Abstract
Karina Dorn
Elizabeth Costello Dis-graced?
None of the reviewers and essayist writing about Elizabeth Costello – Eight Lessons (2003) seem to have noticed the striking similarities between the fictional heroine of the book and the real-life author, Nadine Gordimer. In my paper I want to argue that both, Gordimer and Coetzee, not only have been aware of each other for a long time as authors, but Coetzee involves them in a fascinating one-sided literary polemic. He initiated it with Disgrace (1999), which can be regarded as an uncanny revision of Gordimer's None to Accompany Me (1994). The parallels are not hard to detect; the most obvious one being that both novels deal with the question of land politics and responsibility in South Africa in the post-apartheid era and both end with white women choosing to become tenants of black men. In Elizabeth Costello Coetzee's character, the Australian author Elizabeth Costello (which is her maiden name) spent her childhood in the suburbs of a big city. By analogy, Nadine Gordimer also kept her maiden name and grew up in the suburbs of Johannesburg. Costello married twice, has two children, a son and a daughter, one by each marriage, and her second husband died recently. The same is true of Gordimer. Both women seclude themselves in the mornings to do their writing. Both write about sex, passion, jealousy and envy with an insight that shakes you. Costello received a very important literary prize because it was meant to go to some author from her home country; a fact she was not quite comfortable with. Gordimer received the Nobel Prize in 1991, and some critics thought it was only because she was the most prominent South African anti-apartheid author at the time. Both authors emphasise that in the first place they are writers, not thinkers. Both repeatedly take up the theme of fact and fiction, and being authors from post-colonial countries, they have an ambivalent relationship to Europe's literary canon: admiration and distance. However, like many European authors, Costello and Gordimer see in the traditional novel an attempt to understand human fate in terms of the individual. In 1988 Gordimer stated in an interview, “The function of the writer is to make sense of life … to make something coherent out of it. Isn't all art doing that?” Both women also see the novel as a sort of history. Stephen Clingman called Gordimer's fiction “history from the inside”.
It is most unlikely that all these facts are just fascinating parallels. Coetzee is too conscious and precise a writer for such coincidences. Another detail worth noticing is the first name of Costello's son – John. This is Coetzee's first name. It is not a great discovery to acknowledge that Coetzee might have wanted to point out his relationship to his literary “mother” Gordimer. And yet, as James Wood argues in his review of the novel, Costello was used by Coetzee as a persona speaking up for the author himself.
So, what does this imply? I would like to see Elizabeth Costello as a fictional vehicle, in which Coetzee, Gordimer and a fictional self are being fused into one character, which Coetzee uses for transporting his ideas. In this paper I will elaborate on other implications and outline other aspects of what I call the one-sided literary polemic.