…from Elizabeth Costello, a novel by J.M. Coetzee:
She thinks of the frog beneath the earth, spread out as if flying, as if parachuting through the darkness. She thinks of the mud eating away at the tips of those fingers, trying to absorb them, to dissolve the soft tissue till no one can tell any longer (certainly not the frog itself, lost as it is in its cold sleep of hibernation) what is earth, what is flesh.
Whitney Balliet of The New Yorker had a wonderful reminiscence of John Coltrane; he remembers seeing the jazz giant standing, holding his sax and facing the corner of the recording studio where, for a couple of hours before a session, he would, in Balliet’s words, “practice his improvisations.”
Yes, there’s something odd about preparing something that is supposed to emerge from the doing, from encountering the unknown, the unbidden, the unconscious or the older version of that, the heart and soul. Is the artist really ‘the secretary to the invisible’, as Elizabeth Costello says? Perhaps. But the real talent is to find the new in the familiar and the important among the trivial: to craft the perfect from the merely practiced.
Coetzee transforms himself into Elizabeth Costello in the book of the same name and he lets us watch him standing in the same corner where Trane stood, somehow dreaming up the place and people, their ideas and words. The resulting book is odd but it is a thrilling read and, like all thrills, there a shiver to the experience, a chill. Michael Woods, in the London Review of Books, speaks unhappily about the cold quality, not just Elizabeth Costello, but of much of Coetzee’s recent work. Cold – and old: the querulous quality of an old man.
It is true that in the recent work there an anger, a frustration but also an energy, and a freedom that seems new. On page 1, Coetzee announces:
We have left behind the territory in which we were. We are in the far territory, where we want to be. (p.1)
In his own life, Coetzee has left South Africa, the country that served as the hard stone on which to hone his blade, his plain steel sentence – plain but glimmering with a rhythm that comes as much from the wonder and worries of Africa as the clipped beat of Beckett. Coetzee is now an Australian so why not, having jumped ship, also jump gender and become Elizabeth Costello, a woman who is invited to all the places Coetzee might be invited and asked to give the kind of speeches Coetzee might give and who is as fatly praised and as thinly understood as Coetzee. Coetzee and Costello: both authors and both characters. This is the territory where he wants to be.
Elizabeth Costello, the book, is often funny in an intellectual way. This is Costello-Coetzee explaining Daniel Dafoe’s pioneering realism and using the descriptive details on the beach after the famous shipwreck as example:
Two shoes, not fellows: by not being fellows, the shoes have ceased to be footwear and become proofs of death, torn by the foaming seas off the feet of drowning men and tossed ashore. No large words, no despair, just hats and caps and shoes. (p.4)
Coetzee gives the lesson in realism and shows some of his own descriptive power. Here is Costello’s son, in bed beside the sleeping expert of his mother’s work, unable to sleep and wondering about his mother and her creations:
Such loneliness, he thinks, hovering in spirit over the old woman in the bare room. His heart is breaking; sadness pours down like a grey waterfall behind his eyes. He should never have come here, to room 13 whatever it is. A wrong move. He ought to get up at once, steal out. But he does not. Why? Because he does not want to be alone. And because he wants to sleep. Sleep, he thinks, that knits up the ravelled sleeve of care. What an extraordinary way of putting it! Not all the monkeys in the world picking away at typewriters all their lives would come up with those words in that arrangement. Out of the dark emerging, out of nowhere: first not there, then there, like a newborn child, heart working, brain working, all the processes of that intricate electrochemical labyrinth working. A miracle. He close his eyes. (p.27)
(Remember Coltrane, in the corner, blowing through the notes, the sounds, squeals and squeaks. Listen: this is the thing itself, the only thing…)
Here it is: the two types of thinking, each marked helpfully by ‘he thinks’. The first words, as descriptive as Dafoe; the second words are magically retrieved from Macbeth’s nightmare and they are different. They seem to think for us, to work some kind of miracle and give birth to our minds. Are they ideas? We have indeed left the territory; we are where words are more than ‘just hats and caps and shoes’. But are they ideas?
Coetzee directs us away from that, toward the flesh:
Realism has never been comfortable with ideas. It could not be otherwise: realism is premised on the idea that ideas have no autonomous existence, can exist only in things. So when it needs to debate ideas, as here, realism is driven to invent situations – walks in the countryside, conversations – in which characters give voice to contending ideas and thereby in a certain sense embody them. The notion of embodying turns out to be pivotal. (p.9)
the only thing 2 next Friday, October 19, 2007.