Your show Elizabeth Costello. Sept leçons et cinq contes moraux (Elizabeth Costello. Seven Lessons and Five Moral Tales) isn’t just an adaptation of J. M. Coetzee’s novel: it stages an encounter with a character, a fictional writer, who is as much a recurring presence in the South African writer’s work as in yours…
Elizabeth Costello appears in J. M. Coetzee’s eponymous novel, published in 2003, before returning a few years later in Slow Man, then in “The Glass Abattoir”. In one of his interviews, J. M. Coetzee recounts how she came to be: invited to the United States for a series of conferences, he chose—in a form of mise en abyme—to talk about “the lectures given at American universities by the writer Elizabeth Costello”: instead of literature, he decided—through Costello’s voice—to talk about the condition of animals.
Costello is also a recurring figure in your shows…
I have already “used” her in two shows, particularly in The End, which mixed texts by Franz Kafka and Bernard-Marie Koltès and in which she found herself in the “beyond,” in front of a gate, like Franz Kafka’s “Gate of the Law,” and has to write a statement of faith to be allowed to go through… Elizabeth Costello’s other appearance was in (A)pollonia, in which she gave a conference about the Holocaust and drew a parallel with the contemporary slaughter of animals, scandalising the audience.
Why does she fascinate you so much that, like the winner of the 2003 Nobel Prize in Literature, you keep inviting her to appear in your creations?
As a character, she blurs the line between fiction and reality. Some time after the novel was published, one of Coetzee’s friends was asked about Elizabeth Costello’s work: she had become real in the readers’ minds! J. M. Coetzee has a complex relationship with her. Like him, she travels from conference to conference. She became his alter ego. Some of her lectures were inspired by Coetzee’s own: they are permeated by questions of evil or the respect for animal life—themes dear to the author himself. This fiction within fiction within fiction is fascinating. It has invaded my own work. I like this question Coetzee asks: “What if, in the end, everything we do were just fiction?”
What makes Elizabeth Costello such a unique writer?
In the novel, we are introduced to her as she receives the Stowe Prize in Williamstown, Pennsylvania. She is presented as one of the greatest writers in the world. We follow her to Africa, then to Antarctica, the United States, Amsterdam… From conference to conference, journey to journey, she reveals her unique way of thinking about the world. Of course, J. M. Coetzee hides behind her, flirting with the line of political correctness. Through her, he gains freedom. In the background, there are the problems she encounter in her relationships with her son, her sister, her acquaintances… Her existence becomes problematic and embarrassing. She is increasingly ostracised. She is getting older and must negotiate with her desires—which affects her greatly. Through those embarrassing conferences, the question of her own life, her future, her aging, arises. This is probably why, after her arrival at the Gate at the end of the novel, J. M. Coetzee chose to bring her back in two other stories, allowing her to grow older…
How do you bring such a character to the stage?
I selected certain lectures over others—having already used two of them in other shows. To play this complex character, I chose six actresses of different ages and physiques, as well as a man. The idea is to explore this character, a writer who slowly loses control over her life. “Elizabeth Costello”—both her stories and the character itself—represents a sort of disturbance that manifests not only through her speeches or lectures, but through this constant flirtation with the impossible, leading us somewhere we would have never gone otherwise. Repeating “I have opinions but I don’t believe in them,” Elizabeth Costello reveals a unique personality. Unlike other authors, she doesn’t want to answer questions about literature. She would rather question us, without providing answers of own, about essential, visceral issues. J. M. Coetzee could echo Flaubert’s famous declaration: “Madame Bovary, c’est moi.” Is Elizabeth Costello me?
As a character and alter ego of Coetzee, Costello questions the responsibility of the artist…
Costello expresses her thoughts freely, even if it means disturbing others, or having to confront the question of evil after drawing a connection between the Holocaust of the Jews and the mass slaughter of animals. She is the one through whom scandal arrives: she embraces this role, while being fully aware of the horror of the Holocaust. At the same time, she wonders if artists have a right to explore the underworld—those subterranean zones which hide the horrors of humanity—and to come back to describe what they have seen. As usual, she leaves us without a definitive answer, but the question she raises is essential.
How did the relationship between Costello and Coetzee evolve over time?
What begins as a form of mystification by J. M. Coetzee slowly turns into something more troubling. Elizabeth Costello has no single truth. She is made up of multiple facets. She appears in Slow Man against Coetzee’s will! She meets a man, Paul Rayment, who lost a limb after a bike accident, and questions him about his choices. This is all the more troubling because J. M. Coetzee is himself an avid cyclist (and even raced around Avignon!).
At the end of the show, there is the striking image of a chick on a conveyor belt, an image taken from “The Glass Abattoir”. Can you tell us more about this image?
The show opens with Elizabeth Costello at the peak of her career. She has won all sorts of awards, feels she doesn’t deserve such accolades, and can’t imagine for a moment that the current generation would be divided about her! She strives as much as possible to appear open-minded. Through Eros, she is interested in the relationships between gods and mortals. She is sensitive to animal rights, and evil is one of her favourite themes: she discusses it in her lecture entitled “Silence, complicity, and guilt.” But with time, she tends to become entrenched in her own convictions. She is the first to admit she no longer thinks the way she once did. Although she has received the equivalent of a Nobel Prize, her critical mind continues to torment her. The little chick at the end of the show seems to be the only image that preoccupies her: a chick condemned to death on a conveyor belt, destined to know only a brief existence before its execution. Costello is the only one, except for God, to be aware of the fate of this forgotten being. Here opens the abyss of the unknown, which only the Word can access. This Word is what Costello, Coetzee, and my team and I are looking for, knowing full well that we will not find it. But it is this quest that gives meaning to our lives.
Interview conducted by Marc Blanchet (March 2024) and translated to English by Gaël Schmidt-Cléach