J.M. Coetzee and the Power of Narrative
Powered By Xquantum

J.M. Coetzee and the Power of Narrative By Gillian Dooley

Chapter 2:  Coetzee's Freedom
Read
image Next

heroine, she resists giving her audience what they want, even pulling the rug from under their polite acquiescence. Having silenced the room by announcing at an academic dinner that her vegetarianism arises “out of a desire to save my soul,” she then further alienates the one person who expresses respect for her “way of life” by responding, “I'm wearing leather shoes…I'm carrying a leather purse. I wouldn't have overmuch respect if I were you” (EC 89). She is in turn rejected, or stonewalled, by Paul West, the novelist whose book The Very Rich Hours of Count von Stauffenberg (1980) she is about to attack in her paper “Witness, Silence, and Censorship” at an international conference in Amsterdam. She tries to explain herself to him in private beforehand, but although he hears her out, he makes no sign, speaks no word, in response. After her paper, she sees two alternatives—to stay at the conference or leave, but

there ought to be a third alternative, some way of rounding off the morning and giving it shape and meaning: some confrontation leading to some final word. There ought to be an arrangement such that she bumps into someone in the corridor, perhaps Paul West himself; something should pass between them, sudden as lightning, that will illuminate the landscape for her, even if afterwards it returns to its native darkness. But the corridor, it seems, is empty. (EC 182)

No neat conclusions for Coetzee's characters: their resistance, heroic or otherwise, is not to be rewarded with illuminations and resolutions.

But the last of the eight “lessons” in this “novel,” if not exactly light-hearted, at least tends towards the lighter end of the spectrum. Elizabeth Costello is confronted with what will presumably be her final challenge, “At the Gate.” To pass through the gate, she must make a statement of beliefs, but she is not prepared to do so: “I am a writer, a trader in fictions…I maintain beliefs only provisionally: fixed beliefs would stand in my way” (EC 195). This, however, is unacceptable to the authorities, and she is stranded in a world where a parody of Kafka jostles grotesquely with a comic-opera pastiche, trying to reconcile her skepticism with the requirement that she believe in something. Eventually, she