J. Coetzee - Elizabeth Costello

Conversation with the Godwins is clearly flagging. She turns to the person on her right, but he is deeply engaged elsewhere.

'When I was a student,' she says, turning back to the Godwins, 'which would have been around 1950, we read a lot of D. H. Lawrence. Of course we read the classics too, but that was not where our real energy went. D. H. Lawrence, T. S. Eliot – those were the writers we pored over. Perhaps Blake in the eighteenth century. Perhaps Shakespeare, because as we all know Shakespeare transcends his time. Lawrence gripped us because he promised a form of salvation. If we worshipped the dark gods, he told us, and carried out their observances, we would be saved. We believed him. We went out and worshipped the dark gods as best we were able, from the hints that Mr Lawrence let drop. Well, our worship did not save us. A false prophet, I would call him now, in retrospect.

'What I mean to say is that in our truest reading, as students, we searched the page for guidance, guidance in perplexity. We found it in Lawrence, or we found it in Eliot, the early Eliot: a different kind of guidance, perhaps, but guidance nevertheless in how to live our lives. The rest of our reading, by comparison, was just a matter of mugging things up so that we could pass exams.

'If the humanities want to survive, surely it is those energies and that craving for guidance that they must respond to: a craving that is, in the end, a quest for salvation.'

She has spoken a great deal, more than she meant to. In fact, in the silence that now falls, she sees that others have been listening in. Even her sister is turned towards her.

We did not realize,' says the Dean loudly from the head of the table, 'when Sister Bridget asked us to invite you to this happy event, that it was the Elizabeth Costello we would have in our midst. Welcome. We are delighted to have you.'

'Thank you,' she says.

'I could not help catching some of what you were saying,' the Dean continues. 'Do you then agree with your sister that the outlook for the humanities is dark?'

She must be careful how she treads. 'I was merely saying,' she says, 'that our readers – our young readers in particular – come to us with a certain hunger, and if we cannot or will not satisfy their hunger then we must not be surprised if they turn away from us. But my sister and I are in different lines of business. She has told you what she thinks. For my own part, I would say that it is enough for books to teach us about ourselves. Any reader ought to be content with that. Or almost any reader.'

They are watching her sister to see how she reacts. Teaching us about ourselves: what else is that but Studium humanitatis?

'Is this just a conversation over luncheon,' says Sister Bridget, 'or are we being serious?'

'We are being serious,' says the Dean. 'We are serious.'

Perhaps she should revise her opinion of him. Perhaps not just another academic bureaucrat going through his hostly motions, but a soul with the hungers of a soul. Grant that possibility. In fact, perhaps that is what all of them are around this table, in their deepest being: hungering souls. She should not rush to judgement. If nothing else, these people are not stupid. And they must by now have realized that in Sister Bridget, whether they like her or not, they have someone out of the ordinary.

'I do not need to consult novels,' says her sister, 'to know what pettiness, what baseness, what cruelty human beings are capable of. That is where we start, all of us. We are fallen creatures. If the study of mankind amounts to no more than picturing to us our darker potential, I have better things to spend my time on. If on the other hand the study of mankind is to be a study in what reborn man can be, that is a different story. However, you have had enough lecturing for one day.'

'But,' says the young man seated next to Mrs Godwin, 'surely that is precisely what humanism stood for, and the Renaissance too: for humankind as humankind is capable of being. For the ascent of man. The humanists were not crypto-atheists. They were not even Lutherans in disguise. They were Catholic Christians like yourself, Sister. Think of Lorenzo Valla. Valla had nothing against the Church, he just happened to know Greek better than Jerome did, and pointed out some of the mistakes Jerome made in translating the New Testament. If the Church had accepted the principle that Jerome's Vulgate was a human production, and therefore capable of being improved, rather than being the word of God itself, perhaps the whole history of the West would have been different.'

Blanche is silent. The speaker presses on.

'If the Church as a whole had been able to acknowledge that its teachings and its whole system of beliefs were based on texts, and that those texts were susceptible on the one hand to scribal corruption and so forth, on the other to flaws of translation, because translation is always an imperfect process, and if the Church had also been able to concede that the interpretation of texts is a complex matter, vastly complex, instead of claiming for itself a monopoly of interpretation, then we would not be having this argument today.'

'But,' says the Dean, 'how have we come to know how vastly difficult the business of interpretation can be except by experiencing certain lessons of history, lessons that the Church of the fifteenth century could hardly have foreseen?'

'Such as?'

'Such as contact with hundreds of other cultures, each with its own language and history and mythology and unique way of seeing the world.'

'Then my point would be,' says the young man, 'that it is the humanities and the humanities alone, and the training that the humanities provide, that will allow us to steer our way through this new multicultural world, and precisely, precisely' – he almost hammers the table, so excited has he grown – 'because the humanities are about reading and interpretation. The humanities begin, as our lecturer said, in textual scholarship, and develop as a body of disciplines devoted to interpretation.'

'In fact, the human sciences,' says the Dean.

The young man pulls a face. 'That is a red herring, Mr Dean. If you don't mind, I will remain with either studia or disciplines.'

So young, she thinks, and so sure of himself. He will remain with studia.

'What about Winckelmann?' says her sister.

Winckelmann? The young man looks back at her uncompre-hendingly.

'Would Winckelmann have recognized himself in the picture you paint of the humanist as a technician of textual interpretation?'

'I don't know. Winckelmann was a great scholar. Perhaps he would have.'

'Or Schelling,' pursues her sister. 'Or any of those who believed, more or less openly, that Greece provided a better civilizational ideal than Judaeo-Christianity Or, for that matter, those who believed that mankind had lost its way and should go back to its primitive roots and make a fresh start. In other words, the anthropologists. Lorenzo Valla – since you mention Lorenzo Valla – was an anthropologist. His starting point was human society. You say the first humanists were not crypto-atheists. No, they were not. But they were crypto-relativists. Jesus, in their eyes, was embedded in his own world, or as we would call it today his own culture. It was their task as scholars to understand that world and interpret it to their times. Just as it would in due course become their task to interpret the world of Homer. And so on down to Winckelmann.'

She terminates abruptly, glances at the Dean. Has he perhaps given her some signal? Has he, unbelievably, beneath the table, tapped Sister Bridget on the knee?

'Yes,' says the Dean, 'fascinating. We should have brought you down for a whole lecture series, Sister. But unfortunately, some of us have engagements. Perhaps at some time in the future…' He leaves the possibility hanging in the air; graciously Sister Bridget inclines her head.