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Jm Coetzee and Animal Rights

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Jm Coetzee and Animal Rights J.M. COETZEE AND ANIMAL RIGHTS: ELIZABETH COSTELLO’S CHALLENGE TO PHILOSOPHY Richard Alan Northover SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF ENGLISH LITERATURE IN THE FACULTY OF HUMANITIES UNIVERSITY OF PRETORIA PRETORIA, 0002, SOUTH AFRICA Supervisor: Professor David Medalie OCTOBER 2009 © University of Pretoria Abstract The thesis relates Coetzee’s focus on animals to his more familiar themes of the possibility of fiction as a vehicle for serious ethical issues, the interrogation of power and authority, a concern for the voiceless and the marginalised, a keen sense of justice and the question of secular salvation. The concepts developed in substantial analyses of The Lives of Animals and Disgrace are thereafter applied to several other works of Coetzee. The thesis attempts to position J.M. Coetzee within the animal rights debate and to assess his use of his problematic persona, Elizabeth Costello, who controversially uses reason to attack the rationalism of the Western philosophical tradition and who espouses the sympathetic imagination as a means of developing respect for animals. Costello’s challenge to the philosophers is problematised by being traced back to Plato’s original formulation of the opposition between philosophers and poets. It is argued that Costello represents a fallible Socratic figure who critiques not reason per se but an unqualified rationalism. This characterisation of Costello explains her preoccupation with raising the ethical awareness of her audience, as midwife to the birth of ideas, and perceptions of her as a wise fool, a characterisation that is confirmed by the use of Bakhtin’s notion of the Socratic dialogue as one of the precursors of the modern novel. Along with the Platonic/Socratic binary, Bakhtin’s concepts of polyphony, dialogism and monologism are applied to analyses of Coetzee’s fiction, which, in keeping with his anti-authoritarianism, is shown to be polyphonic. Costello’s apparently insensitive and repeated comparison of industrialised ani- mal farms to Nazi concentration camps is likewise scrutinised. It is argued that the point of the comparison is to question the normality and humanity of societies that i ii choose to ignore the suffering of animals in the animal exploitation industries. Her raising the question of this willed ignorance is related to Socrates’ maxim that evil is a result of ignorance, and Coetzee’s concern with the psychic cost to their humanity of those complicit in these industries is considered. David Lurie’s evocation of Holo- caust imagery in Disgrace is also examined, as is the role of art and the sympathetic imagination in attaining a degree of grace. Platonic ideas on eros, beauty, art and immortality are found to be central to Co- etzee’s fiction, not only to that relating to Costello but also to Disgrace and much of his other work. While acknowledging the importance of Plato, Coetzee continuously extends, tests and subverts his ideas, frequently subjecting them to carnivalistic play. Unexpected connections are made between Coetzee’s conception of the parent-child relationship, both biological and intellectual, and his notions of creativity, power and justice. Ideas of eating and fasting are explored in his fiction and related to the hunger-artistry of Franz Kafka. Coetzee’s ideas on animals, writing and diet are found to be essential to his notions of secular salvation and an ethical way of life. Keywords J.M. Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello, Mikhail Bakhtin, Franz Kafka, Platonic, Socratic, eros, midwife, ethics, animal rights, liberalism, humanism, humanity, rationalism, sympathetic imagination, Holocaust, disgrace, grace, secular salvation, polyphony, dialogism, monologism, hunger-artistry Acknowledgements I would like to thank David for his kindness and his careful comments, Mandy for inspiring me to embark on my doctorate, Johann for suggesting the topic, and all those who gave me their support and encouragement. iii Table of Contents Abstract i Acknowledgements iii Table of Contents vi 1 Positioning Elizabeth Costello in the animal rights debate: J.M. Coetzee’s (non-)use of the philosophers and poets in The Lives of Animals 1 2 Elizabeth Costello as a Socratic figure: Eros, Maieusis and Death in The Lives of Animals, Elizabeth Costello and Slow Man 43 3 Misology, dialogism and monologism: Costello’s (mis-)use of her sources in The Lives of Animals and her alleged abuse of reason, Part 1 92 4 Misology, dialogism and monologism: Costello’s (mis-)use of her sources in The Lives of Animals and her alleged abuse of reason, Part 2 152 5 The Possibility of Secular Salvation in the Writings and Fiction of J.M. Coetzee: Sister Bridget’s Challenge to Humanism 195 6 Animals and Secular Salvation in Disgrace 228 7 J.M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Eating 313 vi 8 Conclusion 367 vii Chapter 1 Positioning Elizabeth Costello in the animal rights debate: J.M. Coetzee’s (non-)use of the philosophers and poets in The Lives of Animals Let me add entirely parenthetically that I, as a person, as a personality, am overwhelmed, that my thinking is thrown into confusion and helplessness, by the fact of suffering in the world, and not only human suffering. These fictional constructions of mine are paltry, ludicrous defenses against that being-overwhelmed, and, to me, transparently so. (Coetzee, 1992, 248) In his thoughts, Herman spoke a eulogy for the mouse who had shared a portion of her life with him and who, because of him, had left this earth. “What do they know—all those scholars, all those philosophers, all the leaders of the world—about such as you? They have convinced themselves that man, the worst transgressor of all the species, is the crown of creation. All other creatures were created merely to provide him with food, pelts, to 1 2 be tormented, exterminated. In relation to them, all people are Nazis; for the animals it is an eternal Treblinka. And yet man demands compassion from heaven.” (Singer, 1984b, 271) This chapter aims to position J.M. Coetzee in the animal rights debate, adopting more an ecocritical approach, as outlined by Graham Huggan (Huggan, 2004), than a purely postcolonial one, as exemplified by Attwell’s work (Attwell, 1993). In order to do so, it will have to consider the most relevant modern philosophers (and philoso- phies) and the poets whose work Coetzee does not explicitly acknowledge in The Lives of Animals (Coetzee, 1999b). The discussion will begin with the influential works of the leading animal rights philosophers. Peter Singer’s utilitarian and Tom Regan’s rights-based approaches to animal rights will initially be examined in relation to The Lives of Animals. This will be followed by an exploration of approaches that share with Coetzee (and Costello, apparently his fictional persona) a rejection of appeals to ethical principles, namely the approaches of Mary Midgley and of ecofeminism. The apparent inadequacies of the utilitarian and rights-based approaches will ne- cessitate a look at one of the other major modern ethical schools of thought, namely virtue ethics, represented in this chapter by Anette Baier and Alasdair MacIntyre. While MacIntyre does not say much about animals in his important work, After Virtue (MacIntyre, 2007), it will be argued that this work is crucial to Coetzee’s rejection of Enlightenment rationalism and of its rights-based and utilitarian philoso- phies. Furthermore, MacIntyre’s alternative philosophy of virtue ethics may help to solve some other problems raised in The Lives of Animals, since Coetzee’s work is by no means merely about animal rights, nor should the work be read merely as an argument and its dramatic structure be ignored. However, this chapter will focus on positioning Coetzee intellectually, reserving a literary analysis for later chapters. This chapter will also attempt to assess Coetzee’s contribution to the animal rights debate, in particular, his controversial and paradoxical attack on the rationalist tradition in Western philosophy and his pitting poetic “sympathetic imagination” against reason. This opposition between philosophy and poetry will be problematised by showing how dependent philosophers sometimes are on images and imagination, 3 and by demonstrating how reasonable the poetic mode can be. Positioning Coetzee in the animal rights debate is complicated by the fact that he expresses his views through what appears to be his controversial persona and alter- ego, Elizabeth Costello. Some reviewers are hesitant to identify her views with those of Coetzee (Kunkel, 1999) (Webb, May 19, 1999),1 believing that Coetzee uses the fictional mode of the philosophical dialogue in order to express more extreme views than he himself would be prepared to admit to. Peter Singer expresses just such an opinion in his essay in the “Reflections” section of The Lives of Animals (Coetzee, 1999b, 91). Yet many of the attacks on Costello’s arguments are ad hominem and deliberately misinterpret her or make no sympathetic attempt to understand what she is trying to communicate. She faces not so much rational, intelligent criticism— although she faces that too—as hostile, wilful incomprehension or mere indifference. Furthermore, her own approach is excessively hostile toward the philosophical tradi- tion of rationality, and Coetzee makes no attempt to use the intellectual and moral authority of those philosophers and poets whose ideas and words could have strength- ened Costello’s case. Furthermore, it will be argued that even though Coetzee maintains an ironic distance between himself and his persona Elizabeth Costello, even though she is far more outspoken and blatant than Coetzee when making public statements on important issues, and despite the numerous critics cautioning against attempts to ascertain Coetzees own views on animal rights, his views do seem to coincide quite closely with those of Costello. The views expressed by Coetzee in an interview with him after he received the Nobel Prize in 2003 and a speech of his that was read at the opening of an art exhibition in Sydney, Australia, in early 2007 will be provided as evidence for this.
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