리얼리즘과 깨진 “말-거울”: J. M. 쿳시의 『엘리자베스 코스텔로』

The purpose of this paper is to examine J. M. Coetzee’s ideas on realism in Elizabeth Costello, with a focus on its three frame stories: Lesson 1, “Realism,” Lesson 8, “At the Gate,” and the Postscript. In Lesson 1, he detaches realism from the practice of detailed realistic description or the notion of verisimilitude and redefines it by the pivotal notion of ‘embodiment’ and ‘embeddedness (in life).’ Also, he presents realism as facing an unprecedented plight resulting from the language crisis introduced by Costello’s speech on the broken “word-mirror.” What this crisis points to is the irrevocable loss of correspondence between word and object, statement and meaning. In Lesson 8 and the Postscript, the motif of language crisis is more fully developed, and the allegorical dimension of language is explored, heightening the conflict and tension between the realistic impulse to be faithful to the reality of things and the representational limitations of language. The paper concludes that staying in this taut tension is essential to Coetzee’s new version of realism, which offers an alternative both to the untenable old realism and to the fall into the abyss of representational impossibility.