Thank You!

I just wanted to extend a big thank you to Joanne and Karla!  Your Presentation Bibliography was a tremendous help in finding pertinent sources which were invaluable to me during the writing Process.  Thank you again!

Seminar Paper

J.M. Coetzee and the Issue of Authorship in:

The Lives of Animals and Elizabeth Costello

Daniel Linton

English 620JMC

Dr. Ian Barnard

14 Dec 2011

            In 1997, J.M. Coetzee decides to read a narrative for a lecture at Princeton university.  The Princeton University Press publishes it two years later as The Lives of Animals.  In 2003 Coetzee publishes a book entitled Elizabeth Costello which is comprised, mostly, of previously published material, including the two parts that make up The Lives of Animals.  Elizabeth Costello is the main character of both books.  Three months later during his acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize in Literature he uses a story once again.  This time it is about Robinson Crusoe and Daniel Defoe.  Why?  The scholarship runs deep with many answers.  It is divided between those that feel it is a way for Coetzee to avoid any direct criticism and those who see it as an attempt to break away from genre-specificity by reinventing authorship.  In this paper I want to explore the issue of authorship as seen through The Lives of Animals and Elizabeth Costello to argue that Coetzee is consciously masking himself in order to draw our attention to the inability of language to say what we mean.  That these two books are a response to a way of thinking that starts as far back as the enlightenment and continues to have residency in the world of literature today.  By creating a fused entity, composed of himself and Costello, he reestablishes the writer/character relationship which awakens a new demand on the reader.  One that draws them away from a truth as conceived through the modes of fiction and non-fiction.          

The Lives of Animals

           

            Reason is the source of our modern discomfort. It has rearranged certain natural principles in an attempt to offer convenience and comfort.  As institutions are installed to monitor and maintain these luxuries, they inevitably filter into every aspect of our lives.  Our modes of communication get modified and language becomes supplanted with superfluous intents, ones that have begun to be recognized.  In "The Post-Modern Condition" Jean-Francois Lyotard writes, "…to speak is to fight" (Lyotard )  Reason has always been our adopted banner in order to justify and qualify what humans do. That logic supplies both a divisible and tangible result.  Absent from this thinking is a language that is is conscious of itself and what it does.  A cunning self-preservation disguised by a collection of letters and words that simply facilitate communication between two or more people.  The Lives of Animals is Coetzee's first fully concentrated salvo launched at the core of our relationship to reason.  This concern has been there from the very first novel Dusklands and has consistently gathered momentum.  But here there is a visceral break from the conventional concept of authorship.  Reason is singled out for two reasons.  First it is a common determinate used to show possession of a heightened sense of being, "…a sort of unspoken agreement, humanity has chosen to hold one mode of being, the mode engendered by reason, as the only sanctioned mode of existence. This willed belief in the supremacy of reason allows humanity to occupy the moral high ground." (Smuts 73)  Secondly it is the genesis for a current of thought that has given rise to a set of aesthetics that have ushered in the enlightenment and from there modernism which have been used to determine the way into a novel and a novelist can capture reality.  In Elizabeth Costello's lecture The Philosophers and the Animals she attacks the legitimacy of reason as a measure in which to decide a hierarchy of being.  Her fundamental argument is that reason is not an ordained condition that predates us and has a place woven into the fabric of the universe itself but instead is a highly sophisticated product of human thought kept alive through a complex pattern of redundancy. 

Of course reason will validate reason as the first principle of the universe- what else should it do?  Dethrone itself?  Reasoning systems, as systems of totality, do not have that power.  If there were a position from which reason could attack and dethrone itself, reason would already have occupied that position; otherwise it would not be total. (The Lives of Animals 25)

Coetzee sets-up a dilemma, that by beginning at the very source of our systems of knowledge, which is reason, threatens everything that originates from that source.  Indeed the entirety of Costello's argument comes at the cost of logic, which is a pinnacle of western thought.  She believes it is the "sympathetic imagination" the ability to, "…think my way into the existence of a being who has never existed…[and] any being with whom I share the substrate of life." (The Lives of Animals 35)  Costello's idea of what constitutes "being" has similarities with Coetzee's displeasure with the limited nature of language, specifically, "…the opacity and waywardness of words in their refusal transparently to represent, their refusal simply and unequivocally to perform or facilitate communication…" (“He and His Man” Cornwell 98)  Gareth Cornwell continues his point which is relevant to what Coetzee is doing as a writer.  He is not only pointing out the vacancy that exist in fiction when it tries to convey a accurate portrayal of reality but also of the attempt to that tries to highlight this inefficiency.  Coetzee is surrounding on all sides, as an author, the authority of literature, and by extension himself, to determine what is right or wrong, moral or immoral. 

Thus any attempt to describe this failure is itself doomed to fail: in pointing to the catachresis that waits at the interface between every intention and the speech act to which it gives rise, I, too resort to catachresis.  In the perspective that governs "He and His Man," every description is a betrayal because words are not things an every name is therefore the wrong name (“He and His Man” Cornwell 98)

"He and His Man" is the narrative that Coetzee used as his Nobel Lecture six years after he The Lives of Animals was used at the Tanner Lectures at Princeton University and three months after Elizabeth Costello was published.  It expands on the themes of authorship that these works introduced.  In Cornwell's article entitled "He and His Man": Allegory and Catachresis in J.M. Coetzee's Nobel Lecture he examines the historical relationships that exist within Coetzee's works.  Namely, how the close alignment of fiction and history form a collusion. It is a blurring seen throughout Coetzee's novels, the real stacked alongside the fictional, the observable juxtaposed with the undocumented that has a realization as real as any history we were taught to be adherents of.  This treatment makes apparent that the line which divides fiction and history is a matter of conjecture.  Cornwell defines the speech as a study of "…the manner of existence of a fictional character and the relationship between the character and the author who invented him or her." (“He and His Man Cornwell 100)  The intersection of these works revolves around is our dependence on a failed system of representation that has hampered our ability to broaden our ideas of communication and therefore deepen our sense of humanity.  The categorization of literature limits its potential by denying the autobiographical basis of all writing.  The categories of fiction and non-fiction are related through the same flaw which is the belief that they are different.  That a lecture is not a narrative and that a narrative is not a lecture.

            There is a discontent attached to Coetzee's decision to read a narrative at a lectern.  He has recognized the futility of literature and the author as agents of change.  At least in the present context.  The illusion of the writer as an elevated source of wisdom is damaging to any potential that literature may have.  The relationships must be reestablished and if Coetzee's lectures our any indication it starts by renegotiating our reliance on language as a means to achieve lucidness.  In Thorsten Carstensen's article Shattering the Word-Mirror in Elizabeth Costello: J.M. Coetzee's Deconstructive Experiment he writes, "According to postmodern wisdom, the world's contingency renders any consistent representation of reality in a fictional text utterly impossible." (Carstensen 81)  Coetzee has used the novel to encroach this awareness upon his readers.  To inform them that supposed lines that have been drawn by the ideals of the enlightenment and or of realism are merely transparent gossamer that does nothing to prevent the osmosis Coetzee is determined to draw our attention to.  In Coetzee's proceeding works we see the maturation of this idea.  In fact from the very beginning there is a post-modern handling of truth and history that has a guarded consideration of the author/character dynamic but in The Lives of Animals it becomes the most overt and from thereon out the principal form that informs Coetzee's work.

            I believe The Lives of Animals is where Coetzee inaugurates his "ventriloquizing" (“ He and His Man” Cornwell 100) where the work seeks to absorb the terms fictional and non-fictional together to show us the outcomes are inevitably the same.  I mentioned earlier the word humanity and I want to return to it here because I feel it is an integral part of the entire discussion.  Elizabeth Costello feels the an overestimation of reason has driven us away from our imaginative abilities.  In The Lives of Animals the dichotomy of reason and sympathy is presented to us as the turbulent relationship between Elizabeth and Norma which works as a representation of the novelist and philosopher and the assumed differences between the two.  The novelist relies on the emotional response whereas the philosopher appeals to reason.  When reduced down it becomes a mater of the subjective vs. the objective.

In other words, they closed their hearts.  The heart is the seat of a faculty, sympathy, that allows us to share at times the being of another.  Sympathy has everything to do with the subject and little to do with the object, the 'another' as we see at once when we think of the object not as a bat…but as another human being.  There are people who have the capacity to imagine themselves as someone else, there are people who have no such capacity…and there are people who have the capacity but choose not to exercise it. (The Lives of Animals 35)

Elizabeth is absorbed by a perceived loss of humanity that taxes her faith in the world.  She laments "They lost their humanity, in our eyes, because of a certain willed ignorance on their part." (The Lives of Animals 20)  By subtracting "willed ignorance" and replacing it with reasoning the essence of the statement is not dulled and therein lies the problem for Costello.  This faculty unchecked has as enormously dangerous potential which is not only the ability to commit atrocities, either physical or mental, but the ability to rationalize such acts.  Norma mocks Elzabeth's stance as "shallow relativism" and states that "Human beings invent mathematics, they build telescopes, they do calculations, the obstruct machines…Reason provides us with real knowledge of the real world." (48)  In this book, between these two women, there is an argument of context.  Elizabeth would argue that context changes subjectively, that is from one person to person or from one environment to another and that the proportions constantly change within each context. Norma suggest that there is an objective context to which we are all a part which has specific features and dimensions that can be measured and understood because they remain, at all times, static. 

            This is the ground where Coetzee places his fluid narrator, where authorship becomes diluted and permeable.  Between the homogeneous which borders into the archaic and the heterogeneous which risks identity.  There is an animate flux which allows the text to go in multiple places at once.

We move between two different and (only apparently) incompatible perspectives, that of the self-conscious author or knowing critic marveling at the diegetic construction of the tale.  We are at once within and without the "story" and never allowed to settle comfortably into the conventions of either a purely realist or postmodern fiction. (Moses 27)

 The reader is always negotiating with what belongs to the characters and what belongs to the author.  Costello has discussions with both fictional and real people which creates a ground populated by things we can directly engage with beyond the text as is the case of the real personas Coetzee uses.  Even with the fictional characters we can build fairly accurate assumptions based on their names which point to blatant connections to very factual events/people which Marjorie Garber discusses in her essay included in the "Reflections" portion of The Lives of Animals.  The idea of real and imagined constantly overlap to such a degree that we begin, after a time, to integrate the two. This vacillation sets up a dynamic new ground that gives Cotezee the freedom to wander in and out of genres in order to subvert the ingrained notions of authorship.  This admixture offers rich possibilities as to how a novel can function.  From here Coetzee will test, more and more, the durability of this process by publishing another collection of lecture/narratives with Elizabeth Costello as the talisman.                  

Elizabeth Costello

            If there is no way to completely convey reality in a text what then is the writer's recourse?  What than is the role of the author?  The eight lessons in Elizabeth Costello are a vibrant investigation into these questions which culminate in a complicated and bizarre postscript whose brevity makes for a wickedly cruel conclusion.  Coetzee composes around the realization that there is nothing one can do to resolve such inquiries.

Elizabeth Costello demonstrates that we have only language by means of which to engage with the question of language. There is no stepping outside language to transcend its limits.  Any determination in language requires a subjection to the limits of language.  At best we can step outside a particular discursive formation (the narrative) into another discursive formation (the postscript), thereby redrawing the boundary and creating another determination. (Klooper 130)  

The only choice available is to consciously acknowledge that fact by writing directly toward it.  Costello opines on this subject during an acceptance speech when she says, "'There used to be a time when we knew.  We used to believe that she the text said, "On the table stood a glass of water," there was indeed a table, and a glass of water on it, and we had only to look in the word-mirror of the text to see them" (Elizabeth Costello 19)  Ironically she is receiving an award for her work, an award which by extension of her remarks is invalidated.  There, in as much summation as is possible when attempting to reduce the integrity of the many issues in this work, is the theme of the book.  Dissolution and transience haunt each lesson.  There is a temporal factor weighing on every element the book introduces and puts into play: Costello's physical body, the ideas of realism, and issues of sanity.  As we progress through the various sections each of these issues is complicated by the "against the grain" perspectives of the perceived and imagined authors: Coetzee and Costello.  Magnified by the fact that the surroundings and people in the work alternate between real and imagined.  It is a contention that defines this book and the experience of reading it.

            The novel strays, as all Cotezee's literature does, into nihilistic territory as it seeks to find something permanent and substantial, behind our notion of human existence.  Costello is an interesting choice as a representative of Coetzee calculated attempt to remove the novel from the failed confines that convention insist on recycling.  She stumbles rather than strides or as Heather Walton puts it "The narratives painfully highlight her faltering delivery, imperfect arguments and the puzzled responses of her hearers." (Walton 282)  Her body is at the beginning stages of rejecting her.  The drive which she must summon to navigate these areas at times is half-hearted and not immediate.  Her disbanding is a poignant comment which is engorged with representational possibility.  It symbolizes the dying of outmoded literary genres, "…the failure of writing and the impossibility of fiction fulfilling its religious vocation." (Walton 291) and signals the fate of all the ensuing reinventions that will take one another’s place.  One could argue it describes the difficulty of finding new ways to engage the same old stories in a different way.  Further still it could be said that it conveys a cynicism that questions the importance of seeking such new ground when inevitably it will fail to resolve the issue(s) which inspired it into existence.  Coetzee's novel could be a warning as to the circular cruelty these endeavors follow.  

            So who then is Elizabeth Costello?  Is she a classical fictional character or something more?  If, as Coetzee himself has suggested, all stories are to some degree autobiographical then they are, by degrees, the same.   I would argue the structure of the book itself is the first suggestion that the relationship is something more than the conventional transfer that exist between author and character. It is something far more entrenched than that, "…she is a persona who exists in order to deliver the lectures that comprise the greater part of the texts in which she appears." (“Realism”Cornwell 355)  The lessons stand as philosophical etchings impinging themselves upon a narrative ground.  The two converge at a point where each has been reduced to their necessary elements and then combined.  Costello is a mouthpiece, an alter-ego but one that comes with the turbulence of fictive aspects.  She has a history.  We witness her correspond with others.  There is dialogue.  The book is a mixture of the emotional elements of narrative and philosophical reason which impart what I imagine was Coetzee's aim, to create a text that works in new territory, upon grounds not fully fleshed out.  Indeed the book has glaring omissions, at times it can feel unfinished or half put together but I believe that to be the, as Coetzee sees it, the composition this book requires in order to connect in a purely ambivalent way.  I use ambivalent because one could suggest the fractured quality of the book stems from the fact that the book is not a novel but instead a collection of lectures, formatted as narrative, but lectures nonetheless.  I would then point to the Postscript and here I would justify the term ambivalent.  Not only to describe the content of that postscript but as to it's function within the work and how its appearance then rearranges or perhaps reinforces everything that came before it and confirms the rupture that Coetzee appears intent on committing

…the postscript is anomalous in having been written not by the author of the first letter, the husband, but by the wife, who writes on behalf of the husband and stout his knowledge, usurping his prerogative and depriving him, if not of his authority, then at least of having the last word.  Moreover, it is an addition not to one but to two texts.  It is a postscript to the narrative of Elizabeth Costello, and the name that appears at the end of the letter, Elizabeth C, indicates an obvious correspondence with the name Elizabeth C(ostello).  But it is also a sequel to the ether of Lord Chandos, a excerpt of which is provided as basis for it. (Klooper 120) 

The issue of power that Dirk Klooper addresses is a paramount ingredient in the relationship that Coetzee is actively "usurping."  The postscript underlines the relinquishing of the dominance that has been placed into the hands of the writer, a bestowment that Coeztee views as unsound.  The role of the writer as an unquestioned authority has constructed a rationale, the foundation of which, this book is seeking to disassemble.  Cotezee's entire oeuvre is a model of dealing in ambivalence, of connections not entirely made, of yawning holes to large to be marks of failed craftsmanship.  These spaces are purposeful. They are the tangible portion of Coetzee's break from the realist dependency on materialism. The focus on external elements to capture reality as vividly as possible.  But as we have seen that feat is impossible, but maybe impossible is to severe a word in this case,  perhaps the more apt description is obsolete.  In Coetzee's words, "…a limit has been reached, the limit of what can be achieved with a body of balanced, well-informed modern folk in a clean, wel-lit lecture venue in a well-ordered, well-run European city in the dawn of the twenty-first century." (Elizabeth Costello 175)    So this is the retort, matured and resolved.  From the very beginning it is a style that has been expanding, from Dusklands to Elizabeth Costello it has been evolving into an ever larger area, from the muted emissions that reside within the novel to the glaring self-references of highly self-conscious narrators exhausting themselves in metafictional diatribes that take over the work entirely.  For Coetzee the ability of art to be able to do its job effectively depends on its detachment from what is positively determined. The more a story is embedded with specifics the more attached it becomes to things of a secondary nature. The mundane subjects art to an immutable condition.  The success of a work depends on its ability to exist on its idea(s)

Realism has never been comfortable with ideas.  I t could not be otherwise:  realism is premised on the idea that ideas have no autonomous existence, can exist only in things.  So when it needs to debate ideas, as here, realism is driven to invent situations- walks in the countryside, conversations- in which characters give voice to contending ideas and thereby in a certain sense embody them.  The notion of embodying turns out to be pivotal.  In such debates ideas do not and indeed cannot float free:  they are tied to the speakers by whom they are enounced, and generated from the matrix if individual interests out of which their speakers act in the world-  for instance, the son's concern that his mother not be treated as a Mickey Mouse post-colonial writer, or Wheatley's concern not to seem an old-fashioned absolutist. (Elzabeth Costello 9)

Ambivalence is essential to finding this comfort.  It creates an instability that reaches out from the text and directly engages the reader and forces them to confront the ideas outside the context of the work.  By eliminating material dependence the book gains a sentience that forwards a deeper reading engagement.  One that is more intimately connected to our way of thinking and more realistically reflective of the inexhaustible nature of the questions that humans contend with.  Ideas are wrapped in a sardonic styling that is not tailored to a specific person, place, or thing. and fluctuates between cynicism and comedy.  There is no direct signaling that ties one thing to another.  In fact weaved deeply into Coetzee's approach is an attempt to rearrange and disorder signification.  In Thorsten Carstensen's article Shattering the Word-Mirror in Elizabeth Costello: J.M. Coetzee's Deconstructive Experiment he writes, "Elizabeth Costello deliberately dismantles the imagined unity of the work of art, engaging in a metafictional discourse about language and its relation to fact and fiction." (Carstensen 82)  Coetzee is actively pursuing a new avenue, a new form of embodiment that can withdraw from representation and instead draw from a self-referentiality.  The opening line engages with this technique

There is first of all the problem of the opening, namely, how to get us from where we are, which is, as yet, nowhere, to the far bank.  It is a simple bridging problem, a problem of knocking together a bridge.  People solve such problems every day.  They solve them, and having solved them push on.

            Let us assume that, however it may have been done, it is done.  Let us take it that the bridge is built and crossed, that we can put to out of our mind.  We have left behind the territory in which we were.  We are in the far territory, where we want to be. (Elizabeth Costello 1)

The gapping works to resist the realist tendency to build through exactness by establishing histories, one constructed of corporeal things.  Things we can immediately identify with because they surround us in our everyday lives.  Coetzee counters that by plunging us into a monochromatic space that is filled with a terse rendering of our protagonist, a history which is simply an unadorned biography.  There is no setting up or drawing in through personal detail instead we are plunged directly into a time and place and forced to surmise what we can from an opaque geography.  In "Reading Through the Gates: Structure, Desire and Subjectivity in J.M. Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello Eckard Smuts refers to it as "..the text is introducing a dynamic in which both the narrator and the reader are involved in the process of establishing some form of relational existence." (Smuts 65)  This is what I would qualify as the plunge where the immediate need that arises without the aid of realist detail must be dealt with.  Smuts continues his thought by saying "Or, in the terms used earlier, one might see it as a problem of determination- both the reader and the narrator have to move from "nowhere" to a location where the being can be defined in spatial, or relational terms." (Smuts 65)  The location Smuts alludes to is what I defined as the opaque geography.  The deceptively simple writing establishes a blankness that, through its detachment, suggest an immense depth.  One that resist navigation and therefore any promise of closure.  One could even advocate a dream-like sequence, that allows a willing suspension of disbelief which in turns allows us access into the aforementioned deep but we are offered no order or resolution to that profundity.  We only have a highly conscious narrative to contend with, one that never lets us forget that it is there, that allows us to come to terms with it as we wish.  It counters our traditional reading patterns by contending directly with that which created those patterns.  It interrupts itself and speaks to us directly about what it is consciously failing to tell us, what it is choosing to withhold

The presentation scene itself we skip.  It is not a good idea to interrupt the narrative too often, since storytelling works by lulling the reader or listener into a dreamlike state in which the time and space of the real world fade away, superseded by the time and space of the fiction.  Breaking into the dream draws attention to the constructedness of the story, and plays havoc with the realist illusion.  However, unless certain sciences are skipped over we will be here al afternoon.  The skips are not part of the text, they are part of the performance. (Elizabeth Costello 16)     

This subtraction, I would maintain, is the philosophical form asserting itself.  If reason is the hallmark of philosophical writing, it seems the monotonic approach that dresses each of theses lessons is a deliberate event.  One that makes possible the hybridity which is the signature of the work.  The deconstruction at play within the novel propels it farther and father from the tradition it sought to separate itself from.  The disjointed feeling that is imparted from the pairing of these once individual works is never repaired by some ultimate coherence.  The tarnished quality that both the text and Costello bear never achieves redemption, the primary concerns of the novel never conclude at a far distance from where they started.  When one looks at each lesson there is no decisiveness, no decision. The only finality that does exist in the novel is time which is constant and everywhere.  It is the only thing that moves with certitude and registers itself in both a tangible and intangible form.  The tangible example is Elizabeth's body and how it demonstrates, physically, the onus of time.  Her bodily decline is an apparent register of time.  The novel's form is a secondary body that follows an intangible diminishment manifested by the lessons that act as extremities that perform specific and different functions while belonging to the whole.  It is a representation exhibiting itself not in a immediately recognized way, one steered by convention.  It is more of a bodily manifestation, a physique that imposes itself upon the page which helps elicit the transformation. 

While Elizabeth continuously deconstructs her own ideas, the novel displays a similar lack of coherence and discomfort with universal statements. This structural parallel reveals the irony that lies behind calling the novel’s eight chapters “lessons”. Acting within different fields of discourse, Elizabeth experiences the loss of an all-embracing, ultimate truth. Forever gone is the unifying metanarrative which would offer the necessary criteria for judging and (de-)legitimizing individual claims. As a result, Elizabeth Costello can be interpreted as a narrative site which, to use Zygmunt Bauman’s terms, is motivated by “constant mobility and change”, but lacks a “clear direction of development.” (Carstensen 80)

This, depending on the reader, can be seen as nihilistic, realistic, or simply uninteresting.  Again the consciousness Coetzee allows the text invites many possibilities that give this novel a life that transcends the realist attachment to time and place.  Carstensen describes it this way "Coetzee engages in a discussion of the representational issues he has always been concerned with, both as a critic and novelists…the aim of this narrative-turned-essay is to challenge modernist concepts of civilization and truth, to question the project of enlightenment." (Carstensen 80)  The critical studies awakened by this work and that continue to arise seem to collectively agree that this book is renegotiating the concept of universal values.  The relationships that have been established around a codified set of ethics determined to define all elements into specific categories.  The result is an ever growing pile of archaic text that fail to be attached to any transcendent principle.  This is what Costello presence speaks to.  Her voice indoctrinates a new possibility of knowledge within the context of the novel.  Costello's lectures are a form of reckoning that are both clandestine and blunt that are directed not only at her predecessors and contemporaries but at herself as well

There is every reason, then, for me to feel less than certain about myself as I stand before you.  Despite this splendid award, for which I am deeply grateful, despite the promise it makes that, gathered into the illustrious copy of those who have won it before me, I am beyond time's envois grasp, we all know, if we are being realistic, that it is only a matter of time before the books which you honor, and with whose genesis I have had something to do, will cease to be tea and eventually cease to be remembered.  And properly so.  There must be some limit to the burden of remembering that we impose on our children and grandchildren.  They will have a world f their own, of which we should be less and less part.  Thank you. (Elizabeth Costello 20)         

One of the defining things about Costello is the clumsiness with which she attends to her work.  An element of doubt is never far removed from her, it seeps into the way she handles issues.  Her reliability is constantly tested, we can never establish any incontrovertible connection with her.  There is a constant resistance between the reader and protagonist.  There never comes a moment of fulfillment or gratification.  All of this is the cumulative distrust that Coetzee has toward the representational.  Language has no exactness and therefore no ability to effectively embody things.  For Coetzee Literature does not reflect this.  The novel has failed to institute an awareness of its inherent failings and having done so it has allowed us to have mistakenly place a faith in what it tells us.  The gaps that Coetzee places in his works are there to undermine that faith.  To get us to rethink, reexamine and reevaluate what it is that a novel can tell us. 

            What does this mean for the novel?  If it is completely vacant of any sort of integrity what is the purpose of using it.? If the reader is conscious of the inabilities they are then in a better position to interact with the novel.  The novel is no longer  bankrupt once its limits are made apparent.  In "Literature and Salvation in Elizabeth Costello Or How to Refuse to be an Author in Eight or Nine Lessons" Michael S. Kochin explains this methodology as a "response to the material history of literature." (Kochin 80)  He documents the history of the authorship as evolving from one of servitude to an independent livelihood where what the author wrote was what they choose for themselves.  Kochin writes about the emerging mistrust of any ideological text of the enlightenment and the collapse of the institutions which defined it.

The existing institutions of authorship are dead because they are no longer capable of teaching us how to live these ideals, that is to say live humanely…The institutionalized author is no longer capable of teaching us how to respond with grace to the beauty of bodies, or to respond with grace to fundamental needs of the body…Authors no longer have the lightness, the distance from subjective need and interests, required for teaching us how to feel…(Kochin 82)     

I think of the letter Elizabeth writes to her sister Blanche in "The Humanities of Africa" about the intimate moment she shares with a dying man and the issue of co-existence it addresses. She talks about "…a word we both skirted: humanity." (Elizabeth Costello 150)  The letter touches upon what Kochin has brought to our attention, which is what we are no longer capable of, the remove that has occurred between us and our human origins.  More specifically, how the tools of modernity have actuated an isolationism that as dulled our communal sense.  The fact that we no longer register one another in terms of equivalence due to the fact that our language has become more and more infested with subjectivity, which has become the core material of our correspondences.  Elizabeth's act of charity toward the dying man is an act of submission, she neglects pleasure in order to offer it.  The aversion we feel toward the act is directly correlated to the sense of place modernity has made us feel entitled to which is rejected by the hostility that language creates in such space.  The more our use of language becomes unquestioned the less we are able to discern the common features that define us as human.  The scene as it is described plays upon the readers notions of good and bad as attained through enlightenment ideals which extends into our cultural concept of proper and improper intimacy.  Returning to the letter, I want to focus on the portion where Costello writes

When Mary blessed among women smiles her angelic smile and tips her sweet pink nipple up before our gaze, when I, imitating her, uncover my breasts for old Mr. Philips, we perform acts of humanity…Nothing compels us to do it, Mary or me.  But out of the overflow, the overflow of our human hearts we do it nevertheless (Elizabeth Costello 150)   

We fail, at least initially, to recognize the selfless attempt to ease another humans suffering.  Elizabeth's actions occur without language and touch upon an area not entirely dependent upon it.  Mary, herself, in her description is absent of any speech.  Her act is purely physical and her manner is self-effacing.  These attributes are the behaviors we have distanced ourselves from through the function of language which is amplified by our ignorance to its consequences.  This compliance was a crucial competent of Modernism's surge where an urban sprawl sought to separate and advance our perceived comforts.  A result of this was an isolationism that slowly fed a subjective expanse which brought with it a hostility that inflected upon our sources of communication.  The tension that arose between the author and reader is the one that Coetzee seeks to resolve. Kochhin refers to Coetzee's output as "…a series of exercises designed to purge him of the impulse to take idealistic stands in the manner of an author." (Kochin 82)  Furthermore he contends that "In writing Elizabeth Costello, Coetzee has taken up the project of turning inside out the manner in which talented authors apply or betray their talents in judging real people and the lives they live." (Kochin 83) 

            I would argue that this is why any claim that Coetzee's only aim in using this technique is to avoid contact with any certain opinions or stances and deflect any direct criticism of those beliefs is misguided.  Critics who feel the book "…is nothing but a mask for the author to hide behind." (Walton 283) or describe Costello "…as a 'stand in' for him and what she says is what he thinks." (Walton 283)  Passing judgment is not Coetzee's concern, instead it is the study of the ways in which we internalize and rationalize fluid ideas of right and wrong within an arena that is established through a fixed set of laws.  Throughout Coetzee's work we see characters that inhabit undetermined ground and watch as they endeavor to claim some form of secure footing.  With Magda and David Lurie or the Magistrate and Michael K the writing entrenches itself within shadowy regions that defy specific geography or explanation.  But it is with The Lives of Animals and Elizabeth Costello that Coetzee detaches completely from the authorial perch and puts the writer directly into the fight. Where they must, like their characters, seek out a purpose for themselves.  But legitimacy is elusive and is never fully captured and the presentation of this fact through the conduit of Elizabeth Costello which we can never fully subtract from J.M. Coetzee lengthens its application beyond both fiction and non-fiction into something new.  Something that as of yet remains unnamed. 

WORKS CITED

Carstensen, Thorsten. "Shattering the Word-Mirror in Elizabeth Costello: J.M. Coetzee's Deconstructive Experiment." The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 42.1 (2007): 79-96. Web. 29 Nov. 2011.

Coetzee, J.M. Elizabeth Costello. New York: Penguin Group, 2003. Print.

Coetzee, J.M. The Lives of Animals. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1999. Print.

Cornwell, Gareth. ""He and His Man": Allegory and Catachresis in J.M. Coetzee's Nobel Lecture." English in Africa Oct 33.2 (2006): 97-114. Web.

Cornwell, Gareth. "J.M. Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello, and the Inevitability of "Realism"" Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 52.3 (2011): 348-61. Web. 29 Nov. 2011.

Klopper, Dirk. ""We Are Not Made for Revelation": Letters to Francis Bacon in the Postscript to J.M. Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello." English in Africa Oct 35.2. Web.

Kochin, Michael S. "Literature and Salvation in Elizabeth Costello Or How to Refuse to Be an Author in Eight or Nine Lessons." English in Africa May 34.1 (2007): 79-95. Web.

Lyotard, Jean-Francois. The Postmodern Condition. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1979. Print.

Moses, Michael Valdez. ""King of the Amphibians": Elizabeth Costello and Coetzee's Metamorphic Fictions." JLS/TLW Dec 25.4 (2009): 25-38. Web.

Smuts, Eckard. "Reading Through the Gates: Structure, Desire and Subjectivity in J.M. Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello." English in Africa Oct 36.2 (2009): 63-77. Web.

Walton, Heather. "Staging John Coetzee/Elizabeth Costello." Literature & Theology Sept 22.3 (2008): 280-94. Web.