Coetzee’s Fictions of Deformation

This chapter traces the inextricability of the worlds of education and literary aesthetics in J.M. Coetzee’s work of the 1990s and early 2000s. The central figures in this fiction are all involved with education: the fallen professor in Disgrace; the titular writer-lecturer at the heart of Elizabeth Costello; the traumatized student in Boyhood; the young man seeking lessons from modernists in Youth; Coetzee himself, traveling around the world giving talks (in the form of fiction) at various universities. Pedagogical forms like lectures, lessons, and tests function as key narrative hinges in meaning-making in these novels. Like Dickens, Coetzee positions (de)formation as an explicit problem in his writing of this period, composing story out of life in his autobiographies and exploring the shape of development or dissipation for characters in their fifties and sixties. If Boyhood and Youth take the rocky development of the child to the professional adult as their narrative subject, Disgrace and Elizabeth Costello track the downward slope of aging and displacement. In these narratives of deformation, Coetzee delineates between the institutional authority associated with education on the one hand and the release of certainty, definitiveness, and fixity that emerges in the encounter with literature on the other.