Who is the character?
Scene from ‘Elizabeth Costello’, directed by Krzysztof Warlikowski, 2024, photo: Magda Hueckel / Nowy TeatrThe play begins, however, with a monologue given by a different character. This is AnnLee, a digital figure whose design was purchased by artists Philippe Parreno and Pierre Huyghe in 1999 (for 46,000 yen, about $430 at the time) from a Japanese company that creates characters for games, commercials, films or comics. Parreno’s several-minute animation Anywhere Out of the World, which opens the show, signals what is perhaps the most salient interpretive trope in the question: What is a character’s subjectivity and does one exist? AnnLee, a simple female avatar with empty eye sockets, speaks of being selected from a catalogue of many, sometimes expensive, detailed designs of heroines and protagonists with complex psychological backgrounds. In the voice of the enigmatic Daniela (‘The voice you hear has never been my voice. I have no voice’), she acknowledges that she is a product that has been created and sold but does not belong to anyone. Selected from a portfolio, she appeared in the works of many different artists over the next few years, gaining a life she would most likely never have had if someone else had bought her. In 2022, Parreno and Huyghe, with the help of lawyer Luc Saucier, transferred the rights to use her image to her (or, in fact, to the AnnLee Association), putting an end to further artistic transformations.
AnnLee’s lot corresponds to the way in which the literary character Elizabeth Costello functions. The latter – as we learn from the novel published in 2003 by Nobel laureate John Maxwell Coetzee – is a writer born in Melbourne in 1928, the author of nine books of prose, two books of poetry and a book on bird life. She has two children from two different marriages, but she first appeared a few years earlier: in 1997, Coetzee, invited to give two lectures at Princeton University within the framework of the Tanner Lectures on Human Values series, decided to read two pieces of prose with Costello as the protagonist… herself invited to give two lectures. In 1999, Costello’s speeches – ‘The Philosophers and the Animals’ and ‘The Poets and the Animals’ – were published as The Lives of Animals. Four years later, they became parts of a novel whose title was the heroine-writer’s name. This complex map combining textual fiction and the reality of the writer’s work is embellished with the fact that Costello’s most famous novel is The House on Eccles Street, dedicated to Marion Bloom, the wife of Leopold Bloom, the protagonist of James Joyce’s Ulysses, whom Costello portrays in a very different context: ‘I wanted to liberate her from that house and especially from that bedroom, from that bed with the creaking springs, and release her, as you put it, onto the streets of Dublin’, she says in an interview with a journalist. Thus, a fictional character explains in the novel the reasons why she decided to take over and set in motion another fictional character, making her the protagonist of another literary fiction. What does this construction tell us? Above all, why does Coetzee need a character like Elizabeth Costello? Who is Costello for Warlikowski? And what happens when she appears in the theatre?