J. Coetzee - Elizabeth Costello

'And this is your first hearing?'

'Yes.'

'And you want -?'

'I want to pass the gate. To pass through. To get on with what comes next.'

'Yes. As you must have learned by now, there is the question of belief. You have a statement to make to us?'

'I have a statement, revised, heavily revised, revised many times. Revised to the limit of my powers, I venture to say. I don't believe I have it in me to revise it further. You have a copy, I believe.'

'We do. Revised to the limit, you say. Some of us would say there is always one revision more to do. Let us see. Will you read out your statement, please.'

She reads.

'I am a writer. You may think I should say instead, I was a writer. But I am or was a writer because of who I am or was. I have not ceased to be what I am. As yet. Or so it feels to me.

'I am a writer, and what I write is what I hear. I am a secretary of the invisible, one of many secretaries over the ages. That is my calling: dictation secretary. It is not for me to interrogate, to judge what is given me. I merely write down the words and then test them, test their soundness, to make sure I have heard right.

'Secretary of the invisible: not my own phrase, I hasten to say. I borrow it from a secretary of a higher order, Czeslaw Milosz, a poet, perhaps known to you, to whom it was dictated years ago.'

She pauses. This is where she expects them to interrupt. Dictated by whom? she expects them to ask. And she has her answer ready: By powers beyond us. But there is no interruption, no question. Instead their spokesman wags his pencil at her. 'Go on.'

'Before I can pass on I am required to state my beliefs,' she reads. 'I reply: a good secretary should have no beliefs. It is inappropriate to the function. A secretary should merely be in readiness, waiting for the call.'

Again she expects an interruption: Whose call? But there are going to be no questions, it would seem.

'In my work a belief is a resistance, an obstacle. I try to empty myself of resistances.'

'Without beliefs we are not human.' The voice comes from the leftmost of them, the one she has privately labelled Grimalkin, a wizened little fellow so short that his chin barely clears the bench. In fact, about each of them there is some troublingly comic feature. Excessively literary, she thinks. A caricaturist's idea of a bench of judges.

'Without beliefs we are not human,' he repeats. 'What do you say to that, Elizabeth Costello?'

She sighs.'Of course, gentlemen, I do not claim to be bereft of all belief. I have what I think of as opinions and prejudices, no different in kind from what are commonly called beliefs. When I claim to be a secretary clean of belief I refer to my ideal self, a self capable of holding opinions and prejudices at bay while the word which it is her function to conduct passes through her.'

'Negative capability,' says the little man. 'Is negative capability what you have in mind, what you claim to possess?'

'Yes, if you like. To put it in another way, I have beliefs but I do not believe in them. They are not important enough to believe in. My heart is not in them. My heart and my sense of duty.'

The little man purses his lips. His neighbour turns and gives him a glance (she can swear she hears the rustle of feathers). 'And what effect do you think it has, this lack of belief, on your humanity?' the little man asks.

'On my own humanity? Is that of consequence? What I offer to those who read me, what I contribute to their humanity, outweighs, I would hope, my own emptiness in that respect.'

'Your own cynicism, you mean to say.'

Cynicism. Not a word she likes, but on this occasion she is prepared to entertain it. With luck it will be the last occasion. With luck she will not have to subject herself again to self-defence and the pomposities that go with it.

'About myself, yes, I may well be cynical, in a technical sense. I cannot afford to take myself too seriously, or my motives. But as regards other people, as regards humankind or humanity, no, I do not believe I am cynical at all.'

'You are not an unbeliever then,' says the man in the middle.

'No. Unbelief is a belief. A disbeliever, if you will accept the distinction, though sometimes I feel disbelief becomes a credo too.'

There is a silence. 'Go on,' says the man. 'Proceed with your statement.'

'That is the end of it. There is nothing that has not been covered. I rest my case.'

'Your case is that you are a secretary. Of the invisible.'

'And that I cannot afford to believe.'

'For professional reasons.'

'For professional reasons.'

'And what if the invisible does not regard you as its secretary? What if your appointment was long ago discontinued, and the letter did not reach you? What if you were never even appointed? Have you considered that possibility.'

'I consider it every day. I am forced to consider it. If I am not what I say I am, then I am a sham. If that is your considered verdict, that I am a sham secretary, then I can only bow my head and accept it. I presume you have taken into account my record, a lifetime's record. In fairness to me you cannot ignore that record.'

'What about children?'

The voice is cracked and wheezy. At first she cannot make out from which of them it comes. Is it Number Eight, the one with the pudgy jowls and the high colour?

'Children? I don't understand.'

'And what of the Tasmanians?' he continues. 'What of the fate of the Tasmanians?'

The Tasmanians? Has something been going on in Tasmania, in the interim, that she has not heard about?

'I have no special opinions about Tasmanians,' she replies cautiously. 'I have always found them perfectly decent people.'

He waves impatiently. 'I mean the old Tasmanians, the ones who were exterminated. Do you have special opinions about them?'

'Do you mean, have their voices come to me? No, they have not, not yet. I probably do not qualify, in their eyes. They would probably want to use a secretary of their own, as they are surely entitled to do.'

She can hear the irritation in her voice. What is she doing, explaining herself to a gaggle of old men who might as well be small-town Italians, or small-town Austro-Hungarians, yet who somehow sit in judgement on her? Why does she put up with it? What do they know about Tasmania?

'I said nothing about voices,' says the man. 'I asked you about your thoughts.'

Her thoughts on Tasmania? If she is puzzled, the rest of the panel is puzzled too, for her questioner has to turn to them to explain.'Atrocities take place,' he says.'Violations of innocent children. The extermination of whole peoples. What does she think about such matters? Does she have no beliefs to guide her?'

The extermination of the old Tasmanians by her countrymen, her ancestors. Is that, finally, what lies behind this hearing, this trial: the question of historical guilt?

She takes a breath. 'There are matters about which one talks and matters about which it is appropriate to keep one's peace, even before a tribunal, even before the ultimate tribunal, if that is what you are. I know what you are referring to, and I reply only that if from what I have said before you today you conclude that I am oblivious of such matters, you are mistaken, utterly mistaken. Let me add, for your edification: beliefs are not the only ethical supports we have. We can rely on our hearts as well. That is all. I have nothing more to say.'

Contempt of court. She is running close to contempt of court. It is something about herself she has never liked, this tendency to flare up.

'But as a writer? You present yourself today not in your own person but as a special case, a special destiny, a writer who has written not just entertainments but books exploring the complexities of human conduct. In those books you make one judgement upon another, it must be so. What guides you in these judgements? Do you persist in saying it is all just a matter of heart? Have you no beliefs as a writer? If a writer is just a human being with a human heart, what is special about your case?'