J. Coetzee - Elizabeth Costello

She picks up a crucifix, not the largest, but large nevertheless: an eighteen-inch Christ on the cross, in a heavy reddish wood. 'What do you call this wood?'

'Is karee. Karee wood.'

'And you carved it?' She holds the crucifix out at arm's-length. As in the chapel, the face of the tortured man is a formalized, simplified mask in a single plane, the eyes slits, the mouth heavy and drooping. The body, on the other hand, is quite naturalistic, copied, she would guess, from some European model. The knees are raised, as if the man were trying to relieve the pain in his arms by putting his weight on the nail piercing his feet.

'I carve all the Jesus. The cross, sometimes my assistant make it. My assistants.'

'And where are your assistants now? Does no one work here any more?'

'No, my assistants all gone. Too many crosses. Too many crosses to sell.'

She peers into one of the boxes. Miniature crucifixes, three or four inches high, like the one her sister wears, scores of them, all with the same flat mask-face, the same raised-knee posture.

'Don't you carve anything else? Animals? Faces? Ordinary people?'

Joseph pulls a face. 'Animals is just for tourists,' he says disdainfully.

'And you don't carve for tourists. You don't carve tourist art.'

'No, no tourist art.'

'Why do you carve then?'

'For Jesus,' he says. 'Yes. For Our Saviour.'

'I saw Joseph's collection,' she says. 'A bit obsessive, wouldn't you call it? Just the one image, over and over again.'

Blanche does not reply. They are having lunch, a lunch she would under normal circumstances call exiguous: sliced tomato, a few wilted lettuce leaves, a boiled egg. But she has no appetite. She toys with the lettuce; the smell of the egg nauseates her.

'How does the economics of it work,' she continues – 'the economics of religious art, in our day and age?'

'Joseph used to be a paid employee of Marianhill. Paid to do his carvings, and some odd jobs as well. For the last eighteen months he has been on pension. He has arthritis in his hands. You must have noticed that.'

'But who buys those carvings of his?'

'We have two outlets in Durban that take them. Other missions accept them as well, for resale. They may not be works of art by Western standards but they are authentic. A few years ago Joseph did a commission for the church at Ixopo. That put a couple of thousand rand in his pocket. We still get bulk orders for the small-size crucifix. Schools, Catholic schools, buy them for prize-givings.'

'For prize-givings. You come top in Catechism and you get one of Joseph's crucifixes.'

'More or less. Is there anything wrong with that?'

'Nothing. Still, he has overproduced, hasn't he? There must be hundreds of pieces in that shed, all identical. Why didn't you get him to make something else besides crucifixes, crucifixions? What does it do to a person's – if I dare use the word – soul to spend his working life carving a man in agony over and over again? When he isn't doing odd jobs, that is.'

Blanche gives her a steely smile. 'A man, Elizabeth?' she says. 'A man in agony?'

'A man, a god, a man-god, don't make an issue of it, Blanche, we're not in theology class. What does it do to a man with gifts to spend his life as uncreatively as your Joseph has done? His gifts may be limited, he may not be an artist properly speaking; still, might it not have been wiser to encourage him to expand his horizon a little?'

Blanche sets down her knife and fork. 'All right, let us face the criticism you make, let us face it in its most extreme form. Joseph is not an artist but he might perhaps have become one if we – if I – had encouraged him, years ago, to extend his range by visiting art galleries or at least other carvers to see what else was being done. Instead Joseph remained – Joseph was kept at the level of – a craftsman. He lived here at the mission, in total obscurity, doing the same carving over and over again in different sizes and different woods, until arthritis struck him and his working life was over. So Joseph was prevented from, as you put it, expanding his horizon. He was denied a fuller life, specifically an artist's life. Does that cover your charge?'

'More or less. Not necessarily an artist's life, I would not be so foolish as to recommend that, just a fuller life.'

'Right. If that is your charge, I will give you my reply. Joseph spent thirty years of his earthly existence representing, for the eyes of others certainly but principally for his own eyes, Our Saviour in his agony. Hour after hour, day after day, year after year, he imagined that agony and, with a fidelity you can behold for yourself, reproduced it, to the best of his ability, without varying it, without importing new fashions into it, without injecting into it any of his own personality. Which of us, I now ask, will Jesus be most gladdened to welcome into his kingdom: Joseph, with his wasted hands, or you, or me?'

She does not like it when her sister gets on her high horse and preaches. It happened during her speech in Johannesburg and it is happening again. All that is most intolerant in Blanche's character emerges at such times: intolerant and rigid and bullying.

'I think Jesus would be gladder still,' she says as drily as she is able, 'if he knew that Joseph had had some choice. That Joseph had not been dragooned into piety.'

'Go out. Go and ask Joseph. Ask him whether he has been dragooned into anything.' Blanche pauses. 'Do you think Joseph is just a puppet in my hands, Elizabeth? Do you think Joseph has no comprehension of how he has spent his life? Go and speak to him. Listen to what he has to say.'

'I will. But I have another question, one that Joseph cannot answer because it is a question to you. Why does the model you, or if not you then the institution you represent – why does the specific model you set before Joseph and tell him to copy, to imitate, have to be what I can only call Gothic? Why a Christ dying in contortions rather than a living Christ? A man in his prime, in his early thirties: what do you have against showing him alive, in all his living beauty? And, while I am about it, what do you have against the Greeks? The Greeks would never have made statues and paintings of a man in the extremes of agony, deformed, ugly, and then knelt before those statues and worshipped them. If you wonder why the humanists whom you wish us to sneer at looked beyond Christianity and the contempt that Christianity exhibits for the human body and therefore for man himself, surely that ought to give you a clue. You ought to know, you cannot have forgotten, that representations of Jesus in his agony are an idiosyncrasy of the Western Church. They were entirely foreign to Constantinople. The Eastern Church would have regarded them as indecent, and quite right too.

'Frankly Blanche, there is something about the entire crucifixional tradition that strikes me as mean, as backward, as medieval in the worst sense – unwashed monks, illiterate priests, cowed peasants. What are you up to, reproducing that most squalid, most stagnant phase of European history in Africa?'

'Holbein,' says Blanche.'Grünewald. If you want the human form in extremis, go to them. The dead Jesus. Jesus in the tomb.'

'I don't see what you are getting at.'

'Holbein and Grünewald were not artists of the Catholic Middle Ages. They belonged to the Reformation.'

'This is not a quarrel I am conducting with the historical Catholic Church, Blanche. I am asking what you, you yourself, have against beauty. Why should people not be able to look at a work of art and think to themselves, That is what we as a species are capable of being, that is what I am capable of being, rather than looking at it and thinking to themselves, My God, I am going to die, I am going to be eaten by worms?'