Summary "The Human Document" examines the representation of reading in Coetzee's novel Elizabeth Costello (2003) as an amoral "conspiracy" or "breathing together" of reader and fictional character. Reading so conceived erases the difference between real and fictional persons, permitting a fluid and promiscuous interpenetration of experience that a reader, at the moment of reading, is powerless to refuse. This circumstance challenges the premise of recent ethical theories of the novel. These propose that the reader conscientiously agrees to bracket his or her own values or experience while reading so as to allow a full experience of a character's alterity unconstrained by judgment or other preconceptions. In contrast, Elizabeth Costello proposes that the reader's experience while reading precludes consent or any other exercise of free will essential to an ethical act. Reading amounts instead to the involuntary activation of a synapse between reader and character which challenges the reader's foundational assumption, as a free agent, of his or her ontological priority over character. Insofar as fictional representation entails a kind of incarnation, it suggests the possibility of a literary ontology which Elizabeth Costello enacts through a peculiarly Coetzeean practice of doubling whose structure and significance are examined in this article.
