“입증할 수 없는 것”으로부터 배우기 —쿳시의 『엘리자베스 코스텔로』

Taking a cue from J. M. Coetzee's analysis of Erasmus's (non)position in the essay, “Erasmus: Madness and Rivalry,” this paper examines the question of the ethics of writing and reading in Elizabeth Costello. Coetzee's view of the limits and possibilities of the Erasmian (non)position -- meaning “off the stage of political rivalry” in the era of political turmoil -- sheds much light on the writer-protagonist Elizabeth Costello's position in the novel, as well as that of Coetzee's own in postcolonial discourses. As a writer who is notoriously elusive or silent on political matters, Coetzee has frequently been accused of political and/or moral irresponsibility. On the other hand, other critics have focused on Coetzee's postmodern metafictional writing from a different perspective, arguing that Coetzee's formal experimentalism enacts an ethics which is not assumed to be secondary to politics, but initiative of alternative politics. Drawing on recent studies in relation to ethics, particularly those about the ethics of postmodern theories, these critics emphasize that Coetzee's texts reveal the unknowability of the Other, the unbridgeable gap between self and Other, language and body, and text and world, namely, the limit of representation. Few critics, however, have noted the fact that Elizabeth Costello directs the reader's attention to the 'stages' that constantly seek to make Elizabeth's statements part of the discourses of power, and thus, deliberately foregrounds the ways in which the unsympathetic and overly rational audience simplify, misunderstand, and/or distort her language about literature, ethics, and being. Elizabeth's lectures at times sound absurd, passionate, or simply crazy, and yet, the seemingly common sensical and logical accusations against her turn out to be even more problematic in their failure to read Elizabeth's “unverifiable” yet true messages: alternative knowledge and experiences that affirm “knowing” and “being” the Other. Far from endowing Elizabeth with the authority to deliver and teach truth and ethics, the text suggests that the ethics of writing would not be possible without the existence of a reader who is willing to “listen” to the “unverifiable” through an on-going process of learning how to read.