Crossing borders or the ends of man I come or surrender to the animal—to the animal in itself, to the animal in me and the animal at unease with itself.
—Jacques Derrida (Derrida 372)
There is an unfortunate tendency to take Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals as a literal interpretation of its narrative surface, as do many members of Elizabeth’s Costello’s audience. In doing so, the reader becomes nothing more than another oblivious spectator of a bigger message she is attempting to illustrate, another hardheaded, impenetrable surface trapped within its own ideological discourse, as is her son and his wife. Embedded beneath Costello’s exterior narrative is a complicated discussion that directly attacks the scientific mind-set of her son John and his philosophically trained wife, Norma. In addition to literally placing her argument between science and philosophy, Costello also places her argument in a space between beast and God and just as many other characters in Coetzee’s novels are, she is herself displaced, not only with her argument, but with her own struggles and frustrations. Within this complicated structure, there is an argument being made that not only brings into question the humane treatment of animals and the concept of animals being “living souls” as are humans, but a discussion within and among the human race that points directly to racism and colonialism; it is the connection between all of these ideas that her audience fails to recognize.
Within dialogue and commentary, the disconnection between Costello and others is painfully visible, in the sense that they are not capable of understanding her, or refuse to understand her. This separation directly puts them in the same position of those “killers” at the Nazi death-camps. The horror being that the “killers refused to think themselves into the place of their victims” (34), is the same situation that Costello finds herself in – the inability or refusal of others to remove themselves from their self-proclaimed moral and justified heights and discourses in order to consider being or thinking like the “other.” Her concept of “reason” is also a concept that is rejected in the same way. Science has its own idea of reason and philosophy has its own idea of reason. Both are unyielding to the concepts of the others and discussion often ends in no resolution, no third idea, but only the original division. This “discussion” between the two discourses is literally portrayed in the tension and bickering between John and Norma. Costello’s idea of reason as being neither the universe or God but as reason being “a certain spectrum of human thinking” (23), will remain her idea alone considering the rigidity of the outside discourses. Disconnection is also visible in President Gerard’s question to Elizabeth Costello during dinner and her subsequent response: “Your own vegetarianism, Mrs. Costello, it comes out of moral conviction, does it not?” (43). Her response that “It comes out of a desire to save [her] soul” (43) leaves the table in silence as nobody understands the response of wants to attempt understanding. Costello’s response is not a reference to Christianity. She means that salvation will come to her “through the alertness of all her senses to the embodied fullness of animal life” (Lamb 70). This disconnection is prevalent among all the characters: those who ask questions during her lecture, those seated at dinner with her and Abraham Stern who doesn’t show up because he too, even in his own poetic discourse, cannot understand the larger point being made by her comments on Jews and cattle.
Beyond the surface ideas that cannot, in the refusal, be understood is a more profound argument. There is a direct link between Costello’s argument against the assumption of the human as a high being and of animals being void of conscious thinking, to that of the conflicts, and non-acknowledged conflicts, involved in racism and colonialism. The numbness involved in killing for food or scientific testing is the same ideology that surfaces in the oppression and brutality of other humans. The “right” to treat animals in “inhumane” ways because of their “non-human qualities” is the same excuse used to oppress humans who are deemed “sub-human” by those who believe they have the intellectual right to proclaim such and then act upon. The assumption that one has the power and the “other” does not is a gross misconception.
Whatever else, the body is not “that which is not,” and the proof that it is is in the pain it feels…In South Africa it is not possible to deny the authority of suffering therefore of the body…The suffering body takes this authority (Coetzee 248)
While Costello attempts to squash the binaries and oppositions that lead to misuse, misunderstanding and mistreatment, she is confronted with the “dog-headed” mentality of the privileged Western mentality who proclaim their right to retain power at any cost, who refuse to understand, feel or be an “other” for fear of loosing this power. Coetzee’s above quote proclaims that power is universal, not one-sided, and exists in many forms; forms that most often cannot be comprehended by those who proclaim to intellectuals. While Norma asserts that Costello’s argument is “naïve [and] shallow” (47), and that this way of thinking can only “lead[] to total intellectual paralysis” (47), it is ironically her own intellectual paralysis that she unknowingly describes.
Coetzee, J.M. Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews, ed. David Attwell (Cambridge
1992).
Coetzee, J. M., and Amy Gutmann. The Lives of Animals. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP,
1999. Print.
Derrida,Jacques. "The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow) ."Trans. David
Wills. Critical Inquiry 28 (Winter 2002): 369-418.
Lamb, Jonathan. "Sympathy with Animals and Salvation of the Soul." The Eighteenth
Century 52.1 (2011): 69-85. Print.
Hi Kelley,
ReplyDeleteI really like your take and input on the novel. As I read the lecture, I could not stop thinking about animal rights. I thought Elizabeth Costello’s argument and the responses to Coetzee’s lecture are using reason and theory as a way to express how animals should and should not be treated. After reading your post, I am on the same page. I also think we should not take The Lives of Animals too literally. Yes, animal rights are the center of the speech. But I think we need to read the lecture as a response to how human beings live their lives and how human beings are treating the “other.” In this case, the “other” is an animal. In other cases, they may be, like you said, any group of people who are oppressed. Animals, in a sense, are oppressed by humans, who in turn, are animals. For instance, Costello says, “People complain that we treat animals like objects, but in fact we treat them like prisoners of war” (58). She then goes on to say that “captive herds are slave populations” (59). In other words, human beings have taken groups of animals and are using them as slaves and slaughtering them. Some people even abused animals in early zoos. This can be viewed as a metaphor for slavery and/or the apartheid. Human beings do not know what a cow or chicken thinks. A human being is only capable of truly knowing what they individually think and feel. According to Costello, these oppressors are only thinking of themselves and not the animals. Hence the oppressor and the oppressed; the self and the other.