Elizabeth Costello by J.M Coetzee -- Chapter 6 analysis and response

• Problems with fiction about horror: it can be pleasurable; it doesn’t do justice to the horror (but at least there’s exposure)
• Have we considered that the explorer enticed into that forest may come out not better and stronger for the experience but worse?
• How do you compare two evils? Can you? Is there an ethical problem with such a comparison?
• Having to choose between telling a story and doing good. Elizabeth would choose good; he would choose to tell a story. Basically he is an aestheticist and she is an ethical writer.

The answer, as far as she can see, is that she no longer believes that storytelling is good in itself, whereas for West, or at least for West as he was when he wrote the Stauffenberg book, the question does not seem to arise. If she, as she is nowadays, had to choose between telling a story and doing good, she would rather, she thinks, do good. West, she thinks, would rather tell a story, though perhaps she ought to suspend judgement until she hears it from his own lips.

• Who even says bringing it back to life is even bad? Maybe it’s good. Usually, the protest you hear against holocaust fiction is that it doesn’t do horror justice; it is PRAISED for bringing the issue to the attention of the public
• Evil is transferable

The devil entered the docker that night on Spencer Street, the devil entered Hitler's hangman. And through the docker, all that time ago, the devil entered her: she can feel him crouched inside, folded up like a bird, waiting his chance to fly. Through Hitler's hangman a devil entered Paul West, and in his book West in turn has given that devil his freedom, turned him loose upon the world.

• Interestingly, in this figure of speech it is enough to witness evil even as a victim to become evil (because she became evil after she was attacked). You don’t have to sympathize with evil.
• It’s like saying watching tv will increase violence which we discussed first lecture… no evidence…
• It’s interesting that she didn’t say that she sympathizes with characters but with the author who penned them…

She should never have come, never have accepted the invitation, she knows it now. Not because she has nothing to say about evil, the problem of evil, the problem of calling evil a problem, not even because of the ill luck of West's presence, but because a limit has been reached, the limit of what can be achieved with a body of balanced, well-informed modern folk in a clean, well-lit lecture venue in a well-ordered, well-run European city in the dawn of the twenty-first century. THE BANALITY OF EVIL

…

Through reading him that touch of evil was passed on to me. Like a shock. Like electricity.'

…

'It is not something that can be demonstrated,' she says, returning a last time to her questioner. 'It is something that can only be experienced.

…

The twentieth-century of Our Lord, Satan's century, is over and done with. Satan's century and her own too. If she happens to have crept over the finish line into the new age, she is certainly not at home in it.

..

He pitches his tent in odd places - for example in Paul West, a good man, for all she knows

• Interesting. I think she is saying that she can’t engage their imaginations and sympathies; it’s an argument that in order for it to be understood you need to imagine the horror and suddenly feel capable of committing it. Then you would agree that one shouldn’t read or write about horrors. But audiences rise above imagination and appeal to logic (but if they do – they really are made of “sterner stuff”)
• People are too scarred by the holocaust to think they will allow this shit to happen again (in the West). So satan is reincarnating in ways we just don’t recognize yet…
• I think perhaps after the holocaust institutionalized evil is not going to happen again in the West. It is transformed to other small forms of evil that are individualized like shootings

The banality of evil.

• We have become desensitized to evil

the story of the July plotters, knew that within days of their attempt on Hitler's life they were tracked down, most of them, and tried and executed. She even knew, in a general way, that they were put to death with the malicious cruelty in which Hitler and his cronies specialized. So nothing in the book had come as a real surprise.

• IMPORTANT

Where could West have got his information? Could there really have been witnesses who went home that night and, before they forgot, before memory, to save itself, went blank, wrote down, in words that must have scorched the page, an account of what they had seen, down to the words the hangman spoke to the souls consigned to his hands, fumbling old men for the most part, stripped of their uniforms, togged out for the final event in prison cast-offs, serge trousers caked with grime, pullovers full of moth-holes, no shoes, no belts, their false teeth and their glasses taken from them, exhausted, shivering, hands in their pockets to hold up their pants, whimpering with fear, swallowing their tears, having to listen to this coarse creature, this butcher with last week's blood caked under his fingernails, taunt them, telling them what would happen when the rope snapped tight, how the shit would run down their spindly old-man's legs, how their limp old-man's penises would quiver one last time? One after the other to the scaffold they went, in a nondescript space that could have been a garage or equally well an abattoir, under carbon-arc lights so that back in his lair in the forest Adolf Hitler, commander-in-chief, would be able to watch on film their sobbings and then their writhings and then their stillness, the slack stillness of dead meat, and be satisfied he had had his revenge.

…

For the energy came, in a certain sense, from West himself. It was West who invented the gibes (English gibes, not German), put them in the hangman's mouth.

• Thinking of evil inspired him to invent more evil.

I do not want to read this, she said to herself; yet she had gone on reading, excited despite herself. The devil is leading me on: what kind of excuse is that?

…

What had she said? I do not want to read this. But what right had she to refuse? What right had she not to know what, in all too clear a sense, she already knew? What was it in her that wanted to resist, to refuse the cup? And why did she nonetheless drink--drink so fully that a year later she is still railing against the man who put it to her lips?

• Burke’s sublime can be useful – you are compelled to keep viewing the art in spite of yourself because there is pleasure in viewing pain from a sufficient distance. I think Aristotle said something similar in his poetics. I think Costello has overcome the pleasure portion – she realizes how real all the horrors are and she can no longer take pleasure in the horrific

In whose liver, in whose gut was Satan, that fateful day last year when again, indubitably, she felt his presence: in West's or in her own?

• The responsibility of the reader or the writer?
• Paul West never discusses with her… the reader must figure out for himself what he thinks about evil in writing

J.M Coetzee