Background Fiction
The penultimate chapter, "At the Gate", is an overt reworking of several of Franz Kafka's stories and novels, principally "Before the Law" and The Trial. The last chapter consists of a letter from Lady Chandos to Francis Bacon. This is a fictitious intertext to the well-known Lord Chandos Letter by Hugo von Hofmannsthal (1902). The Chandos Letter, in which the narrator, Philip Lord Chandos, laments that language has begun to fail his need for self-expression, is often cited as a key text of literary modernism. Coetzee's fabrication of Lady Chandos's letter replicates what in the novel Elizabeth Costello herself is presented having done, namely adding a female voice (that of Molly Bloom) to a canonical modernist work (Ulysses).
Read more about this topic: Elizabeth Costello
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