1. Interpreting the Portrayal of the Author at Work in J. M. Coetzee’s
Laura Cernat KU Leuven & University of Bucharest The Scene of Invention
Interpreting the Portrayal of the Author at Work in J. M. Coetzee’s
The Master of Petersburg

2. Biographism’s loss of territory - the concrete author in the shadow -
One of the first distinctions between the everyday man and the auctorial “I” was made by Proust, in Contre Sainte-Beuve (written around 1908, published in 1954), and therefore coincided with one of the firmest rejections of biographism.
« (…) un livre est le produit d’un autre moi que celui que nous manifestons dans nos habitudes, dans la société, dans nos vices. Ce moi-là, si nous voulons essayer de le comprendre, c’est au fond de nous-mêmes, en essayant de le recréer en nous, que nous pouvons y parvenir » (Proust, Contre Sainte-Beuve, 226, my emphasis)
In the 1920s, Tynianov and Vinogradov started developing a theory of “literary personality” and, respectively, “author’s image”, referring to the abstract entity which sums up the mechanisms of a literary text.
Wimsatt & Beardsley famously criticized “The Intentional Fallacy” in 1946.
With Wayne C. Booth’s Rhetoric of Fiction (1961), Eco’s Lector in Fabula, and Jaap Lintvelt’s Essai de typologie narrative (1981), the contrast between implied author (Booth)/ abstract author (Lintvelt)/ abstract subject (Mukařovski)/ model author (Eco) and the actual individual who sat down and wrote became an established notion in narratology and, gradually, a textbook platitude.
No sooner had the abstract author been introduced as a concept than the interest for the concrete author ceased (at least in literary theory and criticism).

3. The Writer at Work: A Liminal Situation
The (by now traditional) distinction was refined in 2004 by Dominique Maingueneau (Le Discours littéraire, p. 107), who emphasized the difference between inscripteur (roughly, the abstract author), écrivain (the public person) and personne (the private one).
The concept of posture (Meizoz, 2007) focuses on the conjunction between inscripteur and écrivain, revealing the strategies behind littérature engagée and the forms of assuming a social persona by means of the literary work. One side of the biographical self (the public one) is thus back in the spotlight.
The conjunction between inscripteur and personne, on the other hand, remains less explored by Meizoz. A very relevant instance of the fusion or blurring of borderlines between these two (the abstract entity projected in the work and the private self of the author) is constituted by the moment when the writer is practically at the writing desk, producing the text.

4. … Meanwhile, in popular culture:
As Nigel Hamilton (Biography. A Brief History , 2007), Hermione Lee (Biography. A Very Short Introduction, 2009) and Catherine N. Parke (Biography. Writing Lives, 1996) have all remarked, biography’s history in the second half of the twentieth century evolved quite independently from the theoretical considerations regarding the intentional fallacy (Wimsatt and Beardsley) or the death of the author (proclaimed by Barthes and nuanced by Foucault in “What Is an Author?”). Apart from literary biographies written by academics, a flood of celebrity biographies, biographies romancées, biographical documentaries and not least biopics (and biographical novels) attracted public attention. Some of the stereotypes of biographical discourse were preserved despite the all-pervasiveness of fashionable theories of impersonality.
In movies and books – including instances of “high-brow” literature – a naively Romantic notion of inspiration still survives. There is a nearly mystical fascination for the creative moment. Portraying the writer /inventor at work involves a set of stereotypes (the struggle with temporary sterility, the unexpected epiphany, the gaze lost in a sort of rapture, following the invisible idea) belonging not necessarily to the auctorial posture as a feature of this or that individual, but to a more general posture of The Author, molded in concordance with the expectations of the reader / film viewer (which contradicts Meizoz‘s notion that the posture expresses the singularity of an individual). The image of this generic creator is bound to distort biographical fictions from being faithful either to the life or to the work of an author.

5. Example 1: A Beautiful Mind (2001) 00:20:06-00:22:36

6. Example 2: Total Eclipse (1995) 01:26:04-01:28:28

7. Example 3: The Hours (2002) (00:09:50-00:10:51 & 00:26:31-00:27:05)

8. Narrativizing inspiration (in popular culture)
Characteristics of inspiration:
Triggered by an external anecdote (see “A Beautiful Mind” or “The Imitation Game”)
Constitutes a moment of awe (the “Eureka” feeling)
Accompanied by music that suggests triumph or revelation
Followed immediately by the setting in motion of the plan (writing / calculating / assembling the machine, solving the equation, etc.), which goes on with implausible fluency.
Function: Not to recompose the moment of creation as it was, but to explain it, to make sense of it in a narrative logic. (Example: the dating parable in A Beautiful Mind is not the origin of Nash’s economic theory, but, on the contrary, it is a retrospective construct: an application derived from that theory and adapted to the public’s understanding. The effect or the example is embedded back into the frame which originated it.)
The transformation imposed by narrativization upon the process of literary creation alters the accurate representation of the birth of an idea much in the way dreams are altered by their transposition into narratives. The alteration is at once a distortion of the original syntax of the elements involved in the dream/ in the new idea and an inevitable condition of expression.

9. Deconstructing the standard narrative of invention
While the usual story makes a canonical text or well-known discovery stem from a particular life-event through its emplotment as a revelation, Coetzee derives from the story of Pavel Isaev’s death (a fiction, since Dostoevsky’s stepson survived the writer by several years in real life) the inspiration of the text we know as “The Possessed (The Devils)”. Only that the fragment he intertextually inserts in the author-at-work scene is not part of the published novel, but of the famous posthumously published excerpt “At Tikhon’s” / Stavrogin’s confession (1922, Hogarth Press, tr. Virginia Woolf & S. S. Koteliansky), and it is not quoted in the form found in Dostoevsky’s manuscripts, but rewritten in third person, not in the original phrasing, but in Coetzee’s words (a reversal of Pierre Menard).
This is (in my view) a strategy for pushing to the extreme the mechanisms of Coetzee’s own textual inventiveness in order to prove the artificiality of all narratives of invention.
In other words: The fact that inserting a counterfactual plot in a life story takes us on a path that does not reach the real text in the end (but an apocryphal one) comes to show that there is an opacity at the origin of each text, which cannot be reduced to clarity through narrative means. Coetzee’s fake quote from Dostoevsky unmasks all writer-at-work mythologies as vain pursuits of a text that is no longer itself.

10. Writing The Possessed (Demons) - facts and fictions (I)
Context: In 1868 Dostoevsky was in Switzerland, writing against the clock at The Idiot in order to make up for the money he had lost gambling. He had to switch houses five times during his work on the novel, he dropped a hundred-page version for being “mediocre”. On May 12, his first daughter, Sofya, died at the age of two months. Nevertheless, he almost completed the novel by the December 1868 deadline. In February 1869 he published the last part.
Meanwhile, his stepson, Pavel Isaev (the son of his late wife Maria Dimitrievna by her first marriage) quit two clerk-jobs that Dostoevsky had found for him and remained financially dependent on the writer.
Around September 1869, Dostoevsky started planning a large novel titled Atheism. The drafts for it gradually melted into another novel project, called The Life of a Great Sinner, which also remained unfinished. Finally, the sketches for both these texts were absorbed by The Possessed.
On September 26, Dostoevsky’s second daughter, Lyubov, was born.
On account of working at the new novel, Dostoevsky asked Maikov to intercede with his editor in order to obtain money to face his financial strain.
September – end of November – Dostoevsky writes The Eternal Husband.
December: working at The Life of a Great Sinner, which was to include the monk Tikhon as a character. Tikhon eventually became the dialogue partner in “Stavrogin’s confession”, which was taken out of the final version of The Possessed at friends’ and editors’ suggestion.

11. Writing The Possessed (Demons) - facts and fictions (II)
Coetzee’s biographical novel
Dostoevsky’s factual biography
On November 21, 1869, young anarchist Sergey Nechaev, along with his followers, killed Ivan Ivanov for contesting Nechaev’s absolute power in the group & wanting to withdraw.
In late December, Nechaev, who had fled Russia, is linked to the murder.
December 1869-February 1870: Dostoevsky, who at that point was still abroad, working on a novel about a “great sinner”, starts redrafting the novel to include the murder, which had surged many comments in the newspapers.
In October 1869, Pavel Isaev, Dostoevsky’s stepson, is killed in mysterious circumstances in a conflict between the police and a group of anarchists led by Nechaev. Dostoevsky comes to Petersburg incognito and argues with Nechaev.
Ivanov appears as a beggar.
Dostoevsky has an affair with Pavel’s ex-landlady, witnessed with distress by her twelve-year old daughter, Matryona, who in her turn is sickly fascinated by Nechaev.
Nov.: Dostoevsky writes At Tikhon’s.
The Possessed: September (1871?): Piotr Verhovensky (a caricature of Nechaev) convinces a group of would-be anarchists and radicals to join him in murdering Shatov, a member of their group, suspected of intending to betray them. Verhovensky’s actual reason was to cement the group’s unity through guilt.
At Tikhon’s: Stavrogin (protagonist of The Possessed) confesses to having abused a twelve-year old girl, Matryosha.

12. Dostoevsky on inspiration
The Landlady: January “I am writing my Landlady (…). My pen is guided by a source of inspiration rising directly from the soul. Not like Prokharchin, over which I agonized all summer.” (letter to his brother Mikhail)
The Idiot:
September 1867: “Dostoevsky estimated, with his usual overoptimism, that once writing began he would complete it in five months. (…) What he counted on, as he wrote to Maikov, was the sudden flash of inspiration that would enable him to discover, among the swarming multiplicity of his scenarios, the one that he could most profitably develop.” (Frank 556)
November 1867, upon abandoning a considerable first draft: “I said to hell with it all. I assure you that the novel could have been satisfactory, but I got incredibly fed up with it precisely because of the fact that it was satisfactory and not absolutely good.” (letter to Maikov)
The Possessed:
1869: “I have tackled a rich idea. (…) I am not speaking of the execution, but the idea. One of the ideas that has an undoubted resonance among the public. Like Crime and Punishment, but even closer to reality, more vital, and having direct relevance for the most important contemporary issue. I hope to make at least as much money as for Crime and Punishment, and therefore, by the end of the year there is hope of putting all my affairs in order and of returning to Russia Never have I worked with such enjoyment and such ease.” (letter to Maikov)
December 1870: “All year I only tore up and made alterations. I blackened so many mounds of paper that I even lost my system of references for what I had written. I have modified the plan not less than ten times, and completely rewrote the first part each time.” (letter to Strakhov)
(letter quotes apud Joseph Frank. Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time. Princeton & Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2010)

13. Inspiration, waiting, and fear in The Master of Petersburg
Unlike the narrativization of inspiration in popular culture, where the newness of the idea is drowned in the familiarity of the discovery scenario, Coetzee’s novel preserves this newness in the truest sense: the idea is something to be feared, something whose occurrence cannot be anticipated, whose orientation cannot be controlled. The writer is at the mercy of the spectre (and Stavrogin’s appearance, as an alter-ego of both the lost Pavel and the young Dostoevsky, is described precisely in terms of spectrality: “the phantasm”; “this presence, so grey and without feature”- Coetzee 240), who can choose to come or not, to be good or evil.
“Confronting it is like descending into the waters of the Nile and coming face to face with something huge and cold and grey that may once have been born of woman but with the passing of ages has retreated into stone, that does not belong in his world” (ibid.)
“He is sick and he knows the name of his sickness. (…) he can give himself to it, refuse the chloroform of terror or unconsciousness, watch and listen instead for the moment which may or may not arrive – it is not in his power to force it – when from being a body plunging into darkness he shall become a body within whose core a plunge into darkness is taking place, a body which contains its own falling and its own darkness.” (Coetzee, 234, my emphasis)

14. Invention as openness to the unexpected
Derek Attridge (Coetzee and The Ethics of Reading, 2004, p ) describes Dostoevsky’s writing scene in this novel in Derrida’s terms of waiting for the arrivant (Apories), or in terms of “inventing the other” (ibid., 129):
“The coming of the other or its coming back is the only possible arrival, but it is not invented, even if the most genial inventiveness is needed to prepare to welcome it and to prepare to affirm the chance of an encounter that not only is no longer calculable but is not even an incalculable factor still homogeneous with the calculable, not even an undecidable still in the labor of bringing forth a decision. Is this possible? Of course it is not, and that is why it is the only possible invention.”
(Derrida, Psyche. Inventions of the Other, I, Stanford University Press, 2007, p. 45)
Invention is thus the unforeseen possibility that exceeds narrative logic. This is why the representation of inspiration through the common plot-structure always alters the reality of its unforeseeable-ness and of its dangerousness.

15. Is The Master of Petersburg a Clear Refusal to Narrativize Invention?
Yes, to the extent to which it does not adopt the common recipe of explaining a familiar text through the biographical circumstances that engendered it, slightly modified to fit an anecdotic pattern and thus make a good story. On the contrary, Coetzee’s novel subverts the usual procedure by taking his readers on a journey from a fake biographical episode to a pseudo-Dostoevskian text. Among the examples provided earlier, only The Hours (based on Michael Cunningham’s book) is as metatextual in playing with different levels of the life-book correspondence.
Not completely, because it contains some elements of the typical writer-at-work scenario:
The writer’s block moment (“He is distracted, and irritated with himself for being distracted. (…) He paces around the room, changes the position of the table a second time. (…) He cannot write, he cannot think.”; “For hours he sits at the table. The pen does not move.”– Coetzee, )
The smoothness of the writing process once the idea is grasped (“He writes all of this in a clear, careful script, crossing out not a word.” – Coetzee, 245; “It takes him no more than 10 minutes to write the scene, with not a word blotted.” – Coetzee, 249)
Most importantly: the connection suggested between previous events in the story and the birth of the new literary idea (= narrativization of the creative process)
But: the element of awe, the “Eureka” feeling is absent, replaced by bitterness and the feeling of damnation (“Thus at last the time arrives and the hand that holds the pen begins to move. But the words it forms are not words of salvation.” – Coetzee 243; “I have lost my place in my soul, he thinks” (…) He has betrayed everyone.” – Coetzee 250)

16. Welcoming strangeness – the reader’s work
If the writer’s task is to welcome the stranger (“the thief in the night”, to use Coetzee’s biblical metaphor), the idea or the character as something wholly new, struggling with it in a very personal way, the reader is faced with welcoming the (impersonal) strangeness of the already constituted text.
“The reader’s responsibility towards the new work, the novel suggests, is to give oneself attentively to it, expecting the unexpected as unexpected, neither passively yielding to its seductions nor actively managing its meanings, knowing (…) that one’s efforts will always be inadequate, will always involve sacrifice and betrayal. It enjoins me to focus my attention on the opaque or disturbing passages, not to pass them by to concentrate of the familiar.” (Attridge, Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading, 134, my bolds)

17. Conclusion
The scene of invention is structurally similar to the scene of a crime in two ways:
It is a departure from a state of innocence, into the unknown. (Writing is described as “Perversion – everything and everyone to be turned to another use, to be gripped to him and fall with him” - Coetzee, 235, my bolds)
It can never be perfectly reconstructed. When something is created, just like when something is destroyed/ killed, an event happens whose reiteration can only destroy or create something else, never the same. The scene of writing is surrounded by an inviting, alluring, yet self-regenerating opacity.

18. A manuscript page from The Possessed (Demons)
Source: Joseph Frank. Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time. Princeton & Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2010, p. 627

19. Works cited
A Beautiful Mind. Dir. Ron Howard. Perf. Russell Crowe. Universal Pictures, DreamWorks & Imagine Entertainment, 2001
Attridge, Derek. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading: Literature in the Event. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004
Coetzee, J. M. The Master of Petersburg. London: Minerva, 1995
Derrida, Jacques. Aporias. Trans. Thomas Dutoit. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993
Derrida, Jacques. “Psyche: Invention of the Other”. Psyche. Inventions of the Other. Eds. Peggy Kamuf & Elizabeth Rottenberg. Vol. 1. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,
Dostoevsky, Fyodor Mikhailovitch. Stavrogin’s Confession and the Plan of The Life of a Great Sinner. Annotations & Trans. S. S. Koteliansky & Virginia Woolf. Richmond: Hogarth Press, 1922
Dostoevsky, Fyodor Mikhailovitch. The Possessed (The Devils). A Novel in Three Parts. Trans. Constance Garnett. Eds. David Moynihan, David Widger and Michelle Knight. Project Gutenberg, Web at
Foucault, Michel. “What Is an Author?”. The Foucault Reader. Ed. Paul Rabinow. New York: Random House, (Trans. Josué F. Harari)
Frank, Joseph. Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time. Princeton & Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2010
Hamilton, Nigel. Biography: A Brief History. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007
Lee, Hermione. Biography: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009
Maingueneau, Dominique. Le discours littéraire. Paratopie et scène d'énonciation. Paris: Armand Colin, 2004
Meizoz, Jerôme. Postures littéraires. Mises en scène modernes de l’auteur. Genève: Slatkine Érudition, 2007
Parke, Catherine N. Biography: Writing Lives. New York: Routledge, 2002
Proust, Marcel. Contre Sainte-Beuve. Pastiches et mélanges. Essais et articles. Eds. Pierre Clarac & Yves Sandre. Paris: Gallimard, 1984
The Hours. Dir. Stephen Daldry. Based on a novel by Michael Cunningham. Perf. Nicole Kidman, Maryl Streep, Julianne Moore, Stephen Dillane. Paramount Pictures, Miramax, Scott Rudin Productions, 2002
Total Eclipse. Dir. Agnieszka Holland. Perf. Leonardo DiCaprio. FIT Production, Portman Production, SFP Cinema, K2, 1995.