“The Kafka Business”: J. M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello and Parable

Abstract: “The Kafka Business” argues that J. M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello ’s final lesson, “At the Gate,” shares with Kafka’s “On Parables” the distinction of being parables that do not offer instruction but concern the inaccessible, death, as the source of literature. Reading Coetzee and Kafka along with Maurice Blanchot’s “Literature and the Right to Death,” the essay offers a defense of Coetzee’s allegorical method as a mode for thinking the ethical rather than an avoidance of ethics or politics. It argues, after Blanchot, that to become literature is to affirm death as the continual possibility of an always deferred meaning.