Image

I'm looking at my copy of Elizabeth Costello right now, and I feel compelled to ask: Could J.M. Coetzee's name be written any bigger? I swear, he takes up about half of the cover page. The title of the book is written in these tiny little letters at the bottom. I mean, yeah they're written in gold, so they stand out a bit. But I really think that, even though Coetzee's “fictional device enables him to distance himself” (Anthology, 347) from what is being said, the cover of my copy of this novel hints that Coetzee is not as distanced from what is being said as he'd like us to believe. And the amount of time dedicated to Costello's ideas within the novel, as well as the title of the book, makes me think that it is with Costello and her arguments that Coetzee most identifies with, though he tries to get by “without... really committing himself” (Anthology 347) to what's being said.

Coetzee's name is written in HUGE letters.

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/416HPNV61ZL.jpg

Now. Why is this important? If I wanted to get all technical, I could talk about how it's a superb literary device used by Coetzee to tackle a potentially controversial topic, namely animal cruelty. I could compare it to... I don't know... The Yellow Wallpaper, and how Gillman uses her main character to express the dissatisfaction she feels about the condition of the married woman. But really, the literary device itself is not what I think is important. It makes Elizabeth Costello a book of literary merit, which is probably part of why it has received so many rave reviews, some of which are quoted in all of their fawning glory on the back cover. But this literary device, to me, is important because of how it plays into what Coetzee says in his first few chapters, through Costello, about image.

Gillman uses the same literary device as Coetzee.

http://thefuturists.files.wordpress.com/2008/12/yellow.jpg

Actually, what Coetzee talks about more then image itself is the divide between image and who we really are. I love Costello's detached feeling as she gives her cruise ship speech, how “she is not sure, as she listens to her own voice, whether she believes any longer in what she is saying” (Coetzee, 39). Oh, my goodness, I have done that before. More times then I care to remember.

Exhibit A: At my high school, I took a class called Theory of Knowledge. Not the funnest class of my life, I've got to admit. I guess if I had to describe it, I'd say it was a philosophy class. But it wasn't one of those memorization philosophy classes, where you sit around memorizing everything Aristotle ever wrote. The whole thing was that you were given a few topics over the course of the semester and you created your own philosophy about them. SO, anyway, I was super excited about getting to write on all these crazy topics, and I wrote this intense paper about how there is no such thing as objective knowledge, and blah, blah blah. I turn the paper in, and two days later my teacher hands it back and he's basically highlighted every single line in red and at the end of the paper he's writes me this note that basically says he disagrees with me so, even though my paper is well written and well supported, he's not going to give me an A.

WELL. Excuse me for being original. I mean... I knew from our dicussions in class that he had a differing opinion. But I didn't want to play that game that so many of my peers got caught up in, the game where you write exactly what you know the teacher wants to hear, regardless of whether or not you agree with it. I wanted an A though. Quite a dilemma I was in... In the end, I sort of cheated. I turned in pretty, agreeable papers all semester long, regurgitating exactly what my teacher had said in class, “believing whatever [had] to be believed in order to get the job done” (Coetzee 39). That summer, though, I basically rewrote all of my papers. Pretending to agree with my Theory of Knowledge tyrant teacher was too much for me. Upholding my “image” during the semester almost undid me, and now that the job was done, now that my A was secure, I was ready to shed that image like an old coat and give myself over to how I really felt.

I created an image of agreeing with my teacher so I could get that ever elusive A.

http://z.hubpages.com/u/210160_f520.jpg

I think Costello was able to give her speech on animal cruelty despite the fact that "her sponsors would no doubt like [for her to speak about herself and her fiction]" (Coetzee, 60) because, after decades of toning down her beliefs, she was too tired to uphold the image she had created for herself. My mom always says that the older she gets, the harder it is for her to be polite. That's basically what I think happened to Costello: she is “old enough not to have time to waste on niceties” (Coetzee, 94). And she makes people uncomfortable with what she says. Abraham Stern actually refuses to come to dinner with her, he is so offended by what she has said. But her image has already been shattered by her lecture, and she keeps picking away at it the next day at the debate even after receiving his biting explanation for his absence because she is tired, tired, tired of being what everyone else expects her to be.

Now, I talked to you earlier about Coetzee and his grand literary device, about how he prettily separated himself from what was being said in this novel. I also said that this literay device wasn't important. And for my purposes, for just taking to heart what the book is trying to convey, it really isn't. But I think that this particular literary device, used for separation, relates to what Coetzee uses this book to say about image. It's like... it's like Coetzee wants to be Costello. Like he would love to be able to speak freely as she does, to ruffle feathers and attempt to change the world, one lecture at a time. But he hasn't reached this level yet. His use of Costello to talk about the subject of animal cruelty hints that he has yet to fully discard his image.

I don't know that much about Coetzee. I don't know if he's actually very vocal about his animal right beliefs, or if he truly does speak solely through his characters. But I do know that most of us spend our lives wrapped up in the protective casing of the image we let the world see, and sooner or later our beliefs are going to get too big to fit in that casing. The casing is going to burst, eventually. Everyone is going to know what we really think. Is it better to just let it out right away, to bypass the casing alltogether? I don't know. But, I figure, if Coetzee is right, and it's all going to come out eventually, I might as well divulge as much of it now as I can, because, sooner or later, everyone's going to know anyway.

The image we try to show the world can be likened to this decidedly unattractive chemical suit, but eventually the suit will not be able to contain our true selves.

http://lib.fo.am/_media/chemical-protective-suit.jpg

Images, as Coetzee proves through Costello, are hard to maintain and very fragile.