J.M.
Coetzee Reads
By
John Byrne
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in Finney to hear one of his newest unpublished readings.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. |