Countering the Obscene
BROWN, ROSELLEN
Countering the Obscene Elizabeth Costello By J.M. Coetzee Viking. 230 pp. $21.95. Reviewed by Rosellen Brown Author, "Half a Heart," "Street Games" It is apparent to anyone who has...
...Coetzee goes on to involve the poets Robert Duncan and Susan Mitchell (admiringly) in later lessons...
...She ponders, for example, what it would be like to be made love to by a god...
...Finally, a Postscript less expected than all that has come before: We read from Hugo von Hofmannsthal's "Letter of Lord Chandos to Lord Bacon" (1902), Chandos' rapture at all that has life, inanimate creatures included...
...a daughter-inlaw who dislikes her intensely...
...Coetzee, reveling in the coincidence of names, signs the letter "Your obedient servant Elizabeth C." and dates it "11 September, AD 1603...
...will cease to be read and eventually cease to be remembered...
...Of the two, gods and mortals, it is we who live the more urgently, feel the more intensely...
...Elizabeth next confronts, on the cruise ship, an old Nigerian friend named Emmanuel (once more than a friend, as it happens) with whom she debates publicly and privately what she views as the essential dishonesty of "the African novel" written not for those who can or will read it, but for those who need to be instructed about its subject...
...It is not my profession to believe, just to write...
...I do imitations, as Aristotle would have said...
...Though she has lived daringly and been brutalized herself, here she exemplifies her own ideal...
...The writer likes his paradoxes...
...It is as if everything...
...This might explain why the winner of the 2003 Nobel Prize for Literature, J.M...
...Pressed to elaborate, she insists, "In my work a belief is a resistance, an obstacle...
...Those who resent being toyed with in this way are attending the wrong performance...
...Apparently so, to Elizabeth...
...At a conference where, she belatedly discovers, the (real) novelist Paul West is scheduled to appear, she attacks him for his novel The Very Rich Hours of Count von Stauffenberg...
...Whether he intends to start a literary dustup or is merely enjoying his walk along the fine line dividing fiction from exhortation one can only guess...
...That said, the novel consists of skips, of interrupted narrative, and endless, if uncomfortable, performance, both literal (poor Elizabeth is forever in the spotlight) and figurative (the author assembling a new text out of many old ones...
...To Coetzee as well...
...This reader, though, undone by the power of the previous book, is frankly grateful for the relief...
...Or, rather, how one person lived, among billions...
...We do not, of course, ever hear whether this is the answer that will open the gates...
...She apologizes to Bacon that her husband may have written "in a fit of madness" and refers to his further ravings, but admits, reluctantly, that she has felt those shudders...
...She marshals all hereloquence to argue that animals be spared the casual murder we impose on them through commodif ication—by our refusal to hear their pleading voices...
...He sends Elizabeth to visit her sister, Blanche, a nun ("intolerant and rigid and bullying," says the pot calling the kettle black), in rural Zululand, where her lecture on the relative merits of Christianity and humanism is not particularly engaging...
...Like an action painting, a book is an event in the writer's life fed by energies that, not surprisingly, ebb and flow...
...Elizabeth Costello, the eponymous heroine of this short but intense new work, is an aging Australian novelist, an elliptically constructed character who delivers several impassioned lectures in venues familiar to traveling writers and academics (universities, conferences and, rather less likely for this reluctant celebrity, a cruise ship in search of intellectual entertainment...
...Story and antistory fight, feint and wrangle...
...it should not matter whether Kafka's ape was a man or his man was an ape...
...The subject of this lesson is Kafka's "Report to an Academy," a monologue in which a speaking ape breaks the "wordmirror" of realism "irreparably" by presenting himself, inconclusively, either as an ape who resembles a man or a man who resembles an ape...
...we are part of her audience, present to hear Coetzee's lectures inher voice...
...The play of realism against metafictional disjunction is confounding, but rather than a lazy recycling of old work, the deliberately broken frame turns out to be oddly expressive...
...All of them exist in fictional space and time but yield center stage, again and again, to the lessons that contend for the soul of this quasi-novel...
...Do the mangled dogs, not to mention the variously abused women, in Disgrace not count as hideous...
...In the end, it is very simple...
...We have just read his eight lessons...
...Thus, weary but without apparent despair, she casts aside her fame along with her debts to history...
...After which Coetzee, an "imitator" like Elizabeth, answers in the voice of another Elizabeth, Lady Chandos...
...But there are other characters in the frame: her son, astonished to discover his mother an aging, physically unappealing woman (though combative as ever...
...Coetzee's new novel, both brilliant and brittle, must have felt positively restorative: R&R for the instigator of the depredations of the spirit that brought David Lurie, the arrogant professor in Disgrace, to his knees...
...The principle of conserving energy is clearly at work here, and though that does not diminish the novel's peculiar pleasures, it does—with the exception of some spirited argument and a few wrenching scenes— circumscribe its emotional force...
...The lecture hall itself may be nothing but a zoo," Elizabeth slyly suggests...
...As for Coetzee, what can we say to him: "No teaching...
...They did not say, 'How would it be if I were burning?' They did not say, ? am burning...
...Earlier, she has pleaded that we relieve our children of "The burden of remembering...
...had to choose between telling a story and doing good, she would rather do good" The other lectures are studded with intriguing ideas, none of them the local themes we might anticipate (apartheid, imperial or anti-imperial conquest) from this South African author...
...It is a difficult argument: She accuses West of painting too vivid a picture of the execution of a group of Hitler's would-be assassins, because "he gives the butcher a voice, allowing him his coarse, his worse than coarse, his unspeakable gibes at the shivering old men he is about to kill...
...Refusing to "dictate" the meaning of the story, she ungratefully tells the hosts at the college where she is being presented an award for her writing, that "it is only a matter of time before the books which you honor...
...The ultimate humanism shatters the hierarchy of animals: No living thing should suffer...
...There is far more to smile at in this book, in spite of—even during—its cruelties and hostile moments, than in most of Coetzee's work...
...The bombs that explode, figuratively, in Disgrace, would be sufficient to exhaust the soul of any man...
...that exists...
...Reviewed by Rosellen Brown Author, "Half a Heart," "Street Games" It is apparent to anyone who has written one novel and intends to write another that the accomplishments of the first infringe, sometimes cruelly, on the conception of the second...
...beyond words...
...Elizabeth's "personal" life is, in a sense, parenthetical...
...All of Elizabeth's notions are alive with sensuous possibility...
...He has shown," she persists, "what ought not to be shown...
...how people lived in a certain time and place...
...If this is purgatory, it is "a kind of literary theme park," but she presses on, and before she is done she elevates the words "passion" and "heart" above reason, and insists that her books "teach nothing, preach nothing...
...They did not say, 'It is I who am in that cattle car...
...Coetzee, has followed the shattering emotional effects of Disgrace, his most recent novel, with the exceedingly cool intellectual pleasures of Elizabeth Costello...
...We are obviously privy to the author's own preoccupations, delivered by an alter ego who, though she hardly shares his biography—a novel about LeopoldBloom's wife clinched her fame—certainly has in common with her creator a reticent, even austere, demeanor before live audiences...
...No preaching...
...By lucky coincidence, she channels eight "lessons" that began as Coetzee's own talks and lectures...
...But out of this encounter surfaces one of Elizabeth's most poignant memories, when her personal humanity moved her to do a sexual kindness for a man humiliated by age and impending death...
...Obscene" May we, Elizabeth asks, inflict wounds that cannot heal...
...Whether they are his or her own, she cannot say...
...From here, in the guise of Elizabeth, Coetzee segues into the barbarity of the Nazis, implying that their victims' voices, like those of animals, also went unheard...
...We circle back to the opening lecture...
...They said, 'It is they in those cattle cars rattling past...
...The "oral novel," she insists, dismissively, is not the same as a novel about an oral people "just as a novel about women isn't a women's novel...
...It is the tortured letter of an unbeliever in her own experience, of someone who grieves that it is not the age of giants or angels, but of fleas...
...How does Coetzee recycle these elegantly argued theses...
...And she muses, "In marking us down for death, the gods gave us an edge over them...
...The skips are not part of the text, they are part of the performance...
...I try to empty myself of resistances...
...Not my business...
...But at the end of her long earthly day, spiny outspoken Elizabeth, opinions still thick as a swarm of bees around her head, meets up with an unseen panel of judges (an irony for someone who, though she quotes him, is not captivated by Kafka) and is asked to declare her credo...
...He may find the gates closed, not for saying the unspeakable, but for (intentional, ironic, playful) inconsistency...
...It is terrible...
...There must be some limit to the burden of remembering that we impose on our children...
...If she...
...I am a writer," she says...
...they merely spell out...
...I am falling in ash.'" Coetzee, it seems, is ready to take his place at the Seder table...
...Should anything literally be unspeakable...
...With the third lesson we arrive at the center of Elizabeth's obsession, derived from an earlier Coetzee book called The Lives of Animals (containing responses from a posse of real-life challengers, including Marjorie Garber and Wendy Doniger...
...Some of the most delicious passages in Elizabeth Costello confess the despair of the ardent lecturer forced to minister to the unconvinced, the indifferent, the antagonistic, and—better or worse?—the fawning...
...Then, in a lecture titled "The Problem of Evil," Elizabeth, undaunted before audiences who both revere and revile her, dares to name names...
...Her final bid for heaven sounds like something God might say: "I believe in what does not bother to believe in me...
...Do we refuse to grant the relief of unremembering to readers by so explicitly rendering atrocities...
...The removed, ironic narrative voice of the opening lesson, entitled "Realism," plays like a riff on John Gardner's famous invocation of fiction as a "vivid, continuous dream": "It is not a good idea to interrupt the narrative too often, since storytelling works by lulling the reader or listener into a dreamlike state in which the time and space of the real world fade away, superseded by the time and the space of the fiction___Breaking into the dream draws attention to the constructedness of the story, and plays havoc with the realist illusion...
...everything my confused thinking touches on, means something...
...The horror is that the killers refused to think themselves into the place of their victims, as did everyone else...
...and since sex, especially with strangers, is yet another kind of selfpresentation, a professor (also no fan of Elizabeth) who spends a night with the son...
Vol. 86 • November 2003 • No. 6
