Abstract
As evidence in support of her argument for the boundlessness of the sympathetic imagination upon which her ethical outlook depends, Elizabeth Costello cites her novel The House on Eccles Street and its representation of the life of Molly Bloom outside of Joyce’s Ulysses. This chapter asks how seriously we can take this argument, and what is its relation to Coetzee’s own thinking of his way into the existence of Elizabeth Costello, Magda, Mrs Curren, and Susan Barton. Is the ethical force of the novelistic imagination equivalent to that of our responses to actually existing beings? And how might the gender dynamic implicit in the male writer’s creation of the inner lives of female characters bear on the ethics of the sympathetic imagination?
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Notes
- 1.
J. M. Coetzee, Letter to Richard Begam, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, Coetzee collection, Container 79, Business Correspondence, November 1994–June 1995. Further references to this collection will be to container and file.
- 2.
Container 30, File 3 (9 July 1995).
- 3.
Container 35, File 2 (Notebook 13/12/94–5/3/97) (19 July 1995). In the drafts the ‘Eccles Street book’ is first called Six, Four, and Seven Eccles Street, which is the correct number, before settling down as The House on Eccles Street. It may be significant that in July 1995, when he was working on this draft, Coetzee had just returned from a trip to Dublin to receive the Irish Times International Fiction Prize. He had said to me in an e-mail before travelling to Ireland, ‘I’ll give greetings on your behalf to Eccles Street.’
- 4.
Container 30, File 3 (22 July 1995).
- 5.
An early draft has a more detailed version:
[W]ith many of the great books there’s so much prodigality, such carefreeness, such wealth of invention, that there’s a lot left over when the book is finished. It’s as if the builder left beams and struts and so forth sticking out, and there’s room for someone to come and build on another room or two. (Container 30, File 3; 20 July 1995)
- 6.
Costello has misremembered Ulysses: Bloom’s curiosity about the diets of goddesses has been aroused by the food being consumed in Davy Byrne’s pub, and he wants to find out if the sculptors of the statues in the Dublin National Museum (not the ‘Public Library’) furnished their representations of female immortals with anuses. He doesn’t actually get to carry out the inspection, however.
- 7.
Container 30, File 2 (9 July 1995).
- 8.
Coetzee’s well-known distinction between ‘autobiography’ and ‘autrebiography’ suggests a similar duality in one’s response to one’s own past self (Coetzee and Attwell, 1992: 394), although it is probably more accurate to characterise that response as a rather vexed combination of both intimacy and alterity.
- 9.
- 10.
Container 35, File 2 (Notebook 13/12/94–5/3/97) (30 November 1995).
- 11.
Both paragraphs in this note are placed between quotation marks, though it is hard to ascribe them to a single speaker. Whoever it is comes close to Derrida’s understanding of the Levinasian ‘third’, which intervenes to prevent ‘the absolute immediacy of the face in the face to face’, an immediacy that would result in violence to the subject (1999: 32–33).
- 12.
Container 33, File 6 (11 January 1985).
- 13.
Container 35, File 2 (30 September 1996).
- 14.
Container 30, File 3 (9 July 1995).
- 15.
Container 30, File 3 (7 July 1997).
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Attridge, D. (2019). Molly Bloom and Elizabeth Costello: Coetzee’s Female Characters and the Limits of the Sympathetic Imagination. In: Kossew, S., Harvey, M. (eds) Reading Coetzee's Women. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19777-3_3
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