Archival and Affective Displacements: The Ethics of Self-reflexivity, Shame, and Sacrifice in J.M. Coetzee’s Life-Writing

From the vantage point of the archive, J.M. Coetzee’s literary oeuvre appears vexed by the question of the self in writing, or of writing as a repository of the self and its ineluctable baggage. Across three fictionalized memoirs, Coetzee’s literary selfarchiving is constructed through an epistemological dynamic of presenting and concealing that enables a revealing and masking of this self. More fundamentally, however, Coetzee also constructs an ontological dynamic of producing and erasing the self that is often overlooked. As Carrol Clarkson astutely argues in her review of J.C. Kannemeyer’s 2012 biography of Coetzee, to speak only of the presenting and concealing of “the ‘inner life’ of a person, as if it were something hidden from view, accessible to oneself only and not to others, is to run the risk of assuming some stable and inviolable ‘essence’ of a self that has no public mode of expression” (265). Indeed, Coetzee’s notion of “autre-biography” captures this sense of the self’s constitutive lack of self-sufficiency (Doubling 394), including in affective terms (I explore the impurity and contingency of Coetzee’s sense of affect below). This essay argues that both the epistemological-archival and ontologicalaffective displacements of Coetzee’s life-writing, specifically those of the third memoir Summertime (2009), epitomize his wider use of literary writing to reckon ethically with life as something inherently finite and limited, both in a biological and biographical sense. Although the first two memoirs, Boyhood (1997) and Youth (2002), can to a large extent be factually verified with the extant record of Coetzee’s biography, Summertime poses larger questions about literature as a mode of engaging with personal history. These questions address to what extent literature constitutes a form of truth or truth-seeking. As Clarkson subtly hints, that involves more