JOSEPH FRANK
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their upbringing to carry out an assassination, to tell the story of their
ineptitude and its consequences from beginning to end, and to leave one
feeling, to one's surprise, authentic pity, authentic terror." Nor had she
felt any objection to the book until the scene of the hanging, with its
deliberate degradation of the prisoners, and particularly the portrait of
the hangman, the butcher, to whom West gives "a voice, allowing him
his coarse, his more than coarse, his unspeakable gibes at the shivering
old men he is about to kill, gibes about how their bodies are going to
betray them as they buck and dance at the end of the rope."
This, as we know, is Paul West's conception. As author he is responsi–
ble for the manner in which he depicts this episode, and there is no evi–
dence here of pity, only terror and even horror. It is such horror that leads
Costello to level against him the charge of "obscenity," and to arrive at
her extreme conclusion: "To save our humanity, certain things that we
may want to see
(may want to see because we are human!)
must for ever
remain off-stage. Paul West ... has shown what ought not to be shown."
But has West shown what really ought not to be shown, or has he rather
shown it in such a way that its impact leads to Costello's charge? Has she
gone too far in wishing to outlaw such a scene entirely, and assuming that
the only other possibility is to accept it unobjectionably as it stands (leav–
ing its effect, as Vargas Llosa had insisted, to the vagaries of the reader)?
Coetzee's sketch ends without any resolution, but nonetheless its final
paragraph expresses an unfulfilled longing. Costello yearns for "some con–
frontation leading to some final word"; perhaps, if she met Paul West in the
corridor by accident, "something should pass between them, sudden as
lightning, that will illuminate the landscape for her, even if afterwards it
returns to its native darkness." Nothing of the sort occurs, but one cannot
help thinking that the person Costello really wishes to meet, rather than
Paul West, is an incarnation of Dostoevsky. Is not such a wished-for sudden
illumination typical of his poetics, and would it not have flared up again in
the scene that so afflicted the distraught Costello? Would he not have found
a spark of humanity somewhere in the sadistic ghastliness that West por–
trays? And is it not possible that Coetzee, with his perfect command of the
Dostoevsky corpus-as we know from his
Master of St. Petersburg-and
who likes to play literary games, might have read his story to lead off a Dos–
toevsky panel precisely for this reason?
If
so, he would only have been fol–
lowing
in
the footsteps of Dostoevsky, who so often preferred to present his
positive values
a contrario-by
dramatizing the unhappy fates of those who
disregarded or distorted them with disastrous consequences.
Editor's Note: This article first appeared in the Dutch periodical
Nexus.
