JM Coetzee, Elizabeth and that prize
Elizabeth Costello: JM Coetzee and the Nobel Prize
JM Coetzee
2003, Secker & Warburg
224 pages
Reviewed by Jayne Poyner
As Nobel Laureate of Literature for 2003 the acclaimed South African novelist and academic JM Coetzee is placed firmly in the upper echelons of the literary establishment alongside his fellow South African Nadine Gordimer, as well as Wole Soyinka, Derek Walcott, VS Naipaul and Tony Morrison - all previous winners of the Prize. Njabulo Ndebele, novelist, intellectual and vice-chancellor of the University of Cape Town, where until recently Coetzee was a professor, hails his ex-colleague's success, "This is a proud moment for South Africa".
Coetzee is widely regarded as one of the greatest living writers of the novel in English: that he was the first to win the Booker Prize twice, with Life & Times of Michael K in 1983 and Disgrace in 1999, had already confirmed his reputation as a novelist of international stature. His fiction and critical essays have generated a plethora of scholarly research both in South Africa and abroad, not least for the contentious interventions the oeuvre makes into South African politico-cultural discourse and the burgeoning field of postcolonial studies more generally. Coetzee is known for his taciturnity (it is unlikely that he will attend the Nobel award ceremony just as he was absent at that of the Booker), and his fiction has been criticised for being politically evasive. Unlike Gordimer, with whom he is frequently compared, Coetzee has been profoundly sceptical of the movement for committed literature during apartheid, claiming a position of 'nonposition'. Interviewed by the literary scholar David Attwell, he has stated that, "My difficulty is [ ] with the project of stating positions, taking positions".
Not unfamiliar with controversy, Coetzee, by winning the Nobel, has sparked a furious debate at home between the Democratic Alliance [an opposition party in parliament] and the African National Congress [the ruling party], the former demanding an apology from the ANC for its apparent condemnation of Coetzee's earlier novel Disgrace. In a remarkable turnaround President Thabo Mbeki now asks fellow South Africans to join him in celebrating his compatriot's success, whilst previously Disgrace had been used by the ANC's report on racism in the South African media as illustrative of the racism still prevalent amongst whites in the post-apartheid state.
Many readers have been troubled, some outraged, by the seemingly stereotyped portrayal of bl
ack people in the novel, the rape of a white woman by three black men, at a time when South Africa is struggling to come to terms with its traumatic past and soaring crime rate. Illustrative of this controversy is the decision by the editors of the postcolonial journal Interventions to devote almost an entire issue to defending the ethics of Coetzee's project in Disgrace. In the novel the protagonist, the salacious Professor David Lurie formerly of Cape Technical University, seeks sanctuary at his daughter Lucy's farm in the Eastern Cape from the aftermath of an affair with a young student, who by South African designation is probably 'Coloured' since Lurie renames her "Meláni", or "dark one". Mirroring what Lurie conceives as his abuse of Melanie, which was "Not rape, not quite that", Lucy is gang-raped by three black hooligans, and father and daughter bizarrely come to rationalise the attack as reparations for the past, both for the egregious oppression of South Africa's black peoples by the apartheid regime, and for colonialist rule that preceded it. Yet, as Attwell has pointed out, these critics have tended to overlook the portrayal of Manas Mathabane, Professor of Religious Studies, who heads the disciplinary committee that charges Lurie with sexual harassment. According to Attwell, Mathabane is "the true representative of the Enlightenment", and is emblematic of the rising black middle classes. Given the proclivity of 'postcolonial' and ethically minded writers awarded the Nobel in recent years, Coetzee must surely feel vindicated (he apparently was shocked at the reception of Disgrace in South Africa).
"Many readers have been troubled by the seemingly stereotyped protrayal of black people in the novel"
With the publication of Elizabeth Costello (2003) immediately prior to the announcement of the Nobel Prize, Coetzee makes his most pronounced departure from the South African context to date (the Tsarist Russia of The Master of Petersburg (1994) is analogous to apartheid South Africa), leaving us wondering whether he has abandoned for good the (post)colonial condition with which the earlier fictions engage. However, Elizabeth Costello might be read as a way into the earlier fictions since it crystallises debates about the ethics of intellectual practice in evidence in all of Coetzee's writing, both his essays and novels. (The book may well prove too literary for the lay reader, since it alludes to a range of difficult and/or obscure texts.)
As the literary critic Derek Attridge has suggested, the trajectory of Coetzee's fiction moves towards a "minimal ethics", sparsely portrayed through the figure of Elizabeth Costello, an ageing academic and novelist. Her most famous novel, The House on Eccles Street, imagines the life of Marion Bloom, wife of Leopold in James Joyce's Ulysses. Mrs Costello singularly speaks out on 'heartfelt' issues such as animal rights, the decline of the humanities in Africa and the nature of 'evil'. (The initials of Coetzee's protagonist here signal a re-negotiation of the protagonist in Age of Iron (1994), Mrs Elizabeth Curren, who struggles with her political consciousness during the time of the narrative: 1986-89 perhaps constituting the most brutal years of Nationalist Party rule in South Africa.) In Coetzee's latest work Elizabeth Costello's endorsement of feeling and sentiment is couched against Enlightenment discourses of reason and rationality, developing Coetzee's concern with the notion of the private speaking to and informing the public sphere. Originally presented as a series of meta-generic lectures - Costello, like Coetzee, is addressing a public audience - the volume incorporates respondents to, or 'critics' of, Costello/Coetzee.
In 'Lesson 1: Realism' Elizabeth Costello makes an acceptance speech at Altona College, Pennsylvania, choosing to question the limits of what we understand as realism: the lesson opens self-consciously with a note on the beginnings of literary texts and then frustrates our assumptions of the realist novel with Costello’s discussion of Kafka. 'Lesson 2: The Novel in Africa' sets Costello's own rather tired and dry conception of what it means to be a novelist against the ebullient Nigerian Emmanuel Egudu's talk on the novel in Africa, in which Egudu highlights the marginalisation of African novelists in the global market. The two author-antagonists, who we learn only at the end of the chapter have been lovers many years before, have joined a luxury cruise as part of its "education and entertainment staff".
Reading Disgrace alongside Elizabeth Costello reveals parallels in the structure of these texts. Lurie, Costello, Egudu and Costello's sister Blanche (a nun who is also known as Sister Bridget) are all both private individuals and academics - Bridget also speaks for the Church. All express publicly eccentric (ex-centric) opinions that they no doubt anticipate will rile their audiences: Lurie challenges the jurisdiction of the University's disciplinary committee (a loose analogy of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission); in 'Lesson 3: The Philosophers and the Animals' of Elizabeth Costello Costello delivers a lecture on animal rights at Appleton University against the expectation of a discussion of her fiction; whilst in 'Lesson 5: The Humanities in Africa' Blanche/Sister Bridget, with Costello looking-on, gives her public acceptance speech as honorary graduate. Drawing on the university theme, Blanche/Bridget raises the question of the decline of the humanities in Africa, which, she suggests, has lost its connection to the humane, or to humanism:
"The studia humanitatis have taken a long time to die, but now, at the end of the second millennium of our era, they are truly on 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 animating principle of the universe: reason, mechanical reason."
These publicly aired positions are then disseminated within the private sphere: Lurie's retreat to his daughter Lucy's farm, Costello's heart-to-heart with Egudu's new and much younger lover, Costello's bitter argument with her daughter-in-law Norma, amongst others, around the dinner table following her lecture ("She is, after all, the paid entertainer", Costello's son John notes), and Costello and Blanche's visit to the church at Marianhill, Zululand, and their uncomfortable leave-taking. Following the argument made here, public debate is to some degree 'resolved' or digested within the private domain: private speaks to public, or 'truth' - in Coetzee's conception - 'speaks to power'.
For Coetzee, empathetic speech/writing informs the public sphere: reformulated, the oeuvre suggests that ethics speaks to politics. In Lesson 3, the first part of Costello's/Coetzee's exegesis of animal rights entitled 'The Lives of Animals', Costello suggests that the heart is "the seat of a faculty, sympathy, that allows us to share at times the being of another": by sharing experiences one makes oneself accountable to one's fellow beings and to society. It is a feeling towards a sense of community rather than a community of correct feeling. The problem would seem to be, as Costello says, that:
"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? Reasoning systems, as systems of totality, do not have that power. If there were a position from which reason could attack and dethrone itself, reason would already have occupied that position; otherwise it would not be total."
Coetzee's writing even suggests that private thoughts are not, as commonly held in Enlightenment discourse, free from policing. The oeuvre tests how far one's innermost thoughts and feelings can be brought acceptably into the public sphere. To what extent, Coetzee asks tacitly, can one reveal one's 'darker side' and remain within the bounds of the ethical - an issue which profoundly troubles Elizabeth Costello in 'Lesson 6: The Problem of Evil'? Invited to speak at a conference in Amsterdam, she argues that writers are tainted by an engagement with evil. She publicly criticises a book by Paul West (modelled on the real life novelist), who chooses to describe in intimate detail the execution of a group of assassins who had plotted against Hitler. Such representations, Mrs Costello argues, are "obscene because having taken place they ought not to be brought into the light but covered up and hidden forever in the bowels of the earth".
Indicative of his evasiveness, perhaps Coetzee hereby distances himself from Mrs Costello, with whom the mode of the lectures suggests he associates himself, for Coetzee's writing is noted for its graphic portrayal of violence, particularly that of a sexual nature, take Dusklands (1974), Waiting for the Barbarians (1980) and Disgrace, for instance. Coetzee's novels "test the limits" - to borrow his phraseology - of acceptable discourse and, post-apartheid, this means necessarily critiquing the newly realised status quo. His writing typically grapples with taboo, which in Disgrace is the myth perpetrated by whites of the black man as rapist. In Elizabeth Costello it is, amongst other things, factory farming, the Holocaust and death.
By arranging Elizabeth Costello as a series of lessons Coetzee pokes fun at critics who have charged him with literary elitism, as one reviewer of the novel has commented, but the book also assumes distinctly theosophical aspects, particularly in 'Lesson 7: Eros' and 'Lesson 8: At the Gate'. Moving closer towards her own death, anticipated by her son in 'Lesson 4: The Poets and the Animals' - "There, there, it will all be over soon" - Costello ruminates on the artistic/sexual relations between the gods and man in 'Eros'. Overtly recalling Franz Kafka's embedded meta-parable 'Before the Law' in The Trial, Mrs Costello, who seemingly has died, awaits admittance into heaven (we presume) in 'At the Gate'. She is confounded by the bathos of the situation in which she finds herself:
She has a vision of the gate, the far side of the gate, the side she is denied. At the foot of the gate, blocking the way, lies stretched out a dog, an old dog, his lion-coloured hide scarred from innumerable manglings. [...] It is her first vision in a long while, and she does not trust it, does not trust in particular the anagram GOD-DOG. Too literary, she thinks again. A curse on literature!
This passage invokes familiar Coetzean motifs: Samuel Beckett's absurd inversion of the Divine, for instance, and Kafka's tale which has been read by Jacques Derrida as an allegory of critical endeavour, the impossibility of locating 'correct' meanings in texts and a warning against reductive allegorical reading practices. The lame or sick dog figures absolute alterity, as Attridge has argued elsewhere: investing in the Other with no prospect of reciprocation ensures the most ethically pure actions on the part of the self. Dogs are central to Disgrace and are utilised to similar ends in The Master of Petersburg and Age of Iron.
However, whilst Coetzee proves useful for rethinking notions of the public, the efficacy of his academic intellection, particularly his refusal to be positioned, might be questioned when he speaks as a public intellectual within the wider public sphere, both during apartheid and after, when the need for political agency amongst oppressed and marginalised groups was, and still is, essential. Now that Coetzee has quit South Africa has he also left behind the concerns generated by apartheid and postcolonial conditions?
Although Coetzee is rightly acknowledged as a key figure in 20th and 21st century literary studies, is he announcing new directions in his fiction through the parodic 'death of the author', Elizabeth Costello? (Elizabeth Costello closes with 'Post Script: Letter of Elizabeth, Lady Chandos, to Francis Bacon', signed Elizabeth C. and dated 1603, suggesting a cyclical rebirth of the author figure, here another 'E.C.'.) And will interest in Coetzee's writing wane, as it has for Salman Rushdie with the latter's The Ground Beneath Her Feet, now that he has seemingly made such a transition? Always one step ahead of his critics, Coetzee will probably outwit us all.
Jayne Poyner has been awarded a PhD from Warwick University in the UK. The title of her thesis was
