Time, Narrative, Life, Death, & Text-Type Distinctions: The

Example of Coetzee's Diary of a Bad Year

H. Porter Abbott

Narrative, Volume 19, Number 2, May 2011, pp. 187-200 (Article)

Published by The Ohio State University Press

DOI: 10.1353/nar.2011.0009

For additional information about this article

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/nar/summary/v019/19.2.abbott.html

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 H. Porter Abbott

Time, Narrative, Life, Death, &

Text-Type Distinctions: The Example
of Coetzee’s Diary of a Bad Year

THE NARRATIVE DIFFERENCE

“[A]ll knowledge is encoded as stories.” This sweeping assertion by Roger Schank

and Robert Abelson seems designed to provoke (2).1 But then here’s Mark Turner
affirming much the same position: “Narrative imagining—story—is the fundamental
instrument of thought” (4). And here’s Merlin Donald asserting that “the narrative
mode is . . . the basic product of language” (257). Fredric Jameson called narrative
“the central function . . . of the human mind” (13), and Lyotard called it “the quintes-
sential form of customary knowledge” (19). Goranson and Cardier called narrative
a “driving imperative” (1), and Robert Storey contended that narrative is “an innate
way of knowing, essentially as pre-linguistic in its operations as conceptualization has
proven to be” (84) and, as such, “the ‘deep grammar’ of literature itself ” (113). Storey
was echoing both Algirdas Greimas and Greimas’s sometime critic Paul Ricoeur, who
both preferred the term “narrativity” for this deep pre-linguistic informing capabil-
ity, with Ricoeur extending its operation well beyond fictive literature, as did most
emphatically Hayden White, who called narrativity a “panglobal fact of culture” (19).
If there is no empirical evidence yet that would put any of these assertions be-
yond doubt, they nonetheless indicate a shared intuition that narrative is somehow of
a different order from the other text types. And this intuition, in turn, can make the
job of discriminating text types a lopsided endeavor. In strictly literary discourse, dis-
criminating text types has traditionally been a matter of formal categories rather than
cognitive equipment. Generally, as formal categories, they constitute equivalent kinds
in a hierarchy of forms. In this scheme, they are usually situated equally together at
H. Porter Abbott is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His pub-
lications include The Fiction of Samuel Beckett: Form and Effect (1973), Diary Fiction: Writing as Action
(1984), Beckett Writing Beckett: The Author in the Autograph (1996), On the Origin of Fictions: Interdisci-
plinary Perspectives (editor, 2001), and The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative (2002; 2nd edition, 2008).
The current title of his work in progress is The Fine Art of Failure: Narrative, Syntax, and the Unknowable.

NARRATIVE, Vol 19, No. 2 (May 2011)

Copyright 2011 by the Ohio State University
188   H. Porter Abbott

the top of the ladder, while below them lie the genres, and below the genres lie dis-
course segments or modes (Georgakopoulou 595).2 Plato put them on the top rung
when he introduced the distinction between diegesis and mimesis. Roland Barthes did
the same thing when, in a footnote to his landmark “Introduction to the Structural
Analysis of Narrative,” he suggested a “typology of forms of discourse” comprised of
“three broad types”: “metonymic (narrative), metaphoric (lyric poetry, sapiential dis-
course), enthymematic (intellectual discourse)” (84n). Scholars differ on what a com-
plete list of text types would include, but common candidates for inclusion are narra-
tive, description, explanation, exposition, lyrical effusion, argument, portraiture, and
analysis (Werlich, Chatman, Bruner, Görlach, Herman, Phelan). What makes the list
lopsided from the cognitive viewpoint I am taking in this essay is the fact that, for the
other text types, one cannot find the kind of intuitive privileging that has been given
to narrative.3 One doesn’t come across assertions like “all knowledge is encoded as
description” or “lyrical effusion is the fundamental instrument of thought.”
I would contend that there is good reason for this lopsidedness, and it lies in
the fact that narrative is the only text type that requires all four of the dimensions in
which we live our lives, three of space and one of time. All the text types take time to
read, of course, but narrative is the only one that has what Chatman called an “inter-
nal time sequence” (9). It is this unique dimensional scope of the narrative text type
that has led, generally, to the absorption of Plato’s distinction between diegesis and
mimesis into one overarching type. The melding of Plato’s types began almost imme-
diately with Aristotle, who described them as sub-types, the told and the dramatized,
of the same thing, mimesis. For most narratologists today the term of choice is nar-
rative. If the inclusion of drama and film in this overarching text type has brought in
its wake problematic applications of the terms narrate and narration (and it has), the
general willingness to accept this price is a sign, I think, of the primary importance of
the temporal character of drama and film that they share with written and oral narra-
tive. They all present stories that unfold over time, and it is this internal temporality
that sets them apart from the other text types.4
This deep distinction of narrative echoes the distinction in schema theory be-
tween frames and scripts, where frames are “representations of relatively static objects
and relations” and scripts are “representations of dynamic (or temporal) processes”
(Herman, Jahn, and Ryan 513). Speaking loosely, a script is an animated frame. Scripts,
of course, are not, strictly speaking, narratives but unparticularized, stereotypical
representations which may or may not serve a representation of events that has the
added quality of narrativity (Herman, Story Logic 90–91). But it is their full four-di-
mensionality that is necessary if there is to be narrative at all.5 Paradoxically, it is the
recognition of this full dimensionality that has energized recent work on the spatial
dimensions of narrative, accommodating in theory the importance of a storyworld’s
three-dimensional domain as it evolves through time. As J. C., the writer in the novel
discussed below, puts it: “To write a novel you have to be like Atlas, holding up a whole
world on your shoulders and supporting it up there for months and years while its
affairs work themselves out” (Coetzee, Diary 54). By contrast, all the other text-type
candidates are not time-dependent. We may apprehend them in time, and scripts may
function within them in many ways, but the world they occupy is not one dominated
by the unfolding of a sequence of events. In this sense, each of them is a kind of pause.
 Narrative, Text-Type Distinctions, and Coetzee’s Diary of a Bad Year  189

One of my fantasies as a child was that life should be like a musical so that every
once in a while I and those around me could be released from linear, unidirectional
time and sing and dance together in harmony, bathed by an altogether different kind
of time from the one we are required to live in—a repetitive, metrical time that travels
in a circle to end where it begins. Music is not, technically, a text type, but the kind
of release from narrative that it permits is what I am trying to get at here. Narrative
fiction, of course, is itself a release from the actual world we live in. But within it our
time is replicated, stirring the same kinds of hopes and fears for the characters that we
feel for ourselves and the people we love. When argument or analysis or description
or lyrical effusion dominates a text, it invites a disengagement from the urgency of
time and from what Meir Sternberg calls “the unbreakable law-likeness of the narra-
tive process” (“Universals” 328) in order to fulfill its non-narrative ends. Description,
for example, though it can cause complex effects when it occurs within narrative,6 can
be made to approach the condition of still life when it is dominant: “of space com-
posed, yet unappropriated, of rooms not entered, of tables not cleared, a time made
for meditation and repose” (Blanchard 277).
Similarly, where the lyrical dominates, time and the effects of time may be very
much the subject, but suspense is suspended. Adonais? He’s dead already. Shelley’s
elegy is the weeping for him. Like all texts of any length, lyrical texts will most likely
be to some degree “impure” in the sense that there is some admixture of discourse
segments that, were they excised from context, would exist as some other text type.
For example, the turn of mood at the end of “Adonais” or Milton’s “Lycidas” can be
seen as a narrative consequence of what goes before. But for the most part the lyrical
expression of grief dominates these poems, not the sense of going anywhere.

COMBINING TEXT TYPES

Narrative-dominant texts are particularly flexible in their capacity to tolerate such ad-
mixtures without losing their status as narrative. I have argued elsewhere that once a
narrative response is cued and then to some degree sustained, the result is a narrative
platform on which authors can pile almost any kind of discourse segment without
disturbing the sense that a narrative is in progress (Abbott). Here, for example, is a
fragment, taken from one of many long, heavily expository passages in Saul Bellow’s
Herzog:

It has been suggested (and why not!) that the reluctance to cause pain is actu-
ally an extreme form, a delicious form of sensuality, and that we increase the
luxuries of pain by the injection of a moral pathos. Thus working both sides of
the street. Nevertheless, there are moral realities, Herzog assured the entire
world as he held his strap in the speeding car, as surely as there are molecular
and atomic ones. However, it is necessary today to entertain the very worst
possibilities openly. In fact we have no choice as to that.. . . .” (178)

To underscore the difference in mode, Bellow sets off Herzog’s expository thought in
italics. But, dominated by the narrative text type within which it occurs, the passages
190   H. Porter Abbott

of exposition are absorbed into the narrative (referenced here in the brief external
shot of Herzog in the speeding subway car) and become a working part of it. In this
sense, to draw on a concept first introduced by the Russian formalists, narrative func-
tions in Bellow’s novel as its “dominant.” As a general rule, we handle this quite easily.
Herzog’s mental letters to famous people (basically letters to himself) expand our un-
derstanding—amused, sympathetic, admiring, appalled—of a desperate, time-bound
character in narrative transit. Occasionally, when another text type is sufficiently
present, a narrative text can acquire the status of a hybrid. But as James Phelan has
argued, the logic of the text’s unfolding generally tips the balance, making one or the
other type dominant. This tipping of the balance in turn brings the elements of the
secondary text type into a supporting role (Phelan) in the same manner as the exposi-
tory passages in Herzog.7
This almost invariable tendency of a text to settle into one or another text type
brings me to my demonstration text, which seems to have been written as a direct
challenge to our cognitive need to establish a text’s dominant. In Diary of a Bad Year,
J. M. Coetzee has visually separated the expository text type of the occasional essay
from the narrative text type of the fictional story. Quantitatively, the essay form actu-
ally dominates the book, starting at the top of each page and often extending past
the middle. Below it, separated by white space and a line, is a thread of narrative in
the voice of the essayist, one J. C., author of Waiting for the Barbarians (though this
novelist is a “post-physical” seven years older than the author of the text we read).8
After a few pages, another thread of the same narrative appears further down the
page, separated by more space and another line. This one is in the voice of Anya, a
beautiful Filipina who lives with J. C.’s antithesis, a hard-headed broker named Alan.
J. C. has hired Anya to type up the “Strong Opinions” that he has been commissioned
to write and that we are following at the top of each page [Figure 1]. These essays are
referenced in the narrative, and their evolution into more personal diary entries late
in the book is an integral consequence of the narrative development we follow in the
threads below, but thanks to the way Coetzee has formatted them, we experience the
essays as interruptions of that narrative, self-contained and without, moreover, any
particular temporal locations on the narrative time-line.
The reviews of this book were mixed, but almost all had trouble with the struc-
ture of a text that resisted settling into a dominant text type. As one reviewer wrote:
“Here’s a novel that can be read three different ways, none of them wholly satisfying.
You can’t read any one part without becoming aware that you’re ignoring the others. If
you tried to read them all at once, you’d go nuts” (Roth).9 Grappling with this formal
strangeness, a number of reviewers took their cue from an encomium to Bach late in
the book as a prompt to read it as a kind of contrapuntal music.10 And though it is
impossible to hear the text literally as music, there are themes and motifs in the essays
and in the two narrative threads that repeatedly chime or play off against each other
in the three levels. Finding a non-textual analog like music is in effect a way of side-
stepping the whole issue of identifying this text’s dominant. And it is true that, with
varying degrees of subtlety and boldness, themes of power, sex, the body, sport, mas-
culinity, opinions, angels, privacy, competition, honor and dishonor resonate back
and forth among the three levels, often on the same page. And, like a piece of complex
music, it gets richer in successive readings.
 Narrative, Text-Type Distinctions, and Coetzee’s Diary of a Bad Year  191

Figure 1.

TIME AND THE ABSENCE OF TIME

Once the musical analogy is realized, however, the issue of having to cope with con-
testing text types stubbornly refuses to go away. And in my view it shouldn’t. To re-
turn to my opening theme of the deep difference between narrative and the other
192   H. Porter Abbott

text types, the case I want to make is that the discomfort that Coetzee builds into
the format of this book is an essential part of his object. His emphatic separation of
narrative and expository text types and the consequent page-by-page experience of
cognitive re-orientation that this separation forces on the reader provide a continual
affective depth to the book’s content. For all its disruptive effect, it fits because much
of the thematic and motific content of this novel is rooted in the difference between
being in time and being out of time, a difference we feel as we cross back and forth
from one text type to the other.
J. C.’s “strong opinions” belong to a world out of time where the mind exerts com-
plete control. In this space, they are impervious to time. They are, he tells his German
editor, not Meinungen that may change, but Ansichten that are fixed (129). It is a mode
that suits him personally. As J. C. admits to Anya, he is a man who lives within a nar-
row range of behavior. He has never gone “off the rails” and probably never will: “It is
too late now. If I went off the rails at my age I wouldn’t have time to get back on” (86).
Even as a novelist, he fears he may have been just “a pedant who dabbles in fiction”
(191). Keeping himself from “being swept along on currents of mass feeling,” he has
been incapable of celebrating life in his novels as the great Russian authors did. “One
of these days some state official or other will pin a ribbon on my sunken chest and my
reassimilation into society will be complete, Homais c’est moi” (191).11
The key point here is that those great Russian novelists J. C. admires not only
celebrated life but also included in that celebration characters as compulsively cogi-
tating as J. C. (as he would be the first to admit). They, like the similarly hard-thinking
Herzog, resided in the storyworlds of narratives that are much more recognizable as
novels. If Herzog’s mental letters are an extreme case, Bellow’s manner of stitching
them into the fabric of his narrative is simply an extension of a time-honored way
of rendering thought in fiction. Moreover, Bellow’s novel, like those of the Russians
and unlike Coetzee’s hybrid, featured a cogitator with a gift for “running off the rails.”
Herzog is a character passionately caught up in the action of his story—a revenge
plot, no less, though without the “bloody, and unnatural acts” that undid his equally
cogitating prototype, Hamlet. And like the thoughts of Hamlet, Herzog’s disjointed,
if often brilliant, thoughts run right along with him, giving their own depth to the
moves he is making as he makes them.
J. C. is a much tougher nut to crack. In the long first part of Diary of a Bad Year
(roughly two-thirds of the book), his thinking falls into neatly woven, self-sustaining
packets, destined to be disengaged from the story of his life, sewn together, and sent
out into the world. Typographically, they are quite literally situated above the action,
while Alan, the man of action, for whom such musings are at best gratuitous, reigns
largely in the typographical bottom rung, where Anya’s is the recording voice. Here he
vents his own strong opinions, builds his fortune, makes passionate and passionately
reciprocated love with Anya, and, increasingly, grows jealous of the impotent, wiz-
ened old man she’s working for. In between these two levels is J. C.’s apartment where
J. C. is the narrator and where he and Anya interact for much of the book. Both this
level and the one beneath it are time-bound and, as such, pervaded by the currents of
feeling that move time along. On a larger scale, these belong to the same irresistible
currents of history that are a major theme of J. C.’s first essays on subjects like de-
mocracy, Machiavelli, terrorism, and the origins of the state. They also belong to the
 Narrative, Text-Type Distinctions, and Coetzee’s Diary of a Bad Year  193

powerful currents that energize the evolutionary struggle for reproductive success,
another topic of J. C.’s essays that includes excursions on such subjects as the body,
competition, torture, sport, and the spread of viruses. The real world in which these
subjects are actualized is a realm that, despite local illusions of control, is ultimately
beyond control. Being in time means giving oneself up with more or less abandon to
being “swept along.”
But the middle level is also the level in which J. C.’s strong opinions are being
typed up. Moreover, they are not simply present on the pages that Anya types, but
both their form and content become key factors in the interaction of the cerebral es-
sayist and his vibrantly alive transcriber. Between them these two characters do not
simply adjudicate the claims of the timeless and the time-bound but rather bring out
the complexity of their co-existence. After all, the aged man of strong opinions still
has a body, while the beautiful embodiment of erotic power turns out to have a razor-
sharp mind. Anya, at the start of the novel, is a visitation of purely material being who
suddenly appears in a laundromat to the wondering gaze of J. C., self-described as a
“crumpled old fellow in a corner” (4). It is the “startling . . . brevity” of her “tomato-
red shift” (3) and “a derrière so near to perfect as to be angelic” (8) that rouses this old
fellow’s body to life and with it this narrative level of the book’s discourse, squeezed
in on the first page under a sober disquisition on “The Origins of the State.” Yet, as
their interaction develops, it is Anya who often takes the intellectual lead, prodding
and provoking the thinker whose mind is having a hard time coping with the provo-
cations of his body. Her intellectual sway is nowhere more critically the case than in
her initiation of a key reflexive issue: How are abstract themes best communicated
in the temporal world of the living? In a sly ironic turn, the direction in which Anya
leads this crumpled former master of the novel is . . . back to the novel. Moreover, it
is through Anya’s voice in the third level, a voice with a greater capacity for directness
than the voice of J. C., that we learn much of this second-level development.
Thus, on the same page where, on his narrative level, J. C. is telling us about
Anya’s penchant for shopping, and her forty shoes, and how she “thinks Kyoto is a
misspelling of Tokyo” (71), and how she speaks French with a charming accent but
has never heard of Voltaire, Anya on her level is telling us much more interesting
things: how she is bored by the essays she is transcribing and how she has taken the
liberty of advising the great man to “[t]ell a few stories and you will come across as
more human, more flesh and blood” (68). And when he tries to dodge her advice,
she won’t let him. She calls him a “machine for turning out opinions” (69), with his
“know-it-all tone,” that in effect tells his readers: “I am the one with all the answers,
here is how it is, don’t argue, it won’t get you anywhere” (70). Her acuity has allowed
her to see his sage-like persona as a way of playing God (i.e., J. C.), standing outside
of time where he can engrave the Truth (“It is written”), setting it all down the way it
is, now and forever. Moreover, she understands why the man of opinions should want
so badly to gain such transcendence. And she lets him know she knows, rendering
him “speechless” when she whispers his own words: “Dishonour descends upon one’s
shoulders” (92).
For the reader who has been caught up in J. C.’s essays with their eloquent critique
of the age we are living in, J. C.’s reaction at this point seems melodramatic. After all,
as J. C. struggles to explain, he’s been writing about the dishonor that descends upon
194   H. Porter Abbott

you when you live “in shameful times”: “shame descends upon everyone, and you
have simply to bear it, it is your lot and your punishment” (96). But he reacts the way
he does because in his heart he knows that Anya isn’t “mixing up . . . [t]wo different
sources of shame” (95). She understands that his high-minded discourse on shame,
for all its power and persuasiveness in the receptive minds of his readers, has its roots
in his thoughts about Anya. She knows that he knows that the thoughts he had when
he first saw her and then hired her were “lewd” thoughts: “What a pretty ass, you
thought, one of the prettiest asses I have ever seen. But nothing upstairs” (93). After
all, Anya is a specialist in the erotic. She loves to make love. So she knows, too, that
that word “lewd” is really J. C.’s word and that the “shame” connected with it is really
fear—fear of giving way to the needs of his body. For Anya, there is nothing shameful
in these needs. But she does know what is truly shameful in this department, and
when J. C. says “Enlighten me,” she says: “Let me tell you a story” (96). And she does.
And it is a good story about a sailing trip she and a friend took with some “American
college boys” who “must have decided we were just a couple of bimbos, a couple of
putas” (97). It makes clear in the way that only stories can that what is shameful in the
realm of the erotic is not the urge but its abuse.
Narrative, then, as Anya both recommends and demonstrates, is the mode in
which the claims of feeling and thought, of time and the timeless, are best negoti-
ated. It can be a meeting ground in the same way as Coetzee sought to create a kind
of meeting ground of these claims in the second typographical level of this strange
textual hybrid. The story that is told in this level works reflexively since the tension
that drives it is J. C.’s fear of, and desire for, life in the world of time. But there is one
more very important turn of this screw and it has to do with the connection between
the way we are caught in the stream of time and the way narratives—good ones, the
ones that work—are created. And in this department, J. C. is the expert. He’s the one
who used to write novels, novels that have worked for a wide audience, so he speaks
with authority (pun intended) when he tries to explain why he can’t follow Anya’s
advice and go back to writing stories. The problem, he tells her, is that he cannot sim-
ply choose to write stories, and the reason he gives tightens the connection between
the flow of narrative and the flow of life: “Stories tell themselves,” he says, “they don’t
get told. . . . Never try to impose yourself. Wait for the story to speak for itself ” (55).
In other words, let go of the urge to control—the same urge that one satisfies so well
outside of time in the realm of exposition. For the novelist, the paradox of authorship
is that one only gains “authority” by letting go, by “ceasing to be oneself ” (151).

DEATH AND LIFE

So far I have been arguing that Coetzee has formatted his work to get the greatest
cognitive heft in shifting the reader in and out of time. My argument is predicated on
the idea that narrative is the one text type that is governed by the four dimensions of
life itself, and that it is the fourth dimension, time—the necessary immersion of the
reader in story time—that sets it apart from all other text types. Part of the appeal of
those other text types, then, in this case the text type of exposition, is the way they
provide a space, free of the temporal claims of the body, where the mind can assert
 Narrative, Text-Type Distinctions, and Coetzee’s Diary of a Bad Year  195

control. And I have tried to show briefly how this opposition plays out in the text’s
thematic development.
But in this spare work of art there is yet another thematic twist, and it has to do
with the release from time that only time can bring. This ultimate release from time is
what J. C. sees coming when, in a dream, he sees himself already dead and on his way
out of this world. An important component of this dream is that he is “guided to the
gateway to oblivion by a young woman” (59). It is not hard to guess who this woman
may be. With her beauty and radiant eroticism and the gradual revelation of her keen
intelligence, Anya is necessarily both the Angel of Life and the Angel of Death, luring
J. C. out of his timeless cocoon into life and a fortiori toward death.12 In the last pages
of the book, we learn that Anya, who has in the interval broken up with Alan and left
the city, is planning to return to care for the man she calls Señor C in his last days. “I
will do that. I will hold his hand. I can’t go with you, I will say to him, it is against the
rules. I can’t go with you but what I will do is hold your hand as far as the gate” (226).
This brief interpretation would not be complete without emphasizing that J. C.’s
descent into the stream of time, giving himself up to it and to the oblivion to which it
leads, is also an act of making the most of time while it lasts. At the start of the second,
shorter part of Diary of a Bad Year, he again records a “troubling dream” in which he
“had died but had not left the world yet” (157). When, on the second day of his death,
he feels his “internal organs . . . decaying irremediably,” he wakes up, feeling “lucky”
to still be alive. Coetzee’s touch is so light that one could easily miss the allusion here
to Dickens’s Christmas Carol. “I still have time left, he breathes to himself ” (158). Like
Scrooge, he re-enters the temporal world as an active agent of sociality. On the same
opening page of part 2, Anya and Alan are surprised to receive a formal invitation to
dinner (catered as it turns out) in J. C.’s shabby apartment to celebrate the completion
of his “Strong Opinions.” The party is a disaster. Alan, drinking heavily, mercilessly
skewers his “rival” with savage brilliance. But life in time is life in the realm of un-
intended consequences. By the very ferocity of his attack, the Alpha Male loses his
trophy lover, who decides then and there to leave him.
It is arguable that the transformation of a human being over time is story mate-
rial with the highest degree of “tellability” and, eo ipso, unlocks the greatest potential
for narrativity.13 For Herzog, if there is a moment of transformation in the sequence of
action, it is the moment he recognizes the humanity of his rival and realizes that “fir-
ing [his] pistol was nothing but a thought” (257). But there is still much to work out
and many mental messages to send until, in the final pages, Herzog is quite clearly the
only recipient of his thoughts, and these bring him in their turn to an acceptance that
requires “no messages for anyone. Nothing. Not a single word” (341). In our context,
it is worth quoting from his last message to himself:

Anyway, can I pretend I have much choice? I look at myself and see chest,
thighs, feet—a head. This strange organization, I know it will die. And inside
something, something, happiness. . . . But this intensity, doesn’t it mean any-
thing? Is it an idiot joy that makes this animal, the most peculiar animal of all,
exclaim something? And he thinks this reaction a sign, a proof, of eternity? .
. . But I have no arguments to make about it. “Thou movest me.” “But what
do you want, Herzog?” “But that’s just it—not a solitary thing, I am pretty
196   H. Porter Abbott

well satisfied to be, to be just as willed, and for as long as I may remain in
occupancy.” (340)

Despite his gift, or compulsion, for heady wonderment, Herzog also has the gift for an
“intensity” that can only come with life in time. And much as this intensity provokes
him to want to know what it is all about, it would also seem in the end to override this
provocation, allowing him to be, simply, “satisfied to be” and eventually to die.
As I’ve noted, J. C. is a tougher case with a harder shell. Still, there is something
like the same drift in this year of his life. As noted above, we learn of his awkward
social initiative at the beginning of part 2. Told in the third-level voice of Anya, it
coincides with subtle formal adjustments that also appear in this second part of Diary
of a Bad Year. The tops of the pages now consist of J. C.’s more personal “soft opinions,”
recorded in a kind of hybrid diary, on the one hand segmented into pensées with
their semi-formal titles, on the other hand inflected by the passage of real time in the
world of the writer as he writes. In sign of this, the middle level is blank for the first
ten pages, a white space with lines above and beneath it. When it comes to life, it is
to record J. C.’s last encounter with Anya, a farewell that ends with a chaste kiss and
then, at her invitation, a hug: “[A]nd for a whole minute we stood clasped together,
this shrunken old man and this earthly incarnation of heavenly beauty, and could
have continued for a second minute, she would have permitted that, being generous
of herself; but I thought, Enough is enough, and let her go” (190). From here to the
end (thirty-seven pages), this level is occupied by Anya’s voice, her written voice more
exactly, in a long letter to Señor C from Brisbane, while her still more generous voice
continues in the third level to unfold the plan cited above.
J. C.’s penultimate entry in his Second Diary is devoted to J. S. Bach, whose music
is “[t]he best proof we have that life is good, and therefore that there may perhaps be
a God after all” (221). But what was generally overlooked in the reviews is that J. C.
saves his last entry for a very different kind of an artist, one whose torment and lack of
serenity marked his work right up to his last unfinished novel. “I read again last night
the fifth chapter of the second part of The Brothers Karamazov, the chapter in which
Ivan hands back his ticket of admission to the universe God has created, and found
myself sobbing uncontrollably” (223). He is moved, he writes, not by Ivan’s argument
but by his rhetoric: “the accents of anguish, the personal anguish of a soul unable
to bear the horrors of this world” (225). I do not see in this conclusion anything
like Herzog’s acceptance. Rather there is a lack of contentment that echoes, however
dimly, the unrelenting discontent of the author it praises. It also brings us back to the
theme of narrative and what narrative can be at its best. At the end of this last entry, J.
C. thanks “Mother Russia” for the unendingly restless genius of her two great masters
of the novel, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. “By their example one becomes a better artist;
and by better I do not mean more skilful but ethically better. They annihilate one’s
impurer pretensions; they clear one’s eyesight, they fortify one’s arm” (227). And can
we avoid seeing in these words, J. C.’s shadow self, seven years his junior, who may yet
have time for the miracle to happen?
More than most successful novelists, J. M. Coetzee has been a prolific essayist.
And in the small subset to which he belongs, he is further distinguished by the way,
 Narrative, Text-Type Distinctions, and Coetzee’s Diary of a Bad Year  197

as essayist, he does not belittle the abstract world of heady academic theorizing but
rather breathes its rarified air quite comfortably. In this late “novel” (or whatever) he
invites the reader by any number of signs (beginning with his own initials, J. C.) to see
the duality of this personal literary history as, at least in part, an extensive paratext—a
context for an enhanced appreciation of the work. In this essay, I have been arguing
that the way he has spliced these two ways of being a man of letters together, while at
the same time keeping them apart, is no mere tour de force. It was an ingenious way
to get the reader to feel their difference on every page and in this way to experience
the opposing claims of time and the release from time that is so much a part of the
work’s content. But it also was a way of indicating how far a writer of this type would
still have to go to achieve the ideal fusion of these two modes that can only be found
in the greatest novels.
That said, there may, finally, be a third motive behind Coetzee’s determination to
make the reader think of the actual Coetzee, even as that real man in the real world is
obscured by a fictional Coetzee in the fictional world. In this strange duality, the real
Coetzee is not a paratext but a ghostly presence called up from a world where he lives
(and in later years will have lived) under the shadow of death. It makes this work and
some of Coetzee’s other recent books performative hybrids of fact and fiction. In Coe-
tzee’s next “novel,” Summertime, a fictional character, Julia, recalls a conversation with
a fictional Coetzee about an actual novel, Dusklands, by the actual Coetzee. “What is
this?” she asks, “Is it fiction?” To which the answer is: “Sort of ” (55). In these hybrids,
Coetzee meets his readers half way, calling on them to give him life in a world where
he can go on living even as he lets them know that it isn’t really him—that is, the one
who has to die. In this way, they can both enjoy the game and feel the sad inevitability
that makes it necessary.

ENDNOTES

1. “Stories . . . are the basis of understanding. Understanding means retrieving stories and apply-
ing them to new experiences” (33). These comments come from Schank and Abelson’s long lead
essay in an issue of Advances in Social Cognition devoted to their theory of cognition. In their
concluding reply to a host of largely favorable responses, Schank and Abelson appear to hedge
their provocation, calling it a “strong” formulation of their position.
2. The labels for these three levels are by no means standardized (nor for that matter are the number
of levels). I have accepted the labels employed by Alexandra Georgakopoulou for her entry on
text types in the Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory. To get something of the diversity of
terms and hierarchical schemes for what we are dealing with, see Fludernik, “Genres, Text Types,
or Discourse Modes?”
3. Mine is not the only cognitive viewpoint one can take on the subject of text types. For a cogni-
tive approach at a different level of analysis, see David Herman’s deft deployment of classification
theory and other disciplinary resources to show how “text-type classifications can themselves be
studied as instances of the more general process by which people group items into categories in
order to structure and comprehend their experiences” (“Description, Narrative, and Explanation”
441). Herman’s focus is on the contrasting kinds of gradience and porosity that exist at the bor-
ders between narrative and description, on the one hand, and narrative and explanation, on the
198   H. Porter Abbott

other. In the process, he opens up yet another significant asymmetry in the nature of text types.
4. The most frequently cited discussion of narrative as a text type distinguished by its temporal
uniqueness can be found in Seymour Chatman’s useful chapters on narrative, description, and
argumentation in Coming to Terms (6–73). But where I am trying to account for, and sort out,
the effects of what seems to be an almost instinctive privileging of the narrative text type, Chat-
man explicitly seeks “to explain the relations among text-types from a point of view that does
not privilege any type or medium” (206n). For contrasting formalist discussions of narrative as
a privileged text type see Genette (127–44) and Chambers (90–101). In Film Art, Bordwell and
Thompson necessarily privilege narrative form in film, because of its quantitative predominance
(74), but in their treatment of documentary and experimental film they distinguish nonnarrative
formal types as well: categorical, rhetorical, associational, and abstract (342–70).
5. In Towards a “Natural” Narratology, Fludernik draws on schema theory to develop her argument
for an experience-based rather than an action-based concept of narrativity but does not, as far
as I can see, allow for narrative representations that are, in effect, non-temporal. Among action-
based concepts of narrative that deploy schema theory there has been some inquiry into a pos-
sible grammar of “story schemata” that allows us to recognize and discriminate larger narrative
structures, but this is still a matter of considerable debate (Emmott and Alexander 413).
6. See in this regard the excellent collection of essays in a special issue of Yale French Studies devoted
to description (Kittay).
7. For a more exclusionary statement of how the dominant text type takes control, see Sternberg,
“How Narrativity” (119–20). For a less exclusionary view, see Schmid (21–22). For a completely
non-exclusionary view, see Henry James, who argued that any effort to distinguish between “in-
cident and description” was wasted effort: “People often talk of these things as if they had a kind
of internecine distinctiveness, instead of melting into each other at every breath, and being inti-
mately associated parts of one general effort of expression” (12–13). For a similar argument that
the distinction between narrative and description is an academic construct that separates what
cannot be separated in practice, see Ronen.
8. In the storyworld of Coetzee’s next “fiction,” Summertime, the Nobel-Prize-winning author J. M.
Coetzee has already died. Like other fictional memoirs d’outre tombe, the practice puts its own
spin on the idea of a “self-consuming artifact.”
9 . James Wood’s review in The New Yorker is a good example of how the need to settle on a domi-
nant in such a disruptive text can make even best of literary critics go wrong: “These essays are
always interesting, and some are dazzling. . . . Coetzee wants to interrupt the usual smoothness
because, in part, he wants to remind us of the provisionality, the unfinishedness, of ideas as we
encounter them in novelistic form. The diary excerpts in the lower parts of the page function as
the rebellious downstairs of this intellectual mansion. . . . In truth, one reads the top section of
each page with mounting excitement, and the bottom two sections rather dutifully.”
10. “The structure is polyphonic—a tribute to Bach. . . . the unfolding of Diary of a Bad Year is split
into multiple, but simultaneous, levels or voices. Like an orchestral score, this music-haunted
book demands to be read from left to right and from top to bottom. And the reader has to work
out a way of holding it all together in the head” (Sen). “Pas étonnant que le livre se termine par un
cri d’amour à Jean-Sébastien Bach. La musique, encore et toujours. Des lignes mélodiques qui se
croisent, des variations à foison: un subtil art de la fugue” (Noiville).
11. J. C. compares himself here to Monsieur Homais, the indefatigably banal pharmacist in Madame
Bovary. The same self-criticism appears two years later in the novelized memoir of the late J.
M. Coetzee. A friend remarks: “Without being a Dionysian himself, he approved in principle of
Dionysianism. Approved in principle of letting oneself go, though I don’t think he ever let himself
go—would probably not have known how to. He had a need to believe in the resources of the
unconscious, in the creative force of unconscious processes. Hence his inclination toward the
more vatic poets” (Summertime 213).
 Narrative, Text-Type Distinctions, and Coetzee’s Diary of a Bad Year  199

12. In ironic counterpoint, Alan, the bottom-feeder, who has hacked into J. C.’s neglected wealth and
schemes to make a killing with it, nominates himself J. C.’s “guardian angel” (85).
13 . The distinction between tellability and narrativity is drawn from David Herman’s lucid treat-
ment of the subject in Story Logic (“tellability attaches to configurations of facts and narrativity to
sequences representing configurations of facts,” 100); the arguable point I make here, though not
original, is my own.

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