J. M. 쿳시의 소설과 공감적 상상력의 교육 —『엘리자베스 코스텔로』와 『치욕』을 중심으로

Throughout his novels, Coetzee has probed deep into the nature of the sympathetic imagination and its elusive workings, urging the reader to accompany him on the quest. His thinking on the sympathetic imagination finds an unprecedented, vigorous expression in his recent novel Elizabeth Costello. Especially in the two ‘Lessons’ titled “the Lives of Animals”. the eponymous main character, deeply affected and disturbed by the abuse of animals and people’s indifference, gives a pair of lectures on the philosophical approach to animals and on the poetical one. She criticizes the rule of reason and the anthropocentric understanding of animals and firmly expresses her belief in the power of the sympathetic imagination, asserting that “there are no bounds to the sympathetic imagination.” Costello’s idea of the sympathetic imagination has frequently been construed and criticized as meaning an imaginative identification with the other that is in danger of ignoring the radical otherness of being. Also she was thought to believe that the sympathetic imagination arises only through a conscious effort or voluntary decision of the ethical subject. Against these interpretations, this paper proposes an alternative reading: Costello is putting forward the possibility of the sympathetic imagination without ignoring the otherness of being, founding it upon the fullness of being and the vulnerability and finitude of embodied being that humans and animals have in common. It will be shown that she asks for the sympathetic imagination as a state of ex-stasis, a being outside oneself, and as an ethical responsibility to be open to the demands of the other. This paper concludes by adding a brief examination of Disgrace to see how it supplements and modifies Costello’s idea of the sympathetic imagination regarding its possibility and limits.