it has to be noted that the paratext constitutes the

first element that questions the authority of the representations offered in the book. As Justin

Neuman writes, “Our encounter with the book is highly mediated by a paratextual apparatus

involving the market potentials, press releases, reviews, and short-listings attendant on the release

of a Nobel Laureate's newest book.24 And even if a reader would not know Coetzee before starting

to read, he would still be informed by the cover that this is the book of a Nobel Prize winner, and by

the short biography that precedes the trilogy that Coetzee lives in Australia (and thus is still alive).

Therefore, the reader is prepared to read such remarks as that “Coetzee was never a popular writer”

24 Neuman, Justin. Unexpected Cosmopolitans: Media and Diaspora in J.M. Coetzee's Summertime. In Criticism Winter 2011; Vol. 53; 1. 127-136. 130.

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(235) with adequate skepticism.

Derek Atttridge, in J.M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading, analyzes both Boyhood and

Youth in terms of confession. He argues that “it is primarily Coetzee's choice of person and tense

that prevents the interminable spiraling of confession by short-circuiting it before it even gets

going.”25The use of the third person causes a distance between the narrator and the narrated

consciousness. In addition, the present tense “both heightens the immediacy of the narrated events

and 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.”26 Through this technique, the

question of the authority of the author's account of his former self is shifted to the reader. Attridge

continues: “if anyone is to take responsibility for judgments on the boy, it is the reader [sic], and the

reader is thus implicated in the ethical web spun by the work.”27 The same holds true for

Summertime, only the technique by which this effect is achieved is different.

Summertime includes many comments and judgements about the character John Coetzee

during a certain period of his life (1972-1975, when Coetzee had just returned to South Africa).

However, these are not directly voiced by the narrator, but by four women and one male colleague,

who present the reader with different and slightly contradictory perceptions of the character John

Coetzee. This technique, as the interviewer Mr. Vincent puts it, should altogether give a more

realistic, a truer, picture of Coetzee than just one perspective would do (448). The different

perspectives compete against each other, and their authority is being questioned, so that the question

about the truth of their view on the character Coetzee gets complicated. Julia, for instance, claims

that the story is rather about her life and Coetzee's part in it than the other way around (317). Sophie

asks: „Why should what I tell you about Coetzee be any more worthy than what he writes in his

own person?“ (454). All the interviewees protest against the way they fear being represented by Mr.

Vincent. Adriana asks: “Can I change the label I wear around my neck which says I was one of

Coetzee's women?” (437). Margot, when asked whether the text about her “can stand as it is”,

answers: “Not as it is, no. I want to go over it again, as you promised.” That is the end of the printed

text about her, her protest is followed by silence and nothing is altered in the preceding text. If the

interviews are read as confessions about the life of the interviewed people and their relations to

John Coetzee, their motives for giving their account of him can also be questioned. Julia, for

example, could be suspected of exhibitionism, following her claim that the story is actually about

her life and Coetzee's role in it, and taking into account her claims about being a good-looking

25 Attridge, Derek. “Confessing in the Third Person. Boyhood and Youth.” In Attridge, Derek. J.M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 2004. 138-161. 143.

26 Ibid.27 Ibid.

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young woman at the time she knew John Coetzee (313).

Mr. Vincent is an academic of debatable credibility. His method of conducting interviews

and creating a balanced picture of John Coetzee is directly questioned in the interviews. For

instance, he decides to turn the interview with Margot into a narrative which he “dramatizes [...]

here and there” (350), thereby deforming her story. Furthermore, Martin criticizes his method,

because he doesn't include Coetzee's written work (449). Mr. Vincent takes over part of the role of

the narrator by deciding what is included in the book and what not.28 In the case of Margot, he even

tells the story. While in Boyhood and Youth it is the narration providing the effect of using the

present tense and the third person, in Summertime it is Mr. Vincent. The typography of the book,

italics for Mr. Vincent and block letters for the interviewees (the other way around in the case of

Margot) minimizes the role of an abstract narrator, who would insert comments such as “he said”

and “she answered”. The effect of this designation of the narrative role to Mr. Vincent is that the

narrator can be actively addressed and openly criticized, and thereby the selective process of

narration can be reflected. The writer Coetzee disappears behind a veil of fictionalization,

constituted by the interviews, the openly criticized narrator and the fiction of his own death.

2: The Questioning of Authority

Imagology

In this chapter it will be asked what elements of confession, what possible causes for shame about

the former self can be found in Summertime. The analysis will focus on the political aspects of the

novel, which includes not only Coetzee's own deeds, but also his role as a white man of Afrikaans

descent in the South Africa of apartheid. As Sophie says: “you must remember, in those days

politics thrust its way into everything“ (462). In order to explore this question, the method of

Imagology will be used. Imagology is the critical analysis of the representation of nationality, such

as national stereotypes, in literary discourse and other forms of cultural representation. The term is

based on the notion of our mental images of the Other and of ourselves. These are defined as mental

silhouettes of the Other, who appears to be determined by the characteristics of family, group, race

etc.29 There are two main characteristics to be taken into account. First of all, imagologists are

concerned with representations as textual strategies and as a discourse; it's aim is to understand a

discourse of representation rather than a society.30 This means that in analyzing Summertime we are

28 Especially in the interview with Julia, there are traces of an abstract narrator who selects the information that is being given to the reader. For instance, in a non-fictional setting there would be no need to emphasize that Coetzee is dead (335; 432).

29 Beller, Manfred; Joep Leerssen (ed.). Imagology. The cultural construction and literary representation of national characters. A critical survey. Rodopi, Amsterdam, 2007. xiii.

30 Ibid.

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not asking what the position of white South Africans or Brazilian migrants was in the South Africa

of the 1970s, but how this position is represented in the book. The strength of literary works,

according to Beller and Leerssen, is that they “unambiguously demonstrate that national

characterizations are commonplace and hearsay rather than empirical observation or statements of

fact.”31 In this part of the theory a shift between fiction and reality can be said to take place: not

only does imagology analyze national characterizations in works of fiction, it also shows that those

characterizations, as they are commonly used in political or cultural discourse, are generally

fictional, that they are “imaginated”32.

Secondly, Sources are subjective and rhetorically schematized33, which means that the

authority of the sources has to be questioned and their subject's motives for a certain representation

have to be taken into account. The question of authority becomes especially intricate when a certain

representation or web of representations can be read as a confession or a web of confessions, as is

the case in Summertime. Furthermore, the hetero-image, which is the image of the Other, that a

character holds says something about their self-image.34

Imaginated discourse generally singles out a nation from the rest of humanity by

characterizing it as somehow different or “typical”, and implies that the person or group from

whose perspective the nation is imaginated does not have these qualities. Furthermore, a moral,

characterological or collective-psychological motive for the described national characteristics is

articulated or suggested. For instance, when Adriana describes Coetzee as lacking connection to his

body and links this to his Dutch ancestry, she suggests this is because the main occupation of the

Dutch protestants used to be “counting money with cold fingers” (423-424).

Images of Coetzee: Foreigner and Barbarian

In this section the images of the foreigner in general and the barbarian more specifically will be

discussed in relation to Summertime. The two images are closely interlinked, because the barbarian

is the image most commonly linked to somebody who is considered as a foreigner. The image of the

foreign, as Corinna Albrecht writes, “operationalizes otherness and alterity in a relational sense: The

foreign is not an objective quality of whatever is distant, strange, unknown, unfamiliar or rare but

relative vis-à-vis the observer's subjective experience or knowledge.”35 Seeing something or

31 Beller, Manfred; Joep Leerssen (ed.). Imagology. The cultural construction and literary representation of national characters. A critical survey. Rodopi, Amsterdam, 2007. xiii.

32 Ibid. xiv.33 Ibid.34 Ibid.35 Albrecht, Corinna. “Foreigner.” In Beller, Manfred; Joep Leerssen (ed.). Imagology. The cultural construction and

literary representation of national characters. A critical survey. Rodopi, Amsterdam, 2007. 326-327.

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somebody as foreign is part of a given social reality and subject to historical and cultural change.

Since individual perceptions and interpretations of reality are always connected with collective

constructions of meaning, each individual's interpretative activities depend, more or less, on

predominant models of imagination and their changing cultural and social functions (327). It is this

dependence of the imaginations on predominant models of discursive representation that will be

important in the following analysis of images in Summertime. Specific modes of imaginating the

foreign that will be relevant can be exoticism, xenophobia and ethnocentric views.

The image of the barbarian is the most frequent hetero-image that can be found in discursive

representations. It originated from the ancient Greek word for “stranger”, which received the

negative connotation of uncivilized brutes, uncouth in appearance and manners. A barbarian is a

person of savage nature, living in primitive conditions. In the context of colonialism an

anthropology of barbarism arose, in which the word also carried (or still carries) positive

connotations. The negative meaning which used to describe human races which were seen as

inferior also came to denote the 'noble savages': These were people living in primitive conditions,

who were thought to be closer to (human) nature than the civilized Europeans. This imagination of

foreign peoples was part of the European self-identification as civilized and emancipated from

nature.36

In Summertime, Martin describes the sense of being foreign that he shared with John

Coetzee: “Whatever the opposite is of native or rooted [italics in the original], that is what we felt

ourselves to be. We thought of ourselves as sojourners, temporary residents, and to that extent

without a home, without a homeland.” (442). He ascribes this “provisionality in our feelings

towards the country” to his and Coetzee's origins: “colonial and South African.”

Within his own Afrikaans family, Coetzee is also imaginated as a foreigner with barbarian

features. Margot's image of John as he arrives at Voëlfontein together with his father is the

following:

She could not help laughing when he made his arrival at the farm behind the wheel of this selfsame truck, he

with his beard and his unkempt hair and his owl-glasses, his father besides him like a mummy, stiff and

embarrassed. She wishes she could have taken a photograph. (354).

John appears to her as uncouth in appearance, with long, unkempt hair, a beard and old-fashioned

glasses. As stated above, this is one of the central characteristics of the barbarian. John's father is

attributed some characteristics of a mummy, which is something from a distant, ancient age. These

36 Beller, Manfred. “Barbarian.” In Beller, Manfred; Joep Leerssen (ed.). Imagology. The cultural construction and literary representation of national characters. A critical survey. Rodopi, Amsterdam, 2007. 266-269.

12

attributions make clear that what Margot sees is a scene altogether foreign and somewhat

uncivilized. The image is so unfamiliar and comical to her that she would have liked to take a

photograph, as one would take pictures of unfamiliar scenes in foreign countries.

Adriana's first impression of her, as he enters her apartment upon being invited for tea, is as

follows:

“He was in his early thirties, I estimated, badly dressed, with badly cut hair and a beard when he shouldn't have

worn a beard, his beard was too thin. […] he seemed ill at ease, itching to get away. He had not learned to hide

his feelings, which is the first step towards civilized manners” (406).

The way she imaginates Coetzee, as being badly dressed, having badly cut hair and a thin beard,

corresponds to the image of the barbarian as outlined above. Furthermore, she interprets his being

nervous as the incapability to hide his feelings, which she links to a lack of civility. Coetzee, in her

opinion, has not even made “the first step towards civilized manners”, which means he is the

opposite of a civilized human being – a barbarian.

Furthermore, Adriana links John's uncivilized characteristics to his Afrikaans descent. She

wants her daughter Maria Regina to learn “proper English, from an English person”, not from

somebody who “sounds like an Afrikaner” (404). Maria Regina tries to convince her that “Mr.

Coetzee is not an Afrikaner”, stating that “he has a beard” and “he writes poetry”. It is not exactly

clear why having a beard and writing poetry proof that somebody is not an Afrikaner, but to the girl

those two things seem to mean something positive, and being an Afrikaner does not. Adriana,

however, connects the sound of his name to several negative characteristics:

This Mr Coetzee sounds like an Afrikaner to me […] I never liked Afrikaners. We saw lots of them in Angola,

working in the mines or as mercenaries in the army. They treated the blacks like dirt. […] I didn't even like to

listen to the language […] I don't like the sound of him” (404).

Before she has even seen him, connects Coetzee's name to a negative image of Afrikaners, which

she has developed through earlier experiences.

As indicated in the previous paragraph, the barbarian characteristics of the Afrikaans people

are contrasted with the civilized manners of the English. Adriana expects Coetzee to come and drink

tea with them in order to prove that he is a proper English teacher (404). The tea has to be bought

especially for his visit, and Adriana only wants to drink it because it is English: “Joana brought

home some tea the day before for this guest of ours, Earl Grey tea it was called, very English but

not very nice, I wondered what we were going to do with the rest of the packet” (407). Later on in

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the interview, when Adriana asks Mr. Vincent to come back on Wednesday, she promises to give

him tea (416), which in the context of her earlier account can be understood to mean that she will

treat him in a civilized way. During Coetzee's visit to Adriana's house she even “accuses” (406) him

of not being English. Coetzee tries to put her essentialist image of the language into perspective, by

saying that “it is just one language among many”, and that he spoke English from an early age and

passed university examinations in the language (406). It only makes Adriana angry (407).

At the beginning of the interview with Martin, Mr. Vincent reads out a fragment from

Coetzee's notebooks, in which he describes his job interview at the University of Stellenbosch.

John's description of his own appearance at the beginning of the fragment is striking: “If he is not

yet Mr Sobersides, at least he no longer looks like the Wild Man of Borneo.” (439). In this sentence,

the stereotype of a neat English gentleman is directly contrasted with that of an embodiment of the

stereotype of a savage.37 Furthermore, Coetzee refers to “the British way” of conducting job

interviews, which he describes as follows: “to drop the contestants into the pitch and watch to see

what will happen”. He realizes that he will have to “reaccustom himself to British ways of doing

things, in all their brutality.” Britain is described as “a tight ship, […] crammed to the gunwales.

Dog eat dog. Dogs snarling and snapping at one another, each guarding its little territory.” (439) Yet

for the Cape, there is no other way than to clutch “what is left of British ways […] tight to its

chest”, because without that “saving connection” it would just be “a minor landing on the way to

nowhere, a place of savage idleness.” This passage explains why British manners are valued so

highly in the novel, while at the same time they are represented in an ambiguous manner. The

English set high standards for neatness, but at the same time they are described as staging

something that recalls the gladiator fights in the Roman Empire. The country is represented as a full

ship, at which the right of the strongest prevails. This, for the character John Coetzee, is the

backside of civility.

Coetzee's images of Others

John Coetzee himself is not free of essentialist imaginations of Others. His image of Adriana is a

striking example of this. When Mr. Vincent tells her that John was in love with her, she protests and

says: “... if he was in love, it was not with me, it was with some fantasy that he dreamed up and

gave my name to” (417). She describes John's image of her as “some fantasy of a Latin mistress that

he made up in his own mind” (432). Adriana is imaginated as sensuous Brazilian dancing teacher, a

woman of emotions rather than rational thinking (in contrast to John).

37 The name The Wild Man of Borneo is often used to refer to Oofty Goofty, a varieté character from San Francisco of at of the nineteenth century, who was covered in tar and horse-hair. Asbury, Herbert. The Barbary Coast. An Informal History of the San Francisco Underworld. Alfred. A. Knopf, New York, 1933. 133-135.

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Sophie sheds further light on Coetzee's stereotype of the Brazilians, when she explains:

He longed for the day when everyone on South Africa would call themselves nothing, neither African nor

European nor white nor black nor anything else, when family histories would have become so tangled and

intermixed that people would be ethnically indistinguishable, that is to say – I utter the tainted word again –

Coloured. He called that the Brazilian future. He approved of Brazil and the Brazilians. He had of course never

been to Brazil. (459).

In this description a common image of Brazil referred Brazilian notion of tropicalismo, which

denotes an “ideal of sensual and cultural hybridity transcending racial divisions” and which can be

traced back to Gilberto Freyre's Casa grande e sanzala (1933).38 This also explains the expectations

of Adriana's black students (423), and her comment: “Latin American was popular in South Africa

in those days” (403). John Coetzee, in his idealization of Adriana, might have been thinking of this

ideal, thus linking his sexual desires with the political utopianism described by Sophie (455). When

Mr. Vincent, in the interview with her, remarks that Coetzee had Brazilian friends, Sophie merely

says “He had met a few Brazilian refugees in South Africa” (460). She does not comment on

Coetzee's relation to those refugees, even when Mr. Vincent inquires whether she is talking about

“biological mixture” (460).

Sophie provides the reader with information on Coetzee's exoticist view of African people.

She says:

He saw Africa through a romantic haze. 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. […]

His philosophy ascribed to Africans the role of guardians of the truer, deeper, more primitive being of

humankind. He and I argued quite strenuously about this. What his position boiled down to, I said, was old-

fashioned Romantic primitivism. (458).

Here John Coetzee's views are immediately linked to the image of the barbarian, positively

imaginated as the “superior guardian of unspoilt simplicity and wisdom”39 by the the colonizers. As

Beller remarks, these images, even though they contain an element of self-criticism, are still

patronizing and imply a privileged position of looking at other peoples' primitivism.40 Interestingly,

Sophie links Coetzee's views to his disability to be at ease in the company of other people. She says:

“Was he at ease with black people? No. He was not at ease with people who were at ease. The ease

38 Beller, Manfred; Joep Leerssen (ed.). Imagology. The cultural construction and literary representation of national characters. A critical survey. Rodopi, Amsterdam, 2007. 222.

39 Ibid. 266.40 Ibid. 266-267.

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of others made him ill at ease. Which sent him off – in my opinion – in the wrong direction” (458).

Here the dynamics between the hetero-images and the self-images that Coetzee held becomes clear:

because he felt he lacked connection to his body, he attributed this characteristic to the Other.

The paradoxical discursive situation in which John, viewed as an Afrikaner, is imaginated as

a barbarian, while at the same time, from the standpoint of his being Afrikaner he ascribes that

image to others, can be understood when the notebook fragments at the beginning of the book are

read with a focus on their intertextual relations with Waiting for the Barbarians. On the first page of

Summertime, as a commentary to a newspaper article about a murder case committed by Afrikaans

speaking people in Botswana, John writes: “So they come out, week after week, these tales from the

borderlands” (287). In Waiting for the Barbarians, the magistrate recalls that “last year stories

began to reach us from the capital [the magistrate is at the frontier] of unrest among the barbarians”

(Coetzee 1982, 8); he is waiting for the “tremors along the frontier” to end (9). The situation in

South Africa sketched in Summertime shows similarities to that of the Empire in Waiting for the

Barbarians: In Summertime the Afrikaners as a people are criticized for seeing themselves as “alone

and friendless at the remote tip of a hostile continent”, where they “erected their fortress state and

retreated behind its walls”, afraid of being “massacred by the blacks”. The two novels both describe

this situation as a struggle for civilization from the side of the white population: “they would keep

the flame of civilization burning until the world came to its senses.” (Coetzee 2009, 289). Finally, in

both novels the 'civilized' people are planning their departure in case the situations gets too

dangerous.

As in Waiting for the Barbarians, while reading Summertime the question can be raised

which of the peoples is closer to the notion of the barbarian, the so-called 'civilized' people or the

black and colored peoples. In Waiting for the Barbarians, the barbarians pose an almost invisible

threat to the people of the Empire, and it never becomes clear whether they are really responsible

for the murdered citizens. However, Colonel Joll feels entitled to imprison, torture and murder the

people known as barbarians at his whim. In Summertime the situation is more complicated.

However, the novel does raise the topic of these paradoxical imaginations rooted in the South

African political discourse, by creating an image of the John Coetzee as a barbarian, while at the

same time not hiding the way he as Afrikaner imaginates Others.

Coetzee's Political Attitude

Being an autobiography, Summertime can be read as a self-critical book on the topic of Coetzee's

position within the discourse of South African apartheid. In this section this self-criticism will be

explored as confession and as a burden. When asked why Coetzee did not distance himself from his

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Afrikaner identity, Sophie answers: “My opinion is that under the gaze of history he felt there was

no way in which he could separate himself from the Afrikaners while retaining his self-respect, even

if that meant being associated with all that the Afrikaners were responsible for, politically” (464).

Martin, who sees himself as sharing his position within the political discourse with John,

describes their situation in the following way:

Therefore, no, I did not regard our fate as tragic, and I am sure he did not either. If anything, it was comic. His

ancestors in their way, and my ancestors in theirs, had toiled away, generation after generation, to clear a patch

of wild Africa for their descendants, and what was the fruit of all their labours? Doubt in the hearts of those

descendants about title to the land; an uneasy feeling that it belonged not to them, but, inalienably, to their

owners. (443).

John and Martin both feel they were born in a country that they feel they cannot honestly regard as

their homeland, because of the history of colonization. This explains John's ambiguous relation to

the Karoo: it is the place of the summers of his youth and he feels a strong the farm, but at the same

time he knows that his ancestors took the land from the original inhabitants, the Hottentots. He tries

to learn the Hottentot language from books, and explains to Margot that he does so in order to speak

with the death, because “who else are cast out into everlasting silence.” (364). This everlasting

silence can be read as the silence of the oppressed and murdered, who are literally robbed of their

voice. John's attempt to learn Hottentot, then, is an attempt to revive them from that silence.

The last part of the confession discussed in this paper is the question of how John deals with

the shame he feels concerning his home country. The answer to this question constitutes the last part

of the confession explored in this paper. Margot's initial reaction to John's attempt to learn

Hottentot languages from books is: “I thought languages exist so that we can communicate with

each other […] What is the point of speaking Hottentot if no one else does?” (363). Margot,

thereby, does not emphasize the political content of John's undertaking, but rather his impractical,

intellectualist take to the world.

Throughout the novel John is portrayed in an ironical way as somebody who can't refrain

from saying intellectualist things. Julia, upon getting the explanation of why the laying of the

concrete around the house in Tokai road is taking much longer than he thought, reassures him that

she often gets the decimal points wrong when dealing with numbers. John's reaction is: “Yes, but a

factor of six isn't like misplacing the decimal point. Not unless you are a Sumerian. Anyway, the

answer to your question is, it is going to take forever.” (307). Julia has lost him already. When she

tells him her name, he quotes a poem by the English poet Robert Herrick: “How sweetly flows the

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liquefaction of her clothes”41 (309). Julia's thought puts his behavior into ironic perspective: she

simply asks herself what he meant. She describes John's take to theory when dealing with human

relations best in the following passage: “Here we have a man who, in the most intimate of human

relations, cannot connect, or can connect only briefly, intermittently. Yet how did he make a living?

He made a living writing reports, expert reports, on intimate human experience” (348). When

speaking about his theory of making love in accordance with a string quintet by Schubert, she says:

“he drags a third presence into the bedroom.” (348). It is this taking to the third, the theory, that can

also be recognized in John's dealing with shame and disgrace.

The remaining question is that of closure in Summertime, of how the confession in the novel

can be brought to an end. The last of the undated notebook fragments at the end of the book shows

how John is finally forced to abandon the “third presence” and take a decision. The necessity to act

in life comes from the illness of his father, who is diagnosed with laryngeal cancer. In the interview

with Margot, the problem of John's father was already present. When they drive to Merweville in

John's truck, he tells Margot of his plans to buy a house there, for his father to spend his old days

and for himself to write (366). The family doesn't approve of the plan (381), there is talk of what

John is really going to do with the house, and it is not clear which version of the story corresponds

to reality. Now that his father takes ill, the question of his care becomes urgent and calls for a

decision.

Returning to the interview with David Attwell in Doubling the Point, it becomes clear that it

is not a coincidence that John's father has a tumor on the larynx, a disease that destroys his voice.

As in Foe, the closure in Summertime is provided by the mute, suffering body.42 While sitting at his

father's bedside, Coetzee is still in the mode of thinking of the confession. He explains his

reservation to take his father's hand by family practice and considers breaking it. But he

immediately goes on to question the truthfulness of the gesture: “If on this one extreme occasion he

were to ignore family practice and grasp his father's hand, would what that gesture implied be true?

Is his father truly loved and cherished? Is his father truly not alone?” (482). The arrival of his father

at home puts and end to this endless reasoning. Coetzee is simply left with two options, to take care

of his father or to abandon him. There is no place for theory here, no possibility to ask whether

taking care of his father would be a true gesture or not, the wound in his throat does not allow for it.

The question whether to care for his father or not is left open, yet from the perspective of the writer

Coetzee the question is primarily rhetorical.43 It must be noted that this closure takes place on a

41 Herrick, Robert. Hesperides: or the Works both Humane and Divine. Little, Brown and Company, Boston, 1856. 7842 Coetzee, John; David Attwel. Doubling the Point. Harvard College, 1992. 248.43 Neuman, Justin. Unexpected Cosmopolitans: Media and Diaspora in J.M. Coetzee's Summertime. In Criticism

Winter 2011; Vol. 53; 1. 127-136. 136.

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narrative level: it isthe narrative forces Coetzee to take a decision, and the question of whether it

was the right one will then cease to be important. Coetzee expresses this ending force with a

reference to the third presence of theory: “One or the other: there is no third way” (484).

Conclusion

In this paper it was shown that it is fruitful to read Summertime as a confession by the writer

Coetzee about his former self, since this reading is able to account for the specificity of the novel

both on the level of the structure and on that of the content of the book. On the level of the

structure, the reader is confronted with many perspectives on John Coetzee provided by different

characters with their own interests, whose authority is being questioned through the narrative itself.

On the level of the content, it was found that several characters represent Coetzee as a barbarian in

the novel, and link this image to his Afrikaner descent. The ambiguous attributions of the image of

the barbarian both to Coetzee as Afrikaner and as a foreigner to the Afrikaner community provoke

the question of 'who is the real barbarian'.

The notion of shame, which is crucial to the writer Coetzee's understanding of confession in

“Autobiography and Confession”, helped to understand the weight of the political situation that

John was born into and that he feels pressing on his shoulders. His Afrikaner descent appeared as

something that he feels foreign to, yet cannot escape. His way of dealing with that shame is to resort

to theory.

Coetzee's essentialist imaginations of other nations, most notably Brazil, could possibly be

understood as attempts to escape this identity. However, since this paper mainly focused on the

representation of Coetzee as an Afrikaner and the link that is made in the novel with the image of

the barbarian, that question could not be sufficiently answered. Another option for exploring the

content of the confession in Summertime, which could not included here, would be to ask how the

topic of migration and diaspora is explored in the book. As Justin Neuman emphasized, it is

remarkable that all of the interviewed characters used live in South Africa, but (except for Margot)

have spread across the globe at the time of the interviews.44

The main problem of the notion of confession, as the writer Coetzee defines it, is that it

stages an endless regress of “true” explanations about the self. In the novel, Coetzee deals with the

shame he feels about his political stance, which leads to the shame about his overtly intellectual

way of dealing with that shame, which in its turn is questioned, and so on into infinity. In posing the

question of closure, Coetzee shows his strength as a political writer. The only entity that can claim

44 Neuman, Justin. Unexpected Cosmopolitans: Media and Diaspora in J.M. Coetzee's Summertime. In Criticism Winter 2011; Vol. 53; 1. 127-136. 132.

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the authority to end this chain of confession is the suffering body of Coetzee's father, who loses his

voice and finally forces him to act. Though this action lies beyond the confines of the novel, there is

at least the prospect that the endless regression of confession will cease.

20

Bibliography

Asbury, Herbert. The Barbary Coast. An Informal History of the San Francisco Underworld. Alfred.

A. Knopf, New York, 1933.

Attridge, Derek. “Confessing in the Third Person. Boyhood and Youth.” In Attridge, Derek. J.M.Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 2004.138-161.

Beller, Manfred; Joep Leerssen (ed.). Imagology. The cultural construction and literaryrepresentation of national characters. A critical survey. Rodopi, Amsterdam, 2007.

Coetzee, John; David Attwel. Doubling the Point. Harvard College, 1992.

Coetzee, J.M. Diary of a Bad Year. Harvill Secker, London, 2007.

Coetzee, J.M. Summertime. In Scenes from Provincial Life. Boyhood, Youth, Summertime. PenguinBooks, 2012.

Meek, James. “All about John.” The Guardian. 05.09.2009. Web. 14.04.2013.http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/sep/05/jm-coetzee-books1?INTCMP=SRCH

Neuman, Justin. Unexpected Cosmopolitans: Media and Diaspora in J.M. Coetzee's Summertime. InCriticism Winter 2011; Vol. 53; 1. Wayne State University Press. 127-136. Access provided by FreieUniversität Berlin at 02/14/2013.

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