134 chApter four
author and protagonist, and between human and animal. In a sense, Coe-
tzee’s lecture- narrative—perhaps especially through the genre and gender
trouble it offers—is an act of dispossessing his own claim to authority by
submitting himself (as woman, as animal, as fiction) to others trained to
disavow vulnerability. Through his female double, he engages imaginative,
even utopian performances of humanimality that radically extend the hori-
zons of our ethics. Although the protagonist of his narrative is bound to
fail in her anti- intellectual emotional plea to her intellectual audience, her
failure against the force of discipline ultimately brings us toward “more
creative, more cooperative, more surprising ways of being in the world”
(Halberstam 2011, 2– 3). Through what Halberstam calls “counterintuitive
modes of knowing,” Costello privileges feeling over the rational mode in
order to dispossess us from the disciplined and disciplining subjectivities
from which we have been crafted and to which we have remained bound.
Disciplining Anxieties
Underlying the academic response to The Lives of Animals has been an anx-
iety about how much of Coetzee’s political and ethical beliefs are registered
through his fictional female protagonist. Initially delivered orally, then pub-
lished in 1999 as a Tanner Lecture, and finally included as two chapters
in the novel Elizabeth Costello (2003), the text upsets the rigid boundary
between truth and fiction, lecture and story, author and text, male and fe-
male, and human and animal. This interpretive anxiety tells us something
vital about the relation between intellectual thought and fiction, about how
ungrounded we become when “truth” is disrupted by less authorized ideas,
genres, forms, and concepts. Perhaps just as importantly, it reveals how pro-
foundly we—and by “we” I mean to include those situated squarely within
Western culture, those working in relation to Western academia, and, per-
haps most perversely, those of us who are literary scholars—distrust the
word (and the world) of fiction. The novel Elizabeth Costello “helps” to ease
both the genre and gender trouble caused by Coetzee’s addressing his au-
dience “as” an aging white woman writer.
Critics of Elizabeth Costello, Derek Attridge writes, ”complain that Coet-
zee uses his fictional characters to advance arguments... without assuming
responsibility for them, and is thus ethically at fault” (2004, 197). According
to the logic of this complaint, by couching his arguments in fictional form,