Beyond the Death of the Author: Summertime and J. M. Coetzee's Afterlives

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis paper begins by exploring via Roland Barthes's eponymous book about himself the implications of the premise of J. M. Coetzee's novel Summertime that the author John Coetzee is dead. I show how Summertime’s fragmented structure and echoes from Coetzee's earlier novels undermine the idea of a coherent authorial subject, and how emigration and acts of translation in the novel are central to how Coetzee's personality, life, and work are interpreted. The paper goes on to examine the influence of Nabokov's work on Coetzee's later fictions, with an emphasis on the interplay between Nabokov's actual and fictionalised struggles with his biographers. The paper concludes by arguing that J. C. Kannemeyer's biography of Coetzee, notwithstanding its claims to objective detachment, cannot but be read as a text scripted in the spirit of Coetzee's novel.