Diary of a Bad Year starts off with a single narrator (an older male writer) but the text is split between his writings and his diary. Visually, this split is represented with a shift in the shape of the text: the top three-quarters of the page (the essay) are justified, while the bottom quarter (the diary) is ragged right; a thin rule separates the two. Above, the voice is proper, in its place (but only barely so); below, it’s casual and at times self-conscious. So the vertical shape of the page is precarious: a heavy block rests upon a few shallow, uneven lines.
As the book proceeds, another voice enters: that of a woman. Her voice comes up from the bottom, further splitting the page, so that it’s now in thirds. And she doesn’t respect the boundaries as he did; whereas the narrator was careful to craft sentences and paragraphs that could begin and end on a single page, her voice ranges across the pages. As a reader, you must choose between shifting from her narrative to the writer’s in mid-sentence (leaving her to trail off) or else skip over the writer’s voice and stay with her for a few pages, only to backtrack and catch up with him later. The design of the text then physically captures the sense of youth careening ahead, of an old man chasing after it, losing his way in the process.
When the woman’s voice first breaks the page, it’s in a passage where she talks about how the writer’s eyes are going:
He forms his letters clearly enough, m’s and n’s and u’s and w’s included, but when he tries to write a whole passage he can’t keep the line straight, it dips like a plane nosediving into the sea or a baritone running out of breath. Coetzee, Diary of a Bad Year (42–43)
It’s another twenty pages before he follows after her and runs across the page as well:
These thoughts about the body occur not in the abstract but in relation to a specific person, X, unnamed. On the morning of the day he died, X brushed his teeth, taking care of them with the due diligence we learn as children.…X was not buried but cremated; and the people who built the oven in which he was consumed ensured that it was hot enough to turn everything to ash, even bones, even teeth. Even teeth. Coetzee, Diary of a Bad Year (60–61)
In both passages, there is a sense of routine – of trying to maintain control even as it slips away – while the design of the page supports the text in subtle ways. The initial control of one voice gives way to two (and later, three); the essays cede space to the woman’s criticism of them, so that the justified lines are diminished as the ragged text swells up from the bottom of the page, in contrast to the writer’s own diving handwriting.
