From lectures to lessons and back again:The deterritorialization of transmission in Elizabeth Costello

Abstract J. M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello consists of eight “lessons,” which in their turn play host to seven lectures as given either by Coetzee himself or his fictional doppelganger. When a fiction consists of lessons that embed lectures, the latter are delivered simultaneously to the present direct addressees and to absent indirect ones. Both Costello and Coetzee refuse to accept the consensual illusion of their lecture halls by preferring to address a scattered and heterogeneous readership. Their lectures break the realist illusion by drawing attention to their unreliable performers who cannot act as unbiased agents of commonality. The best way to provoke dissent is to put emphasis on the consensual reality’s discarded “real,” such as violated children, exterminated peoples, or suffering animals. By responding to its call from an ever-new point of view and establishing a migrating point of view, Costello and Coetzee untiringly distance themselves from the artifice of reality that surrounds them.