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Between the Real and Fiction — Performative Writing in Elizabeth Costello

Yeo Sun Park 1

1서울대학교

Accredited

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the performative aspect of J. M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello. The novel pursues the question of how form is related to the expression of content. More significantly, the novel addresses critical debates concerning the relationship between philosophy and literature. It brings into focus how the literary form shapes the philosophical content: the novel’s moral and political import is inseparable from its distinctively literary qualities. Coetzee dramatizes ethical, moral and philosophical interest mediated through the form of fiction and by so doing explores a new formulation of ethical thinking in ways that can only be offered by literature. Thus, the philosophical argument is, in the novel, presented in a way that involves engagement with characters, and the reflection on moral life is conveyed in the form of emotions. Throughout the novel, Coetzee invokes the text as a stage, writing and reading as a performance. The setting that the novel constitutes is not so much mise en scène attributed to representation, but rather mise en abîme referring to the impossibility of representation. Seen in this light, Coetzee’s experiment in form may be regarded as seemingly postmodern; it aims, however, at a new dimension of realism, which emphasizes the importance of essentially related nature of lived experience and brings into being its embeddedness in life rather than the life represented. Through his performative writing that dramatizes the potential plight of a novelist arising from her insistence on fidelity to the “real,” Coetzee reinterpretates what the “real” means and reinvents a new dimension of realism in Elizabeth Costello.

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