A visit to Elizabeth Costello, the character honored by Rita Segato in the speech that opened the fair

Rita Segato On Thursday 25, her inaugural address at the 45th International Book Fair in Buenos Aires began with: "Elizabeth Costello always saves me when I see myself in a situation like this". And it was possible to start there to understand why his speech was entitled "The virtues of disobedience" and why they were going to be eight years old – to call them in the Costello way – "lessons". Shortly after, Segato explained that it was less the themes of Elizabeth Costello in the book that bears her name and her appearances in Animal life and Slow man -All books signed by J.M.Coetzee- which "lowers a saint, as it is said in the language of candomblé" but "… the fact that he spoke of something for which he had not been (invited) to speak, that is to say, his indiscipline, his indomitable finesse, his distraction from the academic protocol which, apparently, would have taken her to the podium she occupies today ". And that was the subject of Segato's speech at the fair. It was a speech that, although framed in the book world, spoke of other topics for which she was clearly not invited to speak. Segato won this podium and used it for unpleasant purposes, in order to divert the attention of the subjects that he is interested in proposing and discussing. Segato is also Costello.

Rita Segato will be 68 next August. She is two years older than the protagonist of the novel, for calling the unclbadifiable book of Coetzee one way or another. Like Elizabeth Costello, Rita Segato is an insurgent totally free in her speech, without lukewarmness or withdrawal, but with contradictions and changes of opinion. Rita Segato puts it this way in the first disobedience of her speech: "Our logic is tragic, in that it can coexist with incoherence, with incompatible truths, with the equation a and not-a, opposite. and true at the same time, and at the same time, and therefore always, always, endowed with the vital force of disobedience, with a paradoxical logic aimed at preserving life, guaranteeing continuity and greater well-being to more people, to maintain the open horizon of history without pre-fixed, so that time goes on. "And yet Costello enters the scene. It is because Coetzee's character is invariably linked to changes of opinion, to incoherence in a framework that demands a coherence that she finds paradoxical and that leaves her perplexed. Costello is apart from the security that they require and, although his ability to move and challenge his audience is also known, and I dare say, as Segato- tears itself in the face of the impossibility of convince, bring water to your sources.

Like Segato's speech, Coetzee's book, Elizabeth Costello It is divided into "eight lessons", with a postscript. These lessons are not all originals of this book but have already been published in Animal life or were readings that Coetzee himself read in various lectures, universities and lectures, always using the voice of Elizabeth Costello, to the perplexity of the participants. And it's that the Costello character has been repeated many times, it works like an alter ego of Coetzee himself that every time you have to talk about yourself, your ideas, and your beliefs, you choose to avoid the first person. He clearly explained his fictional biography in three books Childhood, youth and Summer in which he speaks of himself in the present, in the third person, or in the voices of others who speak of him and him. In this case, choose to speak through the voice of an academic and a writer.

Elizabeth Costello – the character – is Australian (country in which Coetzee resides since the end of apartheid in South Africa, his country of birth). In the eight lessons and postscript of the book, Costello will address topics very close to Coetzee, namely: the novel in Africa, the abuse of animals, the idea of ​​evil, censorship, a literary corpus , cultural colonizations … We know his life and his thought of his son, John (name of Coetzee), physicist who loves his mother but does not really know what to do with his ideas and all that causes each time 39, he makes a public intervention.

John is presented as the duty to be, the politically correct, the attachment to the institutions. Be that as it may, he hesitates before many of his mother's proposals, without compromise but with common sense. He is not the only character who can make solid arguments against Costello's arguments. It is precisely the complexity of a hard-hitting text, which requires several readings and leaves a lot of material to cut. And from there comes, I dare say, Segato's decision to refer to this book as the kickoff of his speech.

For example, in a lecture titled "Philosophers and Animals", will be inspired by Kafka's "Report for an Academy", an essay in which a monkey tells in the first person and in front of an audience. On the academic level, the vicissitudes and achievements of a very good education and the resulting promotion imply an unusual proximity to men and the ensuing alienation. Costello stops in this text to denounce in a thorough and poignant manner the abuse of animals (what Coetzee had already mentioned in his previous novel, Disgrace, in which the main character says that, to redeem himself, he must suffer in solitude as a dog). Costello carries this complaint already provided in Disgrace to the point of comparing this abuse with the Nazi extermination camps.

The radical nature of their expressions arouses in listeners the most varied reactions: not to understand at all the parallel that Costello makes between man and the animal, to the exasperation of bringing the Nazi camps to the center of the discussion. One of the participants in this presentation, a poet by the name of Abraham Stern, is absent from the homage paid to the dinner in tribute to the writer in protest and wrote a strong note. "If the Jews were treated like cattle, it does not follow that the animals are treated like Jews, the investment insults the memory of the dead and the horrors of the camps are marketed cheaply." Thus, with voices within the academy or the book world, Coetzee manages to add even more complexity to Costello's speech. His opinions appear, but he also saves the silenced opinions of those to whom his speech exasperates.

One of Costello's lectures is particularly relevant to the speech of Rita Segato. Invited to give a lecture on the contemporary novel aboard a cruise ship traveling from New Zealand to South Africa, Elizabeth is on board with a former lover, the African writer. Emmanuel Erguduwho will give a lecture on African literature. They both have a very interesting discussion during which Costello questions Emmanuel's speech. The African author tries to account for the difficulty of African writers in finding readers in the Western world. On the contrary, Costello thinks that writers should try to connect to the African public because each author must write for the audience to which he belongs.

This statement goes hand in hand with the creation of the Coetzee Chair at UNSAM. For several years, South African and Australian writers traveled to Argentina to exchange their experiences with local writers. I think in any case that the reverse invitation was not performed with the same intensity. Maybe there was a lack of time or budget. In addition, this lesson goes hand in hand with the Segato lecture, which, during his second disobedience (and in a more poetic way during the fourth disobedience as well), raises the anger that had aroused him in the speech of his father. acceptance of the Nobel Boy of Garcia. Márquez called "The Loneliness of Latin America", in which Segato reads a subtext that says that Latin America can only exist if it is monitored by Europe.

Segato concludes: "… it is Europe that is alone, it looks in the narcissistic mirror of its museums, but it lacks the real mirror, one that can exert resistance and show flaws, because these objects can not make Europe look like this powerful feminine utensil that is the "mirror, mirror" of the Bad Queen of stories: it does not see its defect in the reflection that could offer the eyes of the others, because to the other he only has preciously preserved in the window of his colonial power "

Finally, Costello's themes are always unexpected and conflicting and invite discussion and discomfort of established patterns. They force us to leave, so to speak, our comfort zone but in the manner of Segato, which challenges us not to copy, to create our own way of being in the world, not to need the look of the North, but also of the plurality, the link that makes us unique and different: "Our feminism belongs to a world in which even in the whitened metropolis, the link is vital and can and must be preserved by the refuge it offers us and the happiness it gives us, a world in which fragments of community have been preserved. I am convinced that we should not delegate the arbitration of our erotic life to a third party. I still believe that the management of desire must be possible in our face-to-face, hand-to-hand world, and that we must fight for it, creating the conditions for that to be possible. For this, we must work hard on power relations in the field of work and studies, in which the hierarchy is decisive and where patriarchy manifests itself more viciously, and regenerate communal structures capable of monitoring and taking into account charge the way people lead lives. The rest serves to dismantle the patriarchal political order and usher in a new era of history. We are clearly going there, "he read.

Elizabeth Costello It's an unclbadifiable book, one of the most intricate of Coetzee's work. Complex in many ways. It can not be cataloged, it does not have a clear genre, it does not maintain the narrative voices expected, it does not support the argumentative lines but, on the contrary, it contradicts itself and is completed in the voices that react to the more and more incisive thoughts of his protagonist. It's a book written by a man who has chosen to talk about what he believes doing through the voice of a woman. And Rita Segato chooses Elizabeth Costello – who is Coetzee – and speaks of connection and plurality. And it comes out victorious.