Wednesday, December 14, 2011
Coetzee's Embedded Animals
Coetzee’s Embedded Animals
J.M. Coetzee’s novels are in no way cheerful, consoling or encouraging. They are upsetting in what they reveal about our world and about us as groups and individuals. They invoke resistance and reveal repression (Bell 172). He shakes up comfort zones and destabilizes intentioned blindness and silence through his facilitation of disturbing, and sometimes offensive and shocking, discussions. His fictitious novels draw the reader to continue, but their real-life contexts, and his avoidance of resolution, leave his audience fractured, disturbed and sometimes annoyed, but always filled with some sort of new passion. This strategy allows the discussion to linger and not cease with the last page in which all loose ends and questions are peacefully resolved. Coetzee said in one interview: “passion in discursive prose is like ‘reading the utterances of a madman,’ but a novel ‘allows the writer to stage his passion’” (Bell 174).
Coetzee’s passions are evident in the themes that run through his work:
bureaucratic violence,
the human condition and marginalized people,
race,
rape,
justice,
peace,
liberation,
isolation,
mortality,
authorship,
reality,
difficulty of communication between genders,
generations and species
and the limits of sympathy and empathy
The themes intertwine, embed themselves within each other and all, ultimately, are personal as well as political. In his essay “Taking Offense,” Coetzee writes, “without empathic participation in the feeling of outrage, and perhaps even privately deeming outrage in itself to be backward, a too-easy slide into self-serving emotionalism” can take place (Offence 4). Yet, even for the moralist, the feeling of uneasiness and discomfort, as Elizabeth Costello knows all to well, makes it for some “extremely difficult to live outside of cultural norms” (Bell 186). It is much easier to be blind and to be silent.
Coetzee purposely places himself in the public realm and then leaves his sometimes blunt and sometimes confusing messages to be debated. When Elizabeth Costello, The Lives of Animals, Age of Iron and Disgrace were published, a newer theoretic discourse pounced on the discussion, adding another layer to Coetzee’s post-colonial and socio-political themes. Critical Animal theorists have concentrated predominantly on these texts not only because they are densely rich in animal rhetoric, but also because they seem to shift, in this respect, from Coetzee’s earlier work. However, just as Coetzee’s themes are embedded within and between texts, connecting them on thematic and literal levels, his discussion of animals is no different. Though earlier ideas may appear less jarring or less radical, animal subjectivity is nevertheless present throughout.
It is important to understand that Coetzee’s entrance into animal studies was not a sudden, or “in” move, nor a change or realization of his position in relation to the treatment of animals or of the human relation to them. In the next section, a brief connection between his earlier work is presented as a general knowledge of their animal content and connections which will be necessary as comparison points in a later discussion of later, more “animal dense” texts. Arguing this connection, this continuity and growth of interest, this essay will then discuss a portion of the Critical Animal Theories (CAT), relating them back to his earlier texts and themes. The CAT tenants will include the problems of language, death, the Holocaust.
Peter Singer speaks on Animal Studies
Beetles, Barbarians and Beasts Oh My…
Critical Animal theorists devote a great deal of attention to Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals, Elizabeth Costello and Disgrace, as they should. Far from being over-studied, the discussion in this essay will as well be naturally drawn to these texts. It is however a focus on Coetzee’s prior novels that I wish to bring the reader’s attention to. Specifically, ideas in CAT that present themselves as questions, concerns and areas for thought and investigation that are manifested within Coetzee’s early texts, display its importance in discourse for Coetzee as well as for interested readers. (These ideas and their links between earlier and later texts will be discussed later.) It is in this area of discussion, one that proposes infinite links with other discourses, that links all of Coetzee’s novels, and therefore his complicated themes are better understood in the context of his work, than in the context of a text.
Dusklands
“The Vietnam Project”
Coetzee’s first novel, Dusklands, is comprised of two separate stories that at first seem to have no connection to the other. Not so. In the first, “The Vietnam Project,” Eugene Dawn struggles with disconnection to his mind and to his body as his work on the New Life Project and the war being fought impacts his self and destroys his life as he once knew it. In a wonderful foreshadowing, Eugene says, “Marilyn’s [his wife] great fear is that I will drag her out of the suburbs into the wilderness. She thinks that every deviation leads into the wilderness” (Dusklands 9). It is through Coetzee’s deviations, that at the close of this introductory story, his readers will all be lead into the wilderness, into distant scenes, into seeing the Other, into sympathy, empathy and hopefully a reconsideration of the reader’s ethical self. Eugene has mentally departed his urban society long before. In his insanity lives a certain preservation of what other humans fail to recognize. He is no longer interested in his own marital problems, the suburb problem, but finds interest in other ideas: “I find insects fascinating, even more fascinating than birds. I am impressed by the invariability they achieve in their behavior. Perhaps I should have been an entomologist” (Dusklands 36). These are the clues to the future: wilderness and animals; the two as separate and the two combined.
“She thinks that every deviation leads into the wilderness”
Dusklands
“The Narrative of Jacobus Coetzee”
Jump forward, or backwards if you like, to the second tale from Duslands, “The Narrative of Jacobus Coetzee,” and just as warned, the reader is now in the wilderness, surrounded by animals and a man who at times is intrigued, and sometimes haunted, by animals and insects.
There is a little black beetle, to be found near water, of which I have
always been fond. If you lift the rock under which he lives, he scuttles
away. If you block his path he will try another path. If you block every
path, or if you pick him up, he will curl his legs under his body and
feign death. (Dusklands 96)
Perhaps he should have been an entomologist, instead of an elephant hunter. Or not. He studies the beetle and wonders about its own pain and about its own realization to its own death, or if this is possible. The inquiry is nice, the obvious experience through which he speaks do not reflect an empathetic heart:
You may pull off his legs one by one and he will not wince. It is only
when you pull the head off his body that a tiny insect shutter runs
through him; and this is certainly involuntary. What passes through
his mind during his last moments? Perhaps he has no mind, perhaps
his mind is extroverted as mere behavior. (Dusklands 96)
If the beetle does not wince when his legs are pulled off, does that mean he feels no pain? When Three-Fingered Jack’s mother was put onto the stretcher and she did not wince, was that because she felt no pain? When slaves took the lashes from their masters, refusing to acknowledge pain, does it mean that they felt none? Of course not. Deciding whether the beetle has a mind or not is not for him to do, just as pulling off the legs one at a time and then the head in an attempt to find the mind, is not for him to do either. He is an odd character though. While he details his traumatic childhood memories of being instructed on “how to dispose of a wounded bird” (Dusklands 105), where he would be unsuccessful and thus “stand there cuddling the expiring creature in [his] hands, venting upon it the tears of all [his] pity for all tiny helpless suffering things, until it passed away” (Dusklands 105), he grows up to be a hunter.
Furthermore, he is not simply a hunter, but one that appears to be void of empathy and is enamored by his own dominant ability to kill: “Like God in a whirlwind, I fell upon a lamb, an innocent little fellow, who had never seen his master and was thinking of a good night’s sleep, and I slit his throat” (Dusklands 100). With further commentary on the slaughtering of elephants and the removal of their tusks, it at first seems to not fit with that younger boy who wept for the dying birds. But this is the difference between the suburbs and the wilderness, the dog we pet and the chicken we eat, the “civilized” Westerner and the uncivilized “Other,” the beasts.
In a 1988 essay, Coetzee draws similarities written by visitors to the Cape of Good Hope, in which the Hottentots, the inhabitants with which the protagonist Jocobus Coetzee associates. These authors write, “The local natives have everything in common with the dumb cattle…They are handicapped in their speech, clucking like turkey-cocks” (Idleness 12). Coetzee points out nineteen points that the authors use to distinguish themselves, the Western European, from these other “people,” or “at least the Western European as he imagines himself to be” (Idleness 13). A twentieth point, which seems to be the main irritation by westerners, is an idleness that the Hottentots display.
“ The local natives
have everything
in common with the
dumb cattle.”
As Coetzee points out, however, what is it in the idleness that is wrong. Why should one spend his day working, cultivating land, instead of “spend[ing] his days dozing in the sun, or in the shade when the sun gets too hot, half-aware of the singing of the birds and the breeze on his skin, bestirring himself to eat when hunger overtakes him” (Idleness 18). Jacobus is the white man among the Hottentots and his descriptions of them parallel those of other authors. To him, they are beast-like, lazy and dumb. And thus, Coetzee introduces his readers into a new world, a wilderness, one that inhabits the west, the colonizer, the “civilized,” and those he who he claims domination over: the animals, the natives, the beasts. The direct connection between animals and colonialism is laid out in his next novel, In the Heart of the Country.
In the Heart of the Country
Magda, the daughter of a white colonizer, struggles with her place in society and her own mental instability. She connects herself with insects, as a “a thin black beetle” (Heart 18) and struggles to understand her human position like a part of this insect world where “the particles of food that must be carried over mountaintops and stored in holes, the eggs that must be arranged in hexagons, the rival tribes that must be annihilated” (Heart 35). Surely it must be just as natural for groups of humans to collect and store food, bare and raise children in a certain fashion and remove, conquer and or dominate their rivals. Surely there must be some instinctual qualities that humans share with other animals. For Magda, her life as part of the human world is no different than the lives of other animals and within this framework she tries to convince herself that the domination of one group of people by another is just nature. The world of the colonist, herself, and as a victim of her own politics,
[She] is the hermit crab…that as it grows migrates from one empty
shell to another….Whose shell I presently skulk in does not matter, it
is the shell of a dead creature. What matters is that my anxious soft-
bodied self should have a refuge from the predators of the deep, from
the squid, the shark, the baleen whale, and whatever else it is that
preys upon the hermit crab” (Heart 43)
But she fails to convince herself. She understands her role in a larger scheme. She is below the male through her gender and she is also “responsible” for placing others below herself. She is not only the hermit crab, she is also the shark: “I was a shark, an infant black shark. Why did you not recognize it and cut its throat? What kind of merciful father were you who never cared for me but sent me out into the world a monster?” (Heart 71). Magda strives to understand the world she is born into, the contradictions, and drives herself mad in the process. Eugene and Magda are both negatively effected by their own system, over which they have no control, and to which they are stuck, embedded, and cannot escape. These first two books state their location, however Coetzee takes us deeper into his jungle in his next novel and gives the reader zero knowledge of where he leads them, but leaves it up to them to decipher their new surroundings.
Waiting for the Barbarians
Waiting for the Barbarians, is written in an ambiguous location; it is anywhere that indigenous people live peacefully and the white western imperialist come to colonize. In this novel it is the indigenous people, the “Barbarians,” who play the largest role as the beast. The Magistrate warns Colonel Joll: “The animal you are chasing will smell you coming and vanish into the desert while you are still a day’s march away” (Barbarian 11). The river people are animals as well, but less of a threat to the civilized man. In fact the river people are more like a domesticated dog, or a stray cat, who “unless [you] chase them away…may stay with you forever” (Barbarian 19). After the Magistrate begins tending to the tortured Barbarian woman, he develops an unexplainable empathy towards her. This space of closeness, of care, begins, though every so slightly, begins to shift “his sensitivity to the subjectivity of animals” (Donovan 79).
While the Magistrate tries to do the right thing by keeping a silver fox cub in his room, where “it cowers all day under the furniture” (34), he equates the Barbarian girl with the fox: “People will say that I keep two wild animals in my room, a fox and a girl” (34) and later describes her as “brimming with young animal health” (55). Yet as his own situation changes, as he questions his own position in his imperialistic community, his mind becomes more in line with those of the animals and of the indigenous “barbarians” than with the ideology enforced through Colonel Joll. The Magistrate goes hunting, and once he has his gun focused on a waterbuck, he cannot pull the trigger. There is eye contact made, a moment, and the animal runs off. The magistrate witnesses as the barbarian girl calms two horses that have been frightened by a storm: “The girl stands with her arms stretched like wings over the necks of two horses. She seems to be talking to them: though their eyeballs glare, they are still” (67). On the way home, when a horse dies, he allows his men to slaughter it for food, but he does not partake. His heart has changed as he now resides somewhere in between what used to be an obvious and rigid binary, yet once he is imprisoned and tortured, the Magistrate describes himself as a dog that is scarfing down its food and as a beast.
*****
In Coetzee’s next four novels, which for space-sake won’t be discussed in any length, discourses involving animals continues. Whether it is in relation to Michael K’s and his desire to live off the land, the treatment of Friday in Foe as a dog, taught commands, wearing a collar, following his master and sleeping on the floor, to continued canine references in Age of Iron, and The Master of Petersburg, for Coetzee there is and has always been an importance in the incorporation of animals into his philosophical and urgent debates. Shortly after these publications came Elizabeth Costello, The Lives of Animals and Disgrace and an explosion of animal theorists ready to pounce and analyze.
What IS Critical Animal Studies???
The Disability of the Human Language
In the area where literary studies and animal studies converge, there is a good deal of concern revolving around language. There are those who are interested in whether or not animals have language capabilities. There are those like Jacques Derrida who advocates a removal of the language hierarchy and contends that communication occurs at the “event”-like nature of the encounter when sense of time, space and self are jumbled (Calarco 126). Finally, much like Derrida, those who are interested in “forms of subjectivity that are not language-based” (Weil 87). This later concern also links itself with persons who have linguistic disabilities, such as autism, deafness and Asperger, and it refutes the “scientists who maintain that language is essential for thinking” (87).
Author Temple Grandin discusses in her texts the way in which she “think[s] in pictures…[and] that words are like a second language to [her]” (Weil 87). Grandin also argues that she “would be denied the ability to think by scientists who maintain that [spoken] language is essential for thinking” (87). She further explains how she has transformed her disability into a special gift: “That her autism has given her special insight into the minds of nonhuman animals…that she is able to see what and how nonhuman animals see” (88). For both Grandin and Karl Weil, from whose essay this information is extracted, the linguistic ability of “normal” humans is a product of an “over-active consciousness” and a disability that causes them to “screen” the world (88).
A prime example is a well-known study in which participants are asked to count passes made by a certain member in a basketball game. Their “screening” prevents them from seeing the woman who walks onto the court dressed in a gorilla outfit (Weil 88). Thus, human consciousness has become an impediment, an obstruction, between ”normal” human vision and the world.
The sociolinguistic component of the human is great disadvantage in the quest to understand nonhuman animals. Paraphrasing Jacques Lacan, Derrida writes: “Man is an animal, but a speaking one, and he is less a beast of prey than a beast that is prey to language” (Zoology 123). In this sense, one must consider if animal’s (if it is a fact) lack of language is a lack, or if human’s linguistic ability is the lack (Weil 89).
It becomes Elizabeth Costello’s inability to communicate with her peers, her esteemed authorship that has lost its understanding in the utmost of literary academia, that becomes her disability. The space created between her and the normal human has moved her closer to a better understanding of and empathy for animals. David Lurie is in a parallel position. He becomes physically and mentally removed from his life as a literature professor at the university. The further he moves from language, the stronger his empathy for and understanding of animals becomes. The Magistrate cannot decipher the script on the slips or the markings on the Barbarian girl’s body and he too grows closer to the animal nonhuman world. Throughout Coetzee’s novels, language plays a vital role in its relation to animals and to death…
Death
The dog tied up and secured to a rock by the Hottentots, the black beetle whose defense it is to play dead (Dusklands 96), the dogs that “snarl and cower” (Heart 95) when Magda calls them, the Magistrate for whom dogs represent his own degradation (Tremaine 589), Michael K’s killing of lizards and birds for food and the metaphorical dogs in Foe, “dumb beasts locked and chained,” to which Susan Barton compares Friday (589), all represent the lives of and the treatment of animals in a human world and is present throughout Coetzee’s texts. The association of animals with death cannot be dismissed and the questions of suffering, knowledge, sympathy and imagination must be considered. A central issue that Coetzee agonizes with “is not simply that we can be made to suffer and that we die, but that we know this, in the way that his animals know the knife is descending and can do nothing about it” (598).
It is only through the character’s own degeneration, their sliding away from normal human subjectivity, that they can begin to understand the animal. Jacobson considers “what passes through the mind [of the beetle] during his last moments” (Dusklands 96), only as he has become the captured and questions his own fate. In addition, Eugene Dawn, Magda, the Magistrate, Susan and Lurie, “without full understanding of what is happening, each …exchange [their] position of complicity in the victim’s suffering for the suffering itself, and in that position each…experiences the shame of both at once” (Tremaine 600). The shame is a result of the helplessness when the animal or human knows it is about to die. The idea that it is only through the character’s non-normativity that they can sympathize with the “Other” is also a central characteristic to Elizabeth Costello.
Costello is the odd one, the one who doesn’t fit in with her peers, the “normal” members of her society. As discussed earlier, she demonstrates that despite her being a well-known author, her own language is deficient in its ability to communicate and to express her ideas at Appleton College. It is this linguistic disability that helps to form her isolation from others, but it is also her strength in so far as her connection with animal ethics is concerned. Unlike the other characters, that do not fully understand their position, Costello is outspoken in her convictions. While her round about way of delivering her speech at Appleton attacks the principles of philosophy and science, her audience, and the readers, are primarily transfixed on one word: holocaust.
Costello’s audience “condemn the deployment of [her] Holocaust analog[y] as vulgar, loose, potentially dangerous and lacking in cultural sensitivity” (Buettner 30). She dismantles the hierarchy of genocide that the Holocaust at the top of by claiming that the mass genocide in slaughterhouses makes the Holocaust look miniscule in comparison. The comparison of human importance to animal importance raises anger for this hierarchal reason: “We are the agents who decide which forms of life are valuable enough for protection” (31). Coetzee is by no means the only author to use the Holocaust as a way to describe animal genocide.
In a book written by Stephen Wise, Rattling the Cage, in which he advocates that human rights include non-humans, he writes:
“equality destroyed anywhere, even for chimpanzees, threatens the destruction of equality everywhere. That is why, near the onset of the American Civil War, Abraham Lincoln told Congress that, “[i]n giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom for the free’” (32).
To keep treating animals as we are means that we will keep treating humans as animals. The word “Holocaust” is used two times in The Lives of Animals, yet is the most remembered part. While its “underlying motivation is how to manage the unimaginable” (31), it forces the blindness and silence to be removed, if only temporarily. It forces realities of horror that have been swept under the rug. Silence, for Coetzee, “cannot be the appropriate attitude in the face of contemporary catastrophes. Being silent in the face of the ‘voiceless’ suffering of animals would be silencing them even further and also silencing ourselves – into non-action” (37). When Costello says that she is a vegetarian because she want to “save her soul” (Lives 43), it is possible that she is offering her self as a sacrifice. She is not only speaking for animals, “but is putting herself in their place, effectively sacrificing herself as a dignified public persona” (Bell 189). It is by way of her own disability that she is drawn to the marginalized Paul Raymond in Slow Man.
Lurie, in Disgrace, also, though unknowingly, sacrifices his self in the name of animals. In addition to this connection is the idea, again, of language. A former literature professor, Lurie becomes isolated from his peers and his loss of language draws him closer to animal empathy. Sticking with the Holocaust scenario there is additional evidence of embedding. Bev Shaw is described in similar ways that Hitler’s executioner is in the sixth lesson of Elizabeth Costello. He is described as the devil and of having leathery wings. Bev Shaw is later described as not “a liberating angel but a devil, that beneath her show of compassion may hide a heart as leathery as a butchers” (Disgrace 144). There is an obvious connection between Shaw and her job to put to sleep the unwanted animals, and the Holocaust. Further emphasizing this clink is the following passage:
They do not say straight out, ‘I have brought you this dog to kill,’ but that is what is expected: that they will dispose of it, make it disappear, dispatch it to oblivion. What is being asked for is, in fact, Losung.
“Losung” is German for “solution.” “Endlosung” is the Nazi term for “final solution.” “On Saturday afternoons…he helps Bev Shaw “losen” the week’s superfluous canines,” drawing another direct connection between the treatment of animals and the Holocaust (Donovan 87).
Coetzee’s novels share similar themes and structures and sometimes even characters. They are also embedded within each other, referencing the next or the former. Concerning the human treatment of animals, it is evident that this has been a passion of Coetzee’s from day one. But Coetzee does not separate out his agendas or messages or points. They are circular within themselves. Each implies another. One colony represents the world and history. Animals refer to oppression of all animals, human animals included. Terse comments have global meanings. Language speaks to truth, to denial, to silence, to what we don’t want to hear, as the Holocaust has referred to animal laboratories and slaughterhouses.
Read with empathy, see with full sight and listen to understand.....
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