J. M. Coetzee and the uses of anachronism in Summertime

In this essay I develop a reading of J. M. Coetzee's most recent work, Summertime, examining the use Coetzee makes of anachronism in particular, but also arguing that anachronism forms part of a larger formal strategy. By drawing on ideas that Coetzee outlines in the collection of interviews and critical essays entitled Doubling the Point, I show how this formal strategy involves the use of deliberate error or inconsistency" that it is inconsistency, in effect, that is being used to get as close as possible to an ideal of 'truth'. As he has shown in what he calls his 'autrebiographies', and in his idea of what it means to write autobiography or confession in general, a central problem occurs: how can one express the truth of the self? I argue that Coetzee develops an original response to the somewhat prosaic claim that "in a larger sense all writing is autobiography": by using error and anachrony as a formal strategy for generating the truth. I consider the way in which Coetzee's understanding of writing" an understanding that involves an intense and carefully considered analysis of the forms of language" is based on an ongoing relation between truth and lies.