Dostoevsky and evil.(Poem)

IN THE SPRING OF 2002, a colloquium on the problem of evil, sponsored by the Nexus Foundation, was held at the University of Tilburg in Holland. I was a member of a panel assigned to discuss Dostoevsky, certainly the modern writer who has given the theme of evil one of its most powerful expressions. Our keynote speaker was the South African novelist J. M. Coetzee, who, however, sprung a surprise on his fellow panelists and the audience by not speaking about Dostoevsky at all. Instead, he read a sketch supposedly written by a fictional personage already familiar from his work, a writer like himself named Elizabeth Costello, presumably invited to speak at precisely such a conference on precisely such a topic; and she finds herself rebelling at the task she had assumed.

Her own experience with evil, as she now horrifiedly recalls, was of having been badly beaten by a would-be lover, whom she had carelessly picked up as a young student out of self-indulgence and a youthful search for adventure. After accompanying him to a rooming house, she finally refused her favors; and, his frustration then turning to sadism, he beat her so brutally and relentlessly that, among other injuries, he broke her jaw. This had been her own personal experience with evil, the release of demonic forces in a human personality--forces, she had concluded, that craved satisfaction in her thwarted lover even more strongly than his initial demand for sexual surrender. The encounter left her with a psychic-emotional scar that had never healed; and although she had since become a successful novelist and essayist, she had never utilized this traumatic episode in her works. It had been too painful for her to resuscitate even in some altered artistic form. Now she was wondering why she had accepted the invitation to speak as a writer at a conference on evil. For she had begun to doubt whether anyone should be encouraged to depict its all-too-widespread ravages in the modern world and whether those who did should be approved and applauded.

This question had become acute for her because she had recently read a novel describing the trial and execution of the German army officers who had attempted to assassinate Hitler. Ironically entitled The Very Rich Hours of Count von Stauffenberg--thus evoking late-medieval and Renaissance celebrations of the peaceful pursuits and glories of royalty--the book had finally revolted her to the core. "All was going well enough until she came to the chapters describing the execution of the plotters." The horrifying and repugnant details employed here showed these more or less aged notables being stripped physically of any shred of human dignity and being mocked and taunted by their executioner with the most revolting particularities ("how the shit would run down their spindly old-man's legs"). This was more than she could endure; reading such pages made her "sick with the spectacle, sick with a world in which such things took place, until at last she pushed the book away and sat with her head in her hands."

The word that came to her mind at this point was "obscene," and she had determined to object to the generally accepted opinion that the use of such material was necessarily desirable. Was she then in favor of censorship? Not at all in the usual sense--that is, of some external authority setting limits to what could or could not be portrayed. But, inwardly, she had now come to question the belief, indigenous to Western culture as a whole, that "unlimited and illimitable endeavor" was unquestionably beneficial, and the accompanying conviction "that people are always improved by what they read." Furthermore, she is not at all sure that "writers who venture into the darker territories of the human psyche always return unscathed." What troubles her above all is that, while appalled and repelled by the book, she had not been able to push it away entirely. It had resisted her feelings of revulsion and disgust, and she feared that some of the "absolute evil" it depicted had, as it were, also infected her: "she felt, she could have sworn, the brush of Satan's hot, leathery wing."

Coetzee depicts the inner debate of his feminine alter ego with all the insinuating subtlety of his talent; but he does not allow her conclusion to remain unchallenged. Indeed, after she expresses such ideas in her paper, a member of the audience arises to contest her point of view. Moreover, Coetzee undermines her even further when she recalls that, in her own work, she had no more spared the feelings of the reader than the author she is now reproving. For she had "shown no qualms about rubbing people's faces in, for instance, what went on in abattoirs. If Satan is not rampant in the abattoir, casting the shadow of its wings over the beast ... where is he?" Those familiar with Coetzee's writings will ...