Boyhood differs from JM Coetzees novels, writes Shaun de Waal
JM Coetzees new book, Boyhood: Scenes from Provincial Life, is a memoir of his growing up in Worcester and Cape Town in the 1940s and early 1950s, but it is written in the third person. The boy is named only once, and indirectly; otherwise, he is he only, yet so tight is Coetzees focus that no confusion is possible.
The device is apt. How many people, looking back 50 years, speaking of a self of half a century ago, can use I without feeling, to some degree, that it means a different person? Many autobiographies are precisely about the mutations of that I over time, are attempts to gather all those instances of I into one coherent whole.
Never mind the potential linguistic slippages of the first-person singular, in fiction or non-fiction, as traced by Roland Barthes and others. The I who writes is not the same as the I who is written, and Coetzee (who, as David Attwell put it, has long been engaged as a writer with the question of the selfs presence to the self) appears to be acknowledging this.
At the same time, the use of the third person admits a certain gap between author and character, a novelistic space in which each has a little more room to manoeuvre. He can see himself, as it were, from the outside.
Yet the sense of detachment thus provided is balanced by Coetzees telling of the story in the present tense. On the simplest level, this provides the events related with a sense of immediacy (sometimes a childlike simplicity), but it also has the effect of a kind of suspension the story of this boy and his family has not been placed at the arms length of the past tense and made historical, but is constantly in the process of becoming.
That impression is reinforced by the uncertain ending, one which explicitly asks questions the book (and Coetzees other works) can answer only implicitly.
Boyhood is a touching book, emotionally resonant in a way that Coetzees fiction does not always allow itself to be. A complaint about his novels (almost never seen in reviews, but often heard in conversation) is that they are cold, which has partly to do with their intellectual qualities and philosopical grapplings, partly to do with their understated narrative style and refusal to manipulate the reader.
Both those elements are at play in Boyhood, and in prose of coolly limpid beauty. But the devices of design and patterning available to the novelist are not so readily available to the memoirist who is being scrupulous with facts, and Coetzee is nothing if not scrupulous. Imagination is constrained; meaning and motif must emerge from the material in the way they seep from life itself.
In that respect, Boyhood is likely to be a greater commercial success than most of Coetzees novels have been it is less intimidating, less open to multiple interpretations, than his fiction. It will be easy to read as a narrative which is its own meaning, a story for its own sake. And, of course, there is the attraction of a true story, a glimpse into the psyche of the artist as a young man.
Yet there are complexities in what can be read as a narrative of identity-formation, or at least an account of a crucial part of that open-ended process. Coetzee shows from the start how deeply social and political that formation is: from the first chapter (opposite page), the boy is caught in a web of ambivalent allegiances, as he will continue to be throughout the book. It is not just a matter of mother vs father in the Freudian crucible of family, but of English vs Afrikaans, United Party vs Nats, even the Russians vs the Americans.
In one passage, the young John must choose at school between religious affiliations: Are you a Christian or a Roman Catholic or a Jew? he is asked by an impatient teacher. From this multiple-choice quiz, the boy from an atheist family picks Roman Catholic, and is thereafter exiled (to his relief) from the schools official Protestant devotions. But now he has to deal with more than occasional persecution by Protestant bullies he also arouses the suspicion of his fellow exiles, the Catholic boys who want to know why he is absent from catechism.
Johns concomitant fear of exposure is one of many fears he suffers. He is different, and knows it, an outsider separated from others by what he feels keenly sometimes simply guilt, shame, embarrassment. Yet he doesnt want to be normal, to give up the undefined sense of his own specialness, any more than he wants to relinquish his position at the top of the class.
And, paradoxically, part of that sense of specialness is the very way his allegiances are split, his capacity for finding in himself more complex loyalties than those possessed by others. He may be terrified of the violent Afrikaans boys, and an Afrikaans life in general like being sent to prison, a life without privacy but he is able to love the language and to despise Anglophone snobbery toward it. Others may lift their eyebrows and superciliously mispronounce Afrikaans words, but he makes no concessions, even among the English: he brings out the Afrikaans words as they ought to be brought out, with all their hard consonants and difficult vowels.
This stubborn, sensitive boy is capable, too, of a sharp clarity of ethical vision, judging National Party gerrymandering with a delightful metaphor extrapolated from cricket, a sport to which he is devoted: He does not see the point in having elections if the party that wins can change the rules. It is like the batsman deciding who may and who may not bowl.
In such sentences one sees the boy as a foreshadowing of the man and the writer he will become.
– Shaun de Waals collection of short stories, These Things Happen, is published by Donker