J. Coetzee - Elizabeth Costello

Again an opening. Again, tenaciously, the man holds his silence. What is passing through his mind? Is he wondering what he is doing at this get-together in Holland, land of windmills and tulips, being harangued by some mad old witch, with the prospect of having to sit through the same harangue a second time? A writer's life, she ought to remind him, is not an easy one.

A group of young people, students probably, settle into the seats immediately in front of them. Why does West not respond? She is getting irritated; she has an urge to raise her voice, wag a bony finger in his face.

'I was deeply impressed by your book. That is to say, it made an impress on me the way a branding iron does. Certain pages burned with the fires of hell. You must know what I am talking about. The scene of the hangings in specific. I doubt I would be able to write such pages myself. That is to say, I might be able to write them, but I would not, I would not let myself, not any more, not as I am now. I do not think one can come away unscathed, as a writer, from conjuring up such scenes. I think writing like that can harm one. That is what I intend to say in my lecture.' She holds forth the green folder with her text, taps it. 'So I am not asking your pardon, not even asking your indulgence, just doing the decent thing and apprising you, warning you, of what is about to take place. Because' (and suddenly she feels stronger, surer of herself, more ready to express her irritation, her anger even, at this man who does not bother to speak back) 'because you are after all not a child, you must have known the risk you were taking, must have realized there could be consequences, unpredictable consequences, and now, lo and behold' – she stands up, clasps the folder to her bosom as if to shield herself from the flames that flicker around him – 'the consequences have arrived. That is all. Thank you for hearing me out, Mr West.'

Badings, at the front of the hall, is waving discreetly. It is time.

The first part of the lecture is routine, covering familiar ground: authorship and authority, claims made by poets over the ages to speak a higher truth, a truth whose authority lies in revelation, and their further claim, in Romantic times, which happen to have been times of unparalleled geographical exploration, of a right to venture into forbidden or tabooed places.

'What I will be asking today,' she continues, 'is whether the artist is quite the hero-explorer he pretends to be, whether we are always right to applaud when he emerges from the cave with reeking sword in one hand and the head of the monster in the other. To illustrate my case I will be referring to a product of the imagination that appeared a few years ago, an important and in many ways courageous book about the nearest approximation that we, in our disillusioned age, have produced to the monster of myth, namely Adolf Hitler. I am referring to Paul West's novel The Very Rich Hours of Count von Stauffenberg and in specific to the graphic chapter in which Mr West recounts the execution of the July 1944 plotters (excepting von Stauffenberg, he having already been shot by an overzealous military officer, to the chagrin of Hitler, who wanted his foe to die a lingering death).

'If this were an ordinary lecture I would at this point read out to you a paragraph or two, to give you the feel of this extraordinary book. (It is not a secret, by the way, that its author is among us. Let me beg Mr West's pardon for presuming to lecture him to his face: at the time I wrote my talk I had no idea he would be here.) I ought to read to you from these terrible pages, but I will not, because I do not believe it will be good for you or for me to hear them. I even assert (and here I come to the point) that I do not believe it was good for Mr West, if he will forgive my saying so, to write those pages.

'That is my thesis today: that certain things are not good to read or to write. To put the point in another way: I take seriously the claim that the artist risks a great deal by venturing into forbidden places: risks, specifically, himself; risks, perhaps, all. I take this claim seriously because I take seriously the forbiddenness of forbidden places. The cellar in which the July 1944 plotters were hanged is one such forbidden place. I do not believe we should go into that cellar, any of us. I do not believe Mr West should go there; and, if he chooses to go nevertheless, I believe we should not follow. On the contrary, I believe that bars should be erected over the cellar mouth, with a bronze memorial plaque saying Here died… followed by a list of the dead and their dates, and that should be that.

'Mr West is a writer, or, as they used to say once upon a time, a poet. I too am a poet. I have not read everything Mr West has written, but enough to know that he takes his calling seriously. So when I read Mr West I do so not only with respect but with sympathy.

'I read the von Stauffenberg book with sympathy, not excepting (you must believe me) the execution scenes, to the point that it might as well be I as Mr West who hold the pen and trace the words. Word by word, step by step, heartbeat by heartbeat, I accompany him into the darkness. No one has been here before, I hear him whisper, and so I whisper too; our breath is as one. No one has been in this place since the men who died and the man who killed them. Ours is the death that will be died, ours the hand that will knot the rope. ("Use thin cord," Hitler commanded his man. "Strangle them. I want them to feel themselves dying." And his man, his creature, his monster, obeyed.)

'What arrogance, to lay claim to the suffering and death of those pitiful men! Their last hours belong to them alone, they are not ours to enter and possess. If that is not a nice thing to say about a colleague, if it will ease the moment, we can pretend the book in question is no longer Mr West's but mine, made mine by the madness of my reading. Whatever pretence we need to adopt, let us in heaven's name adopt it and move on.'

There are several more pages to be got through, but suddenly she is too upset to read on, or else the spirit fails her. A homily: let it rest at that. Death is a private matter; the artist should not invade the deaths of others. Hardly an outrageous position in a world where routinely the wounded and the dying have the lenses of cameras poked into their faces.

She closes the green folder. A thin ripple of clapping. She glances at her watch. Five minutes before the session is due to end. She has taken surprisingly long, given how little she has actually said.

Time for one question, two at most, thank God. Her head is spinning. She hopes no one is going to demand she say more about Paul West, who, she sees (putting on her glasses), is still in his place in the back row (Long-suffering fellow, she thinks, and all of a sudden feels more friendly toward him).

A man with a dark beard has his hand up. 'How do you know?' he says. 'How do you know that Mr West – we seem to be talking a lot about Mr West today, I hope Mr West will have a right of reply, it will be interesting to hear his reaction' – there are smiles in the audience – 'has been harmed by what he has written? If I understand you correctly, you are saying that if you yourself had written this book about von Stauffenberg and Hitler you would have been infected with the Nazi evil. But perhaps all that says is that you are, so to speak, a weak vessel. Perhaps Mr West is made of sterner stuff. And perhaps we, his readers, are made of sterner stuff too. Perhaps we could read what Mr West writes and learn from it, and come out stronger rather than weaker, more determined never to let the evil return. Would you care to comment?'

She should never have come, never have accepted the invitation, she knows it now. Not because she has nothing to say about evil, the problem of evil, the problem of calling evil a problem, not even because of the ill luck of West's presence, but because a limit has been reached, the limit of what can be achieved with a body of balanced, well-informed modern folk in a clean, well-lit lecture venue in a well-ordered, well-run European city in the dawn of the twenty-first century.