Elizabeth Costello
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| Author | J. M. Coetzee |
|---|---|
| Country | Australia |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Fiction, Literature |
| Publisher | Secker & Warburg |
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Publication date
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30 September 2003 |
| Media type | Print (Hardback), (Paperback) |
| Pages | 224pp |
| ISBN | |
| OCLC | 52456771 |
Elizabeth Costello is a 2003 novel by South African-born Nobel Laureate J. M. Coetzee.
In this novel, Elizabeth Costello, a celebrated aging Australian writer, travels around the world and gives lectures on topics including the lives of animals and literary censorship. In her youth, Costello wrote The House on Eccles Street, a novel that re-tells James Joyce's Ulysses from the perspective of the protagonist's wife, Molly Bloom. Costello, becoming weary from old age, confronts her fame, which seems further and further removed from who she has become, and struggles with issues of belief, vegetarianism, sexuality, language and evil. Many of the lectures Costello gives are edited fragments that Coetzee had previously published. The lessons she delivers only tenuously speak to the work for which she is being honored. Of note, Elizabeth Costello is the main character in Coetzee's academic novel, The Lives of Animals (1999). A character named Elizabeth Costello also appears in Coetzee's 2005 novel Slow Man.
The penultimate chapter, "At the Gate", is an overt reworking of several of Franz Kafka's stories and novels, principally "Before the Law" and The Trial. The last chapter consists of a letter from Lady Chandos to Francis Bacon. This is a fictitious intertext to the well-known Lord Chandos Letter by Hugo von Hofmannsthal (1902). The Chandos Letter, in which the narrator, Philip Lord Chandos, laments that language has begun to fail his need for self-expression, is often cited as a key text of literary modernism. Coetzee's fabrication of Lady Chandos's letter replicates what in the novel Elizabeth Costello herself is presented having done, namely adding a female voice (that of Molly Bloom) to a canonical modernist work (Ulysses).
Elizabeth Costello frequently engages philosophers and their ideas. Among the philosophers mentioned by name are historical figures such as Aristotle, Porphyry, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, René Descartes and Jeremy Bentham, as well as contemporary figures such as Mary Midgley, Tom Regan and Thomas Nagel. In addition two minor characters, Elaine Marx and an academic named Arendt (whose first name is not mentioned) share surnames with the famous philosophers Karl Marx and Hannah Arendt. The frequent allusions to philosophers have caused critics to debate whether there are philosophical themes in Coetzee’s work and, if so, what they might be.
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