Speaking (from) out of tradition: hermeneutics, literary style and the task of textual interpretation in J. M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello (2003) and Julian Barnes’s Elizabeth Finch (2022)

Abstract

ABSTRACT This essay will argue for the pertinence of a hermeneutical approach to textuality, literary style, and the legacy of the contemporary novel in J. M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello and Julian Barnes’s Elizabeth Finch. I will emphasize how Coetzee and Barnes’s ‘novels of ideas’ both explore the limitations and necessities of understanding character and the burden of textuality as ways through which the contemporary novel continues its self-conscious destabilizations and regenerations of form and aesthetic response towards the world. Contrary to a critical fashion which maps metafictional techniques with postmodern sensibilities, Coetzee and Barnes’s concerns with textual embeddedness and the demands of literary conventions do not lead to a position of ideological relativism that negates the potentialities of interpretation and reading to revivify these generic markers. Instead, I demonstrate that these two novels indicate the relevance of a hermeneutical position, which stresses how positionality within tradition is both constraining and liberatory.