Saturday, October 08, 2005
On "Elizabeth Costello" by J. M. Coetzee
The novelist whose work most fascinates me these days is the South African Nobel Laureate, J. M. Coetzee (pronounced koot Zay). I’ve just ordered his newest "Slow Man" primarily because I’ve just finished "Elizabeth Costello".
Reading Coetzee’s "Elizabeth Costello", I find the writing curiouser and curiouser as I troll further through it. About writers and writing, about critics and criticism, about fiction and philosophy, sex and religion, about the encounter between the objective and the relative and most curious of all, about a Lady Chandos writing to Francis Bacon??? And all of it woven around a series of lectures?? What’s it all about?
It’s all fascinating, written with a diamond like rhetoric -hard and brilliantly controlled; filled with arcane literary fact and wisdom, bold enough to bring even a living writer into its debate (Paul West and his novel about the failed assassination of Hitler while leaving West as a character to sit as a silent shade in the background while the elderly Elizabeth chatters at him like a school girl). What is it all about this story of a once sexy now wilting old lady who’d written one famous book based on another famous book and how she goes about the planet provoking academics and religionists who wish only to praise and honor her?Is this about a fictional writer or is it about the author or what?
Perhaps it is poetry.
With my curiosity at the highest pitch having read the Lady Chandos letter - is this another invention [Elizabeth Chandos, Elizabeth Costello???] ???? - I Googled Chandos and found:
"LETTER OF ELIZABETH, LADY CHANDOS, TO FRANCIS BACON a brief new work byJ.M. COETZEE
"The Letter is a plea from Elizabeth Chandos written not long after a similar letter from her husband, also addressed to Francis Bacon. In her letter, she too tries to convey some idea of their growing estrangement from words and language.
"The Letter of Lord Chandos, by Hugo von Hofmannsthal, is a remarkable work, not only in the career of the author, but in the history of literature. While Hofmannsthal did not, like his character Philip Chandos, forsake writing altogether, his publication of this piece coincided with a significant change of his focus as a writer. "Now, J.M. Coetzee adds a new voice to the correspondence, speaking through Philip's wife Elizabeth."
This of course required that I Google Hugo Von Hofmannsthal and Chandos where I found the following from the New York Review of Books site: "The most influential of all of Hofmannsthal's writings is the title story, a fictional letter to the English philosopher Francis Bacon in which Lord Chandos explains why he is no longer able to write. The "Letter" not only symbolized Hofmannsthal's own turn away from poetry, it captured the psychological crisis of faith and language which was to define the twentieth century."
So what is the purpose of all my compulsive searching? Well, the best way I can plumb Coetzee’s objective in writing Elizabeth Costello is to work backward. Von Hofmannsthal’s letter is about no longer being able to write poetry. In the letter, Von Hoffmanstahl has Chandos say, "My case, in short, is this: I have lost completely the ability to think or to speak of anything coherently."
Isn’t this complaint made visual in the paintings of that time (Modernism, the early years of the 20th ce ) when deliberately fragmented paintings like Nude Descending were created? Isn’t this part of the heritage of the Enlightenment, perhaps the dark side of the Enlightenment, when the old forms, the old dispensations are no longer potent to the artist? 1900 was hardly a time when a serious artist could follow the lead of a Raphael.
And isn’t this Elizabeth Costello’s problem, the writer who no longer writes; who, instead, goes about the world challenging the beliefs of others and is unable on the brink of heaven to proclaim a belief of her own?
Enough to say that Coetzee using a metaphorical character (perhaps an allegorical character), is probing a catastrophe, a state of perhaps irremediable ruin in the planetary culture, a time when all belief is challenged and targeted.
One last quote from the end of the novel and excerpted from Elizabeth’s letter to Francis Bacon, "All is allegory, says my Philip. ... Drowning, we write out of our separate fates. Save us."
Don’t we identify Bacon with the onset of the the Enlightenment?
Yes. I think Elizabeth Costello is poetry, poetry demonstrating Coetzee’s (Costello’s) determination to keep poetry alive.
And I have to admit, I’d never heard of Von Hoffmannsthal’s letter before today.
Reading Coetzee’s "Elizabeth Costello", I find the writing curiouser and curiouser as I troll further through it. About writers and writing, about critics and criticism, about fiction and philosophy, sex and religion, about the encounter between the objective and the relative and most curious of all, about a Lady Chandos writing to Francis Bacon??? And all of it woven around a series of lectures?? What’s it all about?
It’s all fascinating, written with a diamond like rhetoric -hard and brilliantly controlled; filled with arcane literary fact and wisdom, bold enough to bring even a living writer into its debate (Paul West and his novel about the failed assassination of Hitler while leaving West as a character to sit as a silent shade in the background while the elderly Elizabeth chatters at him like a school girl). What is it all about this story of a once sexy now wilting old lady who’d written one famous book based on another famous book and how she goes about the planet provoking academics and religionists who wish only to praise and honor her?Is this about a fictional writer or is it about the author or what?
Perhaps it is poetry.
With my curiosity at the highest pitch having read the Lady Chandos letter - is this another invention [Elizabeth Chandos, Elizabeth Costello???] ???? - I Googled Chandos and found:
"LETTER OF ELIZABETH, LADY CHANDOS, TO FRANCIS BACON a brief new work byJ.M. COETZEE
"The Letter is a plea from Elizabeth Chandos written not long after a similar letter from her husband, also addressed to Francis Bacon. In her letter, she too tries to convey some idea of their growing estrangement from words and language.
"The Letter of Lord Chandos, by Hugo von Hofmannsthal, is a remarkable work, not only in the career of the author, but in the history of literature. While Hofmannsthal did not, like his character Philip Chandos, forsake writing altogether, his publication of this piece coincided with a significant change of his focus as a writer. "Now, J.M. Coetzee adds a new voice to the correspondence, speaking through Philip's wife Elizabeth."
This of course required that I Google Hugo Von Hofmannsthal and Chandos where I found the following from the New York Review of Books site: "The most influential of all of Hofmannsthal's writings is the title story, a fictional letter to the English philosopher Francis Bacon in which Lord Chandos explains why he is no longer able to write. The "Letter" not only symbolized Hofmannsthal's own turn away from poetry, it captured the psychological crisis of faith and language which was to define the twentieth century."
So what is the purpose of all my compulsive searching? Well, the best way I can plumb Coetzee’s objective in writing Elizabeth Costello is to work backward. Von Hofmannsthal’s letter is about no longer being able to write poetry. In the letter, Von Hoffmanstahl has Chandos say, "My case, in short, is this: I have lost completely the ability to think or to speak of anything coherently."
Isn’t this complaint made visual in the paintings of that time (Modernism, the early years of the 20th ce ) when deliberately fragmented paintings like Nude Descending were created? Isn’t this part of the heritage of the Enlightenment, perhaps the dark side of the Enlightenment, when the old forms, the old dispensations are no longer potent to the artist? 1900 was hardly a time when a serious artist could follow the lead of a Raphael.
And isn’t this Elizabeth Costello’s problem, the writer who no longer writes; who, instead, goes about the world challenging the beliefs of others and is unable on the brink of heaven to proclaim a belief of her own?
Enough to say that Coetzee using a metaphorical character (perhaps an allegorical character), is probing a catastrophe, a state of perhaps irremediable ruin in the planetary culture, a time when all belief is challenged and targeted.
One last quote from the end of the novel and excerpted from Elizabeth’s letter to Francis Bacon, "All is allegory, says my Philip. ... Drowning, we write out of our separate fates. Save us."
Don’t we identify Bacon with the onset of the the Enlightenment?
Yes. I think Elizabeth Costello is poetry, poetry demonstrating Coetzee’s (Costello’s) determination to keep poetry alive.
And I have to admit, I’d never heard of Von Hoffmannsthal’s letter before today.
