2.1. The Novel’s Theses
The lessons that make up
Elizabeth Costello constitute a critique of literature and the humanities through the (auto)biographical fiction of an authorial figure [
13]. In the first six lessons, Elisabeth Costello’s lectures on literature are embedded in the personal everydayness of the speaker in a narrative that openly shows the “wiring” behind realism as a literary style by the real author. Though the actual author never interrupts the narrative to rupture the fictional world, the exposure of realism as a fictional mode is achieved by the various metafictional techniques of self-reflexivity. Furthermore, no one is allowed to appear either glamorous or authoritative, nothing goes without being challenged, undermined, passionately and personally criticized. At first, Elisabeth Costello is introduced in good realist form: we are given her date of birth, present age, countries of residence, and marital history, after which follows the explanation that she is traveling all the way from Australia to Williamstown, Pennsylvania, to receive one of the most generous literary prizes, the Stowe prize, at Appleton College, and give a speech at the prize ceremony.
The speech itself is then a total subversion of the already tired realism of this story. The title “What is realism?” immediately launches into a description of Kafka’s famous story “Report to an Academy”, briefly discussed as proof of the end of realism, of the debunking of the realist illusion by its exposure as just that, an illusion, and by the multitude of uncertainties and ambiguities of Kafka’s story that are not merely epistemological ones, but deeply ontological ones, shared by herself and her contemporaries. The son’s argument with his mother on the appropriateness and relevance of her topic and its development turns into another kind of argument on realism and animal lives. The chapter ends with his view of the open mouth of his sleeping mother, and while staring down into it and imagining the rest of her inner organs, he protests (in his mind): “No, he tells himself, that is not where I come from, that is not it” ([
1], p. 34); yet another rejection of realism. The protest is not merely attributable to a kind of (male) squeamishness with regard to the (female) human anatomy, but against the reduction of reality to a purely materialist vision of being.
The graphic anatomical orality of this ending is then followed by a look at the claims of orality in African literature. The novel in English lays claim to a very specific matrix of genesis in eighteenth-century England, where the insistence on realism—as opposed to the excess of the romance tradition in prose fiction—has the most formative and polemical role. The rise of the realist mode in prose fiction however, cannot be separated from the focus on the individual as guarantor of the truth of experience and of individualism in the growing literary industry. These remarks by no means exhaust the parameters, context or conditions for the origins of the English novel, but they do matter in pointing out the radical difference of this genre from other traditions of storytelling elsewhere, and therefore raise the question of its universality. In chapter/lesson 2, “The Novel in Africa”, Elisabeth Costello finds herself accepting an invitation to give a lecture series on a cruise ship. There she encounters an old acquaintance and former lover, the African writer Emmanuel Egudu, whom she describes as having ceased to produce anything of substance for some years now, cashing in on his identity as African novelist to make a living on such cruises. His speech, given in full, offers well-known arguments on orality in African culture, the essential difference and distinction of Africans and other ideas known from the Negritude movement. He presents these in support of the essential difference of the African novel from the European novel. The speech is highly contested by Elisabeth in an exchange she has with the speaker in the presence of two lay members of the audience, who also have their viewpoints. The disagreements of Elisabeth, the elusive answers of her interlocutor, the entirely different approach of the non-writers and the sexual jealousy with which the chapter ends, hinting that perhaps Elisabeth’s vehement disagreements were not entirely fuelled by disinterested aesthetic judgments, all serve to undermine any pretence to rational authority, yet also sustain a polyphonic narrative debate. It is a debate that has affected for some decades now the formerly facile assumptions of academic departments of (English) literature, especially in Anglophone countries. It is worth noting also how this chapter, as the previous one put forward critiques and critical debates that arise from a comparative perspective. The legitimacy of comparativism itself will come under attack in the section to follow.
If the arguments of the previous lesson are partly fuelled by personal feelings, this issue is brought into the foreground of the following two lessons. The Lives of Animals picks up and most fully develops the “hobbyhorse”, as her son calls it, of Elisabeth Costello. Again, it is an invitation to speak that she has accepted. This time she is to give two lectures at her son’s college. Rather than talk about her novels, she flouts disciplinary divisions and institutional conventions and talks about animals: their status as living beings, but especially the industrial production, slaughter and consumption of animals, linking this vast topic and its ethical ramifications with literature and philosophy as two different ways humans approach the differences between human and (other) animal being. From an ethical it becomes an ontological and also an aesthetic discussion, breaking down not only the distinctions between humans and animals, but also trampling the prerogatives of disciplinary specialization and, for some, committing sacrilege by making a comparative reference to the mass murder of Jews during the Holocaust with the industrial mass production and murder of animals to fulfill dietary and other purposes of humans. Here, the greatest diversity of ideological positions, are shown, once again, to have personal roots, to be inexorably products of embodied and ideologically embedded existences.
Thus far we have been exposed to the limitations of realism, the hidden and unhidden biases of universalism, the arrogance and error of human supremacism in the animal world, based typically on the spurious prerogative of language. Each chapter underlines and undermines the continuing fallacies of humanism without, however, offering an easy way out, or total refutation, of humanism. The next two lessons are highly complementary chapters and also return us to issues in the previous lessons: the interrelation of the aesthetic and the ethical. In “The Humanities in Africa”, the writer has a debate with her sister, a Catholic missionary nurse who runs a hospital for dying children in Africa. The debate is occasioned by the indictment of the humanities in her Sister Bridget/Blanche’s acceptance speech for an honorary doctorate. The Sister argues that the humanities failed and are dead, for some centuries now. The contemporary disciplines comprising the humanities, especially literary studies, constitute a form of study that perverted from its original raison d’être, i.e., as a means for the salvation of the soul through the development of the knowledge and method needed for Western Europeans to read and interpret the Greek New Testament for themselves, into a secular and fragmented set of disciplines with no ultimate purpose or usefulness in the world. The value of literature, especially the written text, is, thus, contested by two independent cultural histories: Negritude and African oral traditions of performance (the thesis of the Nigerian writer’s talk), and late Medieval and Renaissance Europe or Western Christendom on the other. The aesthetic dimension is prevalent in the African contestation, the ethical dimension in the European one. What then, could be the point, purpose or project of the humanities today? On what basis could one argue for their legitimation? The collective assemblage that constitutes the “machinic desire” of this novel present key facets of this contemporary problem, inviting us, as readers, writers, authors, students and teachers, to engage in the discussion. The outcome cannot be known but the engagement itself implies a commitment to salvaging what is worthwhile, refuting what can no longer be accepted as valid or relevant, and perhaps a move towards a new future for the humanities, a post-humanist one in many respects.
The next lesson, “The problem of Evil”, picks up from the earlier indictment of the Catholic church as promoting an aestheticization of suffering by its manner of focusing on the representation of the Passion and the dying Christ on the cross. It also links up the theme of the Holocaust from the chapters on the lives of animals with the problem of evil in general, and specifically, the question of whether evil should be represented in literature. Elisabeth Costello has been invited to a conference on the theme of evil in Amsterdam, where, just having read a fictional account of the trials and execution of those German officers who had planned to assassinate Hitler, she has been stunned by the author’s uncanny ability to get inside the head of the brutal executioner and Nazi cruelty, to take the readers to scenes that in fact had no witnesses, apart from the executioner, who presumably never gave an account. Feeling “touched by evil”, she intuits that the author must also have been touched by evil in his imaginative historical description of their degradation, suffering and slow deaths. Disconcerted by the unexpected presence of the actual author in the audience, she contemplates a variety of solutions (mostly self-censorship) but in the end decides to go ahead and read the original paper.
Elisabeth argues that of such evil we must be silent, because of the power of its affect not just on the mind, but on the soul, too. Her view is that everything affects the soul; “This soul is”, as Jean-François Lyotard refers to it, “but the awakening of an affectability” [
14]. It is a view that also tacitly aligns her with the aesthetics of the classical Greek world, since in ancient tragedy, the representation of extreme violence on the stage was forbidden, thus, the aestheticization of violence was elided. Despite violence and human evil being at the heart of tragedy, it was the meditation on the motives and effects of violence that mattered. The two stances, Elisabeth’s and the classical one converge on the agreement that everything has an effect on the soul, that representation of violence aestheticizes violence—she describes herself as being excited and carried away by the narration—and that in the case of the graphic depiction of evil, these effects carry too high a risk.
Contrary to the dangers inherent in imagining and depicting evil, the lesson “Eros” probes the sexual relations between humans and gods/goddesses in ancient Greek myths; the greater curiosity behind this attempt to imagine sexual intercourse with a god or goddess is whether such intimacy would allow one “to
get a sense of, a god’s being?” ([
1], p. 188). Perhaps this is the most untimely of the meditations since, as Costello notes immediately after, it is “a question that no one seems to ask anymore” ([
1], p. 188). She then offers her own articulation of this question: “
Other modes of being. That may be a more decent way of phrasing it. Are there other modes of being besides what we call the human into which we can enter; and if there are not, what does that say about us and our limitations?” ([
1], p. 188) In other words, we return to the question of the limits of the imagination that was first raised in the lesson on the poets and the animals. Moving once more in favor of the direction of the sympathetic imagination, of feeling, both as sensation and sentiment, the chapter concludes with a reference to love as offering a vision of the pattern that brings and holds disparate entities together.
The playful metaphysical musings of the lesson “Eros” are continued in the final lesson. “At the Gate” is a fantasy of the afterlife and judgment in an obvious and signaled postmodern, parodic take on Kafka’s “Before the Law”. Elizabeth Costello must provide a statement of beliefs to a board of judges in order to be allowed to pass through the gate into a realm of brilliant light. Her initial resistance to this demand, on the grounds that belief runs counter to the vocation of the writer, is dissolved in the end by the surprising epiphany that “She lives by belief, she works by belief, she is a creature of belief” ([
1], p. 222). Equally surprising, perhaps only to the readers, is her exasperation at her tendency to view everything around her, even in the afterlife, as and through literariness. Her own final words in this lesson are the exclamation: “A curse on literature!” when the vision of an old dog lying beyond the gate prompts the automatic production in her mind of “the anagram GOD-DOG” ([
1], p. 222). The writer’s exasperation at her conditioning that produces the hubristic perception of the most sacred word, leads her then to the double hubris of cursing her own confessed faith in literature. Literature, and by extension language, can also block one’s apprehension of reality and should not be mistaken for an adequate path to all truths either since not only the signifier and the referent are arbitrarily linked but the sign may easily slip into or be substituted by another sign.
This curse emitted by Elizabeth Costello nevertheless realizes itself, albeit anachronistically, in the post-script, which refers us to the 1902 letter “
Ein Brief” by Hugo von Hoffmansthal, in which a fictional character, Lord Chandos, writes a letter denouncing all literary endeavour to a real historical person, Francis Bacon. As is well known, this fictional letter was the proclamation of a truthful statement by Hoffmansthal himself to end his short but acclaimed career as a poet and turn instead to the writing of librettos. Coetzee provides a brief quote from Hofmannstahl’s letter:
At such moments even a negligible creature, a dog, a rat, a beetle, a stunted apple tree, a cart track winding over the hill, a mossy stone, counts more for me than a night of bliss with the most beautiful, most devoted mistress. These dumb and in some cases inanimate creatures press toward me with such fullness, such presence of love, that there is nothing in range of my rapturous eye that does not have life. It is as if everything, everything that exists, everything I can recall, everything my confused thinking touches on, means something.
He then gives a second letter, written by an invented wife, Lady Elizabeth Chandos, some twenty days supposedly after the date of the original by her husband. It is a secret letter to Francis Bacon, in which she confesses to having read her husband’s letter, prompting her to write her own in an attempt to override the authority of her husband’s account of his subjective experience for the sake of their conjugal happiness, as well as for the good of all.
What is this fictional supplement to the Lord Chandos letter doing as a postscript to a book that has chronicled the crisis of literature and the humanities, as institutions in their present form, through the crises of its academic author-protagonist?
Coetzee’s rewriting, or supplementation of the Chandos letter from the perspective of his wife, Lady Chandos, is an appeal on behalf of her husband. Here, postmodernism reads romanticism (more specifically, it is possible to situate the Lord Chandos Letter within romantic decadence or romantic modernism). A comparative reading of the original with this hypertextual version will point to, amongst other things the continued crisis of literature that has now deepened into a crisis of language itself. Retreating from the extreme affectation of the soul in the experience of sublimity, Lady Chandos asks for a return of attention to the exigencies of the everyday, and through its 9/11 dating, to the ethical urgency for action, for words to be
useful again for doing things. Though the original letter by Hoffmansthal does not include a direct explanation of why the addressee should be the eminent English humanist, Bacon, Coetzee’s Lady Chandos provides us with a clue: “he writes to you, as I write to you, who are known above all men to select your words and set them in place and build your judgments as a mason builds a wall with bricks” ([
1], p. 230). Here, rather than looking to the gods or God (
i.e., the ancient Greek or Judaeo-Christian ultimate form of authority—a Lacanian big Other), the letter issues an appeal to a great figure of tradition (Hoffmansthal, Lord Bacon), an appeal for
salvation, and it would seem, for a new “golden age” of literature, of culture, in which transcendence will again be possible.
2.2. From the Crisis of Language to the Crisis of Aisthesis
If from the realm of the afterlife Elizabeth Costello has met her fellow in Lady Elizabeth Chandos, the impassioned and direct plea for the relevance of literature, for a new (post-)humanism, and therefore for a newly-oriented humanities, would not be incompatible with the unease, doubts, uncertainties, critique and crises of the more hesitant and guarded postmodern author, Elizabeth Costello. Nor, indeed, would it be implausible to divine some share of that unease in the situation of the factual author, J.M. Coetzee, who between 1997 and 2003, the period of the writing of all the sections of
Elizabeth Costello had suffered the condensation of these crises of literature and the humanities in his own literary, academic life [
15].
Considering how the Greek origin of the word
crisis (‘
krisis’) signifies both the act of forming a judgment and the condition of suffering, it is possible to identify a link between the last two sections of the book. It is a crisis of legitimation, for the author/creator and for literature/language that links the intertextual dialog with Kafka and Hoffmanstahl in these final sections of
Elizabeth Costello. If, instead of the allusion to “Before the Law”, we consider Kafka’s short story “The Silence of the Sirens”, in which modernism reverses the matrix of the mythical encounter between Odysseus and the sirens in order to create an allegory of its present condition, a further illumination of the postscript can be effected. Here Kafka rewrites the siren song episode as an enigma which, even more uncannily than in Hoffmanstahl’s prefiguring of Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s reading of the episode in
Dialectic of Enlightenment [
16]. In their first chapter, Adorno and Horkeimer read the cunning episode where Odysseus has himself tied to the mast of the ship and blocks his crew’s ears so they do not hear the sirens and be enthralled by their song or his own cries to untie him as an early sign of the progressive alienation of modern Western humanity from nature through the subject’s reliance on instrumental reason, and of the relegation of art (epic/narrative art) to impotent decoration. Kafka’s sailor revisits the site of the Sirens’ island but finds tragedy turned into farce since the sirens do not sing to him. Is this an answer/punishment to humanity for resisting their epic/lyrical power of sublimity leading to death? Or is it just Kafka’s perennial fear of not being able to write? The condensed polysemy of this new myth allows for more than one answer. If we consider the Homeric episode, Kafka’s story, Adorno and Horkeimer’s polemical interpretation together with Hoffmansthahl’s “Ein brief” and Coetzee’s supplement as a single palimpsest, we may look back to Kafka’s revisitation of the episode in “The Silence of the Sirens” as the first moment of the absurd, of the siren’s threat having become the threat of meaninglessness, of lack of signification as well as significance. It foretells the opposite of being overwhelmed by the power, meaning and beauty of the original siren song. The end comes not by fire, but by ice; the fear of being consumed by transcendence is replaced by the horror of being abandoned to an impermeable solipsism. However, here again we note the uncanny resemblance of Kafka’s story to the theoretical re-articulation of the sublime by Jean-François Lyotard in terms of the threat of privation, of the “Is it happening?” no longer occurring. Kafka’s story can be ready as an exemplary fantastic narration of that catastrophe.
Thus, in the postmodern moment we have a revisitation of both modernist and late romantic anxieties. In Lyotard there is the fear or dread of privation; in Kafka the terrifying silence of the sirens is dreadful for the utter lack of emotional affect. Yet both stories report the disaster of aesthesis, a phrase used by Lyotard to describe the Burkean and Kantian interface in the discourse of the sublime. The disaster of aesthesis indicates a problem with subjectivity; what happens if/when there is no “anima minima” to enable sublimity and the “Is it happening?” of art/literature? Additionally, if one moves on from Lyotard’s consideration of the issue, we must ask, as do Coetzee’s later works in their entirety: how does literature/the arts in general and their study in the university figure in the project of sustaining this “anima minima”?
Truth, anima minima, the arts and humanities, the future (of the) university, but also literature and sublimity, from which we started, are, for these writers, and the connections I’ve drawn between them, intricately and inextricably linked. For those postmodernist or late modernist writers and thinkers, such as Coetzee and Adorno, the sublime becomes either the object of an impossible yearning/haunting, inadmissible and irreconcilable with the negativity bequeathed by much modernism (Coetzee’s view) or plain irrelevant if not ridiculous for the contemporary consideration of aesthetics, art, literature, the humanities. However, though Adorno contends, in his
Aesthetic Theory, that suffering is the secret and inalienable
raison d’être of art, its special prerogative that justifies its continuing relevance, he virtually rejects the sublime, out of the bias held against Romanticism [
17]. To refer once more to Paul Celan, it is his work that vindicated lyrical poetry after Auschwitz; in his poetics the necessity and possibility of a sublimity stemming from extreme suffering is present even as it impossibly shrinks representational poetics into near-immateriality, thus intensifying the emotive and performative force of the poem in the direction of a very Kantian, very Lyotardian also, understanding of the sublime. For Lyotard, the sublime is not just now, to cite the title of Barnett Newman’s 1948 essay, “The Sublime is Now”, which he refers to, it is also necessary [
18]. For Kafka, too, it was necessary; without it no literature was worthwhile. Is this not what his 1904 letter to his schoolmate Oskar Pollak famously says when he disdainfully dismisses books that leave him indifferent, declaring as his principle of poetics a principle of
aesthesis: “a book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us” [
19]? Aesthetics has replaced, and guides, poetics in modernity and postmodernity alike.
If not achieving the sublime, these works gesture towards it, or point to its absence, since it is also not only the task of the writer, the task of the book, but also the task of the reader. As Maurice Blanchot reminds us, the book does not exist until it is read [
20], which means that in the hands of the reader, the book may or may not become the work, may or may not attain the function of the axe, since, in Heideggerian terms, the axe-book would remain a mere tool, not a work of art, without a “sea inside us” to act upon, even if frozen. What happens if, where once there was a frozen sea, there now is a desert? What good may an axe be in the desert? Here, I refer once more to Lyotard’s postulation of the
anima minima, of the bare modicum of subjectivity still needed, with all its metaphysics, if there is to be
aesthesis.
Thus, in these last three parts, what seemed initially perhaps to be a strange series of three digressions due to their formal and uniformal palimpsestuousness, turn out rather to be a literary enactment of the previous chapters’ more diegetic, dramatic and theoretical discourse of Coetzee’s Costello, who on and off had referred to literature as salvation, to the entire history of the humanities in Europe as having been such an attempt. A failed and perhaps mislead attempt, to put it in other words, to achieve what Plato called “the care of the soul”; an ideal, but the only ideal that could ever make Europe worthwhile according to the Czech philosopher Jan Patočka in
Plato and Europe [
21]. What directions this solicitude over the anima minima, the
psyche or, as one prefers, the spirit or soul, may take can be gauged by the impassioned contestations and experiments in the history of humanist scholarship and the contemporary humanities, which Coetzee’s highly metafictional novels manage to distill and dramatically convey outside the ivory tower of the university.
Coetzee dramatizes the relations between lay and professional readers, literary authors and academics, poets and philosophers, religious thinkers and secularists in an intricate web of personal relations that underpin and affect the professional disputes. Laying all bare, getting into the consciousness now of the son of the famous mother, now of the writer herself, Coetzee issues a challenge to two major pillars of the world of letters and the humanities per se: academe and the institution of the author. Both are powerful institutions emerging from modern European history that nonetheless today and, arguably, for more than a few decades now, are experiencing a severe crisis.
Elizabeth Costello’s linking of the question of literature to the purpose of the humanities and to the university—a link which, according to Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe in The Literary Absolute characterizes (Early German) Romanticism, and by extension therefore, our own, still, concept of the liberal arts in the university—continues in the next novel Coetzee published, Diary of a Bad Year.