Shaun de Waal
THE LIVES OF ANIMALS by JMCoetzee et al (Princeton)
JM Coetzee’s is the only name that appears on the cover of The Lives of Animals, but he is not the book’s sole author. His text, however, a long two-part story, is the centrepiece around which the others revolve.
This text was delivered as a Tanner Lecture at Princeton University’s Centre for Human Values, but it is presented as a fiction, one doubled in ways beyond its bipartite structure: Coetzee’s lecture is a story in which an ageing novelist, Elizabeth Costello, gives “the annual Gates Lecture”. Various other characters – including her antagonistic daughter-in-law – reply and dissent. There is further counter-argument outside the fiction: the rest of the book is made up of responses to Coetzee/ Costello by academics from different disciplines.
The issue is animal rights: whether humanity is not responsible for “a crime of stupefying proportions” in the way we treat – and eat – animals. Elizabeth passionately contends that we have no right to farm, kill and consume them. Against the justification that animals are of a lower order than humans, Elizabeth asserts that even if they do not have the same kind of consciousness as we do, no real awareness of the future or mortality, they possess some kind of consciousness and that, she argues, means they are more like us than they are unlike us. We are able to imagine their suffering.
We tend not to slaughter animals with whom we have developed bonds of affection; we differentiate between pets and food (potential or actual), but is this a valid and moral distinction to make? If the methods by which we slaughter our food-to- be are painless and free of cruelty, is that okay?
This is the debate Elizabeth Costello and her ventriloquist, Coetzee, engenders. It is possible to object, as bioethics professor Peter Singer (a real-life bioethics professor, not a fictional one) does, that Coetzee is speaking through Elizabeth in order to distance himself from her views to some degree, to protect himself, and he is pre-empting disagreement by imbedding many possible objections to Elizabeth’s argument within the fiction.
Is Coetzee trying to put a case – and, despite Elizabeth’s lack of “solutions”, it is a pretty radical one – without taking responsibility for it? After all, the story is not intensely dramatised: it is largely composed of statement and colloquy in novel-of-ideas style. Clearly, it is harder to gain a purchase on the views being argued if they are in the mouth of a fictional character and not Coetzee speaking in propria persona (though his extract from an “untitled fiction” in the anthology celebrating Nadine Gordimer’s 75th birthday last year indicates an interest in this area: it is set in an animal clinic). In turn, Singer does manage to make an effective statement of his contrasting views – in the form of a fictional dialogue with his daughter.
Yet Singer is playing himself, saying pretty much what he’d say in life. Coetzee, by contrast, is “playing with possibilities”, as he put it in the 1992 essay and interview collection Doubling the Point: “Stories are defined by their irresponsibility … The feel of writing fiction is one of freedom, of irresponsibility, or, better, of responsibility toward something that has not yet emerged, that lies somewhere at the end of the road.”
One of the virtues of imaginary people is that they can go so much further than one might oneself; they can occupy a position one can envisage and may be tending towards without being able quite to defend it to the death. Being themselves hypothetical, fictional characters can do and say things simply for the sake of argument.
At the same time, fiction is the practice of an imaginative faculty that enables one to intuit the other, even very other others. As literature professor Marjorie Garber writes in her contribution to The Lives of Animals, fiction has meaning and is useful precisely because it is an act of imaginative sympathy – like Elizabeth’s feeling for animals.
Strangely, though, as anthropologist Barbara Smuts writes in her closing piece, we aren’t given much of a clue as to why Elizabeth feels so strongly about animals. In fact, she notes, “none of the characters ever mentions a personal encounter with an animal”, though Elizabeth’s son, embarrassed by his mother’s excesses, thinks at one point: “If she wants to open her heart to animals, why can’t she stay at home and open it to her cats?”
Smuts tells of living with a group of baboons whose individuality began to emerge as she got to know them better and whose attempts at “inter-species subjectivity” mirrored her own.
The lives of animals, as Elizabeth argues without citing personal experience, can become powerfully intertwined with our own; perhaps that was something she learnt from her cats.