Dispensing with realism, we can see reality

Elizabeth COSTELLO is a quite famous Australian novelist -- her best known work is a feminist reinterpretation of James Joyce’s Mrs. Bloom -- now getting on in life and more accustomed to traveling, lecturing and receiving prizes than to writing new novels. She is about to visit America, escorted by her son, to pick up quite a grand award, given by Altona College. In addition to the prize, it is incumbent on her to give a talk, answer questions and in a general way make herself available to Altona’s faculty.

So far so good. “Elizabeth Costello,” the latest novel by J.M. Coetzee, who won this year’s Nobel Prize for literature, might almost be an academic version of E.M. Forster’s Mrs. Moore, making the passage from one continent to another. But just as modern poetry is often about the difficulty of writing poetry, so the contemporary novel usually feels a need to escape the banality of mere narration. New Yorker cartoonist J.B. Handelsman imagined the sultan’s executioner’s being sent away that first morning when he arrived to collect the new wife, Scheherazade. “Go away,” says the sultan, “I must hear what happened to the hippopotamus’ wife.”

Good novels indeed used to tell us, in their own good time, what happened to the hippopotamus’ wife. Coetzee, an excellent traditional novelist in his own way, as a masterpiece like “Waiting for the Barbarians” so clearly reveals, has decided to play around here in the contemporary manner, with results that at their best are brilliant, at their worst rather unfocused and scrappy. Instead of chapters, he divides the book into eight sections, the two longest being the first -- “Realism” -- and “The Problem of Evil.” Some of what we read is palpably authorial; some are Costello’s reflections, parts of her speech and her unrehearsed conversations.

Iris Murdoch used to say that philosophy and fiction do not mix. She wrote both but was always careful, or so she claimed, to keep the two apart. In fiction, the hippopotamus’ wife was, so to speak, much more important as herself than were any fleeting metaphysical speculations, en route, by the author or other characters. It may be that Coetzee doesn’t intend us to feel any great interest in Costello herself or in what happens to her. Whether that is so or not, it is certainly difficult to feel very much.

“Robinson Crusoe” is a shrewd example chosen by Coetzee to tackle in this novel’s section on realism. The moment of truth -- of the Daniel Defoe novel’s essential verisimilitude -- comes early on, when the shipwrecked Crusoe safely reaches shore. During the day that follows, bits of miscellaneous flotsam come to land, relics of the drowned crew, including “two shoes that were not fellows.” That is the moment of reality: After that moment, we accept everything, believe everything Coetzee tells us. “Robinson Crusoe” is the story of the real man: It is not a novel about the problem of writing a novel called “Robinson Crusoe.”

“Realism” is a brilliant opening section, which shows that Coetzee thoroughly understands what he is trying to do as a novelist. He is in fact not aiming for realism but mingling with skill and art the appearances of realism, of the “two shoes that were not fellows,” with a nicely calculated degree of reflection, meditation and his own substitute, so to speak, for philosophy. No doubt it is a combination of these elements that has helped to win him his much-deserved Nobel.

Costello does not “believe” in anything, except the reality of the mud frogs she used to see in the small river where she played as a child -- but did that river really exist? She sometimes wonders. And she turns out to have no personal views on “The Problem of Evil.” She does not, like Hannah Arendt, believe in evil’s banality, nor does she desire to gloat darkly over its contemplation. When Costello remembers the 1944 plot against Adolf Hitlerand how he gave orders that the conspirators should be hanged with especially thin piano wire, she does her best to reject the image, to refuse any mental connection with it or any similarly evil event. Coetzee seems to be implying that we cannot help enjoying the spectacle of evil -- the Crucifixion, Sept. 11 -- and that there is wickedness in that enjoyment, as much as in the events themselves.

Kafka is summoned to play his part at this juncture. Costello finds herself called before an imaginary tribunal whose members wish to know, roughly speaking, how she feels about herself. She cannot tell them; she does not know, nor does she have any idea how she might find out. Readers may feel similarly at this concluding point of the novel. But we, as readers, can feel -- with an almost overwhelming sympathy (a favorite term of Costello’s) -- her own sudden and vivid recall of that moment in Homer’s epic poem “The Odyssey” when Odysseus descends into the underworld with a live ram as a blood sacrifice he will use to summon up the dead he will encounter. She believes in this sacrificial ram in the same way that she believes in her own body. “Both are alive and both will die.”

Despite this novel’s odd shapelessness -- the center sections, mostly about animals and their fate in the world, tend to ramble and repeat themselves -- it nonetheless achieves an overall impression that is extraordinarily comprehensive and satisfying. To read it straight through is a true aesthetic experience whose effectiveness lies in its idiosyncratic form and corresponding lack of formulaic pretension. Coetzee is that rare novelist who can simply talk to us, through his own mouth or through that of a chosen protagonist, and give us the sense of life on the move -- “living life,” as Dostoevsky phrased it -- that both excites and calms his readers’ own sense of being alive. Costello has a dry humor in this direction. In the talk she must deliver as part of the prize-giving ritual, she observes that “if you had wanted someone to come here and discriminate for you between mortal and immortal souls, or between rights and duties, you would have called in a philosopher, not a person whose sole claim to your attention is to have written stories about made-up people.” Such stories, as Coetzee and all really good novelists privately acknowledge, can tell us -- to paraphrase Murdoch again -- a great deal more about ourselves and the lives we are leading than any philosophy can. *