Elizabeth Costello

by J. M. Coetzee

  The next morning John finds himself in another literary debate. In the hotel gymnasium he bumps into Gordon Wheatley, chairman of the jury. Side by side on exercise bicycles they have a shouted conversation. His mother will be disappointed, he tells Wheatley – not entirely seriously – if she learns that the Stowe Award is hers only because 1995 has been decreed to be the year of Australasia.

  ‘What does she want it to be?’ shouts Wheatley back.

  ‘That she is the best,’ he replies. ‘In your jury’s honest opinion. Not the best Australian, not the best Australian woman, just the best.’

  ‘Without infinity we would have no mathematics,’ says Wheatley. ‘But that doesn’t mean that infinity exists. Infinity is just a construct, a human construct. Of course we are firm that Elizabeth Costello is the best. We just have to be clear in our minds what a statement like that means, in the context of our times.’

  The analogy with infinity makes no sense to him, but he does not pursue the issue. He hopes that Wheatley does not write as badly as he thinks.

  Realism has never been comfortable with ideas. It could not be otherwise: realism is premised on the idea that ideas have no autonomous existence, can exist only in things. So when it needs to debate ideas, as here, realism is driven to invent situations – walks in the countryside, conversations – in which characters give voice to contending ideas and thereby in a certain sense embody them. The notion of embodying turns out to be pivotal. In such debates ideas do not and indeed cannot float free: they are tied to the speakers by whom they are enounced, and generated from the matrix of individual interests out of which their speakers act in the world – for instance, the son’s concern that his mother not be treated as a Mickey Mouse post-colonial writer, or Wheatley’s concern not to seem an old-fashioned absolutist.

  At eleven he taps at the door of her room. She has a long day before her: an interview, a session at the college radio station, then, in the evening, the presentation ceremony and the speech that goes with it.

  Her strategy with interviewers is to take control of the exchange, presenting them with blocks of dialogue that have been rehearsed so often he wonders they have not solidified in her mind and become some kind of truth. A long paragraph on childhood in the suburbs of Melbourne (cockatoos screeching at the bottom of the garden) with a sub-paragraph on the danger to the imagination of middle-class security. A paragraph on the death of her father of enteric fever in Malaya, with her mother somewhere in the background playing Chopin waltzes on the piano, followed by a sequence of what sound like impromptu ruminations on the influence of music on her own prose. A paragraph about her adolescent reading (voracious, unselective), then a jump to Virginia Woolf, whom she first read as a student, and the impact Woolf had on her. A passage on her spell at art school, another on her year and a half at post-war Cambridge (‘What I mainly remember is the struggle to keep warm’), another on her years in London (‘I could have made a living as a translator, I suppose, but my best language was German, and German wasn’t popular in those days, as you can imagine’). Her first novel, which she modestly disparages; though as a first novel it stood head and shoulders above the competition, then her years in France (‘heady times’), with an oblique glance at her first marriage. Then her return to Australia with her young son. Him.

  All in all, he judges, listening in, a workmanlike performance, if one can still use that word, eating up most of the hour, as intended, leaving only a few minutes to skirt the questions that begin ‘What do you think . . . ?’ What does she think about neoliberalism, the woman question, Aboriginal rights, the Australian novel today? He has lived around her for nearly four decades, on and off, and is still not sure what she thinks about the big questions. Not sure and, on the whole, thankful not to have to hear. For her thoughts would be, he suspects, as uninteresting as most people’s. A writer, not a thinker. Writers and thinkers: chalk and cheese. No, not chalk and cheese: fish and fowl. But which is she, the fish or the fowl? Which is her medium: water or air?

  This morning’s interviewer, who has come up from Boston for the occasion, is young, and his mother is usually indulgent towards the young. But this one is thick-skinned and refuses to be fobbed off. ‘What would you say your main message is?’ she persists.

  ‘My message? Am I obliged to carry a message?’

  Not a strong counter; the interviewer presses her advantage. ‘In The House on Eccles Street your lead character, Marion Bloom, refuses to have sex with her husband until he has worked out who he is. Is that what you are saying: that until men have worked out a new, post-patriarchal identity, women should hold themselves apart?’

  His mother casts him a glance. Help! it is meant to say, in a droll way.

  ‘Intriguing idea,’ she murmurs. ‘Of course in the case of Marion’s husband there would be a particular severity in demanding that he work out a new identity, since he is a man of – what shall I say? – of infirm identity, of many shapes.’

  Eccles Street is a great novel; it will live, perhaps, as long as Ulysses; it will certainly be around long after its maker is in the grave. He was only a child when she wrote it. It unsettles and dizzies him to think that the same being that engendered Eccles Street engendered him. It is time to step in, save her from an inquisition that promises to become tedious. He rises. ‘Mother, I am afraid we are going to have to call a halt,’ he says. ‘We’re being fetched for the radio session.’ To the interviewer: ‘Thank you, but that will have to be all.’

  The interviewer pouts with annoyance. Will she find a part for him in the story she files: the novelist of failing powers and her bossy son?

  At the radio station the two of them are separated. He is shown into the control booth. The new interviewer, he is surprised to find, is the elegant Moebius woman he had sat beside at dinner. ‘This is Susan Moebius, the programme is Writers at Work, and we are speaking today to Elizabeth Costello,’ she commences, and proceeds with a crisp introduction. ‘Your most recent novel,’ she continues, ‘called Fire and Ice, set in the Australia of the 1930s, is the story of a young man struggling to make his way as a painter against the opposition of family and society. Did you have anyone in particular in mind when you wrote it? Does it draw upon your own early life?’

  ‘No, I was still a child in the 1930s. Of course we draw upon our own lives all the time – they are our main resource, in a sense our only resource. But no, Fire and Ice isn’t autobiography. It is a work of fiction. I made it up.’

  ‘It is a powerful book, I must tell our listeners. But do you find it easy, writing from the position of a man?’

  It is a routine question, opening the door to one of her routine paragraphs. To his surprise, she does not take the opening.

  ‘Easy? No. If it were easy it wouldn’t be worth doing. It is the otherness that is the challenge. Making up someone other than yourself. Making up a world for him to move in. Making up an Australia.’

  ‘Is that what you are doing in your books, would you say: making up Australia?’

  ‘Yes, I suppose so. But that is not so easy nowadays. There is more resistance, a weight of Australias made up by many other people, that you have to push against. That is what we mean by tradition, the beginnings of a tradition.’

  ‘I’d like to get on to The House on Eccles Street, which is the book you are best known for in this country, a path-breaking book, and the figure of Molly Bloom. Critics have concentrated on the way you have claimed or reclaimed Molly from Joyce, made her your own. I wonder if you would comment on your intentions in this book, particularly in challenging Joyce, one of the father-figures of modern literature, on his own territory.’

  Another clear opening, and this time she takes it.

  ‘Yes, she is an engaging person, isn’t she, Molly Bloom – Joyce’s Molly, I mean. She leaves her trace across the pages of Ulysses as a bitch on heat leaves her smell. Seductive you can’t call it: it is cruder than
that. Men pick up the scent and sniff and circle around and snarl at each other, even when Molly isn’t on the scene.

  ‘No, I don’t see myself as challenging Joyce. But certain books are so prodigally inventive that there is plenty of material left over at the end, material that almost invites you to take it over and use it to build something of your own.’

  ‘But, Elizabeth Costello, you have taken Molly out of the house – if I can continue with your metaphor – taken her out of the house on Eccles Street where her husband and her lover and in a certain sense her author have confined her, where they have turned her into a kind of queen bee, unable to fly, you have taken her and turned her loose on the streets of Dublin. Wouldn’t you see that as a challenge to Joyce on your part, a response?’

  ‘Queen bee, bitch . . . Let’s revise the figure and call her a lioness, rather, stalking the streets, smelling the smells, seeing the sights. Looking for prey, even. Yes, I wanted to liberate her from that house, and particularly from that bedroom, with the bed with the creaking springs, and turn her loose – as you say – on Dublin.’

  ‘If you see Molly – Joyce’s Molly – as a prisoner in the house on Eccles Street, do you see women in general as prisoners of marriage and domesticity?’

  ‘You can’t mean women today. But yes, to an extent Molly is a prisoner of marriage, the kind of marriage that was on offer in Ireland in 1904. Her husband Leopold is a prisoner too. If she is shut into the conjugal home, he is shut out. So we have Odysseus trying to get in and Penelope trying to get out. That is the comedy, the comic myth, which Joyce and I in our different ways were paying our respects to.’

  Because both women are wearing headphones, addressing the microphone rather than each other, it is hard for him to see how they are getting on together. But he is impressed, as ever, by the persona his mother manages to project: of genial common sense, lack of malice, yet of sharp-wittedness too.

  ‘I want to tell you,’ the interviewer continues (a cool voice, he thinks: a cool woman, capable, not a lightweight at all), ‘what an impact The House on Eccles Street made on me when I first read it in the 1970s. I was a student, I had studied Joyce’s book, I had absorbed the famous Molly Bloom chapter and the critical orthodoxy that came with it, namely that here Joyce had released the authentic voice of the feminine, the sensual reality of woman, and so forth. And then I read your book and realised that Molly didn’t have to be limited in the way Joyce had made her to be, that she could equally well be an intelligent woman with an interest in music and a circle of friends of her own and a daughter with whom she shared confidences – it was a revelation, as I say. And I began to wonder about other women whom we think of as having been given a voice by male writers, in the name of their liberation, yet in the end only to further and to serve a male philosophy. I am thinking of D. H. Lawrence’s women in particular, but if you go further back they might include Tess of the D’Urbervilles and Anna Karenina, to name only two. It is a huge question, but I wonder if you have anything to say about it – not just about Marion Bloom and the others but about the project of reclaiming women’s lives in general.’

  ‘No, I don’t think there is anything I would want to say, I think you’ve expressed it all very fully. Of course, fair’s fair, men will have to set about reclaiming the Heathcliffs and Rochesters from romantic stereotyping too, to say nothing of poor old dusty Casaubon. It will be a grand spectacle. But, seriously, we can’t go on parasitizing the classics for ever. I am not excluding myself from the charge. We’ve got to start doing some inventing of our own.’

  This is not in the script at all. A new departure. Where will it lead? But alas, the Moebius woman (who is now glancing at the studio clock) does not pick up on it.

  ‘In your more recent novels you have gone back to Australian settings. Could you say something about how you see Australia? What does it mean to you to be an Australian writer? Australia is a country that remains very far away, at least to Americans. Is that part of your consciousness as you write: that you are reporting from the far edges?’

  ‘The far edges. That is an interesting expression. You won’t find many Australians nowadays prepared to accept it. Far from what? they would say. Nevertheless, it has a certain meaning, even if it is a meaning foisted on us by history. We’re not a country ofextremes – I’d say we’re rather pacific – but we are a country of extremities. We have lived our extremities because there hasn’t been a great deal of resistance in any direction. If you begin to fall, there isn’t much to stop you.’

  They are back among the commonplaces, on familiar ground. He can stop listening.

  We skip to the evening, to the main event, the presentation of the award. As son and companion of the speaker he finds himself in the first row of the audience, among the special guests. The woman to his left introduces herself. ‘Our daughter is at Altona,’ she says. ‘She is writing her honours dissertation on your mother. She’s a great fan. She has made us read everything.’ She pats the wrist of the man beside her. They have the look of money, old money. Benefactors, no doubt. ‘Your mother is much admired in this country. Particularly by young people. I hope you will tell her that.’

  All across America, young women writing dissertations on his mother. Admirers, adherents, disciples. Would it please his mother to be told she has American disciples?

  The presentation scene itself we skip. 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 space of the fiction. Breaking into the dream draws attention to the constructedness of the story, and plays havoc with the realist illusion. However, unless certain scenes are skipped over we will be here all afternoon. The skips are not part of the text, they are part of the performance.

  So the award is made, after which his mother is left alone at the rostrum to give her acceptance speech, entitled in the programme ‘What is Realism?’. The time has arrived for her to show her paces.

  Elizabeth Costello dons her reading glasses. ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ she says, and begins to read.

  ‘I published my first book in 1955, when I was living in London, at that time the great cultural metropolis for Antipodeans. I remember clearly the day the package arrived in the mail, an advance copy for the author. I was naturally thrilled to have it in my hands, printed and bound, the real thing, undeniable. But something was nagging at me. I got on to the telephone to my publishers. “Have the deposit copies gone out?” I asked. And I would not rest until I had their assurance that the deposit copies would be mailed the same afternoon, to Scotland and the Bodleian and so forth, but above all to the British Museum. 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 neighbour turned out to be Marie Corelli.)

  ‘One smiles now at such ingenuousness. Yet behind my anxious query there was something serious, and behind that seriousness in turn something pathetic that is less easy to acknowledge.

  ‘Let me explain. Ignoring all the copies of the book you have written that are going to perish – that are going to be pulped because there is no buyer for them, that are going to be opened and read for a page or two and then yawned at and put aside for ever, that are going to be left behind at seaside hotels or in trains – ignoring all these lost ones, we must be able to feel there is at least one copy that will not only be read but be taken care of, given a home, given a place on the shelves that will be its own in perpetuity. What lay behind my concern about deposit copies was the wish that, even if I myself should beknocked over by a bus the next day, this first-born of mine would have a home where it could snooze, if fate so decreed, for the next hundred years, and no one would come poking with a stick to see if it was still alive.

  ‘That
was one side of my telephone call: if I, this mortal shell, am going to die, let me at least live on through my creations.’

  Elizabeth Costello proceeds to reflect on the transience of fame. We skip ahead.

  ‘But of course the British Museum or (now) the British Library is not going to last for ever. It too will crumble and decay, and the books on its shelves turn to powder. And anyhow, long before that day, as the acid gnaws away at the paper, as the demand for space grows, the ugly and unread and unwanted will be carted off to some facility or other and tossed into a furnace, and all trace of them will be liquidated from the master catalogue. After which it will be as if they had never existed.

  ‘That is an alternative vision of the Library of Babel, more disturbing to me than the vision of Jorge Luis Borges. Not a library in which all conceivable books, past, present and future, coexist, but a library from which books that were really conceived, written and published are absent, absent even from the memory of the librarians.

  ‘Such, then, was the other and more pathetic side to my telephone call. We can rely on the British Library or the Library of Congress no more than on reputation itself to save us from oblivion. Of that I must remind myself, and remind you too, on this proud night for me at Altona College.

  ‘Let me now turn to my subject, “What is Realism?”

  ‘There is a story by Franz Kafka – perhaps you know it – in which an ape, dressed up for the occasion, makes a speech to a learned society. It is a speech, but a test too, an examination, a viva voce. The ape has to show not only that he can speak his audience’s language but that he has mastered their manners and conventions, is fit to enter their society.

  ‘Why am I reminding you of Kafka’s story? Am I going to pretend I am the ape, torn away from my natural surroundings, forced to perform in front of a gathering of critical strangers? I hope not. I am one of you, I am not of a different species.