Summertime
JM Coetzee
Harvill Secker/Random House, 2009
R295
Talking on a topic for one minute “without repetition, hesitation or deviation” was the challenge of a 70s radio word game. Here’s a new challenge: Discuss a book by JM Coetzee avoiding words prefixed with post-, or de-, or beginning with the letter S.
The premise of Summertime, JM Coetzee’s third fictionalised autobiography, after Boyhood, and Youth, is that a biographer is interviewing five people who have interacted with fictional writer John Coetzee during the period 1972-1977. The interviews are sandwiched between a series of extracts from the late writer’s notebooks from that period. The rather concrete beginning (literally, too, as he is laying cement around the ramshackle house he shares with his widower father in Tokai, Cape Town), a comment on news of the SADF’s attack on a house in Botswana, contrasts with the notes at the end which are far more fragmentary and less certain, to the extent that John Coetzee (fictional) more or less dissolves.
There are plenty of red herrings, or levels at which Summertime could be read. Fictional John Coetzee, for example, invites the reader to consider what forces shape an individual and what capacity they have to resist them; he observes how his widower father tries to find meaning in his life; and a superficial reading might give one a cameo of a segment of Cape Town society during a particular era, through the five interviewees. And of course Summertime could be perceived as a warning to would be biographers, or a finger in the face of gossip (this fictional John Coetzee has much in common with the JM Coetzee of anecdotes that do the rounds in academic and literary circles).
But Summertime is ultimately about language, and authorship. It’s at this level that the linguist and flesh-and-blood author JM Coetzee starts to play. Puns, both large and small, pepper the discourse beginning with the “author” about whom the biography will be. The question is raised of “authorisation” with regard to the biographer’s right to write about John Coetzee (fictional). And of course his father, who is the fictional writer’s “author”, or originator, turns out to have no control over the actions of his creation (his son) when he becomes terminally ill. More than a nod to 20th century French literary theorist and philosopher Roland Barthes’s “death of the author”.
It is significant that the alienated, cold-fish fictional John Coetzee comes across as his most human, most compassionate, when he helps his overworked father, a book-keeper (geddit?), check figures in the office. Numbers being the ultimate symbol, and signifi-cance being at the heart of Nobel prize-winning author JM Coetzee.
Reinforcing this connection is that in the second set of writer’s notes, John Coetzee explains how when things take a turn for the worse and every day turns out bad, the writer tires of elaborating and instead replaces each day’s entry with a simple asterisk.
Summertime is about the way language embodies and limits. A delightful vignette early on alerts the reader to the notion that language has a will of its own. Fictional John Coetzee describes how a widow hires him, as a linguist, to reinterpret a clause in her husband’s will. He describes her frustration at his inability to make language mean what she wants it to.
In his 2003 Nobel Prize acceptance speech Coetzee spoke about Foe. He discussed the allegorical aspects of Robinson Crusoe, describing it as “the original story”, and Friday’s footprint as a sign “you are not alone”.
The underlying archetype in Summertime, though, is the Oedipal myth. He doesn’t sleep with his mother but cousin Margot is a stand-in, most closely representing his origins on his maternal side. And he does contemplate “killing” his father by neglect.
So that’s the end of the author, and this is the end of the review – and I haven’t once said semiotics, stylistics or post-deconstructionism.
SmilingSouth 
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