The final pages of Mimesis sometimes have the air of a sincere lament, but also recognise that modernism was a decisive development that altered the way literature went about the business of representation. It was a moment of self-knowledge from which there was no retreat, part of a broader cultural shift away from a belief in rational certainty and objectivity. In ‘Realism’, the opening chapter of J.M. Coetzee’s most recent novel, Elizabeth Costello: Eight lessons (2003), the eponymous heroine, a successful Australian novelist, gives a speech in which she ironically likens herself to a talking ape from a short story by Franz Kafka. The story’s ambiguities lead her to reflect on this historical loss of certainty, the way it seems to have undone the very possibility of direct communication and unproblematic representation. There was, she argues, ‘a time when we knew’:

We used to believe that when the text said, ‘On the table stood a glass of water’, there was indeed a table, and a glass of water on it, and we had only to look in the word-mirror of the text to see them. But all that has ended. The word-mirror is broken irreparably, it seems. [...] There used to be a time, we believe, when we could say who we were. Now we are just performers speaking our parts. The bottom has dropped out.

Her speech is not well received. Elizabeth Costello spends most of Coetzee’s novel acting the role of a celebrity writer. She travels the world making appearances, delivering lectures, fielding questions about the meanings and motivations behind her writing. It is not something she enjoys. Often her appearances do not run smoothly; her ideas tend to provoke dissent and dissatisfaction. On this occasion, it is implied her views are passé. Susan Moebius, a smooth parody of an academic littérateur, explains that Costello faces these problems because she does not tell people what they want to hear. What they want, says Moebius, is something ‘more personal. It doesn’t have to be intimate. But audiences no longer react well to heavy historical self-ironization. They might at a pinch accept it from a man, but not from a woman.’ The audience wants literal confession; but Costello’s aim is to keep ‘her true self safe’. Or so her son John believes; for Costello, the issue cuts deeper than this. She has come to doubt the very existence of such a thing as a ‘true self’. The word-mirror is irreparably broken, yet she is compelled to appear before an audience. Inevitably, what she presents is ‘an image, false, like all images’.

The irony is that Elizabeth Costello’s expressions of doubt are sincere. Moebius is mistaken. What Costello tells her audience is ‘personal’. She does not pretend to be someone she is not; she merely goes through with the ritual of each public appearance knowing it is an empty ritual. The problem arises because her sense of self, conscious of this artificiality, can only find legitimate expression through the hesitancies and qualifications of irony, but she is faced with a literal-minded audience expecting the clear and unambiguous intention, the moral stance, that they assume underpins her work. In a sense, they want to be able to short-circuit her novels. They want a key that will unlock the secret of the text. They want to confirm their existing opinions, so as to avoid the awkward ambiguities that might arise from the difficult business of interpretation.

As a depiction of the life of a successful author, Coetzee’s novel possesses a dry wit. Costello’s troubles are seen to be an unavoidable part of the celebrity writer’s lot, a symptom of cultural expectations. ‘Television’. Jonathan Franzen has argued – and let us assume ‘television’ is synecdoche for the entire apparatus of the mass media and celebrity culture – ‘has conditioned us to accept only the literal testimony of the self’. Literature, as an ironic and humane art, holds out the promise of sanctuary from the literalising and trivialising power of contemporary culture, but it is also part of this culture. It is as the literal testimony of the self that novels are regularly promoted. As Elizabeth Costello discovers, audiences often prefer the security of an easy illusion to the difficult and ambiguous conception of the self that she presents. Irony’s elusiveness is greeted with suspicion or incomprehension. The nuanced inner world that was opened up by the modernists has given way to a world of images.

Franz Kafka wrote in his diary: ‘My doubts stand in a circle around every word.’

The latest in the rolling series of crises that seem permanently to afflict Australian literature is a crisis of declining readership. Literary fiction is losing market share to memoirs and genre fiction. It has been suggested that a dearth of good new writers and a glut of mediocre novels are to blame. Certainly, there are many novels published in this country that are dull, under-realised or just plain bad, but this is not necessarily the root of the problem. Culturally speaking, the shit-at-a-wall theory has its virtues. On balance, having more writers rather than less is a good thing. In any case, Australian literature is currently more diverse and robust than it is sometimes given credit for; good novels are being published, even if they are not always the most visible. The problem would seem to be less one of latent talent – which is beyond anyone’s control – than of cultivating readers who are prepared to take on a challenging, difficult novel. This may have something to do with our timid publishing culture, but it is also part of a broader cultural failure to attend to literature as a representative, ironic art form. There is plenty of chatter about books, but little in the way of serious consideration of basic questions about literature, about how and what it expresses, about what to expect from it, about how it should be read. The ways in which fiction is promoted encourage an idea of literature that is ultimately self-defeating.

There is a contradiction in the popular perception of serious literature. On the one hand, it has prestige. There is a general impression that an intelligent, educated person will at least occasionally read books, some of which should be ‘literary’ in the vague sense of being the most profound and meritorious works a culture has to offer. At the same time, there is a counter-perception that literature consists of books that are difficult and dull; that it is something to be consumed for its healthful properties rather than its taste. People want literature, but do not want to be alienated or confused by it.

The understandable response of publishers, whose aim is to appeal to the widest possible audience, is to be conservative. It is in their interest to make literature seem serious and profound, but also safe and unthreatening. Thus ‘literary’ novels are packaged in a reassuring guise. They are pushed into recognisable pigeonholes. This is one of the reasons for the blandness of local fiction publishing, which was eloquently deplored by the novelist Andrew McCann in a recent edition of Overland. Many ‘literary’ works seem to have found their way into print because their subject-matter allows them to be slotted into a niche market, and not because of merit. At the very least, they speak of a chronically unadventurous idea of what constitutes a literary novel. It is a kind of weirdly adolescent idea that equates serious literature with swooning lyricism, plenty of ‘poetic’ references to weather and flora, and, of course, total humourlessness. The supposedly serious end of the market is awash with novels dressed in soft-focus pastel covers that are so slight they only run to two hundred pages with the help of oversized, generously spaced typefaces; novels so precious and insubstantial that they threaten to dissolve into dust at the first puff of wind. The common wisdom is that the reading public is reluctant to engage with novels that are difficult, but maybe we are being presented with books that are not difficult enough.

On an intellectual level, this striving for reassurance assumes a number of forms, all of which are subject to the law of diminishing returns. The word ‘story’, for example, is regularly used in a way that implies all narratives are valuable for their own sake. This has its basis in the valid idea that human beings understand themselves and the world through narrative, but it has degraded into a term suggesting a facile universality. We all have a story; we all understand stories. A story in any form, we are asked to believe, will enrich us, no matter how pointless. The logic resembles that of a callow schoolboy who wonders why he has to study English when he already knows how to speak it; instead of being reprimanded, however, he is told that he is quite right and that no effort is required. The word ‘story’ is now used to indicate a book is safely anti-intellectual, that it contains nothing unusual or challenging; that literature’s wisdom does not have to be worked for but can be attained simply by exposing oneself to the affirming glow of the story. Novelists are relabelled ‘storytellers’ as a sop to a reading public whose inability to cope with anything even slightly unorthodox or thought-provoking is presumed to be total. The idea of the ‘story’ has, in short, become a platitude that is trotted out in defence of the bland and mediocre in an attempt to protect it from scrutiny. Successfully, it seems, since no one is reading these novels anymore.

This tendency has reached its nadir in the ongoing compulsion to label novels supposedly written for adults as ‘fairy tales’. The origin of this trend is honourable, lying in the decades-old vogue for magic realism which, at its best, recognised the subversive psychological undercurrents in many folk tales. But it has long ceased to have any subversive resonance. It is now used to signify that the ‘literary’ has been rendered safely infantile. The back cover of one recent débutante novelist’s book was adorned with the question, ‘Do you believe in creatures at the bottom of the garden?’ This is so cretinous it drools. The only possible answer a sane person could give to this question is ‘No’. One can only assume that this unfortunate author’s publishers have reached such a level of cynicism that they assume the target market for new Australian novels consists entirely of nitwits. Here, perhaps, is one reason why sales are low: read a blurb and you risk having your intelligence insulted.

The staple of book promotion has become the author as celebrity, presented in feature articles, interviews and public appearances. There are good reasons for this emphasis. There is no question it works. The easiest way to spark interest in a book is to hint at the creative struggle that was involved in writing it. There is nothing necessarily invidious or even new about this focus on the author. Many great writers – Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, Oscar Wilde – cultivated public personas that complemented their writings. Most of the time this appeals to a basic curiosity about other people and the creative process. The revelations tend to be trivial or harmless. (I hear Brian Castro’s favourite pencil is a 2B.) Cannier authors play up to the interest. They learn how to handle themselves in an interview and to present their novels as extensions of themselves. It is a common trick for novelists to blur the lines between reality and fiction to give their narrative credibility.

From a critical perspective, which is to say from a reader’s perspective, the distinction between fiction and non-fiction is difficult to sustain. The critic Northrop Frye, a dedicated literary taxonomist, regarded it as arbitrary, a product of the reader’s assumptions and not of the text itself, pointing out that ‘an autobiography coming into a library would be classified as non-fiction if the librarian believed the author, and as fiction if she thought he was lying’. Novels as far back as Robinson Crusoe (1719) have assumed the form of first-person confessions – the point being that once something has been shaped into a narrative it has implications that extend well beyond the question of how closely it corresponds to reality. All narratives are tendentious, with their own logic. They are, as William Gass said, ‘sneaky justifications’, even if they pretend not to be. Their truth is always provisional and subjective. It is why realism is ultimately in the eye of the beholder. It is also why the modernists and their heirs felt the necessity for formal innovation.

By being railroaded into a narrative, autobiography becomes fictionalised. This is not to say that all memoirists are liars (some clearly are) but simply that their works are rhetorically indistinguishable from fiction and demand the same kind of interpretation, the same scrutiny of a self that is ultimately an image, false, like all images. The revelation that Norma Khouri fabricated the details of her ‘memoir’, Forbidden Love (2003), could be seen as a scandal of incorrect classification. The embarrassment it caused sprang from the assumptions that are made when a book is presented as a true story. The ‘truth’ of the narrative is treated as a licence for the reader to suspend his or her critical faculties, to read literally, as if the word-mirror was still intact. Rather than being alert to the way a public persona is constructed, we are encouraged to collude with its creation as a way of manipulating our response. There would have been no controversy if Forbidden Love had simply been called a novel. But it was not, and so when the literal testimony of the self turned out to be an illusion there was a scandal.

One of the things the Khouri affair hinted at was the way the promotion of books as a literal expression of their author’s beliefs and experiences encourages a looking-glass view of literature. It is not possible to consider the meaning of a novel without considering its aesthetics. After all, it is a rhetorical structure that wants to shape your response. This has to be taken into account in any competent reading. To read literally is to misread. But not only are we encouraged to ignore the fictional qualities of non- fiction, there is also a tendency for the public emphasis on the personality of the author to turn this misguided credulity back onto works that are explicitly fictional.

In James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), Stephen Dedalus gives a detailed explanation of his theory about the autobiographical inspiration behind Hamlet. ‘Every life is many days,’ he says at one point, ‘day after day. We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love. But always meeting ourselves.’

The most dramatic example of this climate of literalism was the successful publicity campaign for The Bride Stripped Bare (2003), a novel credited to ‘Anonymous’ but revealed almost immediately (before publication, in fact) to be the work of Nikki Gemmell. The way the book was promoted has already been the subject of some analysis (see Linda Hawryluk’s ‘Miss Gemmell Regrets: Anatomy of a PR Campaign’ in Overland 176, 2004). The key point here is the way the novel’s fictional qualities were either downplayed or ignored altogether. The author encouraged this view. Gemmell could have distanced herself, pointing out that, as a work of fiction, the book was an imaginative transformation of reality whose ideas were speculative and contingent. But her public statements instead emphasised the novel’s autobiographical veracity. The Bride Stripped Bare, she asserted in every one of her numerous interviews, was ‘honest’. The reason she had chosen to publish the book anonymously, she argued, was to allow herself the freedom to write in a confessional mode, to be utterly frank about the taboo subject of female sexuality. She publicly admitted to sharing many of her protagonist’s specific sexual dislikes. The book’s claim to absolute truthfulness, its faithful representation of the real experiences and feelings of its author and her closest female friends, was presented as its rationale, its defence against criticism, and the source of its literary merit.

There is no reason to suspect Gemmell was anything other than sincere in advancing this interpretation of her novel. In fact, she gave the impression of being as oblivious to any possible complications to her argument as she was to the contradiction in agreeing to a punishing round of media appearances to discuss her preference for anonymity. But the significance of this promotional campaign, and the reason for its success, was that it transmitted one key message over and over again: The Bride Stripped Bare could be read as a work of sexual autobiography. That Gemmell had wanted the book published anonymously became a stamp of authenticity, a guarantee that it expressed her deepest desires and that they were uncensored and explicit. The more Gemmell spoke of her personal sense of mortification, the more it fuelled the impression that something terribly private had been made public through some ghastly mistake. Here was a book that truly promised to deliver the literal testimony of the self. And the publicity worked. According to The Age, The Bride Stripped Bare was the highest-selling Australian novel for the year 2003 and the second highest-selling Australian novel in 2004, behind Bryce Courtenay’s Brother Fish (2004).

If, however, we turn to the book itself, we can see what a limiting, unsustainable, even delusional reading this is. The Bride Stripped Bare’s unnamed narrator claims ‘no one’s completely honest about sex’, a catch-cry that echoed throughout the promotional campaign. Of course, there was always an unspoken qualification to this sweeping declaration: the message was ‘no one’s completely honest about sex – except me’. But if we take this universalising statement in context as an assertion made by a character in a novel who then goes on to talk about sex in some detail, it could be read as casting doubt on the reliability of the narrator herself. It contradicts itself: in fact, it is a version of the Cretan paradox.

This logical awkwardness might lead us to attend more closely to those moments in the novel in which the narrator is not honest. It might draw attention to the fact that being honest and the act of declaring oneself to be honest are two different things. This in turn might lead us to take note of the dissenting voices within the book which imply the narrator is indulgent and narcissistic. The chapters in The Bride Stripped Bare are called ‘lessons’ – might this be ironic? After all, each ‘lesson’ also begins with a quotation from a moralising Victorian-era text instructing women on their social obligations. These provide a running commentary on the action, and at times seem to be mocking the narrator’s self-image.

Indeed, the claim that no one is honest about sex might draw attention to the artificiality of the entire narrative, its conservative structure, the contrived way it moves its protagonist from an exaggerated state of timid repression to a caricature of liberation. We might become conscious of the stereotypes lurking close to the surface of the novel’s characters: the dissatisfied wife, the insensitive husband, the enigmatic Spanish lover. There is, we might come to suspect, something implausible or clichéd about the quasi-pornographic encounters through which the narrator liberates herself. Our attention might be drawn to the way her desires, her ideas about romance, seem to spring from comparisons to artificial standards unconsciously absorbed from the wider culture. We might notice that while some restrictive gender roles are being challenged, others are reinforced. We might want to reflect upon the excessive squeamishness the narrator feels about the human body and its functions. We might detect an underlying dislike for men in both her pre- and post-liberation manifestations, and baulk at her belief that the experience of childbirth grants her the right to a smug sense of superiority over childless women. Throughout the novel, the narrator is, in other words, constructing a sense of self, defining herself as a particular type of person through her narrative. But stories are sneaky justifications; the stories we tell about ourselves especially so. We would be wise to be on guard, lest we are, as the narrator claims to be at one point, ‘seduced by text’ and find ourselves believing too readily in an image whose appearance is deceptive.

To read The Bride Stripped Bare in this manner, to read it as a novel, to interpret it as what the Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin called ‘a living mix of varied and opposing voices’, is to open up a space between the persona the narrator presents and the implicit challenge to that persona that is reflected back at her by the fictional reality she inhabits. This requires paying attention not only to what the narrator tells us about herself but how she tells us. It requires a consideration of the novel as an aesthetic object and not simply as a truthful representation. If we read in this manner, the narrator’s brittle sense of self begins to fracture and the reasons that were publicly advanced as arguments for its validity disappear. The novel’s ‘honesty’ becomes redundant.

Literature throngs with characters who ingenuously cast themselves into the wider world only to have their naïve illusions shattered against the anvil of reality. Indeed, the contemporary idea that a person’s image of himself or herself is always valid and unquestionable, that it should be given respectful treatment even when it is self-serving and false, has received derisory treatment from many of the great novelists of the past. Think of the wicked sport Jane Austen has with her characters’ vanities; or the way some of George Eliot’s protagonists have their lives efficiently ruined because their self-belief blinds them to some crucial personal failing. By the time of the modernists, Sigmund Freud had given common currency to the idea that our motivations are not always what we understand them to be and are often far less admirable than we imagine, but of course literature knew that already. The literal testimony of the self, it cautions us, is inherently unreliable.

When Oscar Wilde said that all bad poetry is sincere, he did not mean that good poetry is necessarily insincere, but that the poetaster has such an unshakeable belief in the special profundity of her tremulous soul and the unique depth of her feelings that she is deaf to the awfulness of her verse. This self-belief mistakenly assumes that sincerity is so valuable that it overrides any other defects. Fatally, it believes that the act of communicating an experience is unproblematic, that intention is enough to carry the day. But it is possible to confess to one’s deepest secrets with total honesty and do no more than reveal their banality.

When Stephen Dedalus is asked whether he believes his own theory, he says ‘No’.

The critic Jane Adamson has suggested that irony provides a way to understand the false and sometimes damaging consequences of a literal sense of self. Drawing on William Hazlitt’s reading of Shakespeare, she defines literary irony as a conversational form that opens up the possibility of self-criticism. Irony, she argues, is a mode that creates ‘a multifarious, complex awareness of an object’. It produces ‘shafts of insight from disparate yet convergible ideas’. It allows ‘things to be apprehended simultaneously from different angles and in disparate moods, as in T.S. Eliot’s classic definition of Marvell’s “wit” as involving “a recognition, implicit in the expression of [a particular] experience, of other kinds of experience which are possible”’. Irony, at some level, is essential to serious literary endeavour. It could even be argued that irony is implicit in the idea of literature itself. Representing something, projecting it into a fictitious realm, creates a distance between the creator and the creation. It is this space that opens up the possibility of ambivalence and ambiguity. It allows an idea to doubt itself. Irony is more than a clever device; it is a constructive and ongoing process of reinterpretation.

An ironic sense of self is central to Brian Castro’s Shanghai Dancing (2003), a novel described by its author as a ‘fictional autobiography’. In Shanghai Dancing, identity is something elusive and ever-changing, drawing on a swamp of warped memories and untruths. The narrator is named Antonio Castro. At the age of nine, we see Antonio reading Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927) and ‘not understanding a thing’; but at some point, we can be reasonably confident, Brian Castro has read the same novel and understood it well. Shanghai Dancing is alive to the nuances of the moment and the rich swirl of metaphor it creates. This vivid awareness becomes a philosophy of sorts. ‘There is no interpretation of life,’ says Antonio, ‘there is only muscular memory.’

This idea is expressed through the novel’s disjointed style. One chapter, for example, begins with the memory of a specific object: his grandmother’s wind-up gramophone. This draws forth one of Castro’s rich clusters of metaphorical associations. The gramophone’s bent arm suggests a broken wrist; the needles, kept in a silver tin, become a doctor’s hypodermic. He remembers feeling the music enter his body through the needle like liquid through a syringe, like a drug, rushing like the waters of the Yangtze. For his grandmother, the music evokes her past experiences and this inspires in Antonio a realisation about the elusiveness of memory that he associates with his calling as a writer:

Then an immense sadness would pass over from time to time, because as my grandmother was growing deafer and deafer, I realised that in her crouching and sighing, she was trying to recapture a memory that had already begun to lose its potency. The effects became briefer, until there was a kind of confusion of the senses as to what devastations had taken place in what past life and though she could not relate to me the forgetting which she was desperately trying to shore up with dramatic performances and with the aid of her needles, I knew instinctively that I had been chosen as the recipient of its multifariousness and deception.

The chapter is titled ‘Mimesis’. But what is being represented here is less a concrete reality than the experience of remembering. It is a representation of a representation. Each image in the swirl of metaphorical associations refers to each of the others. The mind is led from one image to the next, reshaping and reinventing the past as it goes. Despite his claims to the contrary, Antonio’s ‘muscular memory’ is an interpretation of sorts. The transformation introduces an element of uncertainty, and it creates a reality that is subjective and thus unreliable. This is an awkward and ambiguous position for a man trying to write a factual account of the history of his family, and when he meets his cousin Cindy Ling, her instinctive scepticism quickly zeroes in on his compromised motivations:

So you’re writing some sort of story?
Lives.
Lies? She smirked [...]
I’m just after something to get me started. True or false it doesn’t matter. I don’t have any sneaky agendas.
Sure. They all say that.

Antonio occasionally longs for something sincere, for direct access to the truth about his family’s history, but accepts with a certain sadness that this can never be achieved. Shanghai Dancing could be read as a novel, not only about understanding the past, but about the problems of representation, of constructing one’s sense of self from fragments and fading memories, and the perils of communicating that subjective understanding. There is a wonderfully bathetic moment when the young Antonio, in a naïve attempt to communicate with the world, writes his thoughts on small pieces of paper, twists them, and drops them out the window of his house. ‘In their coded weaving,’ he says, ‘they rotated briefly with fatuous hope, paused, soared and landed serendipitously in chicken shit or on the soggy garbage of a dozen families living in tiny ratholes worse than ours.’

Shanghai Dancing is an ambitious novel. It makes a point of resisting the reassuring certainties of narrative. ‘Okay, so you know English grammar,’ says Antonio’s half-sister Stella. ‘Big shot from boarding school. But you know shit for story.’ This sometimes makes for difficult reading, but given its subject matter and the ideas its sets out to explore, it could hardly have been written differently. And if we were looking for another example of the frosty reception this kind of ironic exploration of the self is apt to receive, then we need look no further. For Shanghai Dancing also arrived on the heels of a scandal, a real scandal, although not a controversy to command the kind of media attention granted The Bride Stripped Bare. Despite being the work of an established, highly regarded writer, Castro’s novel was published by the small independent imprint Giramondo rather than by a major publisher. The reason? ‘I have to put it baldly,’ Castro told The Age, ‘I was being forced to dumb down. People wanted things “clarified”. The word they used was “signpost”. I thought, hang on, this book is about dissociation! So I walked away before I was kneecapped.’ Our suspicions about the literal testimony of the self might lead us to be wary here. Are these the words of a literary prima donna? A precious author’s fit of pique at modest and respectful editorial advice? Alas, no. Here it is at last: the ring of truth.

‘Art is not difficult because it wants to be difficult,’ said Donald Barthelme, ‘but because it wants to be art.’ Works that test the boundaries of form are essential to a literary culture because they explore the limits of expression and thus the boundaries of the self. Inevitably, these books place demands on the reader in excess of most forms of entertainment. They require not just reading, but rereading. Their aesthetic is one of complexity, indeterminacy, slow philosophical reflection. As such, they run counter to the contemporary idea of entertainment, offering instead more esoteric and cerebral pleasures. Reading is an occupation that is opposed to the temper of the times; reading literary fiction especially so. Castro was quoted recently as saying the trick to great writing is to ‘border on boredom’ in order to allow time to be ‘carved out for thinking the normally unthinkable’. Maria Takolander, one of ABR’s reviewers, perhaps bemused that an author would admit the possibility of boring his readers, described the remark as ‘enigmatic’. It is certainly a comment to make a publisher blanch. But if we look past the cheeky phrasing of Castro’s assertion, we might notice how it echoes another claim of Barthelme’s: ‘what we are looking for is the as-yet unspeakable, the as-yet unspoken’. We might notice how it wants to bring the reader into the creative process through the act of interpretation, how it expresses the ambitious desire to alter the way the reader thinks, and how it does not want to control what is being thought but opens itself up to new possibilities.

Elizabeth Costello was a surprising omission from the 2003 short list for the Man Booker Prize. One of the judges that year, D.J. Taylor, later revealed that Coetzee’s novel was overlooked at the insistence of one judge in particular. Taylor wrote in the Guardian that he admired the book, but his unnamed colleague was vehement in his dislike, denouncing it as ‘deplorable’ and ‘dishonest’. It is an inscrutable interpretation. What might the word ‘dishonest’ mean in this context? After all, the eventual winner, D.B.C. Pierre’s Vernon God Little, is a novel that is dishonest in an obvious sense: it is narrated by a liar whose explicit intention is to seduce you with his narrative and so convince you of his innocence. We can only speculate that perhaps the judge’s objection was related to the form of Elizabeth Costello. Perhaps he thought that presenting a series of lectures – or ‘lessons’, as Coetzee ironically titles his chapters – was evasive; that, even though the novel gives voice to conflicting ideas, Elizabeth Costello was a mouthpiece for Coetzee’s opinions and fiction was being used to provide the cover of deniability.

James Wood, a sometimes stern critic of Coetzee’s work, certainly saw Elizabeth Costello as a confessional novel. ‘Coetzee’s framing device,’ he wrote in the London Review of Books, ‘does not so much evade as self-incriminate.’ But what Elizabeth Costello is confessing to is doubt. She ‘no longer believes very strongly in belief’; she doubts her ideas even as she is articulating them, distrustful of their very form. ‘Belief may be no more, in the end, than a source of energy,’ she thinks, ‘like a battery which one clips into an idea to make it run. As happens when one writes: believing whatever has to be believed in order to get the job done.’ She doubts reason itself, suspecting it of being a self-validating narrative. This doubt reaches to the core of her identity. In the novel’s final chapter, she finds herself in a kind of bureaucratic purgatory. In a scene that is both a homage and a parody of Kafka, she is told to give a statement of her beliefs. ‘It is not my profession to believe,’ she responds, ‘just to write. Not my business. I do imitations, as Aristotle would have said. [...] I can do an imitation of belief, if you like. Will that be enough for your purposes?’

When pressed, she does, finally, admit to a belief of sorts. After all, nihilists do not exist, and if they did they would not, like Costello, write novels. She believes she can ‘think her way into other people, into other realities’, even the reality of another species. She believes there ‘are no bounds to the sympathetic imagination’. Wood read Costello’s arguments, interestingly, as ‘the reply of literature to philosophy’. It could also be seen as a retort to a culture that wants to treat literature as a storehouse of profound desk calendar mottoes. The character of Elizabeth Costello, a representation of a disgruntled celebrity author, is literature’s response to a culture that demands something from writers they cannot in good conscience give and wants to overlook what literature does offer. The problem that Elizabeth Costello confronts is the gulf between her self and its expression. The act of articulation falsifies her ideas. She is constantly bumping up against the limits of the expressible. Her position is reminiscent of some of David Foster Wallace’s characters when they find themselves trapped in the lethal involutions of self-consciousness. Elizabeth Costello is both a critique of the idea of representation and a demonstration of its power as a means of understanding ourselves.

There is a touch of romanticism to Costello’s ideas about the imagination. Her belief is a version of John Keats’s negative capability. She is expressing a faith in literature, even as she voices her frustrations with the limitations of representative art. It is a moral belief in the imagination as Hazlitt defines the term in his anti-utilitarian essay ‘On Reason and Imagination’ (1826). Hazlitt argues that the imagination is an innate human faculty that mediates between our subjective selves and the world around us. Imagination is the means by which we are able to empathise with other people, to understand their thoughts and feelings. Moral and poetical truths, he claims, can only be arrived at by attending to the specific instance, not by rushing to claim ownership of a universal principle derived from abstract generalities. It is only if ‘we are imbued with a deep sense of individual weal or woe’, he writes, that ‘we shall be awe-struck at the idea of humanity in general’. Referring to Hamlet’s directions to the travelling players, he says that ‘the object and the end of playing, “both at the first and now, is to hold the mirror up to nature”, to enable us to feel for others as for ourselves, or to employ a distinct interest out of ourselves by the force of imagination and passion’.

Auerbach eventually arrives at a similar idea. Returning his attention to Woolf after his general condemnation of the negativity implied by the modernists’ fracturing of perspective, he observes that ‘something entirely different takes place here too’. To the Lighthouse is also a book filled with ‘irony, amorphous sadness, and doubt of life’. The reason for this is ‘the emphasis on the random occurrence’ and Woolf’s desire ‘to exploit it not in the service of a planned continuity of action but in itself’. This, paradoxically, provides the glimpse of universality in which we might detect hope:

It is precisely the random moment which is comparatively independent of the controversial and unstable orders over which men fight and despair; it passes unaffected by them, as daily life. The more it is exploited, the more the elementary things which our lives have in common come to light. The more numerous, varied, and simple the people are who appear as subjects of such random moments, the more effectively must what they have in common shine forth.

So the modernists were not destroying after all, they were affirming. The word-mirror is broken, but fragments continue to reflect. The self-lacerating irony of Elizabeth Costello might be accused, as the modernists were, of being despairing and pessimistic and solipsistic, but it is the opposite. Its irony struggles against the inevitability of solipsism and the literalism of the image. It suggests something beneath the surface. It is not evasive, although its instability and irreducibility might be mistaken as evasive. It is like an animal flinging itself against the bars of its cage. Futile perhaps, but we are more likely to be sympathetic to such a creature than one who sits passively, mistaking captivity for the freedom of the jungle. It is only by acknowledging artifice that one can move beyond artifice. It is only through ceaseless interpretation that we might catch a reflected glimpse of the human subject at the heart of literature. Reading is a creative act. Unlike almost everything we are encouraged to consider entertainment, it is an active pursuit. Without this process of interpretation we cannot know ourselves.