Realism, Rape, and J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace

Abstract

In 1997-98, J. M. Coetzee elected to deliver the Tanner lectures at Princeton University in the form of a narrative in which Elizabeth Costello, an elderly Australian novelist delivers two lectures at a prestigious American university on the subject of the responsibilities of human beings toward animals. That narrative makes up the bulk of The Lives of Animals. In the absence of an explanation from Coetzee, we do not know why he chose that strategy of mediation, but it appears to function as a distancing device, a way of “insulat[ing] the warring 'ideas'” presented in the piece “against claims of authorship and authority” (Lives of Animals 79). The strategy perhaps originated in 1987, with Coetzee's expression of unease at being obliged when making a public address to speak a “language” other than his own–that is, to communicate in expository or discursive rather than narrative prose (“The Novel Today” 3). Storytelling, Coetzee declared then, is “another, an other mode of thinking” (4).