Abstract
The social and political relevance of fiction has recently been reasserted by the new ethical theory, which proposes an ethics of otherness. Yet rather than claiming that fiction rests upon ethical foundations, this chapter inverts the traditional understanding of the relationship between ethics and fiction to argue that ethics has a fictional element at its core. To demonstrate this principle, this chapter offers an understanding of the ethical role of J.M. Coetzee’s fiction-making process in Elizabeth Costello as one that participates in a “game of make-believe” according to Kendall L. Walton’s theory of fictionality. This understanding, in turn, allows for a more generative interpretation of the postscript to Elizabeth Costello—which has often been ignored or dismissed by scholars—as an active attempt to elicit an ethical response from the reader.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
J. M. Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello (New York: Penguin Group USA, 2004), 173. Italics in original.
- 2.
Whether this work is properly a “novel” is debatable, and the cover page itself simply designates this work as “fiction.”
- 3.
Hermione Lee, “The Rest Is Silence,” The Guardian, Aug. 30, 2003, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2003/aug/30/bookerprize2003.highereducation
- 4.
Elizabeth MacFarlane, Reading Coetzee (New York: Rodopi, 2013), 53.
- 5.
Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello, 156.
- 6.
Ibid., 176.
- 7.
Dorothy J. Hale, “Aesthetics and the New Ethics: Theorizing the Novel in the Twenty-First Century,” PMLA 124, no. 3 (2009): 899–900.
- 8.
Particularly literature post-Henry James, as expressed in Hale’s lecture on Henry James. Dorothy J. Hale, “Henry James and the Novelistic Aesthetics of Alterity: Othering Maisie,” (lecture, Summer Institute for Narrative Studies, Sønderborg, Denmark, August 2017).
- 9.
Ibid.
- 10.
In particular, see Andy Lamey, “Sympathy and Scapegoating in J.M. Coetzee,” in J. M. Coetzee and Ethics: Philosophical Perspectives on Literature, ed. Anton Leist and Peter Singer (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010): 171–93.
- 11.
Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello, 91–92, 106.
- 12.
Typescript of “Introduction to ‘Before the Gate,’” by J. M. Coetzee, delivered at Stanford University, May 2001, MS-00842, Box 38, Folder 5, J. M. Coetzee Papers, The Harry Ransom Center, Austin, Texas, USA.
- 13.
Typescript of “Introduction to ‘Before the Gate,’” by J. M. Coetzee, delivered at University of Oklahoma, 2003, MS-00842, Box 61, Folder 4, J. M. Coetzee Papers, The Harry Ransom Center, Austin, Texas, USA.
- 14.
Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello, 194.
- 15.
Ibid.
- 16.
Ibid., 195 (italics in original).
- 17.
Ibid., 199, 204.
- 18.
James Wood, “A Frog’s Life: Coetzee’s Confessions,” review of Elizabeth Costello, by J. M. Coetzee, London Review of Books, Oct. 23, 2003, http://www.lrb.co.uk/v25/n20/james-wood/a-frogs-life
- 19.
Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello, 195.
- 20.
Ibid.
- 21.
Ibid., 203.
- 22.
Ibid., 79.
- 23.
J. M. Coetzee and Arabella Kurtz, The Good Story (New York: Viking, 2015), 133.
- 24.
Ibid., 51–52.
- 25.
Ibid., 134.
- 26.
Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello, 203 (italics in original).
- 27.
Ibid., 204.
- 28.
Ibid., 205.
- 29.
Kendall L. Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990), 69.
- 30.
Ibid., 21–22.
- 31.
Kendall L. Walton, “Fiction, Fiction-Making, and Styles of Fictionality,” Philosophy and Literature 7, no. 1 (Apr. 1983): 87.
- 32.
J. M. Coetzee, “Fictional Beings,” Philosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology 10, no. 2 (2003), 133.
- 33.
Ibid., 133–134.
- 34.
Ibid., 134.
- 35.
Shani Orgad, Media Representation and the Global Imagination (Boston: Polity Press, 2012), 41.
- 36.
Hans Vaihinger, The Philosophy of “As If”: A System of the Theoretical, Practical and Religious Fictions of Mankind, trans. C. K. Ogden (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Co., 1924).
- 37.
Ibid., 15 (italics in original).
- 38.
Kwame Anthony Appiah, As If: Idealization and Ideals (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2017), 3. Italics in original.
- 39.
Cognitive narrative theorists have particularly embraced the claim that reading produces real-world emotions. For instance, Lisa Zunshine states that we have an “intuitive realization that on some level our evolved cognitive architecture indeed does not fully distinguish between real and fictional people.” Because we do not fully distinguish between the reality-fiction divide, literary works trigger our emotional responses in the same way that our actual experiences do. Patrick Colm Hogan similarly writes: “To know that something is fictional is to make a judgment that it does not exist. But existence judgments are cortical. They have relatively little to do with our emotional responses to anything.” Liza Zunshine, Why We Read Fiction (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2006), 19. Patrick Colm Hogan, Cognitive Science, Literature, and the Arts (Philadelphia: Routledge, 2003), 185. See also Alan Palmer, Fictional Minds (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004); and David Herman (ed.), Narrative Theory and the Cognitive Sciences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003).
- 40.
Coetzee and Kurtz, 51.
- 41.
Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello, 230.
- 42.
See Hugo von Hofmannsthal, “A Letter,” in The Lord Chandos Letter, trans. Joel Rotenberg (New York: New York Review of Books, 2005): 117–128.
- 43.
Derek Attridge, J. M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 196 fn7. Alternative critical responses have been to analyze the postscript as a text separate from the main work. For instance, Dirk Klopper argues that the postscript “gestures to the inconclusiveness of the writing, its failure of closure”; Reingard Nethersole discusses the postscript as a palimpsest “that not only stands intratextually in relation to Elizabeth Costello but also overwrites hypertextually in 2003 the “Chandos Letter” hypotext written in 1902”; and Stephen Mulhall states that “The signatory of this postscript is one Elizabeth C., but apparently not the protagonist of Coetzee’s eight lessons.” See Dirk Klopper, “‘We Are Not Made for Revelation’: Letters to Francis Bacon in the Postscript to J. M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello,” English in Africa 35, no. 2 (2008): 119; Reingard Nethersole, “Reading in the In-Between: Pre-Scripting the ‘Postscript’ to Elizabeth Costello,” Journal of Literary Studies 21, no. 3/4 (Dec. 2005): 266; Stephen Mulhall, The Wounded Animal (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 231.
- 44.
Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello, 228 (italics in original).
- 45.
Ibid., 227 (italics in original).
- 46.
Ibid., 229.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2024 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Howard-Sukhil, C. (2024). Imagining the Other: J.M. Coetzee’s Fictional Ethics. In: Hagberg, G.L. (eds) Fictional Worlds and the Political Imagination. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-52026-6_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-52026-6_2
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-031-52025-9
Online ISBN: 978-3-031-52026-6
eBook Packages: Religion and PhilosophyPhilosophy and Religion (R0)