The Forbiddenness of Forbidden Places

I.

In ‘The Problem of Evil’, the sixth chapter of his 2003 novel Elizabeth Costello, J.M. Coetzee stages a fictional encounter between his eponymous protagonist and the English writer Paul West. Invited to speak at a conference in Amsterdam, ‘on the age-old problem of evil’, Elizabeth Costello decides to talk about ‘Witness, Silence and Censorship’, focussing primarily on West’s novel The Very Rich Hours of Count von Stauffenberg. Unknown to Costello, West has also been invited to the conference. On learning that he will be present at her lecture, Costello, fearful that her remarks will be taken as a personal attack, at first tries to rewrite her lecture, only to realise that this attempted ‘softening’ is an act of self-censorship that she cannot perform with a clear conscience. Resigning herself to possible embarrassment and scandal, Costello decides to read her original text unaltered. Her one precaution is to warn West beforehand. His response – a tenacious silence both before and after the lecture – reminds us not only that West (the real West) has been given no opportunity to defend himself within the space of Coetzee’s narrative, but also that there is no obvious common ground between West and Costello. Their respective attitudes to language are fundamentally different: Costello acknowledges this, West does not. That Costello attempts to understand the nature of this difference while West remains silent underlines the – potentially unbridgeable – gulf between them. Costello cuts short her lecture having realised she has reached the limit of what she can say. West’s response remains unarticulated.

For Costello, the problem with West’s book is its obscenity. In describing the execution of the officers who had plotted to kill Hitler, West, in her opinion, goes too far. The pages in question have an energy that comes, ‘in a certain sense, from West himself.’ It is as though

‘[t]hrough 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.’

Costello is aware that ‘[i]neluctably she is arguing herself into the position of the old-fashioned censor.’ To escape this trap she endeavours to justify her reaction to West’s book. It might be nothing more than a consequence of age, she concedes; nevertheless, her attitude to writing – and to obscenity – has changed (her reading of West’s book is also a possible contributing factor, she notes):

‘Once upon a time she would have said, All honour to a writer who undertakes to follow such a story to its darkest recesses. Now she is not so sure...

‘... 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.’

This uncertainty about the true value of writing leads her to the conclusion that there is a limit to what can be said, to what should be said; it leads, in other words, to her conception of the obscene. She dares utter what for many writers is a heresy: the suspicion that people are not always ‘improved by what they read.’

‘Furthermore, she is not sure that writers who venture into the darker territories of the soul always return unscathed. She has begun to wonder whether writing what one desires, any more than reading what one desires, is in itself a good thing...

‘Obscene. That is the word, a word of contested etymology, that she must hold on to as a talisman. She chooses to believe that obscene means off-stage. To save our humanity, certain things that we may want to see (may want to see because we are human!) must remain off-stage.’

As she states in her lecture:

‘... I take seriously the forbiddenness of forbidden places. The cellar in which the July 1944 plotters were hanged is one such forbidden place. I do not believe we should go into that cellar, any of us. I do not believe Mr West should go there; and, if he chooses to go nevertheless, I believe we should not follow.’

To follow Mr West – as Costello has done, almost in spite of herself – is to consent to an act of violence perpetrated against ourselves. We harm our own humanity by sharing in the violation of what should remain hidden.

‘Let me not look. That was the plea she breathed to Paul West (except that she did not know Paul West then, he was just a name on the cover of a book). Do not make me go through with it! But Paul West did not relent. He made her read, excited her to read. For that she will not easily forgive him.’

In this context, Costello recalls an incident from her past. As a young woman she was violently assaulted: ‘it was her first brush with evil.’ Rather than write about her experience, rather than make use of it, she keeps it to herself:

‘For half a century the memory has rested inside her like an egg, an egg of stone, one that will never crack open, never give birth. She finds it good, it pleases her, this silence of hers, a silence she hopes to preserve to the grave.

It is some equivalent reticence that she is demanding of West.’

This call for reticence is greeted, as Costello anticipates, with mingled unease and hostility. One (male) audience member, at the end of her lecture, accuses her of being ‘a weak vessel’, and of attributing her weakness to everyone else. Other people may read West’s book and not feel violated, the audience member asserts. West himself may have emerged unscathed; it is not for Costello to say. Surely it is better to know the world’s horrors intimately and to learn from them, than to close one’s eyes.

Typically, Costello/ Coetzee can only admit helplessness when attempting to answer this. Rather than insist on a degree of reticence among writers and readers, Costello/Coetzee can only recommend it. There is no ‘third alternative’, at least none that is obvious. We can either choose to follow West - and writers like him – into forbidden places, or we can choose not to.


II.

Two novels that choose to enter the forbidden places Coetzee describes are Jose Saramago’s Blindness (1995) and Stieg Larsson’s The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (2005). Both are bestselling novels; both have been made into films (two film versions in the case of Larsson’s book); both contain scenes of violent rape; both reveal – in these scenes - an ambiguity bordering on prurience.

Doubtless there are numerous other examples of books that flirt with the sort of obscenity Coetzee describes; however, the popularity of these two novels gives them a certain prominence. In comparing the depiction of rape in these two novels to Coetzee’s treatment of rape in his 2000 novel Disgrace, we see most clearly the problematic nature of language and storytelling alluded to in Elizabeth Costello. Unfortunately, in order to demonstrate this, we have to follow both Saramago and Larsson ‘into the room’.

In Saramago’s novel an unnamed city is struck by an epidemic of ‘white blindness’. Those suffering from this unexplained affliction are quarantined by the authorities, locked in an asylum, and effectively left to fend for themselves. As order deteriorates, violence and savagery become the rule. The women in the asylum are now at the mercy of the men. Gang-rape inevitably (according to the novel’s logic) follows.

We see events through the eyes of a female character – ‘the doctor’s wife’ – who, for some again unexplained reason, is not afflicted by blindness (she keeps quiet about this in order to protect herself and her husband). In a lengthy passage, we follow her and several other women into ‘ward 3’ where they are then raped. The leader of the gang of rapists – the ‘king’ of ward 3 – chooses the doctor’s wife and another young woman for himself. After raping the young woman he passes her to his fellow gang-members; he then turns his attention to the doctor’s wife, forcing her at gunpoint to perform fellatio. Only after these two acts are described does Saramago end the scene. Morning comes and the women are finally allowed to leave. Saramago, however, feels the need to reiterate what has happened during the night:

‘For hours they had passed from one man to another, from humiliation to humiliation, from outrage to outrage, exposed to everything that can be done to a woman while leaving her still alive.’

The rhythm and repetition in this sentence – its rhetorical, almost lyrical cadence – is deeply disturbing. Not only is the sentence unnecessary in terms of plot development and atmosphere, it also suggests – by dint of its ornamental quality – that Saramago has written it not from a sense of urgency, but from a sense of enjoyment: he has written it merely because it sounds good. A summation of sorts, it confirms that he knows what he is talking about, that he has described fully what he intended to describe. In other words, his choice of language is unproblematic.

We sense a similar narrative confidence in The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. Here, the protagonist, Lisbeth Salander, is first of all forced to perform fellatio on her guardian Nils Bjurman, then, later, she is tied to his bed and raped. The long, rhythmic sentences of Saramago’s narrative are replaced here by short, declarative sentences; succinct descriptions of what is taking place. There is no doubt in the reader’s mind of the horrifying nature of the assault. Lisbeth is ‘completely vulnerable’ we are told. She can ‘hardly breathe’ and feels ‘excruciating pain’.

Larsson then cuts away from the scene (throughout he has been interweaving two narratives – that of Lisbeth and that of the novel’s other protagonist, Mikael Blomkvist) in order – ostensibly - to spare us the rest of the ordeal. However, he then cuts back to reiterate – as Saramago does – that Lisbeth has undergone something deeply traumatic. The fact that he cuts away from the rape only after letting us know – explicitly – what has happened to Lisbeth, then returns after the rape has finished to make her trauma even more explicit, reveals that in fact he wishes to spare us nothing. Like Saramago, he makes sure we know exactly what he is talking about. Neither writer relents, although both pretend to do so. Neither trusts the reader to imagine what happens (which suggests that the narrative confidence both men display is largely illusory: the desire to describe everything revealing a fundamental insecurity).

For Coetzee, on the other hand, remaining ‘outside the room’ – choosing not to describe the physical act of rape – means it is up to the reader to imagine what happens. The result is just as disturbing as the effects created by Saramago and Larsson, but - essentially - not in the same way. Whereas both Saramago and Larsson allow themselves to become caught up in the description – doubtless because neither wants to risk disrupting the narrative flow of their texts and thereby disappointing their readers – Coetzee, crucially, refuses to be dragged along. He confounds the reader’s expectations, even the logic of the narrative itself, by leaving the details of the rape unrecorded. We remain with the novel’s protagonist David Lurie, locked in a bathroom, while in the bedroom his daughter is being raped. Afterwards, despite Lurie’s attempts to talk about what happened, his daughter resists him. ‘In his embrace she is stiff as a pole, yielding nothing’ we are told. The experience – Coetzee suggests – cannot be spoken about. Or possibly, should not be spoken about. It is language itself that is viewed with suspicion.

Saramago and Larsson undoubtedly have good intentions. Both try to convey a sense of the horror of rape; yet for some reason both veer dangerously close to prurience. In Coetzee’s phrase, both ‘excite’ us to read. In order to maintain tension, both writers choose to enter forbidden places, to show us in detail what is happening. Yet in this description there is something unsettling – a hint of the obscenity Coetzee describes. Although in both Blindness and The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, we ostensibly see things from the point of view of female characters, in fact we are looking through the additional filter of an unnamed third-person narrator who is unmistakably male. The language used is an already eroticised one: it has a sadistic, voyeuristic quality. That both the doctor’s wife and Lisbeth Salander are forced to perform fellatio reveals the male presence behind the language: a female writer, arguably, would not have focussed on this particular act. That in Saramago’s text the raped women are ‘exposed to everything that can be done to a woman’, and that in Larsson’s text Lisbeth is sodomized, further suggests that for both writers vaginal rape is not enough: it has to be compounded by other acts of violation. Just as Costello/Coetzee detects in Paul West an additional ‘energy’ above and beyond the requirements of his subject matter, so it is possible to see in Saramago and Larsson an energy in their writing that might be called enjoyment.

Coetzee’s Disgrace maintains a narrative tension – and elicits a sense of horror – without having to rely on the erotic energy of an essentially voyeuristic language. In doing so, it demonstrates that a ‘third alternative’ perhaps exists after all. By acknowledging the problematic nature of language, by respecting the forbiddenness of forbidden places, the text paradoxically says far more than it might otherwise be able to do. We are spared a description of the horror, but we are not spared the horror itself. Without being told, we know what has happened – or at least, we know enough. David Lurie’s daughter is raped, but she is spared the additional humiliation of having us watch.