Abstract
Anne Haeming
COETZEE AND THE PROBLEM OF AUTHENTICITY: Diaries, Chronicles, Records as Index-Simulations
Edited, with an Afterword, by S.J. Coetzee
Translated by J.M. Coetzee1
J.M. Coetzee is a master when it comes to simultaneously highlighting and concealing the
made-ness of things, be it his own texts, or, within his works, constructions, ideologies or
objects. As the quote suggests, the author draws attention to the quality of his texts as
constructs and thus emphasizes the existence of an originator. The author is dead, Barthes
famously proclaimed – but: long live the author. While the text may be robbed of the author
as origin in the sense of a meaning generating power over the text2, what remains in the
focus of Coetzee’s work is the instance that causes the (textual) artifact to emerge: the
author as auctor. The author falls back on self-referential narrative devices to stage the
intermediary realm between fact and fiction: diaries, chronicles, records and editorial frames
pervade his work. Be it the prologues and prefaces, the dates and captions, the epilogues
and appendices – they all function as indexical signs, referring, according to the semiotics of
Charles S. Peirce, to an existent referent.3 Especially South Africa in its ongoing state of
nascent emergence is in search of “representational fixity”4– as the work of the so-called
Truth Commission suggests. The wanted process of “analogical verification”5 to eliminate
doubt necessitates material projections which function “like luminous breadcrumbs leading
home, traces in the external world of the overcoming fact at the center.”6 This might well be
considered the poetic version of what Peirce says about the logic of his indexical signs.
Cotzee’s Foe is a telling example for this notion, as represented by Susan Barton, crying out
loud when struggling with her autobiographical story about her ship-wreck:
In a life of writing books, I have often, believe me, been lost in the maze of doubting.
The trick I have learned is to plant a sign or marker in the ground where I stand, so
that in my future wanderings I shall have something to return to, and not get worse
lost than I am. Having planted it, I press on; the more often I come back to the mark
[…], the more certainly I know I am lost, yet the more I am heartened too, to have
found my way back.7
In her description, Susan Barton’s markers have a material, three-dimensional, concrete
quality: they are her “luminous breadcrumbs” which assure her of the authenticity of her
recollected experiences. These immaterial material markers ought to suffice, for she “brought
back not a feather, not a shimbleful of sand, from Cruso’s island”8 to verify her story. She is
the author, the witness to her experiences, as she is the existent originator of the words she
is writing. Words take on an object-status: comparable to sand and eathers from the remote
island they serve as indices: “[T]he mass of ink on the sheet by means of which a graph is
said to be scribed is not […] a symbol, but only a replica of a symbol of the nature of an
index.”9 The most interesting quality of indexical signs in the Peircean sense is their
necessary physical existence – ink traces on a sheet of paper. In this respect, Barton’s
reaction to the “maze of doubting” she feels to be stuck in is of utmost importance: she
projects spatial markers she can hold fast onto. Authenticity is the object of her desire.
Especially in the current context of reclaiming the South African past, Coetzee’s
preoccupation with (hi)stories as (re)constructions calls for an analysis of the role of the
index in his oeuvre.
1Introductory words on the title page of the second part of Coetzee’s first work of fiction. J.M.
Coetzee, “The Narrative of Jacobus Coetzee,” Dusklands (1974; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984) 51.
2Aleida Assmann, “Schrift und Autorschaft,” Inszenierte Imagination:Beiträge zu einer Historischen
Anthropologie der Medien, ed. Wolfgang Müller-Funk, Hans Ulrich Reck (Wien: Springer: 1996) 23.
3Charles S. Peirce, The Collected Papers of Charles S. Peirce: I-VIII, ed. by Charles Hartshorne, Paul
Weiss, and Arthur W. Burks (1931;1935;1958; Harvard: Harvard UP, 1994) 2.283. From now on, the
footnotes of Peirce’s quotations will refer to the standardized paragraphs of his CP only.
4Ned Rossiter, “The Photographic Impulse of Colonialism: Time, Space and Modernity at International
Exhibitions,” Southern Review 33.3 (2000): 332.
5Scarry 14.
6Scarry 37.
7J.M. Coetzee, Foe (London: Penguin, 1986) 136.
8Coetzee, Foe 51.
9 Peirce, CP 4.500.