Summertime by J.M. Coetzee - a review, sort of

Coetzee’s first autobiographical work Childhood: scenes from a provincial life (1997) covered his early years as a child in rural South Africa. The second work Youth (2002), his first unhappy adult years in England.

Coetzee’s third fictionalised autobiography Summertime: scenes from provincial life (2009) covers his life between 1972 and 1977, it spans an interesting part of his life, the period when he begins to be published but before his fame or renown develops. Here Coetzee is back living with his father, a 31 year old, somewhat of a failed migrant/exile. There is a gap between Youth and Summertime, that is not addressed, this is the period in the US, in which he married and fathered two children. It is clear that Coetzee, known as an intensely private man, does not want, for the sake of his family or himself, to expose that part of his life to scrutiny.

The return to South Africa, at a time when the civil war was ongoing and due to escalate, allows him to re-enter a culture and society at the end point of a four hundred year experiment. For Coetzee the return to his homeland appears to have given him the freedom to re-appraise his life, he has always written, but now he is to become a writer. It is also the point at which he makes his move towards vegetarianism, a development into action of his growing moral outlook. He cannot take part in the political and military war going on around him, but by altering his eating habits he could at least stop some killing.

As he states in his standard third person form, from this time:

“His life project was to be gentle. Let me start again. In Dusklands you must recall how much killing there is – killing not only of human beings but of animals. Well, at about the time the book appeared, John announced to me he was becoming a vegetarian. I don’t know how long he persisted in it, but I interpreted the vegetarian move as part of a larger project of self-reformation. He had decided he was going to block cruel and violent impulses in every arena of his life – including his love life, I might say – and channel them into his writing, which as a consequence was going to become a sort of unending cathartic exercise.” (p.58-59)

Coetzee was making these personal changes, after moving back into South African society which would seemingly be a much greater challenge than if he had attempted this in either of his previous homes in Britain or the United States. Coetzee moved into the same home as his father, an Anglophile Boer maybe, but still a Boer. Boer society then as now is very much a meat eating one, in which sharing braaied Boerewors is the single most iconic activity. The eating of meat, the hunting of and casual cruelty to animals is still to this day a defining aspect of Boer culture. According to the text of Summertime, Coetzee’s initial diet with his father continued to be the norm of meat and potatoes. Later, once he has decided to become vegetarian, he is initially timid about the diet, at a first family gathering after his decision he refuses the meat option, in favour of the vegetables But does not declare his hand, saying ‘not tonight’, rather than not ever when offered meat.
It is only later that he becomes defined or defines himself as a vegetarian. This may not be too radical a step for many, but for Coetzee, who never chooses to be identified with any opinion or ‘side’ this is a major step.

Like many people who become, rather than are born vegetarian, there is an episode in childhood when the death of an animal brings the fate of animals into light. With Coetzee there is an episode highlighted where when a six year old he pulled the leg off a locust, before leaving it to its fate.

‘Do you remember’, she says, ‘how once you pulled the leg off a locust and left me to kill it? I was so cross with you.’
‘I remember it every day of my life, 'he says. ‘Every day I ask the poor thing’s forgiveness. I was just a child, I say to it, just an ignorant child who did not know better. Kaggen, I say, forgive me’
‘Kaggen?’
‘Kaggen. The name of mantis, the mantis god. But the locust will understand. In the afterworld there are no language problems. It’s like Eden all over again’. (p. 96)

That this episode has resonance for Coetzee and to his mindset is clear as he still finds it necessary to repeat and by writing atone for the crime. Writing clearly for Coetzee remains the cathartic exercise in 2009, as it was in 1974. There are in vegetarian literature a thousand reasons given in personal testimonies as to what first made people become vegetarians, including, the unexpected sight of slaughter, a connection made and with an animal later severed by slaughter, or even just the sudden satori of seeing through the absent referent that an animal lived and died for the thing on your fork. Coetzee is too much an ethicist to have been swayed by this incident alone, after all he had a whole childhood in South Africa to see violence and killing.

Coetzee in all his novels deals with violence, power and morality but he rarely or never wrote specifically on vegetarianism from his change of diet in the mid 1970s up until the publication of The Lives of Animals (1999) and the subsequently linked fictive work Elizabeth Costello (2003). He has in recent years in Australia lent his name to some animal welfare/rights groups (such as Voiceless), but he could in no way be seen or taken for an animal activist.

Coetzee writes of moral choices and the implications of acting immorally (it is gainsaid that meat eating is immoral) but he is talking about himself, there is no sense here of advocacy. The closest that Coetzee has got to advocacy is in the words given to his female character Elizabeth Costello, the aged vegetarian writer. In the eponymous novel, Costello (Coetzee) gives haltingly delivered lectures on animals that are obfuscated by fictionalised elements and attacked and derided by members of her own family. Coetzee foresees how easily taking a stand can lead to misunderstanding, animosity and derision.

Partly his failure to ‘engage’ is seemingly due to the same reason he does not publicly speak on other issues. He is not and cannot be a public intellectual, presenting his opinions via the spoken media. Coetzee has much to say but will not participate in what he sees as a political dialogue. His ideas which are complex, individual and emotionally based are only capable of being delivered by his fiction. But his fiction is powerfully resonant, As the Swedish academy who presented Coetzee with the Nobel Prize for literature in 2003 said "With intellectual honesty and density of feeling, in a prose of icy precision, you have unveiled the masks of our civilization and uncovered the topography of evil."

But it is not just his ideas that are delivered by fiction. Summertime, his autobiography is also fictionalised. Coetzee only speaks even about himself in fiction. He rarely gives public lectures and never press interviews, even when accepting his Nobel Prize rather than making a speech, as previous winners have done, he instead spoke only in so much as he read aloud a piece of fiction. Coetzee will not speak to us directly, saying I believe this, or I felt this. Summertime too relies upon fictionalised interviews with past loves, a colleague and a cousin, allowing these fictionalised interviews to intercede and to allow for the removal of Coetzee. Once he has removed himself he can be devastatingly harsh in his self criticism, notably in the reminiscences of former lovers. He even evinces some guilt for his inability to act, rather than just write, as in the sections that deal with a Portuguese dancer with whom Coetzee says he was in love. She, Coetzee writes, despised him, as a man of inaction, which he later understands was because he continued to send only love letters to her, whilst what she really needed was practical and physical help as an immigrant in a strange unwelcoming land.

Given this propensity to detach himself from the frame or to speak in allegory, it seems unfair to expect Coetzee to be a spoken ambassador for anything.
Of course, Coetzee, being a very private man, who doesn’t do media interviews, is not well known and is not what we would call a celebrity writer. He is of course an acclaimed writer, multiple award winner, and read and taught throughout the world, but he remains resolutely not a public figure. As such his use to the vegetarian movement would be limited, he is not able to forefront a public campaign, and would be unknown to the majority of the public if he did. It is not for no reason that the successful publicity campaigns used by PETA use only the most media friendly young ‘celebrities’ .

But even if presented with a public platform and the ability to deliver the spoken words, what would Coetzee call for. He has no political platform, he finds political speak offensive and has no defined set of beliefs that can be easily encapsulated. He himself recognises this political naiveté, when giving a character an opinion on what Coetzee believes (in 1970s South Africa) he writes:

“The closing down of the mines. The ploughing under of the vineyards. The disbanding of the armed forces. The abolition of the automobile. Universal vegetarianism. Poetry in the streets. That sort of thing.” (p.230)

All of the above are quite possible for individuals to personally achieve by not participating in things which do harm, and conversely by supporting that which does good. Though none clearly are political practicable. For Coetzee this is irrelevant as he is someone who chooses to stand outside of the entire political process, not being naïve enough to believe that supporting one side over another in any political system will bring about a lasting change in policy or behaviour. Coetzee speaks to individuals through his works, that is his role - as a moral force.
Coetzee could see and acknowledge that the Apartheid system in South Africa was wrong but did not convince or engage actively in its opposition. He wrote about it, but did not take sides. And even after the ‘liberation’ of South Africa he remained outside of the government and its processes. For instance his novel Disgrace (1999), about the aftermath of the end of Apartheid and an allegory on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was not seen as helpful by the ANC. The ANC for him were always just another set of different actors in a war, also engaged in attaining power through violence and politics. Given this ability to see that replacing one set of oppressors with another does not lead to manifestly better outcomes, he remained essentially and sensibly silent.

Coetzee then does not take part in the human political process, but with animals there is not a political process that can lead to their ‘winning’ and thus lead to their systematic oppression of any ‘losers’. In Coetzee’s moral universe there can only be winners when there is no longer any violence perpetrated by any thing or anyone. Vegetarianism then is a cause which Coetzee can support without any loss of moral compass. But his support is limited to speaking through his writing to individuals. But then that is the gift of all great writers, the ability to change lives through the written word. Coetzee does not need to become a personality, to do his work.