‘That word cannot be found in the classics, whether you understand the classics to mean Homer and Sophocles or whether you understand them to mean Homer and Shakespeare and Dostoevsky. In a happier age than our own it was possible for people to bluff themselves into believing that the classics of antiquity offered a teaching and a way of life. In our own times we have settled, rather desperately, for the claim that the study of the classics in itself might offer a way of life, or if not a way of life then at least a way of earning a living which, if it cannot be proved to do any positive good, at least is on no side claimed to do any harm.
‘But the impulse behind the first generation of textual scholars cannot be diverted so easily from its proper goal. I am a daughter of the Catholic Church, not of the Reformed Church, but I applaud Martin Luther when he turns his back on Desiderius Erasmus, judging that his colleague, despite his immense gifts, has been seduced into branches of study that do not, by the standards of the ultimate, matter. The studia humanitatis have taken a long time to die, but now, at the end of the second millennium of our era, they are truly on their deathbed. All the more bitter should be that death, I would say, since it has been brought about by the monster enthroned by those very studies as first and animating principle of the universe: the monster of reason, mechanical reason. But that is another story for another day.’
III
That is the end of it, the end of Blanche’s oration, which is received less with applause than with what sounds, from the front row of seats, like a murmur of general puzzlement. The business of the day is resumed: one by one the new graduates are called up to receive their scrolls; and the ceremony closes with a formal procession of which Blanche, in her red robes, is part. Then she, Elizabeth, is free for a while to wander among the milling guests, listening in on their chatter.
That chatter turns out to be mainly about the inordinate length of the ceremony. It is only in the foyer that she hears specific mention of Blanche’s address. A tall man with an ermine-trimmed gown over his arm is talking heatedly to a woman in black. ‘Who does she think she is,’ he is saying, ‘using the occasion to lecture us! A missionary from the sticks in Zululand – what does she know about the humanities? And this hard Catholic line – what has happened to ecumenicism?’
She is a guest – a guest of the university, a guest of her sister’s, a guest in the country too. If these people want to take umbrage, that is their right. It is not for her to get involved. Let Blanche fight her own battles.
But not getting involved turns out to be less easy than that. A formal luncheon has been scheduled, and she has been invited. When she takes her seat, she finds herself next to the same tall man, who has in the meantime got rid of his medieval costume. She has no appetite, there is a knot of nausea in her stomach, she would prefer to be back in her hotel room having a lie-down, but she makes an effort. ‘Let me introduce myself,’ she says. ‘I am Elizabeth Costello. Sister Bridget is my sister. Sister by blood, I mean.’
Elizabeth Costello. She can see that the name means nothing to him. His own name is on the place card before him: Professor Peter Godwin.
‘I presume you teach here,’ she goes on, making conversation. ‘What do you teach?’
‘I teach literature, English literature.’
‘It must have cut close to the bone, what my sister was saying. Well, don’t mind her. She is a bit of a battleaxe, that’s all. She likes a good fight.’
Blanche, Sister Bridget, the battleaxe, is sitting at the other end of the table, wrapped up in a conversation of her own. She cannot hear them.
‘This is a secular age,’ replies Godwin. ‘You cannot turn back the clock. You cannot condemn an institution for moving with the times.’
‘By an institution you mean the university?’
‘Yes, universities, but specifically faculties of humanities, which remain the core of any university.’
The humanities the core of the university. She may be an outsider, but if she were asked to name the core of the university today, its core discipline, she would say it was moneymaking. That is how it looks from Melbourne, Victoria; and she would not be surprised if the same were the case in Johannesburg, South Africa.
‘But was that really what my sister was saying: that you should turn back the clock? Wasn’t she saying something more interesting, more challenging – that there has been something misconceived in the study of the humanities from the start? Something wrong with placing hopes and expectations on the humanities that they could never fulfil? I do not necessarily agree with her; but that was what I understood her to be arguing.’
‘The proper study of mankind is man,’ says Professor Godwin. ‘And the nature of mankind is a fallen nature. Even your sister would agree with that. But that should not prevent us from trying – trying to improve. Your sister wants us to give up on man and go back to God. That is what I mean when I refer to turning back the clock. She wants to go back to before the Renaissance, before the humanist movement she spoke about, before even the relative enlightenment of the twelfth century. She wants us to plunge back into the Christian fatalism of what I would call the Low Middle Ages.’
‘I would hesitate to say, knowing my sister, that there is anything fatalist about her. But you should speak to her yourself, put your point.’
Professor Godwin addresses himself to his salad. There is a silence. From across the table the woman in black, whom she takes to be Godwin’s wife, gives her a smile. ‘Did I hear you say your name is Elizabeth Costello?’ she says. ‘Not the writer Elizabeth Costello?’
‘Yes, that is what I do for a living. I write.’
‘And you are Sister Bridget’s sister.’
‘I am. But Sister Bridget has many sisters. I am merely a sister in blood. The others are truer sisters, sisters in spirit.’
She intends the remark lightly, but it seems to fluster Mrs Godwin. Maybe that is the reason why Blanche raises people’s hackles here: she uses words like spirit and God inappropriately, in places where they do not belong. Well, she is not a believer, but in this case she thinks she will stand with Blanche.
Mrs Godwin is speaking to her husband, flashing him looks. ‘Elizabeth Costello the writer, dear,’ she is saying.
‘Oh yes,’ says Professor Godwin; but clearly the name rings no bell.
‘My husband is in the eighteenth century,’ says Mrs Godwin.
‘Ah yes. A good place to be. The Age of Reason.’
‘I do not believe we see the period in quite so uncomplicated a way nowadays,’ says Professor Godwin. He seems to be about to say more, but then does not.
Conversation with the Godwins is clearly flagging. She turns to the person on her right, but he is deeply engaged elsewhere.
‘When I was a student,’ she says, turning back to the Godwins, ‘which would have been around 1950, we read a lot of D. H. Lawrence. Of course we read the classics too, but that was not where our real energy went. D. H. Lawrence, T. S. Eliot – those were the writers we pored over. Perhaps Blake in the eighteenth century. Perhaps Shakespeare, because as we all know Shakespeare transcends his time. Lawrence gripped us because he promised a form of salvation. If we worshipped the dark gods, he told us, and carried out their observances, we would be saved. We believed him. We went out and worshipped the dark gods as best we were able, from the hints that Mr Lawrence let drop. Well, our worship did not save us. A false prophet, I would call him now, in retrospect.
‘What I mean to say is that in our truest reading, as students, we searched the page for guidance, guidance in perplexity. We found it in Lawrence, or we found it in Eliot, the early Eliot: a different kind of guidance, perhaps, but guidance nevertheless in how to live our lives. The rest of our reading, by comparison, was just a matter of mugging things up so that we could pass exams.
‘If the humanities want to survive, surely it is those energies and that craving for guidance t
hat they must respond to: a craving that is, in the end, a quest for salvation.’
She has spoken a great deal, more than she meant to. In fact, in the silence that now falls, she sees that others have been listening in. Even her sister is turned towards her.
‘We did not realize,’ says the Dean loudly from the head of the table, ‘when Sister Bridget asked us to invite you to this happy event, that it was the Elizabeth Costello we would have in our midst. Welcome. We are delighted to have you.’
‘Thank you,’ she says.
‘I could not help catching some of what you were saying,’ the Dean continues. ‘Do you then agree with your sister that the outlook for the humanities is dark?’
She must be careful how she treads. ‘I was merely saying,’ she says, ‘that our readers – our young readers in particular – come to us with a certain hunger, and if we cannot or will not satisfy their hunger then we must not be surprised if they turn away from us. But my sister and I are in different lines of business. She has told you what she thinks. For my own part, I would say that it is enough for books to teach us about ourselves. Any reader ought to be content with that. Or almost any reader.’
They are watching her sister to see how she reacts. Teaching us about ourselves: what else is that but studium humanitatis?
‘Is this just a conversation over luncheon,’ says Sister Bridget, ‘or are we being serious?’
‘We are being serious,’ says the Dean. ‘We are serious.’
Perhaps she should revise her opinion of him. Perhaps not just another academic bureaucrat going through his hostly motions, but a soul with the hungers of a soul. Grant that possibility. In fact, perhaps that is what all of them are around this table, in their deepest being: hungering souls. She should not rush to judgement. If nothing else, these people are not stupid. And they must by now have realized that in Sister Bridget, whether they like her or not, they have someone out of the ordinary.
‘I do not need to consult novels,’ says her sister, ‘to know what pettiness, what baseness, what cruelty human beings are capable of. That is where we start, all of us. We are fallen creatures. If the study of mankind amounts to no more than picturing to us our darker potential, I have better things to spend my time on. If on the other hand the study of mankind is to be a study in what reborn man can be, that is a different story. However, you have had enough lecturing for one day.’
‘But,’ says the young man seated next to Mrs Godwin, ‘surely that is precisely what humanism stood for, and the Renaissance too: for humankind as humankind is capable of being. For the ascent of man. The humanists were not crypto-atheists. They were not even Lutherans in disguise. They were Catholic Christians like yourself, Sister. Think of Lorenzo Valla. Valla had nothing against the Church, he just happened to know Greek better than Jerome did, and pointed out some of the mistakes Jerome made in translating the New Testament. If the Church had accepted the principle that Jerome’s Vulgate was a human production, and therefore capable of being improved, rather than being the word of God itself, perhaps the whole history of the West would have been different.’
Blanche is silent. The speaker presses on.
‘If the Church as a whole had been able to acknowledge that its teachings and its whole system of beliefs were based on texts, and that those texts were susceptible on the one hand to scribal corruption and so forth, on the other to flaws of translation, because translation is always an imperfect process, and if the Church had also been able to concede that the interpretation of texts is a complex matter, vastly complex, instead of claiming for itself a monopoly of interpretation, then we would not be having this argument today.’
‘But,’ says the Dean, ‘how have we come to know how vastly difficult the business of interpretation can be except by experiencing certain lessons of history, lessons that the Church of the fifteenth century could hardly have foreseen?’
‘Such as?’
‘Such as contact with hundreds of other cultures, each with its own language and history and mythology and unique way of seeing the world.’
‘Then my point would be,’ says the young man, ‘that it is the humanities and the humanities alone, and the training that the humanities provide, that will allow us to steer our way through this new multicultural world, and precisely, precisely’ – he almost hammers the table, so excited has he grown – ‘because the humanities are about reading and interpretation. The humanities begin, as our lecturer said, in textual scholarship, and develop as a body of disciplines devoted to interpretation.’
‘In fact, the human sciences,’ says the Dean.
The young man pulls a face. ‘That is a red herring, Mr Dean. If you don’t mind, I will remain with either studia or disciplines.’
So young, she thinks, and so sure of himself. He will remain with studia.
‘What about Winckelmann?’ says her sister.
Winckelmann? The young man looks back at her uncomprehendingly.
‘Would Winckelmann have recognized himself in the picture you paint of the humanist as a technician of textual interpretation?’
‘I don’t know. Winckelmann was a great scholar. Perhaps he would have.’
‘Or Schelling,’ pursues her sister. ‘Or any of those who believed, more or less openly, that Greece provided a better civilizational ideal than Judaeo-Christianity. Or, for that matter, those who believed that mankind had lost its way and should go back to its primitive roots and make a fresh start. In other words, the anthropologists. Lorenzo Valla – since you mention Lorenzo Valla – was an anthropologist. His starting point was human society. You say the first humanists were not crypto-atheists. No, they were not. But they were crypto-relativists. Jesus, in their eyes, was embedded in his own world, or as we would call it today his own culture. It was their task as scholars to understand that world and interpret it to their times. Just as it would in due course become their task to interpret the world of Homer. And so on down to Winckelmann.’
She terminates abruptly, glances at the Dean. Has he perhaps given her some signal? Has he, unbelievably, beneath the table, tapped Sister Bridget on the knee?
‘Yes,’ says the Dean, ‘fascinating. We should have brought you down for a whole lecture series, Sister. But unfortunately, some of us have engagements. Perhaps at some time in the future . . . ’ He leaves the possibility hanging in the air; graciously Sister Bridget inclines her head.
IV
They are back at the hotel. She is tired, she must take something for her continuing nausea, she must lie down. But the question still nags at her: why this hostility on Blanche’s part towards the humanities? I do not need to consult novels, said Blanche. Is the hostility, in some tangled way, aimed at her? Though she has religiously sent Blanche her books as they have come off the press, she can see no sign that Blanche has read any of them. Has she been summoned to Africa as a representative of the humanities, or of the novel, or of both, to be taught a last lesson before they both descend into the grave? Is that really how Blanche sees her? The truth – and she ought to impress this on Blanche – is that she has never been an aficionado of the humanities. Something too complacently masculine about the whole enterprise, too self-regarding. She must set Blanche straight.
‘Winckelmann,’ she says to Blanche. ‘What did you mean by bringing up Winckelmann?’
‘I wanted to remind them of what the study of the classics would lead to. To Hellenism as an alternative religion. An alternative to Christianity.’
‘That is what I thought. As an alternative for a few aesthetes, a few highly educated products of the European educational system. But surely not as a popular alternative.’
‘You miss my point, Elizabeth. Hellenism was an alternative. Poor as it may have been, Hellas was the one alternative to the Christian vision that humanism was able to offer. To Greek society – an utterly idealized picture of Greek society, but how were ordinary folk t
o know that? – they could point and say, Behold, that is how we should live – not in the hereafter but in the here and now.’
Hellas: half-naked men, their breasts gleaming with olive oil, sitting on the temple steps discoursing about the good and the true, while in the background lithe-limbed boys wrestle and a herd of goats contentedly grazes. Free minds in free bodies. More than an idealized picture: a dream, a delusion. But how else are we to live but by dreams?
‘I do not disagree,’ she says. ‘But who believes in Hellenism any more? Who even remembers the word?’
‘Still you miss the point. Hellenism was the sole vision of the good life that humanism was able to put forward. When Hellenism failed – which was inevitable, since it had nothing whatever to do with the lives of real people – humanism went bankrupt. That man at lunch was arguing for the humanities as a set of techniques, the human sciences. Dry as dust. What young man or woman with blood in their veins would want to spend their life scratching around in the archives or doing explications de texte without end?’
‘But Hellenism was surely just a phase in the history of the humanities. Larger, more inclusive visions of what human life can be have emerged since then. The classless society, for instance. Or a world from which poverty, disease, illiteracy, racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, and the rest of the bad litany have been exorcised. I am not putting in a plea for either of these visions. I am just pointing out that people cannot live without hope, or perhaps without illusions. If you turned to any of those people we had lunch with and asked them, as humanists or at least as card-carrying practitioners of the humanities, to state the goal of all their efforts, surely they would reply that, however indirectly, they strive to improve the lot of mankind.’
‘Yes. And therein they reveal themselves as true followers of their humanist forebears. Who offered a secular vision of salvation. Rebirth without the intervention of Christ. By the workings of man alone. Renaissance. On the example of the Greeks. Or on the example of the American Indians. Or on the example of the Zulus. Well, it cannot be done.’