AustLit

This article examines the persona of Elizabeth Costello as performed by J.M. Coetzee in public lectures, articles, and the novels Elizabeth Costello and Slow Man. She rejects one of the most common critical responses to this staging – that Coetzee cowardly uses Costello to voice his own provocative, eccentric views, conveniently heaping the burden upon a far more vulnerable female character. Instead, she argues that Coetzee deliberately removes himself from the position of the “great male author” to speak from a position which lacks authority. He mobilises the “destabilising energies of the feminine” to engage with subjects which are gendered feminine in our culture – “embodiment, death, the imaginary, evil, animals, literature herself” – and to do so “outside the terms established by the dominant discourse”.

Walton also argues that Coetzee uses Costello to explore the responsibilities of the novelist, and the ultimate failure of literature to achieve those responsibilities. For example, just as Costello is convinced that humans are distinct in their ability to enter imaginatively into the consciousness of others, yet never justifies this belief with convincing examples, Coetzee’s staging of Costello “impresses upon us the obligation of literature to respond through imaginative association to the claims of others as well as the impossibility of meeting this demand”.