by David Lodge
In Lesson 6, a year after her controversial visit to Appleton College, Elizabeth is once again flying long-haul, this time to Amsterdam, to contribute to a conference on ‘The Problem of Evil’, regretting that she has let herself in for another demand on her diminishing energy and appetite for disputation. She soon has more reason for regret. What prompted her to accept the invitation was that it arrived while she was ‘under the evil spell’ of a book, a novel by Paul West, The Very Rich Hours of Count von Stauffenberg, about the aristocratic officer who led the ill-fated July Plot of 1944 to assassinate Hitler. She was impressed by the novel at first, but horrified and disgusted by its description of the execution of the conspirators, who were hanged on Hitler’s orders by the cruellest and most degrading method, and their death throes filmed for his delectation. That is a matter of record, but what particularly offended Elizabeth in the novel was the imagined behaviour of the hangman, who sadistically torments and humiliates the condemned men up to the point of death. ‘Through Hitler’s hangman a devil entered Paul West’, and she felt the brush of his leathery wing as she read this part of the book. It is, she thinks, ‘obscene’ – such things should not be thought, or written, or read. That is what she has come to Amsterdam to say. The title of her paper is ‘Witness, Silence and Censorship’. Paul West’s book is her main exemplum.
To her consternation she discovers that Paul West is himself attending the conference. How can she deliver this attack on his book with him sitting in the audience? It is, in a way, a darkly comic situation. She tries rewriting her paper, leaving out references to him and his book, but it is impossible. She looks covertly at the men at breakfast in the conference hotel, wondering which one is Paul West. Eventually he is pointed out to her and she confronts him, and warns him of the content of the paper she is going to deliver, not apologetically, but as a courtesy. To her irritation, he listens silently, and says nothing in reply.
As some, but probably not all, of Coetzee’s readers will know, Paul West is not a fictional character but a real novelist, who published The Very Rich Hours of Count von Stauffenberg in 1980. His CV is not unlike Coetzee’s, though less brilliant: born in England, but an American citizen, he has held a number of prestigious posts as a professor of literature, and writes literary novels which have won several awards. For a writer to introduce another, living writer as a character into his fiction, in such a prejudicial light, is a very unusual, perhaps unprecedented thing to do. One might speculate that Coetzee read The Very Rich Hours . . . with much the same reaction as Elizabeth’s, wanted to write about that experience, and felt that inventing a fictitious novel and novelist would not serve his purpose – indeed, would involve him in the same kind of ‘obscene’ imagining of which Elizabeth accuses West. (Though it must be said that there are some very nasty imagined tortures in Waiting for the Barbarians. There may be an element of self-accusation here; alternatively Coetzee may be implying that imagining the torture of real people is more corrupting than imagining the torture of fictional creations.) When she finally accosts him, ‘West, the real West, glances up from what he is reading, which seems, astonishingly, to be some kind of comic book’. In context the epithet ‘real’ distinguishes him from a man Elizabeth wrongly suspected of being West in the restaurant, but it also draws attention to the real existence of Paul West, and teases us with the possibility that Coetzee actually met him in circumstances not unlike these. No further reference is made to the comic book. It’s the kind of detail that sticks in one’s memory in real life simply because it was unexpected or incongruous, but as a signifier in the code of ‘realism’ its effect is to associate West with the crude exaggerations of comic books (‘Supply the particulars, allow the significations to emerge of themselves . . .’). The whole episode is a startling transgression of literary protocol, and one can’t help wondering what Paul West himself thinks of it. It ends in an empty corridor, without the meeting between heroine and antagonist, and the resolution of their conflict, that a well-formed story would normally require.
I have read West’s novel, and agree with Elizabeth’s literary judgement: it begins well, but falls off, especially towards the end, when the ghost of von Stauffenberg (who was summarily executed on the day of the abortive plot) observes and reports the horrible end of his fellow conspirators. There is a serious failure of tone in the fictional treatment of Hitler and his hangman, cranking up the horror when the known facts are horrific enough. Such subjects should certainly be handled with care – history and documentary probably being the best way – but Elizabeth surely goes too far in asserting that they should be sealed up and passed over in silence. 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.
Lessons 7 and 8 have not been previously published. ‘Eros’ consists of Elizabeth’s whimsical musing on sexual relations between gods and humans in myth. She imagines that the gods envy us our greater orgasmic ecstasy, which is ironically linked to our mortality. This rumination is prompted by reading a poem about Cupid and Psyche by Susan Mitchell, which reminds Elizabeth of meeting and being strongly attracted to the Black Mountain poet Robert Duncan when she was a young woman. Again real writers, one living (Mitchell), are brusquely drafted into Coetzee’s fiction to kick-start his heroine’s thoughts, which then meander entertainingly through literature and mythology. Thinking about Ulysses, however, Elizabeth makes a puzzling mistake:
I do not like that other world, writes Martha Clifford to her pen pal Leopold Bloom, but she lies: why would she write at all if she did not want to be swept off to another world by a demon lover?
In Joyce’s novel, Leopold Bloom receives a letter from Martha Clifford, a young typist with whom he is conducting a clandestine correspondence, in which she typed ‘world’ when she meant to write ‘word’ – evidently an obscene one which Bloom had used in his previous letter. This is quite clear from the context: ‘I called you naughty boy because I do not like that other world. Please tell me what is the real meaning of that word. Are you not happy in your home you poor little naughty boy?’ Bloom recalls the typo later, as he leaves the churchyard in the Hades episode, finding it appropriate to his thoughts about death: ‘I do not like that other world she wrote. No more do I.’ It seems implausible that Elizabeth, who has rewritten Ulysses from Molly Bloom’s point of view, would not know all this, but even more unlikely that Coetzee is unaware of it. So what is the point of making Elizabeth commit this howler (or bloomer)? It is another small enigma in a highly enigmatic book.
Lesson 8, ‘At the Gate’, brings the novel to its conclusion. Elizabeth, tired and hot, alights from a bus in some dusty provincial town, where there is a gate, and a gatekeeper, and a court with a panel of inquisitors who demand that she state her beliefs before she is given permission to pass through the gate. She says she has no beliefs – it is not compatible with her profession of writer. She can do an imitation of a belief if that will do. It will not. (We wonder what has happened to her passionate belief in the rights of animals.) She lugs her suitcase to a roughly constructed dormitory, and claims a wooden bunk with a greasy straw mattress, to think about revising her application. The dormitory resembles the huts of the death camps. Everything in this place reminds one of something encountered a hundred times before in books, plays, films: the Kafkaesque court, the idle customers at the café tables, the uniformed band that plays light music in the square, the stonewalling guardian of the Gate. If this is the threshold to the afterlife, Elizabeth thinks truculently, couldn’t they have come up with something more original? Or is it a purgatory especially designed for writers, to torture them mercilessly with clichés? It is a brilliant piece of writing, both funny and poignant. Elizabeth goes back repeatedly to the court, and repeatedly fails to satisfy her inquisitors. If she could say, ‘I believe in the irrepressible human spirit,’ she would pass, but she cannot perjure herself. She says sh
e believes in the little frogs that, when she was a child, survived in a semi-comatose state under tons of mud in the mudflats of the Dungannon river until the rains came, but the inquisitors stare at her and snigger. They think she is ‘confused’. Perhaps, then, Elizabeth is succumbing to dementia. Or perhaps she is a seer. She has a vision of a dog lying at the foot of the gate, blocking her way, ‘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 dog seems to have loped out of Disgrace, which ends with the hero dedicated to putting such unfortunate animals humanely out of their misery. Is Coetzee expressing his own loss of faith in literature here? The book’s Postscript, entitled ‘Letter of Elizabeth, Lady Chandos, to Francis Bacon’, is an ambiguous pointer, of complex provenance. It stands in the same relation to Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s ‘Letter of Lord Chandos to Lord Bacon’ (1902) as Elizabeth Costello’s The House on Eccles Street does to Ulysses, though on a much reduced scale. In von Hofmannsthal’s (entirely fictitious) text, Lord Chandos writes to Bacon, in 1603, to explain his ‘complete abandonment of literary activity’. He no longer trusts the connection between language and reality and is in a state of total apathy and despondency, occasionally alleviated by astonishing, mystical visions of the Infinite through the humblest things in creation. In Coetzee’s text Elizabeth Chandos, having had a sight of her husband’s letter, writes to assure Bacon that her husband is not mad, but she sounds on the verge of madness herself:
Save me, dear Sir, save my husband! Write! Tell him the time is not yet come, the time of the giants, the time of the angels. Tell him we are still in the time of fleas. Words no longer reach him, they shiver and shatter, it is as if (as if, I say), it is as if he is guarded by a shield of crystal. But fleas he will understand, the fleas and the beetles still creep past his shield, and the rats; and sometimes I his wife, yes, my Lord, sometimes I too creep through. Presences of the Infinite he calls us, and says we make him shudder; and indeed I have felt those shudders, in the throes of my raptures . . .
This makes a bit more sense when read in conjunction with von Hofmannsthal’s text, but its bearing on the main story is still problematic. Elizabeth Chandos’s letter seems to be simultaneously vouching for the authenticity of her husband’s mystical visions and begging the empirical, rational Lord Bacon to ‘save’ him from his ‘affliction’.
So what are we to make of the whole extraordinary book? Its first Lesson, it will be remembered, was that all texts are now open to infinite interpretation; but in spite of deconstruction we persist in trying to discern some kind of communicative intention in works of literature, for they do not come into existence by accident. The choice of a Renaissance voice to end this one is interesting. In its mixture of realistic narrative, myth, controversial polemic, Platonic dialogue, erotic interludes and gossipy allusions to fellow writers, it is more like a Renaissance prose work than the average modern novel. But Coetzee’s Elizabeth Chandos is of course a modern re-creation of a Renaissance personage, expressing a modern anxiety – as indeed was von Hofmannsthal’s Lord Chandos. The German writer’s text reflected a creative, intellectual and psychological crisis of his own, after which his work took a different direction. Perhaps Elizabeth Costello will prove a similar kind of turning point, though it comes much later in Coetzee’s career. Certainly one senses in the book’s implied author, as well as in its heroine, a disillusionment with the value our culture attributes to literature, a strong feeling that, in Marianne Moore’s words, ‘there are things that are important beyond all this fiddle’, and a kind of restiveness at being regarded as ‘a writer of world importance’. Ironically, its publication coincides with the award of the Nobel Prize, which will cement that burdensome crown still more firmly to Coetzee’s head.
Coetzee has never sought popularity or celebrity. His books are always unsettling, unexpected, and uncomforting. He seems a rather aloof figure in the contemporary literary world, who seldom gives interviews, and often declines to collect his prizes in person. But he is one of the few living writers routinely described as ‘great’. He deserves the Nobel because he is exceptionally intelligent and a master of his medium. If he goes to Stockholm the acceptance speech should be memorable – but what will they serve for the main course at the banquet?
POSTSCRIPT
I don’t know what was on the menu at the banquet in Stockholm, but one can safely assume that there was a vegetarian option. When I wrote the concluding paragraph of my review, I confused or conflated two separate discourses: the acceptance speech which a recipient of the Nobel Prize gives at the banquet and the lecture which he or she gives on a separate occasion, and which is usually some kind of personal credo or manifesto. Both of Coetzee’s addresses (which are accessible on the Nobel website) were characteristically idiosyncratic. His very brief banquet speech began with a domestic anecdote:
The other day, suddenly, out of the blue, while we were talking about something entirely different, my partner Dorothy burst out as follows: ‘On the other hand,’ she said, ‘on the other hand, how proud your mother would have been! What a pity she isn’t still alive!’
The assembled guests were left to speculate about the tenor of the previous discussion of the prize implied by ‘On the other hand’. Coetzee made the somewhat curmudgeonly reply to Dorothy that if his mother were still alive she would be ninety-nine and a half and probably be suffering from senile dementia. But on his feet at the banquet he conceded that he had missed the point:
For whom, anyway, do we do the things that lead to Nobel Prizes if not for our mothers?
‘Mommy, Mommy, I won a prize!’
‘That’s wonderful, my dear. Now eat your carrots before they get cold.’
The speech concluded with a gracious thank-you to the Nobel Foundation, but its general effect was surely a gently teasing deflation of the significance of the prize.
Coetzee’s Nobel lecture was equally unconventional, being in the form of a literary fiction, or metafiction, about – not Elizabeth Costello, as readers of his recent novel might have anticipated – but Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, a character whose story has long haunted Coetzee’s imagination, and which he reworked in his novel Foe (1986). Entitled ‘He and His Man’, the ‘lecture’ presents Robinson Crusoe as an elderly widower, living a quiet retired life in Bristol, musing on his experiences on the desert island, while apparently receiving information from ‘his man’ about a host of curious and interesting subjects – the tame ducks used as decoys in the fen country, a primitive guillotine once employed in Halifax, the horror of the plague in London, and so on. We infer that ‘his man’ is Daniel Defoe, and that the author has been corresponding with his character. Then it is revealed that Robinson Crusoe is actually writing these reports himself:
The writing of his adventures has put him in the habit of writing . . . In the evening by candlelight he will take out his papers and sharpen his quills and write a page or two of his man . . .
Author and character have changed places; Crusoe is writing Daniel Defoe. The story, which is beautifully written, is a parable about the mysterious relationship between the author as a real human being and the author self-created and encountered in the products of his imagination. ‘How are they to be figured, this man and he? As master and slave? As brothers, twin brothers? As comrades in arms? Or as enemies, foes?’
Coetzee’s most recent novel, Slow Man (2005), continues this metafictional theme, and reintroduces Elizabeth Costello. The story is set in Australia and the central character is a retired, somewhat misanthropic divorcé, Paul Rayment, who in the first chapter is knocked off his bike by a car, injuring his leg so badly that it has to be amputated. The shock, pain, anger, humiliation and indignities of the accident and its aftermath are all evoked in the first third of the novel with consummate skill. The illusion of reality is com
plete, as Rayment argues testily with medics and friends about his handicap, and begins to have tender feelings for his down-to-earth Croatian home help. Then in Chapter Thirteen there is a ring on Rayment’s doorbell and Elizabeth Costello marches into his flat and his life. She announces that he is a character in a novel she is writing, or trying to write:
‘You came to me,’ she says. ‘In certain respects I am not in command of what comes to me. You came, along with the pallor and the stoop and the crutches and the flat you hold to so doggedly and the photograph collection and all the rest. Also along with Miroslav Jokic the Croatian refugee – yes, that is his name, Miroslav, his friends call him Mel – and your inchoate attachment to his wife.’
‘It is not inchoate.’
‘Yes it is.’
Throughout the rest of the novel Elizabeth constantly interferes in Rayment’s life, criticises his actions, tells him what he should do instead, and generally gets on his nerves. One can read this narrative as an objectification, or dramatisation, of the dialogue of a writer’s mind with itself, as he struggles with a recalcitrant work-in-progress. It is written with wit and ingenuity, but it risks alienating readers who resent having the enjoyable illusion of reality shattered (which was the reaction of several reviewers). Instead Slow Man offers a more specialised, even perverse pleasure, the literary equivalent of trying to force the identical poles of two magnets together, a sensation at once frustrating and fascinating. Rayment and Elizabeth belong to different planes of being between which there is an irreducible logical gap. It is therefore impossible to ‘make sense’ of the story. We encounter a narrative aporia, comparable to, but starker than, the one presented by Nabokov’s Pnin. If Rayment is ‘real’ then Elizabeth is mad (as Rayment thinks at first) in claiming he is a character in her book. But her intimate knowledge of his life proves she is not mad. If we have read Elizabeth Costello we know Elizabeth is herself a fictional character, a novelist, and to some extent a surrogate for, or alter ego of, the real J. M. Coetzee. Elizabeth therefore is to Coetzee as Rayment is (she claims) to Elizabeth. This makes Rayment a doubly fictional character – yet paradoxically he seems more real, more convincing, than Elizabeth. The novel ends with Rayment giving his alleged creator her quittance: