The Year of Henry James

by David Lodge

  The effect of the fictional narrative is to generate sympathy for the main character, but it is not unambiguously clear that she is articulating the views of the author (or lecturer, as he was in this case). The whole sequence of events is seen mainly through the eyes of Elizabeth’s son, John (Coetzee’s own first name, it is worth noting) who happens to be a teacher of physics and astronomy at Appleton College but has previously concealed his relationship to his famous mother, and who is throughout her visit divided between filial loyalty and discomfort at the way her extreme opinions get up the noses of his colleagues and his wife. What gives most offence is the analogy she draws between the industrial production of meat and the extermination of the Jews by the Nazis. ‘We are surrounded by an enterprise of degradation, cruelty and killing which rivals anything that the Third Reich was capable of, indeed dwarfs it, in that ours is an enterprise without end . . .’ she asserts. A senior member of the faculty, a poet called Abraham Stern, absents himself from the dinner in protest and writes a dignified note of dissent. ‘If Jews were treated like cattle, it does not follow that cattle are treated like Jews. The inversion insults the memory of the dead. It also trades on the horrors of the camps in a cheap way.’

  The Tanner Lectures were published by Princeton University Press in 1999, with an introduction by a political philosopher and responses from four other distinguished members of the Princeton faculty. Not surprisingly most of the commentators felt somewhat stymied by Coetzee’s meta-lectures, by the veils of fiction behind which he had concealed his own position from scrutiny. ‘A lecture within a lecture; a response within a response. What is the strategy of such an appropriation?’ Marjorie Garber asked, and answered her own question tartly: ‘Among other things it is a strategy of control.’ The philosopher Peter Singer complained it was hard to get a purchase on Coetzee’s discourse, because ‘we don’t know what voice to believe’, and retaliated by casting his own contribution in the form of a dialogue with his teenage daughter. In short, there was a feeling, shared by some reviewers of the book, that Coetzee was putting forward an extreme, intolerant, and accusatory argument without taking full intellectual responsibility for it.

  Encountered in its new context, as Lessons 3 and 4 of Elizabeth Costello, ‘The Lives of Animals’ no longer seems vulnerable to such a criticism. The character of Elizabeth in the novel is a much more rounded figure, with a much more complex history, and is preoccupied with more than one ethical or philosophical issue. But the question of how far we are meant to identify with her and her opinions persists, partly because of the teasing similarities and differences between her and her creator. She is Australian-Irish-Catholic by birth and upbringing. Coetzee is South African, from an Afrikaaner background, but now lives in Australia; he relates in his memoir Youth that as a schoolboy he pretended to be a Catholic to be excused Religious Instruction classes. Elizabeth is ‘a major world writer’ around whom ‘a small critical industry’ has grown up, and the recipient of numerous prizes and awards. So is Coetzee. She ‘is by no means a comforting writer’; neither is Coetzee (Disgrace must be one of the least comforting novels ever written). Elizabeth’s most celebrated work is The House on Eccles Street (1969), an imaginative recension of James Joyce’s Ulysses from Molly Bloom’s point of view; Coetzee has engaged in similar intertextual games with Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. Like Coetzee, Elizabeth frequently travels round the world to give lectures and to attend international conferences. All the first six episodes or ‘Lessons’ are in fact concerned with discourses delivered and/or heard by Elizabeth on some such occasion.

  The main difference between author and character, apart from gender, is that Elizabeth Costello is twelve years older than Coetzee – ‘sixty-six, going on sixty-seven’ in 1995, when the first episode is set. She increasingly feels her age as the novel progresses – both physically, in the weariness of flesh and bone, and metaphysically, in her troubled meditations on life and death and the art to which she has dedicated herself. Coetzee, sixty-four in the year of the novel’s publication, has succeeded remarkably in creating the character of a woman undergoing the transition from middle age to old age, coming to the end of sexuality, to the end of fulfilling personal relationships, even perhaps to the end of writing, and finding a new urgency in the big, perennial questions: Why are we here? What should we do? What is it all about? It is a book which begins like a cross between a campus novel and a Platonic dialogue, segues into introspective memoir and fanciful musing, and ends with a Kafkaesque bad dream of the afterlife. It is progressively permeated by the language of religion, by a dread of evil, and a desire for personal salvation. Its keywords are ‘belief’ and ‘soul’.

  The first Lesson is called ‘Realism’, the topic on which Elizabeth has chosen to speak when accepting the ‘Stowe Award’ ($50,000 in cash and a gold medal) from the fictitious Altona College in Williamsburg, Pennsylvania. Her son John is in attendance (as he will be two years later in Massachusetts), being on leave from Appleton College for unspecified ‘reasons of his own’. Elizabeth has flown all the way from Australia to receive the award. That is usually a condition of getting this kind of loot – you have to be there in person, give a speech, submit to media interviews, meet people who are writing scholarly books about you, field questions about your peers (‘What do you think of A. S. Byatt, Ms Costello . . . what do you think of Doris Lessing?’), sign copies of your novels, attend receptions and formal meals – and John feels his increasingly frail-looking mother needs his support to get her through the exhausting routine. ‘He thinks of her as a seal, an old, tired, circus seal. One more time she must heave herself up on the tub, one more time show she can balance the ball on her nose.’ The story of the visit is told mainly through John’s eyes and ears, with laconic metafictional interpolations by the implied author, drawing attention to the conventions of realism that are employed, and occasionally flouted, in the narrative itself:

  The blue costume, the greasy hair [of Elizabeth], are details, signs of a moderate realism. Supply the particulars, allow the significations to emerge of themselves . . . there is a scene in the restaurant, mainly dialogue, which we will skip . . . when it needs to debate ideas, as here, realism is driven to invent situations – walks in the country, conversations – in which characters give voice to contending ideas . . . The presentation scene 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 . . .

  Elizabeth’s address is a kind of obsequy over, or elegy for, realism. She reminds her audience of Kafka’s ‘An Academic Address’, in which an ape who has been captured and civilised gives a brief account of his experiences to a learned audience. The story mimics her own situation (and also anticipated Coetzee’s use of the lecture as fictional discourse) but its meaning, Elizabeth says, is utterly obscure.

  There used to be a time when we knew. We used to believe that when the text said, ‘On the table stood a glass of water,’ there was indeed a table, and a glass of water on it, and we had only to look in the word-mirror of the text to see them. But all that has ended. The word-mirror is broken, irreparably it seems. About what is really going on in the lecture hall your guess is as good as mine.

  It is not clear whether Elizabeth is referring here to the deconstructionist theory of the late twentieth century which undermined the assumption that texts have intentional, recuperable meanings – in which case Kafka is a bad example, because his texts were recognised as being radically indeterminate in meaning well before the advent of poststructuralism – or whether she is saying that Kafka was a kind of prophet of deconstruction. It is the first of several moments in the book as a whole where the reader is not quite sure whether he is intended to spot some confusion or contradiction or non-sequitur in Elizabeth’s arguments.

  Elizabeth’s audience is not much interested in realism or its obsolescence. John senses that they are disappointed by her address, which contained nothing about feminism or post
colonialism – the isms with which she is publicly associated – and he suspects her hosts are already hoping that the Stowe Award jury will come up with a livelier recipient next time. He puts his tired mother to bed and goes down to the hotel bar where he recognises the attractive female professor, Susan Moebius, a specialist in women’s writing who interviewed his mother for radio earlier that day. The attraction is mutual, and before long they are in Susan Moebius’s bed together. John is aware that he is being seduced into satisfying her professional curiosity about his mother, but doesn’t put up much resistance. He is both proudly admiring of Elizabeth and irritated and embarrassed by her, as the children of famous writers often are.

  One of the pleasures of Coetzee’s text is its wryly knowing observation of the professional lives of authors in the global village, their privileges and opportunities and compromises. Never in history, perhaps, have writers, ‘serious’ writers, been materially as well off as they are today – there are so many awards, fellowships, teaching posts, speaking engagements, grants and freebies available to supplement income derived directly from writing – but there is always a danger that these may become displacement activities. A typical perk is the cruise lectureship, by which a writer with a modest degree of celebrity can enjoy a free luxury vacation, and get a fee as well.

  In Lesson 2, entitled ‘The Novel in Africa’, Elizabeth accepts a free cruise on a ship going to Antarctica in exchange for diverting the passengers with an undemanding course of lectures. She finds herself paired with an African novelist, Emmanuel Egudu, whom she met many years ago at a PEN conference in Kuala Lumpur, and then regarded as something of a poseur. But she is no longer confident of making such judgements. ‘Which of us is what he seems to be, she seems to be?’ She listens to herself giving her opening talk, on ‘The Future of the Novel’, and is not sure that she believes in what she is saying. Indeed ‘she no longer believes very strongly in belief . . . Belief may be no more . . . than a battery which one clips into an idea to make it run’ (a good example of Coetzee’s gift for coining simple but striking metaphors). Egudu lectures with more verve on ‘The Novel in Africa’, but what he has to say seems to her depressing. African culture, he says, is essentially oral, and hostile to private silent reading. The African writer can draw on this oral culture to create a different kind of novel from that of the Western literary tradition, but he still won’t have an African readership. He is condemned to make his professional life outside Africa, writing for foreigners. This, Elizabeth tells Egudu later, explains why there are ‘so many African novelists around and yet no African novel worth speaking of’. It is the result of ‘having to perform your Africanness at the same time as you write’. This is a fairly provocative assertion for a white South African writer to put into the mouth of his white Australian heroine, and is made even more so by the fact that Egudu’s lecture discusses the work of several real African novelists, such as Amos Tutuola and Ben Okri, in some detail. In the fictional scene Egudu declines to rise to the provocation, and patronisingly pats Elizabeth on the shoulder. ‘If we were alone, she thinks, I would slap him.’ As readers we are puzzled by the violence of her reaction. She reflects scornfully that he hasn’t written a decent book in ten years, that he has become an entertainer, working the cruise ships for money and sexual opportunities. She is not surprised to see the Russian female singer from the ship’s band leaving his cabin early in the morning. When they meet on a shore expedition Elizabeth asks the woman, in German, a language they have imperfectly in common, what she sees in the African novelist. The answer is that his voice makes her ‘shudder’. Elizabeth accepts that as a valid answer, and acknowledges her own jealousy. It transpires that she and Egudu were lovers in Kuala Lumpur.

  ‘The oral poet,’ she said to him teasingly. ‘Show me what an oral poet can do.’ And he laid her out, lay upon her, put his lips to her ears, opened them, breathed into her, showed her.

  Now she feels excluded by her age from such miracles, but the memory ends the second Lesson on a positive note. Sex, which in Coetzee’s previous books has usually been represented as phallic, compulsive, obsessive, and rather joyless (I think particularly of Waiting for the Barbarians and Disgrace), appears in this book as something much more polymorphous, tender, unselfish and healing.

  In Lessons 3 and 4, ‘The Lives of Animals’, the novel comes closest to the Platonic dialogue in form. One is quickly drawn into the debate, fascinated by the thrust and parry of argument and counter-argument, and compelled to re-examine one’s own principles and assumptions – not only with reference to animal rights and vegetarianism. For these issues involve the definition of what it is to be human and where human beings stand in relation to the rest of creation, questions which have engaged the attention of several disciplines in recent years – ethology, sociobiology, anthropology, and cognitive science, as well as philosophy.

  To Elizabeth our oppression of animals – keeping them in captivity, submitting them to painful or denaturing experiments, and above all breeding them in order to kill them on an industrial scale – arises from an unwarranted privileging of man and the faculty of reason. It is because we believe animals do not have the power of reasoning and the self-consciousness that comes from it – the Cartesian cogito ergo sum – that we claim the right to dispose of them in our own interests. She therefore attacks reason as ‘a vast tautology . . . Of course reason will validate reason as the first principle of the universe – what else should it do?’ The ultimate value of existence is not reason but ‘fullness of being’, which animals enjoy in their natural state, and compared to which ‘Descartes’ key state . . . has . . . the empty feel of a pea rattling round in a shell’. There is a whiff here of the antihumanist views recently expounded by the British philosopher John Gray in Straw Dogs (2002), where he recommends a shamanic identification with animals as a corrective to human destructiveness and discontent. Elizabeth cites the philosopher Thomas Nagel’s celebrated paper, ‘What Is It Like To Be a Bat?’ and rejects his conclusion that the question is unanswerable. If we can imagine what it is like to be dead, if we can imagine what it is like to be a fictitious character, why should we not imagine what it is like to be a bat? (As it happens, some creative writing students in my novel, Thinks . . . [2001], are set this very exercise by their teacher.) Elizabeth has a very effective shot at imagining what it is like to be an ape subjected to a behaviourist experiment involving bananas placed out of reach:

  The bananas are there to make one think . . . One thinks: Why is he starving me? One thinks: What have I done? One thinks: Why has he stopped liking me? One thinks: Why does he not need these crates any more? But none of these is the right thought . . . The right thought to think is: How does one use the crates to reach the bananas?

  Elizabeth argues her case eloquently, but she also overstates it at several points. The mediating presence of her son John, pragmatic and tolerant, allows us to see this, and to observe an element of hysteria in her state of mind. In the car on the way to the airport at the end of her visit, she admits that sometimes she thinks she must be mad to believe that the ordinary decent people around her are all ‘participants in a crime of stupefying proportions . . . Yet every day I see the evidences . . . Corpses. Fragments of corpses that they have bought for money.’ She turns a tearful face to him, pleading for reassurance. All he can do is stop the car, take her in his arms and murmur, ‘There, there, it will soon be over.’ It is not clear whether he means this gruelling trip, or her life.

  At Appleton College Elizabeth startles a dinner table by saying that her vegetarianism ‘comes out of a desire to save my soul’. In Lesson 5, ‘The Humanities in Africa’, she encounters the Christian way to salvation in a particularly uncompromising form, when she goes to a university in South Africa to attend the conferment of an honorary degree on her sister, Blanche. Blanche was trained in classics, then switched to medicine, and became a nun. She runs a hospital in Zululand dedicated to the care of AIDS victims, where native healers work
alongside doctors practising modern medicine, and has achieved international celebrity as a result of a book she wrote about this enterprise. She is a kind of alter ego to Elizabeth – an equally forceful, radical, eloquent critic of modern society, but working from quite different beliefs and principles. Her address to the Faculty of Humanities has a family resemblance to Elizabeth’s lectures: ‘I have no message of comfort to bring to you . . . The message I bring is that you lost your way long ago.’ The humanities, she says, began in the Renaissance as an effort of textual scholarship focused on the Bible. This led its practitioners to learn Greek, which caused them to be seduced by Hellenism, and to depreciate the message of Christianity; but Hellenism as a philosophy of life has failed, and the humanities with it. They have failed because they offer ‘a secular vision of salvation’. Elizabeth (who severed her Catholic roots long ago) argues rather weakly against this absolutist position, handicapped by the fact that she has lost much of her own faith in the saving power of secular literature. She visits her sister’s hospital out of a sense of duty, admiring its care of the terminally sick, but resisting Blanche’s insistence that suffering is the central, authentic human experience: ‘To the people who come to Marianhill I promise nothing except that we will help them bear their cross.’ There is ancient sibling rivalry as well as ideological difference in their exchanges. Elizabeth feels that 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. ‘If you had put your money on a different Greek you might have stood a chance,’ says Blanche as they part. ‘Orpheus instead of Apollo. The ecstatic instead of the rational.’ Back home, in a kind of extended esprit de l’escalier, Elizabeth formulates a reply to her sister by recalling how as a young woman she brought comfort to an elderly neighbour dying painfully of cancer, first by posing for him bare-breasted, and later by a more intimate sexual contact, thus transcending the opposition of eros and agape, and enacting a fusion of spiritual and sensual ecstasy such as one sees in Renaissance religious paintings. But the message remains unsent – it would shock Blanche too much.