Alert! The first excerpt of JM Coetzee’s Summertime in the original English has appeared online at last.
BOOK SA readers will recall that parts of a Dutch translation of the work were published by the book’s Dutch publishers earlier this month – which we duly retranslated back into English courtesy Google Translate, with rather mixed results.
Like that excerpt, this one is styled as a series of “fragments”. And as in Coetzee’s previous fictionalised memoirs, Boyhood and Youth, the third-person, present-tense narration sets the mood:
It is a Saturday afternoon in winter, ritual time for the game of rugby. With his father he catches a train to Newlands in time for the 2:15 curtain-raiser. The curtain-raiser will be followed at 4:00 by the main match. After the main match they will catch a train home again.
He goes with his father to Newlands because sport—rugby in winter, cricket in summer—is the strongest surviving bond between them, and because it went through his heart like a knife, the first Saturday after his return to the country, to see his father put on his coat and without a word go off to Newlands like a lonely child.
His father has no friends. Nor has he, though for a different reason. He had friends when he was younger; but these old friends are by now dispersed all over the world, and he seems to have lost the knack, or perhaps the will, to make new ones. So he is cast back on his father, as his father is cast back on him. As they live together, so on Saturdays they take their pleasure together. That is the law of the family.
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June 29th, 2009 @20:48 #
I read this with an open mind, really, truly I did. I always hope to see what everyone else does when reading JMC. But by the time I reached the end of this, I was reaching for the razorblades. Goddess knows what the entire book would do to me. The skill is extraordinary, but oh lordie, the GLOOM.
June 29th, 2009 @21:48 #
Why razorblades? Why gloom. This excerpt is so exquisitely turned around a poignant humour, a great sense of empathy towards the fading father (the older Coetzee) and the insight the son (John) has into his own path. It captures an elegaic sense of loss and futility in the most mundane of details - a rugby match, rows of columns. That is not gloom - to understand how one's parents fade away, to want a washing away of wrongs, an atonement for unremembered sins. Surely that is not razorblade material. Behind that sadness, alongside the loneliness of men, the isolation, the inability to reach beyond the carapace of language is a yearning of connection which in this passage is expressed in the idealisation of the feminine, of that promise that Coetzee seems to see in the feminine
"For that is the chief impression he carries away from his brush with her. He calls her feminine because he has no better word: the feminine, a higher rarefaction of the female, to the point of becoming spirit. With Mrs. Noerdien, how would a man, how even would Mr. Noerdien, traverse the space from the exalted heights of the feminine to the earthly body of the female? To sleep with a being like that, to embrace such a body, to smell and taste it—what would it do to a man?
That might be fantasy but not gloom, not for razorblades. The gift of Coetzee's writing cannot be reduced to a matter of skill - of trickery. The insights are too clear, the emotion behind them too distilled. It is that that makes the writing powerful. the spareness and the lucidity. Like the blinded eye of the barbarian girl in Waiting for the Barbarians. This excerpt here made me think again of DIARY OF A BAD YEAR - a book I loved for both its simplicity and its elegance. And its strange glacial warmth.
June 30th, 2009 @00:01 #
It's like I'm missing a sense of smell or something, or there's a colour everyone else can see and I can't. I just don't get it, not even when it's this beautifully explained. I get the glacial, absolutely, but not the warmth. But then I loathed The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Lolita and The World According to Garp. Those now wishing to fire me as their editor are welcome to send kissograms.
June 30th, 2009 @08:18 #
The observation of human frailty and inadequacy are not a collusion with either the frailty or the inadequacy. Writing to the borders of language, right up to the point where language fails, might be a lament for the limits of language but it is act of solidarity, I always feel, of those borderliners who experience life and death in that place where language vanishes. We all inhabit that space sometimes. Kundera - I did my Honours thesis on him and wrote extensively on The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Kundera has been called a misogynist writer, one who celebrates womanisers and the women they transfix. But I love his writing - that observation and meticulous recording of the sexual, how enslavement to another happens in the minute details of an interaction. Lolita too - Humbert Humbert's desire surrounds us. the erotic beauty of those changeling children on the cusp of adolescence suffuses so much literature and art. To pretend it is not there by never writing it does not make it vanish. All things like the morgue, like the prison cell, like the discarded corpse. They don't go away by not being written, it just means that they lurk on the borderland of the psyche. That war of attrition that life seems to be on the body, on the heart, on relationships is what Coetzee captures so well. And the fantasy that the feminine is a site of return, of wholeness, of forgiveness, fascinates me. The persistence of hope of re-union, of love, of a return to something good that is beyond language - the woman's body, the young woman's body especially as a place of rapture and absolution - is fascinating to me. My own fantasy of connection resides somewhere else, but I also have it - it is what keeps one alive, I imagine, and writing despite the failure of connection.
June 30th, 2009 @13:18 #
Margie, this is fascinating. If you'd taught me English at UCT (pretty impossible, as we were students at the same time), my entire reading life might have been different. Almost all my lecturers on 20th-century fiction were appalling; boring or glorying in the sexism of the writers they were teaching. I fled into poetry and the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries in search of refuge. Even Shakespeare's Roman plays seemed preferable to the sneering scorn with which my lecturers and their subjects spoke of (a) women and (b) religious faith (not well received by a young feminist Catholic). I'm not sorry, as I can't imagine life without Villette, Middlemarch, every word Jane Austen wrote, the metaphysicals, Hopkins and Yeats, never mind the focus of my two dissertations (Malory and Christina Rossetti). But I wish I hadn't been pushed into that either/or space at such a tender age. Although I think I'd always favour art and literature that celebrates the triumph (rather than the failure) of connection.
June 30th, 2009 @13:35 #
John Donne is a fine example of the forensic precision of writing feeling that runs through English literature - and in Coetzee, I think. Tolstoy too and the other 19th century writers. Yeats too is so full of mourning so much of the time. I think what 20th century writers like Kafka, Becket, Kundera, Coetzee and others capture is the bleakness of a century defined by the dissolution of language and by genocide. The play of the feminine and the female in that is complex. Misogyny needs to be looked at and understood, Freud, Lacan, Derrida, Kristeva all of them trying to find the source of rupture and chaos. it is represented in and by the female body/the maternal body: the site of hope and destruction. So that Kali-spirit and the fear is not new - it is just differently organised. The twentieth century had a different economy of sexual fear to the centuries before. And just because nervous little men in tweed jackets sneer at women and faith, does not mean they should be left alone.
June 30th, 2009 @13:37 #
May I applaud you both for this eloquent and enlightening exchange.
Please continue.
June 30th, 2009 @14:24 #
The eloquence is all Margie; what I'm trying to express is bafflement. It's precisely the way that Yeats and Donne express loss and grief and cynicism that makes me love them so much -- there is flesh on the bone, or sap in the veins no matter how woody the branches. There is the promise of regeneration, redemption (now see what I wrote!) always hinted at. Whereas I found/still find Coetzee, Becket et al mechanical, somehow lacking in juice, something that ebbs and flows. Margie's response tells me that I'm wrong about the sense of connection (which I find lacking), so I went back to that extract from Summertime: to me, it's like a finely wrought piece of equipment clacking away like a metronome. To be honest, by the end of even that short piece, I was bored. Is it just a matter of aesthetics? Or do I find alienation so alienating that I can't appreciate when it's done well? Or is it that I just don't see the point?
After I wrote my last, I thought about the vast sexism (as well as the other nasties, like anti-Semitism) of the literature I immersed myself in as a student. Then I realised I was always aware of context when being taught and reading these works, whereas the florid men in corduroy slacks who held mothers and Mother Church in such contempt taught entirely acontextually. In the process, they were more dogmatic than the dogma they screamed against. Plus greats like Chaucer and Shakespeare and Malory were always straining away from misogyny, institutionalised hatred etc. I learnt from reading them, even when eyes were being put out (King Lear) whereas Lawrence, Kundera etc just left me feeling miserable and angry without understanding why.
Fascinated by Margie's take on the play of the feminine and the female, and deeply impressed by the notion that "The twentieth century had a different economy of sexual fear to the centuries before". Must go and think about this; this chimes with my theory that as (phallocratic) sexuality was glorified in the 20th century, so female sexuality came in for new forms of hatred -- i.e. the passage of the affectionate bawdy slang term "quaint" for female genitals from the 14th century to today's see-you-en-tee. Which is vicious and full of hatred (and terror). One simply can't imagine the Wife of Bath bragging in mixed company that her "belle chose is as fresshe as a rose" in anything written by Hemingway and Co.
Maybe I'm a romantic puritan at heart. Want literature not just to enlighten but uplift. I have to believe that spring will come.
June 30th, 2009 @14:37 #
Perhaps you should seek room in your heart for all seasons. Without giving up your preferences.
June 30th, 2009 @15:01 #
Richard, that's lovely -- thanks. This is waaaaay too much info, but I now wonder if my personal physiology in my youth had anything to do with it? I used to have such spectacularly bad PMS that the medicos at GSH (I was such an extreme case, they wanted to use me for research) said I fell into the 2% of the female population that was at risk of lethal psychosis. I didn't dare drive while possessed (too easy to off myself and others), and I had to be very careful what books I read, films I saw, music I listened to. Hope always had to triumph over destruction.
Now that I can more easily accommodate despair, I have a new worry: time. How will I ever read all the books I want to read, plus all the brilliant new stuff coming out the whole time? You see why revisiting Kundera tends to get shunted down the list.
Eeek. Just realised I have spent the whole day cogitating on Margie's wise words, and I am behind on half a dozen things, not least something for Louis...
June 30th, 2009 @15:20 #
That just goes to prove how much despair is chemically driven. My tragically simple philosphy is that you can make things as complicated as you like.
- You're born, you have some fun, you die.
- You're born, you have some fun, you make some choices, you die.
- You're born, you have some fun, you make some choices, you learn some things, you die.
- You're born, you have some fun, you make some choices, you learn some things, you teach some people, you die
- You're born, you have some fun, you make some choices, you learn some things, you teach some people, you change some things, you die.
I hardly ever revert to option 1, but it's nice to know it's there.
June 30th, 2009 @15:48 #
WRiting, for me, is an affirming and mad thing to do. The ordering of words in the face of chaos and the dispersal of memory, the fading of love and enthusiasm etc. But that compulsive need to tell stories, to make sense, to bear witness to the tiny things that distinguish one moment from the next, one individual from the next one is a marvel. Coetzee's spareness, his willingness to go for the detail that make up ordinary rain-coated gray lives is a gift. I suppose I grew up with his writing and it has explained things to me. I am uncertain about upliftment - Wonderbra does a good job, as does WEstern Union if one has a message to send, but I do think the times do produce the writers we need. WE might not want them, but there you go...
And CUNT is a good word. Take it. own it. Use it and it becomes your own weapon, not a weapon in the hands of someone else. I like, I suppose, stripped down prose that speaks of things as they are. I look at very dark places and it I have found that it is in the writing of them that one can humanise things a bit. Because once something is said, written, expressed then that borderland of languagelessness - the psychotic perhaps, the unconscious, is not so dark. Because you see that someone else saw that loneliness and despair and could write it in words that contain and honour. That need Coetzee has for atonement for the sin committed against the father was so moving. Who has not wished that? to beg a parent, a child, a lover for forgivness for a moment of vicious smallness, the jealousy a child feels for the independence of their parents? their separateness?
June 30th, 2009 @16:16 #
Eek. I'm with Helen on both Margie and Kundera. I.e. Margie as teacher and alchemist, extracting the essence of Coetzee. It is true.
Helen, I'm with you on Kundera and D.H. Lawrence; unsure where I stand vis-a-vis Lolita. I struggled through that book when in undergraduate, and couldn't decide. With Kundera, it's more an associated taste/ hard prejudice thing ever since I saw Lightness lying on the dashboard of a 3-series BMW way back, when it was ostensibly the car of choice for yuppies. I've read several Kundera, but I just couldn't get away from the feeling that one read Kundera if you wanted to impress people with the hip new thing - which he was back then at UCT. Give me Hrabal anytime.
As to the Coetzee extract, I dunno. I think you should read Youth before your read Summertime. It is hilarious. As Margie points out, this extract is not humourless, but there is certainly an increase in gloom compared to Youth. But I wholly take Margie's reading of the extract - it is spot on.
Helen, if I may try and re-word your take: I think there is a sense of translucence in the prose that for some readers turns the elegiac tone into something short of bloodless, but in a curious. Perhaps not a ticking clock or metronome, as you say; I think of it more as a baby gecko: it is living, it's translucent, you can see its veins, its blood. But that very translucence is kind of eerie, unreal, making you not see the blood, but rather the fact that you can see the blood. Ghostly, almost. But also, the gecko is out of place - instead of the wall that it's on, it makes one think that it is actually on the vivisectionist's table. But it also stops short, as if it promises the blood, but stops short of the incision.
There is the truism that there is no such thing as autobiography; that it is not access to the true person, the true life, etc.; that it is, itself, a form of fiction because memory reinvents, etc etc. I like to bring the writer back into the equation and say that any form of confessional writing - any writing that sets out to tell the or a story of the self, unveils and veils at the same time. That veiling is a by-product of the ostensible unveiling of an autobiographical project. Not in a deliberate fashion as wanting to hide things from public, but as part of the process, so that what is bloodless is sanguine and vice-versa. And so one gets a gecko: showing its veins, but somehow keeping them from truly showing.
June 30th, 2009 @16:39 #
Autobiography is like all stories - a selection of moments, an editing of life, a step back to observe your beautiful little gecko on the steel gurney, the stepping back of the writer to observe the life he (or she, I suppose) is writing. For me why writing can be healing (the uplifting part perhaps?) is that one can choose what to reveal and what to hide - to unveil, veil. That is its beauty, really, is that one can reveal the sin committed (the record scratched, in Coetzee's case) in order to hide a worse sin (one's birth, the usurping of the youth of your father). Like the writing of a traumatic event, the writer can control the moment. Can claim back speech, in the sense that Elaine Scarry writes about in The Body in Pain, in order to restore an order to the mad, senseless minute-after-minute-after-minute that is life.
Kundera was hip, yes. But he appealed to me in 1986 when I was writing about him because he found a way to counter a totalitarian system by writing the body, by asserting the prsence of a naked, vulnerable body - male and female into a political space that was the antithesis of the human body. The scale of the Soviet system struck me as similar to apartheid: a huge panopticon that rendered the body - naked, sexual, marked, small - into absence. there was no way to measure yourself against it - it was too big, to beauratic, to filled with hate. That is what I learned for Milan Kundera - how to bring back the disruptive, living body as a story telling device.
June 30th, 2009 @17:05 #
Margie, do you remember that 90s movie in which Mary-Louise Parker and Whoopi Goldberg sing out the word "cunt" to each other over and over? I loved it for that moment alone. Didn't know what the etiquette of using it in netspace was (have also grown nervous of attracting porn googlers ever since discovering the suspicious number of hits my commissioned piece on child rape was getting on the Womankind site...) And I suppose this takes me to the question of dark places -- the fact that I can research stuff that is truly beyond the pale, but not read about it in fiction. I insist on that wall between the real world and the world as reconstructed in art, with truth as a kind of bridge between the two. But I guard that bridge very closely.
It's extremely possible, even likely, that I'm not qualified to comment on the closer textual scrutiny you and Rustum do with such skill and intelligence -- I last read Norman Mailer, Kundera, Mailer, Joyce, John Irving, Hemingway, Lawrence and co mostly between the ages of 18 and 21, because I had to (although I read Lawrence and Hemingway earlier, in the expectation that I would enjoy them -- and was horribly disappointed, except for For Whom The Bell Tolls). I probably shouldn't judge them from a distance, no matter how authentic my aversion at that time.
But Rustum's gecko analogy (a metaphysical conceit in the true sense of the word: "a comparison more noteworthy for being striking than apt", remember?) is helpful, to me anyway, in that the vision of the beautiful little gecko on a steel gurney makes me want to seize it and return it to the garden or at least a sunny wall. How shamelessly prelapsarian I am. Margie, then I must be the classic reader who doesn't want to Go Where The Text Takes Her -- certainly in the case of Coetzee.
June 30th, 2009 @17:06 #
Margie, I hope you didn't read my diss of Kundera as a diss of your thesis matter. I did qualify it as a 'hard prejudice'
June 30th, 2009 @17:18 #
I've just remembered that I have a very good reason for "hard prejudice" against Unbearable Lightness: many moons ago, my lover was sent a copy by his ex (theirs had been an acrimonious break-up and they weren't speaking). Then it transpired that while still a couple, they had seen the movie together, and it had been The Story of Their Relationship yadda yadda yadda. I was not best pleased. I wonder how often such personal details shape our reception of texts? All the time, I would think.
June 30th, 2009 @17:32 #
Big can of worm-o-ghetti that, I suppose. That's part of my prejudice (although not a hard one) against DHL was who was recommending it. Same with music, etc. Good friends have had to suffer that prejudicial ignoring of their recommendations because of all sorts of associations. I mean, recommendations themselves, or the act of recommending may just supply some tension to tauten the chains on the drawbridge. Crazy, but, well...
June 30th, 2009 @17:34 #
No diss taken:) I had to defend it a lot then - what I was doing was looking at Eastern European literature as protest and comparing it South African protest literature. So Mister Kundera was one of many. It felt quite fun being secretly promiscuous while pretending to love the ubermiester only. most theses (that plural, what is it?) would do better for more dissing and less footnoting. Although, his way of seeing and writing has stayed with me. And being a girl in a boy's lit world. the genre I have ended up in being a case in point - writing indrag is what I feel like I do alot of the time. I picture those glam lesbian novels of the 50s - girls in suits with short hair and big guns.
June 30th, 2009 @17:45 #
Margie, your thesis (the dissing dissertation, yay) sounds v. interesting. Have been enjoying this conversation so much. More "here-I-find-the-debates-I-always-hoped-to-have-at-varsity-and-never-did". Makes me want to send this thread to WISER to see if they want to publish it. An idea or what?
June 30th, 2009 @17:47 #
See what they say, the wise ones.
June 30th, 2009 @17:59 #
Probably best to delete my bits then, or to include them as coffee stains.
June 30th, 2009 @19:31 #
But I like your bits! *thinks* perhaps I need to rephrase... the whole point is that here we get to be seriocomic (great word, not so? used by Rustum in commenting on my poems) in a way that the academy does not encourage.
July 2nd, 2009 @13:04 #
And anecdotal:
i was given Unbearable LOB by an ex - at around 8 years of our now accumulated 15. inside he wrote our first relationship - 1995 - 1997, Ex-Boyfriend(insert name).
Thnk u vvvv much for this read/feed, better than textbooks etc etc - i haven't been studying this year and was missing discussions like this - tho, thru UNISA one lands up having them alone, late at night, a few hours before the exam.
July 31st, 2009 @15:29 #
I've been waiting for a discussion like this since I joined the site a week or so ago. This is enriching. Humbling too, makes me want retract (where's the recall button?) a post I wrote on Disgrace that was intended to be, well, critical, and ended up I think simply aggressive (and wanting, by the standards of such schooled writing). Suffice to say I'm consoled that my week long remorse is surely trifling by comparison to the twenty year old remorse of Coetzee's latest creation.
My allegiance is (intuitively) with Margie's criticism, though I admire Helen's sobering comments for us Coetzee enthusiasts.