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Sunday, February 15th, 2009
Yesterday I was talking with Ellen about Elizabeth Costello, how Elizabeth is herself a novelist and there is a lot of discussion of reading and writing in the book; Sylvia interjected, "It would be cool if there was a book that had someone reading the book that had someone reading the book that had..." Nice!  We talked about mirrors for a little while. And then, this morning we were looking at xkcd's Sierpinski Valentine, and checked out Wikipædia's article about Sierpinski Triangles (which has a nice animation) -- I asked Sylvia if she knew what infinity meant, she said "Yeah, like something that never ends." And she made reference back to the book she had been talking about yesterday -- I found it pretty exciting that she would make this connection.
 And this is funny: apparently David Foster Wallace made the claim that Infinite Jest is structured like a Sierpinski triangle.
posted morning of February 15th, 2009: Respond
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Saturday, February 14th, 2009
Well: the end of Elizabeth Costello did not, as I was vaguely hoping, tie things together; if anything it further unravelled them. I'm not sure right now what to think this book is about -- the longing Costello feels for union with the Other, variously expressed as Animal Nature or as Divine Nature; her role as an author in making that union possible for the reader (? -- I just put these words together now -- are they in the story?) How expressing arguments mediates with belief in the principles she is arguing for. Her relationship with colonial history. Her aging, of course. And other tangents... I am dividing the novel into four quite distinct parts: Chapters 1 through 6, about public speaking and argument (the plot of the novel, as far as it can be said to have a plot, is confined to this part); Chapter 7, about union with God; Chapter 8, a fable about justifying one's beliefs; and the afterword (with its epigraph), which seems to be about union with God and insanity. (And just now I noticed that Coetzee calls them not "Chapters" but "Lessons".) Let's look at the ending of each of these sections: Final paragraph of Lesson 6: There ought to be a third alternative, some way of rounding off the morning and giving it shape and meaning: some confrontation leading to some final word. There ought to be an arrangement such that she bumps into someone in the orridor, perhaps Paul West himself; something should pass between them, sudden as lightning, that will illuminate the landscape for her, even if afterwards it returns to its native darkness. But the corridor, it seems, is empty.
Final paragraph of Lesson 7: A vision, an opening up, as the heavens are opened up by a rainbow when the rain stops falling. Does it suffice, for old folk, to have these visions now and again, these rainbows, as a comfort, before the rain starts pelting down again? Must one be too creaky to join the dance before one can see the pattern?
Final paragraph of Lesson 8: The man behind the desk has evidently had enough of questions. He lays down his pen, folds his hands, regards her levelly. 'All the time,' he says. 'We see people like you all the time.'
Final sentences of Afterword: Drowning, we write out of our separate fates. Save us. The afterword is Coetzee writing in the voice of Lord Philip Chandos' wife Elizabeth. (Wheels within wheels: Elizabeth Chandos ~ Elizabeth Costello; Costello wrote a book from the point of view of Leopold Bloom's wife Molly...) Lesson 7 might be the most interesting part of the whole book, with the most to think about. Possibly the final paragraph of Lesson 7 above is meant to represent Costello's death.
posted afternoon of February 14th, 2009: 5 responses
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An experience that I've had many times: I am browsing in a bookstore (usually by the shelves marked "Fiction" or as the case may be, "Classics"), pulling down titles that intrigue me, looking at quotes on the back jacket or the inside front cover, first sentences, etc. After a little while of this I get into a rhythm, the browsing is what I'm doing, I melt into the bookstore a little... and then some new book that I've never heard of before pops into my hand, and it suddenly seems like just the right thing for me to read. Today I was looking in the new bookstore in Maplewood and found a book which I had never heard of, and which seems like just the right thing. It is Night Train to Lisbon, by Pascal Mercier (a Swiss author with a French name, who writes in German) -- the three epigraphes are from Jorge Manrique, Michel Montaigne, Fernando Pessoa. (The Montaigne quote is especially to my tastes -- "We are all patchwork," it begins, and ends, "There is as much difference between us and ourselves as between us and others.") The initial sentence has a slightly formulaic whiff about it: "The day that ended with everything different in the life of Raimund Gregorius began like countless other days." -- But it is a formula that has worked on me many times, and I have high hopes for this time.
posted afternoon of February 14th, 2009: Respond
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How beautiful it is, this world, even if it is only a simulacrum. At least there is that to fall back on.
I'm trying to figure out what I think about the new direction Coetzee is taking in the last part of Elizabeth Costello. It is very much unexpected, which I count as a good thing. I'm having some trouble figuring out quite how to relate it to the rest of the book; but there is a general sense that the relationship exists -- Costello's character is the same, the narrator's voice is the same. I'm holding out hope they will be sewn together in the final ten pages.'What are you saying in your confession?''What I said before: that I cannot afford to believe. That in my line of work one has to suspend belief. [Ooh, lovely! -- ed.] That belief is an indulgence, a luxury. That it gets in the way.' 'Really. Some of us would say the luxury that we cannot afford is unbelief.' She waits for more. 'Unbelief -- entertaining all possibilities, floating between opposites -- is the mark of a leisurely existence, a leisured existence,' the woman goes on. 'Most of us have to choose. Only the light soul hangs in the air.' She leans closer. 'For the light soul, let me offer a word of advice. They may say they demand belief, but in practice they will be satisfied with passion. Show them passion and they will let you through.' 'Passion?' she replies. 'Passion the dark horse? I would have though that passion leads one away from the light, not towards it. Yet in this place, you say, passion is good enough.' I am liking the juxtaposition of belief and passion a lot. Costello thinks the line "Only the light soul hangs in the air" must be a quotation; I am not finding anything to back this up.
posted afternoon of February 14th, 2009: Respond
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Seated at one of the pavement tables she briskly composes what is to be her statement. I am a writer, a trader in fictions, it says. 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 reqest exemption from a rule of which I now hear for the first time, namely that every petitioner at the gate should hold one or more beliefs. She takes her statement back to the guardhouse. As she half expected, it is rejected.  And we are getting down, here, to the heart of the matter -- this is what I think. As Chapter 8 opens, Coetzee manages to startle me once again, changing his narrative style completely (while continuing to narrate in the same voice), veering into Kafkaesque allegory -- he acknowledges as much a few pages later but calls it "Kafka reduced and flattened to a parody."Costello is speaking to my concerns earlier about how nobody in this novel seems to be attached to the arguments they are making; she is a writer, a vessel for words and beliefs (like Mary or Leda is a vessel for God's seed -- I'm not sure yet what to make of this parallel but it is definitely front and center). I have got the feeling that Coetzee is writing in his own voice here -- should be wary of this given the repeated cautioning against it earlier in the book -- I was wondering, when Elizabeth defends herself against the charge that she has ignored the genocide of the Tasmanians (and implicitly, that she as a white Australian is not sensitive to issues of imperialism and oppression), whether Coetzee faces similar charges as a white South African. Perhaps the student in Chapter 1 was meaning to launch an attack on these grounds?
posted morning of February 14th, 2009: Respond
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Friday, February 13th, 2009
This passage is just too awesome:
Magnificat Dominum anima mea, Mary is reputed to have said afterwards, perhaps misheard from Magnam me facit Dominus. That is pretty much all she says in the Gospels, this maid who is matchless, as though struck dumb for the rest of her life by what befell her. No one around her has the shamelessness to question what must surely have occurred to people, to her girlfriends in Nazareth for instance. How did she bear it? they must have whispered among themselves. It must have been like being fucked by a whale. It must have been like being fucked by the Leviathan; blushing as they spoke the word, those barefoot children of the tribe of Judah, as she, Elizabeth Costello, almost catches herself blushing too, setting it down on paper.
posted evening of February 13th, 2009: Respond
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Another chapter of Elizabeth Costello, another bunch of references.
Robert Duncan is an American poet from California. (Ellen has heard him read but says he was "considered old-fashioned" by her cohort.) Elizabeth heard him read "A poem beginning with a line from Pindar", the only time she met him, and it turned her on. She thinks of him while reading Susan Mitchell's prose poem  "Erotikon (a Commentary on «Amor and Psyche»)" (this link is to Google Books, I'm not sure if it remains usable in the long term.)
And shall I come sweet sex to thee
bound truelovewise?
O take fast hold, said Sex to me,
of the moneybox, and night was our koine
with its bleats and glottic stops
its suctions and seductions.
All night we laved a fierce lallation.
Wake now, my love, I said to Sex.
Be not overly
subtle with periods and semicolons.
Take fast hold of the quim and quid.
By morning I was catamount.
Sex was microcephalic.
The legend of Eros and Psyche, which I feel like I really ought to know already, is the story of Venus attempting to humiliate her mortal daughter Psyche by the agency of her divine son Eros. (Duncan's poem also has reference to this legend.) Why the interest in Psyche among American poets, she wonders? Do they find something American in her, the girl who, not content with the ecstasies provided night after night by the visitor to her bed, must light a lamp, peel back the darkness, gaze on him naked? In her restlessness, her inability to leave well enough alone, do they see something of themselves? Anybody know what is the movie referenced here:
She thinks of a movie she saw once, that might have been written by Nathanael West though in fact it wasn't: Jessica Lange playing a Hollywood sex goddess who has a breakdown and ends up in the common ward of a madhouse, drugged, lobotomized, strapped to her bed, while orderlies sell tickets for ten minutes at a time with her. 'I wanna fuck a movie star!' pants one of their customers, shoving his dollars at them.
Please speak up in comments if you know. (Update: paledave says it is Frances (1982).)
Interesting that this is the first chapter not to include a speech. This makes me think the talk on censorship in Chapter 6 was a turning point for the novel, and that Coetzee is giving us an interlude here. (Would kind of like to know how the conference in Chapter 6 played out, what were the repercussions for Costello and for her reputation...)
posted evening of February 13th, 2009: 4 responses
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Thursday, February 12th, 2009
Interesting, so now I'm reading Elizabeth Costello and I'm seeing arguments about morality and animal rights everywhere I look. Today Saramago is writing about lobsters and geese: Putting a living lobster in boiling water and cooking it is an old culinary practice in the western world. It seems that if the lobster were dead in the bath, its final flavor would be different, for the worse. There are furthermore those who say that the rosy color with which the crustacean leaves the pot is due precisely to the high temperature of the water. I don't know it, I'm saying what I've been told, I am incapable of properly frying an egg. One day I saw in a documentary how to prepare chickens, how to kill and butcher them, and I was very close to throwing up. And the other day, if I am remembering right, I read a magazine article about the use of rabbits in the manufacture of cosmetics, and there I found out that the tests to prevent any possible irritation caused by the ingredients of shampoos involve applying them directly to the eyes of these animals, after the fashion of the dreadful Dr. Death, who injected petroleum into the hearts of his victims. Now, a brief notice appears in the periodicals informing me of how, in China, the birds' feathers which are destined to be stuffing for pillows are plucked out the same way, while living, after which they are cleaned, disinfected, and exported for the enjoyment of civilized societies which find it proper and fashionable. I will not comment, it is not worth the trouble, these feathers are enough.
posted evening of February 12th, 2009: Respond
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How will Amsterdam react to Elizabeth Costello in her present state? Does the sturdy Calvinist word evil still have any power among these sensible, pragmatic, well-adjusted citizens of the New Europe? Over half a century since the devil last swaggered brazenly through their streets, yet surely they cannot have forgotten.
Some notes on Chapter 6 of Elizabeth Costello:The novel Costello is reading at the beginning of the chapter is The Very Rich Hours of Count von Stauffenberg by Paul West. West wrote a review of Elizabeth Costello for Harper's, under the title "The Novelist and the Hangman"; however that review is not available online. Costello refers to Stalin as "Koba the Bear, [Hitler's] older brother and mentor" -- this seems ahistorical to me and reeks vaguely of Holocaust denialism. Stalin and Hitler were both brutal tyrants and genocidaires; but there was not a mentor relationship. It is very interesting to watch Costello, the novelist, reading and reacting to West's novel. I'm still wondering what the student who tried to make a scene at Costello's lecture in Chapter 1 wanted to talk about. Was she a vegetarian? A person morally opposed to vegetarianism? Perhaps a biology student upset about Costello's stand against animal research? The Holocaust-belittlement would not have been an issue at that point in time unless she had made the same remarks previously; but that seems unlikely.
posted evening of February 12th, 2009: Respond
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Wednesday, February 11th, 2009
I am a comic novelist, idiot-savant of the humanities; lecturing is outside my remit. Hendrik Hertzberg alerted me today to the publication of Zadie Smith's article "Speaking in Tongues" in the current NY Review of Books. It's adapted from a lecture she gave at the NYPL's "NYPL Live" series in December; you can download a recording of the lecture from the series page. Smith speaks very eloquently of Pygmalion and of Dreams from My Father, of Obama's "story of a genuinely many-voiced man".We'll see if Obama's lifelong vocal flexibility will enable him to say proudly with one voice "I love my country" while saying with another voice "It is a country, like other countries." I hope so. He seems just the man to demonstrate that between those two voices there exists no contradiction and no equivocation but rather a proper and decent human harmony.
posted evening of February 11th, 2009: Respond
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