“O Droewige Land!”: Memory Landscapes in J.M. Coetzee’s Summertime
Abstrakt
DOI: 10.19251/sej/2018.7(5)
Summertime (2009), the third book of J.M. Coetzee’s autobiographical trilogy, is more poetic and more nostalgic in its depiction of South Africa than the writer’s previous works, though his vision remains sharp and unsentimental. Written from the perspective of an émigré writer, Summertime is an imaginative mapping of personal memories that reside in various places of South Africa, especially in the ruggedly beautiful landscapes of the Karoo region. For Coetzee, the Karoo is the site of the individual and collective historical past which he attempts to reconstruct and retain. The open spaces of the Karoo provide inspiration for his art and stimulate his search for new expressive means to represent African landscape, subverting the traditional colonialist topos of exoticism and wilderness. While in his first “Australian” novel, Slow Man (2005), Coetzee problematized the notion of ethno-cultural identity in an age of globalization and mass migration by presenting multicultural individuals whose destabilized identities defy categorizations of belonging and not belonging, in Summertime he emphasizes the crucial role of native landscape in the construction of self-identity, reveals his strong bond with his native country and portrays the Karoo as an anchoring space in a world of heterogeneity. Although, as Coetzee earlier confessed, South Africa is “a wound within him”, in Summertime reflective nostalgia allows the writer to come to terms with his native country and his past.
Key words: J.M. Coetzee, South Africa, regional novel, autofiction, memory, identity
Bibliografia
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