11 - Elizabeth Costello (2003)

Summary

Elizabeth Costello Canvasses the interrelated problems of self-knowledge, self-expression and other-knowledge: phenomenological problems. How can we truly represent ourselves when language — a social institution that preexists and constitutes every individual’s entry into subject-hood — requires a deviation from our direct, bodily experience in and of the world? How can we know what life is like for others when they too must constitute themselves in secondhand language in order to represent themselves to us? And does the removal of language from the relationship help matters? How successfully can we imagine ourselves into the lives of beings not like us, whether we conceive of them as below us (animals) or above (gods)? As linguistic beings, can we even imagine an extralinguistic utopia? What would it look like? How would we behave in it?

To present these relational questions as a problem is to express a desire for a solution — in this case, a desire for true self- and other-knowledge and reliable, authentic self-expression undiluted and undiverted by language. This desire (and its frustration) is evident throughout J. M. Coetzee’s work. The extraordinary closing section of Foe seems to offer exactly this ideal of a transcendent realm beyond language, “a place where bodies are their own signs” even as it undercuts that possibility: the claim that “this is not a place of words” is a performative self-contradiction, a phrase that undoes itself simply by being written down. If there is a place beyond language, where expression is simply embodied, we are not going to find it in a novel, a “place” that exists only in words. While Friday, the only character in Foe who does not use language, might seem a more vivid presence precisely because of his silence, it is only through his contextualization in language (Susan’s, Foe’s, Coetzee’s) that we can interpret his silence in this way. In the end, then, the representation of “the home of Friday” (157) expresses a desire rather than an actuality. While it may be insatiable, this desire for transparent access to consciousness nevertheless animates the constant reapplication of readers and writers to the language games that constitute much of serious contemporary literature.