Abstract
Dorothy Kuykendal
"I Follow the Pen": the (Dis)Location of Two Elizabeth C's
J.M. Coetzee's Booker-prize winning novel Disgrace has so far been the work of choice for scholars who wish to examine the fictions and realities of post-apartheid South Africa . In this paper, I contend that it is equally productive to turn to Coetzee's latest full-length published work, Elizabeth Costello, to gain an understanding of a world after apartheid. The title character, Elizabeth Costello, is an Australian, but spends no part of the book in Australia ; instead, she lives a peripatetic existence, giving or attending various lectures around the world. She has no narrative home.
I argue that Elizabeth Costello reincarnates, as it were, another Elizabeth C.: Elizabeth Curren, the protagonist of J.M. Coetzee's earlier, apartheid-era novel Age of Iron. If Elizabeth Curren is the weakening South Africa, Elizabeth Costello represents the world after apartheid for many white expatriate South Africans like Coetzee: unstable, in flux, confusing. Both women are elderly, educated, mothers, divorced, and close to death during the course of their novels; however, unlike her literary successor, Elizabeth Curren is trapped in her physical environment ( South Africa ), both because of political turmoil and her terminal illness. As her body weakens and dies, so South Africa sickens and collapses all around her. In this way, she represents her own unviable nation. Age of Iron assumes the form of a long letter to Curren's daughter, who has long since emigrated to the United States; in this way she hopes to transcend the limitations of physicality to give her own account of South Africa--indeed, of the whole human condition--in the only way possible.
Elizabeth Costello's mission is both less immediate and less apparent. Indeed, the novel hinges largely on the fact that she has a weak sense of identity and an even weaker sense of purpose: she does not know whether the novelist's remit is to inform, to record, to persuade, or perhaps all three. She also cannot conceive of herself as other than a novelist. Where Elizabeth Curren finds identity chiefly as a mother, a reproductive role that gives her a concrete sense of self, Elizabeth Costello "only" conceptualizes herself as a wordsmith who lives in the world of ideas rather than the flesh. Elizabeth Costello may mark a significant shift in Coetzee's future writing, from depicting South Africa directly, as he does in Age of Iron and later in Disgrace, to meditating on the complications and uncertainties of postcolonial life in a more allegorical way. Viewed through the lens of a postcolonial critique, Elizabeth Costello may prove to be Coetzee's most insightful and penetrating work yet on the discourse of (post-)colonial subjectivity and identity.