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Irony and Belief in Elizabeth CostelloMichael Funk Deckard and Ralph PalmIn fact, now that she thinks of it, she lives, in a certain sense, by belief. . . . She lives by belief, she works by belief, she is a creature of belief. What a relief! |
From the very beginning of Elizabeth Costello, J. M. Coetzee plays with his presentation of his protagonist’s philosophical positions. As the narrative progresses through its eight “lessons,” the reader is increasingly left to wonder whether Costello’s positions are to be taken literally or ironically. In other words, are the opinions articulated by Elizabeth Costello a direct expression of J. M. Coetzee’s own beliefs, or, through the manner of their presentation, does the author take some sort of distance from them? By the end of the novel, there remains a question not only as to Coetzee’s particular beliefs but also what he considers to be the nature, and even the possibility, of belief itself.
In this article, we will ask three basic questions. First, in what sense are Costello’s beliefs presented ironically? And given the manner in which they are presented, how are we to interpret the beliefs Costello expresses throughout the book? Second, we will explore the nature of belief in general, as discussed by Coetzee himself elsewhere, and in contrast to alternative possible views. Third, we return to the text and analyze the explicit discussion of belief as such found in Elizabeth Costello, especially in lesson 8, “At the Gate.” In this way, we hope to show how the form of Elizabeth Costello shapes its content.1
We begin with the first question: Is Elizabeth Costello to be understood ironically? And if so, in what way and to what extent? There are simple, prima facie reasons for taking the lectures in Elizabeth Costello literally, that is, as direct expressions of Coetzee’s own beliefs. First and foremost, there are the passages in which ironic readings are explicitly rejected. For example, during two of her lectures, Costello begins by comparing herself to Red Peter, the talking ape from Kafka’s “Report to an Academy” (Elizabeth Costello, 18, 62). On the second occasion, she remarks: “I want to say at the outset that that was not how my remark—the remark that I feel like Red Peter—was intended. I did not intend it ironically. It means what it says. I say what I mean. I am an old woman. I do not have the time any longer to say things I do not mean” (62, emphasis added). At another point, she goes as far as to reject the “orthodox reading” of Swift’s “A Modest Proposal,” which is “stuffed down the throats of young readers” that Swift (otherwise considered one of the most famous examples of irony in all of English literature) “does not mean what he says, or seems to say” (101). This rejection of irony is also found in Costello’s son John’s characterization of her: speaking to Susan Moebius, John says, “If there is parody in her . . . I confess it is too subtle for me to pick up” (23). Speaking to his wife, Norma, John defends his mother, insisting, “She’s perfectly sincere” (113).
In addition, there are other, less direct but no less substantial, reasons for taking the content of Costello’s lectures at face value. Of course, most of the “lessons” of Elizabeth Costello have been previously published by Coetzee elsewhere, as noted in the acknowledgments (233). It is important to note, for the sake of the casual reader, that it is not simply the lectures that have appeared elsewhere, but the lessons themselves—that is, the chapters, the lectures in their broader narrative context, presented in the form of a story. Moreover, these narrative lessons were delivered by Coetzee himself as public lectures.2
This has led some to treat Elizabeth Costello as merely a vehicle for Coetzee’s presentation of his own views. In this reading, the narrative form is treated, at best, as if it served a merely defensive function. Coetzee is taken to be exploiting the voice of his character Costello as a way to avoid criticism for expressing controversial positions. There is a limited degree of truth to this charge. For example, on the occasion of at least one lecture, Coetzee responded to questions by interposing Costello between himself and his audience: “I think what Elizabeth Costello would say is that . . .”3 However, our purpose in analyzing the intent of the author is to come to a better understanding of the meaning of the text, not to speculate regarding Coetzee’s personal motives in and of themselves.4 So, while the presentation of the lectures in narrative form may serve a defensive function, this can hardly be considered its only function. Reducing the narrative of Elizabeth Costello to a sort of ideological roman à clef would be an oversimplification. Treating the presentation of the lectures of Costello in narrative form as simply a vehicle for the expression of Coetzee’s own positions ignores the complexity of the manner in which Costello’s views are presented.
First of all, there is the opposition between the way Costello presents her views and the way she is characterized. Coetzee introduces her physical appearance as frail. “After the long flight, she is looking her age. She has never taken care of her appearance; she used to be able to get away with it; now it shows. Old and tired” (Elizabeth Costello, 3). Her son John treats her with pity (e.g., 27). He feels the need to protect her (e.g., 30). His wife, Norma, characterizes her positions as “jejune and sentimental” (61), “rambling” (75), and “confused” (81). John does not try to defend her positions but excuses them on account of her frailty. “She’s old, she’s my mother. Please!” (81). The descriptions of physical frailty parallel suggestions of a sort of emotional and mental frailty as well. Costello even, at one point, suggests this “emotional frailty” herself: “Calm down, I tell myself, you are making a mountain out of a molehill. This is life. Everyone else comes to terms with it, why can’t you? Why can’t you?” John can give her only comfort:
She turns on him a tearful face. What does she want, he thinks? Does she want me to answer her question for her? They are not yet on the expressway. He pulls the car over, switches off the engine, takes her mother in his arms. He inhales the smell of cold cream, of old flesh. ‘There, there,’ he whispers in her ear. ‘There, there. It will soon be over.’
(115)
If Costello’s purpose is solely to voice Coetzee’s own views, then it is quite strange that she would be characterized as so pitiful and (more significantly) so confused. If Coetzee’s purpose was solely didactic, then one might expect more self-assurance from his spokesperson. Instead, these sorts of characterizations would seem to undermine rather than reinforce the content.
Second, there are a number of cues that the content of the lectures should not be taken at face value. There are, for instance, certain counterarguments posed by other characters. Norma repeatedly and forcefully rejects her mother-in-law’s claims. “It’s naive, John. It’s the kind of easy, shallow relativism that impresses freshmen” (91); “there is no position outside of reason where you can stand and lecture about reason and pass judgment on reason” (93).5 An even stronger criticism is voiced by Abraham Stern, the poet who protests her comparison of the slaughter of animals for food with the Holocaust. In a note explaining his absence, Stern writes:
You took over for your own purposes the familiar comparison between the murdered Jews of Europe and slaughtered cattle. The Jews died like cattle, therefore cattle die like Jews, you say. That is a trick with words which I will not accept. You misunderstand the nature of likenesses; I would even say you misunderstand willfully, to the point of blasphemy. Man is made in the likeness of God but God does not have the likeness of man. If Jews were treated like cattle, it does not follow that cattle are treated like Jews. The inversion insults the memory of the dead. It also trades on the horrors of the camps in a cheap way.6
(94)
Costello reads the letter and simply sighs. If Coetzee was solely interested in the unambiguous presentation of a set of principles, then one would expect Costello to make some sort of response to these criticisms.7 If Coetzee was simply writing an anthology of essays on particular issues, in the form of a philosophical dialogue, then it would be very odd for his “Socrates” to be left speechless. A lack of direct response on these points presents a further ambiguity in Costello’s positions. It presents an opposition to the reader between Coetzee, who expresses the counterarguments offered by other characters quite forcefully, and Costello, who can manage little or no response.
Such oppositions put the aforementioned protestations against irony in a new light. While Costello is “perfectly sincere” (113), Coetzee’s presentation of her is not. Of course, the irony of the text is not verbal irony, that is, not an opposition between the literal and the figurative. It is only a reading in terms of verbal irony that the text explicitly rejects.8 On the other hand, the opposition between the beliefs held (by Costello) and the way these beliefs are expressed (by Coetzee) strongly suggests the presence of irony. But, if not verbal irony, then what kind?
The first possible alternative is Socratic irony, or the opposition between a speaker’s expressed and actual knowledge. This sort of “feigned ignorance” is the classical definition of the Greek eironeia. As is well known, Socrates is frequently portrayed using this sort of irony as a technique in discussion with his interlocutors. At the most basic level, the possibility of Socratic irony as a legitimate reading is excluded for the same reason that verbal irony is: Costello herself is “perfectly sincere.” While her positions may be seem “irrational” to other characters (e.g., Nora), she is never portrayed with either ignorance or pretense.
However, the suggestion that the character-author opposition of the text represents a sort of Socratic irony is not completely absurd. At a more general level, one could suggest that, like Socratic irony, the opposition serves a sort of pedagogical or rhetorical function. From this point of view, Costello’s expressions of self-doubt would make her appear less didactic and more sympathetic. And if one interprets Elizabeth Costello as a straightforwardly ideological or didactic text (i.e., a direct presentation of Coetzee’s own views), then these doubts combined with the doubts expressed by Coetzee, through other characters and contexts, serve that same rhetorical, sympathetic function. Rather than an opposition between expressed and actual knowledge, the opposition would be between expressed and real certainty. According to this reading, Coetzee would be “feigning doubt” through Costello, who expresses a lack of certainty he himself does not possess.
While not completely absurd, such a reading is not entirely fruitful either. It is both reductive and biographical. This interpretation simplifies Elizabeth Costello’s formal complexities into mere techniques for the expression of ideas. However, if the text is simply a vehicle for the expression of Coetzee’s views, then why does it take the form of a novel in the first place? Why wasn’t it written as a collection of essays? These questions are not simply biographical (“Why didn’t Coetzee choose to write a book of essays instead?”) but also textual. Without a source of information outside of the text, one must read the text as if this difference in form has some significance, that the narrative presentation of the ideas is an essential, rather than contingent, aspect of them. Otherwise, one has simply focused on one part of the text and ignored the whole. Or, in other words, form matters.
A second possible interpretation is that Elizabeth Costello expresses its views in the manner of a “liberal ironist,” in Richard Rorty’s sense of the term.9 Rorty uses a broad definition of “liberal,” as one who thinks that cruelty is the worst thing we can do.10 This definition would seem to include Coetzee quite well.11 As for the term “ironist,” Rorty gives a more complex definition, in three parts:
1) She has radical and continuing doubt about the final vocabulary she currently uses. . . .
2) She realizes that argument phrased in her present vocabulary can neither underwrite nor dissolve these doubts;
3) insofar as she philosophizes about her situation, she does not think that her vocabulary is closer to reality than others, that it is in touch with a power not herself.12
Parts 1 and 2 of the definition also seem to fit the views expressed in Elizabeth Costello. We have seen this a bit already, but one passage in particular highlights the relationship between the two:
“I don’t know what I think,” says Elizabeth Costello. “I often wonder what thinking is, what understanding is. Do we really understand the universe better than animals do? 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. It makes sense if you live inside a Rubik cube, but if you don’t . . .”
(90, emphasis added)
Here, Costello expresses both her own self-doubt (“what I think”) and her doubts about rationality as such (“what thinking is”). This skepticism of rationality is a leitmotif of lesson 3. However, at that point, she seems unable to fully escape the urge to express herself in rational terms. For example, take these two lines: “For, seen from the outside, from a being who is alien to it, reason is simply a vast tautology” (70, emphasis added) and “I am alive inside the contradiction, dead and alive at the same time” (77, emphasis added). In both cases, her rejection of reason is expressed using the vocabulary of reason itself (e.g., “tautology” and “contradiction”). From the point of view of the literal, rational observer, this is absurd.13 However, if interpreted in Rortian terms, these sorts of oppositions (between what Costello holds dear and what she is able to express) capture her ambivalence about reason as a final vocabulary. She repeatedly and explicitly rejects reason, yet she has difficulty escaping its terminology. She attempts to rely on another “final vocabulary,” poetry, but this, too, fails.14 She is both aware of the limitations of the “philosophical” and “poetic” vocabularies and, at the same time, unable to overcome them. Thus, according to the first two parts of Rorty’s definition, Costello is a liberal ironist.
However, according to the third criterion, she is not. For Rorty, the recognition of the ironic opposition within one’s vocabulary allows one to reject all vocabularies as final. No vocabulary is “closer to reality” than any other; there is no longer any need for a “power greater than oneself.”15 The ironist recognizes her own vocabulary as contingent. For Rorty, this recognition of contingency is a liberation that makes possible a liberal, public (and utopian) solidarity with others, freeing us from conflicts revolving around differences among private views. For Costello, on the other hand, this recognition of contingency is not a liberation but a tragedy.
This best expression of the tragedy of Costello can be seen in her love of animals. Costello does not see, cannot even imagine, her feelings toward animals as something contingent. For example, vegetarianism is not simply a matter of her own private choice but something she is compelled to speak publicly about16 not only for ethical reasons but from a deep-seated spiritual necessity.17 She feels compelled to speak, and yet she cannot communicate the nature of this necessity to anyone. All the other characters in Elizabeth Costello are static. None of them are changed or convinced by anything she says. At best, they remark that she has given them “much food for thought” (90). Her lectures convince no one. For a writer, for one whose feelings run so deep, what could be more tragic?
This is where the formal aspects of Coetzee’s work become significant. While the characters in the novel may remain unchanged, the reader might not. What Costello cannot say, Coetzee might be able to manage. Coetzee not only expresses the content of Costello’s views but also expresses those views in a certain form. Through the portrayal of her contradictory manner of expression and the responses of other characters (e.g., pity, doubt, indifference), through the descriptions of her desire to have an effect and the repeated frustrations of that desire, Elizabeth Costello the novel says something that Elizabeth Costello the character cannot.
The novel accomplishes this through irony. This irony is not essentially verbal, Socratic, or Rortian. The fundamental opposition, between the beliefs held and the way these beliefs are expressed, suggests the presence of a form of romantic irony: an “ironic attitude” or, more precisely, an irony toward attitudes. Naturally, this irony has nothing to do with a lack of seriousness. An ironic attitude imposes a distance between belief and its expression not for the purpose of simple evasiveness but rather for self-awareness of a special sort. Paul de Man, in a discussion of traditional romantics, provides a good description of this purpose:
What they were against, predominantly, was reason and the enlightenment restriction of reason to a universal human norm. At the same time, they were aware of the paradoxes of a critique of reason. In order to argue against or challenge reason one needed to speak, but such speech would seem to demand understanding and would therefore rely on the very norms of reason it set out to delimit. The only possible response to this predicament would be irony: a speech which at once made a claim to be heard, but which also signaled or gestured to its own limits and incomprehension.18
Strikingly, De Man’s description of romantic irony seems to conform almost perfectly to Elizabeth Costello. Costello rejects reason. Coetzee (through the voices of other characters, Costello’s feelings of self doubt, and so on) is clearly aware of the paradoxes involved in such a critique. Elizabeth Costello expresses positions on a number of issues but expresses them in such a way as to call attention to their limitations. In terms of form, there is an opposition in the novel between its title character and its author. This opposition is ironic, in the romantic sense, because through the portrayal of both Costello’s efforts and their frustration, Coetzee is able to express both these particular views while at the same time taking his distance from them, stepping outside them. As in romantic irony, the purpose of this opposition, this distance, is not evasiveness or self-concealment but a more honest self-awareness. The purpose is to examine one’s attitudes from new angles, other perspectives, not for the purpose of relativizing or abandoning them19 but in order to gesture to something greater, to attempt to express, indirectly, the ineffable.20
Once one takes into account this irony, the oppositions expressed in the form of its presentation, Elizabeth Costello can no longer be considered exclusively in terms of its particular content, its expression of this or that particular belief. A complete interpretation, one that takes the text as a whole, must address what the text says about the nature of belief as such.
Before exploring the question of belief in Elizabeth Costello, it is first necessary to examine the nature of belief from a broader perspective. To begin with, we can take the following as a general philosophical definition of belief: “A mental state, representational in character, taking a proposition (either true or false) as its content and involved, together with motivational factors, in the direction and control of voluntary behaviour.”21 Such a textbook definition is adequate but not complete. It is incomplete because it does not address how beliefs “stick” or become anchored in our minds or souls or how belief might relate to sentiment (except in the phrase “together with motivational factors,” which may include a factor such as sentiment). Every day, we believe, in this limited sense, many things. For example, I believe that if I were to turn this door handle the door will open. I also believe that if I look outside when I get up in the morning and if there are clouds in the sky, a state of mind will exist in which I believe it may rain today. This leads me to an “action tendency” in which I bring an umbrella with me when I leave my house. At this basic level, it seems that it would be impossible for a human being to exist without any beliefs at all, as claimed by Elizabeth Costello (199–200).
There are two further analyses of belief that will help us to understand Elizabeth Costello better. On the one hand, there is an analysis of belief that is closely tied to knowledge, where “belief” is the same thing as “judgment.” According to this view, if a belief is justified by reason, then it becomes knowledge. The founder of this view, Plato, uses the voices of Socrates and his interlocutors in a way similar to the way Coetzee uses Costello and the other characters.22 Of course, we do not wish to claim that Coetzee is Platonic23 but rather that in order to analyze Coetzee’s view of belief, it is useful to have points of comparison. For the sake of simplicity, we will call this first account of belief B1.
A second analysis of belief (which we will call B2) is one in which knowledge is not the main concern, but probability. In Elizabeth Costello, there is no simply “black and white” view of belief in which one must either have a true or false belief concerning x, as found in the textbook definition above. Instead, the differing views of belief that we will examine here leave us in an aporia but, at the same time, provide a broader perspective regarding belief in general.
Belief as knowledge (B1), according to one definition, “is just as good a guide as knowledge, when it comes to guaranteeing correctness of action.”24 In this case, belief must both be true and useful insofar as it serves as a guide to knowledge and action. But is it necessary to have knowledge in order to take action? An interesting claim regarding B1 concerns how belief becomes anchored in our minds.25 There is no doubt that human beings—even fictional ones like Elizabeth Costello—have true beliefs, at least at some level, that remain anchored. The problem then, which the text addresses indirectly, lies in how one anchors these true beliefs, thus bringing them to the level of knowledge. But Costello does not feel the need to develop rational grounds for why she believes what she believes. She only requires enough confidence to make her statement “at the gate.”26
However, there is another view of belief, in terms of probability (B2).27 B2 is closer to Coetzee’s own view than B1.28 Since most people are too credulous, believing everything that they hear, the question lies, “Wherein consists the difference betwixt incredulity and belief?”29 The best that B2 can manage is a steady and habitual feeling. Regarding this point, David Hume writes,
An opinion or belief is nothing but an idea, that is different from a fiction, not in the nature, or the order of its parts, but in the manner of its being conceived. But when I would explain this manner, I scarce find any word that fully answers the case, but am obliged to have recourse to every one’s feeling, in order to give him a perfect notion of this operation of the mind. An idea assented to feels different from a fictitious idea, that the fancy alone presents to us: And this different feeling I endeavour to explain by calling it a superior force, or vivacity, or solidity, or firmness, or steadiness.30
Whereas the treatment of belief in terms of B1 relies on tying beliefs down with reasons in order to become pieces of knowledge, B2 requires nothing other than a firm or steady feeling, and this steadiness “gives them [beliefs] a superior influence on the passions and imagination.” The only thing philosophy does, then, is enable one to distinguish “something felt by the mind, which distinguishes the ideas of the judgment from the fictions of the imagination. It gives them more force and influence; makes them appear of greater importance; infixes them in the mind; and renders them the governing principles of all our actions.”31
This distinction between belief as knowledge (B1) and belief as probability (B2) helps us better understand Costello. While she becomes entangled in what it takes to have “foundational”32 beliefs (that is, either true or false beliefs concerning x, e.g., the killing of animals), there may be degrees of truth and falsity behind or within the nature of belief as such. Keeping in mind this distinction between B1 and B2, we can proceed to discuss Costello and Coetzee’s understanding of belief. Regarding Coetzee, Derek Attridge writes:
The issue of belief is, of course, what has been at stake in all these fictional representations of positions held and debated. Does Coetzee, does the reader, believe in what Elizabeth Costello, or Emmanuel Egudu, or Sister Bridget have to say about the treatment of animals, the fictional representations of evil, the oral novel, the value of humanities?33
It is precisely this mental state of belief that Coetzee places into question in Elizabeth Costello, despite his overt awareness of the epistemological, ethical, and religious issues at stake. Coetzee writes at the beginning of lesson 8, “At the Gate”:
‘Before I can pass through I must make a statement,’ she repeats. ‘A statement of what?’
‘Belief. What you believe.’
‘Belief. Is that all? Not a statement of faith? What if I do not believe? What if I am not a believer?’
The man shrugs. For the first time he looks directly at her. ‘We all believe. We are not cattle. For each of us there is something we believe. Write it down, what you believe. Put it in the statement.’
(Elizabeth Costello, 194)
What is important here is the quality of human belief as opposed to the seemingly “bovine” lack of belief. Cattle need not believe in anything, whether the grass is green or whether God exists. But for humans, according to our initial definition, there is a more elaborate version of belief, that is, a form of belief which takes a proposition as either true or false, and thus is linked to knowledge. The demand of the tribunal “at the gate” is for belief in the first sense (B1), requiring a statement, a logos, or an explanation. But what is also important in the “textbook definition,” and underlying a more complete discussion of belief are the “motivational factors” or sentiments behind all (particular) beliefs. The assumption behind B2 is that humans will never act from reason alone. We require passions to move us. Since Costello cannot say that she believes or she doesn’t, she tries to “suspend judgment until she hears it from his own lips” (167) and is thus left standing at the gate. Costello is forced into an either (believe) or (not believe) decision, a fixed alternative she attempts to reject. However, what she rejects is not belief as such but only belief as expressed in terms of knowledge (B1). Another sense of belief (B2) remains a possibility.
In an interview some years ago, Coetzee pointed out that he avoids “the structures of opposition, of Either-Or, which I take it as my task to evade.” Along with Costello, he seems to suggest the possibility of a strangely disconnected meaning of belief, a state of mind somehow able to disengage from any form of belief whatsoever. He continues:
Let me simply say that I am not enamored of the Either-Or. I hope that I don’t simply evade the Either-Or whenever I am confronted with it. I hope that I at least try to work out what ‘underlies’ it in each case (if I can use that foundationalist metaphor); and that this response of working-out on the Either-Or isn’t read simply as evasion. (If it is, I have been wasting my time.) . . . I try to talk about the Either-Or and about vagueness or slipperiness or other stances (or non-stances) toward the Either-Or in a more philosophical way. A more philosophical way which . . . must also be an appropriately foolish way.34
What could this “philosophical way” be? Why is it an “appropriately foolish way”? Coetzee claims to want to “work out” what underlies the opposition of the Either-Or while at the same time rejecting both evasion and resolution of it. The “structures of opposition” he rejects here is the false alternative of the Either-Or, not opposition as such. In fact, the purpose is to explore this opposition more deeply, not to escape it but to dwell within it.
The purpose of this exploration is not a resolution or set of answers (i.e., a statement of particular beliefs, a manifesto) but a better understanding of the question (i.e., “What does it mean to believe?”), thereby achieving greater self-awareness. What is important for Coetzee is not some didactic point in which we are exhorted to believe this or that principle, but rather his continual plea for consciousness of what is at stake. This plea is described, as one article puts it, in terms of the not forgetting of the past.35 It is not merely animal rights or the history of South Africa or colonialism that is at stake here but a “movement through ignorance to attentiveness.”36 Put another way, the universal message of his work thus need not be taken only allegorically.37
Having discussed belief in general terms, we can now return to a greater focus on the text at hand. In this section, we will examine more closely lesson 8, “At the Gate,” where Elizabeth Costello explicitly discusses belief as such, in which, “as befits someone on the threshold between life and death, Costello finds herself compelled to give an account, or a moral justification, of her life as a writer.”38 As in Coetzee’s earlier Age of Iron,39 Costello “finds herself in some indefinite limbo between life and death.”40 Her inability to articulate such an account or justification for her belief makes her feel uneasy. There is an explicit tension at the heart of Costello’s lack of decisiveness, since she is unable to believe (in terms of B1), let alone justify why or how she does not believe. She states clearly that it is not her profession to believe, just to write, which she says to the man at the gate, stating that she does imitations, “as Aristotle would have said” (194). She can even do imitations of beliefs yet doubts that is enough.
Looking back, we can see that Costello has attempted such justifications several times earlier in the novel. In lesson 3, she tries to use philosophy to support her position. There, she states: “I want to find a way of speaking to fellow human beings that will be cool rather than heated, philosophical rather than polemical, that will bring enlightenment rather than seeking to divide us into the righteous and the sinners, the saved and the damned, the sheep and the goats” (66). Yet for a writer who calls for sympathy, how can a conversation also be “cool rather than heated”? At the same time Costello appeals to the “cool” and the “philosophical,” she rejects reason: “I could ask what St Thomas takes to be the being of God, to which he will reply that the being of God is reason. Likewise Plato, likewise Descartes, in their different ways. The universe is built upon reason. God is a God of reason” (67). Her “dilemma” is that she seems to want it both ways, both cool rationality and warm sympathy, a “cold sympathy” without any rational ground.41
Trying to work her way out of this dilemma, Costello, discussing Descartes, rejects the opposition of rational thought, on the one hand, and “fullness, embodiedness, the sensation of being . . . a heavily affective sensation” (78), on the other. In place of this dualism, she appeals to the heart, that “seat of a faculty, sympathy, that allows us to share at times the being of another” (79). This sympathy is what allows one to “get inside” others, to feel what they feel, to suffer with them. For Costello, this sympathy is, at least potentially, limitless: “Despite Thomas Nagel, who is probably a good man, despite Thomas Aquinas and René Descartes, with whom I have more difficulty in sympathizing, there is no limit to the extent to which we can think ourselves into the being of another. There are no bounds to the sympathetic imagination” (79–80). This “sympathetic imagination” is described as being both opposed to reason (insofar as it is a feeling), and at the same time beyond the opposition.
In lesson 3, Costello extols her audience to “open your heart and listen to what your heart says” (82). When Dean Arendt debates at the dinner table, “I will accept that underlying [your dietary taboos] are genuine moral concerns. But at the same time one must say that our whole superstructure of concern and belief is a closed book to animals themselves,” (89) Costello (at this point) accepts the premise but rejects the consequences: “They have no consciousness therefore. Therefore what? Therefore we are free to use them for our own ends? Therefore we are free to kill them?” (90). But the premise itself is a problem. If animals have “no consciousness we would recognize as consciousness,” that is, if they lack our (human) consciousness, how are we supposed to be able to sympathize with them? If we assume animals do have the same sort of consciousness as humans, then how would we be able to distinguish our sympathetic imagination from a mere projection, a substitution of our experience for theirs?
To where, we might ask, does Costello’s strong sympathy for animals disappear by the time we reach lesson 8? When asked for a statement of belief, shouldn’t she tell them, “I believe in animal rights”? By this point, it seems as if her convictions have been abandoned or at least forgotten. Whereas earlier Costello stated her positions with some confidence, now, after her failures and frustrations, she searches for “fixed beliefs,” beliefs that “stick.” In her first statement, she writes,
I maintain beliefs only provisionally: fixed beliefs would stand in my way. I change beliefs as I change my habitation or my clothes, according to my needs. On these grounds—professional, vocational—I request exemption from a rule of which I now hear for the first time, namely that every petitioner at the gate should hold to one or more beliefs.
(195)
This statement is, as she expects, rejected. What is at stake in this statement, however, are the grounds on which she supports her claim for why she cannot state her beliefs.
Costello claims, as writer, that she is a “disbeliever” (201). It is not simply that she lacks certain required beliefs, but that she is incapable of belief itself. Even when she asks for a glimpse of the other side of the gate, she wonders, “What has she seen? Despite her unbelief, she had expected that what lay beyond this door fashioned of teak and brass but also no doubt of the tissue of allegory would be unimaginable: a light so blinding that earthly senses would be stunned by it. But the light is not unimaginable at all” (196).
Costello’s statement—in effect, her grounds—is not sufficient to get her through the gate. Why is this the case? In her second statement, she writes:
I am a writer, and what I write is what I hear. I am a secretary of the invisible, one of many secretaries over the ages. That is my calling. . . . Before I can pass on I am required to state my beliefs . . . I reply: a good secretary should have no beliefs. It is inappropriate to the function. A secretary should merely be in readiness, waiting for the call. . . . In my work a belief is a resistance, an obstacle. I try to empty myself of resistances.
(199–200)
Yet at the same time, Costello is aware of the fact that, even as a writer, she cannot withhold all particular beliefs. She is aware of the unavoidability, the sheer humanness, of belief. In response to the judge who states twice, “Without beliefs we are not human,” she answers,
Of course, gentlemen, I do not claim to be bereft of all belief. I have what I think of as opinions and prejudices, no different in kind from what are commonly called beliefs. When I claim to be a secretary clean of belief I refer to my ideal self, a self capable of holding opinions and prejudices at bay while the word which it is her function to conduct passes through her.
(200)
In place of specific beliefs, she offers a meta-reflection on belief as such, an expression of her awareness of how belief works in itself. It is only as an “ideal self” that she can doubt everything.42 Here, she returns to the dualism she rejected in Descartes, but in another form. For Costello, the dualism is transposed from (real, articulated) beliefs into (ideal, ineffable) heart. It is this dichotomy that allows her to claim, “I have beliefs but I do not believe in them. They are not important enough to believe in. My heart is not in them. My heart and my sense of duty” (200). This attempt to have it both ways, through division between the certainty of the heart and the uncertainty of belief is, from a rational perspective, tenuous and unsatisfying at best.
There is nevertheless a certain level of humility in this distinction. She maintains a provisional cynicism, not taking herself too seriously. Yet at the same time, she retains an (ineffable) attachment to that which she is reluctant to embrace. She cannot formulate any credo, as, when she responds to the question “You are not an unbeliever then” with the following: “No. Unbelief is a belief. A disbeliever, if you will accept the distinction, though sometimes I feel disbelief becomes a credo too” (201). She nevertheless follows her rejection of belief with a more positive conclusion: “Let me add, for your edification: beliefs are not the only ethical supports we have. We can rely on our hearts as well. That is all. I have nothing more to say” (203, emphasis added). This view is both unsustainable and unnecessary. It is possible, as we suggest earlier, to reject B1 without rejecting belief as such, without relying on dubious, artificial, and ineffable distinctions. B2 remains a possibility. We can have B2, which enables us to act in the world, without necessarily needing to have B1. Here, Coetzee falls back into the same sort of false alternative Either-Or which he elsewhere claimed to reject, an aporia that strongly resembles an inarticulate skepticism.43 But this is not Costello’s last word. She does have more to say, in particular, on the notion of heart, with which she continues to struggle, particularly when asked if she believes in God. This is the question to which, one way or another, all questions of belief appear to ultimately lead. The following pointed passage touches on the very essence of belief:
‘And these voices that summon you,’ says the pudgy man: ‘you do not ask where they come from?’
‘No. Not as long as they speak the truth.’
‘And you—you, consulting only your heart, are judge of that truth?’
She nods impatiently. Like the interrogation of Joan of Arc, she thinks. How do you know where your voices come from? She cannot stand the literariness of it all. Have they not the wit to come up with something new?
A silence has fallen. ‘Go on,’ the man says encouragingly.
‘That is all,’ she says, ‘You asked, I answered.’
‘Do you believe the voices come from God? Do you believe in God?’
Does she believe in God? A question she prefers to keep a wary distance from. Why, even assuming that God exists—whatever exists means—should His missive, monarchical slumber be disturbed from below by a clamour of believes and don’t believes, like a plebiscite?
‘That is too intimate . . . I have nothing to say.’
(204–5)
Costello herself seems desperately to want to believe in something. She admits this, for the most part, only to herself, when she is not in front of the judges. “I believe in the irrepressible human spirit: that is what she should have told her judges. . . . I believe that all humankind is one” (207). She recalls the passions of her youth (e.g., art) but seems unable to hold on to even these. “Has she carried that childish faith into her late years, and beyond: faith in the artist and his truth?” (207). Later, she even poses a rather physiological option: does the flow of blood count as a belief? “Would they, the bench of judges, the panel of examiners, the tribunal that demands she bare her beliefs—would they be satisfied with this: I believe that I am? I believe that what stands before you today is I? Or would that be too much like philosophy, too much like the seminar room?” (210–11). She conjures up a vision of Odysseus in the underworld. She thinks this vision may be “the sum of her faith” (211). This theme is repeated continually in the last moments of the last lesson. When another woman asks, “What are you saying in your confession?” she answers, “What I said before: that I cannot afford to believe. That in my line of work one has to suspend belief” (213). Even though she grasped at a stream of possibilities, every conviction fails to take hold. In response, another woman waiting at the gate states:
Unbelief—entertaining all possibilities, floating between opposites—is the mark of a leisurely existence, a leisure existence. . . . They may say they demand belief, but in practice they will be satisfied with passion. Show them passion and they will let you through. . . . Who knows what we truly believe. . . . It is here, buried in our heart . . . buried even from ourselves. It is not belief that the boards are after. The effect is enough, the effect of belief. Show them you feel and they will be satisfied.
(213–14)
Costello moves “through ignorance to attentiveness,”44 only to move back again to ignorance, albeit in another form. Durrant explains, “While ignorance may simply indicate a profound indifference to other lives, it can also indicate the wisdom of ‘knowing not to know,’ a state of humility or self-doubt that undoes the logic of self-certainty that founds the Cartesian tradition.”45 But of course, Coetzee casts a much broader net than this one tradition. More fundamentally than narrow reference to any particular thinker, Elizabeth Costello questions, through ironies and aporias, the nature of philosophical questioning throughout the whole of the Western philosophical tradition, all the way back to Socrates.
In the end, neither this line of questioning nor Elizabeth Costello’s attempts at a “both-and” resolution are enough. She remains forever on one side of the gate, caught inarticulately in an opposition, unable to either articulate a belief in something or to abandon her attachment to the possibility of an abstract, ineffable alternative. She wants beliefs without belief, to convince others without reason, justification without grounds, a “heart” without blood. Ultimately, this unresolved conflict is the tragedy of Elizabeth Costello.46
Notes
1. All references are to J. M. Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello (New York: Viking Penguin, 2003).
2. See D. Attridge, J. M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), epilogue.
3. Ibid., 193.
4. We are interested here in literary criticism, not biography. For the sake of ease of expression, any subsequent references to “Coetzee” should be understood in a limited sense as references to the author of the text Elizabeth Costello, rather than in the more general sense of a kind of biographical or psychological claim about Coetzee as a person. Or, to put it another way, claims about the author’s intent more properly refer to the text as a whole, with the form, content, author’s intent, and reader’s response each constituting parts of that whole. Thus, claims about “what Coetzee means” (for the purposes of this chapter, as that meaning is expressed in Elizabeth Costello) are included in what we mean by “text.” On the other hand, claims about “what Coetzee thinks himself” are excluded from consideration.
5. For alternate discussion of the conflict between Elizabeth and Norma, see D. Head, “A Belief in Frogs: J.M. Coetzee’s Enduring Faith in Fiction,” in J. M. Coetzee and the Public Intellectual, ed. J. Poyner (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2006), 100–117, 110–11, where he argues that “Coetzee coaxes his readers to sympathize with Elizabeth rather than Norma, and so to experience the principle by which sympathy is privileged over reason.”
6. This criticism is repeated, returning in lesson 6 (Elizabeth Costello, 156–57).
7. As found, for example, at the dinner at the end of lesson 3 (Elizabeth Costello, 84–90).
8. See, for examples, Elizabeth Costello, 23, 62, and 113.
9. R. Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
10. Ibid., xv. Rorty cites this definition as originating with Judith Shklar.
11. If, of course, one keeps this general definition distinct from Rorty’s later, more specifically humanist qualification. Rorty is concerned with human suffering, explicitly distinct from animal suffering (ibid., 36, 177)
12. Ibid., 73.
13. Elizabeth’s last remark elicits “a little snort from Norma” (Elizabeth Costello, 77). How, for example, could a being alien to reason recognize a tautology? Norma’s criticism expresses the point of view of the rationalist “philosopher”: “There is no position outside of reason where you can stand and lecture about reason and pass judgment on reason” (93).
14. The end of lesson 4, “The Poets and The Animals,” is the moment where Elizabeth breaks down crying in her son’s arms (Elizabeth Costello, 115). See also her difficulties before the tribunal in lesson 8, discussed later in the chapter.
15. Rorty, Contingency, 73.
16. “John, I don’t know what I want to do. I just don’t want to sit silent” (Elizabeth Costello, 104).
17. When asked whether her vegetarianism is grounded in a moral conviction, Elizabeth responds “No, I don’t think so. . . . It comes out of a desire to save my soul” (Elizabeth Costello, 89)
18. P. de Man, “Semiology and Rhetoric,” in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, ed. V. B. Leitch et al. (New York: Norton, 2001), 1514–26, 1515.
19. As is the case for Rorty’s “liberal ironist.”
20. See this chapter, page 348.
21. Fred Dretske, “Belief,” in The Oxford Companion to Philosophy, ed. T. Honderich (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 85.
22. Similarly, but not identically. See this chapter, pages 336–38.
23. The current fashion in Coetzee criticism is to speak of Coetzee as expressing the view of certain postmodern authors, such as Adorno (S. Durrant, “Bearing Witness to Apartheid: J. M. Coetzee’s Inconsolable Works of Mourning,” Contemporary Literature 40, no. 3 [1999]: 430–63), Agamben (S. C. Caton, “Coetzee, Agamben, and the Passion of Abu Ghraib,” American Anthropologist 108, no. 1 [2006]: 114–23), Arendt (P. Ryan, “A Woman Thinking in Dark Times?: The Absent Presence of Hannah Arendt in J. M. Coetzee’s ‘Elizabeth Costello and The Problem of Evil,’” The Journal of Literary Studies 21, no. 3 [2005]: 277–95), Baudrillard (T. Carstensen, “Shattering the Word-Mirror in Elizabeth Costello,” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 42, no. 1 [2007]: 79–96, 86–87.), Derrida (Attridge, Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading), Lyotard (B. Parry, “Speech and Silence in the Fictions of J. M. Coetzee,” in Critical Perspectives on J. M. Coetzee, ed. G. Huggan and S. Watson [London: Macmillan, 1996], 37–65), Lacan (T. Dovey, The Novels of J. M. Coetzee: Lacanian Allegories [Craighall, South Africa: Ad. Donker, 1988]), Levinas (E. Jordaan, “A White South African Liberal as a Hostage to the Other: Reading J. M. Coetzee’s Age of Iron Through Levinas,” South African Journal of Philosophy 24, no. 1 [2005]: 22–32), or a combination of many of these (M. Canepari-Labib, Old Myths– Modern Empires: Power, Language, and Identity in J. M. Coetzee’s Work [New York: Peter Lang, 2005]). We hope to avoid any sort of “projectionist” readings here. While we occasionally refer to the philosophy of belief in philosophical texts like Plato’s Meno and Hume’s Treatise as points of contrast, we do not want to run the risk of projecting other philosophers’ views into the text at hand. Coetzee is a robust enough author to be understood on his own terms. For two texts that do an excellent job of discussing Coetzee with reference to Plato, see J. Lear, “The Ethical Thought of J. M. Coetzee,” Raritan 28, no. 1 (2008): 68–97; S. Mulhall, The Wounded Animal: J. M. Coetzee and the Difficulty of Reality in Literature and Philosophy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2009).
24. Plato, Meno and other Dialogues, trans. R. Waterfield (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 138 (97b7–8). In this dialogue, Plato describes the nature of inquiry itself, recollection, hypothesis, and the teachability of knowledge or virtue. For a recent discussion of how these work in the Meno, see D. Scott, Plato’s Meno (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).
25. For the problem of anchoring belief, see Plato: “There’s as little point in paying a lot of money for an unrestrained statue of [Daedalus] as there is for a runaway slave: it doesn’t stay put. But Daedalus’ pieces are so beautiful that they’re worth a great deal if they’re anchored. What am I getting at? I mean this to be an analogy for true beliefs. As long as they stay put, true beliefs too constitute a thing of beauty and do nothing but good. The problem is that they tend not to stay for long; they escape from the human soul and this reduces their value, unless they’re anchored by working out the reason. And this anchoring is recollection, Meno, my friend. . . . When true beliefs are anchored, they become pieces of knowledge and they become stable” (Meno, 139 [97e–98a], emphasis added). For a discussion of this passage, see Gail Fine, “Knowledge and True Belief in the Meno,” Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 27 (2004), 41–81; Scott, Plato’s Meno, 176–93.
26. See this chapter, pages 345–50.
27. For one origin of this view, see D. Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. D. Fate Norton and M. J. Norton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), chap. 1.3, “Of Knowledge and Probability.”
28. See, for example, Coetzee, Diary of a Bad Year (London: Harvill Secker, 2007), 97–102.
29. Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, 66 (emphasis in the original).
30. Ibid., 68 (spelling modernized).
31. Ibid.
32. In a different context, Coetzee discusses Descartes at Elizabeth Costello, 66–67, 79–80, 92, 106–7, and 112. It is interesting to point out then that, according to Descartes’s foundationalism, there are three innate beliefs that foundationally “underlie” everything else: the belief that I exist and am thinking, the belief in God, and the belief in a world. These, for Descartes, are the beliefs that matter and thus become knowledge by means of their clarity and distinctness. See R. Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, ed. J. Cottingham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
33. Attridge, Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading, 204, emphasis added.
34. “An Interview with J.M. Coetzee,” World Literature Today 70 (1996): 107–10. See also the review of Coetzee by D. Novitz, Philosophy and Literature 21, no. 2 (1997): 482–84, where he writes, “For Coetzee turns out, in these essays, to be a theoretical fence-sitter of a kind that makes all intellectual effort redundant. He does have arguments but he seems whimsically to undermine them—so that in the end he lands up high and dry, deftly buggered by the fence post that he should have scaled” (482).
35. See L. Meskell and L. Weiss, “Coetzee on South Africa’s Past: Remembering in the Time of Forgetting,” American Anthropologist 108, no. 1 (2006): 88–99.
36. S. Durrant, “J. M. Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello, and the Limits of the Sympathetic Imagination,” in J. M. Coetzee and the Public Intellectual, ed. J. Poyner (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2006), 118–34, 120.
37. See Attridge, Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading, chap. 2, for a nonallegorical reading of Coetzee. See also Mulhall’s description of Coetzee as a “realist modernist” in chap. 9 of The Wounded Animal.
38. F. R. Ankersmit, “The Ethics of History: From the Double Binds of (Moral) Meaning to Experience,” History and Theory 43, no. 4 (2004): 84–102, 94. See Mulhall, The Wounded Animal, 220–30.
39. In Coetzee’s 1990 novel, Age of Iron, it is “via Elizabeth Curren, an ex-lecturer of Latin—which she describes as ‘a dead language . . . a language spoken by the dead’—[that] Coetzee [describes] the discourse of liberal humanism, but . . . it is a discourse that is truly marginal, hovering as it is between life and death” (T. Dovey, “J. M. Coetzee: Writing in the Middle Voice,” in Critical Essays on J. M. Coetzee, ed. S. Kossew [New York: G. K. Hall, 1998], 18–29, 26). In Age of Iron, Coetzee uses another female narrator, ‘E.C.’ to show the intransigent role of tying down belief. Dominic Head reads Coetzee’s narratives as supporting a sentimental view of knowledge and morals, one in which “the risk of pathos and sentimentality is a risk that Coetzee deliberately courts, while simultaneously alerting us to its dangers” (“A Belief in Frogs,” 108).
40. Ankersmit, “The Ethics of History,” 94.
41. See D. Head, who writes, “Coetzee seeks to make his readers uneasy about the self- interest implicit in humanist reason and rationality, but, in another unsettling maneuver, he takes us beyond a straightforward rational and literal engagement with the arguments” (“A Belief in Frogs,” 110).
42. This is also articulated well by Derek Attridge, who writes, “What we encounter are not these characters’ beliefs, but their believings; we undergo their speeches and arguments as events, and we share, momentarily, the process of articulating feelings and ideas. . . . ‘At the Gate’ does not present us with an argument about the place of belief in fiction but enables us to participate in Elizabeth Costello’s believing about believing” (Attridge, Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading, 205).
43. Hume had already well understood the problem of this sort of skepticism relative to belief when he wrote, “Nature breaks the force of all skeptical arguments in time, and keeps them from having any considerable influence on the understanding” (Hume, Treatise, 125).
44. Durrant, “J. M. Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello,” 120.
45. Ibid., 120–21.
46. Many thanks to the Leuven Reading Group—Jo, Renée, Sarah, Heidi, Syd, and Julianne—for all the literary discussions over the years. This piece would not have been possible without their contributions.