Abstract
This chapter is my attempt to read back to 2003 (and beyond) to explore Coetzee’s often combative and provocative Elizabeth Costello as a dialogic instigator who emerged during the interstitial space between his South African fictions and his citizenship in Australia, where he moved after publishing 1999s Disgrace. Over the last four decades, Coetzee’s engagement with white female subjectivity has taken three different yet sequential forms: first, via his female narrators Magda (1977), Susan Barton (1986), and Mrs Curren (1990) he has explored the ways in which white women’s voices enter into and are negated from male-dominated institutions like literary and social production. Second, in Disgrace (1999), he creates a narrative about the impossibility of the arrogant male belief that one can ‘be the woman’ (160), embody her narrative, and write her as anything other than his idea of her. Finally, in his creation of Elizabeth Costello (2003, 2005), Coetzee undertakes an act of dialogic drag that engages humour, satire, and parody to reveal the performative nature of gender, literary production, and authorship itself.
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Notes
- 1.
I’m very deliberately referencing Coetzee’s Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech, ‘He and His Man,’ as I am usurping Coetzee’s voice for my own purposes.
- 2.
In an interview with Eleanor Wachtel, Coetzee says, ‘writing dialogically means writing in a manner which respects the knowledge of all who participate in the fiction. It’s a notion that comes quite naturally to drama but doesn’t come so naturally to long works of fiction, because in drama there is a natural dialogue between the characters. In fiction … there tends to be some controlling position, either latent or patent, someone who knows what’s going on in a way that the characters don’t’ (44). While Coetzee does not write drama, his performances of Costello’s lectures do constitute a theatrical encounter.
- 3.
See, for example, Stephen O. Murray and Will Roscoe’s edited collection Boy-Wives and Female Husbands (2001).
- 4.
- 5.
Unless we consider Anya in Diary of a Bad Year (2007) such a narrator, which I do not.
- 6.
I say ‘failing’ in the sense that Coetzee’s narratives point out his failures with regard to such attempts. His fiction is acutely aware of the limitations of embodiment; indeed, his work consistently critiques the notion that one can realistically portray anything, much less that which one is not.
- 7.
According to Rachel Donadio, ‘in public hearings on racism in the media held by the government’s Human Rights Commission, the African National Congress accused Coetzee of representing ‘as brutally as he can the white people’s perception of the post-apartheid black man,’ and of implying that in the new regime whites would ‘lose their cards, their weapons, their property, their rights, their dignity,’ while ‘the white women will have to sleep with the barbaric black men.’ Beyond that, some interpreted a subplot in ‘Disgrace’ about an animal shelter where Lurie ministers to wounded dogs as a sign that the novelist cared more about animal rights than human rights.’
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Wright, L. (2019). He and His Woman: Passing Performances and Coetzee’s Dialogic Drag. In: Kossew, S., Harvey, M. (eds) Reading Coetzee's Women. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19777-3_2
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