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• W2766143602 abstract "Coetzee's Summertime as a Metaleptic Conversation Alexandra Effe (bio) The stories we tell about ourselves may not be true, but they are all we have. J. M. Coetzee, The Good Story Dialogue and Truth in Autobiography, History, and Novels Summertime is the third and most experimental volume in J. M. Coetzee's autobiographical trilogy Scenes from Provincial Life.1 This autobiographical novel is divided into sections that comprise transcriptions of interviews conducted by the fictional biographer Mr Vincent with acquaintances of the late John Coetzee, a fictional surrogate for J. M. Coetzee. These transcriptions appear in different stages of revision, translation, and narrativization. Notebook entries, allegedly written by John himself, frame the interview sections. The result is a highly fragmented self-representation that continuously transgresses the boundary between real world and storyworld. Summertime's status as autobiography is contentious since the text explicitly links the protagonist to the author but also foregrounds its fictional nature. While, as Coetzee says, all writing is autobiography (Doubling the Point 391), Summertime is autobiographical to a higher degree than most novels; at the same time, following Coetzee's dictum that [a]ll autobiography is storytelling (391), Summertime is [End Page 252] more novelistic than most autobiography in that it distinguishes between author and character, and between world and storyworld. In Summertime, these levels are linked but remain distinct. The narratological term for the transgression of boundaries between world and storyworld, or between distinct narrative levels in general, is metalepsis, a narrative strategy that often serves to highlight the effects of narrative or interpretative acts. In Summertime, metalepsis foregrounds the responsibilities such acts of narration and interpretation entail and shows that our understanding of self and other depends on stories we tell or that are told about us—stories that may in important respects differ from the real world. In other words, the author to some extent effects what is narrated even as the people and events he writes about exist on a level outside the narrative. Through metalepsis, fictionality can be employed in the service of truth. Coetzee's text signals its fictional status through differences between author and character. Most blatantly, the character John Coetzee is dead while the author J. M. Coetzee is alive and writing. Summertime however also signals factuality through using the author's name and biographical details, and through references to actual events and places. Through metalepsis, the fictional world serves to make statements about the real world. Yet the difference that remains between world and storyworld renders the truth-status of these statements uncertain. Thus the novel strives for, but acknowledges that it must fall short of, what Coetzee himself calls the one and only truth (The Good Story 68). Summertime tells a story about Coetzee as an emerging writer in South Africa in the 1970s. We learn about his surrogate John's feelings of shame at being a white South African, about his attempts to respond to the country's socio-political situation, and about his and his family's doubts about the adequacy of a response in the form of literature. Coetzee's employment of metalepsis should be seen in the context of these doubts. His own comments on autobiography and on the notion of truth elucidate why his employment of metalepsis amounts to an ethics of writing and suggest that this ethics is a consequence of the challenges he sees himself facing as a white South-African writer. Commenting on the inaccessibility of truth in his 1984 inaugural lecture at the University of Cape Town and in a more recent publication, The Good Story, Coetzee compares the truth-orientation of autobiography to [End Page 253] the truth-orientation of history. Autobiography, he states, is usually thought of not as a kind of fiction-writing but as a kind of history-writing with the same allegiance to the truth as history has (Truth in Autobiography 1). In autobiography you tell the story of yourself as truthfully as you can, or as truthfully as you can bear to (1). Awareness of the fact that the truth one tells about oneself always comes with such a qualification is, according to Coetzee, a common postmodern situation and an..." @default.
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• W2766143602 title "Coetzee's Summertime as a Metaleptic Conversation" @default.
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