“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. We could think of this as a tragic turn of events, were it not that it is hard to have respect for whatever was the bottom that dropped out.”

This morning in Essen I talked about realism and the lesson on realism in Coetzee’s “Elizabeth Costello”.
A professor asked what it meant that the time when we could say who we were has faded.

It’s hard, I said, to answer on behalf of Elizabeth Costello, or J.M. Coetzee for that matter, but this is how I understood these words: we discovered that this thing called reality is filled with unreliable narrators. We cannot even be sure that we ourselves are not unreliable narrators. And that’s the reason that we must be performers speaking our parts; at least if we still value the concept of truth.