Borges, Cervantes and Coetzee, or the fictionalisation of the author

Abstract

One of the most habitual metafictional devices employed by J.M. Coetzee is the figure or persona of the author, together with the autobiographical use of the third person and the present tense, the critical reflection on the concepts of ‘autrebiography’ and ‘confession’, or references to alter egos such as ‘John’, ‘John Coetzee’ or ‘Señor C.’ The aim of this article is to discuss Coetzee’s process of fictionalisation of the writer in the light of Borges’s use of the persona of ‘Borges’ or ‘the blind poet’, and of Cervantes’s use of Benengeli in Don Quixote. My basic contention is that Coetzee is echoing and recreating Cervantes’s, and especially Borges’s, self-projections, wondering, as he put it in Stranger Shores, ‘which Borges [Coetzee] is real, which is the other in the mirror’.

Keywords:

• Metafiction
• fictionalisation
• literary persona
• Coetzee
• Borges
• Cervantes
• Benengeli
• Funes