This essay aims to explore how the biographical texts “Flush” by Virginia Woolf and “Summertime” by John Maxwell Coetzee respond to (post-)modernist concerns and how the texts transgress previous conceptions and genre boundaries concerning the contradiction of fact and fictionality in life-writing. I will show how Woolf, by depicting the life and perceptions of a dog, playfully comments and criticizes previous conventions of life-writing. Coetzee goes even further and takes the reader on a journey through the process of constructing the written representation of a life.
Thereby reflecting upon the multiple perspectives and inaccuracies the biographical representation of ‘a life’, or, in case of autobiography, ‘the self’, necessarily includes. By exemplary comparing Woolf’s linear ‘mock-biography’ “Flush” with Coetzee’s “highly fragmented self-representation” “Summertime”, the evolution of the genre of life-writing from modernism to postmodernism and the shift from epistemological to ontological concerns will be outlined.
Table of contents
Scribal abbreviations
Essay
Bibliography
Scribal abbreviations
F: Flush
S: Summertime
Essay
Epistemology and Ontology in Flush and Summertime-Examples for unconventional modernist and postmodernist life-writing
This essay aims to explore how the biographical texts Flush by Virginia Woolf and Summertime by John Maxwell Coetzee respond to (post-)modernist concerns and how the texts transgress previous conceptions and genre boundaries concerning the contradiction of fact and fictionality in life-writing. I will show how Woolf , by depicting the life and perceptions of a dog, playfully comments and criticizes previous conventions of life-writing. Coetzee goes even further and takes the reader on a journey through the process of constructing the written representation of a life. Thereby reflecting upon the multiple perspectives and inaccuracies the biographical representation of ‘a life’, or, in case of auto biography, ‘the self’, necessarily includes. By exemplary comparing Woolf’s linear ‘mock-biography’ (Saunders 2010:218) Flush with Coetzee’s “highly fragmented self-representation” (Effe 2017:252) Summertime, the evolution of the genre of life-writing from modernism to postmodernism and the shift from epistemological to ontological concerns will be outlined.
The most obvious fictionalization in Flush is the narration of the perceptions and insights of the cocker spaniel. The narrator extensively depicts the perception of the world by an animal as well as the emotions of the dog.
“Then what a variety of smells interwoven in subtlest combination thrilled his nostrils; strong smells of earth, sweet smells of flowers; nameless smells of leaf and bramble; sour smells as they crossed the road; pungent smells as they entered bean-fields” (Flush,7)
“the wind of destruction roared in his ears and fanned the feathers of his paws as a van passed. Then he plunged in terror” (F,18).
Both, Flush’s perception of scents and his bewilderment in the second example, the anxiety a dog feels when confronted for the first time with road traffic, are undoubtedly part of the ‘real world’, but nevertheless unknowable to any biographer. What makes the text interesting, is the foregrounding and explicit thematizing of this obvious gap of insight by the narrator, in this case ‘the biographer’:
“Here, then, the biographer must perforce come to a pause. Where two or three thousand words are insufficient for what we see – and Mrs Browning had to admit herself beaten by the Apennine: ‘Of these things I cannot give you any idea’, she admitted – there are no more than two words and one-half for what we smell. The human nose is practically non-existent. The greatest poets in the world have smelt nothing but roses on the one hand, and dung on the other. The infinite gradations that lie between are unrecorded. Yet it was in the world of smell that Flush mostly lived” (F, 86)
In this passage the inadequacy of biographical description of a life and the necessity of interpretation are highlighted in two ways. Firstly the citation of a source (Elizabeth Barrett Browning) that admits its own limitations “Of these things I cannot give you any idea”, and secondly the remarks of the narrator that there are “unrecorded” but nevertheless existing. For Max Saunders “using Flush as a focalizer shows the limitations of the human point of view in these ways” (Saunders 2010:442). The notion that the very thing the biographer has to invent or guess – namely smells – are the most important part of the life of the subject of the biography is a very clever way to highlight and explore insufficiencies of many biographical writings. Woolf therefore shifts and broadens the genre boundaries by explicitly asking questions regarding the adequate representations of the life of an other. That the other in this case is an animal serves to emphasize the point, as, according to Saunders the “mock-ponderous application of the conventions of human biography to a dog” highlights the antithesis between animal and human (Saunders 2010:442).
However, epistemological questions in Flush are not only raised by the obvious contradiction of the representation of a dogs-life by a human narrator, but also by the content of the ‘story’ itself. As the dog is the only one constantly accompanying Elisabeth Barrett Browning, whose life is interpreted and commented on – making Flush a double biography of the historical person of the poetess as well as of her pet – the reader is gained excess to private details while at the same time made aware that those details must be made up, like the sounds Barett and her lover make:
“now they made a grotesque chattering; now they skimmed over him like birds flying widely; now they cooed and clucked, as if they were two birds settled in a nest” (F,38)
The ‘factuality’ of the statements like the sound of the two lovers’ voices are ridiculed as only Flush can be aware of them and consequently they are depicted as animal sounds. Another example for the obvious inability of the biographer to state a fact is the following:
“He [Flush, JB] could read signs that nobody else could even see. He could tell by the touch of Miss Barrett’s fingers that she was waiting for one thing only – for the postman’s knock, for the letter on the tray” (F,32)
The notion that the dog has a deeper or different understanding of the emotions of Miss Barrett “that nobody else could even see”, allows the narrator to use Flush as a vehicle to comment unfalsifiable on the events, highlighting that that these reports are not “factual history about a particular time, person or event. [BUT, JB] rather, (…) incorporate usable facts into subjective ‘truth’” (Smith & Watson 2010:13). This is clearly intended by Woolf as the text itself states that Flush and Barrett “could not communicate with words, and it was a fact that led undoubtedly to much misunderstanding” (F,23).
The mocking tone of Flush serves to address and criticize society by addressing typical modernist issues (as listed by Whitworth 2007) like the modern urban life: “He saw houses made almost entirely of glass. He saw windows laced across with glittering streamers; heaped with gleaming mounds of pink, purple, yellow, rose.” (F,17) and its detachment from nature when “Door after door shut in his face as Miss Mitford went downstairs; they shut on freedom; on fields; on hares; on grass” (F,14). Sexuality, when Flush’s mating with other dogs “even in the year 1842, would have called for some excuse from a biographer” (F,7), the relation of luxury and primitivism (McHale 2004:7) when the same dog who “naturally, lying with his head pillowed on a Greek lexicon, (…) came to dislike barking and biting”(F,29) after being ‘dognapped’ finds that “as he lay on cushions once more, cold water was the only thing that seemed to have any substance, any reality.” (F,55) or class issues that are addressed and criticized several times, for example when the ‘notes’ at the end state that the ransom payed for the dog was less than a years loan for the servant Lily Wilson. Wilsons literary representation is compared to Flush’s and it is stated that “Miss Barett never wrote a poem about her” (F,110) and “biography had not then cast its searchlight so low”(F,11).
However aware of its own mocking tone and partly self-reflection, this first part of the analysis has shown that Flush mainly askes how a life can be ‘correctly’ grasped and represented, without questioning the existence of ‘the real’. The text asks questions like “What is there to be known?; Who knows it?; How do they know it, and with what degree of certainty?; How is knowledge transmitted from one knower to another, and with what degree of reliability? (…) What are the limits of the knowable?” (McHale 2004:9), questions that are epistemological in their nature and therefore typically modernist (McHale 2004:9). Even though these questions are asked in Flush, and many passages are obviously invented without any claim to represent facts, the text can still be referred to as life-writing because the setting in the novel like Wimpole street in 19th century London refer to “the world” rather than “a world” (Smith & Watson 2010:10) and the characters represented resemble ‘real’ persons.
Where Woolf lets the inaccurate depiction mockingly speak for itself, Coetzee’s Summertime goes beyond that, exploring the textual amendment of reality even further. Where Woolf presents one perspective (Flush’s) on ‘the world’ Coetzee constructs a ‘a world’ of different distinguished narrations that are linked by their subject: John Coetzee. However, this figure remains vague and the linkage between John, the character, and the author is constantly challenged. By adding the metanarrative of the biographer Mr Vincent who is conducting interviews and compiling notebook entries of the departed (!) author John Coetzee, the form of Summertime allows the (real) author (who is still alive) to decouple himself from the protagonist, even though they share the same name; The “autobiographical pact” (Lejeune 1989) is contested and broken, or “fractured” (Smith & Watson 2010:14). For Lejeune the identity of the author on the front page and the protagonist who bears the same name is not negotiable in autobiography: “The reader might be able to quibble over resemblance, but never over identity (“identicalness”) We know all too well how much each of us values his/her name” (Lejeune 1989:39). This is not the case in Summertime.
In the text, self-referentiality is extensively used (cf. Smith & Watson 2010:14). The exaggeration of self-awareness ads a narrative dimension to the text through which the supposed ‘real’ author Coetzee communicates with the reader who is invited to join the meta-level and distance himself from the characters, the ‘plot’ as well as the autobiographical self-description of Coetzee. An example for this is the commentary on the usage of the third person in the second interview, when the biographer Mr Vincent declares:
“Then I did something fairly radical. I cut out my prompts and questions and fixed up the prose to read as an uninterrupted narrative spoken in your voice.” (Summertime,87)
Later, Mr Vincent explains amendments he made to the original transcription of a previous interview, transforming it to a narrative, to the interviewee and source of the original text, Coetzee’s cousin Margot:
“The she I use is like I but is not I. Do you really dislike it so much?
I find it confusing. But go on.” (S,89, italicization in the original)
By adding the layer of the ‘transparent’ revision of the narrated biographical text, commented by the interviewee herself, the narrator challenges the reader to engage in an active interaction with the text at hand. Even though the form is obviously key for the reading of Summertime, Mr Vincent provocatively states:
“Changing the form should have no effect on the content. If you feel I am taking liberties with the content itself, that is another question.” (S,91).
While Flush enabled the reader to distinguish the fictional and the biographical, Summertime “blurs any easy distinction between the fictional and the autobiographical” (Smith & Watson 2010:14). The fictionality of the text is self-referentially remarked by the interviewees, for example Coetzee’s former neighbor Julia:
“So let me be candid: as far as the dialogue is concerned, I am making it up as I go along. Which I presume is permitted, since we are talking about a writer. What I am telling you may not be true to the letter, but it is true to the spirit, be assured of that.” (S,32).
Comments like this one are constantly contrasted by other statements like this one from another interviewee, Adriana:
“I am giving you the truth. Maybe too much truth. Maybe so much truth that there will be no place for it in your book. I don’t know. I don’t care” (S,185)
as well as by Mr Vincent:
“I have been through the letters and diaries. What Coetzee writes there cannot be trusted, not as a factual record – not because he was a liar but because he was a fictioneer. In his letters he is making up a fiction of himself for his correspondents; in his diaries he is doing much the same for his own eyes, or perhaps for posterity” (S,225)
or the ‘protagonist’ Coetzee, who, in an intertextual reference to the real book Dusklands declares to have altered the biography of his father in the preface of that book:
“’I didn’t know your father was an historian,’ (…) I was referring to the preface to his book, in which the author, the writer, this man in front of me, claimed that his father (…) was also an historian (…). ‘You mean the preface?’ he said. ‘Oh, that’s all made up.’” (S,56)
[...]
- Quote paper
- Jonte Buchholz (Author), 2020, Epistemology and Ontology in Virginia Woolf's "Flush" and John Maxwell Coetzee's "Summertime". Examples for unconventional modernist and postmodernist life-writing, Munich, GRIN Verlag, https://www.grin.com/document/1307992
-
Upload your own papers! Earn money and win an iPhone X. -
Upload your own papers! Earn money and win an iPhone X. -
Upload your own papers! Earn money and win an iPhone X. -
Upload your own papers! Earn money and win an iPhone X. -
Upload your own papers! Earn money and win an iPhone X.