J.M. Coetzee’s novels have been read as allegories and as instances of late Modernism, as explorations in ethics, as fictional interventions in philosophy, as a prophecy of a new animal ethics . They have been theorized with reference to Lacan, Lévinas, Derrida, and postcolonial criticism. They have been read as comments on South African history and politics and, to a lesser degree, on Australian and global politics. All of these approaches have contributed to our understanding of Coetzee’s novels. The more perspectives are explored, however, the keener the sense that a focal point, where these perspectives meet, remains obscure. This study argues that the most consistent concern in Coetzee’s oeuvre is a revision of ideas of the human that stress language-use, reason, self-consciousness, autonomy, and God-likeness; that this revision entails a poetic that pits ideas against each other through intertextual references; and that without an acknowledgement of Coetzee’s revisions of the human, other concerns in his novels such as ethics, the status of the animal, or racial politics cannot fully be understood.
To illustrate the novels’ exceptional concern with the human, it suffices to name only a few of the questions they raise. What are the limits of the human with respect to the animal? If the human cannot be defined as an animal plus any given number of defining features raising that animal above all other animals, how exactly does the human differ from the animal? Does the human amount to no more than the discourse of the human or is there such a thing as a human nature? Is the human body shaped by discourse? Can it resist discourse? What trajectories has the discourse of the human been following and what interests has it served? Is there a minimal definition of the human, and if so, is there also a minimal human? What does it mean to say that someone has lost his humanity? What is the relation between humanity and the humane? If there is a politics of the human, how can it be changed?
As Coetzee’s novels respond to a long tradition of philosophical and anthropological reflection, it is tempting to try and extract a set of fundamental ideas from the closely knit fabric of his narratives. While such a method may help to sketch out Coetzee’s revisions of the human, it will never do justice even to those of Coetzee’s novels that gesture most overtly towards philosophical reflection. Martin Puchner has aptly called Coetzee’s novels novels of thinking rather than novels of ideas because they are premised on the belief that ideas only exist in characters engaged with each other and the world (see “Coetzee’s Novels of Thinking” 5–6, 11–12). As Puchner observes, Coetzee’s novels share this premise with Platonic dialogue, a literary genre designed to explore the embodied nature of thinking, arguing, and debating (see Drama of Ideas 3–35, “Coetzee’s Novels of Thinking” 7–12). According to Mikhail Bakhtin, the Platonic dialogue is a forerunner of the dialogic novel (see Problems 110–11).
Friedrich Schleiermacher argued that it is wrong to study Plato’s ideas as if they were dissected body parts, without a view to their function in the whole body. Schleiermacher notes that “form and subject are inseparable, and no proposition is to be rightly understood, except in its own place, and with the combinations and limitations which Plato has assigned to it” (Introduction 14). The same can be said of Coetzee’s novels, which suggest that ideas are inseparable from the characters who exchange, enact, or performatively contradict them in evolving situations. Ideas are independent neither of the bodily needs and desires of those who think them nor of the discourse-practices and particular situations in which those individuals are involved. In Dusklands (1974), for example, the ideas of mythographer Eugene Dawn are not as original as he believes. They turn out to be influenced by his troubled relations with his wife, son, and supervisor, as well as by a larger myth of absolute reason ingrained in Western culture. Both the magistrate in Waiting for the Barbarians (1980) and David Lurie in Disgrace (1999) are forced to discover that the order their minds seek to impose on the world is undermined by their own instincts. The novels demonstrate that ideas are rooted in bodily and historically specific needs and desires and that accounts that ignore these dimensions distort the meaning of those ideas.
Coetzee’s novels further insist that being human involves skills, abilities, and constraints, the bodily experience of which is not reducible to the propositional language of ideas and arguments. What it is to be a body—to dress, to feel fear, to fall asleep, and so on—exceeds what biology, medicine, or psychology can teach about the body. When one tries to explain to someone else how to ride a bicycle or tie a knot, one experiences this gap between propositional knowledge, on the one hand, and embodied knowledge, on the other, or between knowing-that and a form of knowing-how.1 Humans possess knowledge of being a body (of opening a bottle, putting on clothes, falling asleep, etc.) without being able to explain to others what it is they know or how they know it. The most they can do is show it to others—who can then learn by imitation.
Coetzee’s demonstration of the limits of reason is part of his revision of the Enlightenment notion of the human as a disengaged, autonomous thinker. His view of the human as engaged agency has the greatest affinities with ideas developed in theories of posthumanism, materiality, and social practice. A distinctive feature of Coetzee’s critique is that it depends on narrative form as much as it recommends a narrative approach to ideas in general. This point is forcefully made in Elizabeth Costello (2003), which stands out among Coetzee’s novels for thematizing the premise that ideas are not autonomous. As Stephen Mulhall has observed, Elizabeth Costello questions the place of thought in relation to the body and the novel, and thereby intervenes in the quarrel between philosophy and literature. In the locus classicus of this quarrel, Plato’s Republic, Plato famously argues that poets are to be banished from the ideal republic because they lack any rational basis that might legitimate their claims and because they claim to understand things that only philosophers, seeing beyond the representations of ideas, can know (see The Republic 307–24). Yet Plato himself delivers his philosophy in poetic images and, even more importantly, condemns the theatre using a method that is fundamentally dialogical and dramatic (see Mulhall, The Wounded Animal 1–3). Plato’s stance towards literature is thus more ambivalent than is generally admitted by those who consider his ideas independently of the form in which they are presented. By choosing a side and seeming to settle the quarrel, Plato actually provides reasons for continuing that quarrel.
Elizabeth Costello enters the debate by turning the tables on philosophers who deny literature any claim to truthfulness. The novel presents itself as a test case for the claims that narrative can critically reflect on philosophical problems and that its distinctive ways of reflection represent reality more truthfully than philosophy (see Mulhall, The Wounded Animal 3). If, in Mulhall’s words, “the original sin of philosophy [is] that of attempting to lay down requirements on the reality it aims to contemplate”, and if the “possibility for redemption [is] lying in the attempt simply to attend to what is there to be seen, in all its variety and complexity” (The Wounded Animal 14), then literature offers a means to truthfully reflect on variety and complexity, both of which defy categorization and abstraction.2
Narratives, dramatic enactments, and poetry can convey a vicarious experience of a particular body and how it (he or she) comes to think, feel, and act a certain way in a particular situation. Abstract claims in studies or treatises cannot convey this experience. I will show that narratology has only recently begun to theorize this experiential quality of narrative.3 Elizabeth Costello self-consciously demonstrates how narrative allows the reader to inhabit the character of Elizabeth Costello in the very process of her becoming someone else; how ideas exist as embodied instances of which no disembodied originals exist; how these ideas have a history; and how they are constantly coloured, inflected, distorted, and transformed because the human actor who holds them is always already involved in practices, situations, and moods beyond her control.4 The fact that the reader’s vicarious experience is the effect of artifice does not invalidate narrative’s potential. In the perspective of Elizabeth Costello , this merely means that some narratives will offer a more truthful account than others, whereas disembodied and de-contextualizing forms of language will always miss important dimensions of the human. Through their formal properties and word choice, Coetzee’s novels emphasize that their challenges to traditional ideas of the human can never be anything other than artifice; yet it is precisely by raising this awareness that the novels signal their potential truthfulness. Under the s...