Reading ethics in J. M. Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello:The globalizing world, the normal and damnation

Abstract

This article argues that J. M. Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello (2003) seeks to engage with the condition of a globalizing world in the twenty‐first century. Specifically, Coetzee's narrative attempts to posit the question of ethics with regard to a globalizing world. The text first suggests that the globalizing world is associated with an all‐pervasive culture associated with the idea of the ‘normal.’ This culture of the ‘normal’ dissipates the genuine concern with ethics with the upshot that the question of ethics vanishes altogether. Nevertheless, even as Elizabeth Costello depicts this dissipation of ethics, it also continues to evoke the spectre of ethics within the very realm of the ‘normal.’ Specifically, it evokes a spectre of the ethical condition of damnation within the site of the ‘normal.’ It is through this persisting vision of damnation inscribed upon the overwhelmingly ‘normal’ that one continues to apprehend and, indeed,'read’ the ethics of Elizabeth Costello.

Keywords:

• Christianity
• damnation
• ethics
• globalization
• indifference
• the normal

Notes

1 Derek Attridge has located the ethics of Coetzee's fiction in their performativity, where the reader's encounter with the text is an encounter with a singular (textual) act or event. I differ from Attridge by locating Coetzee's ethics as existing in the moral the matics of his text. Specifically, Elizabeth Costello evinces a deep concern with the ethics of guilt and salvation.

2 Having been washed ashore to safety, the marooned Susan Barton in Foe refers to how she is ‘tired, grateful, like all the saved’ (Coetzee 1986, 5). InBoyhood, young John Coetzee is saved from drowning by his scout leader, and the episode is playfully conveyed with the resonance of Christian salvation: ‘The next he knows, he is lying on the river‐bank and his troop‐leader… is straddling him. He closes his eyes, filled with well‐being. He has been saved… From that day onward he knows there is something special about him. He should have died but he did not. Despite his unworthiness, he has been given a second life. He was dead but is alive’ (Coetzee 1997,16-17). In Slow Man, Elizabeth Costello refers to how Paul and Marianna’ [would] be free to work out [their] respective salvations’ (Coetzee 2005, 100).

3 In Lesson 8, Costello has a momentary apprehension of her being in her body which raises metaphysical questions of her origin and creation: ‘Not only is she in this body, this thing which not in a thousand years could she have dreamed up, so far beyond her powers would it be, she somehow is this body; and all around her on the square, on this beautiful morning, these people, somehow, are their bodies too’ (Coetzee 2003, 210).

4 The inscription of the ‘normal’ within the trope of indifference implies that even the most radical or extreme viewpoints presented will be cast within a condition of indifference. They will not be extreme or ‘abnormal’ enough to break out of the ‘normal,’ to mark an authentic difference. All views will always already be indifferently similar.

5 This idea is, of course, Christianity's central doctrine. As theologian John Calvin explains, the normal human state is one of ‘inherited corruption, [i.e. original sin, which extends] to every part of our soul, which…makes us deserve the wrath of God…We are so corrupted by this sin in our nature that we are condemned before God’ (Calvin 1982, 56).

6 This passage is also referenced in ‘Stavrogin's Confession,’ the chapter omitted in Dos‐toevsky's initial publication of his novel Demons which is the basis for Coetzee's The Master of Petersburg. In this chapter, the judgement on the Laodiceans underscores the point that, in terms of the categories of the unbelieving, ‘total atheism is more respectable than [i.e. preferable to] worldly indifference’ (Dostoevsky 1994, 688). This point is applicable to bothMaster of Petersburg and Elizabeth Costello.

7 In this regard, I see the idea of ‘strong opinions’ in Coetzee's latest work, Diary of a Bad Year, as an attempt (though not necessarily successful) to militate against the lukewarm, normal condition.