A Strange Kind of Grace: From Narrative to Embodied Authority in J. M. Coetzee's Age of Iron and Elizabeth Costello

Abstract

Abstract:This essay analyzes Age of Iron and Elizabeth Costello together to interrogate the extraordinary degree of narrative authority usually attributed to the latter work. My analysis highlights the texts' shared denial of closure to implicated subject narrators in settler colonial contexts. I contend that in a world of always already implicated subjects and speakers, Coetzee situates the authority of writing in the body. Reading this authority through the lens of Black feminist theories of embodiment, I attend to how both texts represent the movement away from self-justification in the confessional mode to the grace of embodied mutual witnessing.