"Elizabeth Costello" - читать интересную книгу автора (Coetzee J. M.)

1. Realism

There is first of all the problem of the opening, namely, how to get us from where we are, which is, as yet, nowhere, to the far bank. It is a simple bridging problem, a problem of knocking together a bridge. People solve such problems every day. They solve them, and having solved them push on.

Let us assume that, however it may have been done, it is done. Let us take it that the bridge is built and crossed, that we can put it out of our mind. We have left behind the territory in which we were. We are in the far territory, where we want to be.

Elizabeth Costello is a writer, born in 1928, which makes her sixty-six years old, going on sixty-seven. She has written nine novels, two books of poems, a book on bird life, and a body of journalism. By birth she is Australian. She was born in Melbourne and still lives there, though she spent the years 1951 to 1963 abroad, in England and France. She has been married twice. She has two children, one by each marriage.

Elizabeth Costello made her name with her fourth novel, The House on Eccles Street (1969), whose main character is Marion Bloom, wife of Leopold Bloom, principal character of another novel, Ulysses (1922), by James Joyce. In the past decade there has grown up around her a small critical industry; there is even an Elizabeth Costello Society, based in Albuquerque, New Mexico, which puts out a quarterly Elizabeth Costello Newsletter.

In the spring of 1995 Elizabeth Costello travelled, or travels (present tense henceforth), to Williamstown, Pennsylvania, to Altona College, to receive the Stowe Award. The award is made biennially to a major world writer, selected by a jury of critics and writers. It consists of a purse of $50,000, funded by a bequest from the Stowe estate, and a gold medal. It is one of the larger literary prizes in the United States.

On her visit to Pennsylvania Elizabeth Costello (Costello is her maiden name) is accompanied by her son John. John has a job teaching physics and astronomy at a college in Massachusetts, but for reasons of his own is on leave for the year. Elizabeth has become a little frail: without the help of her son she would not be undertaking this taxing trip across half the world.

We skip. They have reached Williamstown and have been conveyed to their hotel, a surprisingly large building for a small city, a tall hexagon, all dark marble outside and crystal and mirrors inside. In her room a dialogue takes place.

'Will you be comfortable?' asks the son.

'I am sure I will,' she replies. The room is on the twelfth floor, with a prospect over a golf course and, beyond that, over wooded hills.

'Then why not have a rest? They are fetching us at six thirty. I'll give you a call a few minutes beforehand.'

He is about to leave. She speaks.

'John, what exactly do they want from me?'

'Tonight? Nothing. It's just a dinner with members of the jury. We won't let it turn into a long evening. I'll remind them you are tired.'

'And tomorrow?'

'Tomorrow is a different story. You'll have to gird your loins for tomorrow, I am afraid.'

'I have forgotten why I agreed to come. It seems a great ordeal to put oneself through, for no good reason. I should have asked them to forget the ceremony and send the cheque in the mail.'

After the long flight, she is looking her age. She has never taken care of her appearance; she used to be able to get away with it; now it shows. Old and tired.

'It doesn't work that way, I am afraid, Mother. If you accept the money, you must go through with the show.'

She shakes her head. She is still wearing the old blue raincoat she wore from the airport. Her hair has a greasy, lifeless look. She has made no move to unpack. If he leaves her now, what will she do? Lie down in her raincoat and shoes?

He is here, with her, out of love. He cannot imagine her getting through this trial without him at her side. He stands by her because he is her son, her loving son. But he is also on the point of becoming – distasteful word – her trainer.

He thinks of her as a seal, an old, tired circus seal. One more time she must heave herself up on to the tub, one more time show that she can balance the ball on her nose. Up to him to coax her, put heart in her, get her through the performance.

'It is the only way they have,' he says as gently as he can. 'They admire you, they want to honour you. It is the best way they can think of doing that. Giving you money. Broadcasting your name. Using the one to do the other.'

Standing over the Empire-style writing table, shuffling through the pamphlets that tell her where to shop, where to dine, how to use the telephone, she casts him one of the quick, ironic looks that still have the power to surprise him, to remind him of who she is. 'The best way?' she murmurs.

At six thirty he knocks. She is ready, waiting, full of doubts but prepared to face the foe. She wears her blue costume and silk jacket, her lady novelist's uniform, and the white shoes with which there is nothing wrong yet which somehow make her look like Daisy Duck. She has washed her hair and brushed it back. It still looks greasy, but honourably greasy, like a navvy's or a mechanic's. Already on her face the passive look that, if you saw it in a young girl, you would call withdrawn. A face without personality, the kind that photographers have to work on to lend distinction. Like Keats, he thinks, the great advocate of blank receptiveness.

The blue costume, the greasy hair, are details, signs of a moderate realism. Supply the particulars, allow the significations to emerge of themselves. A procedure pioneered by Daniel Defoe. Robinson Crusoe, cast up on the beach, looks around for his shipmates. But there are none. 'I never saw them afterwards, or any sign of them,' says he, 'except three of their hats, one cap, and two shoes that were not fellows.' Two shoes, not fellows: by not being fellows, the shoes have ceased to be footwear and become proofs of death, torn by the foaming seas off the feet of drowning men and tossed ashore. No large words, no despair, just hats and caps and shoes.

For as far back as he can remember, his mother has secluded herself in the mornings to do her writing. No intrusions under any circumstances. He used to think of himself as a misfortunate child, lonely and unloved. When they felt particularly sorry for themselves, he and his sister used to slump outside the locked door and make tiny whining sounds. In time the whining would change to humming or singing, and they would feel better, forgetting their forsakenness.

Now the scene has changed. He has grown up. He is no longer outside the door but inside, observing her as she sits, back to the window, confronting, day after day, year after year, while her hair slowly goes from black to grey, the blank page. What doggedness, he thinks! She deserves the medal, no doubt about that, this medal and many more. For valour beyond the call of duty.

The change came when he was thirty-three. Until then he had not read a word she had written. That was his reply to her, his revenge on her for locking him out. She denied him, therefore he denied her. Or perhaps he refused to read her in order to protect himself. Perhaps that was the deeper motive: to ward off the lightning stroke. Then one day, without a word to anyone, without even a word to himself, he took one of her books out of the library. After that he read everything, reading openly, in the train, at the lunch table. 'What are you reading?' 'One of my mother's books.'

He is in her books, or some of them. Other people too he recognizes; and there must be many more he does not recognize. About sex, about passion and jealousy and envy, she writes with an insight that shakes him. It is positively indecent.

She shakes him; that is what she presumably does to other readers too. That is presumably why, in the larger picture, she exists. What a strange reward for a lifetime of shaking people: to be conveyed to this town in Pennsylvania and given money! For she is by no means a comforting writer. She is even cruel, in a way that women can be but men seldom have the heart for. What sort of creature is she, really? Not a seal: not amiable enough for that. But not a shark either. A cat. One of those large cats that pause as they eviscerate their victim and, across the torn-open belly, give you a cold yellow stare.

There is a woman waiting for them downstairs, the same young woman who fetched them from the airport. Her name is Teresa. She is an instructor at Altona College, but in the business of the Stowe Award a factotum, a dogsbody, and in the wider business a minor character.

He sits in the front of the car beside Teresa, his mother sits at the rear. Teresa is excited, so excited that she positively chatters. She tells them about the neighbourhoods they are driving through, about Altona College and its history, about the restaurant they are headed for. In the middle of all the chatter she manages to get in two quick, mouselike pounces of her own. 'We had A. S. Byatt here last fall,' she says. 'What do you think of A. S. Byatt, Ms Costello?' And later: 'What do you think of Doris Lessing, Ms Costello?' She is writing a book on women writers and politics; she spends her summers in London doing what she calls research; he would not be surprised if she had a tape recorder hidden in the car.

His mother has a word for people like this. She calls them the goldfish. One thinks they are small and harmless, she says, because each wants no more than the tiniest nibble of flesh, the merest hemidemimilligram. She gets letters from them every week, care of her publisher. Once upon a time she used to reply: thank you for your interest, unfortunately I am too busy to respond as fully as your letter deserves. Then a friend told her what these letters of hers were fetching on the autograph market. After that she stopped answering.

Flecks of gold circling the dying whale, waiting their chance to dart in and take a quick mouthful.

They arrive at the restaurant. It is raining lightly. Teresa drops them at the door and goes off to park the car. For a moment they are alone on the pavement. 'We can still abscond,' he says. 'It is not too late. We can get a taxi, drop by the hotel to pick up our things, be at the airport by eight thirty, take the first flight out. We will have vanished from the scene by the time the Mounties arrive.'

He smiles. She smiles. They will go through with the programme, that barely needs to be said. But it is a pleasure to toy with at least the idea of escape. Jokes, secrets, complicities; a glance here, a word there: that is their way of being together, of being apart. He will be her squire, she will be his knight. He will protect her as long as he is able. Then he will help her into her armour, lift her on to her steed, set her buckler on her arm, hand her her lance, and step back.

There is a scene in the restaurant, mainly dialogue, which we will skip. We resume back at the hotel, where Elizabeth Costello asks her son to run through the list of the people they have just met. He obeys, giving each a name and function, as in life. Their host, William Brautegam, is Dean of Arts at Altona. The convenor of the jury, Gordon Wheatley, is a Canadian, a professor at McGill, who has written on Canadian literature and on Wilson Harris. The one they call Toni, who spoke to her about Henry Handel Richardson, is from Altona College. She is a specialist on Australia and has taught there. Paula Sachs she knows. The bald man, Kerrigan, is a novelist, Irish by birth, now living in New York. The fifth juror, the one who was seated next to him, is named Moebius. She teaches in California and edits a journal. She has also published some stories.

'You and she had quite a tête-à-tête,' says his mother. 'Good-looking, isn't she?'

'I suppose so.'

She reflects. 'But, as a group, don't they strike you as rather…'

'Rather lightweight?'

She nods.

'Well, they are. The heavyweights don't involve themselves in this kind of show. The heavyweights are wrestling with the heavyweight problems.'

'I am not heavyweight enough for them?'

'No, you're heavyweight all right. Your handicap is that you're not a problem. What you write hasn't yet been demonstrated to be a problem. Once you offer yourself as a problem, you might be shifted over into their court. But for the present you're not a problem, just an example.'

'An example of what?'

'An example of writing. An example of how someone of your station and your generation and your origins writes. An instance.'

'An instance? Am I allowed a word of protest? After all the effort I put into not writing like anyone else?'

'Mother, there's no point in picking on me to fight with. I am not responsible for the way the academy sees you. But you must surely concede that at a certain level we speak, and therefore write, like everyone else. Otherwise we would all be speaking and writing private languages. It is not absurd – is it? – to concern oneself with what people have in common rather than with what sets them apart.'

The next morning John finds himself in another literary debate. In the hotel gymnasium he bumps into Gordon Wheatley, chairman of the jury. Side by side on exercise bicycles they have a shouted conversation. His mother will be disappointed, he tells Wheatley – not entirely seriously – if she learns that the Stowe Award is hers only because 1995 has been decreed to be the year of Australasia.

'What does she want it to be?' shouts Wheatley back.

'That she is the best,' he replies. 'In your jury's honest opinion. Not the best Australian, not the best Australian woman, just the best.'

'Without infinity we would have no mathematics,' says Wheatley. 'But that doesn't mean that infinity exists. Infinity is just a construct, a human construct. Of course we are firm that Elizabeth Costello is the best. We just have to be clear in our minds what a statement like that means, in the context of our times.'

The analogy with infinity makes no sense to him, but he does not pursue the issue. He hopes that Wheatley does not write as badly as he thinks.

Realism has never been comfortable with ideas. It could not be otherwise: realism is premised on the idea that ideas have no autonomous existence, can exist only in things. So when it needs to debate ideas, as here, realism is driven to invent situations – walks in the countryside, conversations – in which characters give voice to contending ideas and thereby in a certain sense embody them. The notion of embodying turns out to be pivotal. In such debates ideas do not and indeed cannot float free: they are tied to the speakers by whom they are enounced, and generated from the matrix of individual interests out of which their speakers act in the world – for instance, the son's concern that his mother not be treated as a Mickey Mouse post-colonial writer, or Wheatley's concern not to seem an old-fashioned absolutist.

At eleven he taps at the door of her room. She has a long day before her: an interview, a session at the college radio station, then, in the evening, the presentation ceremony and the speech that goes with it.

Her strategy with interviewers is to take control of the exchange, presenting them with blocks of dialogue that have been rehearsed so often he wonders they have not solidified in her mind and become some kind of truth. A long paragraph on childhood in the suburbs of Melbourne (cockatoos screeching at the bottom of the garden) with a sub-paragraph on the danger to the imagination of middle-class security. A paragraph on the death of her father of enteric fever in Malaya, with her mother somewhere in the background playing Chopin waltzes on the piano, followed by a sequence of what sound like impromptu ruminations on the influence of music on her own prose. A paragraph about her adolescent reading (voracious, unselective), then a jump to Virginia Woolf, whom she first read as a student, and the impact Woolf had on her. A passage on her spell at art school, another on her year and a half at post-war Cambridge ('What I mainly remember is the struggle to keep warm'), another on her years in London ('I could have made a living as a translator, I suppose, but my best language was German, and German wasn't popular in those days, as you can imagine'). Her first novel, which she modestly disparages, though as a first novel it stood head and shoulders above the competition, then her years in France ('heady times'), with an oblique glance at her first marriage. Then her return to Australia with her young son. Him.

All in all, he judges, listening in, a workmanlike performance, if one can still use that word, eating up most of the hour, as intended, leaving only a few minutes to skirt the questions that begin 'What do you think…?'What does she think about neolib-eralism, the woman question, Aboriginal rights, the Australian novel today? He has lived around her for nearly four decades, on and off, and is still not sure what she thinks about the big questions. Not sure and, on the whole, thankful not to have to hear. For her thoughts would be, he suspects, as uninteresting as most people's. A writer, not a thinker. Writers and thinkers: chalk and cheese. No, not chalk and cheese: fish and fowl. But which is she, the fish or the fowl? Which is her medium: water or air?

This morning's interviewer, who has come up from Boston for the occasion, is young, and his mother is usually indulgent towards the young. But this one is thick-skinned and refuses to be fobbed off. 'What would you say your main message is?' she persists.

'My message? Am I obliged to carry a message?'

Not a strong counter; the interviewer presses her advantage. 'In The House on Eccles Street your lead character, Marion Bloom, refuses to have sex with her husband until he has worked out who he is. Is that what you are saying: that until men have worked out a new, post-patriarchal identity, women should hold themselves apart?'

His mother casts him a glance. Help! it is meant to say, in a droll way.

'Intriguing idea,' she murmurs. 'Of course in the case of Marion 's husband there would be a particular severity in demanding that he work out a new identity, since he is a man of – what shall I say? – of infirm identity, of many shapes.'

Eccles Street is a great novel; it will live, perhaps, as long as Ulysses; it will certainly be around long after its maker is in the grave. He was only a child when she wrote it. It unsettles and dizzies him to think that the same being that engendered Eccles Street engendered him. It is time to step in, save her from an inquisition that promises to become tedious. He rises. 'Mother, I am afraid we are going to have to call a halt,' he says. 'We're being fetched for the radio session.' To the interviewer: 'Thank you, but that will have to be all.'

The interviewer pouts with annoyance. Will she find a part for him in the story she files: the novelist of failing powers and her bossy son?

At the radio station the two of them are separated. He is shown into the control booth. The new interviewer, he is surprised to find, is the elegant Moebius woman he had sat beside at dinner. 'This is Susan Moebius, the programme is Writers at Work, and we are speaking today to Elizabeth Costello,' she commences, and proceeds with a crisp introduction. 'Your most recent novel,' she continues, 'called Fire and Ice, set in the Australia of the 1930s, is the story of a young man struggling to make his way as a painter against the opposition of family and society. Did you have anyone in particular in mind when you wrote it? Does it draw upon your own early life?'

'No, I was still a child in the 1930s. Of course we draw upon our own lives all the time – they are our main resource, in a sense our only resource. But no, Fire and Ice isn't autobiography. It is a work of fiction. I made it up.'

'It is a powerful book, I must tell our listeners. But do you find it easy, writing from the position of a man?'

It is a routine question, opening the door to one of her routine paragraphs. To his surprise, she does not take the opening.

'Easy? No. If it were easy it wouldn't be worth doing. It is the otherness that is the challenge. Making up someone other than yourself. Making up a world for him to move in. Making up an Australia.'

'Is that what you are doing in your books, would you say: making up Australia?'

'Yes, I suppose so. But that is not so easy nowadays. There is more resistance, a weight of Australias made up by many other people, that you have to push against. That is what we mean by tradition, the beginnings of a tradition.'

'I'd like to get on to The House on Eccles Street, which is the book you are best known for in this country, a path-breaking book, and the figure of Molly Bloom. Critics have concentrated on the way you have claimed or reclaimed Molly from Joyce, made her your own. I wonder if you would comment on your intentions in this book, particularly in challenging Joyce, one of the father-figures of modern literature, on his own territory.'

Another clear opening, and this time she takes it.

'Yes, she is an engaging person, isn't she, Molly Bloom -Joyce's Molly, I mean. She leaves her trace across the pages of Ulysses as a bitch on heat leaves her smell. Seductive you can't call it: it is cruder than that. Men pick up the scent and sniff and circle around and snarl at each other, even when Molly isn't on the scene.

'No, I don't see myself as challenging Joyce. But certain books are so prodigally inventive that there is plenty of material left over at the end, material that almost invites you to take it over and use it to build something of your own.'

'But, Elizabeth Costello, you have taken Molly out of the house – if I can continue with your metaphor – taken her out of the house on Eccles Street where her husband and her lover and in a certain sense her author have confined her, where they have turned her into a kind of queen bee, unable to fly, you have taken her and turned her loose on the streets of Dublin. Wouldn't you see that as a challenge to Joyce on your part, a response?'

'Queen bee, bitch… Let's revise the figure and call her a lioness, rather, stalking the streets, smelling the smells, seeing the sights. Looking for prey, even. Yes, I wanted to liberate her from that house, and particularly from that bedroom, with the bed with the creaking springs, and turn her loose – as you say – on Dublin.'

'If you see Molly – Joyce's Molly – as a prisoner in the house on Eccles Street, do you see women in general as prisoners of marriage and domesticity?'

'You can't mean women today. But yes, to an extent Molly is a prisoner of marriage, the kind of marriage that was on offer in Ireland in 1904. Her husband Leopold is a prisoner too. If she is shut into the conjugal home, he is shut out. So we have Odysseus trying to get in and Penelope trying to get out. That is the comedy, the comic myth, which Joyce and I in our different ways were paying our respects to.'

Because both women are wearing headphones, addressing the microphone rather than each other, it is hard for him to see how they are getting on together. But he is impressed, as ever, by the; persona his mother manages to project: of genial common sense,! lack of malice, yet of sharp-wittedness too.

'I want to tell you,' the interviewer continues (a cool voice, he thinks: a cool woman, capable, not a lightweight at all), 'what an impact The House on Eccles Street made on me when I first read it in the 1970s. I was a student, I had studied Joyce's book, I had absorbed the famous Molly Bloom chapter and the critical orthodoxy that came with it, namely that here Joyce had released the authentic voice of the feminine, the sensual reality of woman, and so forth. And then I read your book and realised that Molly didn't have to be limited in the way Joyce had made her to be, that she could equally well be an intelligent woman with an interest in music and a circle of friends of her own and a daughter with whom she shared confidences – it was a revelation, as I say. And I began to wonder about other women whom we think of as having been given a voice by male writers, in the name of their liberation, yet in the end only to further and to serve a male philosophy. I am thinking of D. H. Lawrence's women in particular, but if you go further back they might include Tess of the D'Urbervilles and Anna Karenina, to name only two. It is a huge question, but I wonder if you have anything to say about it – not just about Marion Bloom and the others but about the project of reclaiming women's lives in general.'

'No, I don't think there is anything I would want to say, I think you've expressed it all very fully. Of course, fair's fair, men will have to set about reclaiming the Heathcliffs and Rochesters from romantic stereotyping too, to say nothing of poor old dusty Casaubon. It will be a grand spectacle. But, seriously, we can't go on parasitizing the classics for ever. I am not excluding myself from the charge. We've got to start doing some inventing of our own.'

This is not in the script at all. A new departure. Where will it lead? But alas, the Moebius woman (who is now glancing at the studio clock) does not pick up on it.

'In your more recent novels you have gone back to Australian settings. Could you say something about how you see Australia? What does it mean to you to be an Australian writer? Australia is a country that remains very far away, at least to Americans. Is that part of your consciousness as you write: that you are reporting from the far edges?'

'The far edges. That is an interesting expression. You won't find many Australians nowadays prepared to accept it. Far from what? they would say. Nevertheless, it has a certain meaning, even if it is a meaning foisted on us by history. We're not a country of extremes – I'd say we're rather pacific – but we are a country of extremities. We have lived our extremities because there hasn't been a great deal of resistance in any direction. If you begin to fall, there isn't much to stop you.'

They are back among the commonplaces, on familiar ground. He can stop listening.

We skip to the evening, to the main event, the presentation of the award. As son and companion of the speaker he finds himself in the first row of the audience, among the special guests. The woman to his left introduces herself. 'Our daughter is at Altona,' she says. 'She is writing her honours dissertation on your mother. She's a great fan. She has made us read everything.' She pats the wrist of the man beside her. They have the look of money, old money. Benefactors, no doubt. 'Your mother is much admired in this country. Particularly by young people. I hope you will tell her that.'

All across America, young women writing dissertations on his mother. Admirers, adherents, disciples. Would it please his mother to be told she has American disciples?

The presentation scene itself we skip. It is not a good idea to interrupt the narrative too often, since storytelling works by lulling the reader or listener into a dreamlike state in which the time and space of the real world fade away, superseded by the time and space of the fiction. Breaking into the dream draws attention to the constructedness of the story, and plays havoc with the realist illusion. However, unless certain scenes are skipped over we will be here all afternoon. The skips are not part of the text, they are part of the performance.

So the award is made, after which his mother is left alone at the rostrum to give her acceptance speech, entitled in the programme 'What is Realism?'. The time has arrived for her to show her paces.

Elizabeth Costello dons her reading glasses. 'Ladies and gentlemen,' she says, and begins to read.

'I published my first book in 1955, when I was living in London, at that time the great cultural metropolis for Antipodeans. I remember clearly the day the package arrived in the mail, an advance copy for the author. I was naturally thrilled to have it in my hands, printed and bound, the real thing, undeniable. But something was nagging at me. I got on to the telephone to my publishers. "Have the deposit copies gone out?" I asked. And I would not rest until I had their assurance that the deposit copies would be mailed the same afternoon, to Scotland and the Bodleian and so forth, but above all to the British Museum. That was my great ambition: to have my place on the shelves of the British Museum, rubbing shoulders with the other Cs, the great ones: Carlyle and Chaucer and Coleridge and Conrad. (The joke is that my closest literary neighbour turned out to be Marie Corelli.)

'One smiles now at such ingenuousness. Yet behind my anxious query there was something serious, and behind that seriousness in turn something pathetic that is less easy to acknowledge.

'Let me explain. Ignoring all the copies of the book you have written that are going to perish – that are going to be pulped because there is no buyer for them, that are going to be opened and read for a page or two and then yawned at and put aside for ever, that are going to be left behind at seaside hotels or in trains – ignoring all these lost ones, we must be able to feel there is at least one copy that will not only be read but be taken care of, given a home, given a place on the shelves that will be its own in perpetuity. What lay behind my concern about deposit copies was the wish that, even if I myself should be knocked over by a bus the next day, this first-born of mine would have a home where it could snooze, if fate so decreed, for the next hundred years, and no one would come poking with a stick to see if it was still alive.

'That was one side of my telephone call: if I, this mortal shell, am going to die, let me at least live on through my creations.'

Elizabeth Costello proceeds to reflect on the transience of fame. We skip ahead.

'But of course the British Museum or (now) the British Library is not going to last for ever. It too will crumble and decay, and the books on its shelves turn to powder. And anyhow, long before that day, as the acid gnaws away at the paper, as the demand for space grows, the ugly and unread and unwanted will be carted off to some facility or other and tossed into a furnace, and all trace of them will be liquidated from the master catalogue. After which it will be as if they had never existed.

'That is an alternative vision of the Library of Babel, more disturbing to me than the vision of Jorge Luis Borges. Not a library in which all conceivable books, past, present and future, coexist,

but a library from which books that were really conceived, written and published are absent, absent even from the memory of the librarians.

'Such, then, was the other and more pathetic side to my telephone call. We can rely on the British Library or the Library of Congress no more than on reputation itself to save us from oblivion. Of that I must remind myself, and remind you too, on this proud night for me at Altona College.

'Let me now turn to my subject, "What is Realism?"

'There is a story by Franz Kafka – perhaps you know it – in which an ape, dressed up for the occasion, makes a speech to a learned society. It is a speech, but a test too, an examination, a viva voce. The ape has to show not only that he can speak his audience's language but that he has mastered their manners and conventions, is fit to enter their society.

'Why am I reminding you of Kafka's story? Am I going to pretend I am the ape, torn away from my natural surroundings, forced to perform in front of a gathering of critical strangers? I hope not. I am one of you, I am not of a different species.

'If you know the story, you will remember that it is cast in the form of a monologue, a monologue by the ape. Within this form there is no means for either speaker or audience to be inspected with an outsider's eye. For all we know, the speaker may not "really" be an ape, may be simply a human being like ourselves deluded into thinking himself an ape, or a human being presenting himself, with heavy irony, for rhetorical purposes, as an ape. Equally well, the audience may consist not, as we may imagine, of bewhiskered, red-faced gents who have put aside their bushjackets and topis for evening dress, but of fellow apes, trained, if not to the level of our speaker, who can mouth complicated sentences in German, then at least to sit still and listen; or, if not trained to that pitch, then chained to their seats and trained not to jabber and pick fleas and relieve themselves openly.

'We don't know. We don't know and will never know, with certainty, what is really going on in this story: whether it is about a man speaking to men or an ape speaking to apes or an ape speaking to men or a man speaking to apes (though the last is, I think, unlikely) or even just a parrot speaking to parrots.

'There used to be a time when we knew. We used to believe that when the text said, "On the table stood a glass of water," there was indeed a table, and a glass of water on it, and we had only to look in the word-mirror of the text to see them.

'But all that has ended. The word-mirror is broken, irreparably, it seems. About what is really going on in the lecture hall your guess is as good as mine: men and men, men and apes, apes and men, apes and apes. The lecture hall itself may be nothing but a zoo. The words on the page will no longer stand up and be counted, each proclaiming "I mean what I mean!" The dictionary that used to stand beside the Bible and the works of Shakespeare above the fireplace, where in pious Roman homes the household gods were kept, has become just one code book among many.

'This is the situation in which I appear before you. I am not, I hope, abusing the privilege of this platform to make idle, nihilistic jokes about what I am, ape or woman, and what you are, my auditors. That is not the point of the story, say I, who am, however, in no position to dictate what the point of the story is. There used to be a time, we believe, when we could say who we were. Now we are just performers speaking our parts. The bottom has dropped out. We could think of this as a tragic turn of events, were it not that it is hard to have respect for whatever was the bottom that dropped out – it looks to us like an illusion now, one of those illusions sustained only by the concentrated gaze of everyone in the room. Remove your gaze for but an instant, and the mirror falls to the floor and shatters.

'There is every reason, then, for me to feel less than certain about myself as I stand before you. Despite this splendid award, for which I am deeply grateful, despite the promise it makes that, gathered into the illustrious company of those who have won it before me, I am beyond time's envious grasp, we all know, if we are being realistic, that it is only a matter of time before the books which you honour, and with whose genesis I have had something to do, will cease to be read and eventually cease to be remembered. And properly so. There must be some limit to the burden of remembering that we impose on our children and grandchildren. They will have a world of their own, of which we should be less and less part. Thank you.'

The applause starts hesitantly, then swells. His mother takes off her glasses, smiles. It is an engaging smile: she seems to be relishing the moment. Actors are allowed to bathe in applause, ill deserved or well deserved – actors, singers, violinists. Why should his mother not have her moment of glory too?

The applause dies down. Dean Brautegam leans into the microphone. 'There will be refreshments -'

'Excuse me!' A clear, confident young voice cuts through the Dean's.

There is a flurry in the audience. Heads turn.

'There will be refreshments in the foyer, and an exhibition of Elizabeth Costello's books. Please join us there. It remains for me -'

'Excuse me!'

'Yes?'

'I have a question.'

The speaker is standing up: a young woman in a white-and-red Altona College sweatshirt. Brautegam is clearly nonplussed. As for his mother, she has lost her smile. He knows that look. She has had enough, she wants to be away.

'I am not sure,' says Brautegam, frowning, peering around for support. 'Our format tonight does not allow for questions. I would like to thank -'

'Excuse me! I have a question for the speaker. May I address the speaker?'

There is a hush. All eyes are on Elizabeth Costello. Frostily she gazes into the distance.

Brautegam pulls himself together. 'I would like to thank Ms Costello, whom we have gathered tonight to honour. Please join us in the foyer. Thank you.' And he switches off the microphone.

As they leave the auditorium there is a buzz of talk. An incident, no less. He can see the girl in the red-and-white shirt ahead of him in the throng. She walks stiff and erect and seemingly angry. What was the question going to be? Would it not have been better to have it aired?

He fears that the scene will repeat itself in the foyer. But there is no scene. The girl has left, gone out into the night, perhaps stormed out. Nevertheless, the incident leaves a bad taste; say what one may, the evening has been spoiled.

What was she going to ask? Whispering, people huddle together. They seem to have a shrewd idea. He has a shrewd idea too. Something to do with what Elizabeth Costello the famous writer might have been expected to say on an occasion like this, and did not say.

He can see Dean Brautegam and others fussing around his mother now, trying to smooth things over. After all they have invested, they want her to go home thinking well of them and of the college. But they must be glancing ahead too to 1997, hoping that the 1997 jury will come up with a more winning winner.

We skip the rest of the foyer scene, move to the hotel.

Elizabeth Costello retires for the night. For a while her son watches television in his room. Then he grows restless and goes down to the lounge, where the first person he sees is the woman who interviewed his mother for the radio, Susan Moebius. She waves him over. She is with a companion, but the companion soon departs, leaving the two of them alone.

He finds Susan Moebius attractive. She dresses well, better than the conventions of the academy usually allow. She has long, golden-blonde hair; she sits upright in her chair, squaring her shoulders; when she tosses her hair the movement is quite queenly.

They skirt the events of the evening. Instead they speak about the revival of radio as a cultural medium. 'An interesting session you had with my mother,' says John. 'I know you have written a book on her, which unfortunately I haven't read. Do you have good things to say about her?'

'I believe I do. Elizabeth Costello has been a key writer for our times. My book isn't about her alone, but she figures strongly in it.'

'A key writer… Is she a key writer for all of us, would you say, or just for women? I got the feeling during the interview that you see her solely as a woman writer or a woman's writer. Would you still consider her a key writer if she were a man?'

'If she were a man?'

'All right: if you were a man?'

'If I were a man? I don't know. I have never been a man. I will let you know when I have tried it.'

They smile. There is definitely something in the air.

'But my mother has been a man,' he persists. 'She has also been a dog. She can think her way into other people, into other existences. I have read her; I know. It is within her powers. Isn't that what is most important about fiction: that it takes us out of ourselves, into other lives?'

'Perhaps. But your mother remains a woman all the same. Whatever she does, she does as a woman. She inhabits her characters as a woman does, not a man.'

'I don't see that. I find her men perfectly believable.'

'You don't see because you wouldn't see. Only a woman would see. It is something between women. If her men are believable, good, I am glad to hear so, but finally it is just mimicry. Women are good at mimicry, better at it than men. At parody, even. Our touch is lighter.'

She is smiling again. See how light my touch can be, her lips seem to say. Soft lips.

'If there is parody in her,' he says, 'I confess it is too subtle for me to pick up.' There is a long silence. 'So is that what you think,' he says at last: 'that we live parallel lives, men and women, that we never really meet?'

The drift of the conversation has changed. They are no longer speaking about writing, if they ever were.

'What do you think?' she says. 'What does your experience tell you? And is difference such a bad thing? If there were no difference, what would become of desire?'

She looks him candidly in the eye. It is time to move. He stands up; she puts her glass down, slowly stands up too. As she passes him he takes her elbow, and at the touch a shock runs through him, dizzying him. Difference; opposite poles. Midnight in Pennsylvania: what is the time back in Melbourne? What is he doing on this foreign continent?

They are alone in the elevator. Not the elevator he and his mother used: a different shaft. Which is north, which south in this hexagon of a hotel, this beehive? He presses the woman against the wall, kisses her, tasting smoke on her breath. Research: will that be her name for it afterwards? Using a secondary source? He kisses her again, she kisses him back, kissing flesh of the flesh.

They exit on the thirteenth floor; he follows her down the corridor, turning right and left until he loses track. The core of the hive: is that what they are seeking? His mother's room is 1254. His is 1220. Hers is 1307. He is surprised there is such a number. He thought that floors went twelve-fourteen, that that was the rule in the hotel world. Where is 1307 in relation to 1254: north, south, west, east?

We skip ahead again, a skip this time in the text rather than in the performance.

When he thinks back over those hours, one moment returns with sudden force, the moment when her knee slips under his arm and folds into his armpit. Curious that the memory of an entire scene should be dominated by one moment, not obviously significant, yet so vivid that he can still almost feel the ghostly thigh against his skin. Does the mind by nature prefer sensations to ideas, the tangible to the abstract? Or is the folding of the woman's knee just a mnemonic, from which will unfold the rest of the night?

They are lying in the dark, flank to flank, in the text of memory, talking.

'So: has it been a successful visit?' she asks.

'From whose point of view?'

'Yours.'

'My point of view doesn't matter. I came for Elizabeth Costello's sake. Hers is the point of view that matters. Yes, successful. Successful enough.'

'Do I detect a touch of bitterness?'

'None. I am here to help – that is all.'

'That is very good of you. Do you feel you owe her something?'

'Yes. Filial duty. It is a perfectly natural feeling among humankind.'

She ruffles his hair. 'Don't be cross,' she says.

'I am not.'

She slides down beside him, strokes him. 'Successful enough -what does that mean?' she murmurs. She is not giving up. A price has yet to be paid for this time in her bed, for what counts as a conquest.

'The speech didn't come off. She is disappointed about that. She put a lot of work into it.'

'There was nothing wrong with the speech in itself. But the title was not appropriate. And she should not have relied on Kafka for her illustrations. There are better texts.'

'There are?'

'Yes, better, more suitable. This is America, the 1990s. People don't want to hear the Kafka thing yet again.'

'What do they want to hear?'

She shrugs. 'Something more personal. It doesn't have to be intimate. But audiences no longer react well to heavy historical self-ironization. They might at a pinch accept it from a man, but not from a woman. A woman doesn't need to wear all that armour.'

'And a man does?'

'You tell me. If it is a problem, it is a male problem. We didn't give the award to a man.'

'Have you considered the possibility that my mother may have got beyond the man-woman thing? That she may have explored it as far as it goes, and is now after bigger game?'

'Such as?'

The hand that has been stroking him pauses. The moment is important, he can feel it. She is waiting for his answer, for the privileged access he promises. He too can feel the thrill of the moment, electric, reckless.

'Such as measuring herself against the illustrious dead. Such as paying tribute to the powers that animate her. For instance.'

'Is that what she says?'

'Don't you think that that is what she has been doing all her life: measuring herself against the masters? Does no one in your profession recognize it?'

He should not be speaking like this. He should be keeping out of his mother's business. He is in this stranger's bed not for his bonny blue eyes but because he is his mother's son. Yet here he is spilling the beans like a nincompoop! This must be how spy-women work. Nothing subtle to it. The man is seduced not because he has a will to resist that is cleverly overcome, but because being seduced is a pleasure in itself. One yields for the sake of yielding.

He wakes once during the night, overwhelmed with sadness, such deep sadness that he could cry. Lightly he touches the naked shoulder of the woman beside him, but she does not respond. He runs the hand down her body: breast, flank, hip, thigh, knee. Handsome in every detail, no doubt about that, but in a blank way that no longer moves him.

He has a vision of his mother in her big double bed, crouched, her knees drawn up, her back bared. Out of her back, out of the waxy, old person's flesh, protrude three needles: not the tiny needles of the acupuncturist or the voodoo doctor but thick, grey needles, steel or plastic: knitting needles. The needles have not killed her, there is no need to worry about that, she breathes regularly in her sleep. Nevertheless, she lies impaled.

Who has done it? Who would have done it?

Such loneliness, he thinks, hovering in spirit over the old woman in the bare room. His heart is breaking; sadness pours down like a grey waterfall behind his eyes. He should never have come here, to room 13 whatever it is. A wrong move. He ought to get up at once, steal out. But he does not. Why? Because he does not want to be alone. And because he wants to sleep. Sleep, he thinks, that knits up the ravelled sleeve of care. What an extraordinary way of putting it! Not all the monkeys in the world picking away at typewriters all their lives would come up with those words in that arrangement. Out of the dark emerging, out of nowhere: first not there, then there, like a newborn child, heart working, brain working, all the processes of that intricate electrochemical labyrinth working. A miracle. He closes his eyes.

A gap.

She, Susan Moebius, is already there when he comes down for breakfast. She is wearing white, she looks rested and content. He joins her.

From her purse she takes something and lays it on the table: his watch. 'It is three hours out,' she says.

'Not three,' he says. 'Fifteen. Canberra time.'

Her eyes rest on his, or his on hers. Green-flecked. He feels a tug. An unexplored continent, from which he is about to part! A pang, a tiny pang of loss, shoots through him. Pain not without pleasure, like certain grades of toothache. He can conceive of something quite serious with this woman, whom he will probably not see again.

'I know what you are thinking,' she says. 'You are thinking we won't see each other again. You are thinking, A wasted investment!

'What else do you know?'

'You think I have been using you. You think I have been trying to reach your mother through you.'

She is smiling. No fool. A capable player.

'Yes,' he says. 'No.' He draws a deep breath. 'I will tell you what I really think. I think you are baffled, even if you won't admit it, by the mystery of the divine in the human. You know there is something special about my mother – that is what draws you to her – yet when you meet her she turns out to be just an ordinary old woman. You can't square the two. You want an explanation. You want a clue, a sign, if not from her then from me. That is what is going on. It's all right, I don't mind.'

Strange words to be speaking over breakfast, over coffee and toast. He did not know he had them in him.

'You really are her son, aren't you. Do you write too?'

'You mean, am I touched by the god? No. But yes, I am her son. Not a foundling, not an adoptee. Out of her very body I came, caterwauling.'

'And you have a sister.'

'A half-sister, from the same place. The real thing, both of us. Flesh of her flesh, blood of her blood.'

'And you have never married.'

'Wrong. Married and unmarried. What about you?'

'I have a husband. A husband, a child, a happy marriage.'

'That's good then.'

There is nothing more to be said.

'Will I have a chance to say goodbye to your mother?'

'You can catch her before the television interview. At ten, in the ballroom.'

A gap.

The television people have chosen the ballroom because of the red velvet drapes. In front of the drapes they have set up a rather ornate chair for his mother, and a plainer chair for the woman who will engage with her. Susan, when she comes, has to cross the whole length of the room. She is ready to travel; she has a calf-leather satchel over her shoulder; her stride is easy, confident. Again, lightly, like the brush of a feather, comes a pang, the pang of forthcoming loss.

'It has been a great honour to get to know you, Mrs Costello,' Susan says, taking his mother's hand.

' Elizabeth,' says his mother. 'Excuse the throne.'

' Elizabeth.'

'I want to give you this,' says Susan, and from her satchel produces a book. The cover shows a woman wearing antique Grecian costume, holding a scroll. Reclaiming a History: Women and Memory, says the title. Susan Kaye Moebius.

'Thank you, I look forward to reading it,' says his mother.

He stays for the interview, sitting in a corner, watching as his mother transforms herself into the person television wants her to be. All the quaintnesses she refused to deliver last night are allowed to come out: pungent turns of speech, stories of childhood in the Australian outback ('You have to realize how vast Australia is. We are only fleas on Australia's backside, we late settlers'), stories about the film world, about actors and actresses she has crossed paths with, about the adaptations of her books and what she thinks of them ('Film is a simplifying medium. That is its nature; you may as well learn to accept it. It works in broad strokes'). Followed by a glance at the contemporary world ('It does my heart good to see so many strong young women around who know what they want'). Even bird-watching gets a mention.

After the interview Susan Moebius's book almost gets left behind. He is the one who picks it up from under the chair.

'I wish people wouldn't give one books,' she murmurs. 'Where am I going to find space for it?'

'I have space.'

'Then you take it. Keep it. You're the one she was really after, not me.'

He reads the inscription: To Elizabeth Costello, with gratitude and admiration. 'Me?' he says. 'I don't think so. I was just' – his voice barely falters – 'a pawn in the game. You are the one she loves and hates.'

He barely falters; but the word that first came to mind was not pawn, it was clipping. A toenail clipping, that one steals and wraps in a tissue and takes away, for one's own purposes.

His mother does not reply. But she does give him a smile, a quick, sudden smile of – he cannot see it in any other way – triumph.

Their duties in Williamstown are over. The television crew are packing up. In half an hour a taxi will take them to the airport. She has won, more or less. On foreign turf too. An away win. She can come home with her true self safe, leaving behind an image, false, like all images.

What is the truth of his mother? He does not know, and at the deepest level does not want to know. He is here simply to protect her, to bar the way against the relic-hunters and the contu-melists and the sentimental pilgrims. He has opinions of his own, but he will not speak them. This woman, he would say if he were to speak, whose words you hang on as if she were the sibyl, is the same woman who, forty years ago, hid day after day in her bedsitter in Hampstead, crying to herself, crawling out in the evenings into the foggy streets to buy the fish and chips on which she lived, falling asleep in her clothes. She is the same woman who later stormed around the house in Melbourne, hair flying in all directions, screaming at her children, 'You are killing me! You are tearing the flesh from my body!' (He lay in the dark with his sister afterwards, comforting her while she sobbed; he was seven; it was his first taste of fathering.) This is the secret world of the oracle. How can you hope to understand her before you know what she is really like?

He does not hate his mother. (As he thinks these words, other words echo at the back of his mind: the words of one of William Faulkner's characters insisting with mad repetitiveness that he does not hate the South. Who is the character?) Quite the contrary. If he hated her he would long ago have put the greatest possible distance between the two of them. He does not hate her. He serves at her shrine, cleaning up after the turmoil of the holy day, sweeping up the petals, collecting the offerings, putting the widows' mites together, ready to bank. He may not share in the frenzy, but he worships too.

A mouthpiece for the divine. But sibyl is not the right word for her. Nor is oracle. Too Greco-Roman. His mother is not in the Greco-Roman mould. Tibet or India more like it: a god incarnated in a child, wheeled from village to village to be applauded, venerated.

Then they are in the taxi, driving through streets that already have the air of streets about to be forgotten.

'So,' says his mother. 'A clean getaway.'

'I do believe so. Have you got the cheque safe?'

'The cheque, the medal, everything.'

A gap. They are at the airport, at the gate, waiting for the flight to be called that will take them on the first stage of their journey home. Faintly, over their heads, with a crude, driving beat, a version of Eine kleine Nachtmusik is playing. Opposite them sits a woman eating popcorn out of a paper bucket, so fat that her toes barely reach the floor.

'Can I ask you one thing?' he says. 'Why literary history? And why such a grim chapter in literary history? Realism: no one in this place wanted to hear about realism.'

Fiddling in her purse, she makes no reply.

'When I think of realism,' he goes on,'I think of peasants frozen in blocks of ice. I think of Norwegians in smelly underwear. What is your interest in it? And where does Kafka fit in? What has Kafka to do with it all?'

'With what? With smelly underwear?'

'Yes. With smelly underwear. With people picking their noses. You don't write about that kind of thing. Kafka didn't write about it.'

'No, Kafka didn't write about people picking their noses. But Kafka had time to wonder where and how his poor educated ape was going to find a mate. And what it was going to be like when he was left in the dark with the bewildered, half-tamed female that his keepers eventually produced for his use. Kafka's ape is embedded in life. It is the embeddedness that is important, not the life itself. His ape is embedded as we are embedded, you in me, I in you. That ape is followed through to the end, to the bitter, unsayable end, whether or not there are traces left on the page. Kafka stays awake during the gaps when we are sleeping. That is where Kafka fits in.'

The fat woman is observing them frankly, her little eyes flicking from the one to the other: the old woman in the raincoat and the man with the bald patch who could be her son, having a fight in their funny accents.

'Well,' he says, 'if what you say is true, it is repulsive. It is zoo-keeping, not writing.'

'What would you prefer? A zoo without keepers, where the animals fall into a trance when you stop looking at them? A zoo of ideas? A gorilla cage with the idea of a gorilla in it, an elephant cage with the idea of elephants in it? Do you know how many kilograms of solid waste an elephant drops in twenty-four hours?

If you want a real elephant cage with real elephants then you need a zookeeper to clean up after them.'

'You are off the point, Mother. And don't get so excited.' He turns to the fat woman. 'We are discussing literature, the claims of realism versus the claims of idealism.'

Without ceasing to chew, the fat woman removes her eyes from them. He thinks of the cud of mashed corn and saliva in her mouth and shudders. Where does it all end?

'There is a difference between cleaning up after animals and watching them while they do their business,' he starts again. 'I am asking about the latter, not the former. Don't animals deserve a private life as much as we do?'

'Not if they are in a zoo,' she says. 'Not if they are on show. Once you are on show, you have no private life. Anyway, do you ask permission from the stars before you peek at them through your telescope? What about the private lives of the stars?'

'Mother, the stars are lumps of rock.'

'Are they? I thought they were traces of light millions of years old.'

'Boarding will now commence on United Airlines flight 323 non-stop to Los Angeles,' says a voice above their heads. 'Passengers requiring assistance, as well as families with young children, may step forward.'

On the flight she barely touches her food. She orders two brandies, one after the other, and falls asleep. When, hours later, they begin the descent to Los Angeles, she is still asleep. The flight attendant taps her on the shoulder. 'Ma'am, your seat belt.' She does not stir. They exchange looks, he and the flight attendant. He leans over and clips the belt across her lap.

She lies slumped deep in her seat. Her head is sideways, her mouth open. She is snoring faintly. Light flashes from the windows as they bank, the sun setting brilliantly over southern California. He can see up her nostrils, into her mouth, down the back of her throat. And what he cannot see he can imagine: the gullet, pink and ugly, contracting as it swallows, like a python, drawing things down to the pear-shaped belly-sac. He draws away, tightens his own belt, sits up, facing forward. No, he tells himself, that is not where I come from, that is not it.