Abstract
Louise Bethlehem
Materiality and the Madness of Reading : J.M. Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello as Post-Apartheid Text
Unlike the "situational metafiction" (David Attwell 1993: 20) of J.M. Coetzee's earlier novels, whose imbrication in the political matrix of the late-apartheid State has become a matter of critical orthodoxy, and unlike Disgrace (1999) and Boyhood (1998 [1997]) which largely adhere to the spatial and temporal priorities of a South African realist tradition, Elizabeth Costello: Eight Lessons (2003) rejects a South African emplacement for its writer-protagonist and hereby seems to suspend questions relating to the positioning of this work within post-apartheid literary culture.
The metafictional priorities of the work as well as its predominant (if incomplete) displacement away from South Africa appear to reconfirm Coetzee's consistent claims for the relative autonomy of the text from the master-narrative of (South African) History—whatever the biography of its author (Coetzee 1988). Coetzee's privileging of the transcultural, or formal aesthetic, dimensions of the work ratifies the normative exclusion of the historical master-narrative in the name of universalism (Judith Butler 2000). Yet, for all that it defensively forecloses the possibility of "post-apartheid South Africa" being taken as its referent, Elizabeth Costello contains a persistent interrogation of the relations between representation and material embodiment that draws the text back—despite itself—into the semiotic matrix of South African literary culture, here to intersect the working through of these relations in extra-literary form before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
I substantiate this claim through a reading of "Lesson 8: At the Gate." The prolongation of Elizabeth Costello's physical body as well as her reflections on Odysseus' ram (Coetzee 2003: 211) reiterate the primacy of the material body that is the burden of Kafka's "In the Penal Colony" rather than the more obvious intertext "Before the Law" (Franz Kafka 1983). Despite its heightened allegorical dominant, I argue that "Lesson 8" remains complicit in the nostalgia for anchorage that the material body provides as a grounding instance of the realist sign—of the realist sign, moreover, in its post-apartheid manifestations (Judith Butler 1993: 30, 2001: 256; Louise Bethlehem 2003). The sur-vie/survival of the material body before a tribunal oriented towards "confession" (Coetzee 2003: 211) presents an opportunity for the haunted and displaced analogy with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission that my paper pursues.
The blatantly metaleptic reasoning of my argument, a kind of attribution of "remote cause to present effect" (Richard Lanham 1991), approximates the possession of the text through what Costello terms "the madness of reading" (Coetzee 2003: 174). In knowing capitulation to this "madness," my paper ends by examining the intra-textual metaleptic passage that Elizabeth Costello stages between "Lesson 8" and the "Postscript". The metaleptic violation of diegetic levels here is partly consequent on the embodied act of "turning the page," a phrase that comes, in my hands, to underscore the pertinence of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission for the interpretation of this work.
References
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