J. Coetzee - Elizabeth Costello

There are many things that it is like, this storytelling business. One of them (so she says in one of the paragraphs she has not crossed out yet) is a bottle with a genie in it. When the storyteller opens the bottle, the genie is released into the world, and it costs all hell to get him back in again. Her position, her revised position, her position in the twilight of life: better, on the whole, that the genie stay in the bottle.

The wisdom of the similitude, the wisdom of centuries (that is why she prefers to think in similitudes rather than reason things out), is that it is silent on the life the genie leads shut up in the bottle. It merely says that the world would be better off if the genie remained imprisoned.

A genie or a devil. While she has less and less idea what it could mean to believe in God, about the devil she has no doubt. The devil is everywhere under the skin of things, searching for a way into the light. The devil entered the docker that night on Spencer Street, the devil entered Hitler's hangman. And through the docker, all that time ago, the devil entered her: she can feel him crouched inside, folded up like a bird, waiting his chance to fly. Through Hitler's hangman a devil entered Paul West, and in his book West in turn has given that devil his freedom, turned him loose upon the world. She felt the brush of his leathery wing, as sure as soap, when she read those dark pages.

She is quite aware how old-fashioned it sounds. West will have defenders by the thousand. How can we know the horrors of the Nazis, those defenders will say, if our artists are forbidden to bring them to life for us? Paul West is not a devil but a hero: he has ventured into the labyrinth of Europe 's past and faced down the Minotaur and returned to tell his tale.

What can she say in reply? That it would have been better if our hero had stayed at home, or at least had kept his exploits to himself? In times when artists clutch to themselves what few tatters of dignity they have left, what gratitude will that kind of answer bring her among fellow writers? She has let us down, they will say. Elizabeth Costello has turned into old Mother Grundy.

She wishes she had The Very Rich Hours of Count von Stauffenberg with her. Could she merely glance again at those pages, brush her eyes across them, all her doubts would vanish, she is sure, the pages where West gives the hangman, the butcher – she has forgotten his name but cannot forget his hands, just as no doubt his victims carried the memory of those hands, fumbling at their throats, with them into eternity – where he gives the butcher a voice, allowing him his coarse, his worse than coarse, his unspeakable gibes at the shivering old men he is about to kill, gibes about how their bodies are going to betray them as they buck and dance at the end of the rope. It is terrible, terrible beyond words: terrible that such a man should have existed, even more terrible that he should be hauled out of the grave when we thought he was safely dead.

Obscene. That is the word, a word of contested etymology, that she must hold on to as talisman. She chooses to believe that obscene means off-stage. To save our humanity, certain things that we may want to see (may want to see because we are human!) must remain off-stage. Paul West has written an obscene book, he has shown what ought not to be shown. That must be the thread of her talk when she faces the crowd, that she must not let go of.

She falls asleep at the writing table, fully dressed, with her head on her arms. At seven the alarm rings. Groggy, exhausted, she does what she can to fix her face and takes the funny little elevator down to the lobby. 'Has Mr West checked in yet?' she asks the boy at the desk, the same boy.

'Mr West…Yes, Mr West is in room 311.'

The sun is streaming through the windows of the breakfast room. She helps herself to coffee and a croissant, finds a seat near a window, surveys the half-dozen other early birds. Might the stocky man with the glasses reading the newspaper be West? He does not look like the photograph on the book jacket, but that proves nothing. Should she go across and ask? 'Mr West, how do you do, I am Elizabeth Costello and I have a complicated statement to make, if you will hear me out. It concerns you and your dealings with the devil.' How would she feel if some stranger did that to her while she was at breakfast?

She gets up, picks her way among the tables, taking the long route to the buffet. The paper the man is reading is Dutch, the Volkskrant. There is dandruff on the collar of his jacket. He glances up over his spectacles. A placid, ordinary face. He could be anyone: a textiles salesman, a professor of Sanskrit. He could equally be Satan in one of his disguises. She hesitates, passes on.

The Dutch paper, the dandruff… Not that Paul West might not read Dutch, not that Paul West might not have dandruff. But if she is going to set herself up as an expert on evil, ought she not be able to sniff evil out? What does evil smell like? Sulphur?

Brimstone? Zyklon B? Or has evil become colourless and odourless, like so much of the rest of the moral world?

At eight thirty Badings calls for her. Together he and she stroll the few blocks to the theatre where the conference is to take place. In the auditorium he points to a man sitting by himself in the back row. 'Paul West,' says Badings. 'Would you like me to introduce you?'

Though it is not the man she saw at breakfast, the two are not unalike in build, even in looks.

'Later perhaps,' she murmurs.

Badings excuses himself, goes off to attend to business. Still some twenty minutes before the session begins. She crosses the auditorium. 'Mr West?' she says, as pleasantly as she can. Years since she last employed what might be called feminine wiles, but if wiles will do the trick then she will use them. 'Might I speak to you for a moment?'

West, the real West, glances up from what he is reading, which seems, astonishingly, to be some kind of comic book.

'My name is Elizabeth Costello,' she says, and sits down beside him. 'This is not easy for me, so let me come to the point. My lecture today contains references to one of your books, the von Stauffenberg book. In fact, the lecture is largely about that book, and about you as its author. When I prepared the lecture I was not expecting you to be in Amsterdam. The organizers did not inform me. But of course, why should they have? They had no idea of what I intended to say'

She pauses. West is gazing into the distance, giving her no help.

'I could, I suppose,' she continues, and now she really does not know what is coming next,'request your pardon in advance, request you not to take my remarks personally. But then you might enquire, quite justifiably, why I insist on making remarks that require a prior apology, why I do not simply cut them out of the lecture.

'I did in fact consider cutting them out. I sat up most of last night, after I heard you were going to be here, trying to find a way of making my remarks less pointed, less offensive. I even thought of absenting myself entirely – pretending I was ill. But that would not have been fair to the organizers, don't you think?'

It is an opening, a chance for him to speak. He clears his throat, but then says nothing, continuing to gaze ahead, presenting her with his rather handsome profile.

'What I say,' she says, glancing at her watch (ten minutes left, the theatre is beginning to fill, she must plunge ahead, no time for niceties),'what I contend, is that we must be wary of horrors such as you describe in your book. We as writers. Not merely for the sake of our readers but out of concern for ourselves. We can put ourselves in peril by what we write, or so I believe. For if what we write has the power to make us better people then surely it has the power to make us worse. I don't know whether you agree.'