In his great study The Historical Novel, Georg Lukács draws a parallel between the novels of Sir Walter Scott and Hegel’s philosophy of history. But he also notes that “Scott had no knowledge of Hegel’s philosophy and had he come across it would probably not have understood a word.” The point is not that Scott was a dummy, but that the Marxist critic has to say the smart, philosophical things for him. Scott could only write these epochal works. We must explain them in ways he would never have been able to write or understand.
The contemporary novelist is different, in that she has foreseen the shopworn theoretical appropriations of her work—even if this appropriation is still allowed to proceed and guarantee a lasting and lucrative place on college syllabi. In an older generation, Salman Rushdie, J.M. Coetzee, and Toni Morrison, and (as Nicholas Dames has argued) among newer writers, Teju Cole, Ben Lerner, and Jennifer Egan, all already know their Hegel (so to speak—their Adorno, their Said, their Derrida). If we critics come onto the scene to explain their works, it is only to trace the steps of a foregone conclusion. Gayatri Spivak’s readings of J.M. Coetzee often feel this way: what can the postcolonial academic critic say that the novelist has not already foreseen and brilliantly “hidden”? (Elizabeth Costello has produced at least one such masterful reading, by the philosopher Cora Diamond.)
Undoubtedly Coetzee has constructed a puzzle for us: Is this what he thinks? Why does he not just come out and say it? The device of the book and its tireless parading of content (in the form of lectures, responses, debates) has encouraged many academic papers about its engagement with philosophy, animal rights, as well as studies of Coetzee’s self-reflexivity and distance.
The book all but dictates this response. For instance, when Elizabeth Costello the character opines that the traditional novel is “an exercise in making the past coherent,” we can take the bait and ask if Elizabeth Costello is a traditional novel? Does it make the past coherent? Is “she” coherent enough as a “person” that we should ascribe this “belief” to “her”? Or, when Elizabeth voices her suspicion of rationalism—“Understanding a thing often looks to me like playing with one of those Rubik cubes. Once you have made all the little bricks snap into place, hey presto, you understand.”—are we supposed to apply this suspicion to our own literary hermeneutics?
But we do not have to play along. Elizabeth Costello does not get to set the terms of its reading, no more than any other book. No one takes Tolstoy’s own reading of War and Peace (the second epilogue) seriously. Dante would not have understood why a reader would read the Inferno without desiring to pass to Paradiso. Sterne’s Tristam Shandy has as complicated a framework of ideas and voices as Dostoevsky or Coetzee, but it is not necessary to read Sterne’s sermons or Locke’s philosophy to get the joke. Coetzee does not get to pick the terrain (“traditional novel,” “coherence,” “belief”) on which we read his book.
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The topic of the book is inadequacy. (Not, as James Wood thought he detected, death.) The inadequacy of the lover to be the thing desired. The inadequacy of words on a page to stand up and proclaim, this is what I mean! The inadequacy of the performer to the role. The inadequacy (or refusal) of the speaker to comply with the terms of the invitation to speak. The inadequacy of our consciousness to imagine the experiences of other beings. The inadequacy of a conference or lecture to respond to a topic like evil. The inadequacy of our “beliefs” to give an account of ourselves.
And then the response of the character, Elizabeth Costello, to this piling-on of disappointments, frustrations, cross purposes, impossibilities, and impositions.
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In the first chapter (Coetzee calls them “lessons” but we do not have to), Elizabeth receives a prize from an American college, for which she is expected to give a public address. —She queries her son, an academic, “What exactly do they want from me?”, but none of his practical, immediate answers satisfy her. — “It seems a great ordeal to put oneself through, for no good reason. I should have asked them to forget the ceremony and send the cheque in the mail,” she says. —“It doesn’t work that way, I am afraid, Mother. If you accept the money, you must go through with the show… It’s the only way they have… They want to honour you. It is the best way they can think of doing that.”
Elizabeth is a withholding mother, an uncharismatic public speaker, a frustrating interview. As a public literary figure, she knows and resents what people want from her; her strategy is to pretend not to understand, so as to throw their presumption back in their faces. “No one in this place wanted to hear about realism,” the subject of her lecture, her son tells her. Still, the son has sex with an attractive academic editor, not because of anything about himself, “but because he is his mother’s son.”
Elizabeth asks aggressive questions for which she already knows the answer. She foists her morbid self-concerns—her age, her impending death, her vanished looks—upon unwilling audiences. She scores “cheap points” hectoring people about meat-eating, by making polarizing comparisons to the Holocaust. At all times she seems bent on making someone else feel bad or uncomfortable or challenged. —“That is the note on which…the proceedings [come] to a close: acrimony, hostility, bitterness… [Her son] is sure that is not what [the prize committee] wanted. Well, they should have asked him before they invited his mother. He could have told them.”
Elizabeth’s sister is a missionary worker in Africa. They disagree about the value of the humanities, about religion, about the prospects of meaning for a human life… but they are interchangeable as hostile, prickly, icy old women. When her son says that he has not had time to ask her about the sudden intensity of her concern for animals, Elizabeth brushes aside the excuse: “A better explanation… is that I have not told you why, or dare not tell you.” Her sister concludes a lecture by announcing, “I do not belong among you and have no message of comfort to bring to you.”
It is a strange thing to keep doing, showing up places and disappointing people, telling them how little you can comply with their expectations or needs. At one point, she delivers a tirade, a judgment of obscenity, against an author who is literally in the audience, proclaiming that “the consequences have arrived,” in the form of her unseemly, unsolicited gripe.
The question of the book, then, is what would you have to think about yourself to justify being such an odious thorn in the side of everyone? And here is where Coetzee’s book is remarkable, because we can enter into Elizabeth’s passions, the way she sees things, her inconveniences and fears and regrets, the indignities that she goes through. Even her confusions: “She is not sure, as she listens to her own voice, whether she believes any longer in what she is saying… On the other hand, she no longer believes very strongly in belief.” —When she declares that she is out to save her soul, we can weigh this concern. When she is cornered into saying what she considers the truth, what voices she will speak for, there is unmistakable self-reflexiveness in her answer: “Do you think the guilty do not suffer, too?”
Finally, Elizabeth’s answers, her belief, her agonized, pressurized judgments and self-castigation, are indefensible. I mean, this is not a reading of her character, this is the plot: she is indefensible. Whatever writing, believing, advocating, confessing, challenging, repeating, are supposed to do on their own—they don’t do.
