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?