Summertime...

Despite bringing half a dozen books home with me, I did not read a page in the three days I spent in NH with my family.

Tonight I'll be reading the second novels by Mina and Theorin, but I think that tomorrow I will put them down for a moment and buy myself Coeztee's new "autobiography," Summertime. According to all the reviewers, at least, there are a lot of problems with calling this new book "autobiography" at all, not least of all the fact that several of the narrative's establishing facts are complete fictions. Not that this is the first time that Coetzee has given us this puzzle--the two autobiographical works that proceeded Summertime (Boyhood and Youth) are ostensibly autobiographical, but Coetzee has always contended that they should not be taken literally. However, the broad strokes of the first two books do largely mesh with Coetzee's own life events, and they do feel like autobiography albeit (strangely) in the third-person. In Summertime, though, Coetzee divorces himself a few more degrees from the conventions of autobiography by making up events and contexts and, more so, giving us a narrative that supposedly consists of a piece written by an unrelated biographer after the subject's death. In some ways this is a gutsy move, imagining what posterity will say of you, but in others it is quite cowardly as it spares the author the necessity of providing an honest narrative and gives him an easy excuse for the half-truths and outright fabrications he perpetrates.

So what is Coetzee doing? What is the point of a fictionalized autobiography, especially one several degrees divorced from the subject? I can only begin to answer that by relating Summertime to the things I know about the man himself. I met the real Coetzee in 2002 when I took a graduate seminar team-taught by him. I kept in touch with him over the next several years, and eventually put him on my dissertation committee in 2005. He ultimately served as second reader of the dissertation I completed in 2008. For years I made a point of emailing him in response to everything he published, whether it was a new novel or a piece in the NYRB. You might think that after all this contact I'd actually know the man, but in point of fact, I don't.

He's slippery like that: the better you think you're getting to know him, the more closed off he becomes. Which seems to be exactly what he is doing with this autobiography, turning what is ostensibly the most revealing of genres into perhaps the most concealing. I learned the hard way that Coetzee doesn't want to be a mentor, no matter how gifted or insightful the student. This was not only my own experience with the man but also an experience that I've watched two friends--both brilliant and insightful--undergo. Clearly Coetzee has always been ambivalent about the concept of autobiography--his use of the third person in the first two volumes tells us as much. But at some point something drove him to create autobiography/confession (a la Tolstoy) in the first two volumes. and perhaps this is the natural development of a mind that has grown increasingly fond of playing with narrative conventions. My point though, is that the man does not like to share personal information, thoughts, feelings, etc., and this is clearly the autobiography of one who has such a hang-up. That's one thing I know.

Another thing I know is that Coetzee, in real life and in the fictions in which he has taken on an alter ego, is morally stringent to an extreme degree. He is one of the only people I know who understands the meaning of supererogation. He holds others to immensely high standards and himself, if possible, to higher. When he writes about the ethics of vegetarianism in The Lives of Animals or Elizabeth Costello, it is not an idle point, but rather the plea of one who believes that our understanding of ethics itself should be expanded to include animals, and one who lives by that edict. But it is also the plea of one who (at least within recent memory) limited his contact with animals to the flocks of birds and so on migrating across his property. A (supposed) animal lover, in other words, without a pet. It would in no way surprise me if this man used a fictionalized autobiography to find fault with himself and his character, as he apparently does to a great extent.

Perhaps it is easier to take oneself to task for one's fictional failings than for one's very real ones, although at first glance it appears that the two may be one and the same, as when, for example Coetzee calls his character "autistic." That is an excellent metaphor, in fact; surely he is not cut out to fulfill even the barest social niceties.

So can we fault the real Coetzee for the failings of the fictionalized Coetzee if, in fact, the two possess the same underlying character, even if the life events that befall them are completely disparate? Perhaps we can. I can say without reading it that Summertime is clearly the work of one who is either pathologically modest or pathologically arrogant, perhaps to such an extent that deciding which one does not matter much. If the character of the man described therein is largely the same as the real man, than the fictionalized events become events that might have happened in a reality that might, perhaps should have, been. Perhaps Coetzee is simply too modest to give us anything other than a disparaging picture of himself, or perhaps he is simply too arrogant to give us the real, unvarnished, story. Perhaps he is no longer comfortable thinking of himself as anything but a character in his own fiction; perhaps he is just getting a jump on the inevitable biographers to come. Posterity will have its say, of course, and doubtless Coetzee will have his little laugh about posterity coming to grips with the post-modernity of this text. Those of us who've tried to know the man for real have found that it's best to glean what wisdom he is willing to give and save the puzzling over these mysteries for a kind of after-dinner drinking game that doesn't have a right answer. Maybe that's the best way to approach too--a riddle wrapped in a mystery wrapped in a drinking game for over intellectual graduate students and critics.