Elizabeth Costello

by J. M. Coetzee

  That is how it would have been for poor bewildered Anchises, one would imagine, for the rest of his life: a whirl of questions, none of which he would dare to air to his fellow cattlemen except in the most general form, for fear of being struck dead in his tracks.

  Yet that is not how it was, not according to the poets. If one is to believe the poets, Anchises led a normal life thereafter, a distinguished but normal human life, until the day his city was set ablaze by foreigners and he was plunged into exile. If he did not forget that signal night, he did not think overmuch about it, not as we understand thinking.

  That is the main thing she would have liked to ask Robert Duncan about, as an expert on extraordinary intercourse, the thing she fails to understand about the Greeks, or if Anchises and his son were not Greeks but Trojans, foreigners, then about Greeks and Trojans together as archaic eastern Mediterranean peoples and subjects of Hellenic myth-making. She calls it their lack of inwardness. Anchises has been intimate with a divine being, as intimate as intimate can be. Not a common experience. In the whole of Christian mythology, setting aside the Apocrypha, there is only one parallel event, and that in the commoner form, with the male god – rather impersonally, rather distantly, it must be said – impregnating the mortal woman. 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 enquire, What was it like, how did it feel, how did you bear it? Yet the question 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. Rude enough among Mary’s countryfolk; positively indecent in someone two millennia older and wiser.

  Psyche, Anchises, Mary: there must be better, less prurient, more philosophical ways of thinking about the whole god-and-man business. But has she the time or the equipment, to say nothing of the inclination, to do so?

  Inwardness. Can we be one with a god profoundly enough to apprehend, to get a sense of, a god’s being? A question that no one seems to ask any more, except to an extent her new find Susan Mitchell, who is not a philosopher either; a question that went out of fashion during her lifetime (she remembers it happening, remembers her surprise), just as it came into fashion not too long before her lifetime commenced. Other modes of being. That may be a more decent way of phrasing it. Are there other modes of being besides what we call the human into which we can enter; and if there are not, what does that say about us and our limitations? She does not know much about Kant, but it sounds to her a Kantian kind of question. If her ear is right, then inwardness started its run with the man from Königsberg and ended, more or less, with Wittgenstein the Viennese destroyer.

  ‘Gods do exist,’ writes Friedrich Hölderlin, who had read his Kant, ‘but they carry on their lives somewhere up above us in another realm, not much interested, it would seem, in whether we exist or not.’ In bygone times those gods bestrode the earth, walked among men. But to us modern folk it is no longer given to catch a glimpse of them, much less suffer their love. ‘We come too late.’

  She reads less and less widely as she grows older. A not uncommon phenomenon. For Hölderlin, however, she always has time. Great-souled Hölderlin she would call him if she were Greek. Nevertheless, about Hölderlin on the gods she has her doubts. Too innocent, she thinks, too ready to take things at face value; not alert enough to the cunning of history. Things are rarely as they seem to be, she would like to instruct him. When we are stirred to lament the loss of the gods, it is more than likely the gods who are doing the stirring. The gods have not retreated: they cannot afford to.

  Odd that the man who put his finger on the divine apatheia, the inability of the gods to feel, and their consequent need to have others do their feeling for them, should have failed to see the effects of apatheia on their erotic life.

  Love and death. The gods, the immortals, were the inventors of death and corruption; yet with one or two notable exceptions they have lacked the courage to try their invention out on themselves. That is why they are so curious about us, so endlessly inquisitive. We call Psyche a silly, prying girl, but what was a god doing in her bed in the first place? In marking us down for death, the gods gave us an edge over them. Of the two, gods and mortals, it is we who live the more urgently, feel the more intensely. That is why they cannot put us out of their minds, cannot get by without us, ceaselessly watch us and prey on us. That, finally, is why they do not declare a ban on sex with us, merely make up rules about where and in what form and how often. Inventors of death; inventors of sex tourism too. In the sexual ecstasies of mortals, the frisson of death, its contortions, its relaxings: they talk about it endlessly when they have had too much to drink – who they first got to experience it with, what it felt like. They wish they had that inimitable little quiver in their own erotic repertoire, to spice up their couplings with each other. But the price is one they are not prepared to pay. Death, annihilation: what if there is no resurrection, they wonder misgivingly?

  We think of them as omniscient, these gods, but the truth is they know very little, and what they know know only in the most general of ways. No body of learning they can call their own, no philosophy, properly speaking. Their cosmology an assortment of commonplaces. Their sole expertise in astral flight, their sole homegrown science anthropology. They specialize in humankind because of what we have and they lack; they study us because they are envious.

  As for us, do they guess (what irony!) that what makes our embraces so intense, so unforgettable, is the glimpse they give us of a life we imagine as theirs, a life we call (since our language has no word for it) the beyond? I do not like that other world, writes Martha Clifford to her pen pal Leopold Bloom, but she lies: why would she write at all if she did not want to be swept off to another world by a demon lover?

  Leopold, meanwhile, strolls around the Dublin Public Library peeking, when no one is looking, between the legs of the statues of goddesses. If Apollo has a marble cock and balls, does Artemis, he wonders, have an orifice to match? Investigations in aesthetics, that is what he likes to tell himself he is engaged in: how far does the artist’s duty to nature extend? What he really wants to know, however, had he only the words for it, is whether congress is possible with the divine.

  And she herself? How much has she learned about gods in her wanderings around Dublin with that irremediably ordinary man? Almost like being married to him. Elizabeth Bloom, second and ghostly wife of.

  What she knows for certain about the gods is that they peek at us all the time, peek even between our legs, full of curiosity, full of envy; sometimes go so far as to rattle our earthly cage. But how deep, she asks herself today, does that curiosity really run? Aside from our erotic gifts, are they curious about us, their anthropological specimens, to the degree that we in turn are curious about chimps, or about birds, or about flies? Despite some evidence to the contrary, she would like to think, chimps. She would like to think the gods admire, however grudgingly, our energy, the endless ingenuity with which we try to elude our fate. Fascinating creatures, she would like to think they remark to each other over their ambrosia; so like us in many respects; their eyes in particular so expressive; what a pity they lack that je ne sais quoi without which they can never ascend to sit beside us!

  But perhaps she is wrong about their interest in us. Or rather, perhaps she used to be right, but now is wrong. In her heyday, she would like to think, she could have given winged Eros himself cause to pay earth a visit. Not because she was so much of a beauty but because she longed for the god’s touch, longed until
she ached; because in her longings, so unrequitable and therefore so comical when acted on, she might have promised a genuine taste of what was missing back home on Olympus. But everything seems now to have changed. Where in the world today does one find such immortal longings as hers used to be? Not in the personal columns, for sure. ‘SWF, 5' 8'', thirties, brunette, into astrology, biking, seeks SWM, 35–45 for friendship, fun, adventure.’ Nowhere: ‘DWF, 5' 8'', sixties, runs to death and death meets her as fast, seeks G, immortal, earthly form immaterial, for ends to which no words suffice.’ In the editorial office they would frown. Indecent desires, they would say, and toss her in the same basket as the pederasts.

  We do not call on the gods because we no longer believe in them. She hates sentences that hinge on because. The jaws of the trap snap shut, but the mouse, every time, has escaped. And what an irrelevancy anyway! How misguided! Worse than Hölderlin! Who cares what we believe? The sole question is whether the gods will continue to believe in us, whether we can keep alive the last flicker of the flame that once used to burn in them. ‘Friendship, fun, adventure’: what kind of appeal is that, to a god? More than enough fun where they come from. More than enough beauty too.

  Strange how, as desire relaxes its grip on her body, she sees more and more clearly a universe ruled by desire. Haven’t you read your Newton, she would like to say to the people in the dating agency (would like to say to Nietzsche too if she could get in touch with him)? Desire runs both ways: A pulls B because B pulls A, and vice versa: that is how you go about building a universe. Or if desire is still too rude a word, then what of appetency? Appetency and chance: a powerful duo, more than powerful enough to build a cosmology on, from the atoms and the little things with nonsense names that make up atoms to Alpha Centauri and Cassiopeia and the great dark back of beyond. The gods and ourselves, whirled helplessly around by the winds of chance, yet pulled equally towards each other, towards not only B and C and D but towards X and Y and Z and Omega too. Not the least thing, not the last thing but is called to by love.

  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?

  8

  At the Gate

  It is a hot afternoon. The square is packed with visitors. Few spare a glance for the white-haired woman who, suitcase in hand, descends from the bus. She wears a blue cotton frock; her neck, in the sun, is burned red and beaded with sweat.

  Past the pavement tables, past the young folk, the wheels of the suitcase rattling over the cobbles, she makes her way to the gate where a uniformed man stands drowsily on guard, propped on the rifle he holds butt down before him.

  ‘Is this the gate?’ she asks.

  Beneath the peaked cap he blinks once in confirmation.

  ‘Can I pass through?’

  With a movement of the eyes he indicates the lodge to one side.

  The lodge, put together of prefabricated wooden panels, is stiflingly hot. Inside, behind a small trestle table, sits a man in shirtsleeves, writing. A tiny electric fan blows a stream of air into his face.

  ‘Excuse me,’ she says. He pays her no attention. ‘Excuse me. Can someone open the gate for me?’

  He is filling in some kind of form. Without ceasing to write, he speaks. ‘First you must make a statement.’

  ‘Make a statement? To whom? To you?’

  With his left hand he pushes a sheet of paper across to her. She lets go of the suitcase and picks up the paper. It is blank.

  ‘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.’

  There is no more doubt in her mind about where she is, who she is. She is a petitioner before the gate. The journey that brought her here, to this country, to this town, that seemed to reach its end when the bus halted and its door opened on to the crowded square, was not the end of it all. Now commences a trial of a different kind. Some act is required of her, some prescribed yet undefined affirmation, before she will be found good and can pass through. But is this the one who will judge her, this ruddy, heavy-set man on whose rather sketchy uniform (military? civil guard?) she can detect no mark of rank but on whom the fan, swinging neither left nor right, pours a coolness that she wishes were being poured on her?

  ‘I am a writer,’ she says. ‘You have probably not heard of me here, but I write, or have written, under the name Elizabeth Costello. It is not my profession to believe, just to write. Not my business. I do imitations, as Aristotle would have said.’

  She pauses, then brings out the next sentence, the sentence that will determine whether this is her judge, the right one to judge her, or, on the contrary, merely the first in a long line leading to who knows what featureless functionary in what chancellery in what castle. ‘I can do an imitation of belief, if you like. Will that be enough for your purposes?’

  His response has an air of impatience about it, as though this is an offer he has had many times before. ‘Write the statement as required,’ he says. ‘Bring it back when it is completed.’

  ‘Very well, I will do so. Is there a time when you go off duty?’

  ‘I am always here,’ he replies. From which she understands that this town where she finds herself, where the guardian of the gate never sleeps and the people in the cafés seem to have nowhere to go, no obligation other than to fill the air with their chatter, is no more real than she: no more but perhaps no less.

  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 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.

  She takes her statement back to the guardhouse. As she half expected, it is rejected. The man at the desk does not refer it to a higher authority, apparently it does not deserve that, merely shakes his head and lets the page fall to the floor and pushes a fresh sheet of paper towards her. ‘What you believe,’ he says.

  She returns to her chair on the pavement. Am I going to become an institution, she wonders: the old woman who says she is a writer exempt from the law? The woman who, with her black suitcase always beside her (containing what? – she can no longer remember), writes pleas, one after the other, that she puts before the man in the guardhouse and that the man in the guardhouse pushes aside as not good enough, not what is required before one can pass on?

  ‘Can I just glance through?’ she says on her second attempt. ‘Take a glance at what lies on the other side? Just to see if it is worth all this trouble.’

  Ponderously the man rises from his desk. He is not as old as she, but he is not young either. He is wearing riding boots; his blue serge trousers have a red stripe up the sides. How hot he must be, she thinks! And in winter, how cold! Not a cushy job, being guardian of the gate.

  Past the soldier leaning on his rifle he takes her, till they stand before the gate itself, massive enough to hold back an army. From a pouch at his belt he takes a key nearly as long as his forearm. Will this be the point where he tells her the gate is meant for her and her alone, and moreover that she is destined never to pass through? Should she remind him, let him know she knows the score?
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  The key turns twice in the lock. ‘There, satisfy yourself,’ says the man.

  She puts her eye to the crack. A millimetre, two millimetres he draws open the door, then closes it again.

  ‘You have seen,’ he says. ‘The record will show that.’

  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. It is merely brilliant, more brilliant perhaps than the varieties of light she has known hitherto, but not of another order, not more brilliant than, say, a magnesium flash sustained endlessly.

  The man pats her on the arm. It is a surprising gesture, coming from him, surprisingly personal. Like one of those torturers, she reflects, who claim to wish you no harm, merely to be doing their sad duty. ‘Now you have seen,’ he says. ‘Now you will try harder.’