On belief and on conviction

"It is not my profession to believe, just to write." (J.M. Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello)

When one speaks, when one writes, when one puts her voice on public display in such a way that assumes a certain amount of authority and consistency, to what extent do we assume her to be in full and renewed possession of her own ideas? In other words, when one writes with conviction, to what extent do we assume that she fully and consciously believes in the words she speaks or pens? What does it take to keep belief alive and active, full and embodied; how often must one revisit a notion or position one has come to feel at home in to make sure it corresponds with what one actually, presently, wants to say?

Quasi-Christian questions, really. Belief and faith are practically inextricable in Judeo-Christian heritage. The word "habit" appears in the OED's first definition of "belief": "The mental action, condition, or habit, of trusting to or confiding in a person or thing; trust, dependence, reliance, confidence, faith." Faith, belief, habit, trust: necessary mental conditions for the placated flocks. Theology, however, demands active and renewed faith from the good Christian, an alive and regular belief in and communication with the Almighty. In the same vein, the Christian devil is not so much a being of straightforward evil but the snake that casts doubt into the faithful, the seed of ambiguity in the straightforward believer, the worm that eats through the whole. We need only look to one of our most troubled deep believers to see these two poles - the godly and the satanic - enacted. Dostoevsky projects a spectrum of ways of believing onto his Karamazovs: the holy Alexei keeps his faith pure and alive by defeating doubt time and time again; the weak-willed and all too human Dmitri sees the Good and the Certain but perpetually flees from their grace; and Ivan, the by far most interesting middle brother, constantly subverts the language of belief and certainty itself, in lengthy speeches that he himself cannot know if he believes the truth of, until he descends into madness in the form of dialogues with a Devil of uncertain existence.

This kind of doubt, put into the mouths of fictional characters, inevitably takes on a metafictional concern. In the pseudo-conscious act of composing literature, many writers have feared a malignant influence in the words appearing before them, as if from an external source, on the page. Is it inspiration, the divine breath, pouring life into their pens? Or something that only passes as the true, a wolf in sheep's clothing, a devil cackling first at its success in tricking the unwitting author, next at this author's own confusion and doubt at her own creation? William Blake, another Christian, evoked these midnight doubts in his famous "The Tiger":

In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand dare seize the fire?

Questions, uncertainty. Blake addresses his poem's own subject, the fearsome night creature, and collapses with the tiger's creator: "On what wings dare he aspire?" Is Blake, as writer and therefore honourary recreator of the tiger, like God or like Devil? Can he trust, can he believe, in the goodness of his creation? Can he tell whether the being coming to life on his page comes from the "skies" or from the "deeps"? If he cannot tell, what are his responsibilities? Destroy the thing, forget the doubt, pray for renewed faith and restrict his poetic creations to the lambs of his Songs of Innocence? Or let the thing go into the world, let satanic uncertainty be its own subject, its own poetical theme, and speak for itself?

Old-fashioned language, Satan, but an ever-present concern. J.M. Coetzee, as secular a writer as one might wish to find, gives Satan name in "The Problem of Evil," one of the lecture scenarios written for his alter ego, the fictional novelist Elizabeth Costello. The very existence of Costello as a literary construct by an important contemporary writer, notorious for his public reticence yet invited time and time again to share his thoughts and opinions in public lectures and interviews, raises crucial issues on the topic of belief. Coetzee, a South African Nobel Laureate and author of such controversial and celebrated works as Waiting for the Barbarians and Disgrace, clearly has much to say. But he says it in his fiction, in a kind of language that eschews the straightforwardly political, the convicted, the polemical, the certain. Coetzee's language is hard, it is unflinching, but it is nebulous. Yet we seek overt wisdom from our novelists, we seek opinions, we seek support for one cause or another. We seek political positioning, we seek stances. We seek petition signers.

Coetzee is no petition signer. But he clearly has some thoughts on some topics that can't find overt expression in his "regular" fictional works. Animal rights, for instance: Coetzee is an avowed vegetarian for explicitly moral reasons. Thoughts on censorship, on what should or should not be written, for another. Thoughts on such broad-ranging and generally irritating interview questions such as: "what do you think is the place of the novel in Africa?" And, to come round, thoughts on the meaning of belief, on the difference between a writer owning her words and a writer letting the words happen to her and through her. We glimpse these thoughts not as personally communicated beliefs on the part of the writer himself, shifting away from his private fictional composing and into his public persona equipped with the expert status of the famed, but through a new fictional character, a novelist who accepts the role of the public intellectual: Elizabeth Costello.

It makes for strange reading. Elizabeth Costello, published in 2003 as a collection of Costello scenarios previously given as lectures or published individually, takes the reader on a strangely detached and episodic journey through select public performances, memories, conversations, and reflections of the Australian novelist, culminating in her self-described Kafkaesque experience at the gates of heaven. "What do you believe in?" is the question she must answer to her absurd panel of judges outside the pearly gates. I am a writer, is her defiant answer: "It is not my profession to believe, just to write." Costello's answer to her judges is immediately reminiscent of some of the novelist's contemplations on the meaning of belief near the beginning of the "novel," as she gives a speech on "The Novel in Africa" to passengers on a luxury cruise ship (the setting clearly contributes to Costello's grappling with her own authenticity):

She is not sure, as she listens to her own voice, whether she believes any longer in what she is saying. Ideas like these must have had some grip on her when years ago she wrote them down, but after so many repetitions they have taken on a worn, unconvincing air. On the other hand, she no longer believes very strongly in belief. Things can be true, she now thinks, even if one does not believe in them, and conversely. Belief may be no more, in the end, than a source of energy, like a battery which one clips into an idea to make it run. As happens when one writes: believing whatever has to be believed to get the job done.

These words bring to mind a certain firmly held conviction of Milan Kundera's, a writer with far less qualms than Coetzee about defining with certainty the place of the novelist in contemporary society. The novelist's special job, says Kundera, is to express the human condition in all its ambiguities and complexities, ambiguities and complexities that have no patience for the simplistic positioning of politics, of regionalism, of religious or moral certitude.

Kundera, of course, writes in a tone of eloquent, even outraged, conviction. He believes, at least, what he is saying, without falling into the dominant categories of belief systems. The OED defines conviction, outside of its highly relevant legal context, as "the mental state or condition of being convinced; strong belief on the ground of satisfactory reasons or evidence; settled persuasion." Sharing the sense of habit - here "settled" - imbued in the idea of belief, "conviction" is belief's secular counterpart, implying rationalism and cerebral accountability to what nevertheless becomes accepted as a norm, with the same risks of complacency and cliché embodied in unquestioned faith. If this is so, how do the concepts of belief and of conviction, so often used synonymously, relate to each other? Can one have strong convictions, for example, against firmly held but unaccountable beliefs or systems of beliefs? Absolutely - we need only look, for example, to the whole Dawkins-Hitchens polemic of recent months to observe this in action. Or to Kundera, for that matter. The most thrilling writing - and cheaply thrilling, for the most part - is composed in the height of conviction. The convicted writer, using all the tools of the ancient art of rhetoric, brings his readers around to his point of view. He leaves no room for doubt. The rational mind wins over the fickle heart, the ineffable intuition.

Elizabeth Costello endlessly complicates this rather untenable association between belief and conviction. What Costello believes - and no doubt, in some instances, Coetzee himself - is in many cases intuitive, un-reasonable, indefensible. Moreover, they are unpopular: Costello stands at public podiums to denounce the slaughter of animals in one case ("The Lives of Animals"), to weakly advocate for the self-censorship of the novelist in another ("The Problem of Evil"). Yet to Costello, an aging woman both more and less certain of her own life-philosophies than ever before, her beliefs are deeply felt and unshakable. How can one argue, for instance, with a highly respected and famed public figure who has "felt the brush of [the devil's] leathery wing, as sure as soap," in a murderous scene constructed in the pages of another man's novel? How can one argue with this surety, especially when Costello herself would be the first to acknowledge her own dubitable beliefs as "old-fashioned"?

Costello has belief without conviction, and is therefore at a hopeless loss when attempting to make her views public. Her necessary solution is to fake it, to fake conviction, to put all of her own self-doubts out of her mind:

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. Paul West has written an obscene book, he has shown what ought not to be shown. That must be the thread of her talk when she faces the crowd, that she must not let go of.

We can only get anywhere as rhetoricians if we appear, at least, fully convinced of what it is we are saying. The danger, of course, is that this appearance of conviction may come to replace living and owned belief on the part of the speaker herself. To speak publicly, Costello must speak, essentially, inauthentically; she must take on a voice not her own - the voice of conviction - in order to be heard and recognized. Her voice become dissociated from what she believes, from what it really is that she is trying to get across, so that in words, even one thing she is certain of - "sure as soap" - becomes lost to her.

Somewhat ironically, what Costello is certain of in "The Problem of Evil" is that there are some things that should not be said, things that should never be written. An attempt to present a rational defense for censorship, or at least self-censorship, is destined to be victim to shaky logic and unpopularity in the context in which Costello is speaking, a public university lecture on human values. Rejecting the dominance of reason, Costello seeks to reconcile the break between belief and conviction, arguing for embodied experience of the true. Hers is essentially a spiritual, if not religious, argument: the holes in her beliefs that cannot be filled with reason are felt, brought alive by the belief of being.

And Costello's embodied beliefs, it might appear, stand contrary to Coetzee's own writing project, which - other than creating an alter ego to complicate his own project - is very much concerned with the exploration of "evil." The obscenity Costello attributes to Paul West's violent imaginings begs to be applied to scenes from Dusklands, from In the Heart of the Country, from Waiting for the Barbarians, and from Disgrace. In short, to scenes from most of Coetzee's novels. In his creation of Costello, Coetzee seems to be engaged at once in a self-chastising and in an ironic chuckle. Assuming, of course, that Coetzee is at one with himself. That any of us is at one with ourselves.

What the Costello character allows Coetzee to do is belief both that violence in art can be pornographic or obscene, and that an exploration of historical atrocity and the human urge to harm is deeply necessary. These two positions need not contradict; they are allowed to be terms in different debates, belong to different parts of ourselves. The Costello character also allows Coetzee - or the parts of Coetzee involved in character creation - to change. Students of literature and philosophy often fall prey to earnest discussion, confusion, or even outrage when a thinker refuses to be consistent over the course of his career, when the "later" stands against the "early" man (rarely "work," often "man," speaking to the romantic desire to get to the man through his words, a desire that believes deeply in the firmness of belief). Much of Costello's belief about the danger of representing evil springs from her aging body, her desire for peace and her growing horror at the obscene sweep of history. Her mind willing less and less to yield. Her own self-consciousness of these changes occurring within her.

Leave the wars to the young, we might see Coetzee as saying. Nothing contradictory there. What Costello allows us, old or young, to see is two highly loaded positions at once, to believe them both and accept that we are always divided from ourselves, in any given moment and across time and age. That held in every belief is not only its counter-belief but a range of possibilities. That too much conviction is a self-denial. That we have a duty to be unsure.