Elizabeth Costello, by J. M. Coetzee. London: Secker and Warburg, 2003

 Wendy Woodward

Coetzee has been a controversial writer in South Africa. During the anti-apartheid struggle, he was criticized for not being political enough. After the new political dispensation, Disgrace was lambasted by the Humans Rights Commission for not promoting “the rainbow nation.” Recently, he has been derided for leaving South Africa for a “safer” Australia. His Nobel Prize for Elizabeth Costello was noted and praised by President Thabo Mbeki. Tellingly, however, Coetzee’s interest in animals hardly has been noted by the media or by critics.

Elizabeth Costello is an extraordinary work, consisting of eight “lessons,” six of which have been published before. Readers of Animals and society may be familiar with “The Lives of Animals,” which is included here in its entirety. The figure of Costello herself functions as a unifying presence throughout, as the novel charts her trajectory (which does not seem strictly chronological) through various lectures and presentations. Costello is elderly, often tired, and without appetite for the publicity attendant on honors and literary prizes. Her talks often mystify her audiences and frequently seem to disappoint them. Although she may be wise and courageous enough to deal with difficult issues, like Mrs. Moore of Forster’s A passage to India, she demands as a right that she not have to expend energy on social niceties.

Coetzee has Costello say in response to an interviewer’s question about her writing from the point of view of a man that “[i]t is the otherness that is the challenge.” In relation to animals, most commentators on Disgrace regard the representation of the township dogs merely as a further exploration of “the other.” But I would argue that Coetzee is concerned with the lives of animals as embodied beings--for their own sakes-- and as beings who potentially have souls. Certainly, Costello is virulent about a society that takes for granted the ongoing commodification of animals’ lives and their deaths for apparent human benefit.

In Elizabeth Costello, Coetzee’s deployment of animals, fish, and mammals as metaphors never denigrates them: Costello’s son thinks of her sympathetically as an “old, tired circus seal” (p. 3) and of her admirers as so many goldfish “circling the dying whale” (p. 6). When a fellow passenger on the voyage to Antarctica belittles the myriad King penguins, simultaneously for their ignorance and their mindless celebration of the human visitors, Costello’s quick retort emphasizes their subjectivities. With Coetzee, of course, readers always are brought short when they think, simplistically, they might have some key to interpretation: Costello is embarrassed by the support of “animal-rights sentimentalists” (p. 156). In the lesson on “The Novel in Africa” she “no longer believes very strongly in belief.”

Coetzee pushes the reader into a ceaseless questioning of ethics while having to face issues both literary and humanist: the contagion of evil, Apollonian order, Christian piety. In the fifth lesson, “The Humanities in Africa,” Costello visits her sister, a nun, who manages a hospital for HIV/Aids patients in Kwazulu Natal. The last two lessons disprove the critical truism that Coetzee is without humor. In “Eros,” Costello muses on human sex with the gods (while exploring age, mortality, death). In “At the Gate,” Costello reaches the much-caricatured gate of heaven, which is more like a gulag or the setting for opera-buffa with its boards who sit in judgment over her and demand to hear what she believes in. Although initially, “belief is a resistance, an obstacle” in her work, she concedes ultimately to believing in what does not believe in her and tells the boards in great detail about the frogs on the mudflats of the Dulgannon where she grew up.

Her vision of the world beyond the gate is one of desert-like immensity guarded by an old battle-scarred dog, who is just part of her mind. “GOD-DOG,” she berates herself, however, is, again, too literary. Like Costello, we are left with not knowing, with endless deferral, and the lack of a sense of self--postmodern fare perhaps. This, however, also is critiqued by “love,” or as Costello has it, “Beliefs are not the only ethical support we have, we can rely on our hearts as well.”

In my reading, then, Coetzee is not a nihilist but a writer of ethical magnitude deserving of the Nobel Prize for Literature--and not least for his foregrounding of the (mostly tragic) lives of animals. At the same time, if Coetzee is a self-reflexive writer, he demands self-reflexive readers. What else can we do as readers but subject our own beliefs (if we have them) to the same process that Costello goes through, while not ignoring the ethics of our hearts?

* Wendy Woodward , University of the Western Cape

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