The self-effacing autobiographer: recasting life writing in Summertime by J.M. Coetzee

In Summertime (2009) J.M. Coetzee brings to an end his autobiographical trilogy with a coup de theatre, staging his own death in what must be received as a brilliant piece of autofiction, which in turn reorients the reading of the first two volumes, Boyhood (1997) and Youth (2002). In fact, those works seemed to conform to traditional autobiographical conventions as they featured two very conventional titles, a retrospective look, a chronological sequence of events, a balance between factual account and introspection, and a consistent focus on the same subject. What is strange, though, is that the subject whose life is being recounted is never referred to as an ‘I’ and the narrative tense is the present; and what is lacking, though, is the author’s commitment to tell ‘the truth’ about himself - a commitment that a postmodern, postcolonial and poststructuralist subject simply cannot undertake, as the foundational assumptions of modern autobiography (self-transparent subjectivity, sincerity of one’s motives, fidelity in representation) have been swept away by several waves of structuralisms. The autobiographer is, by necessity, a fictioneer; and the only way to be sincere and truthful is to openly acknowledge these limits – which is an issue Coetzee has dealt with implicitly and explicitly since the beginning of his career as a writer. Yet, what astonishes in Summertime is certainly not Coetzee’s acknowledgment of these constraints but rather the deliberate interpolation of verifiable events of his life and the fabrication of testimonies whose only purpose seems to create a disagreeable image of himself. The book is in fact the ostensible rough-draft of a biographical project by a certain Mr. Vincent who embarks on a series of interviews with people (mostly women) who were close to young Coetzee. Their accounts are manifestly biased, and the biographer’s goal of disclosing the literary celebrity’s intimate life borders on gossiping. The result is that the reader closes the book with the perception of knowing even less on Coetzee than what he knew when he first picked it up. However, what at first sight may seem a complex device aimed at exposing the fallacy of any naïve autobiographical effort, discloses at further inspection a pars construens, developing an earnest reflection on the alleged moral authority of the artist.