Twenty-second International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello was the first of his Australian novels, but Africa has a significant presence in a novel set on four continents, including Antarctica. The novel is not only cosmopolitan in its geographical and cultural settings, but also crosses many generic borders: novel, lecture, essay, philosophical dialogue, parable, and epistles. Finally, the novel most famously addresses what is perhaps the most significant of permeable borders, that between the human and the animal. This “novel,” if that is the right name for Elizabeth Costello, violates what Jacques Derrida has called “the law of genres.” It mixes genres in a manner that not only calls into question authorial responsibility, something that has disturbed readers beginning with Coetzee’s presentation of chapters as academic lectures but displaces responsibility onto modes of writing, or generic forms. The “lessons” that constitute the book are modes for exploring ethical issues regarding the treatment of animals, Western imperialism, the ethics of writing fiction, and the relation of literature to life. Yet these ethical “themes” are dependent upon a series of simple oppositions drawn from nature and history, law and spirit, physis and technē. This paper examines Coetzee’s violation of genres and the willful nonfulfillment of literature’s generic and ethical responsibilities, thereby denaturalizing both literary representation and the ethical order on which it is based. If Coetzee can be said to challenge the ratio-technical order of the west, he does so to expose the insufficiency of a natural order that has always depended upon scientific-technological rationalism.