Pre-publication draft of chapter forthcoming in: The Cambridge Companion to J.M. Coetzee. Ed. Jarad Zimbler. Cambridge University Press, 2019. SCENES & SETTINGS: FOE, BOYHOOD, YOUTH AND SLOW MAN Meg Samuelson In poetry the action can take place everywhere and nowhere: it does not matter whether the lonely wives of the fishermen live in Kalk Bay or Portugal or Maine. Prose, on the other hand, seems naggingly to demand a specific setting. – J.M. Coetzee, Youth When the aspirant author of J.M. Coetzee’s Youth attempts ‘his first experiment with prose’, he is disconcerted to find that it takes a South African setting. 1 He has, after all, journeyed to the metropolis in a bid to shed his ‘South African self’, which he considers a ‘handicap’. 2 Initially, he tries to emulate Henry James, observing approvingly that ‘James shows one how to rise above mere nationality’: ‘it is not always clear where a piece by James is set […] so supremely above the mechanics of daily life is James. People in James do not have to pay the rent; they certainly do not have to hold down jobs; all they are required to do is to have supersubtle conversations’. 3 But Youth has, tellingly, opened with a detailed reckoning of how John earns and pays his rent, and the ‘price to be paid’ for setting is repeatedly calculated across Coetzee’s oeuvre. 4 John’s attempt to write a story in which his characters are able transcend place thus proves to be ‘like trying to make mammals fly’: ‘For a moment or two, flapping their arms, they support themselves in thin air. Then they plunge’. 5 In a later episode, the gravitational pull of place is no longer experienced by John as failure but elicits instead the affirming sensation of belonging ‘on this earth’. 6 Through these and other pivotal scenes, Coetzee’s kunstlerroman asserts that setting matters. 7 Setting refers broadly to the milieu or sociohistorical circumstances of narrative as well as to the particular locations in which specific scenes or sequences of events take place. It both establishes context and provides the space in which the episodes comprising a story are enacted. This space can be either incidental to the action or foundational. The distinction between the two is described by narratologist Mieke Bal as that between ‘frame-space’ and 1 J.M. Coetzee, Youth (Vintage, 2003), p. 61. 2 Coetzee, Youth, p. 62. 3 Coetzee, Youth, p. 64. 4 See, inter alia, Coetzee, J.M., ‘Jerusalem Prize Acceptance Speech’ in Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews, ed. David Attwell (Harvard University Press, 1992), pp. 96-100. 5 Coetzee, Youth, p. 64. 6 Coetzee, Youth, p. 7 On the importance of place in Youth, see also: Barnard, Rita, Apartheid and Beyond: South African Writers and the Politics of Place (Oxford University Press, 2007); Easton, Kai, ‘Travels to the Metropolis: Cape Town, London, and J.M. Coetzee’s Youth’, Moving Worlds, 4.1 (2004), 72-84; López, María J., Acts of Visitation: The Narrative of J.M. Coetzee (Rodopi, 2011).