Abstract
Dirk Klopper
‘Fictions of the Truth' in J.M. Coetzee's Boyhood and Youth
Coetzee's elusive views on the relationship between autobiography and fiction coincide with his equally elusive views on the relationship between art and truth. In an interview with David Attwell in Doubling the Point (1992), he says that ‘All autobiography is story-telling', while he maintains, in ‘Fictions of the Truth' (2000), that autobiography comprises both ‘historical truth' and ‘poetic truth'.
Critics have pointed out that Coetzee's use, in Boyhood and Youth , of the devices of third-person narrative, simple present tense, free indirect speech, and an ‘immanent voice', has the effect of drawing attention to the fictionalisation the autobiographical subject. By disrupting the relationship between narrator, protagonist and reader, these devices, it is claimed, simultaneously create intimacy and distance, directness of observation and emotional detachment, access to the textured impressions of consciousness and its ironic displacement.
My intention in this paper is to extend the critical work done on these texts by investigating more closely what Boyhood and Youth suggest specifically about the relationship between the aesthetic imagination and truth. Hermione Lee has drawn attention to Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man as one of the predecessors of Coetzee's Youth . Margaret Lenta enlarges on the parallels between Joyce's Portrait and Coetzee's Boyhood and Youth , citing the problematic relationship with family, avoidance of commitment to nationalist ideologies, solitary artistic aspiration, self-imposed exile, and use of the third-person narrative to signal separation of the adult self from the youthful self.
I wish to develop this line of thought further by examining how the convergence in Joyce's text between the notion of desire and the notion of the aesthetic is paralleled in Coetzee's texts by a similar convergence. Youth , in particular, relentlessly pursues the twin themes of passion and poetry. Echoing Joyce's Stephen Dedalus, Coetzee's protagonist speaks, for example, of ‘some indwelling shape in his soul', of the ‘Destined One' from whose embrace he will return to life ‘as a new being, transformed'. Saying that only ‘love and art are … worthy of giving oneself to without reserve', he wonders whether ‘the woman who unlocks the store of passion within him, if she exists, [will] also release the blocked flow of poetry'.
Solipsistic introspection, remorseless ratiocination and deflating irony, evident in Joyce, are deployed with savage self-exposure in Coetzee. Nevertheless, despite the self-deprecation, there is a serious process of reflection in both Boyhood and Youth , but particularly in Youth , concerning the aesthetic imagination and the nature of its truth, its epistemology. 'Poetry is truth', says the protagonist of Youth after reading Joseph Brodsky, and, listening to Bach, he discovers an intimation of ‘a joyous yielding of the reasoning, comprehending mind to the dance of the fingers'. What is the knowledge created by the work of art, this sensuous ‘aura of truth', a knowledge ‘too humble to know it is knowledge'? How does Coetzee's autobiographical fiction represent such truth and reflect upon it?
In exploring these questions, the paper will look at the importance in both Boyhood and Youth of the notion of ‘reciprocation', suggesting that this notion provides a way of addressing simultaneously passionate human relations and the relations that characterise the aesthetic imagination.