Is This the Gate?: J. M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello and Its Operatic Adaptation

Abstract

Premiered at the 2024 Adelaide Festival, Is This the Gate? is an opera excerpt composed by Nicholas Lens and set to a libretto written by J. M. Coetzee. It is adapted from the last section of Coetzee’s novel Elizabeth Costello (2003), revolving around the eponymous character’s trial before the gate in the afterworld. This article explores the literary, musical and dramaturgical elements of Is This the Gate? and contends that the adaptation, despite its brevity and incompleteness, indexes and reworks some of the most important intertexts, localities and motifs that connect Coetzee’s early and late works. Allusions to Kafka and Dante frame the scenario for Costello in limbo—a state mirroring a writer’s late-in-life predicament—while references to Australia’s weather and fauna reflect Coetzee’s relationship to his South African roots and adopted home. Further, Costello’s conviction that she is “a secretary of the invisible” holds clues to Coetzee’s deployment of voices and fictional personae since his debut, Dusklands (1974). The last few acts of the opera excerpt evoke themes of desire and mortality that chime with Coetzee’s other Costello narratives, including his latest collection, The Pole and Other Stories (2023). The adaptation ends with Costello’s declaration of her subjectivity, which suggests a writer’s yearning and resolution to go beyond the threshold of life and death.

1. Introduction: Costello in Limbo

“Elizabeth Costello, author deceased, deceased…”

Is this the gate?

Can I pass through?

—Lens and Coetzee (2024), Is This the Gate? Act 1

On 8 March 2024, Is This the Gate?, an opera excerpt adapted from J. M. Coetzee’s novel Elizabeth Costello: Eight Lessons (2003), was premiered at Elder Hall during the Adelaide Festival in South Australia. With a libretto written by Coetzee, this is Belgian composer Nicholas Lens’s second opera in collaboration with the novelist; the first one, Slow Man, adapted from Coetzee’s 2005 novel, was first performed in Poznań, Poland, in 2012. Lens and Coetzee’s third opera, as indicated in the program note for the 2024 premiere, will be an adaptation of The Master of Petersburg (1994).

As a preview of the full-fledged opera entitled Costello in Limbo (Elizabeth Costello at the Gate), this one-hour-long excerpt is adapted from the eighth lesson, “At the Gate”, in Coetzee’s original novel. It delineates the eponymous character’s trial before a board of judges who demands a statement of belief from the recently deceased author. Performed by Australian soprano Judith Dodsworth, Costello in this condensed production “eagerly steals snippets of text from other soloists (out of the full opera)”—including the Gatekeeper, the Kapo, and three Judges—“and adopts them to make her point”, whereby “she confronts herself in an imagined duality with her own intellectual rebelling nature” (Lens and Coetzee 2024, program note).

Elizabeth Costello, the fictional Australian writer recurring in Coetzee’s oeuvre, plays a pivotal role in Lens’s first two adaptations of Coetzee’s novels. In the Slow Man opera, she is a mysterious and somewhat manipulative visitor—like a puppeteer (Kelly 2020, p. 199)—who arranges an intimate meeting between Paul Rayment, a man on the cusp of old age with an amputated leg, and the blind Marianna. But in the more recent production, a monodrama, Costello herself comes under scrutiny, unapologetically voicing her doubts and convictions before the gate in the afterworld.

At the premiere, Dodsworth (voice) stood alone on stage, accompanied by a chamber ensemble (reduced from the symphonic orchestra intended for the full-fledged opera) comprised of Elizabeth Layton (violin), Helen Ayres (violin), Stephen King (viola), Thomas Marlin (cello), Matthew Kneale (bassoon), and Michael Ierace (piano). The soloist’s incandescent purplish-blue jacket, for anyone au fait with Coetzee’s novel proper, harks back to Costello’s “blue cotton frock” as she “makes her way to the gate where a uniformed man stands drowsily on guard” (Coetzee 2003, p. 193). Dramaturgy (Rachel M. Cholz) is detailed in the program note, often giving stage directions in figurative language, which effectively dramatizes the performance when acted out. After a brief and disquieting prologue to the first act, the first violinist gravely announces: “Elizabeth Costello, author deceased, deceased…”. The introductory notes are sharp and dissonant—before the soprano begins her soliloquy, the musicians collectively create a crescendo of wailing vocals, while producing metallic and scooped sounds on their instruments, “clownishly” mimicking the effect of an electric guitar’s wah pedal (“Un po’ clownesco con effetto wah wah”, Lens and Coetzee 2024, Act 1). This cacophonous opening sets the tone for the entire performance—it does not seek to please, but to provoke difficult thoughts and emotions.

Among several of Coetzee’s novels adapted for film and opera, as reviewed by Michelle Kelly (2020, pp. 198–203) and Ed Charlton (2023, pp. 415–21), Lens’s operatic collaborations with Coetzee deserve special attention. They involve Coetzee’s direct artistic input, both setting his libretti to a form “blend[ing] music and song as well as dramatic action”, which requires greater “technical agility” than other performing arts (Charlton 2023, p. 420). “Adaptations might not liberate Coetzee’s characters from the languages in which they frequently feel imprisoned”, Kelly suggests, “but the best may at least offer them the grammars of new media in which to express themselves” (Kelly 2020, p. 203). A few years before the production of Is This the Gate?, Kelly spoke of the Slow Man opera as Coetzee’s “most successful [adapted work] and the result of a fruitful and ongoing collaboration with Lens” (Kelly 2020, p. 200). While the full-fledged Elizabeth Costello opera is yet to be performed, Is This the Gate? turns out to be a promising start. It shows how this particular art form, with its musicality and theatricality, gives new expression to the writer figure’s late-in-life ethos and pathos. Given that some fundamental ideas of Coetzee’s 2003 novel and other Costello narratives—mortality, animal ethics, desire, and intellectual self-reflexivity—are condensed into a libretto less than two pages long, nearly every unit of the fragmentized lyrics of Is This the Gate? has the potential to be restored as an index to the intertexts, localities and motifs that Coetzee has been engaging with from his debut to his late works.

2. “Straight Out of Kafka”: Intertexts and Counterpoints

Straight out of Kafka!

Straight out of Kafka!

Not the light that Dante saw in paradise.

—Lens and Coetzee (2024), Is This the Gate? Prologue and Act 10

Among Coetzee’s diverse intertextual influences, Franz Kafka and Dante Alighieri stand out as two of his most pivotal inspirations that shape the afterworld setting of Is This the Gate?. In the Prologue to the opera excerpt, accompanying the bowed instruments’ legato, the piano gives an ominous note at the end of each phrase, thus ushering in the soprano’s three lines cited above. The words, sung in a “cautious, ceremonial and bizarre” manner (“prudente, cerimoniale e bizzarro”, Lens and Coetzee 2024, Prologue), are reiterated in this part and then reappear in Act 10, creating an uncanny Kafkaesque ambience both at the outset and in closing moments. While the opening ostensibly acknowledges its allegiance to Kafka and denies “the light that Dante saw in paradise” in Costello’s vision, the juxtaposition of Kafka and Dante encapsulates the rich intertexts of dual nature woven into the opera excerpt.

Before probing into the allusions to Kafka, it should be noted that the intended title for the full-fledged opera—“Costello in Limbo”—is an implicit reference to Dante’s The Divine Comedy. In today’s common usage, “in limbo” means being in an indeterminate state, whereas in the religious sense, it also refers to the state of being in “[a] region supposed to exist on the border of Hell as the abode of the just who died before Christ’s coming, and of unbaptized infants” (Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “limbo (n.1), sense 1.a” 2024). In Dante’s Inferno, the religious connotation of limbo is vividly reflected in Circle One (depicted in Canto 4)—“the edge/of the abyss, that cavern of grief and pain”—where “[n]one was baptized./None passed the gate, in your belief, to faith” (Alighieri [c. 1321] 2012, pp. 16–17). According to Elizabeth Costello, the eponymous character is a non-believer, having “less and less idea what it could mean to believe in God” (Coetzee 2003, p. 167). Her prolonged trial before the gate, therefore, mirrors a pagan’s state of being detained in limbo as described in Dante’s verses.

In the original novel, Costello thinks of Dante while contemplating what lies beyond the gate. “There is light, certainly”, she muses, “but it is not the light that Dante saw in Paradise, it is not even in the same league” (Coetzee 2003, p. 209). Nonetheless, Costello resorts to Dante to frame her problematics as a writer: “Is it someone’s idea of what hell will be like for a writer, or at least purgatory: a purgatory of clichés?” (Coetzee 2003, p. 206).1 Divided into thirteen brief acts in the opera excerpt, Costello’s arduous spiritual quest charted in the novel appears fragmentized and episodic. And yet the analogy between Costello’s trial and the Dantean journey from Inferno, through Purgatorio, to Paradiso is unmistakably retained in the adaptation.

Instead of evoking the Catholic imaginary, the opera excerpt focuses on Costello’s soul-searching and yearning for transcendence in her afterlife. Juxtaposed with Kafka, the first reference to Dante in the Prologue lays bare the literariness rather than religiosity of Costello’s inner world. Even as identical lyrics (“Straight out of Kafka!/Straight out of Kafka!/Not the light that Dante saw in paradise”) recur in Act 10, the Prologue foreshadows Costello’s difficult existential question—“Is this the gate?”—the first line sung out in Act 1, whereas the later act segues into a sombre funeral march in which the heroine confronts Dante’s legacy more directly and authoritatively. Either in comparison with Kafka or singled out as “a deception”, “the light that Dante saw in paradise” is invoked as a negation (Lens and Coetzee 2024, Act 11), insinuating what Costello’s vision is not.

Kafka’s influence, by contrast, features more prominently in the opera. The titles and settings of both Is This the Gate? and Elizabeth Costello’s eighth lesson, “At the Gate”, are constructed in such a way that one is constantly reminded of Kafka’s famous parable, “Before the Law” (Kafka [1916] 1971).2 In the novel, having failed to pass the gate the first time, Costello lies on a bunk in the dormitory reserved for “long-term petitioners” (Coetzee 2003, p. 197), and starts to question the validity of “the afterlife” she assumes she has entered: “[I]f the afterlife turns out to be nothing but hocus-pocus, a simulation from beginning to end, why does the simulation fail so consistently, not just by a hair’s breadth—one could forgive it that—but by a hand’s breadth?” (Coetzee 2003, p. 209). “It is the same with the Kafka business”, Costello thinks to herself. “That wall, the gate, the sentry, are straight out of Kafka. So is the demand for a confession, so is the courtroom with the dozing bailiff and the panel of old men in their crows’ robes pretending to pay attention while she thrashes about in the toils of her own words” (Coetzee 2003, p. 209).

The pith of Costello’s reflection, however, is left out in the libretto: “Kafka, but only the superficies of Kafka; Kafka reduced and flattened to a parody” (Coetzee 2003, p. 209). It is uncertain whether this omission is a practical choice, given the time limit for an opera excerpt performed at the eventful Adelaide Festival, or a strategic simplification—especially for audience members unfamiliar with Elizabeth Costello—that serves to make this adaptation a more focused and self-contained piece of work. By omission I am not suggesting that the adaptation wants for intellectual sophistication and literariness that characterize the original text; rather, considering Coetzee’s dual role as novelist and librettist, the overt and repeated invocation of Kafka in the opera shows the deep connection between his Costello project (both literary and operatic) and Kafka’s fable.

Pursuing Jacques Derrida’s line of thought in Before the Law: The Complete Text of Préjugés (Derrida [1985] 2018), Louise Bethlehem argues that the title “At the Gate” in Elizabeth Costello “constitutes a form of fictive diversion: the distraction—or entertainment—of intertextuality” in itself (Bethlehem 2009, p. 20). For Derrida, the first two occurrences of “Vor dem Gesetz” (“Before the Gate”) in Kafka’s German original—one as the story’s title, the other as the incipit of the narrative (“Vor dem Gesetz steht ein Türhüter” [“Before the law there stands a guardian of the gate”])—are homonymic rather than synonymic. This is because the former “names the entirety of the text”, whereas the latter “designates a situation, the location of the character situated within the geography of the narrative” (Derrida [1985] 2018, p. 37). Bethlehem goes further in saying that the formulation of “At the Gate” in Coetzee’s novel “deliberately opens its syntax to an isomorphic allusion: preposition plus article plus noun”, meanwhile unfolding “the extended performance of citation which contours the intertextual coming-into-being of Coetzee’s text as one index of the literariness of this very text” (Bethlehem 2009, pp. 20–21, italics in original).

Noticeably, in the opera excerpt, the prepositional phrase (“at the gate”) is transformed into an interrogative sentence (“Is this the gate?”). As a pronounced syntactic marker that serves as the title for both the opera excerpt and Act 1, the question form subtly contests or even subverts the explicit references to Kafka as rendered ceremonially on stage. Indeed, “why is it Kafka in particular who is trundled out for [Costello]” (Coetzee 2003, p. 209)? In an intensely self-reflexive way, the befuddled heroine thinks in the novel:

She is no devotee of Kafka. Most of the time she cannot read him without impatience. As he veers between helplessness and lust, between rage and obsequiousness, she too often finds him, or at least his K selves, simply childish. So why is the mise en scène into which she has been hurled so—she dislikes the word but there is no other—so Kafkaesque?

(Coetzee 2003, p. 209)

The metafictional texture of this passage, heightened in Costello’s self-consciousness that she is placed in a Kafkaesque (despite her aversion to this word) mise en scène, is sustained in “Lesson 8” and other Costello narratives. Critics have generally accepted that Kafka remains a prominent literary influence in Coetzee’s intellectual landscapes (Kannemeyer 2012, p. 229; Attwell 2015, p. 131; Mehigan and Moser 2018, p. 4). By the same token, if we treat Costello as Coetzee’s “uncanny performance of his fictional alter ego” (Poyner 2006, p. 2), her statement that “[s]he is no devotee of Kafka” is evidently intended as an irony and self-mockery.

As Robert B. Pippin reminds us, while Costello’s “philosophical crisis” pertains to “a distinctive aesthetic form required by the world of K”, the novel requires “some sort of bridge from the extra-fictional world to the fictional, or, […] from life to literature, or from Coetzee to Elizabeth” (Pippin 2018, p. 303). Upon the premiere of Is This the Gate?, not only was the “mise en scène” previously existing in Costello’s consciousness actualized on stage, Coetzee himself was present in a cultural scene where he came face-to-face with his literary creation. Prior to the performance, he was invited to give a short introduction to the opera along with Lens. Coetzee, in his quiet bass voice, recollected the germination of his cooperation with Lens, gave a synopsis of the opera excerpt, and dutifully thanked the organizer and presenting partner of the performance. This occasion is reminiscent of the speech-giving scenario in Elizabeth Costello’s first lesson, “Realism”. As a counterpoint to “At the Gate”, “Lesson 1” contains yet another allusion to Kafka. It is framed by Costello’s acceptance speech at a certain Altona College in Pennsylvania, where she baffles her audience by drawing on the ape in Kafka’s “A Report to an Academy”. An acclaimed writer on such an occasion, Costello claims, might be no more than “a human being presenting himself, with heavy irony, for rhetorical purposes, as an ape” (Coetzee 2003, p. 18).

The formality of Coetzee’s speech at the premiere, understandably, discourages associations with Costello’s Kafkaesque digression. Nevertheless, some snippets from the libretto and the locale of the performance invite us to examine the connections between Coetzee’s intellectuality and locality, which are crucial to his late career since his relocation to Australia.

3. “Another Hot Day”: Australian Connections

“Another Hot Day” (I/II), the two shortest acts consisting of this single line in Is This the Gate? (Act 6 and 9), imply the significance of Coetzee’s adopted home to his ongoing engagements with the Costello project. The premiere, taking place on a hot afternoon when late summer heat could still be felt in Adelaide, was a throwback to one of Coetzee’s public readings on a similar occasion 20 years before. During the 2004 Adelaide Writers’ Week, two years after he and his life partner Dorothy Driver’s immigration to Australia, Coetzee “[took] his cue from ‘At the Gate’” and gave a reading from an unpublished text in one of the “Meet the Author” sessions:

It was March, it was hot, but there were shaded walks to be had along the Torrens River, where black swans glided serenely.

What kind of place is this, I asked myself—is this paradise on earth?

What does one have to do to live here?

Does one have to die first?

(quoted in Kannemeyer 2012, p. 545, italics mine)

Adelaide Writers’ Week, as part of the Adelaide Festival, was then held biennially (and has been held annually since 2012) at the Pioneer Women’s Memorial Garden by the Torrens riverbank. Coetzee, the then-latest Nobel Laureate in Literature, came under the spotlight after a lengthy and disputed process of immigration to Australia, especially after the controversies over Disgrace (1999) spread around his home country (Kannemeyer 2012, pp. 535–43). The passage cited above, though “in characteristic tribute” to the city where he recently took up residence (Kannemeyer 2012, p. 545), might also reveal Coetzee’s resolution to withdraw from the whirling vortex of debates on his literary work and personal choice at that time.

While the serenity of Adelaide’s landscape and birdlife suggests a new “freedom to define the terms of his existence” from South Africa’s tumultuous state of affairs (Attwell 2015, p. 240), Coetzee’s invocation of local climate, flora and fauna in his public reading as well as in the Costello narratives, pertains to his essential gesture as a writer. Upon the controversial reception of Disgrace, to quote from his private correspondence with Nadine Gordimer, his fellow South African writer, Coetzee stated: “One writes, most of the time, in order to move beyond whatever it is that grips one’s imagination, to purge oneself of that particular set of obsessions” (quoted from Van der Vlies 2021, p. 70). If the titles of all eight lessons in Elizabeth Costello indicate the author’s primary concerns, then Coetzee’s allusions to Kafka’s ape and gate, his obsession with the weather and species inconsequential in most people’s eyes (such as the ram and frogs depicted in “Lesson 8”), can all be understood as Coetzee’s conscious attempt to “move beyond”, to transcend immediate realities in order to articulate some inner truth.

As a resident of Adelaide since the early 2000s and distinguished member of the University community, Coetzee is often invited to give readings and speeches or fêted as a guest of honour at local cultural events (Attwell 2015, p. 240). The Costello stories, collected in Elizabeth Costello and, more recently, in The Pole and Other Stories (2023), remain Coetzee’s most favoured contents for public readings to this day.3 The “small critical industry” and crowded literary circles developed around Costello (Coetzee 2003, pp. 1–2), of which the character is highly aware but from which she prefers to keep clear, are apparently a projection of Coetzee’s own stature and attitude. Owing to his dislike of giving lectures and need for critical distance, Coetzee tends to frame many of his own problematics—novelistic realism, animal rights, humanities in Africa, Eros and Thanatos, to name but a few—through the mouth of Costello (Attwell 2015, pp. 103–4; Van der Vlies 2023, p. 171). “When the demand on Coetzee to become the public intellectual became more and more intolerable”, David Attwell observes, “[he] turned to the resources of fiction, or switched on the power of fiction, to regain control” (Attwell 2015, p. 103). In this context, Costello functions as “a form of puppetry” that allows Coetzee to “mirror back to society its expectations of the writer as public figure, and subject them to his own inscrutable, and occasionally unscrupulous, effects” (Attwell 2015, p. 104).

Twenty years apart, the seemingly out-of-joint references to “another hot day” in Is This the Gate? at the 2024 Adelaide Festival remotely echo the opening line of Coetzee’s reading upon his initial relocation to South Australia. Disinterested as it sounds, this description of the weather is evocative for anyone who has ever braved the elements in Adelaide. On the personal level, it has the potential to activate a chain of visceral feelings associated with the artist’s geographical location and political positioning. On the structural level, the allusions to “another hot day” in both Act 6 and Act 9 serve as transitional passages between Costello’s apostrophe to the bench of judges and her dramatic monologue; both are performed at a “slow marching speed with poetic sadness” (respectively, “Piccola marcia lenta—Piccola passaggio con tristezza poetica” and “Marcia lenta con tristezza poetica”, Lens and Coetzee 2024, Act 6 and 9).

Rendered with subdued emotional intensity, these two brief acts create lingering effects of wistfulness and torpor on stage, thus drawing attention to Costello’s corporeality and her situatedness in a “real” place. In the novel, this aspect is evinced by her awareness that she is surrounded by visitors on the square and people’s chatter in the cafés, and in her recollection of the substance she consumed the day before. For Costello, the latter triggers a disagreeable thought of eating (with an allusion to Kafka’s “A Hunger Artist”), and makes “her body [feel] unpleasantly heavy, unpleasantly corporeal” (Coetzee 2003, p. 215). “Only the light soul hangs in the air”, this idea occurs to Costello as she waits anxiously at the gate, which she readily dismisses as “a quotation” (Coetzee 2003, p. 214). In the opera, the heaviness of Costello’s physical existence is contrasted with the lightness of metaphysical abstractions to which she constantly resorts. The two occurrences of “Another hot day” effectively punctuate and mediate Costello’s weighty testimonies in the lyrics, in which the soloist has to answer the judges and make her own statements alternately.

Act 5, “A Stone Does Not Believe in You”, reproduces Costello’s second hearing before her interrogators in the novel, centring around her belief in “the spirit of life” (Coetzee 2003, p. 219). Borrowing words from the board of judges absent from the opera excerpt, the protagonist repeats in earnest, with some restlessness:

You say: “A stone does not believe in you.

But you choose to tell us not about stones but about frogs,

to which you attribute a life story that is,

as you concede, highly allegorical.

These Australian frogs embody the spirit of life,

which is what you as a storyteller believe in.

Do we read you correctly?”

(Lens and Coetzee 2024, Act 5)

Immediately after these lines, the soloist takes a pause in singing and utters sardonically, in emulation of the contemptuous judges: “They say: ‘She believed in the spirit of life’” (Lens and Coetzee 2024, Act 6). The “Australian frogs”, mentioned in passing in the libretto, are depicted at length in the novel. As Costello recollects affectionately from scenes of her childhood, along with the ebb and flow of the river in rural Victoria, “tens of thousands of little frogs” croak and mate, hibernate and then leap out from the mud, die and regenerate year after year. For her, these frogs represent “the resurrection of the dead” and a life force she believes in (Coetzee 2003, pp. 216–17). “[T]he life cycle of the frog may sound allegorical”, Costello says to the judges, “but to the frogs themselves it is no allegory, it is the thing itself, the only thing” (Coetzee 2003, p. 217).

“To enter the frog’s life is like entering a fictional character’s life”, James Wood contends. “If it represents the paganisation of belief in God, it also represents the sacralisation of belief in fiction” (Wood 2003). Yet when we immerse ourselves in Elizabeth Costello and its operatic adaptation alike, we are reminded that neither the literal nor the allegorical meanings of these narratives should be taken for granted. In this act, the novel’s self-referentiality and scepticism are diluted by the music changed to a slow tempo; “highly allegorical”—the judges’ dismissal of Costello’s statement—is repeated and sung in a hyperbolic tone. It can be observed that the Costello in the opera, who reiterates her beliefs and talks back to the judges, appears more self-assured than the Costello in the novel, who questions her own belief as soon as she declares it. As described in “Lesson 8”, Costello “tries a test that seems to work when she is writing: to send out a word into the darkness and listen for what kind of sound comes back”; for her, this test is comparable to “a foundryman tapping a bell: is it cracked or healthy? The frogs: what tone do the frogs give off?” (Coetzee 2003, p. 219, italics mine). The lyrics, by contrast, replace the marker of conjecture (“seems”) and the series of questions with the imperative mood and several repetitions:

Like a bell: that is how one tests words,

that is how the test works.

Send out the word into the darkness

and listen for the sound that returns.

What tone?

Listen for the sound that returns.

(Lens and Coetzee 2024, Act 5)

Listening to “the sound that returns” repeated five times altogether in the vocal part, the audience could be easily drawn into the reverberations in the auditorium. Elder Hall’s chapel-like recess and high wooden arches seemed to concretize the sounding board—the board of judges Costello petitions for a pass before the gate. The melody taken up by the bow instruments’ cacophony, however, would reject a facile resolution as such—Costello is, after all, appealing to a higher order out of sight.

4. “Secretary of the Invisible”: (Non-)Authorial Voices and Personae

I’m a writer, and what I write is what I hear.

I’m a secretary of the invisible

I’m a writer and what I am called to do:

dictation secretary.

It’s not for me to judge,

it’s not for me to question.

—Lens and Coetzee (2024), Is This the Gate? Act 7

Midway through the opera excerpt, Costello shifts from the particular to the abstract, defining herself steadfastly as “a secretary of the invisible” and “dictation secretary” (Lens and Coetzee 2024, Act 7). Lacking autonomy as it sounds, Costello’s self-definition signals Coetzee’s enduring preoccupation with the writer’s liberty to adopt fictional personae and openness to all voices, especially when this artistic freedom is threatened by pressures upon him to be answerable for historical injustices.

Foregrounding Costello’s subjectivity through anaphora (with “I’m” repeated in the first three lines), Act 7 offers a powerful justification for her profession before the judges. Quite the contrary to the supplicant’s humility and restraint depicted in the novel, this scene is rendered “tenderly, with poetic sadness and a certain joy” in the opera (“Amabile, con tristezza poetica–Con una certa goia”, Lens and Coetzee 2024, Act 7). As challenging bow strokes quiet down, we enter the most melodic paragraph in the adaptation, with the bassoon’s soothing timbre featured in the accompaniment. “I’m a secretary of the invisible”, the soprano regally chants, bringing to the fore a sublimity subdued in Costello’s verbal exchange with the judges on the page. In both the literary text and the opera excerpt, however, the heroine never doubts the sanctity of her calling. In the novel, Costello admits that she borrows the phrase—“secretary of the invisible”—“from a secretary of a higher order, Czeslaw Milosz” (Coetzee 2003, p. 199). Costello’s testimony here, to a considerable degree, is a rewriting of the Polish-American poet’s 1975 work, “Secretaries”:

I am no more than a secretary of the invisible thing

That is dictated to me and a few others.

Secretaries, mutually unknown, we walk the earth

Without much comprehension. Beginning a phrase in the middle

Or ending it with a comma. And how it all looks when completed

Is not up to us to inquire, we won’t read it anyway.

(Milosz [1975] 1988, p. 325)

All three versions of the “secretaries of the invisible”—poetic, novelistic, and operatic—emphasize their mission to transcribe faithfully what is dictated to them, without inquiring, judging or questioning. This, of course, is not to be taken at face value. Inquisitive by nature and intellectually defiant, Costello “believe[s] in the irrepressible human spirit” but is convinced that “in [her] line of work one has to suspend belief”, as she claims in a later statement (Coetzee 2003, pp. 207, 213). Yet in this section of the opera, the paradox inherent in Costello’s calling and being, and the quirkiness of her behaviour, are moderated by a deceptively caressing harmony. Amidst this reassuring overtone, the protagonist’s theatrical self is transformed into a firm believer of what she says in front of the judges, which somehow reduces the complexity of Costello’s personality presented in the novel.

In this moment of lyricism preceding the dissonance in Act 8, “What Have I Seen?”, we might pause and enquire into something underplayed in the opera excerpt: if what Costello writes is what she hears, then what is the nature of the voices she hears? The question of seeing, hearing and writing, and, as a corollary, of reception and representation, is crucial in that it underlies Coetzee’s relationship to literary realism throughout his career, an issue that has long been the focus of substantial studies (Attridge 2004, pp. 200–1; Boehmer 2011, pp. 203–5; Attwell 2015, pp. 62–63, 235–38; Van der Vlies 2023, pp. 169–70). Upon Costello’s recent reappearance in Is This the Gate?, in which she insists her calling hinges on what she passively receives through hearing and seeing, it is worth looking back on Coetzee’s treatment of the writer figure’s subjectivity in his fiction.

“I am open to all voices, not just the voices of the murdered and violated”, Costello cautions her interrogators, when asked about her response to the Tasmanians wiped out in genocide. “If it is their murderers and violators who choose to summon me instead, to use me and speak through me”, she continues, “I will not close my ears to them, I will not judge them” (Coetzee 2003, p. 204). One of the judges, with mistrust and contempt, retorts: “Is that what it is to be a secretary: to write down whatever you are told? To be a bankrupt of conscience?” (Coetzee 2003, p. 204). Stripping away the Kafkaesque veneer in this scenario, Costello’s statement and the judges’ indictment implicate an ethical dilemma Coetzee has been grappling with in his writing and public life. What lies behind “this hearing, this trial” and the provocative reference to the old Tasmanians exterminated by “her countrymen, her ancestors”, Costello is acutely aware, is “the question of historical guilt” (Coetzee 2003, p. 203).

As a South African-born writer of Afrikaner descent and naturalized Australian citizen, Coetzee is confronted with the white settlers’ atrocities and ignominy in both British colonies in history. While the Australian context of Elizabeth Costello is outlined in “a functional, even minimalist referential language” (Boehmer 2011, p. 209), the historical burden of white consciousness is intrinsic to Coetzee’s South African and Australian experiences, and both demand some form of artistry and moral stance to represent. Since the start of his writing career, Attwell observes, Coetzee has been painstakingly “in search of his subject: the voice especially, embedded in a distinctive genre and a distinctive history”; in addition, his habit of “dating and self-archiving”, as evidenced by his well-preserved manuscripts, has enabled him to “move blocks of text around and to recover discarded fragments” (Attwell 2015, p. 20). In this light, I suggest that Elizabeth Costello, as a transitional work connecting Coetzee’s South African and Australian phases, holds some vital clues to his treatment of voices, realities and the writer’s different selves over the span of three decades since his 1974 debut, Dusklands. In some ways, Is This the Gate? creates a new outlet for Coetzee to distil these essential ideas from his early fiction, and to rework them with new insights in an art form that engages the audience more directly.

Act 7 and Act 8 in the opera excerpt, respectively centring on “what I hear” and “what have I seen”, remotely echo the two white male protagonists’ troubling self-consciousnesses in the two novellas that form Dusklands. Admittedly, Eugene Dawn in “The Vietnam Project” and the eponymous character in “The Narrative of Jacobus Coetzee” are not professional writers or scrupulous moralists like Costello. Instead, they are morally flawed and become paranoid due to their involvement with violence and crime—one brainwashed by the American propaganda machine during the Vietnam War, the other abusing the Khoisan on 18th-century expeditions. Even though hearing voices, hallucinating, and obsession with the self can be pathologized as symptoms of their growing insanity, Dawn’s and Jacobus Coetzee’s introspection betrays an intellectual calibre that at once parallels and parodies their creator’s.

In “The Vietnam Project”, Dawn philosophizes when he hears the American army’s broadcasts in Vietnam: “It is the voice of the doubting self, the voice of René Descartes driving his wedge between the self in the world and the self who contemplates that self” (Coetzee [1974] 1983, p. 20). Later, having stabbed his own son and confined to a mental asylum, Dawn thinks to himself, with stark dramatic irony: “I believe in life. I do not want to see people throw away their lives. Nor do I want to see the children of America poisoned by guilt”. What is more, when recalling his days of working on the Vietnam Project in the basement of the Harry S. Truman library, Dawn remembers “feeling the black guilt chuckling through [his] veins” (Coetzee [1974] 1983, p. 48). While Dawn believes that “I was being taken over. I was not my own man” (Coetzee [1974] 1983, p. 20), Jacobus Coetzee, protagonist of the second story in Dusklands, is convinced that he is the inheritor of historical guilt, acting in the service of a higher order beyond his own volition. “All are guilty, without exception”, he reckons. “I am a tool in the hand of history” (Coetzee [1974] 1983, p. 106). Facing his impending death, the merciless Boer explorer concludes the account of his second journey with a statement that resonates with Costello’s: “I know my lessons. I too can retreat before a beckoning finger through the infinite corridors of my self. I too can attain and inhabit a point of view from which, […] I can be seen to be superfluous” (Coetzee [1974] 1983, p. 107, italics mine).

In retrospect, Dawn’s and Jacobus Coetzee’s disclaimers that they are no more than mouthpieces for a divine voice or the embodiment of “a point of view” anticipate Costello’s authorial identity as “a secretary of the invisible”, who is dictated by “powers beyond us” and exists “in readiness, waiting for the call” (Coetzee 2003, pp. 199–200). As discussed earlier, it is commonly recognized that Costello serves as Coetzee’s fictional double. Yet, it should be noted that the two white male characters in Dusklands, though belonging to the category of murderers and violators Costello is not averse to representing, also bear traces of Coetzee’s authorship. Jacobus Coetzee, an 18th-century colonialist bearing the same surname as the author’s, points to J. M. Coetzee’s difficult relationship with his Afrikaner ancestry; whilst the portrayal of Dawn, who is supervised by a “powerful, genial, ordinary man” called Coetzee (Coetzee [1974] 1983, p. 1), reflects a subtle relationship between the character and its creator that is homologous with that between Costello and Coetzee. “Once upon a time a creative person himself”, Dawn says of Coetzee, his supervisor, “he is now a failed creative person who lives vicariously off true creative people” (Coetzee [1974] 1983, p. 1). Likewise, Costello in her old age appears drained of life and creativity, no more than “an old, tired circus seal” in her son’s eyes and dismissed as a “novelist of failing powers” by the interviewer (Coetzee 2003, pp. 3, 11).

The trope of circus animals, which brings to mind one of W. B. Yeats’s last poems, “The Circus Animals’ Desertion” (Yeats [1939] 1990), is also mentioned in Elleke Boehmer’s critique of Coetzee’s Australian realism in Slow Man (2005) and Diary of a Bad Year (2007). Boehmer maintains that “Coetzee is involved in rounding up the various circus animals of the colonial dystopia, the haunt of dying white males, both in Australia, and beyond Australia” (Boehmer 2011, p. 215). Coetzee “exhibits these creatures, demonstrates that he understands them”, Boehmer proposes, “but finally distances himself from them as being no more adequate to writing Australia than tropes from other settler traditions might be” (Boehmer 2011, p. 215). But as an aged white Australian female, Costello haunts Coetzee’s writing and public presence more persistently and thoroughly than any of her male counterparts, and the author likely never truly deserts or distances himself from her, as he does other characters—her memorable reemergence in Is This the Gate? testifies to that.

Notwithstanding the otherworldly tribunal scenes and her enigmatic afterlife rendered in the adaptation, the image of Costello in limbo is the reflection of a prototypical writer figure lost in time and the representation of a writer’s existential predicament, which chimes with Coetzee’s raison d’être late in life. As Attwell notes in J. M. Coetzee and the Life of Writing: Face to Face with Time, the subtitle of the book aims to elucidate “the way Coetzee puts fiction between himself and history, between himself and his mortality” (Attwell 2015, p. 26). This strenuous undertaking of positioning oneself in history, Attwell posits, indicates “the means whereby [Coetzee] challenges himself with sharply existential questions, such as, Is this room for me, and my history, in this book? If not, what am I doing?” (Attwell 2015, p. 26, italics in original).

A telling parallel can be detected between “Is this the gate?” and Coetzee’s existential questions formulated in Attwell’s work. Both the title of the opera excerpt and that of the full-fledged adaptation (“Costello in Limbo”) convey a sense of disorientation and indeterminacy. Since one’s genealogy and lifespan can be subsumed into a segment of history, confronting one’s own mortality and finitude, as Costello does at the gate/before the law, is at the same time a process of being defined, interrogated and refuted by a particular literary criterion or on the threshold of a new beginning.

5. “I Believe What I Am”: Beyond Life and Death

I believe what I am.

I believe what stands before you today is I.

I am!

—Lens and Coetzee (2024), Is This the Gate? Act 4 and 13

As a work premised on the central character’s mortality, Is This the Gate? nonetheless reflects Costello’s aspiration for eternity—not of an individual life, but a life force that can possibly overcome death. Towards the finale of the opera excerpt, its heightened focus on Costello’s intellectual vigour, instead of suggesting her waning vitality, attests to her desire for life, which underlies her philosophical musings in both Elizabeth Costello and the Costello narratives collected in The Pole and Other Stories.

Beginning with Act 8, the second half of Is This the Gate? traces Costello’s inner journey from oscillation to self-affirmation. While Act 7 is a manifesto of Costello’s belief in her calling as “a secretary of the invisible”, her sense of precarity is accentuated in the following act, described metaphorically in the dramaturgy as “Like walking on thin ice—Like a little rapid typhoon” (“Come camminare sul ghiaccio sottile—Come un rapido piccolo tifone”, Lens and Coetzee 2024, Act 8). In the interlude, this is represented by a few bars of melody redolent of tango music. The soloist, instead of dancing to it, adopts a shrieking and trembling voice, and mimics Costello standing in awe of the “brilliant” yet “blinding” light she has seen (Lens and Coetzee 2024, Act 8). This beam of light, captured time and again in the libretto, guides the opera to a closure pregnant with affective ambiguity.

The ensuing acts recapitulate the motifs already developed in the first half, but they are rendered with stronger dramatic effects. Once again, we hear “Another hot day” (Act 9), “Straight out of Kafka” (Act 10), and “Not the light that Dante saw in paradise” (Act 11). Ostensibly, Costello cannot see this eternal light because she is not a believer in God, and therefore, she is likely to be stuck in limbo forever without being able to reach Dante’s paradise. But more essentially, as a writer who always puts her former beliefs to the test and keeps revising them, Costello is unlikely to accept the Dantean resolution or climax that “all seeing there achieved its end” (Alighieri [c. 1321] 2012, p. 480). As Derek Attridge points out, there is a “narrative anticlimax” in Costello’s statement of belief: “what has mattered, for [her] and for the reader, is the event—literary and ethical at the same time—of storytelling, of testing, of self-questioning, and not the outcome” (Attridge 2004, p. 205).

In the opera, the ongoing nature that characterizes an event is transformed into an act, the very meaning of which denotes continuity and progression. As a preview of the full-fledged opera, Is This the Gate? is open-ended in nature; as a character who keeps appearing in Coetzee’s late works, Costello embodies an accomplished writer’s doubt and faith that forever await re-evaluation and contestation. In the two acts leading up to the opera excerpt’s ending, the recurring references to Kafka and Dante can be seen as the reenactment of this process. Awaiting her final judgement, Costello invokes Dante and Kafka alike, not to idolize or canonize them but to engage in self-scrutiny, through which she tries to come to terms with who she is.

Act 11, “Not the light that Dante saw in paradise”, is rendered into “a lugubrious funeral march, with a desire for death” (“Marcia funebre lugubre, con desiderio di morte”, Lens and Coetzee 2024, Act 11). As soon as “in paradise” is sung out, the cello’s slow movement and the piano’s lower register intervene before the soprano resumes singing, intoning “[w]hat a deception” with emotive inflections (Lens and Coetzee 2024, Act 11). While this act dramatizes the protagonist’s “desire for death”, Costello’s untiring petitions and statements of (non-)beliefs achieve quite the opposite effect, which proves her intellectual robustness and desire for life. The tension between Costello’s life drive and death drive is obscured in the opera excerpt, but is more sufficiently developed in Elizabeth Costello and The Pole and Other Stories. Emphasizing Kafka over Dante, Is This the Gate? underscores the aged writer figure’s trial while ruling out the possibility of transcendence in religious terms. But in Coetzee’s evolving Costello project, the Dantean elements are still very much present. Dante and Beatrice’s relationship, which symbolizes the sanctification of romantic love, is a crucial reference point for Costello in limbo—a liminal space where secular and sacred desires mingle.

In The Pole and Other Stories, Costello reappears in the remaining five stories that deal with aging, death and animal ethics, whereas the lead story, “The Pole”, is markedly Dantean. It depicts the love affair between a married Spanish woman named Beatriz and an elderly Polish pianist (Witold), who is a celebrated Chopin performer and disciple of Dante. This Beatriz, ironically, does not believe in the afterlife. After hearing about Witold’s death, she begins to picture “Heaven: a vast ante-room full of souls milling about in their uniform smocks, searching anxiously for their other halves” (Coetzee 2023, p. 136). Just as Costello denies seeing “the light that Dante saw in paradise” in Is This the Gate?, Beatriz in “The Pole” denies embodying the “heavenly being” the pianist claims to have seen in her (Coetzee 2023, p. 145). This new anthology, if read as a short-story cycle and sequel to Elizabeth Costello, contains a revelation of what lies beyond the gate.

It is probably no coincidence that in Elizabeth Costello, the lesson that precedes “At the Gate” is “Eros”, in which the protagonist reminisces about her love interest back in the 1960s and meditates on the erotic life of gods and mortals. “Love and death. The gods, the immortals, were the inventors of death and corruption”, Costello muses (Coetzee 2003, p. 189). Human beings are subject to death and annihilation, while the immortals are not, she figures, because the gods “have lacked the courage to try their invention out on themselves” (Coetzee 2003, p. 189). Curiously, earlier in the novel, Costello sees profane desires as the means of immortality. In “Lesson 5”, Costello recounts her past erotic relationship with old Mr Phillips, a painter and friend of their mother’s, in a letter to her sister Blanche: “Through me a goddess was manifesting herself, Aphrodite or Hera or perhaps even Artemis. I was of the immortals” (Coetzee 2003, p. 149).

Costello’s Hellenistic vision is sharply contrasted with Blanche’s Christian faith. As the administrator of “the Hospital of the Blessed Mary” in Zululand, Blanche believes that “with love and care and the right drugs, these innocents can be brought to the very gate of death without fear” (Coetzee 2003, p. 134). And yet the lesson from the two sisters’ conversation, if there is one, is not about human beings immortalized by erotic love or the role of religion in helping people face their mortality more fearlessly. Both Costello’s Hellenism and Blanche’s Catholicism, ultimately, point to the universality of suffering—aging and ailing as part of it—and the inevitability of death. Sensual desire and religious conviction alike, in this sense, are rooted in the mortals’ impulse to struggle against and imagine beyond this inexorable ending. On a similar note, Costello concludes in “Lesson 7: Eros”: “Strange enough, as desire relaxes its grip on her body, she sees more and more clearly a universe ruled by desire” (Coetzee 2003, p. 191). Right after she envisions the rainbows in heavens (both plural in her imagination) at the end of this section, Costello is stopped before the gate, awaiting her last judgement.

In the penultimate act of the opera excerpt, the universality of human struggle between desire and mortality that concerns Costello is pithily captured by the Gatekeeper’s statement: “We see people like you all the time” (Lens and Coetzee 2024, Act 12). At this final stage of her petition, Costello is not only trying to gain a pass for herself, but longing to understand the impasse of all mortals like her:

“Can you tell me”, I ask, “can you tell, do I stand a chance?

As you see, you see people like me all the time, like me all the time.

Do we all stand a chance?”

(Lens and Coetzee 2024, Act 12)

Costello’s burning questions are left unanswered in Is This the Gate?, yet her eagerness to let all living creatures (not necessarily human) “stand a chance” runs through several episodes in Coetzee’s latest short story collection, in which the gate remains a potent symbol.

In “The Old Woman and the Cats”, among others, Costello expresses to her son, John, her wish for every unborn being’s “chance of incarnation”, whereby she illuminates the bitter-sweet circle of life and death:

Each soul will have a turn to taste life, which is incomparably the sweetest sweetness there is. And at long last we will be able to hold up our heads, we masters of life and death, we masters of the universe. We will no longer have to stand barring the gate, saying, Sorry, you cannot come in, you are too many. Welcome, we will instead be able to say, come in, you are wanted, you are all wanted.

(Coetzee 2023, p. 198, italics in original)

The hospitality Costello expects towards all petitioners—dying or waiting to be born, human or non-human—on the threshold of life and death presses for a positive response to the last question addressed in the opera: “Do we all stand a chance?” As two of the latest instalments of Coetzee’s Costello project, The Pole and Other Stories and Is This the Gate? reimagine the 2003 novel in their own ways and invite the reader/audience to explore how human passions, including the desire to connect with other beings and create narratives, are in themselves the means of countering mortality.

Costello’s moral stance expressed in these works is aligned with her receptiveness as “a secretary of the invisible”, who is intent on giving form to the formless and giving voice to the voiceless. As the opera excerpt draws to an end, the soloist sings the last lines, “gracefully” and solemnly: “I believe what I am./I believe that what stands before you today is I./I am!”, while the instruments help to create “a strange and very mysterious undertone” (“Grazioso, ma con un sottotono strano molto misterioso”, Lens and Coetzee 2024, Act 13). The same lyrics and stage directions occur previously in Act 4, after Costello confronts the judges with the question “what lies on the other side” and complains about “the trouble of making my statement” in a state of agitation (Lens and Coetzee 2024, Act 3). But when this part is reenacted in the final act, the protagonist’s uncertainty and the music’s angularity are smoothed away by slower bow strokes and the bassoon’s melodiousness, which eventually gives way to the soprano’s unwavering final statement: “I am!”.

The last act is a meaningful revision of the ending of “At the Gate”. When the novel reaches its last page, Costello is still suspicious of her vision of the gate: “Too literary, she thinks again. A curse on literature!” (Coetzee 2003, p. 225, italics in original). The lesson ends with the Gatekeeper’s dismissal of her enquiry: “We see people like you all the time” (Coetzee 2003, p. 225). The opera excerpt, however, allows Costello to have the final say and stand a chance against the Gatekeeper, thus accentuating her subjectivity as a writer, no matter what lies on the other side of the gate.

Before the full-fledged operatic adaptation meets its audience, Is This the Gate? proves an engaging and affective preview of Costello’s existential predicament and writerly resolution. Departing from Kafkaesque and Dantean framings, this production revisits the motifs, places and voices that bridge Coetzee’s early and late works, and provides a multisensory experience with its many intertextual, musical and dramaturgical resonances.