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chapter twelve Coetzee’s Postmodern Animals There used to be a time when we knew. We used to believe that when the text said, ‘On the table stood a glass of water,’ there was indeed a glass of water, and a table, and we had only to look in the wordmirror of the text to see them both.” So remarks Elizabeth Costello, a novelist invented by J. M. Coetzee for a talk on realism at Bennington College in 1996 and destined to reappear in Coetzee’s novella, The Lives of Animals. In the earlier incarnation she has flown from Australia to Appleton College in Massachusetts to receive a literary award that prompts her to discuss the matter of realism in literature. “But all that has ended,” she continues, “The word-mirror is broken, irreparably, it seems . . . The words on the page will no longer stand up and be counted, each saying, ‘I mean what I mean!’” Disintegration has set in even further: “The dictionary , that used to stand beside the Bible and the works of Shakespeare above the fireplace, in the place occupied by the household gods in pious Roman homes, has become just one code-book among many.” The rami- fications for a writer are dire: “There used to be a time, we believe, when we could say who we were. Now we are just performers, speaking our parts.”1 Risky as it may be to use fictional words as if they expressed the sentiments of their creator, we’re not going to get very far in connecting with this, or any, author without trying to establish a point of view. And with someone as slippery as Coetzee (a performer speaking his part?), we need all the help we can get. Coetzee sets his new lives of animals into the existing framework of his Bennington talk about realism, retaining not only Elizabeth Costello but her son, Appleton College, and the idea of a public lecture, but the substance has been drastically changed. Costello’s diffidence about the correspondence between words and things—a legacy of Coetzee’s years in the United States as a linguistics graduate student during the period of structuralism and deconstruction—mitigates somewhat 123 “ her powerful moral assertiveness in the earlier version but functions more quietly in the later where, instead of literature, she lectures on animal rights. This diffident assertiveness is perhaps Coetzee’s most salient characteristic as postmodern author for whom playful realism has necessarily replaced oracular prophecy. Yet “postmodern” can be misleading unless a distinction is made between the two postmodernisms: of literary technique and human personae. While on the one hand Coetzee’s prose is increasingly lean and straightforward, not “experimental” or tricksy (although his early In the Heart of the Country comes off as a sometimes tedious cross between Woolf’s The Waves and a Faulkner novel), on the other hand his literary persona reflects the philosophical modesty that comes from living in a world with radically damaged foundations of belief. Realism is a way out, a means by which the postmodern literary persona can seem to avoid postmodern techniques: “Realism has never been comfortable with ideas,” he remarks in his own voice in the Bennington lecture, sharing Costello’s fictional point of view. “Realism is premised on the idea that ideas have no separate existence, can exist only in things. So when it needs to debate ideas, as here [in the Elizabeth Costello story invented for the lecture], it is driven to invent situations—walks in the countryside, conversations—in which characters give voice to contending ideas and thereby in a certain sense embody them. The notion of embodying is cardinal” (65). It’s worth adding that the fiction Coetzee has invented to present his presumed endorsement of realism is filled with echoes of other writers at the same time that we hear a complaint about rehashing the classics; it expresses the view that language, timebound and conventional, writes us (rendering genuinely creativity almost impossible) even as one of the characters expresses a preference for making it new; and it ends with Costello’s son contesting his mother’s esthetic and extolling the creative miracle of the Romantic imagination while rejecting realism’s “smelly underwear.” But Coetzee’s postmodern persona has been throwing curveballs for a long time. In an oft-quoted 1984 essay about his time as a graduate student in English at the University of Texas in Austin (where he arrived from his native South...

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