Coetzee what is realism

She is ready, waiting, full of doubts but prepared to face the foe. She has washed her hair and brushed it back. Already on her face a passive look that, if you saw it in a young girl, you would call withdrawn. A face without personality, the kind that photographers have to work on to lend distinction. Like Keats, he thinks, the great advocate of blank receptiveness. The blue costume, the greasy hair, these are details, signs of a moderate realism.

Supply the particulars, allow the significations to emerge of themselves. Aprocedure pioneered by Daniel Defoe. Robinson Crusoe, cast up on the beach, looks around for his shipmates. But there are none. No large words, no grief and despair, just hats and caps and shoes. For as far back as he can remember, his mother has secluded herself in the mornings to do her writing. No intrusions under any circumstances. He used to think of himself as a misfortunate child, lonely and unloved.

When they felt particularly sorry for themselves, he and his sister used to slump outside the locked door, making tiny whining sounds. In time the whining would change to humming or singing, and they would feel better, forgetting their forsakenness.

Now the scene has changed. He has grown up. He is no longer outside the door but inside, observing her as she sits, back to the window, confronting, day after day, year after year, while her hair slowly goes from black to grey, the blank page.

What doggedness! She deserves the medal, he thinks, this one and many more. For valour beyond the call of duty. The change came when he was thirty-three. Until then he had not read a word she had written. That was his reply to her, his revenge on her for locking him out. She denied him, therefore he denied her. Or perhaps he refused to read her in order to protect himself. Perhaps that was the deeper motive: to ward off the lightning-stroke.

Then one day, without a word to anyone, without even a word to himself, he took one of her books out of the library. After that he read everything, reading openly, in the train, at the lunch table. Other people, too, he recognizes; and there must be many more he does not recognize. About sex, about passion and jealousy and envy, she writes with an insight that shakes him. It is positively indecent.

She shakes him; that is what she presumably does to other readers too. That is presumably why, in the larger picture, she exists. What a strange reward for a lifetime of shaking people: to be conveyed to this town in Massachusetts and feted and given money!

For she is by no means a comforting writer. She is even cruel, in a way that women can be but men seldom have the heart for. What sort of creature is she? Not a seal, certainly: not amiable enough for that. But not a shark either. A cat, perhaps. One of those large cats that pause as they eviscerate their victim and, across the torn-open belly, give you a cold yellow stare. There is a scene in the restaurant, mainly dialogue, which I will skip. I pick up events back at the hotel, where Elizabeth Costello asks her son to run through the list again of the people they have just met.

He obeys, giving each a name and function, as in life. She is a specialist on Australia and has taught there. Paula Sachs she knows. The bald man, Kerrigan, is a novelist, originally Irish, now living in New. The fifth juror, the one who sat next to him, is named Moebius. She teaches in California and edits ajournai. She has also published stories. The heavyweights are wrestling with heavyweight problems. Once you present a problem, you might be shifted over into their court.

An example of how someone of your station and your generation and your origins writes. An instance. Am I allowed to protest? After all the effort I put into not writing like anyone else?

But you must surely concede that at a certain level we write like everyone else. Otherwise we would be writing private languages. John goes down to the hotel gymnasium and there bumps into Gordon Wheatley, chairman of the jury. Side by side on exercise bicycles they have a shouted conversation.

His mother will be disappointed, he tells Wheatley, not entirely seriously, if she hears she has won the Appleton Award because is the year of Australasia. Not the best X or Y, just the best. Of course we say that Elizabeth Costello is the best. We just have to be clear what a statement like that means, in the context of our times. He hopes that Wheatley does not write as badly as he thinks.

Realism has never been comfortable with ideas. It could not be otherwise: realism is premised on the idea that ideas have no separate existence, can exist only in things. So when it needs to debate ideas, as here, it 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 is cardinal. In these debates, ideas do not and indeed cannot float free: they are tied to the speakers by whom they are enounced, are generated from the matrix of individual interests out of which their speakers act in the world. They have a heavy schedule before them: an interview, a trip to the college radio station for a recording session, then, in the evening, the presentation ceremony and the speech that goes with it. At the radio station the two of them are separated.

He is shown into the control booth. The interviewer, he is surprised to see, is the elegant Moebius woman he had sat beside at dinner. She proceeds to give a crisp introduction. Did you have anyone in particular in mind when you wrote it?

Does it draw upon your own early life? Of course we draw upon our own lives all the time - they are all we have. I made it up. But do you find it easy, writing from the position of a man? To his surprise, she does not take the opening. Making up someone other than yourself.

Making up a world for him to move in. Making up an Australia. Critics have concentrated on the way you have claimed or reclaimed Molly from Joyce, made her your own. I wonder if you would comment on your intentions in this book, particularly in challenging Joyce, one of the great father-figures of modern literature, on his own territory. She leaves her trace across the pages of Ulysses as a bitch in heat leaves her smell. Material that almost invites you to take it up and build something of your own.

Looking for prey, even. Yes, I wanted to liberate her from that house, and particularly from that bedroom, with its creaking bedsprings, and turn her loose - as you say - on Dublin. But yes, to an extent Molly is a prisoner of marriage, of the kind of marriage that was available in Ireland in Her husband Leopold is a prisoner too.

If she is shut into the conjugal home, he is shut out. So we have Odysseus trying to get in and Penelope trying to get out. But he is impressed, as ever, by the persona his mother manages to project: of genial common sense, lack of malice, yet of sharp wittedness too.

And I began to wonder about other women whom we think of as having been given a voice by male writers in the name of their liberation, yet in the end only to speak and serve a male philosophy.

I am thinking of D. It will be a grand spectacle. The woman to his left introduces herself. She has made us read everything. They have the look of money, old money. Benefactors, no doubt. You should tell her that. Adherents; disciples. Would it really please her to be told? The presentation scene itself I will skip. Generally speaking it is not a good idea to interrupt the narrative too often, since storytelling works by lulling the reader or listener into a dreamstate in which real-world time and space fade away, superseded by the time and space of the fiction.

Breaking into the dream draws attention to the constructedness of the story, and plays havoc with the realist illusion.

However, unless I skip certain scenes we will be here all day. The skips are not part of the text, they are part of the performance. The award is made. She puts on her glasses. I was living in London, at that time the cultural metropolis for Australians. I remember clearly the day when a package arrived in the mail, a copy of the book, an advance copy. I was of course thrilled to have it in my hands at last, the real thing. But there was still one thing that nagged me.

I got on to the telephone to my publishers. And I would not rest until Ihad their assurance that the deposit copies would be mailed the same afternoon, to the Bodleian and the other places, but above all to the British Museum.

The joke is that my closest literary neighbour turned out to be Marie Corelli. Yet behind my anxiety there was something serious, and behind that seriousness in turn something pathetic that is less easy to acknowledge. Besides all the copies of the book you have written that are going to perish - that are going to be pulped because there is no sale for them, that are going to be opened and read for a page or two and then yawned at and put aside forever, that are going to be left behind at seaside hotels or in trains - besides all these lost ones we must be able to feel there is at least one copy that will not only be read but be taken care of, given a home, given a place on the shelf that will be its own in perpetuity.

What lay behind my anxiety about deposit copies was the wish that, even if I should be knocked over by a bus the next day, this firstborn of mine would have a home where it could snooze for the next hundred years, and no one would come poking with a stick to see if it was still alive. I skip, and resume. It is a speech, but a test too, an examination, a viva voce. Am I going to pretend I am the ape, torn away from my natural surroundings, forced to perform in front of a gathering of critical strangers?

I hope not. I am one of you, I am not of a different species. For all we know, too, the audience may consist not, as we imagine, of be whiskered, red-faced gents who have put aside their bushjackets and topis for evening dress, but of fellow-apes, trained, if not to the level of our speaker, who can mouth complicated sentences in German, then at least to sit and listen; or, if not trained to that pitch, then chained to their seats and trained not to jabber and pick fleas and relieve themselves openly.

The word-mirror is broken, irreparably, it seems. About what is really going on in the lecture-hall your guess is as good as mine: men and men, men and apes, apes and men, apes and apes, whatever. The lecture-hall itself may be nothing but a zoo.

The words on the page will no longer stand up and be counted, each saying, 'I mean what I mean! I am not using the privilege of this platform to make idle, nihilistic jokes about what I am, ape or woman, and what you are, my auditors. That is not the point of the story, say I, who am nevertheless in no position to dictate what the point of the story is.

There used to be a time, we believe, when we could say who we were. Now we are just performers, speaking our parts. The bottom has dropped out. We could think of this as a tragic turn of events, were it not that it is hard to have respect for whatever the bottom was that dropped out - it looks to us like an illusion now, one of those illusions sustained only by the concentrated gaze of everyone in the room.

As soon as you look away, the mirror falls to the floor and shatters. And properly so. There is a limit to the burden of remembering we can impose on our children and grandchildren. They will have a world of their own, of which we will be less and less part.

Thank you. His mother takes off her glasses, smiles. She will be haunted by this question, in various guises, throughout the book. Had Costello been South African, the connection between this challenge and the criticisms sometimes leveled at Coetzee would have been even more evident. The fact that he is known only by his first name in the mission hints at the persistence of racist attitudes among the devout nuns. Joseph, now an old man, has spent his life carving nothing but crucified Christs, the same tortured body over and over in a variety of sizes, and although Elizabeth can think of this only as a stultifying waste of artistic potential, Blanche praises it as true devotion.

In this instance, it is the power of realistic fiction to expose the reader to human evil. Our rational understanding of the ethics of fictional writing may be unshaken, but it has been exposed to an alternative way of experiencing some of the issues, and to the importance of experience itself in ethical judgments.

Now, in her dream or fantasy, or simply thanks to novelistic license, Costello is at the gate that leads to a world that we and she assume is some kind of heavenly reward. The question of her calling that has run through all the previous episodes now becomes central, as she discovers she has to satisfy a tribunal as to her beliefs before she will be permitted to pass through the gate. 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 has to say about the treatment of animals, the fictional representation of evil, the oral novel, the value of the humanities? Rejected on the basis of this argument, Costello later tries a different tack: she believes, she tells the row of judges, in the frogs that inhabit a particular river in rural Victoria, and gives an impassioned description of their lives. We never learn, perhaps she never learns, whether this second answer is accepted; and although this makes for something of a narrative anticlimax, it leaves us strongly aware that what has mattered, for Elizabeth Costello and for the reader, is the event—literary and ethical at the same time—of storytelling, of testing, of self-questioning, and not the outcome.

Fact and fiction became even harder to disentangle when Coetzee subsequently moved from South Africa to Australia. Although born in England, the real Paul West has lived and worked in the United States for most of his life.

The man who stays in London during the Great Plague on the strength of a biblical passage is the narrator—himself a fictional persona created by Defoe—of A Journal of the Plague Year 12—13 , while the same work is the source of the stories of the cloud like an angel with a flaming sword 22—23 , the man Robert who feeds his family from a distance —9 , the man who runs naked into Harrow Alley —72 , and the man buried alive in the dead pit at Mountmill 90— I still confine myself to fiction, you will be relieved to hear.

I have not yet descended to hawking my opinions around. Coetzee himself seems to have felt no inhibitions about publishing discursive nonfiction pieces, collected in such volumes as White Writing, Giving Offense, and Stranger Shores.

Outside the arena of sibling competition, Costello is not nearly so confident about the heritage of Apollo. Derek Attridge is the author and editor of numerous works, including J. View cart Subscribe Login. London and New York: Routledge. Coetzee, J. The Lives of Animals.

Princeton: Princeton University Press. CrossRef Google Scholar. London: Vintage. Stranger Shores: Essays — Elizabeth Costello: Eight Lessons. London: Secker and Warburg. He and His Man. The Official Website of the Nobel Prize. Diary of Bad Year. Summertime: Scenes from Provincial Life 3. London: Harvill Secker. Harrison, K. Lear, J. Ethics and the Problem of Communication. Anton Leist and Peter Singer. New York: Columbia University Press.

Mulhall, S.