Elizabeth Costello

         Elizabeth Costello is now seen as in her more rounded, more complicated life.  Moving beyond, and before, (and including), the Tanner Lectures, Costello’s complexities are described through other lectures around the world – ones that she either gives or attends.  All of these events happen during her later years in life, and each force her to reconsider, to contemplate, to question her own arguments.  In each lecture Costello seems to be met with awkward misunderstandings, resentment, anger, and questioning, yet, it is she who is her biggest critic.  These sections, or lecture segments, are “lessons.”  While there are multiple similarities between Costello and her creator, despite the twelve-year age difference, it seems as though these lessons are written for her, or him, or both. Which one or both, it is difficult to say.  So many of Coetzee’s textual references to other texts usually pan out to be just another case of fiction.  It is for this reason that I found “Lesson 6: The Problem of Evil” to be so intriguing; Paul West is real as is his book The Very Rich Hours of Count von Strauffenberg. 

            This discovery makes me consider what else could be real within this chapter.  Costello is reading West’s book on Hitler and the holocaust when she receives her invitation to lecture in Amsterdam.  There are specific areas in this Lesson that lead me to believe that the anger she feels from reading this book express an anger that in reality is directly linked to Coetzee.  Not only does Costello’s experience in this chapter appear to be a desire of Coetzee’s to express his own frustrations, but the narrator in this section provides evidence that my assumption may possible be factual. 

            Breaking away from the text’s narration style, the question of “where could West have got his information” (158), is followed by a fifteen line rant of anger:

“Could there really have been witnesses who went home that night and, before they forgot, before memory, to save itself, went blank, wrote down, in words that must have scorched the page, an account of what they had seen, down to the words the hangman spoke to the souls consigned to his hands, fumbling old men for the most part, stripped of their uniforms, togged out for the final event in prison cast-offs, serge trousers caked with grime, pullovers full of moth-holes, no shoes, no belts, their false teeth and their glasses taken from them, exhausted, shivering, their hands in their pockets to hold up their pants, whimpering with fear, swallowing their tears, having to listen to this coarse creature, this butcher with last week’s blood caked under his fingernails, taunt them, telling them what would happen when the rope snapped tight, how the shit would run down their spindly old-man’s legs, how their limp old-man’s penises would quiver one last time”  (158).

The evil on the pages and the evil that now circulates through West’s body for having written his “obscenities,” are vividly recounted by the narrator as being the feelings harbored by Costello.  This break in narration style suggests to me that the topic at hand seems to be having its effect on the narrator, just as much as they do for Costello herself.  This break is a possible complicated link between them, Costello and narrator, and Coetzee.  In addition, the comment that, “she can discourse on censorship in her sleep” (160), seems too close to Coetzee for her not to be him and therefore, for the narrator not be intertwined in the knowledge of both.

            Going back to Paul West, is seems as though Coetzee may have found his book to be upsetting and evil, and though Coetzee’s interactions with West, if any, are unknown, there seems to be something to be said regarding Costello’s interactions, or lack thereof, with Paul West.  When she confronts West prior to her lecture, she is met with a nonresponsive Paul West.  She explains the contents of her lecture and West only stares in some other direction. She asks West direct questions to which there is no response. She finally thanks him for listening and still there is no response. Coetzee has written a chapter in which Paul West, a real person, is spoken directly to, by Costello, and then spoken directly about in Costello’s lecture, yet, Coetzee does not give West words, or even a hint of having a voice.  There is an odd one-sided conversation that is taking place between a fictional character and a real man, or between Coetzee and this other writer.  Perhaps it is a wishful conversation on Coetzee’s part.

            Yet there are other confusing parts to this “Lesson.”  What is the relationship between Paul West and Coetzee’s Tanner Lectures?  It is not coincidental that his prior lecture spoke of Nazi Germany and that soon after West and his novel are a significant part of Costello’s lecture in Amsterdam.  What is the connection between the Devil, rewriting the “obscene,” Costello, Coetzee and the idea of the Devil strategically spreading his evil around through writing and reading?  The idea that “writing itself, as a form of moral adventurousness, has the potential to be dangerous” (162), refers to what or to whom exactly?  Does the resurfacing of evil bring only a possible good at the sacrifice of the writer?  Is Coetzee feeling tainted, weakened, by his authorial “duties?”  Does he feel like a “weak vessel?”  Was writing of atrocities a “bridge” that took him to the “far bank?”  Perhaps this is why Costello tells herself repeatedly to “Go back.  Go back” (178), “Go back to the experience” (179), or maybe I am completely off.  Regardless, there seems to be rather strong evidence in this chapter, an actually many others for that matter, that links Coetzee directly to Costello and Costello to Coetzee’s reality.

P.S. Why is Paul West reading a comic book and why does this minute detail stand out so prominently?

The Term 'Animals': The "Violent Gesture"

Derrida and Animals

Stanley Cavell, "Thinking About and Eating Animals" with reflections on Coetzee's The Lives of Animals

The Lives of ALL Animals

Crossing borders or the ends of man I come or surrender to the animal—to the animal in itself, to the animal in me and the animal at unease with itself.

—Jacques Derrida (Derrida 372)

            There is an unfortunate tendency to take Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals as a literal interpretation of its narrative surface, as do many members of Elizabeth’s Costello’s audience.  In doing so, the reader becomes nothing more than another oblivious spectator of a bigger message she is attempting to illustrate, another hardheaded, impenetrable surface trapped within its own ideological discourse, as is her son and his wife.  Embedded beneath Costello’s exterior narrative is a complicated discussion that directly attacks the scientific mind-set of her son John and his philosophically trained wife, Norma.  In addition to literally placing her argument between science and philosophy, Costello also places her argument in a space between beast and God and just as many other characters in Coetzee’s novels are, she is herself displaced, not only with her argument, but with her own struggles and frustrations.  Within this complicated structure, there is an argument being made that not only brings into question the humane treatment of animals and the concept of animals being “living souls” as are humans, but a discussion within and among the human race that points directly to racism and colonialism; it is the connection between all of these ideas that her audience fails to recognize.

         Within dialogue and commentary, the disconnection between Costello and others is painfully visible, in the sense that they are not capable of understanding her, or refuse to understand her.  This separation directly puts them in the same position of those “killers” at the Nazi death-camps.  The horror being that the “killers refused to think themselves into the place of their victims” (34), is the same situation that Costello finds herself in – the inability or refusal of others to remove themselves from their self-proclaimed moral and justified heights and discourses in order to consider being or thinking like the “other.”  Her concept of “reason” is also a concept that is rejected in the same way.  Science has its own idea of reason and philosophy has its own idea of reason.  Both are unyielding to the concepts of the others and discussion often ends in no resolution, no third idea, but only the original division.  This “discussion” between the two discourses is literally portrayed in the tension and bickering between John and Norma.  Costello’s idea of reason as being neither the universe or God but as reason being “a certain spectrum of human thinking” (23), will remain her idea alone considering the rigidity of the outside discourses.  Disconnection is also visible in President Gerard’s question to Elizabeth Costello during dinner and her subsequent response:  “Your own vegetarianism, Mrs. Costello, it comes out of moral conviction, does it not?” (43).  Her response that “It comes out of a desire to save [her] soul” (43) leaves the table in silence as nobody understands the response of wants to attempt understanding. Costello’s response is not a reference to Christianity.  She means that salvation will come to her “through the alertness of all her senses to the embodied fullness of animal life” (Lamb 70).  This disconnection is prevalent among all the characters: those who ask questions during her lecture, those seated at dinner with her and Abraham Stern who doesn’t show up because he too, even in his own poetic discourse, cannot understand the larger point being made by her comments on Jews and cattle. 

         Beyond the surface ideas that cannot, in the refusal, be understood is a more profound argument.  There is a direct link between Costello’s argument against the assumption of the human as a high being and of animals being void of conscious thinking, to that of the conflicts, and non-acknowledged conflicts, involved in racism and colonialism.  The numbness involved in killing for food or scientific testing is the same ideology that surfaces in the oppression and brutality of other humans.  The “right” to treat animals in “inhumane” ways because of their “non-human qualities” is the same excuse used to oppress humans who are deemed “sub-human” by those who believe they have the intellectual right to proclaim such and then act upon.  The assumption that one has the power and the “other” does not is a gross misconception.

                  Whatever else, the body is not “that which is not,” and the                         proof that it is is in the pain it feels…In South Africa it is                            not possible to deny the authority of suffering therefore of                        the body…The suffering body      takes this authority  (Coetzee                     248)

         While Costello attempts to squash the binaries and oppositions that lead to misuse, misunderstanding and mistreatment, she is confronted with the “dog-headed” mentality of the privileged Western mentality who proclaim their right to retain power at any cost, who refuse to understand, feel or be an “other” for fear of loosing this power.  Coetzee’s above quote proclaims that power is universal, not one-sided, and exists in many forms; forms that most often cannot be comprehended by those who proclaim to intellectuals.  While Norma asserts that Costello’s argument is “naïve [and] shallow” (47), and that this way of thinking can only “lead[] to total intellectual paralysis” (47), it is ironically her own intellectual paralysis that she unknowingly describes.

                                                                  

        

Coetzee, J.M. Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews, ed. David Attwell (Cambridge

            1992).

Coetzee, J. M., and Amy Gutmann. The Lives of Animals. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP,

            1999. Print.

Derrida,Jacques. "The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow) ."Trans. David

            Wills. Critical Inquiry 28 (Winter 2002): 369-418.

Lamb, Jonathan. "Sympathy with Animals and Salvation of the Soul." The Eighteenth

            Century 52.1 (2011): 69-85. Print.

Foe: A Discussion of Discourse

Among J.M. Coetzee’s earlier novels, Foe is a favorite for myself; yet, I am struggling to figure out exactly why.  From the onset, I have been intrigued by Coetzee’s use of language, his eloquent yet harsh and below-the-surface style, his intricate way of description without specific detail, his commentary on particular specifics while simultaneously addressing universal agendas and his self-critiquing style of facilitating argument around strategy and trustworthiness of discourse, storytelling and authorship, including his own - and that being in direct correlation to the retelling of individual and political histories.  Coetzee forces the reader’s brain to work, to contemplate and figure; however, he also leaves the reader’s thought process in a continual pattern of non-resolution, as, thus far, Coetzee leaves his endings open for further reader engagement. He leaves the future situations in his narratives as pliable realities, though sometimes extraordinarily resistant to the idea of pliability as well.  The best that I can figure out is that my enjoyment of Foe comes from Coetzee’s transition into a more simplistic, or lamentable, form of narration, as in this respect, the voice and word usage in Foe differs significantly from his prior four novels.  But in this structure of simplicity lies a mesmerizing labyrinth of realities – of myths, of alienations and of manipulation; “necessary” creations are involved within the storytelling process and within the struggle for power in authorship. The tension involved within this process and struggle is fore- fronted at many levels in Coetzee’s Foe, and one most obvious to the reader is the division of speaker, perspective and narrative style among the four sections in the text.

            With each section, I am left wishing for more.  Thoroughly enjoying Susan’s experience on the island and the individual characteristics, as she displays them, of Cruso and Friday, this is a section that Coetzee leaves the reader, or perhaps just me, feeling unfulfilled.  The epistolary format of the second section is deeply embedded with one of Coetzee’s primary focuses – that on authorship and power therein.  The third section follows suit with this focus and dives more deeply into ideas of paternalism and role reversal while leaving the epistolary format behind.  The final section, however, is quite troubling.  In a succinct five pages, Coetzee dismantles any assumptions, theories or reader reflection revolving around the ideas of power, silence, voice, speaker, storytelling – of history, others, or simple continuation of a narrative – and authorship.  It is not clear who the speaker is in this last section or exactly what events are happening nor why.  I can only draw my own conclusion that it is Foe speaking.  However, regardless of who the speaker is, Coetzee has succeeded in monumental form with this novel, and with its last section, in confirming a continuum of discussion among readers, authors and critics.  One critics describes one appropriate thought that may be felt by many upon reading Coetzee’s Foe:

“When a reader finishes Foe, she does not long for Coetzee’s next novel before she wonders if in Foe Coetzee has not effectively silenced himself” (Bishop 56).

Bishop, Scott. "J.M. Coetzee's Foe: A Culmination and a Solution to a Problem of White

            Identity." World Literature Today 64.1 (1990): 54-57. Print.