World-renowned novelist and literary critic John M. Coetzee delivered a stirring reading of one of his own stories Thursday evening in the College’s second convocation lecture.
Hundreds of students, faculty, staff and community members convened in Finney to hear one of his newest unpublished readings.
With a crown of silver hair and a snow-white beard, Coetzee cut an elegant, reserved pose. Speaking in a soft, nuanced timbre, he enraptured his Oberlin audience with a quiet, impassioned voice.
In his reading, he recounted the tale of a woman wrestling with the purpose of the novel and its presentation of evil. The woman, Elizabeth Costello, is a novelist of some repute who hails from Australia.
“She had been invited to speak at a conference in Amsterdam on evil,” Coetzee read. “She had spoken [previously] on the slaughter of animal populations.”
Coetzee brought the aging Costello to life as a character who had earlier lectured on the evils of animal cruelty and one Heinrich Himmler, one of Adolf Hitler’s closest confidantes. She believed that he had designed the crematoriums based on his experiences from animal slaughterhouses.
“Himmler treated people like beasts for so long because beasts had been treated like beasts,” Coetzee said.
Costello becomes terrified by a novel penned by Paul West, an English novelist who writes of the execution of those who had, in 1944, engaged in a failed plot to assassinate Hitler. She is uprooted from her quiet thoughts and bedeviled by what she sees to be pure evil.
“All was going well until she came to the chapter regarding the execution of the plotters,” Coetzee said. “No shoes, no belts, their false teeth and their glasses taken from them …having to listen to this preacher…how the shit would run down their spindly old man’s legs.”
“One after another to the scaffolds they went,” he continued. “Back in his lair in the forest Hitler would be able to watch on film…and he would be satisfied that he had gotten his revenge.”
Costello is horrified.
“Sick with the spectacle, sick with herself and sick with the world in which this took place,” Coetzee stated. “She is no longer sure that people are improved by what they read.”
“Her position in the twilight of life:” Coetzee continued, “Better on the whole that the genie stays in the bottle. Genie or devil.”
The devil, she muses, entered Hitler’s hangmen.
And so, she arrives at the podium at the Dutch conference and declares that West’s novels should never have been written, and should not be read. West himself sits in the audience, but never speaks.
She speaks of Hitler, and of West.
“It is terrible, terrible beyond words,” Coetzee remarked, speaking for Costello. “Terrible that such a man has ever existed, more terrible that he has been called from the grave. Obscene.”
“I do not believe that we should go to that cellar,” Coetzee continued in her voice. “I believe that bars should be erected over that cellar and that should be that.”
But Costello can’t finish her lecture, and tired, retreats and shuts herself in the women’s bathroom. She realizes that she has effectually promoted censorship. She decides that she must return to the conference, to hear what others have to say.
“But the corridor, it seems, is empty.” Coetzee finished on this note and Finney filled with resounding applause.
Coetzee is the first author to receive the Booker Prize for fiction twice. The prize is the highest to be given out for novels by the British academy.
He has written 11 novels and four books of literary criticism, which have been translated into more than a dozen languages.