Birth and Death: Analyzing the Role of the Author and the Text in J.M. Coetzee’s Novels
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Coetzee’s narrators vary significantly. They are representative of binary elements that include men/women, white/colored, powerful/powerless, colonizer/colonized, vegetarian/not vegetarian and the list would forever continue. One might then question Coetzee’s purpose in including the perspectives of all these characters. This is specifically when, we as readers and critics, begin to question the validity in assigning ideas and belief systems to the literary piece based on our assumed understanding of the author’s life. As Roland Barthes states, “Writing is the neutral, composite, oblique space where our subject slips away, the negative where all identity is lost, starting with the very identity of the body writing” (Barthes 1466). Here Barthes asserts that the author and the text should be treated independently. Writing is an entity that comes to life once the initial words to entail its contents begin to unravel. Writing thus becomes the destruction of the unified consciousness. Once on paper, the writing/text takes its own course. In an attempt to extract the two main arguments in conversation, Barthes provides the main two. “The author is thought to nourish the book, which is to say that he exists before it, thinks, suffers, lives for it, is in the same relation of antecedence to his work as a father to his son” (Barthes 1468). This is to say that there is a direct and close relationship with the author, as if tearing them apart would mean that each could not function without each other. It is difficult for a child to survive without the guidance and care of his/her parents. This thus is giving the author too much credit for the direction writing takes once it is released and detached from them. Sure, if it were not for the author the piece would have never been born, however, it does not mean that the “child,” cannot be its own being. To further add to his argument, Barthes adds, “The fact is that writing can no longer designate an operation of recording, notation, representation, ‘depiction; rather it designates exactly what linguists call a performative…in which enunciation has no other content…than the act by which it is uttered” (Barthes 1468). The act of writing and producing text can be seen only as a performative act that can change and differ based on how it is being read and who is reading it. The purpose of the written text is just to be read and analyzed based on its own contents.
Coetzee: More Alive than Dead: Take in Writing
The information on Coetzee’s life is limited, and even then, critics assert that Coetzee is writing from his own experience. When interviewed about his writing, Coetzee makes no direct assertion about his connection with his writing. As the interviewer asked about the “truth” in his writing and about his work being more autobiographical than fictional, Coetzee provides a very complicated answer, but never accepts or denies the claim that they are personalized instances that reflect his life. For instance, he states, “You write because you do not know what to say…sometimes it constructs what you want or wanted to say. What it reveals (or asserts) may be quite different from what you thought…you wanted to say in the first place. That is the sense in which one can say that writing writes us. Writing shows or creates” (Beckett). Writing, from Coetzee’s point of view is a process. That is to say, the author has, in the development of the text, control over what direction the work may take. The author struggles to put in words whatever he/she attempts to project. As more words are incorporated within that piece, the more alive the piece becomes. In the end, writing becomes a product that exceeds beyond the mind of the creator and is therefore open to interpretation. Reflective of this argument, Michel Foucault argues that “the themes destined to replace the privileged position accorded the author have merely served to arrest the possibility of genuine change” (1624). Every piece is subjected to change; every new addition or change made gives birth to a new work, once again taking power over itself.
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Furthermore, Coetzee once again mentions, “Tentatively I propose: to understand the desire that drove me to write what I wrote from 1970-1990—not the novels, which are well enough equipped to perform their own interrogations, but everything else, the critical essays, the reviews, and so forth—pieces whose genres does not usually give them root to reflect on themselves” (Backett). Here, Coetzee is making reference to two pieces of writing, the first being non-fiction serves to explain and pose specific critiqes on real life occurrences. Novels, as he suggests, take on a different shape. Though some of the themes may directly address factual events, the characters are subject to interpretation, which is thus influenced by the reader’s gender, social class, geographic location, and all other factors that may affect the reader’s way of viewing the text. Roland Barthes would add that, “The reader is without history, biography, psychology; he is simply that someone who holds together a single field all the traces by which the written text is constituted” (1469). Thus, when looking at the relationship between the reader and the text, the reader allows the text to unfold and unravel in whatever way applies to the reader. The reader comes in a clean slate and is thus confronted with whatever the words in the page suggest.
Dusklands and Waiting for the Barbarians: Coetzee’s Truth or Our Truth
J.M. Coetzee’s South African background is a characteristic that leads authors to make fallacious connections with the themes in his novels. In his early novels, he is already playing with aspects of the colonizer/colonized. These do not proclaim South Africa as their primary source of inspiration, but the suffering there appears to indicate that connection. In this case, though the personal connection is not specifically made, the sufferings of a third world country are embedded. Through his literature, Coetzee is also seeking to find and define the “truth” of the suffering and chaos a group underwent. How is this truth defined and dealt with if we want to make the separation between Coetzee’s literature and the events that moved an entire country? Take for instance the novel, Dusklands. Not once is the term South Africa ever used or the locations clearly identified. The two pieces each demonstrate some form of oppression, but none detailed enough to indicate that he is speaking of the social, political and economic factors existent in just South Africa. What makes this text most complicated is that Coetzee, the author, uses his name multiple times, each time in a different setting. In the first section of the book, the narrator states, “In Coetzee I think I could even immerge myself, becoming, in the course of time, his faithful copy, with perhaps here and there and a touch of my old individuality” (Coetzee, Dusklands 31). There significant key terms in this statement include “copy” and “individuality.” Anyone who would allow themselves be guided by the say of the author would automatically assume that the novel is a representation of a specific event in his/her life. Coetzee, the author, incorporates his own name; not only his last name, but to make things even more complicated, he also includes his first name. This is in essence why he is often asked if his work is autobiographical. Barthes, here would argue that “It is language which speaks, not the author; to write is, through s prerequisite impersonality (not at all to be confused with the castrating objectivity of the realist novelist), to reach that point where only language acts, ‘performs’, and not ‘me’” (Barthes 1467). Reading as a performative act reveals that language is recognized and understood by the individual reader. The interpretation of third parties hence does not matter in the interpretation of that one single reader.
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In addition, in the second part of the novel, indications of a suffering South Africa are metaphorically illustrated through the powerless. For instance, in speaking about the Bushman, the narrator describes, “If I have a grudge against a farmer they come in the night, drive off as many head[s] as they can eat, and mutilate the rest, cut pieces out of their flesh, stab their eyes, cut the tendons of their legs. Heartless as baboons they are …the only way to treat them is like beasts” (Coetzee, Dusklands 58). The descriptions provided give evidence of the existence of power dynamics within a social organization. In the case of the apartheid, black South Africans were discriminated against and brutalized.
Also, Waiting for the Barbarians, narrates the theme of the colonizer and the colonized through the perspective of a white male. This is indicative through the Barbarian girl he comes in contact with. “The people we call Barbarians are nomads, they migrate between the lowlands and the uplands every year, that is their way of life (Coetzee, Waiting 56). As in the colonized/ colonizer structure, there exists a group who holds power over another. In this case the Barbarians, are seen as the other, the “species” that would not be put on the same level and would subsequently be categorized as the “other.” A violation of the oppressed is widely observed. In describing the Barbarian woman, the narrator describes, “But with this woman it is as if there is no interior, only a surface of which I hunt back and forth seeking entry…I behave in some ways like a lover-I undress her, I bather her, I stroke her, I sleep besides her- but it might equally well tie her to a chair and beat her, it would be no less intimate” (Coetzee, Waiting 49). The power dynamics between the narrator and the Barbarian girl are demonstrated through the two options the narrator contemplates on. The narrator fantasizes about sexually pleasing the Barbarian woman while at the same time sexually hurting her.
In this same manner, truth is seen through torture from a historical lens that may be further contextualized. In an attempt to shift from fiction to nonfiction, the powerful/powerless phenomena can provide pieces of history to demonstrate that history has a motive. In his essay, Thomas P. Crocker made a connection between the Post-September narrative and Coetzee’s novel. Crocket states that, “… regarding matters of both procedural and substantive law, the rhetoric of the exceptional situation requires officials and citizens alike to balance the necessity of state security against the demands of civil liberties” (Crocker 303). This makes reference to ordinary law, which is against torture and other acts which jeopardize the well being of the individual. When catastrophe’s occurs, however, such regulations might not remain as fixed. -September 11 resentment that uphold the individual to the belief that they are either with the country or if there is any opposition, they are terrorists. The American post-September 11 narrative was thus not entirely based on peaceful interventions of the nation state; rather, it was about seeking tranquility and feelings of safety among the citizens regardless of the prize it cost. Within this state of mind and through the substantive law, both the officials and citizens together must alternately create a balance of state security and abiding to civil liberties; thus asserting acts of exceptionalism. Crocker adds that in Waiting for the Barbarians, Coetzee, demonstrates how the, “fear of the faceless threatening enemy leads first to exceptional practices of torture—themselves deployed as if normal under the circumstances— and later to those same practices acting upon and displacing the rule of ordinary law” (Crocker 306). The laws and expectations newly accorded though violate the ordinary law, still serve to protect the country in its entirety. Are we then to say that this discourse should be compared to the contents in the novel? Crocker asserts that there is a direct link. He further states that, “This shift towards legal displacement, exemplified in Coetzee ’s narrative, provides a way of understanding the social and political structure in which everything new is simultaneously old.” There is an old expression that notes that sometimes history repeats itself because though with time come different ideals, thoughts and beliefs, they all originate from the ideals that were present before those existed. The Colonel makes reference to this when he tells, the Magistrate, “You are simply ignorant of the facts. You are living in a world of the past. You think we are dealing with small groups of peaceful nomads. In fact we are dealing with a well organized enemy” (Coetzee, Waiting 131). When the Colonel refers to the past, we can assert that he is envisioning to the point in history when the “barbarians” were a group of defenseless people who were weak and could be easily manipulated. The social and political stance as indicated by the colonel demonstrates that the “barbarians” are more prepared and organized to attack and thus more feared; one can even say that to some extent, they are respected since sometimes to be respected one has to be feared. Ultimately, however, it their eyes, they will always be savage barbarians who are at the bottom of the hierarchical ladder.
[Separation of People Continues] (Louis Theroux)
Also, in the novel, the Magistrate becomes the agent from whom the reader distinguish the new from the old rule, that is, the laws that were originally developed to sustain a governmental system and the new policies implemented with the purpose of improving the state of a particular governing institution. To illustrate, at the beginning of the novel, the magistrate was aware of his power and exercised it when separating himself and his people from the barbarians. Toward the end of the novel, however, he recognizes the savagery being done against them. He tells the Colonel, “You are the enemy, you have made the war, and you have given them all the martyrs they need-starting now but a year ago when you committed your first filthy barbarities here! History will bear me out!” (Coetzee, Waiting 131). The magistrate defies the Colonel’s orders and marks him, based on his acts and morality at the evils against the “barbarians”, as the lowest of people. He is tortured and becomes entertainment just like the Barbarians were to the Colonel and his followers. Despite this, however, as Crocket further indicates, “Even the inscription of “barbarian” is situationally dependent, as the Magistrate thinks himself ‘provoked into a reaction by the sight of one of the new barbarians usurping my desk and pawing my papers’, referring, of course, to an imperial official” (310). Though the Magistrate attempts to distance and isolate himself from the rulings of the colonel, the power differential between himself and the Barbarians is embedded within language itself. This is to say that the color on his skin, the language he adopted and his old duty automatically separated him and put him at an advantage from the Barbarians.
Given this analysis, can one then assert that the political and social indications in Coetzee’s novel transcend beyond his fictional work? A reader who bases her/his interpretation on Coetzee’s life would automatically make the connection with the apartheid in South Africa based on themes of torture, social, political and economic inequality, suffering and regret. A link to the Truth and Reconciliation Act would then also be applicable; the magistrate would thus embody those who became part of the movement and who sought to bring peace to the oppressed and themselves. The Magistrate sinned and had remorse for his sins and consequently attempted to come to peace with himself and the Barbarians by being tortured; in a sense, becoming one of them. Sure, this is a fair interpretation, but basing it solidly on Coetzee’s life not only brings about intentional fallacies that disrupt the validity of varying interpretations, since every reader’s interpretation will be influenced by different factors such as culture and geographic region, but it also limits the scope of the reading. Because the reader is given no specific location, other than that it took place in a “frontier town” under the jurisdiction of “an Empire,” this provides even more space for interpretation, given the historical accounts of many countries in the world that could narrate stories of the powerful/powerless and the colonizer/ colonized. As Foucault states, “We must locate the space left empty by the author’s disappearance, follow the distribution of gaps and breaches, and watch for the openings this disappearance uncovers (Foucault 380). In providing this ambiguity and “gaps” might be Coetzee’s way of asserting that there is no one specific nation that has any more or any less witnessed the injustices created from the separation of individuals and the effects this separation creates.
In the Heart of the Country: Feminist? Or Just Playing the Part?
While critics like Caroline Rody in her journal article, "The Mad Colonial Daughter's Revolt: J.M. Coetzee's In the Heart of the Country” argues that Coetzee’s novels are feminist in nature, there is a broader form of interpretation that should be further analyzed. Besides looking at Coetzee’s writing as a form of critiquing western beliefs of patriarchy and female submission, he is also in the same manner opening up a stage for the female voice to unravel on its own. As Fiona Probyn indicates in her article, Coetzee uses feminist discourse for strategies to reveal a form of marginalization; in doing so, the novel “adopts feminine symbols (fluidity, maternity, writing the body, silences, weaving metaphors), all of which are emphasised in the writings of difference feminists such as Hélène Cixous and Luce Irigaray, in order to suggest a space beyond the limitations posed by (phal)logocentric thinking (Probyn par 1). There is a clear distinction between the author’s beliefs and what the text is conveying to its readers. How much literary authority are we thus giving the author in adopting what the text, as its own entity, is revealing. This question can thus be further analyzed through Magda, the female character in the novel In the Heart of the Country.
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When reading the novel, we are reading through not the voice of Coetzee, the South African male white author, but through Magda, the solitary white woman who finds herself in between two narratives: the daughter of a white landowner who owns land and servants and the woman who is also oppressed by her own father and kept captive from the rest of society. Considering the apparent power dynamics, Magda then becomes the agent of critical inquiry, challenging multiple interpretations. As Probyn suggests, “Coetzee's white women narrators have fallen into roughly two schools of thought: those who see Coetzee’s mimicry of the white woman’s voice as an appropriation of otherness…and those who see the white woman’s voice as an appropriate vehicle or textual strategy for interrogating structures of power, authority and language” (Probyn par 2). Hence, Probyn suggests that the white female narrators can be either the mediator suggesting the existence of the other (the colored female characters) and also to pose that critique on inequalities produced from the hierarchical structure.
Moreover, in exploring Magda’s character, it is important to first pay attention to her role in the novel not only as narrator but also as the author of her own journal-like inserts. This gives power to her character. In her writing, she depicts the life around her and her feelings of constant disillusion in the farm. She takes us on a rollercoaster of events that are at times shadowed by fantasy and make belief. Magda, from time to time, shifts from the first to the third person, taking full control of what the reader is reading and what he/she is experiencing while processing the occurrences in the story. The reader rapidly, since the first entry, becomes entangled in a first person narrative−third person focalizer paradigm, one that provides dualistic points of view. The first person narrator allows for the narration of the events as they occur. The third person focalizer brings the reader into Magda’s consciousness and makes the reader aware of her thoughts and emotions as she narrates the story. Hence, the readers are themselves not living alongside Magda, so they can only rely on Magda to tell them her story. This adds a lot of responsibility on Magda, given she is a white woman in power (at least when compared to the servants). This might be just what causes Magda to be trapped in the paradigm between the powerful and the powerless.
As Laura Wright puts it, “Magda’s narrative is a narrative of desire, the specific desire of a white woman for language, for sex, for connection, and for salvation, within a context that repeatedly negates those desires (16). Though Magda is what any would consider a descent life given she is white, has a home, food, land and a father to care for her, her troubled character is produced by a lack of emotional ties with her father or anyone who can make her feel loved and desired. This was in part due to the disconnection between how she was perceived and how she believed others perceived her based on her race. As Wright adds, “Magda is a kind of self-proclaimed cipher who desires to be the ‘medium’, ‘neither master nor slave, neither parent nor child, but the bridge between…’ but fails for reasons directly attributable to her race and gender.” Magda attempts to disrupt the male/female narrative multiple times first by recognizing that she was as human as Ana and Hendrik and that her class status was just a form of power subjugated just in the language, the signified itself. Magda illustrated, “The land is full of melancholy spinsters like me, lost to history, blue as roaches in our ancestral homes…Wooed when we were little by our masterful fathers, we are bitter spoiled vessels, spoiled for life” (Coetzee 3). Magda’s awareness of the power ideology is informed by her existence and thus is revealed when she describes her own position. She is ascribing herself to a history she finds little connection with but yet is a part of.
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Magda further states, “I, who living among the downcast have never beheld myself in the equal regard of another’s eye, have never held another in the equal regard of mine” (Coetzee, “In the Heart” 8). Again, she challenges the power embedded in the language to demonstrate that ideology of power creates a hierarchy that becomes manifested in language, in a master-slave discourse. The novelistic forms of feminism embedded within the literature thus serve to make a critique on the disparities of power within language itself. The signifiers “white,” “slave owner, “land owner, “master,” “miss,” carry on connotations that are connected to a form of living and through the right and prohibition of people, which is essentially what the signified is. Also, Crocker’s theory on exceptionalism could be further carried along here to demonstrate that even within language and within the ideological framework of power, there are exceptions that have to be incorporated in order to assert justifications on the way people act, whether it is for the well-being of the nation state, to subscribe to a way of living or to justify their “colonizer” attempts. In this novel, for instance, Magda wants to separate herself from her social position and everything that comes with that, but at the same time, when she wants Ana and Hendrik to do something herself, she once again reclaims her position. Acknowledging that her father paid more attention to the black servant Ana than he did to her, his only daughter, further disrupted her way of looking at herself and once again makes the distinction between herself and her servants.
Magda’s character was both a tragic and heroic at the same time. It was tragic in the sense that she always spoke ill about herself and was left alone after killing her father and experiencing sexual affection from a man who didn’t love her. Even the act of rape itself was a form of affection for her. She was a heroic figure at the same time because she attempted to move beyond her historically inscribed status as a colonizer and situate herself in the same level as Hendrik and Ana; this is specifically illustrated when Magda tells Ana to call her “Magda” instead of “Miss.” Ana was unable to do so because the signifier “Miss” carried with it power and authority. This was just what Probyn suggested to demonstrate that the “use of the feminine must …be read in terms of the broader impact of the feminine as a textual strategy in the elucidation of settler postcoloniality” (Probyn par. 2). Magda is not only representative of those women who are singularly oppressed and made a minority, not so much based on their race; but rather, on the mere fact of being women under a male dominated society.
Her character is further complicated by being a representative of the ideals carried from a postcolonial era. Are we then to say that in using Magda to demonstrate these varying factors he is a feminist? This is a question that can’t be answered with a single one word answer. When Coetzee was asked to answer this question, he asserted that in his works he sees himself without authority over the roles the characters take because:
The type of authority associated with his position as a white male in South Africa is one whose authoritarian connotations he rejects and, throughout his novels, attempts to dismantle. He does not ‘see’ himself as an author who commands words (the ‘speaker’ is ‘blind’), nor necessarily as an author who has spawned considerable critical interest in the area of postcolonial, postmodern and South African literature; Coetzee is a writer who is conscious of the ways in which writing itself is inextricably bound up with power. Coetzee represents his marginality, his "writing without authority," in the characters of his white women narrators who construct "their" texts. (Probyn par. 7)
In this manner, it is evident that Coetzee himself treats his works as entities apart from himself. This once again allows more space for interpretation without only closing aspects of suppression on a single particular group.
Elizabeth Co[tzee]stello : There [S]he Goes Again
As central figure in a total of eight short stories, Elizabeth Costello has appeared over and over again in Coetzee’s novels. Because of this, many critics like David Atwell have pointed out the possible relationships between Coetzee (the author) and Elizabeth Costello (the protagonist of many of his novels and short stories). Atwell asserts that the coincidences between the author and the character are significant: “Coetzee is a vegetarian, he is interested in the novel and in the humanities in Africa and elsewhere, as well as activities in Africa. There is a parallel to be made between Costello's interest in intertextuality and Coetzee's: she has rewritten James Joyce's Molly Bloom and he has rewritten Crusoe” (qtd in Lenta 105). In doing so, however, the separation between the author and the text itself is shattered and the line that separates each is shattered. The comparisons still, however continue to be made. Margaret Lenta, for instance, points out that Costello and Cotzee are different in terms of their place of origin (he is South African and she is from Melbourne) and in terms of their sex (105). Lenta goes on to say that the purpose is just to prevent any direct connections between himself and Costello.
Critics have also suggested that Coetzee’s writing reflects on information that he wishes not to reveal with his own voice. This is not to say, however, that everything Coetzee says will be specifically linked to particular parts of his life. Sure it is fair to say that the inspirations were probably present, but the reader should not disclose the reading as Coetzee’s autobiographical account with such simplicity. Lenta further claims that:
If, when he speaks in public rather than publishing his writings, he has chosen to read accounts of fictionalized debates, it is because this particular mode suits his complex purposes, which go beyond advocacy of his views. He is not using the fictional elements within the pieces as semi-opaque screens between himself and the world, allowing his authoritative voice to be heard without exposing his face. He has preferred not to locate truth within a particular character or position in his story, as for example in Waiting for the Barbarians (1980) or Life and Times of Michael K (1983), where no one voice can be relied on to offer the only right view of events. (107)
In reflection to Lenta’s statement, one can then ask the reason why, if it is that Coetzee writes to convey specific critiques or ideas on the social, economic and political state of people writing different geographic locations, has chosen to write fiction? Why not express his writing through nonfictional accounts or articles in history journals? A possible answer to this question is that independent from what the author might be arguing, the characters gain their own voice. It is the characters making claims based on their own circumstance, location, gender, age, class, and any other characteristics that individualize a character. Elizabeth Costello, for instance, speaks of the influences in her life and how she views the arts, since she herself is an author. As an author, she writes about writing and claims that, “It is not a good idea to interrupt the narrative too often, since story telling works by lulling the reader or listener into a dreamlike state in which the time and space of the real fade away, supersede by the time and space of fiction” (Coetzee, Elizabeth 16). Though Coetzee is obviously an author and a writer, it is Costello who is referencing her own experiences in an attempt to allude and contextualize her own historical narrative.
The link between Costello and Coetzee is also made because like Coetzee, Costello is also vegetarian. The only flaw in her argument, however, is that Costello makes reference to the debate on whether or not animals have souls. To further explain this, Margaret Lenta adds that, “ Though animals have 'being,' and some have a degree of consciousness and a vestigial imagination which allows them to fear and anticipate pain, they do not have reason, which is what allows Costello to formulate arguments against cruelty to them (111). In creating ambiguity and raising questions about animals and their ability to think opened up a whole new school of thinking, animal studies. Coetzee’s purpose, independent from his own beliefs on vegetarianism, might have been just this—rather than the reader basing his/her interpretation on his life, that the reader think about some of the issues raised and think critically on what they read and how it is applicable to the life outside of the text. Furthermore, Michael Koshin makes claim to Coetzee’s writing when he says, “Coetzee's body of writing can be seen as what the Greeks called an askesis,a series of exercises designed to purge him of the impulse to take idealistic stands in the manner of an author” (Kochin 82). The author of world stature is one who writes about varying topics that influence the lives of more than one particular culture and one which addresses the concern of the human condition. In taking idealist stands, the reader apart from the author must shape his/her own ideas.
Summertime- “Autopbiography”: How Many Times Do We Have to Kill Him?
Summertime offers yet another way of analyzing the distinction between the text and the death of the author. This time, however, it becomes even more complicated, as John Coetzee is a character within the novel. Without having previously read any of the novels where Coetzee (the author) uses his own name, the likelihood for it to be referred as an autobiography is high. Throughout the novel, Mr. Vincent, who is writing about John Coetzee’s life interviews five people who at one point became part of Coetzee’s life. To add to this, the reader is also challenged to make sense of what is occurring in the novel as fragments of Coetzee’s journal are presented. Through the voices from the individuals interviewed, the reader becomes aware of the hidden pieces of information that the character Coetzee might not have otherwise revealed. This may additionally reveal that the novel was structured in such a way as to demonstrate the gaps, or thematic ruptures, existent in biographies and autobiographies of which only the good is revealed and the bad is kept secret. Also, by structuring the novel in this form, many other concepts are revealed. For one, the novel presents a reversal on female power. Each of the female characters, especially his lovers, demonstrates Coetzee not so much from a positive light. To both, he is a bad lover and ill companion. Julia, for instance, states, “But the fact is, John wasn’t made for love, wasn’t constructed that way—wasn’t constructed to fit into or being fitted into” (81) and later says, “he was not human, not fully human” (83). The women in this sense are questioning Coetzee’s (the character) ability as a man both in terms of his ability to be a compassionate soul mate and as a sexual lover. This then poses the question, if Coetzee (the author) was really writing about his life, would he allow the entire world know that he is a bad friend, lover and companion? Another important concept that develops is based on the taboo that the white man does manual labor. He refers to this taboo multiple times in the writing, particularly when he is making reference to class distinctions. Margot explains how in a trip to Merweville, after his truck broke down, he was fixing it himself and critiqued the way many whites had the hard labor done for them by saying, “Just as in India it is taboo for upper-caste people to clean up—what shall we call it?—human waste, so, in this country, if a white man touches a pickaxe or spade he at once becomes unclean” (Coetzee, Summertime 112). This observation from John makes direct reference to the social and economic distinctions that have developed through the racial separation, especially considering the geographical location of countries where people remain segregated.
[Trading Spaces] (South Africa)
Furthermore, Grant Farred added his own twist on the literal death of Coetzee (the character) by the end of the novel. To do so, he coined the term “autopbiography” to explain how the author, the central character being dialogued about by other characters through the entire novel, perishes in the end. He defines “autopbiography,” as “the critical act of taking apart autopsying —the life of the author before that life is (physically) over” (832). Farred thus attempts to make the connection between Coetzee (the author) who lives and Coetzee (the character) who dies in the end. In explicating Coetzee’s (the author) attempts, Farred proposes that the reader opens up the dead Coetzee and extracts from it what the critic might deem valid. Farred further suggests that “the autopbiography [is] an attempt to formally disenfranchise the critic in order to formally empower the Self as the only critic qualified (or, is that entitled?) to write the life and the death of the Self?” (Farred 834). This is to say that the “Self” in this case, the author Coetzee, takes full control of the piece and has ultimate say on what should be included or deleted from the text itself. In doing so, he plays with a form that will challenge and toy with the critic with the attempt of formulating big enough gaps for interpretation. If everything were told in a linear format and was provided with specifics, then the critic really would have no other duty but to take on and accept everything provided for him/her. To acknowledge the role of writer and critic, Farred further states:
We write only at the frontiers of our knowledge, at the border which separates our knowledge from our ignorance and transforms the one into the other. On the one hand, the expertise of Summertime’s John Coetzee—only he “knows” his own life—sets him against the critics; on the other hand, both autopbiographer and critic work at the “frontiers of knowledge,” a frontier we might, for the sake of convenience, construe as the time of writing, the future, when ignorance may become knowledge. (834)
Farred here is making reference to three individual entities: the author/writer, the work and the critic. The author writes what is known to him/her or what he/she attempts to challenge. The text
then based on these attempts takes on a life of its own and goes on to the hands of the critic. The critic thus plays with the text and interprets only from what is written on text, since he/she will never know what went through the author’s mind upon writing their work.
Conclusion
Who really is Coetzee and what is his role from inside and outside of his texts? As Roland Barthes stated:
A text is made of multiple writings, drawn from many cultures and entering into mutual relations of dialogue , parody, contestation, but there is one place where this multiplicity is focused and that place is the reader, not, as hitherto said, the author. The reader is the space on which all the quotations that make up writing are inscribed without any of them being lost; a text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination. (1469)
Altogether, it doesn’t matter who wrote it but what the text is trying to get at. One can read a book over and over again and each time a different interpretation might developed, so asserting specific elements of the author’s life limits the scope and level of interpretation of the reader or the critic. This is why the author and the text should be viewed as two independent entities whose duty is to serve their own purpose. This could be clearly supported by both Barthes and Foucault’s claim that the author dies when the work is born. Finally, in the words of J. M. Coetzee himself:
As for the other pieces you mention, pieces on South African society, I think they deserve a quiet death. I am afraid that at a certain stage of my career - the mid 198O's - I slipped a little too easily into the role of commentator on South African affairs. I have no talent for that kind of political/sociological journalism. To be more specific, I am too suspicious of the genre, of the vision it locks its practitioners into, to give myself wholly to it, yet I lack enough zeal to try to turn it upside down or inside out. Anyhow, I am far too bookish, far too ignorant about real people, to set myself up as interpreter, much less a judge, of the lives they live. (Attwell 103)
The importance is where it begins rather than where it ends.
