J. M. Coetzee’s unsettling portrayals of Elizabeth Costello - doi: 10.4025/actascilangcult.v33i1.7251

Résumé

This paper addresses the vexed question of animal and human rights by focusing on Coetzee’s ‘trilogy’ connected with Elizabeth Costello’s lecturing and experiencing, from her anti-Cartesian stances and sympathetic imagination advocated in The lives of animals, through the eight lessons which she frantically goes over and delivers like a ‘circus seal’, or even happens to be taught (in Elizabeth Costello), up to Slow man, where she turns into the waspish, vulpine ‘Costello woman’ preying on tortoise-like Paul Rayment. As such a debasing hybridization may already suggest, the committed intellectual shall lose track of her formerly heated debates on animals as ‘embodied souls’ and divinely created beings to be held in great respect, to enter a region of ethical ambivalence where biological and axiological boundaries are deviously blurred. Textual evidence and commentaries on Coetzee’s fictional world and thematic concerns are provided to single out the stages of this unsettling metamorphosis, a process through which Costello wavers between Franciscan self-effacement and dictatorial omniscience. In the upshot, the striving after a recognition of animal dignity is seemingly supplanted by a debasement of the human person into a pet or a beast, as though she had lost herself in a labyrinth of fumbling speculation.