Embodiment and Sacrifice in J. M. Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello

1. Introduction: Neither Fish nor FowlA recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature and other prestigious awards, J. M. Coetzee has written novels, fictionalized biographies, and essays. Coetzee s early writings reflected his context as a dissident writer living in apartheid South Africa. More recently, after his emigration to Australia in 2003, the settings of his stories reflect a broader ethnic and national context.Despite this shift in location, "each of Coetzees novels," Jane Poyner writes, "portrays a (troubled) writer-figure or intellectual" in communities animated by strong, conflicting beliefs.1 The intellectual delivers a paradoxical message: the divisions animating these conflicts are superficial; the violence each perpetrates renders the combatants more alike than different. "The intellectual," Poyner notes, "must maintain independence from all organized social bodies, especially political ones, in order to speak the truth to power."2In Giving Offense, a series of essays on censorship, Coetzee writes that he follows the "spirit of Erasmus" by pursuing an unwavering social critique that is nonetheless "not certain of itself either." Luther dismissed Erasmus as "King of the Amphibians" for theologically and politically being neither fish nor fowl.3 However, Coetzee sees Erasmus pursuing a deeper project than mediation and accommodation. By showing the indeterminacy that attends every text, Erasmus unmasked the ideology underlying the conflicts over the Word in his milieu. By refusing to choose sides in these interpretive conflicts, Erasmus claimed a "well-established political role" that, instead of taking a position or joining a party, asks what it means "to take a position."To answer this question requires a move "outside oneself," beyond ones own particular point of view, "a position of ek-stasis in which one knows without knowing, sees without seeing."4 Erasmus therefore sought to relativize all parties in a conflict so that a more self-critical and chastened politics might emerge.The foregoing sets the stage for assessing Elizabeth Costello. Excerpts from the novel were initially delivered as the 1997-98 Tanner Lectures at Princeton University. The publication of these lectures, entitled The Lives of Animals (1999), along with interdisciplinaiy commentary, has created the impression that Coetzee s purpose in this novel is to present a form of ethical vegetarianism through the main character, Elizabeth Costello, a celebrated Australian writer nearing the end of her career. However, a more complex theology emerges when we read the novel as written in the spirit of Erasmus. On this reading, Elizabeth s vegetarianism expresses only a part of a broader ethical discussion of embodiment, love, violence, and sacrifice.2. Realism and EmbodimentWhen Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello is asked why she became a vegetarian, she responds: "You ask me why I refuse to eat flesh. I, for my part, am astonished that you can put in your mouth the corpse of a dead animal, astonished that you do not find it nasty to chew hacked flesh and swallow the juices of death wounds."5Words like "corpse," "hacked flesh," and "juices" are deliberately intend to repulse, but a more considered position is signified with "death wounds." To understand Elizabeth's claims regarding vegetarianism, then, it is important to consider the philosophical background from which this visceral language arises.Coetzee arranges his novel around eight "lessons" given during the last years of Elizabeth's life. In Lesson 1, "Realism," Elizabeth's son, John, makes a telling observation:Realism has never been comfortable with ideas. It could not be otherwise: realism is premised on the idea that ideas have no autonomous existence, can exist only in things. So when it needs to debate ideas, as here, realism is driven to invent situations-walks in the countryside, conversations-in which characters give voice to contending ideas and thereby in a certain sense embody them. …