J.M. Coetzee and the Power of Narrative By Gillian Dooley

There is some argument about whether Boyhood (1997) and Youth (2002) are in fact autobiographical. Boyhood bears the subtitle A Memoir in several editions, while others are labeled Scenes from Provincial Life, and the New York publisher's press release describes the book as “a revealing and moving account of his childhood in South Africa” (Slovak). The first U.S. edition of Youth is subtitled Scenes from Provincial Life II to match Boyhood, but the British edition and other subsequent editions have no subtitle, as if Coetzee wants to withdraw his identification with the “John Coetzee” who is the main character in Youth: the blurb in the first British edition gives nothing away, guardedly talking about “the narrator of Youth, a student in the South Africa of the 1950s.”¹ It is notable that Youth ends in 1964 with John unmarried, while Coetzee married in 1963 (The Nobel Foundation). Summertime, the third in the “Scenes from Provincial Life” series, confuses the picture even further. The famous writer John Coetzee is dead, and a biographer who never met him is gathering information from various sources. There is clearly one major fictional element here, and there are sure to be many others. There is a somewhat similar problem with Diary of a Bad Year, which concerns an elderly, world-famous South African writer with the initials J. C. who has recently migrated to Australia. In this case, there are several definite clues to distinguish the character J. C. from J. M. Coetzee: his age, for example—seventy-two in 2005, while Coetzee turned sixty-five that year—and the fact that he lives in Sydney rather than Adelaide. However, as Dominic Head suggests, the memoirs “enrich our understanding of the author's life—or, at least his chosen self-projection.”² Boyhood, Youth, and Summertime all follow closely the known history of Coetzee's life; date of birth (though not of marriage or death), education, and so on all correspond, and one could be forgiven for assuming that a memoir, even if it is fictionalized, by a novelist of international stature must be intended to some extent as an account of his development as a novelist.

What we see emerging in Boyhood is a consciousness that questions everything and, while admitting allegiance where it is absolutely unavoidable, to his mother, for example, it does so grudgingly and with