Archival Excavations: J.M. Coetzee’s Youth (2002)

Abstract

This paper reconsiders J.M. Coetzee’s self-reflexive return, in Youth (2002), to his own ephebic preoccupation with metropolitan forms of poetic modernism. Coetzee’s decision to refer to two instances of his own poetic juvenilia in Youth raises pertinent questions about the relationship between his sustained investment in metropolitan forms of modernist production on the one hand, and a little remarked upon, peculiarly South African, poetic and political archive on the other. By reading Youth in relation to this archive, I hope to retrieve and to rehabilitate potentially significant, yet frequently overlooked, local literary contexts informing Coetzee’s longstanding preoccupation with metropolitan forms of modernism. In this way, Youth is reframed as a text that speaks directly to Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker’s interest in ‘the intimate connections’ –and, indeed, disconnections – ‘between cultural texts and geographical location’ that has informed recent interest in the global, rather than narrowly metropolitan, scale of modernist production. Beyond this, I argue that Coetzee's manipulation of his own poetic archive is designed to align his work with – or to relocate it within – specifically metropolitan versions of modernism. This is not to suggest that any divestment on Coetzee's part from local forms of poetic production. Rather, I suggest that Youth works in tandem with Coetzee's poetic archive to disturb the idea that metropolitan forms of modernist style and praxis are discontinuous from or alien to post-colonial literary imaginaries. Reading Youth in relation to its archival sources, in other words, illuminates the specifically local contexts informing Coetzee's preoccupation with metropolitan forms of literary modernism.