![Sample our Language & Literature journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5941/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Language-Literature.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
With the publication of The Death of Jesus (2019), following The Childhood of Jesus (2013) and The Schooldays of Jesus (2016), J. M. Coetzee's Jesus novels are a completed trilogy. Baffling to reviewers and critics, attempts have been made to situate the Jesus novels in Coetzee's previous oeuvre, and to establish continuity in the author's literary thinking and style. This essay highlights Coetzee's identification with Jesus in Summertime (2009), the last instalment in the author's autobiographical trilogy, where an author named John Coetzee is already dead. The essay reads Summertime as an elaborate ‘posthumous’ confessional design meant by Coetzee to evade the obstacles of secular confession and to enable (fictional) redemption and absolution. Coetzee's invocation of Jesus as ‘a guide’ in turn serves to code authorial death and resurrection as a final act of sacrifice and taking responsibility. Thus providing a sense of finality to Coetzee's autobiographical trilogy, the confessional design of Summertime prepares for a new phase in the author's writing, in the name of Jesus.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 As Jennifer Rutherford and Anthony Uhlmann put it, when ‘The Childhood of Jesus was published in 2013, it was met with an initially puzzled reception’ (Rutherford and Uhlmann Citation2017, 2). Yoshiki Tajiri for example notes how ‘the deceptively obvious allegorical mode of The Childhood of Jesus leads us nowhere’ (Tajiri Citation2016, 73). Ron Charles remarks: ‘Although The Childhood of Jesus and The Schooldays of Jesus are presented as allegories, they never yield any interesting allegorical meaning. The result is a story that suggests more profundity than it ever incarnates’ (Charles Citation2017, n. p.). Theo Tait writes on The Childhood of Jesus as ‘a very mysterious novel. I finished it […] without any clear sense of what it was actually about’ (Tait Citation2013, n. p.). Tait also notes how The Schooldays of Jesus ‘lacks the memorable invented worlds, the suggestiveness and partial decipherability of Coetzee's early allegories’ (Tait Citation2016, 31).
2 Coetzee has previously stated in an interview with David Attwell that he does not intend to write a third autobiographical volume, following Youth: ‘Will there be a third volume? My feeling at present is, no. Enough is enough’ (Coetzee Citation2006, 215–6). This reluctance, and the fact that following Summertime, the three volumes were published together as Scenes from Provincial Life (2011) suggest that Coetzee meant it to be final this time.
3 Müller also states that: ‘Summertime as a whole deviates far more from the veritable biographical record than the first memoirs and thereby represents the most elusive, yet also the most powerful, of the set of autre-biographies’ (Müller Citation2016, 207).
4 Truth-telling, just like storytelling, is a literary question, and not (only) a question about what truth is; as Coetzee puts it in an early notebook on Waiting for the Barbarians: ‘I have no interest in telling stories; it is the process of storytelling that interests me’ (qtd. in Sheehan Citation2016, 454).
5 Derek Attridge is perhaps the first critic to read Coetzee's autobiographical writing along with Coetzee's theorising of autobiography, in his ‘J. M. Coetzee's Boyhood, Confession, and Truth’ (Citation1999).
6 Our ‘responsibility toward the other’ (Attridge Citation2004, xii) is a major concern in Coetzee's works, and is often approached through the prism of Levinasian ethics of alterity, for example by Stefan Helgesson (Citation2004), Derek Attridge (Citation2004), and Mike Marais (Citation2009).
7 I am not making claims on Coetzee's religious or spiritual experience beyond possibilities in his writing.
8 Nothing can save, of course, better than willed or willing death. And no relation is more reminiscent of this notion or tradition than a father-son relationship, whose ‘logic of sacrificial responsibility’ requires, as Derrida remarks in The Gift of Death, the ‘exclusion or sacrifice of woman’ (Derrida Citation1995, 76). Perhaps therefore Coetzee's wife and mother, who were both an autobiographical truth in the period of time Summertime covers in Coetzee's life, are absent or ‘sacrificed’ in the book. Julia in Summertime refers to John's father as ‘a widower and his celibate son’ (37), in spite of the fact that at the time she knew Coetzee, the 1970s, he was already married and his mother was still alive (see Cardoen Citation2014, 100).
9 Coetzee's ‘trademark fictional mode’ (Head Citation2009, 3) in his autobiographical works is well known, and these works are usually described as autobiographical fiction (Lenta Citation2003, 157), ‘fictional accounts’ (Poyner Citation2009, 169), or even novels (Attridge Citation2004, 156). Though these works are often marketed as memoirs in the UK, they are received as fiction in the US. There are also obvious discrepancies between Coetzee's life in and outside of these autobiographical writings. As Derek Attridge simply puts it, Coetzee ‘has woven fictional episodes into a framework of autobiography’ (Attridge Citation2004, 160). Attridge writes for example on how Coetzee has changed historical names in Boyhood (Attridge Citation2004, 149) and how in Youth the protagonist is single all along despite the fact that Coetzee got married and had children in that period of his life (Attridge Citation2004, 160). This latter point also obviously applies to Summertime, in addition to the fact that in Summertime, contrary to historical reality, Coetzee is imagined to be still single and living with his father; see Patrick Denman Flanery's ‘J. M. Coetzee's Autre-biography’ (Flanery Citation2009) for details about differences between Coetzee the author and John Coetzee, the dead author in Summertime.
10 It remains important to remember how tenuous or problematic such distinctions are for Coetzee. ‘Fiction of the truth’ to Coetzee is that which autobiography can at best be (Coetzee Citation1999). In Doubling the Point, Coetzee states too that autobiographical writing yields ‘fictions of the self,’ or ‘versions of the self,’ where none is truer than the other (Coetzee Citation1992, 17).
11 This may tie in with Coetzee's distinction between two kinds of truth, one true to facts, and another ‘‘higher’ truth’ that may be revealed through the act of writing itself (Coetzee Citation1992, 17).
12 This radicalises the active role of readers in Coetzee's fiction in general; as Mike Marais puts it: ‘To read a Coetzee novel is to supplement an originary lack in the writing’ (Marais Citation2011, 103).
13 In Summertime, characters repeatedly draw conclusions on Coetzee's life based on his fiction; for example, Julia (80–1) and Vincent (215).
14 Boyhood and Youth of course abound in revelations of shameful experiences, but the very titles of these two books allow the acceptance, and even the necessity, of such revelations.
15 Critics repeatedly highlight and praise Coetzee's honesty and frankness in both Boyhood and Youth (see Kannemeyer Citation2012, 507–509). The form of Summertime consummates this honesty, and the book communicates what Angela Müller describes as ‘anti-heroic posthumous defamations’ (Müller Citation2016, 223).
16 This lack of clarity about what exactly to be confessed, and whether it is worth it in the first place, reflects the contrast between religious confession, in which the penitent, as Coetzee writes in his exchanges with psychoanalyst Arabella Kurtz, has a ready ‘code’ that ‘relies on a well-worn catalogue of sins,’ and confession for ‘post-religious people,’ where the penitent ‘feels there is something wrong but has no idea what it is and certainly doesn't have a neat term for it’ (Coetzee and Kurtz Citation2015, 59).
17 In a note in the draft manuscript of Boyhood, Coetzee wrote of Barthes as the ‘one who has been there before and written the kind of autobiography I want to write’ (Sheehan Citation2016, 458).
18 In Countervoices (Citation2009), Carrol Clarkson has also explored links between Coetzee's and Barthes’ writings. She shows for example how Barthes’ notion of the ‘death of the author’ has occurred to ‘the John of Youth’ while reflecting on how the invention of computers could possibly affect art and alienate the author's heart and feelings (Clarkson Citation2009, 11). Needless to say, the ‘death of the author’ can perfectly describe the ruse of the death of John Coetzee in Summertime as well; as Angela Müller puts it: ‘Coetzee's fictional suicide in Summertime reads like a symbolic Barthesian dramatization of the insignificance of the author – a gesture that emphasizes the centrality of the work over the persona of the writer’ (Müller Citation2016, 210). See also Donald Powers’ ‘Beyond the Death of the Author’ (Powers Citation2016), for further links between Summertime and Barthes’ works.
19 Readers’ capacity to construct for themselves truths of fictions is an extension of the common absence in Coetzee's works of ‘ethical guidance’ and that, as Derek Attridge puts it, ‘we are left to judge for ourselves the actions and decisions of the characters’ (Attridge Citation2004, 7).
20 About the content of which we are given glimpses, thanks to Adriana's ‘good memory’ (176). The irony that haunts this phrase, however, coupled with Adriana's uninvited assertions of her lack of interest in John, should raise our doubts.
21 Although the sections of Summertime are titled with the first names of the interviewees, the interviews themselves, and immediately after these titles, start with last names. Last names are invariably used throughout too in Vincent's exchanges with the interviewees. So, while Coetzee knew Julia, Margot, Adriana, and Sophie, Vincent interviews Dr Frankl, Mrs Jonker, Senhora Nascimento, and Mme Denoël, to whom he is always Mr Vincent.
22 In Youth, and while in London, Coetzee has already considered a similar change of selves: ‘to be rid of his old self and revealed in his new, true, passionate self’ (Coetzee Citation2002, 116).
23 This is what the book itself suggests to us. At both ends of it, questions about the response or responsibility of the dead Coetzee are raised, in the beginning about his response to atrocities reported in Sunday Times (6), and at the end about his responsibility for nursing his father (265–6). In both cases, answers are deferred, and, by the alibi of death, the dead Coetzee evades responsibility, which is therefore transferred to the living one. Since the dead Coetzee already contemplated Jesus as a guide, it can be said that the purpose of these intimations of responsibility is that they act as ‘types,’ like in Biblical typology, to be fulfilled in and by the living Coetzee, who both supersedes and justifies the old version of himself.
24 ‘The self,’ writes Levinas, ‘is a sub-jectum; it is under the weight of the universe, responsible for everything’ (Levinas Citation2006, 116).
25 As Angela Müller also notes, the ‘appraisals of John’ by the interviewees ‘share a conception of John as someone whose relationship to South Africa and its people is complicated and burdened’ (Müller Citation2016, 216).
26 In Diary of a Bad Year (Citation2007), the book published before Summertime, Coetzee has registered a lasting sense of shame and complicity as a white South African: ‘The generation of white South Africans to which I belong, and the next generation, and perhaps the one after that too, will go bowed under the shame of the crimes that were committed in their name’ (Coetzee Citation2007, 44). In Doubling the Point, Coetzee reflects: ‘Is it in my power to withdraw from the gang? I think not [… .] I would regard it as morally questionable to write something like the second part of Dusklands — a fiction, note — from a position that is not historically complicit’ (Coetzee Citation1992, 343).
27 Coetzee's position is similar to that of his father, who in the first entry of Summertime is shown to assume a position of unconcern or irresponsibility as regards the atrocities reported in Sunday Times (the murder of a South African refugee family in Botswana in 1972, apparently committed, though officially denied, by the South African Defence Force). The ‘father shrugs,’ but he does so only because for these atrocities he seems to ignore he ‘can find no form of words spacious enough to cover his distaste’ (4). That Coetzee is like his father in this is suggested at the end of the entry: ‘To be expanded on: his father's response to the times as compared to his own; their differences, their (overriding) similarities’ (6).
28 It is noteworthy that Coetzee the child, as we know from Boyhood, simply claims to be Catholic at school, because he does not want to belong to the majority of students.
29 In a reading he gave in Cape Town, Coetzee stated: ‘I had hoped that the book would appear with a blank cover and a blank title page, so that only after the last page had been read would the reader meet the title, namely The Childhood of Jesus. But in the publishing industry as it is at present, that is not allowed’ (Farago Citation2013, n. p.)
30 In Youth, Coetzee seems to have anticipated that end. While in London, the young Coetzee feels ashamed at being a white South African: ‘South Africa is like an albatross around his neck. He wants it removed, he does not care how, so that he can begin to breathe’ (Coetzee Citation2002, 101). Again, he complains in the third person: ‘South Africa is a wound within him. How much longer before the wound stops bleeding? How much longer will he have to grit his teeth and endure before he is able to say, ‘Once upon a time I used to live in South Africa but now I live in England’?’ (Coetzee Citation2002, 116).
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Sherif H. Ismail
Sherif H. Ismail is a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory, University of Pennsylvania. His research interests include life writing, literature and the environment, postcolonial studies, and the contemporary Anglophone novel.