Elizabeth Costello

“Elizabeth Costello is a writer, born in 1928, which makes her sixty-six, going on sixty-seven. She has written nine novels, two books of poems, a book on bird life, and a body of journalism. By birth she is Australian. She was born in Melbourne and still lives there, though she spent the years 1951 to 1963 abroad, in England and France. She has been married twice. She has two children, one by each marriage.” (EC, p. 1) (Quotes from the 2004 Vintage Edition).

o 1996, Ben Belitt Lecture, Bennington College (Vermont): “What is Realism?” – short story vs. acceptance speech

o 1997, The Lives of Animals (Tanner Lectures) – http://www.tannerlectures.utah.edu/lectures/index.html http://www.tannerlectures.utah.edu/lectures/documents/Coetzee99.pdf

o 2003, Elizabeth Costello – Eight Lessons (collection + two hitherto unpublished pieces – “Eros”; “At the Gate”)

o 2004, “As a Woman Grows Older” (short story in The New York Review of Books)

o 2005, Slow Man (novel).

o “The Old Lady and the Cats” (public readings – B. De Bruyckere’s Cripplewood)

o Untitled piece about EC’s death (?) (public readings).

Genre? Lectures embedded in fictions; fictionalized lectures. “Is it performance art, or performance didacticism? Is it moral philosophy? Does its generic slipperiness constitute academic evasiveness? Is it fiction or non-fiction? […] Does this recycling signal a failure of imagination? Is it […] a work of indeterminate genre?” Flanery, P. D., 2004, “(Re-)marking Coetzee & Costello: The (Textual) Lives of Animals”, English Studies in Africa, 47, 1, pp. 61-85, p. 61

“I was lucky enough to be in the auditorium at Princeton University […] when Professor John Coetzee rose to deliver ‘The Philosophers and the Animals’. […] This was, of course, J. M. Coetzee the novelist, but his presence in an academic setting made one particularly conscious of his status of Professor of General Literature at the University of Cape Town. There had been indications in a few of Coetzee’s publications of a concern with the question of human responses to animal suffering […]. Now, it seemed, he was going to spell out in two lectures his views on animal rights and the ethics of human-animal relations. Although I don’t recall any audible reaction from the audience, there could be no doubt about the surprise produced by Coetzee’s opening words […]. No preliminary explanation, no introduction to prepare us to this clearly fictional statement. […] What made the event in which we were participating all the more disquieting was our gradual realization that it was being mirrored, in a distorted representation, in the fiction itself.” Attridge, D., 2004, J. M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading: Literature in the Event, Chicago and London, The University of Chicago Press, pp. 192-93

“We listened to the lecture given within the fiction –itself a testing of the norms of academic debate. […] Unrecorded in print […] are the questions from members of the audience after the ‘lectures’: here, too, Coetzee tended to avoid the customary first-person consideration of points made to him, preferring locutions like: ‘I think what Elizabeth Costello would say is that…’” Attridge 2003: 193

The Costello-persona controversy

(1) Costello as a means for Coetzee to avoid taking a stand on controversial issues.

“Not surprisingly most of the commentators felt somewhat stymied by Coetzee’s meta-lectures, by the veils of fiction behing which he had concealed his own position from scrutiny. There was a feeling, shared by some reviewers of the book, that he was putting forward an extreme, intolerant and accusatory argument without taking full intellectual responsibility for it.” Lodge, D., 2003, “Disturbing the Peace”, The New York Review of Books, 50 (18), pp. 6-11, p. 6.

(2) Costello as a ‘simple’ character. “In the quirky format of these lectures, although Elizabeth Costello quite literally speaks in Coetzee’s place […], she does not speak for him. Her importance to the present investigation is as another in a line of Coetzee’s fictional protagonists, not as an explicator of his narrative practice.” Tremaine, L., 2003, “The Embodied Soul: Animal Being in the Work of J. M. Coetzee”, Contemporary Literature, vol. 44, n. 4, Winter, pp. 587-612.

(3) Costello as the embodiment of otherwise-too-abstract theories. “Coetzee chose to present his lectures as fiction [!!!] precisely because this is what his art allows: the embodiment of an idea – and necessarily its critique – through dramatic realization.” Lynn, D. H., 2005, “Love and Death, and Animals Too”, The Kenyon Review, 27, 1, Winter, pp. 124-133, p. 130.

“It has been and may continue to be, in the time that is left to me, […] more productive to live out the question than to try to answer it in abstract terms. When I say I have ‘lived out’ the question I mean I have lived it out not only in day-to-day life but in my fiction as well.” Coetzee interview by David Attwell, Dagens Nyheter, 8 December 2003. Quoted in Attwell, D., 2008, “Coetzee’s Estrangements”, Novel, 41, 2/3, Spring, pp. 229-244, p. 229.

(4) Costello as a literary device used by Coetzee to provoke discussion on ethical matters. “Coetzee seems both to make ‘his’ positions more complex and nuanced and to give his readers greater freedom and greater personal responsibility to engage the ethical consequences of the issues under discussion. […] The conscious ambiguities of writing reflect the palpable ambiguities of moral life in a socially independent world, but he leaves each reader individually to recognize or apply whatever lesson there is.” Shillinsburg, P., 2006, “Textual Criticism, the Humanities and J. M. Coetzee”, English Studies in Africa, 49, 2, pp. 13-27, p. 13.

“[Elizabeth Costello] leaves us strongly aware that what has mattered, for Elizabeth Costello and for the reader, is the event – literary and ethical at the same time – of storytelling, of testing, of self-questioning, and not the outcome.” Attridge 2004: 205

“A way out? It’s not for me to offer you a way out. What I do have to offer is a question.” (EC, p. 50)

Resisting interpretation

(1) Narrative technique Present tense; third person; one character’s point of view

(usually John’s); open endings.

(2) Puzzling lexical choices General ‘rational’ lexical patterns vs. sudden, unexpected

and apparently incoherent choices. Religious lexicon – “soul”, “sickness of the soul”, “sin”,

“Satan”, “heart”, “breaking bread”… See Clarkson – Coetzee’s doctoral thesis on Beckett’s prose

style.

(3) Characters and name play John Emmanuel Egudu – Amos Tutuola Paul West Elizabeth Costello – Elizabeth Chandos – Elizabeth Curren “That was my great ambition: to have my place on the shelves of the British Museum, rubbing shoulders with the other Cs, the great ones: Carlyle and Chaucer and Coleridge and Conrad. (The joke is that my closest literary neightbour turned out to be Marie Corelli.)” (EC, p. 16)

(4) Title Eight Lessons – for whom? (See Lodge 2003: 6). “Perhaps that is what these border towns are for: to teach pilgrims a lesson. Very well; but why submit to the lesson? Why take it all so seriously?” (EC, p. 209)

Elizabeth Costello and the limits of

representation

“The word-mirror is broken, irreparably, it seems” (EC, p. 19) “The civilization of the West is based on belief in unlimited and illimitable endeavour, it is too late for us to do anything about that, we must simply hold on tight and see where the ride takes us” (EC, p. 160)

Realism First two paragraphs: “The mystery of [the] bridge construction is an aspect of something real and everyday – of the humdrum acts of writing and reading, telling and hearing stories, and not of the often far from humdrum things that go on in the worlds of those stories. […] A work of fiction cannot contain or embody the problem of the opening as a problem, even in its opening sentence; for it must already have opened in order to do so, and must already have relied upon our willingness to pass over the bridge and its building. It can only, therefore, gesture towards a mystery of its own constitution as something essentially mysterious – at once mundane and miraculous, and always already beyond its grasp.” Mulhall, S., 2009, The Wounded Animal: J. M. Coetzee and the Difficulty of Reality in Literature and Philosophy, Princeton, Princeton University Press, pp. 176-7.

P. 2: “(present tense henceforth)”; “for reasons of his own”; “we skip”; “a dialogue takes place”. P. 4: “The blue costume, the greas hair, are details, signs of moderate realism. [AND YET THEY ARE PART OF A ‘PERFORMANCE’ – SEE P. 3] Supply the particulars, allow the significations to emerge of themselves” P. 7: “There is a scene in the restaurant, mainly dialogue, which we will skip. We resume back at the hotel” P. 8: “You must surely concede that at a certain level we speak, and therefore write, like everyone else. Otherwise we would all be speaking and writing private language.” CODES

P. 9, second paragraph: REALISM/IDEAS/EMBODYING “Coetzee takes the premise that ideas cannot float free from the individuals who articulate them (a premise that Plato’s choice of dialogue form appears to acknowledge, even if so many of his dialogues variously aspire to reorient our attention to a realm of pure ideas or Forms), and then pushes it further, by emphasizing their rootedness in the animality of the human animal, its flesh and blood […]. Perhaps discomfort with ideas is precisely what their real nature demands. Perhaps his point is precisely that ideas discomfort us: they demand a degree of abstraction […] that challanges us, although in a way that we […] cannot dismiss; and their fleshy origins […] revolt us, as they revolted Plato. […] Accordingly, any mode of realism that engages with ideas must do so in a way that embodies that very discomfort.” Mulhall 2009: 182-3.

P. 24, second paragraphs: skips and interruption in the narrative. “The skips are not part of the text, they are part of the performance”. “The skips are not merely made, they are made by means of a sentence that describes the speech act it is performing. […] The form of this metatextual discussion emphasizes other paradoxes internal to the nature of this particular text. […] It encodes an awareness of its own origins in a talk or lecture […] and it introduces a distinction between the text and the performance (not its performance). […] After all, can we simply say of a skipped scene either that it is, or that it is not, part of the story? Is it not, far from simply, both? When he skips, or hurdles a gap, is Coetzee sleeping, or rather staying awake while we sleep?” Mulhall 2009: 178-9.

P. 19: WORD-MIRROR, DICTIONARY, AUTHORITY, PERFORMERS. – p. 20: “actors”.

Representational pessimism?

“So Costello’s invocation of the shattered word-mirror is not necessarily a denial of the possibility of continuing the realist project of the novel. On the contrary: she wants to interpret Kafka’s modernist fables as essentialy realist in inspiration, and this becomes clear precisely (if paradoxically) in the way she denies any straightforward relation between Kafka’s tale and the reality of her own, present situation.” Mulhall 2009: 164.

Mulhall 165: Whole book as a postmodern, representationally effective, broken-mirror reflection of Costello’s. ?

P. 12 – 13 – 14 – 22 - 23: representation of otherness (esp. gender): thinking oneself into something/someone else or “mimicry” (p. 23).

P. 24: “We skip ahead again, a skip this time in the text rather

than in the performance”. P. 26- 27: female bodies. 28: bodies, reality, pregnancy. P. 30: performance/game-related lexicon. Image vs. truth. P. 31: EMBEDDEDNESS – being a body regardless of textual

representations; “zoo-keeping, not writing”; human gaze; “a zoo of ideas”.

P. 33-34 – ending: the body again, being/coming from a body.

The Novel in Africa P. 35: X? P. 36: being a political writer in Africa, being a “poseur” – emphasis on the spectacular. P. 38-9: The Future of the Novel. → Future as a human construct, an idea. History as a commonly agreed-on fiction. What is the role of the “traditional novel”? P. 39: beliefs – see “At the Gate”. P. 40: Egudu – the novel as a ‘Western peculiarity’. P. 44-5: relationship between writing, orality, the body.

P. 45: European invasiveness, Western cultural arrogance. Word used as a form of disembodiment, detatchment from the real.

P. 45: Egudu → “loud”, “spirited”, “force”, “passion” – is Costello a creature of passion?

P. 46: Costello’s incoherence: she is upset because “the body is insisted on, pushed forward” – cfr. “Realism”.

P. 47: African writing as a spectacle, a representation. European expectations. “The contradictions of being himself for other people”; “Egudu obeys, bringing his show to an end”.

P. 50: the novel vs. performance. Is the novel, as a purely verbal medium (medium?), bound to be detatched from reality?

P. 51: again, African writing as a performance. “[African writers] have accepted the role of interpreter, interpreting Africa to their readers”; “Having to perform your Africanness at the same time as you write”. See also p. 52, “fellow entertainers”. P. 53: what is an oral novel, what is a women’s novel? P. 53: the body, voice, and the “disembodied” Western novel – African mystique? Costello’s incoherence? See p. 46. P. 54-5: gender perspectives – Egudu and the singer, Costello and the sailor.

Throughout the story, emphasis on what is not human – animals and landscape. See p. 49, the underwater life “ignored by history”; p. 54; p. 55-6, the albatross and the feel of a mysterious, common origin shared by humans and animals in a mythical past: She and the two birds remain, inspecting each other. Before the fall, she thinks. […] This is how it must have been before the fall. I could miss the boat, stay here. Ask God to take care of me. ‘An albatross,’ she remarks to the woman, speaking softly. ‘That is the English word. I don’t know what they call themselves’. (p. 56) → insufficiency of language; for animals and language, see The Lives of Animals.

The Lives of Animals 1997: Tanner Lectures. 1999: The Lives of Animals Published along with footnotes and “Reflections” – short pieces of commentary by famous scholars from different fields: Marjorie Garber (literary scholar), Peter Singer (ethical philosopher), Wendy Doniger (theology scholar), and Barbara Smuts (anthropologist). 2003: Elizabeth Costello No footnotes and no “Reflections”.

Characters: John (point of view); Norma (‘countervoice’). And he [Coetzee] has this character, Norma, Costello’s daughter-in-law, who makes all the obvious objections to what Costello is saying. […] When he notices that it is starting to ramble, he just has Norma say that Costello is rambling! (Peter Singer, The Lives of Animals, p. 91)

Anti-performance mode: “His mother does not have a good delivery. Even as a reader of her own stories she lacks animation. It always puzzled him, when he has a child, that a woman who wrote books for a living should be so bad at telling bedtime stories.” (EC, p. 63) “In addressing you on the subject of animals […] I will pay you the honour of skipping a recital of the horrors of their lives and deaths. […] I will take it that you concede me the rhetorical power to evoke this horrors and bring them home to you with adequate force, and leave it at that, reminding you only that the horrors I here omit are nevertheless at the centre of this lecture.” (EC, p. 63)

HOLOCAUST COMPARISON: see p. 64-5. “Willed ignorance”. “Sin”, “sickness of the soul”, “pollution”, “God”. “We accept without question that the psyche (or soul) of touched with guilty knowledge cannot be well”. “Cheap point-scoring” (p. 66) PHILOSOPHICAL LANGUAGE: “if you had wanted someone to come here and discriminate for you between mortal and immortal souls, or between rights and duties, you would have called in a philosopher, not a person whose sole claim to you is to have written stories about made-up people.” (p. 66)

REASON “The universe is built upon reason. God is a God of reason. The fact that through the application of reason we can come to understand the rules by which the universe works proves that reason and the universe are of the same being. […] Reason may be not the being of the universe but on the contrary merely the being of the human brain. […] Reason looks to me suspiciously like the being of human thought; worse than that, like the being of one tendency in human thought.” (p. 67) “Norma: Reason provides us with the real knowledge of the real world. It has been tested, and it works. […] There is no position outside of reason where you can stand and lecture about reason and pass judgment on reason.” (P. 92)

REASON AS A TAUTOLOGY “Might it not be that the phenomenon we are examining here is, rather then the flowering of a faculty that allows access to the secrets of the universe, the specialism of a rather narrow self-regenerating intellectual tradition whose forte is reasoning, in the same way that the forte of chess-players is playing chess […]? […] Seen from the outside, from a being who is alien to it, reason is simply a vast tautology. Of course reason will validate reason as the first principle of the universe – what else should it do? Dethrone itself?” (P. 69-70) “Understanding a thing often looks to me like playing with one of those Rubik cubes. Once you have made all the little bricks snap into place, ehy presto, you understand. It makes sense if you live inside a Rubik cube, but if you don’t…” (p. 90)

KÖHLER‘S EXPERIMENTS The idea of pure reason vs. low, instrumental reason. “At every turn Sultan [the chimpanzee] is driven to think the less interesting thought. From the purity of speculation (Why do men behave like this?) he is relentlessly propelled toward lower, practical, instrumental reason (How does one use this to get that?).” (p. 73)

REASON VERSUS EMBODIEDNESS “ „Cogito ergo sum“ […] is a formula I have always been uncomfortable with. It implies that a living being that does not do what we call thinking is somehow second-class. To thinking, cogitation, I oppose fullness, embodiedness, the sensation of being – not a consciuousness of yourself as a kind of ghostly reasoning machine thinking thoughts, but on the contrary the sensation – a heavily affective sensation of being a body with limbs that have extension in space, of being alive to the world. This fullness contrasts sharply with Descartes’s key state, which has an empty feel to it: the feel of a pea rattling around in a shell.” Animals and humans alike are “embodied souls” (p. 78)

SYMPATHY “The question to ask should not be: Do we have something in common – reason, self-consciousness, a soul – with other animals? (With the corollary that, if we do not, then we are entitled to treat them as we like, imprisoning them, killing them, dishonoring their corpses.) I return to the death camps. The particular horror of the camps […] is not that despite a humanity shared with their victims, the killers treated them like lice […], [but] that the killers refused to think themselves into the place of their victims, as did everyone else. […] In other words, they closed their hearts. The heart is the seat of a faculty, sympathy […]. […] There are no bounds to the sympathetic imagination.” (P. 79-80)

Kafka vs. Köhler

Literature vs. Philosophy (Rilke, Hughes)

Symphaty vs. Reason

Embodied-soul vs. Cogito Ergo Sum

The Humanities in Africa

P. 120: the humanities – textual scholarship – humanism

“The text for the sake of which textual scholarship was invented was the Bible. Textual scholars saw themselves as servants in the recovery of the true message of the Bible, specifically the true teaching of Jesus […], obscured no longer by a veil of scholastic gloss and commentary. […] Textual scholarship meant, first, the recovery of the true text, then the true translation of that text; and true translation turned out to be inseparable from true interpretation, just as true interpretation turned out to be inseparable from true understanding of the cultural and historical matrix from which the text has emerged.” (EC, 120-1)

P. 121: The recovery of the true word.

“[Secular scholars] were animated, at least at firts, by the purpose of finding the True Word, by which they understood then, and I understand now, the redemptive word. That word cannot be found in the classics […]. In a happier age than our own it was possible for people to bluff themselves into believing that the classics of antiquity offered a teaching and a way of life. In our own times we have settled, rather desperately, for the claim that the study of the classics in itself might offer a way of life, or if not a way of life then at least a way of earning a living which, if it cannot be proved to do any positive good, at least is on no side claimed to do any harm [see The Problem of Evil!!].” (EC, 122-3)

“The studia humanitatis have taken a long time to die, but now, at the end of the second millenium of our [our?] era, they are truly at their deathbed. All the more bitter should be that death, I would say, since it has been brought about by the monster enthroned by those very studies as first and animating principle of the universe: the monster of reason, mechanical reason.” (EC, p. 123)

P. 125: “Wasn’t she saying […] that there has been something misconceived in the study of the humanities from the start? Something wrong with placing hopes and expectations on the humanities that they could never fulfill?” RELIGIOUS LEXICON: “Maybe that is the reason why Blanche raises people’s hackles here: she uses words like spirit and God inappropriately, in places where they do not belong. Well, she is not a believer, but in this case she thinks she will stand with Blanche” (126); “hungering souls” (128) REASON – PROFESSOR GODWIN [!!!]: “the proper study of mankind is man” (125); “’My husband is in the eighteenth century’, say Mrs Godwin. ‘Ah yes. A good place to be. The Age of Reason’.” (126)

“Lawrence gripped us because he promised a form of salvation. If we worshipped the dark gods, he told us, and carried out their observances, we would be saved. We believed him. We went out and worshipped the dark gods as best as we were able, from the hints that Mr Lawrence let drop. Well, our worship did not save us. A false prophet, I would call him now, in retrospect. […] If the humanities want to survive, surely it is those energy and that craving for guidance that they must respond to: a craving that is, in the end, a quest for salvation.” (126-7) “For my own part, I would say that it is enough for books to teach us about ourselves. Any reader ought to be content with that. Or almost any reader.”(127-8). [Almost any reader??]

HUMANITIES – HELLENISM. IS THERE AN ETHICS IN LITERATURE (OF LITERATURE)? “Something too complacently masculine about the whole enterpriese [of the humanities], too self-regarding” (131). Hellenism: “More then an idealized picture: a dream, a delusion. But how else are we to live but dreams?” (132) “’If you turned to any of those people we had lunch with and asked them, as humanist or at least as card-carrying practitioners of the humanities, to state the goal of all their efforts, surely they would reply that, however indirectly, they strive to improve the lot of mankind’. ‘Yes. And therein they reveal themselves as true followers of their humanist forebears. Who offered a secular vision of salvation. […] By the workings of man alone. Renaissance. On the example of the Greeks. […] Well, it cannot be done. […] I said nothing about damnation. I am talking only about history, about the record of the humanist enterprise. It cannot be done.’” (132)

OBSCENITY – NOT WANTING TO SEE P. 133: It is not something [seeing Blanche’s hospital] she wants. She has not the stomach for it. […] She cannot bear to look any more. […] Let this cup be taken from me! ABOUT JOSEPH, p. 137: “’What does it do to a person’s – if I dare use the word – soul to spend his working life carving a man in agony over and over again? […]’ Blanche gives her a steely smile. ‘A man, Elizabeth?’ she says. ‘A man in agony?’ ‘A man, a god, a man-god, don’t make an issue of it’.” Ethics and aesthetics of art: Joseph’s art is not pleasant, it is not meant to be beautiful, it is “no tourist art” (136).

OBSCENITY AND BEAUTY – MORAL CONSEQUENCES? “Why does the specific model you set before Joseph and tell him to copy, to imitate, have to be what I can only call Gothic? Why a Christ dying in contortions rather than a living Christ? A man in his prime […]: what do you have against showing him alive, in all his living beauty? […] The Greeks would never have made statues and paintings of a man in the extremes of agony, deformed, ugly, and then knelt before those statues and worshipped them. […] the contempt that Christianity exhibits for the human body and therefore for man himself […] There is something about the entire crucifixtional tradition that strikes me as mean, as backward, as medieval in the worst sense […]. What are you up to, reproducing the most squalid, most stagnant phase of European history in Africa?” (139) “Gothic obsession with the ugliness and mortality of the human body” (140)

HELLENISM vs. CHRISTIANITY – P. 141 “’Who can tell gods from men in Greece, the romantic Greece of those young men, heirs of the humanists? Come to our schools, they said, and we will teach you how. We will make you disciples of reason and the sciences that flow from reason; we will make you masters of nature. Through us you will overcome disease and all corruption of the flesh. You will live forever. […] [But] African people come to church to kneel before Jesus on the cross, African women above all, who have to bear the burnt of reality. Because they suffer and he suffers with them.’ ‘Not because he promises them another, better life after death?’ Blanche shakes her head. ‘No. To the people who come to Marianhill I promise nothing except that we will help them bear their cross’.” (141)

P. 142: the spectacle of the Mass – filming, performance P. 143: fainting – the (mortified) body reclaims itself – but also: obscenity (Let me not look!) P. 144: “Out of love” ? P. 145: the wrong Greeks – “Orpheus instead of Apollo. The ecstatic instead of the rational. […] Someone who can die but then come back. A chameleon. A phoenix. [ANIMOT! – ? –] Someone who appeals to women. Because it is women who live closest to the ground. Someone who moves along the people, whom they can touch – put their hand into the side of, feel the wound, smell the blood. [!!]” (p. 145) Many different instances towards THE BODY.

P. 146: pleasure of painting/painting (just) for pleasure vs. the ugliness of the body

P. 148-9: gender; offering one’s beauty to someone else; the divine manifests itself through human beauty (female beauty?); exposing oneself as a form of 1) triumph, 2) performance; both erotic and spiritual component: “erotic energy” and “worship” (150), an “heady mix of the ecstatic and the aesthetic” (150).

It is not hellenism vs. christianity but hellenism AND christianity.

(Moral?) value of beauty.

Exclusively human discourse. Specificity. (Reference to animals, p. 150)

Issue of gender: strongly heterosexual flavour?

P. 151: the body and its ugliness.

Throughout the story, hints to reality and the way it evades/eludes fiction: p. 118 (“Something there capable of being worked up, no doubt about that. Some kind of story sulking, inconspicuous as a mouse in a corner. But she is too tired, here and now, to grasp it, pin it down”), 151 (“what she does not write, what she has no intention of writing, is how the story proceeds”), 153 (“That would be another good place to end the story”; “As a story, a recital, it could end here, […] but in fact it goes on a little longer”), 155 (“What can one make of episodes like this, unforeseen, unplanned, out of character? Are they just holes, holes in the heart, into which one steps and falls and then goes on falling?”)

→ Fiction as both fiction-writing AND constructs we make up for ourselves to make sense of our life stories. See also the ending of “The Problem of Evil”.

The Problem of Evil Earlier version: “Elizabeth Costello and the Problem of Evil”, Salmagundi n. 137-38, 2003 First delivered as a reading at a Nexus Conference on ‘Evil’, in Tilburg, Holland, June 2002

LINKING BACK TO “THE LIVES OF ANIMALS” – HOLOCAUT COMPARISON

The massacre of the defenseless is being repeated all around us, day after day, she had said, a slaughter no different in scale or horror or moral import from what we call the holocaust; yet we choose not to see it. (EC, p. 156) [see her later position on what should and should not be seen]

If Satan is not rampant in the abattoir, casting the shadow of his wings over the beasts who, their nostrils already filled with the smell of death, are prodded down the ramp towards the man with the gun and the knife, a man as merciless and as banal […] as Hitler’s own man (who learned his trade, after all, on cattle) – if Satan is not rampant in the abattoir, where is he? (EC, p. 179)

INSUFFICIENCY OF LANGUAGE AND RATIONAL DISCOURSE: “What hope is there that the problem of evil, if problem is indeed the right word for evil, big enough to contain it, will be solved by more talk?” (157); “She should never have come, [...] she knows it now. Not because she has nothing to say about evil, the problem of evil, the problem of calling evil a problem, not even because of the ill luck of West’s presence, but because a limit has been reached, the limit of what can be achieved with a body of balanced, well-informed modern folk in a clean, well-lit lecture venue in a well-ordered, well-run European city in the dawn of the twenty-first century. (175) “For the expression of [the experience of ‘absolute evil’] only words that resist understanding are appropriate. […] What finds expression here is a fundamental resistance of literature and the literary imagination to the understanding – a difficulty of literary as well as moral reality.” (Mulhall 2009: 208)

P. 176: “Have the grand Lucifers of Dante and Milton been retired for good, their place taken by a pack of dusty little demons that perch on one’s shoulder like parrots, giving off no fiery glow but on the contrary sucking light into themselves?” See also “At the Gate”, p. 196&209, the ‘non-heavenly’ light. There is no grandeur in contemporary forms of representation; language does not shed light on reality – on the contrary, it sucks light. Reality is not just misrepresented; language makes it indecipherable. P. 177, words detached from reality: “Obscene. Go back to the talismanic word, hold fast to it. Hold fast to the word, then reach for the experience behind it: that has always been her rule for when she feels herself slipping into abstraction”.

P. 180, the representation of violence and violence as spectacle: “In Rome it would have been different. In Rome they made a spectacle of executions […]. So what was too much about death at the hands of the Nazis that was not too much in Rome, when all the striving of Rome was to wring from death as much cruely, as much pain as possible? It is just the grubbiness of that cellar in Berlin, a grubbiness that is too much like the real thing, the modern thing, for her to bear?”. Grandeur vs. banality, spectacle vs. the mundane. Also: does Christianity play a role?

THE MORAL CONSEQUENCES OF SYMPATHY Paul West’s The Very Rich Hours of Count von Stauffenberg (1980): “the malign spell of a novel she was reading”; “the novel was about depravity of the worst kind” (157); “obscene”; “black book” (158); “she felt the brush of his [Satan’s] leathery wing, as sure as soap, when she read those dark pages” (168); “Certain pages burned with the fires of hell” (171). “That is what Paul West […] had written about […]; and that is what she read, sick with the spectacle, sick with herself […]. Obscene! she wanted to cry but did not cry because she did not know at whom the word should be flung: at herself, at West, at the committee of angels that watches impassively over all that passes” (158). – Sympathy blurs the lines between writer and reader.

“I read the von Stauffenberg book with sympathy, not excepting (you must believe me) the execution scenes, to the point that it might as well be I as Mr West who hold the pen and trace the words. Word by word, step by step, heartbeat by heartbeat, I accompany him into the darkness. No one has been here before, I hear him whisper, and so I whisper too; our breath is as one. […] What arrogance, to lay claim to the suffering and death of those pitiful men! […] If that is not a nice thing to say about a colleague, if it will ease the moment, we can pretend the book in question is no longer Mr West’s but mine, made mine by the madness of my reading. Whatever pretence we need to adopt, let us in heaven’s name adopt it and move on.” (174)

J. M. COETZEE, GIVING OFFENSE: ESSAYS ON CENSORSHIP (University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 1996) Censorship as a consequence of the feelings of shame and indignation the censor experiences regarding his/her own reaction to an obscene sight. (See “Introduction”, pp. 12-13) Let me not look. That was the plea she breathed to Paul West […]. Do not make me go through with it! But Paul West did not relent. He made her read, excited her to read. For that she will not easily forgive him. For that she has pursued him across the seas all the way to Holland. Is that the truth? Will that do as an explanation? (179)

A MEMORY FROM COSTELLO’S YOUTH: “It was her first brush with evil. She had realized it was nothing less than evil, when the man’s affront subsided and steady glee in hurting her took its place.” (165); “The memory has rested inside her like an egg, an egg of stone, one that will never crack open, never give birth. She finds it good, it pleases her, this silence of hers, a silence she hopes to preserve to the grave. Is it some equivalent reticence that she is demanding of West […]? (166) “Again there is more than a touch of hysteria in her reaction, which revives memories of an ugly sexual assault she suffered in youth and has never mentioned to anyone: the return of the repressed, perhaps.” (Lodge 2003: 10) “Implicit here is a […] connection between what she feels that West did to her, and what the docker did to her years ago when she at first agreed and then refused to have sex with him: a violation of her being, a kind of glee in hurting her.” (Mulhall 2009: 210)

THE WRITER IN THE ‘DARK CHAMBER’ – MORAL CONSEQUENCES?

Where could West have got his information? Could there really have been witnesses who […] wrote down […] an account of what they had seen, down to the words the hangman spoke to the souls consigned to his hands, fumbling old men for the most part, […] whimpering with fear, swallowing their tears, having to listen to this coarse creature, this butcher […] taunt them? […] One after the other to the scaffold they went, in a non-descript space that could have been a garage or equally well an abattoir, under carbon-arc lights so that […] Hitler […] would be able to watch on film their sobbings and then their writhings and then their stillness, the slack stillness of dead meat, and be satisfied […]. (158)

THE MORALITY OF WRITING (! morality and not ethics; the word ‘ethics’ is never mentioned) “She is no longer sure that people are always improved by what they read. Furthermore, she is not sure that writers who venture into the darker territories of the soul always return unscathed. She has begun to wonder whether writing what one desires, any more than reading what one desires, is in itself a good thing.” (160) “She no longer believes that storytelling is good in itself […]. If she, as she is nowadays, had to choose between telling a story and doing good, she would rather, she thinks, do good. […] There are many things that it is like, this storytelling business. One of them […] is a bottle with a genie in it. […] Her position, her revised position, her position in the twilight of her life: better, on the whole, that the genie stay in the bottle.” (167)

“Yet she does the same thing, or she used to. Until she thought better of it, she had no qualms about rubbing people’s faces in, for instance, what went on in abattoirs. […] She, no less than Paul West, knew how to play with words until she got them right, the words that would send an electric shock down the spine of the reader. Butcherfolk in our own way. So what has happened to her now? […] An old woman turning back the clock, to the Irish-Catholic Melbourne of her childhood. Is that all it amounts to?” (179) “[Satan] pitches his tent in odd places – for example in Paul West, a good man, for all she knows, or as good as a man can be who is also a novelist, that is to say, perhaps not good at all, but tending nevertheless to the good, in some ultimate sense, otherwise why write?” (180)

OBSCENITY: Obscene. That is the word, a word of contested etymology, that she must hold on to as a talisman. She chooses to believe that obscene means off-stage. To save our humanity, certain things that we may want to see (may want to see because we are human!) must remain off-stage. (168-169) That is my thesis today: that certain things are not good to read or to write. To put the point in another way: I take seriously the point that the artist risks a great deal by venturing into forbidden places: risks, specifically, himself; risks, perhaps, all. I take this claim seriously because I take seriously the forbiddennes of forbidden places. […] I do not believe Mr West should go there; and, if he chooses to go nevertheless, I believe we should not follow. (173).

J. M. COETZEE: “INTO THE DARK CHAMBER” The issue of the representation of evil is explored. The ‘dark chamber’ exerts a ‘dark fascination’ on writers because (1) it is a metaphor for authoritarianism and its victims and (2) it is an extreme human experience accessible to no one. Coetzee quotes J. T. Irving: ‘it is just that tension toward the dark room that he [the artist] cannot enter that makes that room the source of all his imaginings ̶ the womb of art’. The challenge is to avoid clichés, to go beyond traditional discourse to represent evil and to do so on one’s own terms. As for now, the dichotomy between a horrified (horrifying) fascination and ignoring evil deliberately offers no solutions.

QUESTIONING ACADEMIC PROTOCOLS: THE REAL PAUL WEST’S RESPONSE “For a writer to introduce another, living writer as a character into his fiction, especially in such a prejudicial light, is a very unusual, perhaps unprecedented, thing to do. […] The whole episode is a startling transgression of literary protocol, and one can’t help wondering what Paul West himself thinks of it.” (Lodge 2003: 10). Coetzee is, of course, aware of this, and incorporates the obvious objection in the narrative (see also Norma in “The Lives of Animals”): “‘How do you know that Mr West – we seem to be talking a lot about Mr West today, I hope Mr West will have a right of reply, it will be very interesting to hear his reaction’ – there are smiles in the audience – ‘has been harmed by what he has written? […]’” (EC, p. 175)

Although unsure what to think at first, West came to a different conclusion. "I think he invented her to voice an opinion that he despised ... (She's) a sacrificial animal in that novel; she's carefully set up to be destroyed," he says. […] "If you don't get into the nitty-gritty of this horrible stuff, then you are not sympathizing, empathizing with the people who went through it," West says. "I think literature has an obligation to do that." Of the perpetrators, he says, "(If) you close the gate on certain destructive forms of behavior, then you have failed your obligation as a novelist to be those people - in other words, you're not going to present a representative slice of human life and human horror if you don't do it.

http://marksarvas.blogs.com/elegvar/2004/01/paul_west_respo.html

RELIGIOUS TERMINOLOGY

SOUL: instead of ‘person’ (p. 158); ‘the darker territories of the soul’ (p. 160); the state of Paul West’s soul (p. 161).

‘THE COMMITTEE OF ANGELS THAT WATCHES IMPASSIVELY OVER ALL THAT PASSES’: p. 158, p. 166.

BROTHERS AND SISTERS: p. 178-179

“The twentieth century of Our Lord, Satan’s century, is over and done with. […] In these unfamiliar times Satan is feeling his way, trying out new contrivances, making new accomodations”. (180) HYPOTHESIS???

It [Elizabeth Costello] is progressively permeated by the language of religion, by a dread of evil, and by a desire for personal salvation. Its key words are “belief” and “soul.” (Lodge 2003: 10).

THE BODY AND ITS SUFFERINGS

If there were a mirror on the back of this door […] , if she were just to take off her clothes and kneel before it, she, with her sagging breasts and knobbly hips, would look much like the women in those intimate, over-intimate photographs from the European [!!] war. […] She has a feeling for those dead sisters, and for the men too who died at the hands of the butchermen, men old and ugly enough to be her brothers. She does not like to see her sisters and brothers humiliated, in ways it is so easy to humiliate the old, by making them strip, for example, taking away their dentures, making fun of their private parts. (EC, p. 178) “I take it to be no accident that what Costello understands as absolutely evil is closely related to Coetzee’s recognition […] of the suffering human [JUST HUMAN?] body as functioning in his fiction as an ultimate standard, one that stands firm even in the face of global skeptical doubt about morality or indeed about human judgment and sense-making of any kind.” (Mulhall 2009: 205)

COHERENCE AND DISCONTINUITY

The Lives of Animals ‘The Humanities in Africa’

‘The Problem of Evil’

Holocaust comparison -- Holocaust comparison

Inadequacy, insufficiency of reason

Role-reversal with her sister Blanche. “Blanche is a kind of alter-ego to Elizabeth, [who] feels she has been lured to Africa to be chastened and chastised, and it is all the more galling to

find her own critique of reason turned against her”. (Lodge 2003: 9)

Inadequacy, insufficiency of reason

(‘It is not something that can be

demonstrated […]. It is something that can

only be experienced’. EC, p. 176)

The Lives of Animals ‘The Humanities in Africa’

‘The Problem of Evil’

Elizabeth is considered too radical

Elizabeth considers Blanche too radical

Elizabeth is considered too radical in describing

absolute evil. ‘The stance she presents is in fact

highly reminiscent of that of her sister. […] It invokes taking not only evil but the devil seriously; it offers a

variation on Blanche’s charge that novels describing human

fallenness (as opposed to the possibility of

redemption) are futile or worse; and it invokes the

idea of the absolute as opposed to the merely

relative, in favour of the former’. (Mulhall 2009: 204)

The Lives of Animals ‘The Humanities in Africa’

‘The Problem of Evil’

Sympathy has consequences that are

morally good.

-- Sympathy has consequences that are

not morally good.

Costello represents evil in a way that she will later deplore in ‘The

Problem of Evil’.

What does it do to a person’s – if I dare use

the word – soul to spend his working life

carving a man in agony over and over again?

(EC, p. 137)

Representing evil is, at least, morally

dangerous.

She should never have come. Conferences are for exchanging thoughts, at least that is the idea behind conferences. You cannot exchange thoughts when you do not know what you think. (EC, p. 181)

A ‘POSTCOLONIAL’ SUBTEXT? A CRITIQUE OF WESTERN CULTURAL PARADIGMS? The routine censorship paper is liberal in its ideas, with perhaps a touch of the Kulturpessimismus that has marked her thinking of late: the civilization of the West is based on belief in unlimited and illimitable endeavor, it is too late for us to do anything about that, we must simply hold on tight and go wherever the ride takes us. It is on the subject of the illimitable that her opinions seem to be undergoing a quiet change. Reading West’s book has contributed to that change, she suspects, though it is possible the change would have happened anyway, for reasons that are more obscure to her. (EC, p. 160) Her kind Dutch hosts, her kind, intelligent, sensible auditors in this enlightened, rationally-organized, well-run city (EC, p.159) Paul west is not an evil but an hero: he has ventured into the labyrinth of Europe’s past and faced down the Minotaur and returned to tell his tale (EC, p.168)

The first part of the lecture is routine, covering familiar ground: authorship and authority, claims made by the poets over the ages to speak a higher truth, a truth whose authority lies in revelation, and their further claim, in Romantic times, which happen to have been times of unparalleled geographical exploration, of a right to venture into forbidden or tabooed places. (172)

West, the real West (EC, p. 170)

Enough of this strange woman from Australia of all places, what do they know about evil there? (EC, p. 176)

“John, I am in no position to preach, coming from an Australia that positively slavers to do its American master’s bidding. Nevertheless, bear it in mind that you are inviting me to leave the country where I was born to take up residence in the belly of the Great Satan [the USA], and that I might have reservations about doing so.” “As a Woman Grows Older”, The New York Review of Books, 1, January 2004, pp. 11-14

CONCLUSION: FICTION THAT CANNOT MAKE SENSE OF REALITY; CIRCULARITY VS. LINEARITY There ought to be […] some way of rounding off the morning and giving it shape and meaning: some confrontation leading to some final word. There ought to be an arrangement such that she bumps into someone in the corridor, perhaps Paul West himself; something should pass between them, sudden as lighting, that will illuminate the landscape for her, even if afterwards it returns to its native darkness. But the corridor, it seems, is empty. (EC, p. 182)

Eros (previously unpublished)

P. 183: divinities and bodies? Bodily, instead than mythical, nature of a divinity. Body + words P. 183, Psyche: “Why the interest in Psyche among American poets, she wonders? Do they find something American in her, the girl who, not content with the ecstasies provided night after night by the visitor to her bed, must light a lamp, peel back the darkness, gaze on him naked? In her restlessness, her inability to leave well alone, do they see something of themselves?” Western arrogant gaze? See also “The Problem of Evil” – assuming the right to look anywhere – the dark chamber. P. 184: “the practicalities of a congress across a gap in being” – bodily reality; relationship of incommensurability; is sympathy enough to bridge the gap?

P. 184: animals – humans – gods. P. 184: “the issue of the Holy Ghost running down her thighs” – once again, the bodily and the mythical (irreverently? unexpectedly?) mixed up with one another. P. 185: “She thinks of a film she saw once, that might have been written by Nathanael West though in fact it wasn’t”; another reference to a real-existing author named West. Nathanael West → see ‘West’s disease’ (the corrupted American dream). (G. Clifford, 1982, Frances) P. 185: “the ugly underside of idolatry” (Freud, primitive horde?); “so close to the bone of America does it cut”. P. 185: penetration as violence – see “Letter of Elizabeth, Lady Chandos” and Disgrace P. 185-6 – body/verbal hybrid. “what kind of being, what hybrid of slave body and god soul […]?”

P. 186: “not as we understand thinking” (we Westerns? we humans? we …?). Upon relating to otherness (either animal – see “The Lives of Animals”), new/different codes of thought are required. P. 187: “lack of inwardness” – excess of representation? See also p. 187-8: “Inwardness. Can we be one with a god profoundly enough to apprehend, to get a sense of, a god’s being? […] Are there other modes of being besides what we call the human [not ‘the human’, but ‘what we call the human] into which we can enter; and if there are not, what does that say about us and our limitations? She does not know much about Kant, but it sounds to her like a Kantian kind of question. If her ear is right, then inwardness started its run with the man from Königsberg and ended, more or less, with Wittgenstein [see “Letter of Elizabeth, Lady Chandos”] the Viennese destroyer”

P. 188, Hölderlin. See Hölderlin’s experiments with language and ultimate madness; also: “Great-souled Hölderlin she would call him if she were Greek” – pre-christian conception of soul?

P. 190: “Investigations in aesthetics […]: how far does the artist’s duty to nature extend?” – issue of representation

Pp. 190-1 – observing alterity: “Fascinating creatures, she would like to think [the gods] remark to each other over their ambrosia; so like us in many respects; their eyes in particular so expressive; what a pity they lack that je ne sais quoi without which they can never ascend to sit beside us!” – of course, animals!

P. 191: “Who cares what we believe? The sole question is whether the gods will continue to believe in us” – see “At the Gate”: believing in what does not bother to believe in you.

P. 191-2: Patterns of the universe? Secular (atoms, life-less matter, “appetency and chance”) or religious (there does seem to be a regulating principle) view? What is the role of love? (“Not the least thing, not the last thing but is called to by love”). Also, desire. See Disgrace, “I rest my case on the rights of desire”.

At the Gate (previously unpublished) Mulhall: “an embodiment of the Kafkaesque”. SETTING? No explanation is given about where Costello is, as if we were supposed to know: “she makes her way to the gate” (p. 193). Triumph of representation/performativity: “’I am a writer,’ she says. ‘You have probably not heard of me here, but I write, or have written, under the name Elizabeth Costello. It is not my profession to believe, just to write. Not my business. I do imitations, as Aristotle would have said. […] I can do an imitation of belief, if you like. Will that be enough for your purposes?” (194) “A performance will be required of her” (198)

REALISM vs. DREAM-LIKE ATMOSPHERE Elizabeth’s neck: “burned red and beaded with sweat” (193). → no place of heavenly rarefaction – the body and its limitation continue to affect existence. A MUNDANE AFTERLIFE “Despite her unbelief, she had expected that what lay beyond this door fashioned of teak and brass but also no doubt the tissue of allegory would be unimaginable: a light so blinding that earthly senses would be stunned by it. But the light is not unimaginable at all. It is merely brilliant, more brilliant perhaps than the varieties of light she has known hitherto, but not of another order, not more brilliant than, say, a magnesium flash sustained endlessly.” (196) “There is light, certainly, but it is not the light that Dante saw in Paradise, it is not even in the same league” (209)

“A PURGATORY OF CLICHÉS”; A PLACE OF REPRESENTATION “She makes her way to the gate where a uniformed man stands drowsily on guard, propped on the rifle he holds butt down before him” (193) “The whole thing put together from clichés, with not a speck of originality”; “the woman is a cliché herself. […] She has a feeling she has seen the woman before, or her double, or a photograph of her” (198) “[The judges are] excessively literary, she thinks. A caricaturist’s idea of a bench of judges” (200) “Is it all being mounted for her sake, because she is a writer? Is it someone’s idea of what hell will be like for a writer, or at least purgatory? A purgatory of clichés?” (206)

“Is that where she is: not so much in purgatory as in a kind of literary theme park, set up to divert her while she waits, with actors made up to look like writers? But if so, why is the make-up so poor? Why is the whole thing not done better? […] If the afterlife turns out to be nothing but hocus-pocus, a simulation from beginning to end, why does the simulation fail so consistently[…]?” (208-9) The writer’s afterlife as a simulacrum Then, p. 215, the value of beauty: “How beautiful it is, this world, even if it is only a simulacrum! At least there is that to fall back on”. “Kafka, but only the superficies of Kafka; Kafka reduced and flattened to a parody” (209) “Too literary, she thinks again. A curse on literature!” (224-5)

WRITERS vs. HUMAN BEINGS

Having beliefs (see Lodge and Attridge) “The bankrupt of conscience” (204) vs. “Beliefs are not the only ethical supports we have. We can rely on our hearts as well” (203)

UNKNOWN SOURCE OF INSPIRATION: “A secretary of the invisible” (199) (Milosz); words dictated “by powers beyond us” (200)

“The person whom she, to herself, calls she, and whom others call Elizabeth Costello.” (209)

EMBODIEDNESS: p. 210, being one’s body; p. 216-7, the frogs. “The life cycle of the frog may sound allegorical, but to the frogs themselves it is no allegory, it is the thing itself, the only thing. […] I believe in those little frogs. […] They exist whether or not I tell you about them, whether or not I believe in them.” (217) Reality does not depend on our (human?) perception of it.

INCONSISTENCY AND THE FRAGMENTATION OF IDENTITY “We change from day to day, and we also stay the same. No I, no you is more fundamental than any other. You might as well ask which is the true Elizabeth Costello: the one who made the first statement or the one who made the second. My answer is, both are true. Both. And neither. I am an other.” (221) More on “At the Gate” and the problem of representation: http://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/AMonline/article/view/2141/2365 .