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J.M. Coetzee's Boyhood remains a fundamentally ambivalent work, generically speaking. The author seems unwilling to choose between autobiography and fiction. Whatever truth is attained may, in the last resort, be best expressed as a fiction of the truth.
The difficulties arising from autobiography are legion, not only in terms of the author's realisation of that most elusive of literary projects but also with regard to the hermeneutic reception of the autobiographical text by the reader/critic. Yet the exponential increase that has taken place in recent decades in the proliferation both of the geme itself and in critical and theoretical studies devoted to the geme,2 testifies to the fascination exercised over contemporary western cultures by the individual's struggle to sever the Gordian knot of self-awareness in executing the reckless act quaintly defined by the OED as 'the story of one's life written by himself.
J.M. Coetzee, whose Boyhood: Scenes From Provincial Life is the subject of the present paper, has himself made no small contribution to the seemingly endless flow of meta-literature that has been generated by this most intriguing of literary and philosophical enterprises.3 It is, therefore, to the invaluable frame of reference provided by Coetzee's own theoretical writing on the genre that I have turned in seeking to evaluate the author's apparent adoption of the autobiographical mode in Boyhood.
I say 'apparent' because, despite the fact that most commentators have had no hesitation in reading Boyhood as a personal history,1 there is nevertheless a fundamental ambivalence on the part of Coetzee himself as to the precise nature of his undertaking in this work. Introducing a reading from Boyhood during his stay at the Stanford Humanities Center in 1997, Coetzee recounted the question that had been put to him by his publisher about Boyhood 'Is this fiction or memoir?' to which the author had replied with his usual laconic evasiveness, 'Do I have to choose?'.2 Even the blurb on the book's dust-jacket coyly eschews all designation of the generic category of writing to which Boyhood belongs; the terms 'autobiography' and 'memoir' are both significantly absent from the description which simply states that 'the diagnostic skills of the mature novelist' have been brought to bear on 'his childhood and his interior life'. In other words,...