I
wrote last week about J. M. Coetzee's criticism, and also about his book,
Elizabeth Costello.
I've been reading a lot of literary critics. One reason J. M. Coetzee stands out from some impressive competition is, he has such negative capability. Most critics fall a little in love with their soapbox, and the sound of their own voice. Coetzee just gets out of the way. He is eloquent but mostly transparent, and takes you deep into the work he's considering.
In Elizabeth Costello, he balances halfway between fiction and criticism. Elizabeth is a novelist who goes on various journeys, and lectures on literature and philosophy as she goes. Which gives Coetzee a platform to put forward various theories and feelings about books (and vegetarianism, evil, the afterlife and other subjects) - and also to have other characters argue with Elizabeth, all in the context of her ongoing life.
I found it a very enjoyable and illuminating read. It is much more about ideas than plot, so spoilers won't spoil much of it for you. Here is David Lodge's review, which nicely summarizes the book and what it does in two pages: Disturbing the Peace.
Over the fold, we'll look at one chapter of Elizabeth Costello, on "The Problem of Evil."
Excerpted from David Lodge's review:
Elizabeth . . . was “under the malign spell” of a book, a novel by Paul West, The Very Rich Hours of Count Von Stauffenberg, about the aristocratic officer who led the ill-fated July Plot of 1944 to assassinate Hitler. She was impressed by the novel at first, but horrified and disgusted by its description of the execution of the conspirators, who were hanged on Hitler’s orders by the cruelest and most degrading method, and their death throes filmed for his delectation.
That is a matter of record, but what particularly offended Elizabeth in the novel was the imagined behavior of the hangman, who sadistically torments and humiliates the condemned men up to the point of death. “Through Hitler’s hangman a devil entered Paul West,” and she felt the brush of his leathery wing as she read this part of the book. It is, she thinks, “obscene”—such things should not be thought, or written, or read. That is what she has come to Amsterdam to say. The title of her paper is, “Witness, Silence and Censorship.” Paul West’s book is her main exemplum.
To her consternation she discovers that Paul West is himself attending the conference. How can she deliver this attack on his book with him sitting in the audience? It is, in a way, a darkly comic situation. . . . Paul West is a real author, who published The Very Rich Hours of Count von Stauffenberg in 1980. His CV is not unlike Coetzee’s, though less brilliant: born in England but an American citizen, he has held a number of prestigious posts as a professor of literature, and writes literary novels which have won several awards. For a writer to introduce another, living writer as a character into his fiction, especially in such a prejudicial light, is a very unusual, perhaps unprecedented, thing to do. . . .
I read West’s novel out of curiosity, and agreed with Elizabeth’s literary judgment: it begins well, but falls off, especially toward the end, when the ghost of Stauffenberg (who was summarily executed the day of the abortive plot) observes and reports the horrible end of his fellow conspirators. There is a serious failure of tone in the fictional treatment of Hitler and his hangman, cranking up the horror when the known facts are horrific enough. Such subjects should certainly be handled with care—history and documentary probably being the best way—but Elizabeth surely goes too far in asserting that they should be sealed up and passed over in silence.
That is the biggest question we face. Are there, as Elizabeth Costello thinks, "Scenes that do not belong in the light of day, that the eyes of maidens and children deserve to be shielded from"?
I have always thought that there are no such scenes, that we should consider and discuss everything, especially the hardest truths. OK, I want pictures of child pornography to be illegal. But only because children were abused in the process, and because there is a sickness in those who enjoy such images, a sickness we should not feed. I'd like to ban the business and the pandering - not the whole subject. Indeed, it's precisely these darkest and most dangerous truths that we must face frankly, in order to make them better.
Look at another side of that issue, and it supports my push for transparency. Look at the Catholic church, and all the priests who abused young boys. The priests who did this had a moral sickness. The even uglier part is, there were authorities above those priests, who hid the crimes. These authorities were, pretty much, sane and normal and good - until they looked the other way. Instead of fixing this evil problem, they covered it up. They put those abusive priests in new positions, away from their scandals. Some of the errant priests went right back to abusing innocent children.
One way these Bishops and Cardinals let us down, fell short of their own beliefs, and abandoned their flock is: They had a failure of nerve. The whole business was such a sordid and disturbing mess that they didn't want to look at it squarely, they refused to get their hands dirty.
Humans are capable of doing horrible, disgusting, monstrous things. Most of us have trouble looking into the heart of darkness. If we do it squarely, we may feel a weird vertigo, a terror and revulsion; in part because, if we are honest to our core, there is a bit of monster in each of us.
I'm not certain we should write, read and talk about everything. There may be kinds and degrees of trauma which should only be broached by licensed professionals, in quiet offices or padded rooms. I would like us to be strong and mature enough to face our deepest pains and fears.
The more I consider disturbing books and obscene subjects, the more clearly one truth emerges: The deeper we walk into darkness, the more carefully and responsibly we need to tread.
How Should Evil be Portrayed?
There are a lot more ways to get it wrong than to get it right.
The worst way to fail is by painting evil as too glamorous or seductive, without balancing that against the horror, the damage, and the human cost. Even when an artist shows the whole picture, readers or viewers may grab the wrong end of the morality tale. In Scarface, Tony Montana grabs the (amoral) American Dream with both hands, living the high life. In the end, it catches up with him. He buries his face in a mound of cocaine, goes crazy, gets shot to pieces. Then he falls into a fountain, in front of a statue saying "The World Is Yours". For thirty years thousands of gangsters and thugs have ignored the cost and the fall. They see Al Pacino's performance purely as a model to aspire to, a place to hang their dreams.
The next way to fail is playing evil for laughs. It works, at a sophomoric level, in the Scream movies - where the evil and the deaths don't feel as if they truly count. It works a lot better in Heathers, which has a lot more sensitivity behind the humor and, by the end of the movie, faces up to the costs of Christian Slater's psychopathic deeds. I think there is a far more careless and dangerous spirit at work in the Child's Play movies. The evil Chucky doll makes dismemberment and death look fun, and cost-free. Yet the thrills are far more visceral than in Scream, the excitement is more contagious (if you can stomach Chucky movies in the first place).
The third way to fail is amping up the evil; as David Lodge put it in the block quote, "cranking up the horror, when the known facts are horrific enough." If readers are adult enough to handle the material, then we don't need fairytales, we want the actual human truth.
Here we run into the final stumbling block. When it comes to showing the most disturbing parts of history, and the darkest parts of human nature, very few writers are up to the task. You have to be tough, sensitive, and thoughtful. You have to be determined enough to do all the research, to imagine yourself into every character's skin, to burrow deep into pain, anguish, rage and outright insanity. And you need to carry with you enough faith, hope and humor to make the darkness bearable, for you and your readers.
Elizabeth Costello believes Paul West got the balance wrong, in his tale of Hitler's hangman. But she says in her lecture "[I] know that he takes his calling seriously. So when I read Mr. West I do so not only with respect but with sympathy."
J. M. Coetzee put many elements of himself into Elizabeth Costello, but he also overlaps with Paul West. Coetzee's most famous book, and his darkest, is Disgrace. The hero of the book is sleazy, unpleasant to identify with; and many of the events in the book are brutal or deeply disturbing to read about. A lot of people hate Disgrace. It does to them what Paul West's book did to Elizabeth.
Elizabeth Costello, trying to grasp what Paul West was aiming for:
Flirting with sadism is exactly what Paul West does not do; furthermore, his book barely mentions the Jews. The horrors he unveils are sui generis. That must have been his wager with himself: to take as his subject a handful of bumbling German officers unfitted by the very code of their upbringing to plotting and carrying out an assassination, to tell the story of their ineptitude and its consequences from beginning to end, and to leave one feeling, to one's surprise, authentic pity, authentic terror.
I believe J. M. Coetzee strove, in
Disgrace and other books, to do just that. To find a strange, fresh tale, in the darker corners of the human condition, to bring it to light and to make it ring true. And he has put his (or Elizabeth's) finger on the hardest part: A writer, in these perilous paths, must be tough enough to find all the terror in the tale, yet sensitive enough to make us bleed, even in sympathy with their hardest characters. In the
Inferno, Virgil explains to Dante that he needs both of these to complete his journey, and to fully absorb its lessons: He must have rigor, and tenderness.
Let's look at three particularly disturbing books, which travel far into parts of the human psyche, where we usually prefer not to go.
American Psycho. Bret Easton Ellis had the toughness for the journey. He was able to burrow into the cancerous greed and egotism of Wall St., in the mind of a serial killer. He did closely observe Patrick Bateman, his thoughts and feelings, and his world. He brought a mordant sense of humor and, if you could stomach it, he made an exciting ride of it. I think he failed on the sensitivity. The book holds together, but it lacks a beating heart. Bateman's victims don't fully count.
In Cold Blood. Truman Capote had the sensitivity for the journey. He had toughness, but not enough - he didn't realize how deep inside the rottenness he'd be burrowing. This is a much deeper, and more successful book, than American Psycho. It was so effective in showing the minds and lives of the killers, their victims, and the surrounding community, that it kicked off the True Crime genre. But it turned out that Capote wasn't tough enough to live so long in nightmares, and then escape undamaged.
While In Cold Blood brought him acclaim and wealth Capote was never the same after the project. Digging into such dark territory had taken a toll on him psychologically and physically. Known to drink, Capote began drinking more and started taking tranquilizers to soothe his frayed nerves. His substance abuse problems escalated over the coming years.
Lolita. This is Nabokov's most successful, and most acclaimed book. There's an awful lot to it, richness and layers and tricks. It seems to me that Nabokov succeeded at an almost impossible task: How on earth do you make the tale of a pedophile comic, tragic, sympathetic and creepy, all at once? There's a lot of darkness here, and plenty of readers find the book, ultimately, more unsettling than effective.
Nabokov did realize just how shaky the ground beneath his story was. He put a gripping plot, just enough heart, and an icing of black humor together. And he did the work, weaving with enough care and subtlety that you keep watching the car crash, even when you feel like looking away.
As always, comment on anything you find in the diary, or on the top of your own head.
Are there any books you've read which were very disturbing, but handled the darkness with enough strength, sensitivity, and grace that you were glad you read them?