Re-imagining the Animal in J.M. Coetzee’s

A.M. Wattam

2019

Re-imagining the Animal in J.M. Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals

By

Amy McLeod Wattam

Submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree Magister Artium (English) in the Faculty of Arts at Nelson Mandela University

Supervisor: Prof Marius Crous Co-Supervisor: Dr Jakub Siwak

April 2019

Declaration by candidate

Name: Amy Wattam

Student number: 211257346

Qualification: Master of Arts (English)

Title of project: Re-imagining the Animal in J.M. Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals

Declaration: In accordance with Rule G5.6.3, I, Amy Wattam (211257346), hereby declare that the abovementioned dissertation is my own work and that it has not previously been submitted for assessment to another University or for another qualification.

Signature: Amy McLeod Wattam

Date: 15 April 2019 Contents i. Acknowledgements ii. Abstract Introduction 1 Chapter One: Studying The Lives of Animals – Situation, Reception and Theory 7 1.1. Introduction 7 1.2. Situating The Lives of Animals 8 1.3. Critical Reception 16 1.4. A Posthumanist Reading 18 1.5. Conclusion 28 Chapter Two: Coetzee and Unsettling Boundaries of (Re)presentation 30 2.1. Introduction 30 2.2. Coetzee’s Multimodal Metafiction 31 2.3. Coetzee’s Relation to The Lives of Animals 40 2.4. Coetzee’s Multi-layered Responses 51 2.5. Conclusion 62 Chapter Three: Disconnections in The Lives of Animals 64 3.1. Introduction 64 3.2. Human versus Animal 65 3.3. Reason versus Feeling 75 3.4. Rationality versus Imagination 85 3.5. Conclusion 94 Chapter Four: Establishing Connections in The Lives of Animals 96 4.1. Introduction 96 4.2. Elizabeth and the Animal 97 4.3. Rational Feelings and Human-Animal Interconnection 105 4.4. Imaginative Realities and Human-Animal Relations 114 4.5. Conclusion 122

Conclusion 124 Bibliography 130 i. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank my supervisors, Prof Marius Crous and Dr Jakub Siwak, for guiding me through my labyrinthine imaginings. Thank you to the RCD at Nelson Mandela University for providing me with a Post Graduate Research Scholarship, which funded this study. Thank you to Prof Mary West for introducing me to a book that has challenged, taught and inspired me in more ways than I could have imagined. Thanks also to Wesley Halgreen for reading and commenting. Thanks to my family and loved ones who have supported and loved me through my studies, I appreciate you all very much. Though they will be indifferent to their acknowledgement here, I would still like to thank Molly and Tego, who have taught me much about the joy of life and have kept me sane with our daily walks in our beloved Sardinia Bay.

ii. ABSTRACT

J.M. Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals (1999) is a literary representation of, and intervention into, human-animal relations. It is an experimental literary destabilisation of the generic boundaries that underlie the systematic (mis)representation and (mis)treatment of nonhuman animals, specifically their mass commodification in contemporary societies. The text provides a critique and negotiation of anthropocentric reason and its ramifications for nonhuman animals. This study focuses on how Coetzee’s narrative problematises dominant discourses through questioning their authority and offering alternatives to anthropocentric conceptions of the animal that are based upon reason-centred and dualistic thought. The duality of human versus animal is explored alongside other dualities deconstructed in the text, such as fiction versus nonfiction, and philosophy versus literature. Coetzee’s representation of these constructs and their interconnectedness is investigated, specifically with regards to positively developing human-animal relations. Through exploring what Coetzee calls the ‘sympathetic imagination’, his alternative contribution to the field of human-animal relations will be considered. This study focuses on the space for re-imagination that Coetzee has provided with The Lives of Animals. It highlights the role literature can and ought to play in this re- imagination, and why this re-imagination is necessary for the development of human-animal relations. Posthumanism will be used as a theoretical lens throughout, as it appears to resonate closely with Coetzee’s project. Both the form and the content of the text will be analysed, highlighting their interconnected significance in Coetzee’s project and the continued relevance of interventions such as this. Introduction

‘Animal’ is a term with broad and complex underpinnings and connotations, some of which are brought to light in J.M. Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals (1999). Through analysing Coetzee’s representation of ‘the lives of animals’ in the text, this study explores the complexity of human-animal relations. This complexity is mirrored in the text’s multifaceted form and content, and the intricate interaction between them. The Lives of Animals unsettles many conventional boundaries of representation in its multi-layered re-imagination of the animal, which is what forms the core of this study. The Lives of Animals crosses different boundaries of genre and mode. It was originally presented by Coetzee as an academic lecture and published two years later as a literary text. In 1997, Coetzee delivered a lecture at the Tanner Lectures on Human Values at Princeton University1 under the title ‘The Lives of Animals’. It consisted of two short stories titled ‘The Philosophers and the Animals’ and ‘The Poets and the Animals’. Significantly, these are also the titles of the two lectures delivered within these stories by the protagonist, Elizabeth Costello, who is considered by many critics to be Coetzee’s fictional alter ego. Boundaries between literature and philosophy, fiction and non-fiction, as well as vocal presentation and written representation are unsettled in this work. The University Center for Human Values Series’ version of The Lives of Animals (Coetzee, 1999) is used in this study, as it adds significant value in its reflection of the original form and context of Coetzee’s work. This version of the text includes an introduction by Amy Gutmann2 and a section at the end titled Reflections (1999: 71), which consists of four scholarly essays written by academics3 in response to Coetzee’s multi-faceted and controversial work. The Lives of Animals is not only controversial due to its multi-layered, unconventional form(s), but also its content, which unsettles boundaries in its equally unconventional arguments about animals. Coetzee brings dominant Western discourses surrounding animals and human-animal relations under scrutiny and encourages a rethinking of normative and rigid constructs which he reveals as radically problematic. In relation to the title, The Lives of Animals, ‘animals’ is a term that, in common usage, reduces all creatures that are not human into one category. It also insinuates that humans are not animals.4 This conception thereby

1 The Tanner Lectures on Human Values is a multiversity lecture series in the humanities. 2 A professor at Princeton University, and founding director of the University Center for Human Values. 3 These academics and their responses are discussed in chapter two of this study. 4 As Derrida affirms, the hierarchical human-animal dichotomy has acted to uphold essentialist accounts of species difference, while homogenizing a multitude of species heterogeneity under the word ‘animal’ (2008: 31-32). 1

‘others’ the animal. Since the emergence of modern Western philosophy, and specifically that of Descartes, “individual consciousness has been taken as the privileged centre of identity while ‘the other’ is seen as an epistemological problem, or as an inferior, reduced, or negated form of the ‘same’” (Castle, 2011: 1). In this study, the term ‘other’ is used according to this characterisation, which involves the marginalisation of all beings excluded from, and subordinated by, a central construct and standard of ‘human’.5 In light of this, the term ‘the animal’ used throughout this study refers to both human and other animals, resisting a rigid human-animal ideological divide and the denial that humans are, in fact, animals. Thus, my reading of The Lives of Animals includes the inter-related lives of all animals, human and nonhuman.6 Such a reading of the text encompasses the life of the human protagonist, Elizabeth Costello.7 The two linked stories that make up the text are about the visit of Elizabeth, a well- known Australian novelist, to the prestigious Appleton College to deliver “the annual Gates Lecture” and a seminar in the literature department (1999: 16). Her topic in these lectures is the animal, specifically the (mis)representation and (mis)treatment of nonhuman animals by humans. She criticises the way nonhuman animals have been and are systematically mistreated by humans not only literally, but particularly by the philosophers and the poets who misrepresent them. In other words, she focuses on ideology and representation, which she sees as lying at the root of what she calls a “crime of stupefying proportions” (1999: 69) against nonhuman animals in contemporary societies. This ‘crime’ is in the form of the mass and systematic cruelty involved in nonhuman animal commodification, which has reached an all- time high in contemporary societies. Though Elizabeth is wary of all human representation of the nonhuman animal, she particularly and controversially rejects philosophy as a way of studying and relating to the nonhuman animal. She specifically denounces dualistic conceptions of human-animal relations, revealing the ideological disconnections inherent in such philosophy. Rather, she proposes literature as a means of developing what she calls the “sympathetic imagination” (1999: 35), which she says is what is lacking in the attitudes towards nonhuman animals and their mass suffering in contemporary societies. The sympathetic imagination is a kind of

5 It is explained in my theoretical framework that this conception does not disregard the significant role the theory of othering has on race-relations, but rather seeks to avoid re-instating exclusionary, hierarchal conceptions in terms of human-animal relations. 6 While I am aware that the term ‘nonhuman animals’ is still reductive, I use it as a way of making a necessary distinction in the context of this study, while avoiding clumsiness or lengthy descriptions. 7 In this sense, such a reading correlates with Cora Diamond’s, in which she asserts that the title includes “the wounded [human] animal that the story has as its central character” (2008: 48). 2 empathy felt through imagining oneself as the other by re-imagining the other rather as another, or what Elizabeth calls “the ‘another’” (1999: 35). Ironically, Elizabeth shows and receives little empathy in the text, as other characters struggle to relate or connect to her as a fellow human being. To add to this irony, though the work is titled The Lives of Animals, Coetzee refuses to represent the nonhuman animal in the text, which consists only of human characters. This study argues that these narrative disconnections are deliberate and thought-provoking moves by Coetzee, who plays on irony and uncertainty throughout the text. The multi-faceted form and context of Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals reflects the complexity of its content. In the text, Coetzee points out the inevitable limitations of representations of the nonhuman animal by humans, refusing to attempt his own representation of them. He uses limitation in his representations as a means to challenge authority. Bell notes this in his assertion that just as “Kant established the power of human reason by defining its limits, so Coetzee affirms a deed and a form of power through his insistence on limitation” (2013: 33). This ‘power’ derived from exposing the limitations of a system through the (mis)use of that very system is exemplified in various ways in the text’s content and form. In light of this, the following study examines Coetzee’s deliberate staging of these limitations as a means to bring them to light, and also as a reflection of the impossibility of perfection or living up to ideals. However, it also seeks to establish affirmative connections in the text that harbour value for positively developing human-animal relations. Thus, this study focuses on (dis)connections surrounding both the conception of the animal, and actual human- animal relations (or lack of), as represented in the text. It argues the need for alternative, imaginative interventions into human-animal relations. A posthumanist8 reading is proposed as resonating with Coetzee’s alternative intervention and the re-imagination of the animal that it creates a space for. My specific posthumanist reading incorporates postcolonial and ecofeminist elements, as well as the notion of receptivity,9 and seeks to identify (dis)connections in the text from this distinctive constellation of perspectives. Through this framework, this study explores the complexities of form and content and how they are

8 My use of the term ‘posthumanism’ in this study correlates with that of Cary Wolfe’s. In his book, What is Posthumanism? (2009), his objective is to find ways to push human analysis beyond its inherent anthropocentrism. Wolfe states: “[p]osthumanism in my sense isn’t posthuman at all – in the sense of being ‘after’ our embodiment has been transcended – but is only posthumanist, in the sense that it opposes the fantasies of disembodiment and autonomy, inherited from humanism itself. […] Posthumanism names a historical moment in which the decentering of the human by its imbrication in technical, medical, informatic, and economic networks is increasingly impossible to ignore, a historical development that points toward the necessity of new theoretical paradigms” (2009: xv-xvi). 9 These terms and perspectives are explained in the theoretical framework section of this study as they require more space than this introduction can offer. 3 intertwined, investigating the role of literature and the imagination in reconceptualising and thus re-imagining the animal. Chapter one seeks to clarify this study before an analysis of the text takes place, which is argued as necessary with this multi-faceted and controversial work. The theoretical framework, which is outlined in this chapter, requires its own in-depth discussion, for it involves a broad approach which necessitates clarification. The first section of this chapter attempts to situate The Lives of Animals by providing a brief overview of some seminal work on the animal in philosophy and literature. With this background and context in mind, the text is proposed as a considerable and unique contribution to the field of human-animal relations due to its alternative approach. The second section of this chapter provides a discussion of the critical reception of The Lives of Animals. It shows that criticism of the text is immense in scope and diversity, but that there is very little posthumanist criticism in comparison to other readings, perhaps due to posthumanism’s fairly recent emergence in philosophy and literature. Lastly, the theoretical framework is provided in a discussion of this study’s posthumanist reading of Coetzee’s text. The Lives of Animals does not commit to any specific discourse, but challenges authority through bringing dominant human(ist) constructs of human and animal under scrutiny. Thus, a posthumanist reading of the text is proposed as resonating with the text, which asks one to be cognisant of preconceptions, categories and dualist thought, but to be open to the possibilities of using the imagination to rethink the animal. Important links are made between posthumanism and postcolonialism, and it is argued that it is important to acknowledge postcolonial concerns in a holistic reading of Coetzee’s text. Chapter two focuses on the multi-layered intricacies of representation which make The Lives of Animals such a complex work, exploring the potential effects of this on reception and response. It argues that the text’s content cannot be explored without first addressing its original context and the significance of the mode(s) in which it is/was (re)presented. The elements of representation studied include the original context of the work, mode(s) of communication, genre(s), the relation of the text to the author, and the effect of these elements on reception and response. The first section of this chapter explores Coetzee’s experimental representation and unsettling of categorical boundaries which, as is shown, is inseparable from the text’s commentary on human-animal relations and its effectiveness. Section two discusses Coetzee’s relation to The Lives of Animals, which is particularly complex due to the text’s unsettling of genre boundaries, and the fact that there is controversy surrounding whether the text consists of Coetzee’s personal views or is purely a fictional representation. Lastly, the multi-layered responses within and to The Lives of Animals are discussed. It is proposed that Coetzee pre- 4 empts certain elements of response in his own representation of response to Elizabeth in the narrative. This play with response by Coetzee is linked to the notion of receptivity in this section, which includes reader-response encounters. Chapter three discusses the disconnections in The Lives of Animals. It highlights the contradictory polarisations represented within text, and how they serve as a means of challenging and subverting dominant and traditional dualist conceptions by representing unconventional and thus thought-provoking alternatives. Elizabeth approaches the animal from the polar end of the ideological divide, centralising nonhuman animals, feeling and imagination as opposed to humans, reason and rationality. Thus, Elizabeth’s limitations as a protagonist are also discussed, revealing her partial reinstatement of these disconnections. It is argued that this deliberate staging of dualistic contradictions exposes a tendency for multi-faceted matters to be approached dualistically, but also reveals significant ways in which such inconsistencies might be addressed. The first section of this chapter focuses on the ways in which The Lives of Animals critiques the dualist human-animal ideological divide which it represents as underlying and maintaining the mass and cruel commodification of nonhuman animals in contemporary societies. The second section explores the text’s representation of the relation between reason and feeling, and how this is relevant to human-animal relations. Lastly, the text’s representation of an ideological disconnection between rationality and imagination is investigated as pointing towards a less rigid approach to their roles and relations, specifically with regards to the animal. Although The Lives of Animals is built on significant uncertainties and disconnections, the space for re-imagination that it creates involves establishing affirmative connections. This study argues that the uncertainty surrounding the form and content of the text propels readers to form their own thoughts and opinions, and perhaps to reflect on human-animal relations in new and unforeseen ways. Thus, the last chapter explores and establishes connections in the text, specifically between human and animal, rationality and feeling, and reality and imagination, through re-imagining rigid and dualist representations. Making these connections, as will be shown, depends on a reader’s personal reception. The first section of chapter four focuses on the relation between human and animal represented in the text, establishing underlying connections between Elizabeth and the animal. The next section discusses interconnection in the text, focusing on the interconnection between rationality and feeling, and how this relates to interconnection between human and nonhuman animals. Lastly, the third section of this chapter explores the potential for imaginative realities in the text. This includes deconstructing the ideological disconnections between reality and imagination, and 5 human and nonhuman animal, and proposing imaginative literature as a valuable and realistic means of positively developing human-animal relations. Ultimately, this study seeks to bring alternative, imaginative ways of approaching human-animal relations to light through a receptive, posthumanist reading of a text which demands a re-imagination of the animal. In light of this, the next chapter will outline my approach in aiming for such a reading, and how it contributes to re-imagining the animal in Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals.

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Chapter One: Studying The Lives of Animals – Situation, Reception and Theory

1.1. Introduction

The Lives of Animals has garnered a vast array of critical academic perspectives, some of which are addressed in this chapter. Chapter one of this study seeks to situate The Lives of Animals as a literary work in the field of human-animal relations before a close textual analysis ensues. This is achieved by contextualising it and discussing other work in human-animal relations that can be linked to the text. The critical reception of the text is also discussed to this end, as well as to support my theoretical approach discussed at the end of this chapter. Both The Lives of Animals and posthumanism are complex, controversial subjects surrounded by broad perspectives. In light of this, chapter one serves as a way of clarifying this study and its approach, providing a background and the way forward in studying The Lives of Animals. Section 1.2 of this chapter seeks to situate The Lives of Animals by providing an overview of some seminal work on the animal in philosophy and literature and contextualising the text. It begins with a general discussion of the subject of human-animal relations, followed by an outline of different forms of nonhuman animal writing, which are linked directly to The Lives of Animals. Using these established approaches as a point of departure, the text is proposed as a considerable and unique literary contribution to the field of human-animal relations due to its multi-facted, alternative approach. Section 1.3 provides an outline of the critical reception of The Lives of Animals. Most of the text’s criticism is focused on modern and contemporary Western philosophical discourses that Coetzee has referred to, or that seem to underlie his characters’ arguments. There has not been a substantial body of posthumanist criticism of The Lives of Animals in comparison to other readings, perhaps due to its relatively recent emergence in human-animal relations in philosophy and literature in the last few decades. Although The Lives of Animals deliberately avoids labels or committing itself to a specific theoretical discourse, it challenges dominant conceptions of the nonhuman animal through bringing the construct of the ‘human’ under scrutiny. In section 1.4, a posthumanist reading is proposed as a lens which encourages a rethinking of preconceptions and a receptive, inclusive analysis of the text and its arguments about human-animal relations. This study’s reading of the text involves elements of postcolonial and ecofeminist thought, which are shown to be inseparable from its posthumanist approach to re-imagining the animal in The Lives of Animals.

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1.2. Situating The Lives of Animals

Concern about the animal, and specifically about human attitudes towards and (mis)treatment of nonhuman animals, is a primary focus of most of Coetzee’s more recent work,10 though it is apparent in his earlier work as well. This section provides a brief overview of some seminal work on the animal in philosophy and literature that is linked directly to the arguments in the text in attempt to situate The Lives of Animals. It begins with a general discussion of the subject of human-animal relations, followed by an outline of different forms of nonhuman animal writing made reference to in the text. Lastly, The Lives of Animals is proposed as a considerable and unique contribution to the field of human-animal relations. Nonhuman animals have always been and will always be a central aspect of the human world. However, the nature of human-animal relations, and the ways in which nonhuman animals have been regarded, have depended on how humans perceive ourselves and our place in the world throughout history. Nonhuman animals and their moral status have taken a backseat in dominant modern culture, philosophy and literature in terms of being taken seriously, or as seriously, as humans. This can largely be attributed to various forms and degrees of anthropocentrism. Anthropocentrism is a broad term that, simply speaking, is a worldview based on the idea of the human as centre, and every other form of life as marginal. It is “the view that human beings are primary and central in the order of things” (Steiner, 2010: 1). It is a term that has been problematised, as it can be argued that a human cannot escape anthropocentrism, since being human in itself inevitably means having an anthropocentric perception. However, this study is concerned less with human perception of surroundings and more with human perception of what it means to be human, and how this subsequently affects perception, specifically of nonhuman animals. An anthropocentric worldview that centralises the human as above and separate from the rest of the (reduced) nonhuman world is an affliction of thought that affects all societies on some level. It is a basic belief embedded in many Western religions and philosophies11 based on hierarchical, dualistic thinking. Such systems have been used to rationalise the instrumentalisation12 of nonhuman entities, including nonhuman animals. This disconnects the human from nonhuman animals ideologically, spiritually, and literally. In their study, Literature, Animals, Environment, Huggan and Tiffin define

10 Including his essay Meat Country (1995), parts of his autobiography Boyhood (1997), and his novels Disgrace (1999) and Elizabeth Costello (2003). 11 As Steiner notes, “[a]nthropocentric arguments have long exercised their influence on thinking about animals in the history of Western philosophy” (2010: 2). 12 Instrumental approaches reduce and objectify the nonhuman animal, treating them, “with few exceptions, as property, exempt from ethical concern except of most marginal and precarious kinds” (Plumwood, 2002: 9). 8 anthropocentrism as “absolute prioritisation of one’s own species’ interests over those of the silenced majority” (2010: 4) and explore literary works that investigate this phenomenon. This study uses the term anthropocentrism in the sense described above. The increasing attention given to nonhuman animals and their moral status in recent decades can largely be attributed to the recognition of the ecological and moral crisis facing humanity. This has brought about a rapid shift in what Shapiro and DeMello call the “general anthropocentrism within academia” (2010: 308), and the rise of ecocritical13 movements across disciplinary boundaries. The problematic nature of dualist logic, based on conceptions such as human versus animal, and culture versus nature, is evident in the current global ecological crises. This crisis involves not only environmental factors such as climate change and nonhuman animal endangerment and extinction, but also nonhuman animal commodification and cruelty. Significantly, these elements are intimately intertwined, and many of the practices of mass nonhuman animal commodification, such as factory farming, have been criticized by public health professionals14 and nonhuman advocates.15 Coetzee’s text compares the “drug-testing laboratories, [...] factory farms, [and] abattoirs” (1999: 21) that billions of nonhuman animals are imprisoned, mistreated and killed in each day to the Holocaust, a highly controversial analogy that is discussed later on in this study. Animal cruelty is a global phenomenon, apparent in various forms and degrees. It is this moral crisis that is brought under scrutiny in The Lives of Animals, which Elizabeth links to the sympathetic imagination, or the lack there of. Through Elizabeth, the text illuminates the effects of human practices on the individual lives of nonhuman animals, rather than the broader, more “platonic” (1999: 53) ecological factors. It is the former kind of nonhuman animal writing that is discussed in this section. The moral implications of the numerous forms of mistreatment of nonhuman animals in contemporary societies, linked to their inferior status as a result of anthropocentric culture, have been investigated by philosophers across varying discourses, especially in the last few decades. Leading philosophers and have written

13 Ecocriticism, “as a theoretical discourse, negotiates between the human and the nonhuman worlds” (Glotfelty and Fromm 1996: xix). 14 For example, mass factory farming, which “nearly 65 billion” nonhuman animals are subjected to worldwide, and which produces most store-bought meat, has been found to be “the major cause of man-made global warming” (EcoWatch, 2013). Moreover, it “has polluted streams and rivers; it has injected massive amounts of antibiotics and other drugs into the public food supply, resulting in serious health risks” (Carson, 1997: 7). 15 PETA (People for the ethical treatment of animals), the largest animal rights organization of our time, fight against the inhumane treatment of billions of nonhuman animals, taking place in the name of humans each day. 9 influential works on the subject from utilitarian16 and deontological17 approaches respectively, which will be discussed briefly further on. Singer is not mentioned in the main text of The Lives of Animals. However, he is the co-editor, along with Regan, of Animal Rights and Human Obligations (1976), a collection of articles that Coetzee refers to often in the footnotes of The Lives of Animals. Moreover, Singer is one of the scholarly respondents that contributes to the Reflections section of The Lives of Animals, a section discussed alongside other elements of the text’s form, such as the footnotes, in chapter two. Singer’s views on the animal correlate with many of the arguments made in Coetzee’s text based on the inadequacy of dominant Western ideology and the tradition of Western philosophers for their .18 Although Coetzee does not use the term speciesism specifically, the text critiques anthropocentric moral exclusion based on a criterion of rationality that marginalise nonhuman animals. Despite these similarities, Coetzee’s Elizabeth does not make use of Singer’s moral and philosophical authority in her lectures on the animal. Perhaps this is because, apart from her rejection of philosophy in developing human-animal relations, Singer’s utilitarianism is itself based on a system of rationalism that is instrumentalist. From a utilitarian point of view, the suffering of a nonhuman animal can be rationalised according to how many people benefit from it. In his study of Coetzee in relation to established animal rights philosophers, Northover notes that from a utilitarian position, “the suffering of the animal could be outweighed by the greater happiness the death of the animal will bring to the numerous people who eat it, […] since it is the sum total of pleasure and pain of all those concerned that is important rather than [the] individual” (2009: 13). Therefore, the suffering of a nonhuman animal could be outweighed by the human benefit of consumption and enjoyment. On the other hand, Regan (2004: 208) bases his approach on the deontological, or Kantian, value of receptacles, which focuses on and values the lives of the individual nonhuman animals as sentient beings. This approach correlates closely with the views expressed by Elizabeth. However, for Kant, ultimate value in the universe only exists in the good will of rational, autonomous ‘persons’, and only humans are capable of ‘personhood’, and thus deserving of moral consideration (Kant, 1964: 61). Perhaps this speciesist origin is why Regan is only mentioned once briefly in the main text

16 Though there are many varieties of this approach, “utilitarianism is generally held to be the view that the morally right action is the action that produces the most good. […] [T]he theory is a form of consequentialism: the right action is understood entirely in terms of consequences produced” (Driver, 2014: 114). 17“‘Deontology’ is commonly used in moral philosophy to refer to nonconsequentialist moral conceptions. The most distinctive feature of deontological moral conceptions is that they define fundamental principles of right and justice in terms other than taking the most effective means to promote maximum good” (Freeman, 2001: 391). 18 A term coined by Richard Ryder in 1970 referring to (human) prejudice against nonhuman animals which Wolfe says involves “the ethical acceptability of the systematic ‘noncriminal putting to death’ of animals based solely on their species” (2003: 7). 10

(1999: 22). Like Singer, the theories Regan uses in his argument for animal rights can and have been used to promote and legitimate the exploitation and suffering of nonhuman animals in the name of humans. Though these theories have been adapted by Regan and Singer and are well intentioned, what Coetzee’s text proposes is the need for a complete rethinking of the fundamental ideology that underlies dominant and anthropocentric understandings of the animal, rather than a re-instatement of problematic ones. In reaction to dominant Western philosophical traditions and established ethical principles (evidently dominated by Western males), ecofeminism emerged as an alternative discourse which challenges such ideology. According to Gaard, “ecofeminism's basic premise is that the ideology which authorizes oppressions such as those based on race, class, gender, sexuality, physical abilities, and species is the same ideology which sanctions the oppression of nature” (1993: 1). Renowned ecofeminist is referred to in the main text of The Lives of Animals (1999, 22), and her essay Persons and Non-persons (1985) is cited in the footnotes of the text (1999: 61). Although her work is not discussed in any detail in the text, there are many correlations between her and Elizabeth’s views surrounding the animal. In fact, of all the philosophers Coetzee makes reference to in the text, Midgely’s views most closely resonate with Elizabeth’s. Midgley is critical of the reductionistic view of rational human versus irrational animal and is apprehensive about appealing to fundamental moral principles in promoting animal rights (Midgley, 2002). She rejects the dualist notion of human versus animal and sentiment versus reason, which stems from a certain humanist,19 anthropocentric understanding of rationality. Similarly, Coetzee’s text exposes and resists dualist, humanist thinking. As Northover notes: “one thing [Midgley] [and] [Elizabeth] would presumably agree [on] is the limitations of a certain narrow form of humanism, insofar as it is merely anthropocentric and pits reason against our ‘animal passions’ to sympathise with other animals” (2009: 19). Like Midgely, Elizabeth rejects anthropocentric reason and challenges the rationalist denial of sentiment through proposing the development of the sympathetic imagination. In light of this, ecofeminist approaches have found theories on animal rights such as Regan and Singer’s problematic, arguing that they reproduce a certain rationalistic discourse and deny the significance of sentiment.20 This is where Elizabeth’s gender becomes significant.

19 ‘Humanism’, in this study, refers to Western humanist thought: “a broad category of ethical philosophies that affirm the dignity and worth of all people, based on the ability to determine right and wrong by appeal to universal human qualities – particularly rationality” (Wolfe, 2010: xi, my emphasis). 20 For example, Kheel (1985) challenges such approaches to animal rights arguing that they maintain traditional patriarchal systems of thought which underlie the oppression of women and nonhuman animals. 11

She specifically denounces anthropocentric reason rooted in the thought of male Western philosophers such as Aristotle, Descartes, Saint Thomas Aquinas and Kant. This is because, as Steiner notes, these traditional Western philosophers are all linked “by an underlying logic: that all and only human beings are worthy of moral consideration, because all and only human beings are rational” (2010: 2). Although Coetzee does not overtly mention feminism, Elizabeth’s challenge to philosophy relates to its foundational core, which rests on a history of Western patriarchy and an analytic21 tradition of rationalism and anthropocentrism. There are significant correlations between ecofeminist approaches and recent continental philosophy22 branches of nonhuman animal studies (for example Wolfe, 2003; Calarco and Atterton, 2004; Derrida, 2008), and specifically posthumanist approaches. Posthumanism is a broad term which will be discussed and related to The Lives of Animals in section 1.4 of this chapter, but can be simplified as an approach that “critiques the universalist posture of the idea of ‘Man’ as the alleged ‘measure of all things’” (Braidotti, 2017: 9). It destabilizes the idea that the human is the ultimate source of value in the world. Nonhuman animal writing from this approach is critical of animal rights theories such as Regan’s and Singer’s. Philosophical nonhuman animal writing, although integral in Coetzee’s text, is referenced in a marginal way in comparison to literary nonhuman animal writing. Most philosophers are mentioned very briefly and usually in a footnote, and if they are actually being discussed in the main text they are being critiqued. Literary authors, on the other hand, are discussed in more detail. The author Elizabeth utilises most prominently in her lectures is Franz Kafka. Although she refers to other literary nonhuman animal writers throughout her lectures, such as poets Rainer Maria Rilke and Ted Hughes, they are not dealt with as extensively as Kafka. Elizabeth promotes the reading of nonhuman animal literature in which nonhuman animals are not simply metaphors or symbols for humans and human behaviour, but rather the subjects of the writing, representing their nonhuman animal selves. Her interpretation of Kafka’s “A Report to an Academy” (1917) is that of the latter kind of nonhuman animal literature. As will be discussed in further chapters, she reads the short story about “an educated

21 Analytic philosophy became dominant in Western countries at the beginning of the 20th century, and makes use of conceptual analysis, formal logic, and is more closely related to the sciences and mathematics, than to the humanities (McGinn, 2002: xi). 22The term continental was originally used to refer to philosophy outside the analytic philosophy movement. However, “there are several ways of defining the category, and even more ways of trying to distinguish it from its counterpart, ‘analytic philosophy’” (Calarco & Atterton, 2004: 7). In this study, the fact that “the notion that humanist and anthropocentric conceptions of subjectivity must be called into question is one of the fundamental convictions of many people working on animals in Continental philosophy” (2004: 7) is what is relevant. 12 ape, Red Peter, who stands before the members of a learned society telling the story of his life- of his ascent from beast to something approaching man” (1999: 18) as a story about the ape itself, not “as an allegory of Kafka the Jew performing for Gentiles” (1999: 18). Although not obvious in all of his individual works, Kafka is one of few writers in whose overall literary works nonhuman animals play such a central role. Nonhuman and cross- human creatures are present in all of his longer stories and in about half of his shorter ones, as well as in his letters and diary entries (Yarri, 2010: 269). His understanding of nonhuman animals and what it means to be human is complex, thought-provoking and, as will be explored in chapter three of this study, can be read as posthumanist in various ways. Though most of Kafka’s nonhuman animal figures can be read as symbolic of humans and human concerns, they also invite readings which challenge both this convention and that of anthropocentric human identity. In this way, as in many others, Kafka was arguably ‘ahead of his time’. Goodboy (2016:3) argues that Kafka “anticipated central contentions of the new thinking about animals which has emerged over the past generation, [challenged] accepted notions of human identity by foregrounding our animality, and [drew] attention to the agency of animals”. This approach aligns with various contemporary nonhuman animal writers who can be read as or who define themselves as posthumanist thinkers, and who recognise Kafka’s significance as a predecessor of such thinking.23 Coetzee himself “refers to Kafka as a pioneer in the literary depiction of and philosophical reflection on the human-animal continuum” (Goodboy, 2016: 7). This points to why the literary writer and the nonhuman animal that Elizabeth identifies with most closely in the text are Kafka and his fictional ape, Red Peter. Elizabeth’s contention that “of all men Kafka is the most insecure in his humanity” (1999: 30-31) expresses her own disconcertedness about humans whose humanity she questions due to their direct or indirect mistreatment of others, specifically nonhuman animals, and their apparent indifference to it. In terms of nonhuman animal literature, poetry is a focal point of Elizabeth’s discussion. She focuses on two poems in her lectures: Ted Hughes’ ‘The Jaguar’ and Rainer Maria Rilke’s ‘The Panther’. Both poets wrote extensively on nonhuman animals, which they saw as means of expression beyond the limitations of ‘humanness’. Hughes uses nonhuman animal imagery to challenge the dualist human-animal divide, expose the conformist nature of human society,

23 For example: Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s ‘Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature’ (1975) uses Kafka as a basal figure in unsettling the dualistic human-animal divide. Jacques Derrida references Kafka and his “vast zoopoetics”, as “something that […] solicits attention, endlessly and from a novel perspective” in his ‘The Animal That Therefore I Am’ (Derrida, 1997: 374). Coetzee, apart from his literary references to Kafka and his nonhuman animals, also wrote an academic study of one of his nonhuman animal stories, ‘The Burrow’ (Coetzee, 1981). 13 and reveal the beauty in the purity of the nonhuman animal. His “remedy for healing the split between man and nature, is through romantic primitivism which with its biocentric principles allows man to develop correspondence with nature” (Ghosh, 2018: 276). He wrote against anthropocentrism in being ‘biocentric’, considering all forms of human and nonhuman life as having intrinsic value. Rilke on the other hand was a Modernist poet. He expresses in his poetry the idea of the superiority of nonhuman animals to humans,24 and “his sense that the promise of language is inherently untenable, which prompts him to look to animals for a form of expression that might still be ‘true to life’” (Driscoll, 2014: 33). The idea of human limitation in both these poets’ work resonates with Elizabeth’s own recognition of the limitations and shortcomings of ‘humanity’, specifically in relation to the nonhuman animal. However, what confuses Elizabeth’s seemingly clear polemical argument between literature and philosophy is her critique of the poems that she discusses. She highlights the anthropocentrism in a certain kind of poetry that uses nonhuman animals as symbols for human concerns and traits: “In that kind of poetry, [...] animals stand for human qualities: the lion for courage, the owl for wisdom, and so forth. Even in Rilke’s poem the panther is there as a stand- in for something else” (1999: 50). Moreover, she reveals how the poet can create a dualist relationship between active human writer and passive nonhuman animal, accusing Rilke of this in his poem about a caged panther in the zoo. She says that in this way, “Hughes is writing against Rilke. He uses the same staging in the zoo, but it is the crowd for a change that stands mesmerized” (1999: 50) with the jaguar. In this way, Hughes subverts the active human gazing upon the passive nonhuman animal, writing from a more animalistic perspective. Elizabeth states that “it is the kind of poetry ... that does not try to find an idea in the animal, that is not about the animal, but is instead the record of an engagement with him” (1999: 51). In other words, Hughes’ poetic engagement with the nonhuman animal is not abstractly projective of human perception onto the nonhuman animal. In this sense, his poetry can be read as posthumanist,25 receptive to the nonhuman animal being while remaining aware of the limits of anthropocentric perception. However, Elizabeth sees Hughes as a primitivist: an essentially ecological, platonic approach to the individual lives of nonhuman animals as part of an ecosystem. For her, the “irony is a terrible one… [as] [a]nimals are not believers in ecology”

24 In his ‘Eighth Elegy’, Rilke names the nonhuman animal’s consciousness as superior to that of humans “because the animal’s being is typified by an innate alertness to corporeal existence so complete that it takes in death without separating to from aliveness” (Keane, 2013). 25 See Gifford (2011) for a posthumanist reading of Ted Hughes’ nonhuman animal poetry. 14

(1999: 54). This critique of Hughes puts him in the same position as Rilke: guilty of treating nonhuman animals as emblematic of something else. As can be deduced from the above discussion of nonhuman animal writing made reference to in the text, Coetzee attempts to unearth and critique sources of authority, both philosophical and literary. He makes no attempt to use the moral and intellectual authority of ecofeminist or continental philosophers, for example, whose arguments could have strengthened Elizabeth’s.26 When Coetzee does appeal to the authority of nonhuman animal writers, he reads them in unconventional and original ways, thereby questioning any kind of ideological authority. This openness to interpretation and refusal to commit to any certainty or perspective will be proposed as a deliberate and potentially effective means of provoking the reader to question established discourses and preconceptions and form their own thoughts and opinions. This, in effect, creates the potential for new and unpredictable connections to be established in relation to the animal. The Lives of Animals contributes to and resonates with the constantly changing nature of Western thinking about the animal, which forces us “to recognize the limits of old conceptions of ourselves and animals and to seek new conceptions that adequately reflect our experience of humanity and animality” (Steiner, 2010: 1). It is a form of literature creating a space in which imaginative philosophical connections can be made through an exposition of (dis)connections and the limitations of humanity and our constructs. This, in conjunction with its unusual form, renders it a unique contribution to the field of human-animal relations. In terms of form, Coetzee brings set categories of genre and representation into question, mirroring the way that he questions categories surrounding the animal in the text. It is argued in the next chapter that it is the experimental interaction between content and form that makes Coetzee’s work on the animal so complex, and what McKay calls the “most profound attempt in contemporary writing to answer the challenge of ” (2010: 67). The imaginative, experimental form of Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals is fundamental in demanding that its readers re-imagine what it might mean to be a human or nonhuman animal before tackling the subject of nonhuman animal ethics. This section has situated The Lives of Animals and argued that it is a unique contribution to the subject of human-animal relations. Coetzee destabilises dominant and anthropocentric discourses surrounding nonhuman animals and ethics through crossing and unsettling

26 Such as the discussed ecofeminist Mary Midgely (1985), or philosophers Jacques Derrida (2008), and Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (1998), for instance. 15 boundaries of representation in the content and form of his text. He reveals the ideological disconnections surrounding the animal, its consequences, and the significant and largely overlooked role imaginative literature can and ought to play in positively developing human- animal relations through representation.

1.3. Critical Reception

There is a vast body of critical work on The Lives of Animals, as there is on Coetzee’s body of work as a whole. Although criticism of the text is broad in scope and diversity, it has predominantly been preoccupied with modern and contemporary Western philosophical discourses that Coetzee has made reference to, or that seem to underlie his characters’ arguments. The philosophies of Friedrich Nietzsche and Jacques Derrida (see Derek Attridge, 2004b); George Hegel and (see Laurence Wright, 2008); Emmanuel Levinas (see Mike Marais, 2001); Jacques Lacan (see Michela Canepari-Labib, 2005); Maurice Blanchot (see Sam Durrant, 2006) and Foucault (see Michael Kochin, 2007) have been applied or linked to the text in diverse and novel ways. Generally speaking, there seems to be a split in the criticism of The Lives of Animals with regards to what the text represents. Many critics treat the text as about actual nonhuman animals in terms of animal rights,27 whereas others treat it purely as a representation of human concerns through nonhuman animal imagery.28 In response to the former kind of reading, Kompridis argues that “one would think that a book whose title points to a concern with the lives of animals might check the temptation to treat it strictly as a fictionalized discourse on the rights of nonhuman animals” (2014: 205 my emphasis). This study approaches the text as a representation of the complexities surrounding the inter-related lives, rather than the rights, of human and nonhuman animals. As Kompridis notes, the intertwined complexity of human- animal relations and experience represented in the text is reduced to some extent by preconceived animal rights discourses which critics use to define and evaluate the text. On the other hand, though, the possible contributions to developing alternative conceptions of the

27E.g.: Anton Leist and Peter Singer (2010), as well as Guttman’s and Singer’s responses included in the Reflections on the text (1999). 28E.g.: Marjorie Garber, one of the scholars whose responses to the text is included in the Reflections section, asks: “What does the emphasis on animals tell us about people” (1999: 75) and “we thought John Coetzee was talking about animals. Could it be, however, that all along he was really asking, ‘What is the value of literature?’” (1999: 84). Louis Tremaine argues that Coetzee’s “personal interest in and respect for the conscious lives of animals are quite genuine, but the insight these passages hold for a reader of Coetzee’s novels bears more importantly on human experience” (2003: 598). Michael Bell even suggests that nonhuman animals in the text are “a Trojan horse designed to deconstruct the nature of conviction in relation to all fundamental life issues” (2006: 176). 16 nonhuman animal and potentially better human-animal relations through this literary representation should not be disregarded in a reading which focalises the human and human concerns. Such perspectives evince how a dualistic conception of the animal affects the reading of Coetzee’s text, which has been categorised by various critics as either about animal rights, or about humans. Laura Wright, however, offers a more balanced and holistic reading, arguing that “Coetzee’s text is on the one hand about our treatment of animals, both human and nonhuman, but it is also a rhetorical exercise of the sympathetic imagination and the role that imagining plays in breaking down binary distinctions” (2006: 212). She acknowledges the text as being about human-animal relations, while pointing out the significance of the representational and rhetorical nature of the literary text. This study aligns itself with such a reading, highlighting how the human and literary elements are inseparable from the nonhuman animal element. Although the concept of and encounters with the other in The Lives of Animals has been extensively covered, such as in Attridge’s J.M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading (2004b) and The Singularity of Literature (2004c), the concept of the sympathetic imagination does not seem to have received as much attention. When it has, it has been in relation to established animal rights and ethics, such as in Wendy Woodward’s The Animal Gaze – Animal Subjectivities in Southern African Narratives (2008) and Anton Leist and Peter Singer’s J.M. Coetzee and Ethics (2010). These works focus on Elizabeth’s philosophical (or lack thereof) stance, rather than on her core approach: the limitlessness of the “sympathetic imagination” (1999: 35). Durrant (2006) and Marais (2001) have investigated the sympathetic imagination in their criticism of Coetzee’s text, but remain sceptical of Elizabeth’s ideas even while acknowledging the potential of her approach. In their use of philosophy from Levinas and Derrida, they assert that Coetzee repeatedly offers up the ‘sympathetic imagination’ as a way of approaching nonhuman animals, but that in doing so he exposes how limited it actually is. Brenda Deen Schildgen offers an alternative approach, and praises Elizabeth’s “ethical imperative” (2003: 324) to utilise the sympathetic imagination in engaging with nonhuman animals. Schildgen expresses her faith in the potential for literature to promote this possibility, arguing that “[p]oetic language, particularly metaphor, can make us ‘feel’, the precise capability that modern philosophers have suggested aligns humans with animals” and that “metaphor offers us this insight – to perceive, think, feel, even perhaps be or become like another” (2003: 331). She believes that poetics has the potential to bridge the gaps left by 17 rationalist philosophical discourses, some of which have proven to be inadequate and harmful to human-animal relations. While this study aligns itself with perspectives such as Schildgen’s to some extent, criticism such as Durrant’s and Marais’ is important in acknowledging the contradictions, ironies and intellectual ambiguities in the text. Overall, there has not been a substantial body of posthumanist criticism of The Lives of Animals in comparison to other readings. The few studies and articles found to have utilised posthumanist criticism or related posthumanism to the text in some way have been used to strengthen my arguments in certain sections of this study.

1.4. A Posthumanist Reading

The Lives of Animals challenges anthropocentric conceptions of the nonhuman animal through questioning what it means to be human. In this section, posthumanism is offered as a recent mode of thought that can be used in a critical reading of the text. Firstly, a concise outline of posthumanism in relation to the animal and human-animal relations is provided, making reference to theorists such as Jacques Derrida, Cary Wolfe, Matthew Calarco and Val Plumwood. This is followed by a discussion of the links between posthumanism and postcolonialism, and how they are inseparable in this study’s reading of the text.29 Lastly, a ‘posthumanist reading’ is defined in terms of what it involves, and how it resonates with re- imagining the animal in Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals. As has been discussed, Elizabeth rejects philosophy in favour of literature when it comes to nonhuman animal writing and the sympathetic imagination. Ironically, Elizabeth dualistically dismisses philosophy in her passionate denunciation of dualist conceptions of human versus animal. She believes that this philosophical (mis)representation of the animal has bled into contemporary society and that it underlies and maintains mass systematic nonhuman animal commodification and cruelty. In this way, Coetzee explores dualistic thought on multiple levels, revealing its limitations while acknowledging the difficulties and ironies involved in trying to combat it. Posthumanism is similarly concerned with dualistic thought. It interrupts and negotiates with dualities, questioning fundamental understandings in an attempt to model other structures of thought,30 rather than invoking nondualist thought, which risks

29 Cruelty to nonhuman animals is a universal phenomenon, as is anthropocentrism. A postcolonial analysis is not based on any idea of one culture as less anthropocentric than another, or a demonization of Western culture, but rather highlights linked systems of ‘othering’ that have justified the mistreatment of both humans and nonhuman animals. 30 As Wolfe asserts, posthumanism “points toward the necessity of new theoretical paradigms, a new mode of thought that comes after the cultural repressions and fantasies, the philosophical protocols and evasions, of humanism as a historically specific phenomenon” (2010: xv-xvi). 18 falling into the very dualistic trap it rejects.31 This study reads Elizabeth’s own falling into this trap as a deliberate and self-conscious irony that is fundamental to Coetzee’s text, while recognising her suffering and passionate convictions as a desperate call for new modes of thought. Posthumanism, like The Live of Animals, is difficult to define. It is, simply speaking, a perspective that challenges an exclusionary humanism that reduces agency and value to the human and represses the human’s animal origins. Posthumanism has emerged as problems within and arguably caused by a certain humanist discourse, which rests on hierarchical dichotomies such as human/animal, culture/nature, have become harder to ignore.32 In light of this, posthumanist theorists Herbrechter and Callas argue that “humanism, which across various and sometimes mutually contradictory instantiations has very arguably remained the dominant Western ideology of the past 500 years, is in crisis” (2010: 4). Posthumanist thinking involves an ‘un-learning’ of learnt, exclusionary conceptions of what it means to be a human or nonhuman animal, and acknowledges that, as Elizabeth states, “we are all animals” (1999: 33). As Twine notes, the “reconceptualization and decentring of the human is inseparable from attempts to resolve both anthropocentric hubris and its exclusionary histories” (Twine, 2010: 12). From such a perspective, a re-imagination of the other must begin with a re-imagination of the human(ist) self. However, posthumanism is not necessarily opposed to all principles of humanism. Rather, it destabilises human(ism’s) self-elevation and its separation from animal and, as is exemplified in chapter four of this study, draws on thought from various past and alternative approaches to human-animal relations. As Twine asserts, posthumanism “taps into a historical lineage of ideas that have served to decentre the human” and “emphasize[s] the ways in which we have never really been this ‘human’ that sees itself as separate from other species” (2010: 12).33 From this perspective, humans have never really been ‘human’, and nonhuman animals have never really been ‘animal’. In posthumanist discourse, both ‘human’ and ‘animal’ are terms to deconstruct and reconstruct. The deconstruction of such fundamental modes of understanding calls for re-imagination that goes beyond established discourses.

31 See Sedgwick & Adam (2003) for an in-depth discussion on re-instating dualism through invoking the ‘nondualis’, in which they argue that “it’s far easier to deprecate the confounding, tendenituous effects of binary modes of thinking […] than it is to articulate or model other structures of thought. Even to invoke nondualis, as plenty of Buddhist sutras point out, is to tumble right into this dualistic trap” (2003: 1-2). 32 Problems such as the interrelated ecological, environmental, and mass animal cruelty issues mentioned in section 1.2 of this chapter. 33 Derrida notes that in Western history these ideas include the Copernican revolution, the Darwinian recapture of the human to the animal kingdom, and the Freudian questioning of a human subject in control of itself (2003: 138- 139). 19

Such an approach also points to the problem of traditional ethics discourses that rest on anthropocentric criteria as a means to define and value nonhuman animals (Calarco, 2008: 8- 9; Wolfe, 2003: 10). For example, it is argued that seminal animal rights theorists, such as the earlier discussed Peter Singer and Tom Regan, put too much emphasis on similarity defined in human terms. From this perspective, similarity to humans serves as a base from which to argue for the ethical treatment of nonhuman animals.34 Such an approach suggests that nonhuman animals deserve to be treated ethically because they display certain ‘human’ characteristics. On the other hand, there are arguments for animal rights based primarily on nonhuman animals’ lack of human characteristics and capability, arguing for their protection from an approach that is similar to the argument for that of disabled people. This approach can and has been said to imply that nonhuman animals are somehow lacking or burdenous, oppressing them because of their difference to what is regarded as the ideal form of ‘human’. 35 In The Lives of Animals, Elizabeth is highly critical of such approaches. She mocks the idea of basing the importance of a “being’s” suffering on a discourse determining how human or nonhuman that being is, calling it “profoundly anthropocentric” (1999: 62). She, like Twine, believes that “a conception of the ethical requires a deeper critique of anthropocentrism that also operationalizes a broader relational ontology that further undermines a resilient human- animal dualism” (Twine, 2010: 27). Elizabeth asserts that a nonhuman animal should be valued in its own right, instead of treating its similarity or difference to humans as a constraint. She highlights, rather than denies, the alterity of different species. In this way, her views correlate with Derrida’s posthumanist speculations in The Animal That I Therefore Am (2008),36 in which he deconstructs the human(ist) subject while emphasizing the undeniable alterity of the nonhuman animal to the human. However, while Elizabeth acknowledges it, she does not focus on alterity like Derrida, and emphasizes a shared, interconnected existence, calling for “an acceptance that we are all of one kind, one nature” (1999: 61). This approach resonates with posthumanist ecofeminism,37 which is utilised in chapters three and four of this study in relation to Elizabeth’s arguments about human-animal interconnection.

34 See Donovan and Adams (2007: 5-6) and Wolfe (2009: 272). 35 For example, in Beasts of Burden (2011), Sunaura Taylor discusses the intersectionality of disability and animality, arguing that the same ideology, ‘ableism’, oppresses both groups. 36 Derrida's story of his pet cat staring at his naked human body deconstructs the human-animal dualism by subverting power relations through expressing the power of the nonhuman animal's "bottomless gaze", which exposes "the abyssal limit of the human" in the “absolute alterity” of the nonhuman animal (2008: 12). 37 Posthumanist ecofeminism rests on the same anti-anthropocentric perspectives as posthumanism but focuses specifically on the role of patriarchy in the othering and subordination of both women and nonhuman animals. For example, see Plumwood (2001) and Gaard (1993; 2017). 20

As has been shown, seminal animal rights theories and philosophers have come under scrutiny recently, particularly in the last two decades. The Lives of Animals was a significant contribution to this criticism. Coetzee’s text resonates with Wolfe’s assertions that “just because we study nonhuman animals does not mean that we are not continuing to be humanist – and therefore, by definition, anthropocentric”, for though one’s “external disciplinarity is posthumanist in taking seriously the existence and ethical stakes of nonhuman beings (in that sense, it questions anthropocentrism), your internal disciplinarity may remain humanist to the core” (2009: 272, 568). In her lectures, Elizabeth challenges human supremacism based on anthropocentrism. She rejects the idea that the rational human subject, “a central tenet of humanism before and after the Enlightenment” (Faivre, 2012: 3), holds a superiority based upon reason and the human’s ability to reason. She reveals the anthropocentric limitations of such human constructs, specifically when it comes to dealing with and studying nonhuman animals, and how this links to the (lack of) sympathetic imagination for nonhuman animals. The above-mentioned constructs revolve around a fundamental othering of that which is different to the central construct. In this way, it is important in the reading of The Lives of Animals to acknowledge postcolonial concerns.38 This is not only in terms of contextual elements, such as Coetzee being South African or the novel being set in Australia,39 but more so the recognition that postcolonial and nonhuman animal studies are concerned with the same fundamental questions surrounding self and other.40 Both anthropocentric and colonial constructions of ‘human’ or ‘white’ rely on the othering of ‘nonhuman’ animals or ‘non-white’ humans respectively. Coetzee’s other 1999 novel, Disgrace, as compared to his other works, most obviously combines (post)colonial and (post)humanist concerns.41 The Lives of Animals might not appear to be a postcolonial narrative, as it focuses primarily on philosophy, literature and the animal. However, Elizabeth’s lectures address (albeit discreetly) colonisation, which she says “has entailed slaughtering and enslaving a race of divine or else divinely created beings” (1999: 58). She scrutinizes it and its after effects on the lives of

38 Postcolonial in the sense that “if there exists today such a thing called ‘the postcolonial condition’, it is no longer sufficient to understand it as that which plagues those regions of the world that have endured colonial rule; ‘postcolonial’ signals not a set of geopolitical regions and their peoples, but names our own historical moment” (Borrel, 2009: 209). 39 Australia, like South Africa, was colonised by European settlers, making it a postcolonial region. Significantly, Coetzee emigrated to Australia in 2002 and currently resides there. 40 The sensitivity of discussing nonhuman animal oppression alongside that of marginalised human groups is discussed in detail in chapter three of this study, arguing that they cannot be equated, but that any hope to dissolve either requires an approach that embraces their interconnectedness. 41 This novel reveals the extent to which ‘humanity’ and ‘humanitarianism’ are intertwined with the culture of patriarchy. Its reception was controversial due to the likening of human and nonhuman animal situations in South Africa, among other things. 21 humans and nonhuman animals, who she regards as equally ‘divine’. Moreover, what various critics label the ‘hybrid’42 form of the text might be read as postcolonial in its challenge to Western categories of genre and mode.43 For instance, in their postcolonial reading of the text, DeLoughrey and Handley argue that its “hybrid form functions as a critique of anthropocentrism that is best understood as postcolonial” (2011: 206). In crossing boundaries of representation, The Lives of Animals defies rigid western distinctions between fiction and philosophy, and oral and literary modes. A postcolonial interpretation also serves as a way of countering what may appear to be a purely Western set of concerns, highlighting the underlying links between colonial and humanist thought. Significantly, Coetzee, a white male, signifies the ultimate oppressor of the other in postcolonial theory, as well as the dominant figure in Western animal rights philosophy. His criticism of both forms of dominance in the text involves the attempt to break from one’s own dominant culture and position, and, “as Coetzee argues, requires a means of expression that is neither African nor European” (Borrel, 2009: 61). Much like the hybrid form of his text, Coetzee unsettles boundaries of expression in his position of being a white, male, South African, postcolonial author with a female protagonist that gives lectures on nonhuman animals. This suggests that white postcolonial writing can contribute to human-animal relations, and vice versa, for as Borrel argues in her postcolonial study of The Lives of Animals, it is “out of these histories of European species and cultural relations that white postcolonial cultures emerge, necessarily inheriting from them but also challenging their principles” by “decenter[ing] the anthropos” and revealing that “anthropocentrism, humanism and imperialism are more than parallels or similes for one another; their histories are interwoven narratives of self and other” (2009: 16). In this sense, posthumanism and postcolonialism are not only correlational, but as is discussed further in chapter three of this study, also inseparable in many ways. Postcolonial ecocritical theory44 (such as Huggan and Tiffin, 2010; DeLoughrey and Handley, 2011) is used in analysing elements of Coetzee’s text that suggest that a re-

42 A hybrid literary text (or cross-genre text) is a genre in literature that blends themes and elements from two or more different genres (Ousby, 1995: 367). 43 Postcolonial scholars challenge the Eurocentric approach that dualistically separates orality from text, and denies any relationship between philosophy, myth and cosmology based on the characterisation of philosophy as a rational and critical inquiry, while myth and cosmology are taken as belonging to the purely fictional realm of stories, folktales etc. (Okpewho, 1983: 44). 44 There has been a recent merging of post-colonial and ecocritical analysis in literature which, according to Tiffin and Huggen, has “over the last decade or so, given greater visibility to the ecological dimensions of earlier postcolonial analyses, [and the] need for a broadly materialist understanding of the changing relationship between people, animals and the environment” (2010:19). 22 imagination of the animal might “play its part in the undoing of the epistemological hierarchies and boundaries – nowhere more apparent than under historical and/or contemporary conditions of colonialism – that have set humans against other animals” (Huggan & Tiffin, 2010: 23). This is discussed in chapter three alongside Elizabeth’s controversial human-animal analogies.45 Chapter three makes use of ecofeminist Val Plumwood’s critical framework, which “articulates an implicit posthumanism and respect for the animacy of all earth others” (Gaard, 2017: xvi). It utilises her notion of “hegemonic centrism”, the self-privileging view that she sees as underlying colonialism, racism, sexism, and speciesism, which are all interlinked, reconfirming and supportive of each other (Plumwood, 2001: 4). In light of this, it is argued that however controversial Elizabeth’s analogies are, the systems that are brought under scrutiny have a common ideological base: humanist reason.46 The suggestion by Philip Armstrong in The Postcolonial Animal (2002) that the fields of postcolonial and nonhuman animal studies might form an alliance based on the common antagonist of humanism, recognises the complementarity of these approaches. This study aligns itself with the recognition that both discourses are reactions to an exclusionary form of reason. However, like Armstrong’s article, my approach is not an attempt to equate or even compare the two fields, which have different contexts and complexities. Rather it is a recognition of the ideological ‘centrisms’ that lie at the foundation of the marginalisation of the other, human and nonhuman. It is a proposal of posthumanism as an approach that seeks to destabilize such ideology from the root rather than treating its symptomatic manifestations with the same pattern of thought. In view of these correlations, this study agrees with Singh’s postcolonial argument about a posthumanist reading of The Lives of Animals, which she says goes further in unsettling what have now become the “conventions of postcolonial thought by insisting upon a rethinking of the animal” (2013: 471). This requires a re-evaluation of the defensive stance against an inclusive analysis of human and nonhuman animal marginalisation and suffering.47 Both postcolonial and nonhuman animal studies have largely remained limited by their “political parameters” in this sense, “mired by an unimaginative mode of comparison, forgetting the productive potential of thinking about the animality of all humans and thereby abandoning the urgent need to redress the human/animal distinction that makes possible the subjugation of all

45 Such as comparing the cruelty of factory farming to the Holocaust and slavery. 46 As Wolfe, citing Derrida, asserts: “the humanist concept of subjectivity is inseparable from the discourse and institution of a speciesism which relies on the tacit acceptance that the full transcendence to the human requires the sacrifice of the animal and the animalistic, which in turn makes possible a symbolic economy in which we can engage in a ‘noncriminal putting to death’, as Derrida phrases it, not only of animals but of humans as well by marking them as animal” (1998: 39). 47 See Wolfe (2007: 6). 23 beings” (Singh, 2013: 477). Such ‘unimaginative’ thinking reinstates and preserves a problematic system of thought based on dualist distinctions and prevents a holistic approach to addressing oppression as a global, multispecies phenomenon. In this way, Coetzee’s text reveals and brings into question the underlying logic of exclusionary oppression and how this logic seeps through into the very discourses that have emerged to counteract it. In light of this, a posthumanist reading which involves aspects of postcolonialism will be offered in different forms and to different degrees throughout this study, revealing how these intertwined approaches might be complementary, and how they can be linked to the sympathetic imagination. The phrase ‘posthumanist reading’ in this study refers to a means of reading a text that can be analysed from a posthumanist perspective, rather than a term used to categorise specific texts under a ‘posthumanist’ label. This resonates closely with Huggan and Tiffin’s argument about ‘postcolonial ecocriticism’: “[it] needs to be understood as a particular way of reading, rather than a specific corpus of literary and other cultural texts” (2010: 13). Moreover, the posthumanist lens of this study, including its postcolonial elements, seeks to establish affirmative connections in the text through first analysing Coetzee’s imaginative expositions of real disconnections surrounding the animal in terms of discourse and morality. This way of reading, like Huggan and Tiffin argue, “is morally attuned to the continuing abuses of authority that operate in humanity’s name” and “performs an advocacy function both in relation to the real world(s) it inhabits and to the imaginary spaces it opens up for contemplation of how the real world might be transformed” (2010: 13). As is argued in this study, Coetzee’s literary text opens up an imaginary space in which real world problems surrounding the animal can be rethought in an imaginative way. It pushes its readers (whether successful or unsuccessful) to think beyond their preconceived constraints, creating a possibility for transformation in its readers and their attitudes and behaviour in an extra-textual sense. As can be deduced from the above paragraph, and in accordance with Coetzee’s text and posthumanist theory, a ‘posthumanist reading’ is difficult to definitively articulate. Of the research done for this study, it has been found that Herbrechter and Callas provide the clearest summary of a posthumanist reading, and one which resonates with this study:

It is an expression of ‘care’ that is critical of the ideology that has been pre-empting the most fundamental questioning – and not the annihilation – of the human, as a species, as a construction, as an ‘invention,’ as a ‘myth.’ In reading the humanism inscribed within texts that at the same time explore humanism’s limits, a critical posthumanist approach aims to open up possibilities for alternatives to the constraints of humanism as a system of values. It is not theoretical sophistry claim[ing] that the care of a posthumanist reading lies in the exposure of the strategies by which human(ist) integrity is conscripted. (2008: 121)

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The assertion that a posthumanist reading is not a ‘theoretical sophistry’ constructed to disprove humanist paradigms, or ‘annihilate’ the human, is important. Although posthumanism is simply another human construction or discourse, it is one that brings our entire concept of humanity and our principles into question. It is also an imaginative, speculative approach that promotes care for others (human and nonhuman) based on our unique but shared existence, without romanticising it. In this sense, posthumanism might be considered as the closest one might come to resonating with what comes across as Coetzee’s ‘approachless’ approach to the animal, in which his protagonist criticises human(ist) reason, and outright rejects its proscriptive “principles” (1999: 37). Rather, she proposes: “kindness to animals – and here I use the word kindness in its full sense, as an acceptance that we are all of one kind, one nature” (1999: 61). Elizabeth, in her flawed and rather confusing way, is asking for care based on a recognition of human-animal solidarity, and the limitations of humans and their traditional approaches to the animal. In light of the issue of limitations though, posthumanism has been a controversial emergence in the world of philosophy. Questions around what a posthumanist reading would do or be have quite rightly come up in response to what appears to be limited if not impossible task. As Herbrechter and Callas (2008: 96) ask:

[H]ow [can] one […] go about critically reading assumptions and values about the human, […] how is it possible to read as if one were not human, or at least from a position of analytical detachment in relation to the humanity – whether ‘essential’ or ‘constructed’ – that informs and determines the very position from which it is read? What would be the nature of such an ‘unnatural’ reading?

Part of posthumanism’s postmodern48 existence is its paradoxical recognition of its own limitations. However, posthumanism asks us to push ourselves beyond what our ‘constructed’ preconceptions have conditioned us to believe is the limit to our understandings and engagements, and create new ones, while simultaneously recognising our inherent, ‘essential’ human limitations. Wolfe argues about posthumanism that it is “analogous to Jean-François Lyotard’s paradoxical rendering of the postmodern”, but that it “points toward the necessity of new theoretical paradigms (but also thrusts them on us)” which are based upon a “decentering of the human” (2010: xv). Similarly, the paradox of Coetzee’s text involves the apparent postmodern recognition of the impossibility of transcending our own ‘humanness’. This is

48 Postmodernism is a broad movement that developed in the mid to late 20th century and that marked a departure from modernism. While encompassing a wide variety of approaches, it is generally defined by an attitude of skepticism, irony, or rejection toward the ideologies and assumptions of modernism (Duignan, 2018). 25 apparent in Elizabeth’s rejection of metanarratives49 regarding the animal, which resonates with Lyotard’s notion of the ‘postmodern’ as an “incredulity toward metanarratives” (1979: xxv). However, in accordance with this study’s approach, The Lives of Animals correlates more closely with ecofeminist Cynthia Willet’s argument about posthumanism, which she says explores problems and questions that have “traditionally been confined within narrowly circumscribed disciplinary boundaries”, and proposes imaginative, empathetic engagements that “venture beyond modern and postmodern binaries” (2014: ii, 7). This study utilises posthumanist thought in a way which reverberates with Coetzee’s text, which asks one to be cognisant of preconceptions, categories and dualist thought, but to be open to the possibilities of using the imagination to rethink the animal. In this way, a posthumanist reading of The Lives of Animals requires a renegotiation – indeed, a re-imagination – of otherness, in order to “open your heart” (1999: 37) and tap into, at least partly, a sympathetic imagination not sorely limited by anthropocentrism. This involves reading “against one’s self, against one’s own deep-seated self-understanding as a member or even representative of a certain ‘species’, […] to sympathise and empathise with a position that troubles and undoes identity while struggling to reassert what is familiar and defining” (Herbrechter and Callas, 2008: 96). This study investigates the human/animal, self/other duality through Coetzee’s exploration of the limits of sympathising with any other animal, human or nonhuman, that Elizabeth calls “the ‘another’” (1999: 35). At the same time, the possibilities of what Elizabeth calls the sympathetic imagination are explored, arguing that its potential is inhibited by ideological disconnections. Significantly, a posthumanist reading of the text involves a certain approach to both the text itself, and the human and nonhuman animals that the text imagines. The breakdown of dualism is multi-dimensional in Coetzee’s narrative, based on an interconnected and inseparable relation between content and form. Before engaging fully with the actual arguments made within the text, the text’s experimental form and representation require discussion. The next chapter highlights the text’s typically postmodern features and play on rhetoric, while linking it to a posthumanist reading. This unconventional, sometimes contradictory text is built on uncertainty and dislocation in both its content and form. It requires receptivity50 from readers that Elizabeth’s fictional audience do not display, either to Elizabeth, her lectures, or

49 Lyotard highlights the increasing skepticism of the postmodern condition toward the totalizing nature of metanarratives and their reliance on some form of "transcendent and universal truth” (1979: xxv). 50 Receptivity can be described as “a practical capacity and source of normativity regarding attitude and reception, and is discussed and developed in various ways by writers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Stanley Cavell and Martin Heidegger, among others” (Kompridis, 2006: 199). 26 the nonhuman animals of which she speaks. The notion of receptivity, and the different rhetorical elements which have an effect on it, will be explored as a fundamental aspect of the text’s characterisation and message. In this study, receptivity is shown to be integral to an imaginative, posthumanist reading. The notion of receptivity has both ethical and ontological dimensions. It involves a mode of listening and "normative response" to ethical demands arising outside of the self, "a way by which we might become more attuned to our pre-reflective understanding of the world, to our inherited ontologies" (Kompridis, 2006: 199).51 This ontological approach to ethics involves an acute awareness of the effects that our pre-conceptions or paradigms may have on our reception of new or alternative practices or ideas. It has the potential to generate “non- instrumental” possibilities for social change through self-transformation and “normative responsiveness that is both spontaneous and reflective” (Kompridis, 2014: 218). This includes reception of information that may challenge or destabilize pre-existing knowledge, which can often be met with forms of cognitive dissonance.52 Importantly though, Kompridis states that to “speak of receptivity here is not to speak of passivity or openness: receptivity is not reducible to either of these”, which would “identify it with mindless submission to anyone or anything that comes along” (2014: 218). This reductive conception of receptivity is the very reason that the term itself is treated with scepticism, as it suggests naivety and incredulousness, an inability to make critical judgements, and excessive openness. Kompridis asserts that this is an unrealistic conception “precisely because a mind to which everything mattered equally would be a mind to which nothing mattered. In short, nothing we could recognize as a human mind” (2014: 218). Essentially, the human mind cannot accept everything it receives, which is why psychological mechanisms such as cognitive dissonance form. However, being aware of this element of one’s own mind, and practicing reflectiveness, does not require an ‘equal’ or nonrational approach to all sources of information. In his book From Enlightenment to Receptivity Michael Slote argues that the focus on receptivity understands the value and necessity of rationality, but more particularly

51 For a more systematic and elaborate account of Kompridis’ conception of receptivity, see: ‘Receptivity, Possibility and Democratic Politics’, in Ethics & Global Politics (2011: 255-72); ‘Romanticism’, in Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Literature (2009: 247-70); and Critique and Disclosure: Critical Theory between Past and Future (2006: 199-223) 52 In A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance (1957), Leon Festinger proposed that human beings strive for internal psychological consistency in order to mentally function in the real world, as a person who experiences internal inconsistency tends to become psychologically uncomfortable. Therefore, people are motivated to reduce the cognitive dissonance, which occurs when confronted with new information that contradicts existing beliefs, ideals, and values, by actively avoiding situations and contradictory information that are likely to increase the magnitude of the cognitive dissonance. 27 enables one to see what is wrong with an overemphasis on rationality both in terms of ethics and epistemology (2013: x). Ultimately, receptivity encourages progressive thinking based on a stance of humility and transformation. In this way, receptivity can be directly linked to posthumanism and the kind of attitude Wolfe sees as necessary for “living in a world so newly, and differently, inhabited” (2010: 47), which requires awareness of our own limitations as humans in the form of respect and humility. From such a perspective,

thinking becomes not active apprehension (prehensile grasping of the world by our concepts, as it were) but an act of reception, a reception in which passivity – because it consists of a capacity to be affected by the world in manifold ways that cannot be contained by the choked bottleneck of thought as philosophy has traditionally conceived it – becomes, paradoxically, a maximally active passivity. (2010: 242)

This fine balance between passive acceptance and active apprehension is fundamental to Coetzee’s text, which critiques what Wolfe calls the ‘chocked bottleneck’ of thought according to traditional philosophy while simultaneously exposing the difficulty involved in making and being open to spontaneous claims or convictions. Coetzee’s text is a means to unsettle readers who perceive the animal, literature and philosophy in conventional ways, and proposes the power of the imagination in rethinking, and thus re-imagining, the animal. This study seeks to establish affirmative connections within the text through first identifying and exploring dualist disconnections, such as between human and animal, rationality and feeling, and reality and imagination. This invites a posthumanist re- imagination of the animal in the text: that which begins with a re-imagination of ourselves and our constructs and conventions.

1.5. Conclusion

In situating The Lives of Animals, this chapter has shown that seminal philosophical contributions to nonhuman animal studies and human-animal relations have been critiqued for maintaining fundamental and problematic humanist, dualist reason. Critical philosophical approaches since then have questioned such discourse, and “have laboured to underscore the way in which academic knowledge production itself is not immune from anthropocentrism” (Twine, 2010: 27). Attempts to avoid falling back into such humanist thinking have generally come from posthumanist, ecofeminist and animal studies philosophers “who have turned to continental philosophy” (2010: 27). A posthumanist reading of the text is suggested as offering an approach based on receptivity and a speculative rather than sceptical attitude towards alternative and imaginative ideas about human-animal relations represented in the text.

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In the same way as posthumanist philosopher Cary Wolfe, Coetzee’s text expresses the need for dominant human(ist) constructions, including that of the ‘human’, to be brought into question before there can be a rethinking of the nonhuman animal. A significant element of the text’s value lies in its apparent postmodern refusal to adhere to or add on to generic, conventional regulations. Rather, it creates the space for a re-imagination of preconceptions which might spur unforeseen and self-reflective readings based on faculties other than established or conventional modes of reason, theory and disciplinary boundaries. This chapter has discussed how the text “pushes postcolonial thinking beyond its own disciplinary limits by insisting upon a ceaseless awareness of the animal – both literal and figurative – as that which perpetually signals the violence of everyday life" (Singh, 2013: 481). Elizabeth questions why the immense cruelty to and suffering of nonhuman animals that takes place on a mass scale in contemporary societies is supported by a mass “willed ignorance” (1999: 20), and brings anthropocentric reasoning and representation under scrutiny, linking it to other forms of oppression and othering in such a way that it challenges hierarchisation. At the same time, Coetzee portrays the difficulty and limitations of any form of representation of the nonhuman animal, as well as that of enacting political change. The rest of this study investigates the limitations of the ‘sympathetic imagination’ while also exploring its potential and proposing its value as an alternative approach to the subject of human-animal relations. The next chapter focuses on the multi-faceted representation in The Lives of Animals and its effects on receptivity, for as is argued, it is imperative that the form and context of the work are discussed before an analysis of its content take place.

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Chapter Two: Coetzee and Unsettling Boundaries of (Re)presentation

2.1. Introduction

Coetzee unsettles multiple boundaries of representation with The Lives of Animals in terms of both content and form. The text consists of two lectures that are represented in two short stories and presented by the fictional Elizabeth Costello, who, as is discussed, is believed by various critics to be Coetzee’s alter ego. These two fictional stories, which consist of Elizabeth, her family members and her audience, were originally presented by Coetzee at the Tanner Lectures to a real audience. This chapter investigates the multi-layered intricacies of representation which make The Lives of Animals such a complex work, exploring its potential effects on reception. These elements of representation include the original context of the work, genre(s), mode(s) of communication, the relation of the text to the author, and the reception of and responses to these elements. This chapter demonstrates that the arguments made in the text cannot be analysed without an analysis of these elements. It seeks to exemplify how the ideas (re)presented in the work are inseparable from the form and representational complexities of the text. It argues that Coetzee opens a space for a re-imagination of the animal through bringing human(ist) constructions and practices into question. It focuses on elements of representation and rhetoric, which are shown to be fundamental to Coetzee’s project. Section 2.2 of this chapter explores The Lives of Animals in terms of Coetzee’s experimental (re)presentation, revealing the significance of the intricate relation between form and content. Speech and writing, and imagination and reality become intertwined in Coetzee’s unsettling of categorical boundaries of (re)presentation. The multimodal nature of the work is discussed along with its metafictional aspects, which are interconnected in their significance and effect on the topic of human-animal relations addressed in the text. Section 2.3 of this chapter discusses Coetzee’s relation to The Lives of Animals, which is particularly complex due to its metafictional form. Coetzee’s personal views surrounding the animal and human-animal relations are analysed in relation to The Lives of Animals and its characters, highlighting the significance and effect of Coetzee’s relation to his text. Lastly, the multi-layered responses within and to The Lives of Animals are discussed in section 2.4 of this chapter. The multileveled nature of metafiction is reflected in the multileveled nature of response to and within the text. It is proposed that Coetzee pre-empts certain elements of response in his metafictional representation of responses to Elizabeth in the text. Coetzee’s multileveled play with response and what it may reflect about receptivity is explored, specifically with regards to the topic of human-animal relations.

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2.2. Coetzee’s Multimodal Metafiction

In The Lives of Animals, speech and writing, and imagination and reality become intertwined. The following section explores the ways in which the text crosses these categorical boundaries of (re)presentation and its effects on its content. Firstly, the multimodal nature of the text is discussed, including its use of speech and text, and fiction and non-fiction in a way that blurs boundaries between them. Secondly, the metafictional aspects of the text are investigated. The uncertainty around whether it is a work purely of imagination, or a work of real critical enquiry, due to its multi-layered and reflexive critique within a fictional framework, confuses boundaries of (re)presentation. Lastly, the significance and the potential effects of this multimodal, metafictional approach to the topic of the animal are discussed in relation to rhetoric and its possible impact on reception. The Lives of Animals is a textual fiction made up of two lectures that contain non- fictional criticism, which were originally presented as a real lecture in an academic setting, to a real audience. As Giovanelli notes, it is “caught up in a middle ground between sheer fiction and the public domain of intellectuals, academy and writers” (2011: 65). Moreover, it is caught up in a middle ground between speech and writing, making it a multimodal work on more than one level. In the most basic sense, multimodality is a theory of communication and social semiotics.53 There are a number of different approaches to multimodality,54 which describes communication practices in terms of textual, auditory, linguistic, spatial, and visual modes used to get messages across (Lutkewitte, 2014: iv). The collective use of some or all of these modes contributes to rhetorical situations, or opportunities for increasing an audience's reception of concepts or ideas. Multimodality can change and enhance the way an audience perceives information by utilising different modes simultaneously, thereby increasing the modes of reception. With The Lives of Animals, Coetzee utilises the modes of oral linguistic communication, which involves an aural reception by an audience, not only at the Tanner Lectures, but also in his own fictional depiction of lectures within a textual work. He not only utilises but, as will be shown, comments on multiple modes of communication within the text, expressing (often through lack of expression) the limitations of human language, specifically with regards to the animal.

53 Semiotics is the study of meaning-making, or sign process (semiosis). Social semiotics is a branch of this field of study which explores human signifying practices within certain cultural and social circumstances, and which tries to explain meaningful communication as a social practice. The role of semiotics in literary criticism is to establish key theoretical models that can provide insights so that the connection of the texts to broader meaning structures within literary practices can be better understood (Caesar, 1999: i-iv). 54 See Bateman et al. (2017) for a more in-depth discussion of all these modes. 31

Generally speaking, the humanist discourse proposes human language and reason as what separates human from nonhuman animals, but also what makes us more advanced than other animals. In the text, Elizabeth rejects this discourse. She highlights the limitations of human language, and mocks the idea that “the universe is built upon reason”, asserting that on the “contrary [...] reason is the being of a certain spectrum of human thinking [...] for, seen from a being who is alien to it, reason is simply a vast tautology” (1999: 23). In this way, she challenges the authority of human reason and language when it comes to human-animal relations, rather viewing each animal in its own right, taking contingency into account, and recognising the limitations of projecting human discourse onto nonhuman animals. This resonates strongly with posthumanist thought, which seeks to redefine humanity’s place in the world through destabilising human supremacism and its limited, projective discourses about nonhuman animals.55 Based on such a perspective, human language lags behind in its ability to express new and less anthropocentric ways of thinking, such as posthumanist speculations, for instance. Derrida’s posthumanist argument maintains that language can only reflect human interpretive activity and is thus restrictive. However, he believes that its mediative role, most significantly writing, is different, and has the potential to go beyond certain restrictions of speech (1976: 6- 26). Rational Western approaches to language have attributed originality and centre to speech, whereas writing has been relegated to a secondary or unoriginal status and considered as a mere representation of the spoken word. This is what Derrida calls the “logocentric” (1976: 98) tradition of Western thought. Derrida deconstructs this dualistic claim, and maintains that writing holds a value that differs from speech in that it is primarily an interpretive exercise enmeshed in the "play" of interpretation that takes primacy over presuppositions involved in “speech” (1976, 6-26). Significantly, in an interview with David Attwell, Coetzee boldly asserts his preferential view of writing and its potentially emancipatory and truth telling power over that of speech: “Speech is not a fount of truth but a pale and provisional version of writing” (Coetzee & Attwell, 1992: 66). Speech is ephemeral, and limited to the moment of the act, whereas writing is an unending and dynamic conversation in which interpretation can be adapted. Coetzee utilises the paradoxes and limitations of language through intertwining the mediative tool of writing with speech in his fictionally framed lecture(s). In this way, he

55 For example, see Donovan and Adams (2007) and Wolfe (2009), who propose a mode of philosophy, ethics, and interpretation that rejects the classic humanist divisions of self and other, human and animal, and redefine humanity's place in the world on a continuum in which the ‘human’ is but one life form among many. 32 challenges the ‘presuppositions’ of speech through integrating the multimodal ‘play’ of interpretation. However, Coetzee does not idealise writing, and rather uses it to express (sometimes through a lack of expression) the limits of human language, specifically with regards to the animal and feeling. His representation of Elizabeth’s struggle to express what she desires to express is most clear in Elizabeth’s laments that she cannot put into words the feelings that she has regarding nonhuman animals and their (mis)treatment in society, such as: “when I think of the words, they seem so outrageous” (1999: 69). This perhaps reflects Coetzee’s own struggle to communicate in a way which adequately addresses his topic and expresses the way he feels about it. He conveys Elizabeth’s impossible position of trying to comprehend and express with established language and reason the limitations of both. This is shown through her own comments on the limitations of reason and language, but also her silences, sadness, body language, and general struggles to communicate her intended meaning.56 Elizabeth’s lack of clear answers, such as “I don’t know what I think” (1999: 45), points the fact that sometimes the ‘gaps’ in the text say more than the words do, and are their own mode of communication.

In terms of genre, multimodality also obscures an audience’s (or reader’s) concept of genre by creating grey areas out of what might have been perceived as black and white.57 Coetzee plays on the relation between imagination and reality with The Lives of Animals by blurring boundaries between fiction and nonfiction. He does this in a unique way, creating uncertainty about whether it is a critical, nonfictional essay represented in a fictional framework, or purely a work of fiction with fictional arguments, thereby breaking down both genres. As Bell asserts, Coetzee’s other works, despite their complexities, “are clearly definable as either fiction or discursive essay”, but The Lives of Animals is a “generic hybrid [...] that genuinely answers to each category and thereby succeeds in radically destabilizing both” (2006: 173). Cross-genre writing such as this offers opportunities for opening up debates and stimulating thought and discussion. Fredric Jameson (1975), among others, has highlighted the progressive elements in literature that defies genre expectations and provokes new ways of

56 This situation resonates closely with Julia Kristeva’s work on the ‘semiotic’ which, unlike the ‘symbolic’, is a way of being and communicating that lacks traditional structure and established meaning, and exists before and separate from symbolic conditioning, made up of cultural constructs (see Kristeva’s Desire in Language, 1980). Perumalil writes that the semiotic “is an emotional field, tied to the instincts, which dwells in the fissures and prosody of language rather than in the [symbolic] denotative meanings of words"(2009: 134). 57 See Bateman (2008) for an in-depth discussion on multimodality and genre, in which he uses linguistically- based analysis to show how different modes of expression together make up a document or presentation with a recognisable genre, how this can be experimented with to be made unrecognisable, and the effects of this on an audience’s reception. 33 thinking. Coetzee’s defiant literary work opens up a space for a progressive re-imagination of the animal, starting with our own human constructs and preconceptions. On another level, the split in genre between fiction and nonfiction within the text, both structurally and according to Elizabeth’s arguments, is an ironic way of unsettling boundaries of representation through exposing and commenting on the limitations and inconsistencies of such a dualistic perception. The two chapters that make up the text, titled ‘The Philosophers and the Animals’ and ‘The Poets and the Animals’, are interwoven with philosophy and poetics, or philosophical ‘non-fiction’ and literary ‘fiction’, despite their titles. Both chapters address nonfictional issues, specifically surrounding the (mis)treatment of nonhuman animals in society, within a fictional framework. In terms of Elizabeth’s two lectures, also titled ‘The Philosophers and the Animals’ and ‘The Poets and the Animals’, the interplay within and between them also suggests that fiction and nonfiction are often indistinguishable. For example, her first lecture, ‘The Philosophers and the Animals’, begins with a retelling of Franz Kafka's fictional story ‘Report to an Academy’ (1999: 18), while ‘The Poets and the Animals’ ends with an in-depth philosophical debate regarding “the whole long philosophical tradition” (1999: 67) surrounding the animal. In this way, the text’s hybridisation of literature and philosophy in its form is reflected ironically and subliminally in its content, in which Elizabeth relies on both to make her points. Coetzee’s multimodal hybridisation of oral, nonfictional academic address and fictional narrative writing in his (re)presentation at the Tanner Lectures, is mirrored by Elizabeth’s own unsettling and sometimes confusing presentations. This kind of literary experimentation is what postmodern theorists call ‘metafictional’ experimentation. The Lives of Animals is but one of the works in which Coetzee deliberately misleads his readers.58 It can and has been read as postmodern metafiction by many critics.59 In Linda Hutcheon’s Narcissistic Narrative: The Metafictional Paradox, metafiction is explained as “fiction about fiction – that is, fiction that includes within itself a commentary on its own narrative and/or linguistic identity” (Hutcheon, 1947: 2). Therefore, metafictional literature is a reflexive fictional work that incorporates a postmodern critique or shows awareness of its own composition, thereby defying dualistic boundaries of fiction and non-fiction. The original

58 His 2013 novel The Childhood of Jesus and its sequel, The Schooldays of Jesus (2016) are even more extreme examples of this. They seem to be elusive narrative spaces set up by Coetzee for asking universal questions but provide no answers. Tajiri asserts that Coetzee’s style in these works has “puzzled reviewers and critics with its curious elusiveness” (2016: 72). 59 For example, in the Reflections section of the text, Singer criticises Coetzee’s multi-modal metafictional representation in The Lives of Animals and infers that it is postmodernist game-playing (1999: 85). More positive critiques, such as Paula’s (2012: 8), acknowledge that as a “postmodern metafiction” The Lives of Animals “elucidates the context of production of its facts” and “also puts each argument into perspective”. 34 publication of The Lives of Animals in the Tanner series showcases this reflexivity, defiance and self-conscious critique in an ironic way. As Bell argues, it “preserves the impact of Coetzee’s multi-layered categorical challenge: when invited to give a discursive lecture, he presents a narrative fiction, [...] itself centrally concerned with the limits of a discourse conceived on a model of rational persuasion” (2013: 30). The ironic challenge to convention in the form and context of The Lives of Animals reflects its content and themes. In light of this, one could assume that Elizabeth, a famous novelist and a recurring character in Coetzee’s writing, stands for Coetzee, a famous novelist and philosopher, while the fictional “Appleton College” (1999: 15) to which she is invited to lecture may allude to Princeton University, where Coetzee himself originally presented The Lives of Animals. Derek Attridge, an academic and critic of Coetzee’s work who attended his 1997 lecture at the Tanner Lectures on Human Values, says that what “made the event in which we were participating all the more disquieting was our gradual realization that it was being mirrored, in a distorted representation, in the fiction itself” (2004a: 256). Moreover, in terms of genre and topic, Coetzee’s unexpected fictional (re)presentation of lectures on the animal, in a normatively non- fictional context dedicated to human values, connects him to Elizabeth, who also defies expectation and genre boundaries. Elizabeth’s presentations, which include non-fictional matters on the animal, defied her audience’s expectation of a lecture based on her (human) self and her fiction:

On the basis of her reputation as a novelist [...] [she] has been invited to Appleton to speak on any subject she elects; and she has responded by electing to speak, not about herself and her fiction, as her sponsors would no doubt like, but about a hobbyhorse of hers, animals. (1999: 16)

The language used by Elizabeth’s son here shows that the attitude of the audience to that which does not align with their expectation is not positive. His use of the word ‘hobbyhorse’ also indicates a level of patronization, both of Elizabeth and nonhuman animals. As is shown in further chapters, this lack of receptivity is in some ways linked to anthropocentricism, specifically in reaction to Elizabeth’s posthumanist arguments. This can be seen as Coetzee’s deliberate play with the audience and the reader, showing a kind of pre-emptive, metafictional awareness of a certain kind of reception. Although the characteristics of metafiction vary as widely as the techniques used within them, there are fundamental elements which underlie most metafictional literature. These are: examining fictional systems in a self-conscious manner; incorporating aspects of theory and criticism; creating biographies of imaginary writers; and presenting and discussing fictional works of an imaginary character (Currie, 1995: 2-4). The Lives of Animals, as has been shown,

35 examines ‘fictional systems’, and displays a ‘self-conscious’ commentary on the limits of speech and writing, and human constructs in general, specifically with regards to the animal. This is apparent in the text’s deliberate portrayal of Elizabeth’s own reinstatement of a kind of dualistic thinking (discussed further in chapter three of this study) despite her rejection of dualist conceptions of human-animal relations. In terms of ‘theory and criticism’, nonfictional criticism is applied through imaginary characters, particularly Elizabeth, throughout the text. Moreover, the paratextual60 elements of the text made up of footnotes, and the scholarly comments in the Reflections section, reflect and add to the text’s multifaceted metafictional form through further blurring boundaries between fiction and nonfictional criticism. Giovannelli notes this in her analysis of what she calls the “unsettling” work and says that “bearing witness to this [complexity] is the relevant place held by the paratextual sections in ‘The lives of animals’, comprising footnotes and scholars’ comments” (2011: 65). Lastly, in terms of discussing fictional writer’s ‘biographies’ and ‘works’, Elizabeth’s are discussed at various points in the text, but mainly when she is introduced to the reader or audience:

Elizabeth Costello is best known to the world for The House on Eccles Street (1969), a novel about Marion Bloom, wife of Leopold Bloom, which is nowadays spoken of in the same breath as The Golden Notebook and The Story of Christa T as path breaking feminist fiction. In the past decade there has grown up around her a small critical industry; there is even an Elizabeth Costello Newsletter, published out of Albuquerque, New Mexico. (1999:16)

Here, the metafictional play on imagination and reality are also present in the use of intertextuality. A metafictional text refers to itself but may also refer to other texts intertextually. Elizabeth’s novel The House on Eccles Street (1969) is a kind of ‘writing back’ to James Joyce’s Ulysses (1969), in which she writes from the perspective of Joyce’s female character, Marion Bloom (1999: 35). The two novels referred to alongside Elizabeth’s imaginary novel are real feminist works produced by real writers.61 Again there is the typical aspect of postmodernism in the uncertain relationship between texts and reality. The literary techniques discussed, and the relationships between modes of communication as well as between reality and imagination, lie at the foundation of The Lives of Animals’ purpose and effect. These elements form the core of the work’s contribution to the field of human-animal relations. As outlined in the introduction to this study, human animal

60 Paratexts are “those liminal devices and conventions, both within the book (peritext) and outside it (epitext), that mediate the book to the reader: titles and subtitles, pseudonyms, forewords, dedications, epigraphs, prefaces, intertitles, notes, epilogues, and afterwords – all those framing elements” (Genette, 1997: xviii). 61 Lessing, D. 1962. The Golden Notebook. New York: Simon and Schuster; Wolf, C. 1971. The Quest for Christa T. Christopher Middleton. (trans). London: Hutchinson. As is apparent, Coetzee slightly changes the title of Wolf’s novel, further adding to the complexity and uncertainty of his metafictional representations. 36 relations, and specifically nonhuman animal ethics, has become an important and growing part of various disciplines in recent times. However, as was also mentioned, seminal work on animal ethics has been in the field of philosophy and theory, and less so in more imaginative fields.62 As Aaltola notes, most of “animal ethics has been preoccupied with theory or principles” (2010: 119). In this way, rhetoric has seemingly been under acknowledged in this filed in the past, and Coetzee is commenting on this with his text. Aaltola argues that “this is where J.M. Coetzee becomes relevant”, as he presents “ethical views related to nonhuman animals, constantly underpinned by the issue of how to communicate such views to others” (2010: 119). The Lives of Animals goes beyond standard approaches to nonhuman animal ethics both in its challenge to established approaches and its opening up of a space for alternatives which involve not only a questioning of fixed ideas about the animal, but also how to get more posthumanist ideas about the animal across. The field of human-animal relations becomes inseparable from the issues of rhetoric and reception in the text. Elizabeth is an important part of this rhetoric and reception. She is a fictional character whose imaginary existence is narrated to the readers or audience. Ironically, her character and her position become more accessible to readers (or Coetzee’s audience) on a more personal level than if she were a real person in a real public setting. As Bell observes, in most instances, “public debate seeks quite properly to observe protocols of impersonality and evidence” (2013: 43). However, through his fictional representation of Elizabeth, her struggles, and her rare but tragic displays of emotion outside of the lecture space, Coetzee breaks down this barrier of impersonality and objectivity through allowing the reader or listener to access the character behind the scenes of the lecture. This creates the opportunity for an empathetic engagement through imaginative description and persuasion, making a multimodal receptivity of the information (re)presented possible. An example of this is most apparent in the tragic last scene of the book, which will be discussed in detail in the next section of this chapter, where Elizabeth finally breaks down emotionally in the arms of her son, “turns on him a tearful face” (1999: 69), and appears completely lost and hopeless. It is a powerful scene, which evokes sympathy for Elizabeth’s position as a human animal, and subsequently, potentially, for her arguments and for the suffering of the nonhuman animals of which she speaks. This involves a form of imaginative rhetoric, which may cause a more sympathetic, receptive stance by readers, who themselves may use what Elizabeth calls the

62 However, it must be noted that very recently there has been a surge, specifically in the film industry, of communicating issues surrounding the (mis)treatment of animals, often in children’s films, such as Okja (2017) and documentaries, such as Earthlings (2007). 37

‘sympathetic imagination’ with relating to her, and to the root of her suffering: the mass mistreatment of nonhuman animals in contemporary societies. With this in mind, reading the text in a way that is too objective and literal does not acknowledge the full effect and purpose of it as a literary work. Taking the arguments presented purely as theoretical arguments, and taking the “making of them as the fundamental purpose of the pieces in which they occur” (Attridge, 2004a: 256) involves a dualistic reception that separates content from form and does not engage with the work holistically. In the same way, however, just because the rhetorical elements are acknowledged as fundamental, does not mean that the arguments presented should not be taken seriously or reflected upon. As Attridge asserts, it is “undeniable that the arguments have a certain weight and deserve to be taken seriously. The mistake would be to think that in doing so one had responded to the full ethical force of the fictions themselves” (2004a: 260). Through the mode of metafictional literature, Coetzee offers a space in which to re-imagine both the animal and animal ethics, and does so in a way that may speak to parts of us that established animal ethics does not. As Pughe states: “not only does the text, on a thematic level, incite the readers to resist , but, on a formal level, it invites them to resist – or, at least, to reconsider – the terms in which this call to resistance is clad (2011: 278). Coetzee is not only commenting on the fundamental (mis)representation of the animal, but also on animal ethics as a social movement, bringing under acknowledged elements, such as feeling and imagination (or the ‘sympathetic imagination’), into contact with developing ethical human-animal relations. On another level, the imaginative and self-reflexive literary elements of The Lives of Animals allow Coetzee to question established knowledge, knowledge production and practices, specifically in academia, without being constrained by what he portrays as the rigid walls of academia. Significantly, Elizabeth’s audience consists of fictional academics, including lecturers, professors, scholars and even a famous poet. This represents a fictional pre-emption of a certain kind of audience, and thus a certain kind of response, which might cause one to question one’s own conditioned response. Coetzee’s metafictional form also creates the opportunity for a reception less attached to ego and maintenance of worldviews, because the arguments being presented are not by real figures, and therefore might not elicit the same defensive or purely skeptical critical reading as a non-fictional context would. The use of fiction, in this sense, could soften the blow both in terms of the reception of ideas (re)presented, and in terms of challenging discourse. As Bell notes, “literature achieves a certain authority within its mode of being” and “in a purely theoretical sense, there should be no intrinsic harm in the author’s discussing some of the ‘same’ general questions” as 38 philosophy, “although whether, or to what extent, they are now truly the same is the whole point at stake” (2013: 46). In other words, the author of the fiction has now, in a sense, adopted his or her own discourse, “a parallel discourse” (2013: 46) which is distinctive, and thus not necessarily perceived as threatening to the original discourse. This creates the potential for a more speculative attitude to the posthumanist ideas presented by Elizabeth, but does not necessarily mean, however, that the impact is any less on someone’s thinking. Therefore, Coetzee’s literary work has an extra-textual ethical purpose: experimentally and imaginatively provoking readers to question their own ethical assumptions, specifically relating to human- animal relations and the limitations of established discourse surrounding the animal. It goes without saying that literature can already be part of a general discourse, such as postcolonialism or feminism. However, Coetzee’s resistance to direct translation into established ethics, as discussed in the introduction to this study, is part of what makes it impactful. The enigmatic nature of the text is as important as its words. Coetzee’s offerings represent a break with established categorisation which encourages a self-reflective reading that appeals to readers to think for themselves as much as possible. It creates the potential for people to think in a way in which they may not have before, opening new pathways of possibility. In this way, the text’s multi-layered, multimodal, metafictional complexities are only as effective as its audience’s or readers’ level of awareness and openness to engagement with it. Like posthumanist thought, Coetzee asks readers to think beyond the comfortably ‘thinkable’ by ‘reading between the lines’ and attempting to re-imagine what is accepted as normative and therefore viable or valuable. Bartosch argues along a similar line, saying that “fiction (and experimental fiction in particular) always hints at the necessity of accepting a model of reality that allows for contingency”, and “for what Wolfe has called the posthumanist ‘increase in the vigilance, responsibility, and humility that accompany living in a world so newly, and differently, inhabited’” (2013: 264). Such thinking recognises a world which exists beyond established meanings and humanist discourse, and which requires developing and being open to alternative ways of thinking. This requires, as Wolfe says, a level of ‘respect’ and ‘humility’ which, although often ironically, comes across in both Coetzee’s and Elizabeth’s struggles to try and express ideas on the animal and human-animal relations in a way that does not fall into the trap of (mis)representing “the ‘another’” (1999: 35). This is a theme that underlies all of Coetzee’s work on the animal and human-animal relations.63

63 Including his essay Meat Country (1995), parts of his autobiography Boyhood (1997), and his novels Disgrace (1999) and Elizabeth Costello (2003). 39

The Lives of Animals stands out in relation to the rest of Coetzee’s works involving the animal and ethical human-animal relations, and to other work in nonhuman animal ethics. Its multi-faceted metafictional form creates a space in which the reader or listener is challenged to rethink, indeed re-imagine preconceptions surrounding the animal and ethics. As McKay argues, The Lives of Animals “demands to be given special consideration not simply because, unlike in any other of [Coetzee’s] works, human-animal relations form its thematic core”, but “more important still is that the novella’s experimental metafictional form brings the full potential of literary method to meet the ethical demands that animals place upon us” (2010: 67). Readings such as McKay’s are valuable in recognising the power of literature, specifically the experimental metafictional form, in the ethical realm. Coetzee’s experimentation opens a space for (re-)imagination through what Coetzee himself recognises as uniting “the aesthetic and the ethical” (Coetzee, 1996: 73). The aesthetic and the ethical connect in the form of literature and theory, and imagination and reality with The Lives of Animals. This connection reflects in the links made between human and nonhuman animals, and rationality and feeling in the text, discussed in chapter four of this study. The Lives of Animals brings established meanings and understandings into question in a way which deliberately unsettles the reader through challenging preconceptions and rigid boundaries. A statement by the protagonist at the end of the first chapter is a subtle yet powerful hint at this: “[u]nderstanding a thing often looks to me like playing with one of those Rubik cubes. Once you have made all the little bricks snap into place, hey presto, you understand. It makes sense if you live inside a Rubik cube, but if you don’t...” (1999: 45). The Lives of Animals defies the metaphorical ‘Rubik cube’ where it can be generically defined or categorically labelled, bringing normative assurances into question, and challenging dualities. Its experimentation with representation and rhetoric reveals their significant impact on reception. In this multimodal, metafictional work of literature, speech and writing, and fiction and reality become intertwined, demanding one to think beyond set boundaries of representation, opening a space for a re-imagination of the animal.

2.3. Coetzee’s Relation to The Lives of Animals

An author’s relation to his or her text is a significant element of any work of literature. Coetzee’s relation to The Lives of Animals is particularly complex due to its metafictional form which unsettles boundaries of representation. This section discusses these complexities and their significance. Firstly, some of Coetzee’s personal views surrounding the animal and human-animal relations that he has expressed in certain interviews, speeches and other works

40 are discussed in relation to The Lives of Animals. This is followed by a more specific exploration of his relation to his characters in The Lives of Animals, particularly Elizabeth, analysing her views and relating Coetzee to his apparent fictional alter ego. Lastly, Coetzee’s metafictional approach is discussed in relation to literary authorship and the fictional mode, highlighting the significance and effect of Coetzee’s relation to Elizabeth and the text. Coetzee’s attention to the matter of human-animal relations is evident throughout his work. McKay notes this, and states that “whatever the genre, there is a visible desire to interrogate conventional patterns of ethical belief and moral conduct as these affect our social relations in the widest sense (that is, both with other humans and animals)” (2010: 67). There are indications in many of Coetzee’s works of a concern with human response to the suffering of nonhuman animals, such as the scene of the chained dog in The Master of Petersburg (1994), his ideas on in Meat Country (1995) and his commentary on human-animal relations, specifically dogs, in Disgrace (2000). In a collection of his essays and interviews, Doubling the Point, there is one of the few personal statements that Coetzee allows to be heard in an interview: “Let me add … 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” (Coetzee & Attwell, 1992: 248). As is shown further on in this section, this statement relates him directly to Elizabeth. This relation is on a level that goes deeper than just their arguments and involves the expression of their positions and feelings regarding the suffering of nonhuman animals and the sympathetic imagination. Coetzee is a vegetarian, a topic which he discusses in various works, including The Lives of Animals. He gave a speech in Sydney in 2007, where he made a powerful case for the ethical treatment of nonhuman animals, with a particular focus on the food industry:

To any thinking person, it must be obvious that there is something badly wrong in relations between human beings and the animals that human beings rely on for food; and that in the past 100 or 150 years whatever is wrong has become wrong on a huge scale, as traditional has been turned into an industry using industrial methods of production. There are many other ways in which our relations to animals are wrong (to name two: the , experimentation on animals in laboratories), but the food industry, which turns living animals into what it euphemistically calls animal products and animal byproducts, dwarfs all others in the number of individual animal lives it affects. (Coetzee, 2007)

This is one of many comments Coetzee has made on the systematic mistreatment of nonhuman animals in society for human desires such as fashion and meat, which he says is not necessary. He argues that these unnecessary, torturous methods64 of production are hidden from

64 For example, PETA reports that in factory farms around the world “animals are crammed by the thousands into filthy, windowless sheds and stuffed into wire cages, metal crates, and other torturous devices” for most of their existences. When they have “grown large enough to slaughter or their bodies have been worn out from producing 41 consumers to maintain what Elizabeth calls a mass “willed ignorance” (1999: 20) in The Lives of Animals. Further in Coetzee’s speech, he compares factory farms to death camps, concisely making the point that he says so many people miss when they encounter this controversial comparison for the first time: “that the practice of degrading living beings to the status of production units should be rejected out of hand, regardless of the species of the victims” (Coetzee, 2007). Such a stance reflects a posthumanist challenge to defensive attitudes that some people harbour towards any comparisons between human and nonhuman animal suffering, proposing that these attitudes are a form of speciesism. In light of this, the primary means by which Coetzee proposes sympathy for the nonhuman animal in The Lives of Animals is through his deconstruction of ideological human- animal (hyper)separation that underlies anthropocentrism and speciesism. Through representing the lack of sympathetic imagination in and between his human characters in The Lives of Animals,65 Coetzee deconstructs the conceptual hyperawareness of otherness in relating to, and thus empathising with, the nonhuman animal. Through displaying the failure of Elizabeth’s audience and family to relate to her, and vice versa, Coetzee disrupts the species divide which might affect receptivity towards the experience of “the ‘an-other’” (1999: 35), and thus the feeling of sympathy. As Oerlemans argues, Coetzee’s “human characters mostly fail to know themselves and are almost entirely unable to know others” (2007: 186). His representation of scepticism of knowing other human consciousness serves to deconstruct the dualistic interpretation of being able to relate to human versus being unable to relate to nonhuman animal experience. He reveals the impossibility of objectively knowing any other’s experience, human or nonhuman, exposing the anthropocentrism involved in basing receptivity towards and compassion for other animals on constraints of ‘sameness’. Significantly, within his challenge to dualist conceptions of human versus animal, Coetzee never attempts to represent or speak for or as a nonhuman animal. As Oerlemans argues, “Coetzee resists reflecting and interiority because he is sceptical even about claims for human consciousness” (2007: 186). In The Lives of Animals, Elizabeth suffers in and due to isolation. She struggles to express both her own suffering and the nonhuman animal suffering which lies at the root of it, receiving little sympathy in response to milk or eggs, […] [they] are crowded onto trucks and transported for miles (sometimes days) through all weather extremes, typically without food or water. At the , those who survived the transport will have their throats slit, often while they’re still conscious. Many remain conscious when they’re plunged into the scalding- hot water of the defeathering or hair-removal tanks or while their bodies are being skinned or hacked apart” (PETA, 2015). 65 Such limits are a central theme of all of Coetzee’s novels, such as Disgrace (2000) and Elizabeth Costello (2003) for example. 42 either. Yet, Elizabeth says that “[t]here are no bounds to the sympathetic imagination […] there is no limit to the extent to which we can think ourselves into the being of another” (1999: 35). Durrant picks up on this irony surrounding the sympathetic imagination in the text, arguing that The Lives of Animals continuously rehearses its “failure” in order to make way for a more effective relation toward the other, “a new kind of ethical and literary relation [...] grounded in the acknowledgement of one’s ignorance of the other, on the recognition of the other’s fundamental alterity” (2006: 120). From such a perspective, Elizabeth’s failure to express the experience of an-other calls for an acceptance of the other as ‘unknowable’. It might be argued that these struggles are metafictional expressions of a posthumanist awareness of the limitations of the human, specifically in understanding and adequately representing nonhuman animal consciousness. However, this does not necessarily mean that the text is based on revealing the failure of the sympathetic imagination as a concept. Although Coetzee is unwilling to represent nonhuman animal consciousness, stating in an interview that the “mode of consciousness of nonhuman species is quite different from human consciousness”, he opposes the idea that we cannot “vividly” empathise with nonhuman animals (Interview by Engstrom, 2004). He says: there “is a strong argument to be made that it is impossible for a human being to inhabit the consciousness of an animal, whereas through the faculty of sympathy (fellow-feeling) it is possible for one human being to know quite vividly what it is like to be someone else” (2004). This acceptance of alterity simultaneously recognises a solidarity, rather than being repressive and closed off to ‘the an-other’ and its experiences. Coetzee’s own literary embodiment of a woman might be read as a form of gender appropriation from a sceptical point of view based on a position of unknowable alterity. However, from a position of empathy, Coetzee is engaging with ‘the an-other’ through sympathetically imagining what it might be ‘like to be someone else’. His literary embodiment of Elizabeth suggests the possibility of a more sympathetic, imaginative, less sceptical approach to ‘the an-other’. This being said, Coetzee does express his own forms of scepticism in the text. However, his sceptical attitude is towards human’s conventional understandings of nonhuman animals, rather than towards nonhuman animals or being able to empathise with them. Coetzee is “sceptical not of animals themselves (as if the very existence of nonhuman life was in question), but rather of culture’s means of constructing and classifying the animal in order to make it meaningful to the human” (Baker, 2005: 9). Coetzee’s sceptical mode of representation in The Lives of Animals proposes empathising with nonhuman animals while remaining aware of the dangers of projecting human(ist) meaning onto them. If an acceptance of ignorance of the other 43 is always necessary for ethical relations, as Durrant (2006: 120) shows, Coetzee is attempting to propose a form of ignorance that is sympathetically responsible to an-other, based on a common ground of being a living animal, rather than on a common species or consciousness. Through a posthumanist rethinking of the animal, an empathetic (re-)imagination of what it might feel like to be a nonhuman animal might occur. Ultimately, The Lives of Animals might be read as calling for a change that begins with its readers. Coetzee seems to be asking his audience and readers, if nothing else, to “open [their] heart[s] and listen to what [their] hearts say” (1999: 37). This might be read as a call for readership sympathy in re-imagining the animal in the text, which could transform extratextual attitudes or behaviour. This resonates with Baker’s reading, in which he argues that “Coetzee’s thematization of sympathy operates […] somewhere between the prescriptive call for political action and the Derridean/Adornian notion of transformation in the epistemological realm and as a necessary herald of practical change” (2005: 45). The text explores the potential for an ‘epistemological’ re-imagination of the animal that might transform thinking in a ‘practical’ sense. Its affirmative potential is based on a middle ground, or what Baker calls “Coetzee’s middle road – a practical agenda for transformative action that occurs on a seemingly non- political plane, at sites of interpersonal sympathy”, which he sees as the “affective aim of Coetzee’s fiction” (2005: 27-29). Coetzee appears to recognise the potential for imaginative literature to create a space in which readers might reflect on the limits of their human(ist) beliefs about nonhuman animals, and imagine and re-imagine constructed boundaries in human- animal relations. In light of the above discussion, significant links can be made between Coetzee’s views and those of his characters, particularly Elizabeth. As Aaltola notes, “evidence suggests that Coetzee does, indeed, have strong pro-animal views that coincide with those of his characters” (Aaltola, 2010: 120). The Lives of Animals was published again in 2003 as a part of Coetzee’s novel, Elizabeth Costello,66 another complicated work based on the experiences of Elizabeth. As was mentioned earlier in this study, Elizabeth is a recurring character in Coetzee’s work. Some critics are sceptical about whether Elizabeth represents Coetzee’s personal views or is simply a fictional construction voicing fictional opinions. A significant question with regards to this is whether, or to what extent, Elizabeth is to be taken as Coetzee’s fictional spokesperson.67 In Doubling the Point (1994), Coetzee tells Attwell in an interview that “all

66 The Lives of Animals forms two of the eight ‘lessons’ that make up the chapters of Elizabeth Costello (2003). 67 Elizabeth has been referred to variously as Coetzee’s “alter ego” (Pughe, 2011: 278; Bell, 2006: 174), his “mouthpiece” (Graham, 2006: 219), and his “surrogate” (Attwell, 2006: 33). 44 writing is autobiography: everything that you write, including criticism and fiction, writes you as you write it”. In The Lives of Animals, a work made up of both criticism and fiction, Coetzee’s characters might be read as representing the different thoughts that inhabit his mind, including self-criticism and doubt. In other words, “Elizabeth Costello represents only one of several perspectives” surrounding the animal in the text (Deloughrey & Handley, 2011: 210). Each character represents a thought process or perspective that has been considered or rejected by its author. However, often thoughts and situations may be ambiguous, which reflects in the uncertainty in The Lives of Animals. Therefore, to call Elizabeth Coetzee’s alter ego might be too simplistic, considering that this fictional creation might represent a part, albeit an important part, of Coetzee’s thought processes. Moreover, she might be more of a literary experiment and means of expression rather than an exact, literal representation of Coetzee’s personal perspective. Considering these complexities and Coetzee’s elusive refusal to define his relation to the text, it seems a pointless task to try to pinpoint the exact nature of Coetzee’s relation to Elizabeth, a relationship Coetzee himself may not even be certain about. With this in mind, however, it is an obvious observation that both Coetzee and Elizabeth feel strongly about parallel issues, and in similar ways. They are both “overwhelmed” and express feelings of “confusion and helplessness” (Coetzee & Attwell, 1992: 248) about the mass cruelty towards and suffering of nonhuman animals. Elizabeth is very disturbed by “what is being done to animals […] in production facilities (I hesitate to call them farms any longer), in abattoirs, in trawlers, in laboratories, all over the world” (1999: 19). She, like Coetzee, also places emphasis on factory farming, comparing it to the Holocaust, a controversial element of the text further discussed in the next chapter. Both Coetzee and Elizabeth express a strong distaste for meat production and consumption, particularly that of factory farmed nonhuman animals, which Elizabeth says experience inconceivable “horrors” (1999: 21). Elizabeth and Coetzee are both vegetarian, and feel strongly about people eating the “flesh” (1999: 38) of a fellow animal. Coetzee uses the term ‘flesh’ in other works in which he discusses the eating of nonhuman animals, including Meat Country (1995). Like Elizabeth, he refuses to shelter his audience or readers from the reality of the once living animal and its body. The word ‘meat’ is commodified and allows for a certain kind of distancing from the idea of eating actual flesh from a dead body. Jean Baudrillard,68 in his theory of consumerism and meat

68 Baudrillard, a philosopher often associated with postmodernism, claims that our current society has replaced all reality and meaning with symbols and signs, and that human experience is of a simulation of reality. In Simulacra and simulation (1994), he defines ‘simulacra’ as copies that depict things that no longer have an original, or had no original to begin with, and ‘simulation’ as the imitation of the operation of a real system or process over time. 45 eating, calls this sheltering from reality the “fetishization” of meat (1981: 93). He asserts that this is not “a fetishism of the signified” (1981: 92), or the original material object such as the cow, but rather a “fetishism of the signifier” (1981: 92), or the commodity, such as the packaged steak. However, although Elizabeth and Coetzee are vegetarian, The Lives of Animals does not use this as its base for tackling human-animal relations. Similarly, although they are discussed, the text does not use animal rights as its base for addressing human-animal relations. As is outlined in the introduction to this study, Elizabeth, like Coetzee, does not promote a specific branch of animal rights. The idea that animal rights is a privileged, Western set of concerns cannot be ignored in this instance. It certainly holds relevance in terms of established, canonical movements, some of which have been discussed in this study.69 In response to an audience member who makes this point in The Lives of Animals, Elizabeth replies: “while I concede your main point about Western cultural arrogance, I do think it is appropriate that those who pioneered the industrialization of animal lives and the commodification of animal flesh should be at the forefront of trying to atone for it” (1999: 61). While she shows an awareness of this issue, she expresses a sense of responsibility to ‘atone’ for the damage involved in a history of Western influence, in this case specifically in terms of its effects on the lives of nonhuman animals. The above instance in the text might be seen as a metafictional reference to Coetzee’s own position as a white author writing about human-animal relations in a postcolonial context. Like Coetzee, a descendent of European colonisers of South Africa, Elizabeth is a descendent of European colonisers of Australia (1999: 20). In this way, they are both in a position of white postcolonial writing/address discussed in the introduction to this study. In the text, Elizabeth refers to herself at one point as “an ex-colonial” (1999: 57), showing her awareness of history, her position, and her self-conscious critique of it. The text focuses on the illegitimacy of certain Western human(ist) knowledge production and conceptions of human and nonhuman animals, destabilising the system of knowledge upon which canonical animal rights theories are based. This creates the space for a posthumanist re-imagination of human-animal relations and shows a refusal to rely on established animal rights theories that maintain problematic discourses. The refusal to rely on predictable or conventional modes is multi-layered in the text. Both Coetzee’s and Elizabeth’s mode of (re)presentation in their lectures are not clad on

69 For example, Singer’s (1975) and Regan’s The Case for Animal Rights (1983). See Harper (2011), who argues that these works reflect the mainstream Eurocentric philosophical canon of white, masculinist intellectualism, which denies that racialized consciousness/embodied experience impact the knowledge that comes from the mostly white bodies that produce it. 46 emotion and sentimentality. Coetzee, like Elizabeth, does not rely on his own novelistic, emotive skills to persuade his readers to re-imagine the animal. In fact, there is no nonhuman animal present in the text to sympathise with and, as has been mentioned, very few displays of emotion. Rather, both Coetzee and Elizabeth (re)present, in a rather platonic way, a lack of sympathetic imagination with regards to character relations, while providing arguments for the possibilities for and value of the sympathetic imagination. Both use their power or influence as famous writers to spread a message but are caught in the paradox of having to use an intellectually ‘acceptable’ mode and reason as a way of questioning that mode and reason.70 As Elizabeth asks: “Do I in fact have a choice? If I do not subject my discourse to reason, whatever that is, what is left for me but to gibber and emote and knock over my water glass [...]?” (1999: 23). In other words, how can what needs to be articulated be articulated in a way that will make sense and be taken seriously by an academic audience? But, on another level, this platonic mode of (re)presentation seems to be a way of refusing to rely on literary, rhetorical persuasion, in a text that spends a lot of time arguing for the value of literary persuasion. This irony allows readers to take what they will from the text, unclouded by a flood of sentimental or relational bias, yet perhaps more open to exploring the potentials of that which Elizabeth speaks of. Elizabeth is a complicated character made up of human imperfections, contradictions, uncertainty, and even self-doubt, but is passionate about the power of imagination and empathy, particularly when it comes to the position of nonhuman animals in society. She does not claim to hold a greater truth and says that she follows her “experience” and “intuition” (1999: 23). These lead her to believe in the sympathetic imagination’s ability to awaken the potential for a re-imagination of the animal, and a change in attitude towards the mass systematic cruelty to nonhuman animals. Ultimately, it seems Coetzee, like Elizabeth, has no utopian solution, and may feel uncertain about how to deal with his (com)passion for nonhuman animals and their suffering. However, he is certain about one thing: he will not remain silent. He uses his authorial status and power to the same end as Elizabeth in this sense. A moment in the text which alludes to this is when Elizabeth is speaking to her son who, significantly, shares the same first name as Coetzee:

“[…] our compassion is very thinly spread” “And that is what you want to cure humankind of?” “John, I don’t know what I want to do. I just don’t want to sit silent.” (1999: 59)

70 Linda Hutcheon (1988) talks about this kind of paradox, and the limits of language, which she identifies as definitive of postmodernism. 47

It might be that John represents Coetzee’s own doubts and scepticism, not only about what Elizabeth (or Coetzee) is trying to achieve, but about the world in general. He is a passive and relatively indifferent character who displays an almost deliberate disconnection from his mother and what he calls her “hobbyhorse” (1999: 16) of nonhuman animals, finding little point in what she is trying to achieve in her lectures. Elizabeth, however, will not, and it seems cannot ‘sit silent’ knowing the “horrors” (1999:21) of “what is being done to animals […] all over the world” (1999: 19) daily. This might be Coetzee’s metafictional play on his conflicting thoughts and feelings about his role in contributing to the field of human-animal relations. Finally, in terms of the ‘role’ of an author, the (meta)fictional mode and relation between author and text is significant in terms of message and rhetoric. For Coetzee, as has been discussed, there is little difference between autobiography and fiction. Both forms exist to achieve what he calls a “higher truth” by choosing facts that support an “evolving purpose” (Coetzee & Attwell, 1992: 18, 263). Coetzee uses a fictional framework to challenge conventional and established human(ist) conceptions surrounding the animal through revealing limitations and contradictions, and (re)presents alternative ideas that might point to a ‘higher truth’ without personally or directly committing himself to these ideas or any set beliefs. The author and his personal beliefs do not necessarily have to be scrutinised literally, as the fiction is made up of a spectrum of ideas that the author wished, for some specific purpose, to express. In this case, these ideas might encourage a re-imagination of the animal. Coetzee’s approach, as discussed in the previous section of this chapter, might affect the reception of these ideas. Attridge observes that Coetzee avoids first person analogies with the text and its arguments (2004a: 257). At the Tanner Lectures, for instance, there were questions for Coetzee from the “members of the audience after [his] ‘lectures’” and “here, too, Coetzee tended to avoid the customary first-person consideration of points made to him, preferring locutions like: ‘I think what Elizabeth Costello would say is that…’” (Attridge, 2004a: 257). This evinces Coetzee’s elusive stance about his relation to The Lives of Animals. This elusiveness means that technically, he cannot be held accountable for a specific character’s viewpoints. This allows for preconceptions surrounding his personal status, identity and values as a person and a writer to remain more separate than if he were to present ideas in a purely non-fictional form. As he states in an interview:

There is no ethical imperative that I claim access to. Elizabeth is the one who believes in should, who believes in believes in. As for me, the book is written, it will be published, nothing can stop it. The deed is done, what power was available to me has been exercised. (Coetzee & Attwell, 1992: 250)

48

In this way, Coetzee separates himself from convictions made in the fictional space. He breaks down and crosses boundaries of imaginative fiction and real criticism, confusing conventional modes of reception or response as well, which is discussed in the next section of this chapter. Readers may not always recognise the fictional mode as a form of expression which does not necessarily reflect the author’s personal stance. Similarly, perhaps more so due to its metafictional form, “it is not clear that the implications of these distinctions is fully understood” with The Lives of Animals, “although few such readers would admit [it]” (Bell, 2006: 172). This is one of the reasons that Bell says that the text is “discomforting to read” (2006: 172). It is this discomfort, caused by unsettling boundaries of representation and playing on uncertainties that lies at the base of the text’s purpose: to force audiences and readers to question, and potentially re-imagine their preconceived ideologies, specifically surrounding the animal. On another level, through creating a fictional medium, Coetzee removes himself from a situation where he could himself be criticised for not living up to a conventional, rational standard or expectation at the Tanner Lectures. Coetzee is the opposite to Elizabeth in this way, who, “having gained her reputation as a novelist [...] now seeks to cash in her moral convictions directly in a way that Coetzee, on this occasion as on others, refuses to do” (Bell, 2013: 34). Coetzee engages with the lives of animals in a different way from Elizabeth: “what she suffers, he dramatises” (2013: 43). Coetzee dramatises Elizabeth’s suffering, including her criticism from her audience for lacking clarity, being “sentimental” and “making propaganda” (1999: 16) in her lectures. He narrates her vulnerable position of standing in front of a non-receptive audience to his own, real audience. In this sense, Coetzee speaks for Elizabeth. In another sense though, Elizabeth speaks for Coetzee. If, as Bell believes, Elizabeth is a “defensive or liberating device: a way of getting certain things said for which passionate intensity is of the essence and which Coetzee does not feel able to say in his own voice” (2006: 174), Coetzee is Elizabeth’s ventriloquist. In light of this, the relation between author and text is multi-layered with The Lives of Animals and requires a multi-layered reading. To add to the layers, Coetzee seems to be revealing something more than just what Elizabeth and his other characters argue: he exposes the nature of passionate beliefs, and what it means to have them. Elizabeth’s passionate appeal for the limitlessness of the sympathetic imagination, specifically in the context of her topic of human-animal relations, results in her being alienated by her fellow humans. Coetzee reveals the isolation and discrimination that can result from expressing a conviction that is not shared by the majority, 49 specifically one that is not based on conventional discourse or reason. Elizabeth is aware that she is unable to articulate her feelings about nonhuman animals and their suffering through academic language and reason and recognises that her attitude is “an attitude that is easy to criticize, to mock” (1999: 52), because “it does not follow any criteria of ethical discourse in the analytical sense” (Bartosch, 2010: 265). Norma, Elizabeth’s daughter in law, goes as far as deeming Elizabeth’s lack of established criteria and her sincerity as a sign of insanity, saying that “mad people are sincere” (1999: 67). Coetzee seems to make indirect reference to this kind of attitude in a statement in an interview: “When a real passion of feeling is let loose in discursive prose, you feel you are reading the utterances of a madman. The novel, on the other hand, allows the writer to stage his passion” (Coetzee, 1992: 60-61). The ways in which Elizabeth is treated by other characters in the text, due to her passion for nonhuman animals and the sympathetic imagination, might be read as Coetzee revealing the vulnerability of the author in terms of exposing his own passions or beliefs. Bell argues that this gives a “significant hint as to why he would wish, indeed need, to dramatise it through Costello, and especially so if he really shares her response” (Bell, 2013: 44). This metafictional expression of vulnerability might spark reflection in the readers/audience about what shapes their own preconceptions, expectations, defences, and responses, and potentially make them more receptive to the position of the author and the ideas expressed in his work. On the other hand, though, as is discussed more in the next chapter, it has also sparked confusion and frustration in its reception. Through The Lives of Animals, Coetzee has the means and the freedom to express what Elizabeth fails to express herself. Through his metafictional representation, he expresses what Elizabeth cannot, and vice versa. In this way, the text accounts for the problem of “unthinkability” as described by Cary Wolfe in his work on posthumanism, which he says occurs when something fundamental cannot be expressed using established human(ist) language and meaning due to conditioned ways of understanding (2010: 123). Coetzee is able to express this dilemma, and “finds ways of articulating the inarticulable” (Bartosch, 2013: 264) through his multi-layered representation. This ability is due to the relation between the author and the fictional characters, not on an allegorical or personal level, but in terms of the author’s ‘ways of articulating’ the inexpressible through creating and narrating them in fictional situations where a different picture is painted. This creates a space for a more self- reflexive, and self-reflective re-imagination by the audience or readers. Ultimately, the multi-faceted nature of the relation between author and text in The Lives of Animals is fundamental in Coetzee’s communicative intention and ethical force. Readers may conflate Coetzee with Elizabeth in ways which cause reactions that Coetzee has 50 deliberately sought to complicate through his experimentation with form and refusal to interpret his work according to established conventions and theory. Without committing himself personally to Elizabeth’s arguments, or calling these arguments philosophy or theory, he creates another kind of space which might hold the possibility for a more reflexive, receptive engagement from the audience or the readers of these ideas, and for a (posthumanist) re- imagination of the animal that begins with uncertainty and self-reflection.

2.4. Coetzee’s Multi-layered Responses

It has been briefly mentioned earlier in this study that Coetzee’s multileveled metafictional representation in The Lives of Animals involves multiple forms and levels of response. This section investigates the multi-layered responses within and to The Lives of Animals. It explores what they may reflect about receptivity, specifically with regards to the topic of human-animal relations, and its effect on response. It is proposed that Coetzee pre-empts certain elements of reception and response in his metafictional representation. Firstly, significant fictional responses to Elizabeth by characters within the text are discussed. Secondly, these responses are linked to certain patterns of real response and Coetzee’s apparent pre-emption of them. Lastly, this experimentation with response will be proposed as a pre-emptive literary technique used by Coetzee as a way of provoking readers to think beyond preconceptions and normative patterns of response. In The Lives of Animals, Elizabeth’s own intense response to nonhuman animals’ mass and systematic commodification and suffering is met by responses which do not reflect her urgent and empathetic stance. Elizabeth is calling for a response that involves a change in her fellow humans’ complacency in what she calls a “crime of stupefying proportions” (1999: 69) against nonhuman animals in society. In her introduction to the text, Gutmann is helpful in examining the fictional respondents within the text, arguing that Elizabeth is “demanding something of them”, namely “a radical change in the way they treat animals” which they feel “she has no right to demand, and that they have no obligation or desire to deliver” (1999: 4). As will be shown, Elizabeth is proposing a change that goes beyond reason and established meaning, which requires a change in thinking, and for her audience to “open [their] hearts” (1999: 37). However, her respondents are not willing to ‘deliver’ by being open or committing to this kind of change, and some are patronizing of her approach. Elizabeth’s daughter in law, Norma, is Elizabeth’s harshest critic. A philosopher and believer in ‘rational argument’, she calls Elizabeth’s “opinions on animals, animal consciousness, and ethical relations with animals [...] jejune and sentimental” (1999: 17). She

51 mocks Elizabeth’s vegetarianism and her proposal of the sympathetic imagination, but also her posthumanist struggles with “issues of respect and humility” (Bartosch, 2010: 265) regarding nonhuman animals. These issues manifest in Elizabeth’s struggle to articulate her views on nonhuman animals without being anthropocentrically projective, which Norma attacks: “You spend so much time respecting that you haven’t time left to think” (1999: 47). Norma’s dismissal of sympathy, imagination and posthumanist issues of respect and humility in favour of rational, established modes of thinking can in fact, as will be argued, be a way of avoiding thought. Most of Coetzee’s other fictional characters’ responses display a reception based upon their scholarly backgrounds and preconceived notion of animal rights, deflecting the deconstructive, imaginative and sympathetic elements of Elizabeth’s lectures. In response to a professor who attempts to critique Elizabeth’s lectures as a discussion on animal rights, she replies: “To respond adequately, Professor O’Hearne, would take more time than I have, since I would first want to interrogate the whole question of rights and how we come to possess them” (1999: 62). Elizabeth refuses to engage in such a conversation before discussing the limitations of the construction of ‘rights’ based on humanist and anthropocentric reason, does not wish to define her lectures according to established institutions. Professor O’Hearne’s projection of the institution of animal rights onto Elizabeth’s talks would also limit what can be received and responded to. Kompridis argues that “the rights of animals” is “not the title of the story or the topic of her lectures”, but that “for her audience or readers [it] is the only story she could intelligibly be telling” (2014: 200). Like Coetzee, Elizabeth’s refusal to define or limit her argument to established theoretical or institutional systems may come across as a lack of commitment but might also be read as a lack of confinement. In terms of (un)intelligibility though, it appears that Elizabeth herself is unsure of exactly what she is saying, and she cannot find the words to express why she is trying to say it. This leads to her audience members demanding of her the kind of clarity she cannot give, responding to her lectures with questions such as: “[c]an you clarify?” (1999: 36). Elizabeth’s son’s response to these demands by the audience is that his “mother could do with some clarity” (1999: 36). When asked for clarification of her position according to established modes of thinking and theory about nonhuman animal ethics, she says: “I don’t know what I think [...] I often wonder what thinking is, what understanding is” (1999: 45). Her questioning of certain rational thinking and understanding and her proposal of the sympathetic imagination brings the matters of feeling and (un)intelligibility to the forefront, which her respondents seem to deflect in their criticism. They do not appear to recognize that she is attempting to express something 52 that might not be intelligible according to the meanings which shape their own normative receptions, for as Bell notes, it is “extremely difficult to live outside of cultural norms” (2006: 186). At the end of her second talk, John asks: “Why can’t she just come out and say what she wants to say?” (1999: 37). This is a fair question considering that it is supposed to be a seminar. However, this response to Elizabeth seems to reflect how Coetzee might feel about his own position and his struggle to express himself within the constraints of rational academic language and meaning, as it is not easy to live or express oneself outside of cultural norms. The miscommunication between Elizabeth and her audience is not only due to her struggle to express herself, but also stems from a gap between intention and expectation. The audience expected a traditionally delivered academic lecture on “herself and her fiction, as her sponsors would no doubt like” (1999: 16): a comfortable subject and familiar mode of delivery. However, Elizabeth’s talks on the lives and deaths of animals are neither of these. Her own son “does not look forward to what is coming [as] he does not want to hear his mother talking about death”, and, furthermore, “he has a strong sense that her audience – which consists, after all, mainly of young people – wants death-talk even less” (1999: 19). Such an attitude already limits reception, for an unmet expectation coupled with an unfamiliar and unsettling replacement generally causes feelings of scepticism and perhaps disappointment which may trigger defensive stances. Defensiveness is also apparent in her audience’s reactions to her comparison of human and nonhuman animal mistreatment and suffering which, as is discussed more in the next chapter, is a controversial topic. John says that “she should have thought twice before bringing up the Holocaust. I could feel hackles rising all around me in the audience” (1999: 49). Abraham Stern, an ageing Jewish poet and academic in the story, is so offended by Elizabeth’s comparison between factory farming and the Holocaust that he withdraws from the dinner in Elizabeth’s honour in protest. The gap between intention and expectation with Elizabeth’s lectures is also apparent in terms of her mode of presentation. For example, Norma complains that her mode of delivery of her lectures is inadequate, as it does not fulfil traditional expectation. In Elizabeth’s first lecture, Norma frantically complains that she is “rambling”, has “lost her thread”, and that she “can’t just be allowed to get away with it!” (1999: 31, 36). Norma is implying that Elizabeth does not know what she is talking about, or how to talk about it, according to a specific standard or mode. As Kompridis notes, there is “overwhelming agreement about how this [talking] is done, which provides Norma with all the reassurance she needs to hold Costello to account, to make sure Costello doesn’t get away with doing it the wrong way” (2014: 208). John also displays what might be read as a preoccupation with the wrongness or rightness of a ‘way’ of 53 presenting ideas at the end of his mother’s first lecture, shaped by background agreement and tradition regarding intellectual enquiry: “A strange ending. […] A strange ending to a strange talk, he thinks, ill gauged, ill argued. Not her métier, argumentation. She should not be here” (1999: 37). Both of Elizabeth’s own family members in the text reject and patronize her ideas and the mode in which she (attempts to) express them. Eventually, such responses to Elizabeth trigger her break down at the end of the narrative, which is the first time the reader witnesses any overt emotional side to any of the characters. Elizabeth laments to her son that she is lost and hopeless, as she is unable to comprehend the complicit cruelty of humanity in the mass ‘crimes’ against nonhuman animals: “It’s that I no longer know where I am. [...] Is it possible, I ask myself, that all of them are participants in a crime of stupefying proportions? […] This is life. Everyone else comes to terms with it, why can’t you? Why can’t you?” (1999: 69). Elizabeth has become hurt, overwhelmed and lost in a society that normalises that which causes her devastation, as her passionate beliefs are met with misinterpretation or rejection. This causes her to question her beliefs. As Bell notes, the “intuitive intensity of her belief [...] ultimately threatens her belief in herself”, as it is “extremely difficult to live outside of cultural norms” (2006: 186). John does not know how to respond to her tragic self-questioning, as he does not understand what kind of response she is looking for, or what it is exactly that she suffers: “She turns on him a tearful face. What does she want, he thinks. Does she want me to answer her question for her?” (1999: 69). As Kompridis notes, John “cannot fathom what it is his mother really wants, either from him or from anyone else” (2014:200). The only response John has to his mother’s breakdown is: “[t]here, there. It will soon be over” (1999: 69). He seems to be trying to comfort her in his abandonment of her. This abandonment could be either in her own death, considering her age and fragility, or in the death of her passion regarding nonhuman animals and their suffering. Either way, the burden of her struggle will be ‘over’ in his eyes, and he and his wife will not have to deal with it anymore: “a few hours and she’ll be gone, then we can return to normal” (1999: 68). If Elizabeth abandons what John sees as her ‘hobbyhorse’, and her ‘heart closes’ like the rest of the characters, she will finally be released of the burden which causes her so much pain and can live a comfortable life of “willed ignorance” (1999: 20). However, this is not a possibility for her, for as Bartosch notes, Elizabeth “does not and cannot” (2013: 265) close her heart, leaving her in a painful and isolated position. The word “position” is used numerous times throughout the short text (1999: 25, 48, 60, 68), and is a significant term with regards to what it says about reception. John is not in the position, whatever it may be, to be receptive and offer a meaningful response which would 54 comfort his mother, because he cannot, or will not partake in such difficult thought and feelings. As Kompridis notes, even Elizabeth’s own son “is not ready to take on the pain or the risk involved in following his mother down that line of thought” (2014: 200). Similarly, John excuses Norma’s negative and patronizing behaviour towards Elizabeth and her lectures, saying: “I don’t think she is in a position to sympathise” (1999: 68). The use of the word ‘position’ here has various implications that reveal a certain kind of response to unsettling ideas or realities. While John might simply mean that Norma, who “holds a Ph.D. in philosophy” but “has been unable to find a teaching position” (1999: 17), is not in a good place emotionally or psychologically due to her unemployment, it also suggests another form of unwillingness to sympathise which is not circumstantial. This other form of position involves an internal resistance to new or alternative modes or ideas. As Bell argues, Coetzee’s phrasing of the word ‘position’ suggests Norma’s “adoption of an intellectual posture that excludes the act of sympathy”, and in this way, rational(st) thinking and philosophy “can be a way of avoiding thought” (2006: 186), rather than putting thought into adjusting pre-existing proscriptions. Norma’s preoccupation with rational(ist) human(ist) thought ironically prevents her from displaying the very human capacity for sympathy towards Elizabeth, her views, and nonhuman animals. In another sense, Coetzee’s use of the word ‘position’ may also speak to the importance of location in terms of perspective: the idea that who we are and what we are able to think, understand, and sympathise with is a result of our position in the world, made up of what we have experienced, how we have been taught to think, etc. In other words, there seems to be an implication that the resistance of others to Elizabeth is not a purely deliberate refusal, but a consequence of their own distinct position, as themselves and their conditioning, as well as their (in)ability to relate and empathise. For the most part, the audience do not engage with Elizabeth or her lectures in a way that involves an attempt to openly embrace that which destabilizes or at least challenges their preconceived understandings and practices. An open embrace might hold the potential for a progressive re-imagination of the animal (from a posthumanist perspective for instance) through adopting a receptive rather than purely sceptical stance to new or unsettling ideas.71 This necessarily starts with a questioning of the human, its meanings and its constructs according to dominant thought. Derrida argues that the “transcendental signified” (1976: 20), or the absolute and irreducible totalising of meaning characteristic of logocentrism, may be

71 Slote argues for the importance of receptivity in ethics and epistemology, asserting that “rationality and reason turn out not to be all-important in the way most previous Western philosophical thought has believed” (2013: x). 55 deconstructed by an examination of the assumptions which underlie the metaphysics of traditional Western thought. The Lives of Animals is deconstructive on multiple levels. Not only does it present deconstructive arguments, but if a reader is faced with Coetzee’s representation of ‘logocentric’ responses to Elizabeth’s deconstructive ideas, this might create an awareness of conditioned, constructed response and a more reflective reading of the text. As Kompridis argues, Coetzee’s representation of response involves “anticipating, indeed, [...] internalizing [...] the very construction of The Lives of Animals [...] and the misreading to which it will be exposed” (2014: 205). This urges readers to question their own preconceptions and the effects they have on their response. In this way, Coetzee’s pre-emptive, metafictional representation of response might influence real reception and response to the text and to its demand for a re-imagination of the animal. In terms of real response to The Lives of Animals, Elizabeth and her views have proved to be controversial.72 Some of the real responses mirror Coetzee’s fictional responses to her within the text. As Northover asserts, both “her audience in The Lives of Animals and reviewers of this work have found her attack on reason to be excessive and her Holocaust analogy offensive” (2009: 45). This shows a pattern of response anticipated by Coetzee. Significantly, in terms of the offended responses to her Holocaust analogy, fictional and real, it must be noted that seminal animal rights philosopher, Peter Singer, also uses this analogy. Peter Singer argues that after the Holocaust, experimentation on live humans was transferred to experimentation on live nonhuman animals, and quotes Isaac Bashevis Singer’s controversial statement: “In their behaviour towards creatures, all men [are] Nazis” (Singer, 1975: 67-68). If Peter Singer’s argument is perceived as sound, then Elizabeth’s must also be considered as such. The only real difference is that Elizabeth uses different means to express herself, namely analogy. Northover argues that if one considers Peter Singer’s argument as rational, “then we must conclude that Costello’s views are also rational” (2009: 8). Coetzee chose to address these current and controversial issues in an unexpected form, in which he was able to metafictionally comment on patterns of human response to the issues he raises. The scholarly responses in the Reflections section of the text, and the introduction to the text, are significant elements of the multi-layered responses to the text. They are written by scholars with knowledge relevant to the real-life topics addressed in Coetzee’s metafiction. The

72 While some critics and reviewers have had thoughtful and considered appraisals of The Lives of Animals and Elizabeth, (such as the critics in J.M Coetzee and the Idea of the Public Intellectual [2006], edited by Jane Poyner), others, such as Peter Singer (1999) and Douglas Cruikshank (1999), have criticised her views and dismissed her case for the sympathetic imagination as inconclusive or unconvincing. 56 editor of the text, Amy Gutmann, is a political theorist and the author of the introduction to the text. She describes the text as two lectures presenting “empirical and philosophical arguments that are relevant to the ethical issue of how human beings should treat animals [...] in the frame of fiction” (1999: 4). On a surface level, this is what the text consists of. As Bell notes, “such a response is not wrong” in that Elizabeth “has put into the public domain a passionate conviction about the relations of human beings with animals” and “the work is a contribution, indeed a very telling one, to such a debate” (2006: 173). However, Gutmann’s response does not fully acknowledge the significance of the multileveled metafictional representations discussed in the previous section of this chapter, and how they are intrinsically intertwined with the text and its purpose. Kompridis suggests that responses such as Gutmann’s are “too quick to conclude that these are fictional lectures about the ethical issue of how human beings should treat animals”, and in turn “prematurely limit” what Elizabeth “wants from her audience, from us” (2014: 199). As has been discussed, Elizabeth does not wish to confine or define her lectures according to established nonhuman animal ethics theories, but rather calls for a complete re-imagination of the animal. In light of this, it is argued that the four responses in the Reflections section are significant in their own right, but, as will be shown, are not without their own limitations. The four discussed respondents are prominent figures within their disciplines: Garber, a literary theorist; Singer, a philosopher; Doniger, a religious scholar; and Smuts, a primatologist. They provide critical analyses and commentary from very different perspectives. This is valuable not only in terms of the information they offer regarding human-animal relations in different contexts, but also in revealing how different academic backgrounds generate different responses to the text as a whole. In their aim to respond according to their pre-existing knowledge bases and scholarly positions, they overlook the representational complexities and emotional aspect of the text to some degree. Marchion argues that “to a certain extent, this Reflections section does deflect the emotional impact of Coetzee’s fiction”, but, “still, the responses are insightful and instructive commentaries on Coetzee’s text and interesting in their own right” (2000: 3). This deflection is significant in exploring Coetzee’s metafictional play with response, specifically with regards to first order level response. As Bell argues, “the deceptive transparency that characterizes the metafictional self-questioning” in the text means that it has “been read at first order level, as occurs even with the respondents […] included in the volume” (2006: 173). As will be shown, the scholarly respondents re-instate

57 certain patterns of response that Coetzee pre-empts in the ‘deceptive transparency’ of his fictional construction of responses, and in his refusal to categorise or define his work.73 As is briefly mentioned earlier in this study, Coetzee has been accused of using Elizabeth as a way of avoiding responsibility for his beliefs and convictions. Such a response complains that Coetzee is “thus ethically at fault”, which “most of the respondents in The Lives of Animals [did], for instance” (Attridge, 2004a: 256). For example, in responding to Coetzee's metafictional form, Peter Singer makes the point that Coetzee has not delivered lectures on animal rights but has rather avoided commitment to any real movement by hiding behind the mask of fiction, and specifically Elizabeth, who Singer sees as his alter ego (1999: 85-92). Singer creates his own fictional critique of the text in the form of a short story. This move is a criticism of Coetzee’s metafictional approach, and seems to suggest that Singer is saying that he is able do what Coetzee did and use fictional characters to say what he could (not) say himself. This becomes evident when Singer’s protagonist, whose first name is also Peter, responds to Coetzee’s lectures in saying: “Call me old-fashioned, then, but I prefer to keep truth and fiction clearly separate […] All I want to know is, how am I supposed to respond to this?” (1999: 86). Considering the nature of Coetzee’s text, this is a fair and inevitable question. However, Singer does not acknowledge the significance of Coetzee’s deliberate, deconstructive and unsettling play with (re)presentation and response, and how fundamental it is to the purpose and effect of the text. Kompridis notes about Singer’s response that it “does not acknowledge that the form Costello gives to her concerns, through a variety of discursive and non-discursive means, is meant principally to be received as a normative challenge” (2014: 202). Singer’s sceptical approach deems his uncertainty with how to respond as a result of the text’s inadequacies, rather than its multi-faceted, potentially thought-provoking complexities. The form in which Coetzee presents his ideas is meant to challenge generic boundaries of representation and response. Kompridis argues that perhaps “Singer does not want to follow that line of thought, preferring to attribute the puzzlement and perplexity he feels about how to reply to ‘shortcomings’ or peculiarities of the text” (2014: 201). In this way, Elizabeth’s conundrum with response, represented in fictional characters like John and Norma, is re- instated by Singer to some extent. This seems ironic given the fact that Singer, unlike John and Norma, is a leading voice in the movement for the ethical treatment of nonhuman animals. However, fictional Peter's most adamant complaint is about Elizabeth's belief that she can "think [her] way into the

73 For such reasons, some “reviewers have found these responses redundant” (Marchion, 2000: 3). 58 existence of any being" (1999: 90). He argues against this claim with rationality, which Elizabeth continually emphasises that she is not striving for. As Gutmann notes, Singer “imagines himself in the unusual position of confronting someone like Elizabeth Costello who is more unconventional with regard to animals than even he is” (1999: 9) and feels the need to assert his authority as a rational animal rights philosopher. In a similar way, Garber, the literary theorist, defines Coetzee’s text according to the very knowledge bases that Coetzee seems to deliberately avoid. She recognises Coetzee’s text as a testament to the value of literature, but separates the topic of nonhuman animals from that of literature dualistically. Such a reading “offers us an interpretation of the text that avoids the question of the animal in the name of literature” (Singh, 2014: 472). If the text is about both human-animal relations and literature, and their interlinked effects on each other, “and we feel compelled to choose one over the other, we might very well miss the absolutely essential relation between them” (2014: 472). Like Singer, Garber provides a reading based on her scholarly background, categorising and defining what Coetzee has sought to unsettle. The other two scholarly respondents, Doniger and Smuts, focus more on the content of the lectures in the text. Doniger, a religious studies scholar, discusses the debate surrounding the eating of meat, and provides comparisons of differing religious views on this topic which she points out were not addressed in the text. Smuts, a primatologist, focuses on real, face-to- face human-animal relations. She notices what she sees as a “striking gap” in Coetzee’s text, in that Elizabeth hardly ever talks about “real-life [human] relations with animals” (1999: 120). In light of these responses, it must be noted that Coetzee’s vast research and knowledge of nonhuman animal ethics and culture is evident in his many of his works dealing with human- animal relations, such as Meat Country (1995), and in his footnotes throughout The Lives of Animals. This suggests that he is not unaware that there are cultural and religious approaches that he did not refer to in the text that may have been relevant, some of which Doniger uses in her response, but that he was critical of a specific dominant, rationalist approach, and leaves certain points open for re-imagination, perhaps by people like Doniger. Similarly, what Smuts sees as a ‘gap’ left by Coetzee can also be read as deliberate and meaningful. As has been discussed earlier in this chapter, Coetzee does not attempt to represent real nonhuman animals in the text and focuses on the deep-seated ideology and (mis)representation surrounding the animal, which he reveals as under-acknowledged yet fundamental aspects in developing ethical human-animal relations. Despite their value, the discussed scholarly reflections on the text critique the text according to the protocols that Coetzee deliberately avoids or questions, remaining within their 59 own scholarly boundaries. Coetzee anticipated such first order response in his metafictional representation of a scholarly audience, including Norma, John, and Professor O’Hearne, who display first-order responses to Elizabeth. Cora Diamond (2008: 48) argues that all the respondents in the text, fictional and real, reveal that none of them engage with Elizabeth’s words to the point where they would let themselves question their own assumptions about what it was she was saying. In this way, they reproduce a similar misunderstanding produced by the fictional characters, as their reception was based upon a certain limited, and subsequently limiting perception of the text, defining it according to preconceived knowledge or “abstracting from it a discourse on animal rights” (Diamond, 2008: 48). Although all perception is limited, Elizabeth and the text serve as a challenge to normative conceptions of the animal and of ‘rights’ rather than a failed attempt to add to established notions. Critiques such as Diamond’s appear to assume that the scholarly respondents were unaware of their own limitations, suggesting that had they been aware, they would have taken note of Coetzee’s pre-emptive representation of first order response “instead of reproducing them in their own readings – unknowingly, we might say” (Kompridis, 2014: 41). However, it seems the respondents were more aware than given credit for in this instance and were simply doing what they were asked to do according to their respective scholarly backgrounds. For instance, Garber says in her response: “[i]n view of these partitions of knowledge, I thought I had better pose some questions having to do with the disciplines I was trained in or might be supposed to know something about” (1999: 73). She is producing the kind of response that has been called for, not by Coetzee, but by those who wish to gain the grounding which Coetzee refused to give. Like Garber, Doniger shows an awareness of the first order level of her response: “[i]t seems somehow reductionistic to respond to these deeply moving readings as if they had been dry academic arguments”, however, “all I can do is offer some texts from the other traditions that I know, in support of what I take to be the ideas implicit in” the text (1999: 93). Her deflection is not ignorant, but rather deliberate in fulfilling what has been asked of her. The Reflections section is, after all, a section dedicated to ‘scholarly’ responses. As has been determined, analysis and interpretation are not freely flowing acts, and are governed by specific ‘positions’ and intellectual currents. The notion of receptivity, as discussed in section 1.4 of this study, is intertwined with these preconditioned elements, which can determine how or to what extent a person engages with information. As mentioned, receptivity involves a mode of listening and normative response to ethical demands arising outside of the self and involves an acute awareness of the effects that our pre-conceptions may have on our reception of new or alternative practices or ideas (Kompridis, 2006; 2014). This 60 includes reception of information which may challenge or destabilize pre-existing knowledge, which can often be met with forms of cognitive dissonance. Being aware of this fact about one’s own mind, and practicing reflectiveness, does not require an ‘equal’ approach to all sources of information. Rather it encourages progressive thinking based on a stance of humility and transformation. In this way, receptivity can be directly linked to posthumanism and the kind of attitude Wolfe sees as necessary for “living in a world so newly, and differently, inhabited” (2010: 47). Such a world requires awareness of our own limitations as humans in the form of respect and humility, where thinking becomes “not active apprehension (prehensile grasping of the world by our concepts) but an act of reception, a reception in which passivity […] becomes, paradoxically, a maximally active passivity” (Wolfe, 2010: 242). This fine balance between passive acceptance and active apprehension is fundamental to Coetzee’s text. The complexity of the interaction between Elizabeth, Coetzee and their respondents suggests that there is no easy or right way per se, but also that just because something does not measure up to a set of normative standards, or adhere to conventions, does not mean that it does not deserve recognition or hold value. With The Lives of Animals, a fundamental part of this value lies in its challenge to those standards and conventions. Instead of seeing Elizabeth’s talks as lacking, emphasizing that academic argument is not “her métier” (1999: 37), her audience might have observed that she was determinedly and reflectively refusing to engage in academic forms of argument, and questioning “what thinking is, what understanding is” (1999: 45), specifically with regards to nonhuman animals. In this way, like Coetzee, she was “manifesting for the other another way to engage her audience in urgent discussion of the lives of the animals we are” (Kompridis, 2014: 205), and the ways we (mis)represent and (mis)treat other animals. Similarly, Coetzee’s audience and readers are pushed to go beyond a first order level of interpretation and engage with the multi-layered, thought-provoking nature of the text. In such a reading, form and content are intrinsically interconnected. Kompridis argues about the scholarly responses to the text that perhaps if they had approached “the text and its difficult central character from the stance of receptivity, they may have recognized their own first-order responses” (2014: 205). Through unsettling boundaries of representation on multiple levels, the text asks its readers for a change that begins with a change in thinking: about ourselves, our constructions, and their consequences, specifically for nonhuman animals. These real-life issues, as Coetzee represents in his fictional audience, are often not met with receptivity. In Coetzee’s experimentation with response, reality and fiction again become blurred. As Bell asserts: “response to Coetzee, and his evident play with this response in the text, raises 61 with unusual urgency the nature of the literary in relation to the real” (2006: 172). Coetzee puts his real respondents, including myself, in a position of self-exposure in terms of preconceptions and their effects on response through his literary experimentation. Ultimately, Elizabeth’s claims are not supposed to be interpreted on a first order level as Coetzee’s ‘truth claims’, or lectures on animal rights. Rather, the text serves to unsettle normative patterns of reception and response to make way for a re-imagination of the animal. This requires receptivity towards the unorthodox and sometimes uncertain nature of the text and the ideas (re)presented in it.

2.5. Conclusion

Coetzee’s multimodal, metafictional experimentation with form and the often confusing and contradictory nature of Elizabeth’s arguments are ways of unsettling boundaries of representation. Coetzee’s refusal to adhere to established conventions and his elusive position in terms of his relation to the text have garnered controversy. His metafictional representation of responses to Elizabeth in the text anticipate this controversy based on a certain kind of reception. Elizabeth’s display of devastation due to her sympathetic and receptive stance towards the suffering of nonhuman animals is met with a kind of ‘willed’ inability of her audience, and even her family, to be receptive to her intention. This might be read as Coetzee metafictionally staging the author’s passion and the possible rejection of it. It is also a way of creating a space to be critical of that passion, and to reveal the limits of our understanding, specifically of nonhuman animals, even at its most well-intentioned. This chapter has evinced that the multi-layered representations and responses are fundamental to studying the purpose and effect of the text. As Weir argues, the “possibility for commentary proves important for Coetzee, whose metafictional devices function less to confuse and disorient the reader from engaging with the text” than to “ironically highlight the not-so-evident mechanisms and assumptions that inform each reading act, no matter how covertly” (2006: 16). In this way, Coetzee uses the literary mode to highlight the effect that one’s expectations, preconceptions and proscriptions might have on reception. Like posthumanist thought, the text asks readers to think beyond the comfortably ‘thinkable’ by ‘reading between the lines’ and attempting to re-imagine what is accepted as normative and therefore viable or valuable. Through the mode of metafictional literature, Coetzee creates a space that might spur a receptive, imaginative engagement from the audience or readers of these ideas, and for a self-reflective, re-imagination of the animal. At the same time, he exposes the resistance to such experimental modes of representation.

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In this way, Coetzee’s multi-modal, metafictional experimentation reveals the effects of unconventional representation and ideas on reception and response. An exploration of this was necessary before providing an analysis of the arguments represented in the text, as the multi-faceted form and context of The Lives of Animals are inseparable from its message and meanings. Chapter three begins to analyse the arguments in the text more in depth, highlighting ideological and narrative disconnections and their significance in re-imagining the animal.

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Chapter Three: Disconnections in The Lives of Animals

3.1. Introduction

The Lives of Animals explores, critiques and complexifies dualistic conceptions through revealing the disconnects in such thought. Significantly, within her rejection of dualist accounts of human versus animal, reason versus feeling, and rationality versus imagination, Elizabeth in fact re-instates these disconnections to some extent. Elizabeth is not a completely reliable narrator, but her contradictions are what shed light on the deeper meanings and revelations of the text. This chapter argues that Coetzee exposes a tendency to approach complex matters dualistically, even in attempting to rectify a problematic dualism. To show the one-sided nature of a certain kind of rational thought, Coetzee has Elizabeth approach the animal from the polar ends of ideological dualities, centralising nonhuman animals, feeling and imagination as opposed to humans, reason and rationality. Section 3.2 focuses on the ways in which The Lives of Animals critiques the dualist human-animal ideological divide which it represents as underlying and maintaining the mass and cruel commodification of nonhuman animals in contemporary societies. The interlinked nature of anthropocentric and Eurocentric conceptions of the animal critiqued in the text are analysed in this section. Both Elizabeth and Coetzee create controversy in their subversive approaches to human-animal representation, and re-instate human-animal disconnection to a certain extent by creating defensive attitudes. However, it will be argued that this deliberate, metafictional representation of disconnection by Coetzee is thought provoking and effective in various ways. Section 3.3 explores the text’s representation of the relation between reason and feeling, which is complicated by exposing and creating its own ironies and disconnections. As is discussed, Elizabeth controversially uses reason to attack reason. Though her outright rejection of reason is extreme, she is criticising and deconstructing a dominant, problematic system of thought, challenging its authority, and questioning its relevancy in terms of human-animal relations. It is argued that Elizabeth’s rejection of a certain kind of reason leads her to dismiss reason itself, and that her interest lies in the feelings and virtues that exist independently from this. Lastly, section 3.4 explores the ways philosophy and literature, as forms of rhetoric, are brought into question through both the content and form of the text. The re-imagination that the text creates the potential for includes the relation between rationality and imagination, which has been interpreted dualistically according to traditional Western philosophy. This

64 section proposes that imaginative forms of thinking and writing be taken seriously in real life contexts, specifically human-animal relations.

3.2. Human versus Animal

The Lives of Animals critiques the dualist human-animal ideological divide which it represents as underlying and maintaining the mass and cruel commodification of nonhuman animals in contemporary societies. This section investigates the human-animal disconnection brought to light in the text. Mistreatment and othering of the animal is in no way exclusive to Western thought, but, as this section shows, significant and interesting links can be made between Eurocentric and anthropocentric thought in relation to the text. Firstly, anthropocentric, Eurocentric conceptions of the animal critiqued in the text are analysed. This is followed by a discussion of Coetzee’s human-animal analogies and his representation of how they can in fact re-instate anthropocentric attitudes due to negative cultural connotations surrounding nonhuman animals. Lastly, an affirmative reading of Coetzee’s depiction of these complexities is offered in relation to a receptive and discursive posthumanist approach to human-animal relations. The denial of the animal, both in terms of repressing the idea that humans are animals and the “willed ignorance” (1999: 20) humans display towards the suffering of nonhuman animals due to such anthropocentric distancing, is addressed throughout the text. Elizabeth expresses how nonhuman animals are the lowest on the priorities list in terms of established ethics74 due to anthropocentric worldviews. She highlights this in her dejected proclamation that “we can do anything” to nonhuman animals “and get away with it” (1999: 35). Here she is talking specifically about “production facilities” (1999: 19) that either experiment on or systematically breed and slaughter nonhuman animals on a mass scale in the name of the human.75 She says that these nonhuman animals’ lives consist of “horrors” (1999: 19) that societies turn a blind eye to because nonhuman animals are dualistically separated from the human, as they are “different” (1999: 54) to humans. This dualistic disconnection allows for humans to ideologically and emotionally distance themselves from nonhuman suffering. Moreover, nonhuman animals do not speak human language, so cannot voice their suffering in a way which would be considered intelligible according to human reason. This leads

74 “Animal studies is often regarded as the latest step in a series of discourses of liberation that has struggled (in different orders in different locations) for decolonization, black civil rights, women’s rights and homosexual rights” (Borrel, 2009: 61). 75 By far the most profuse and severe of these forms is factory animal farming, which produces meat through “routine torture and environmental destruction” and “has taken the joy out of the lives of millions of calves and pigs, and billions of hens” (Carson, 1997: 7). 65

Elizabeth to assert that “[a]nimals have only their silence left with which to confront us (1999: 25). Because of this, they are easier to go under acknowledged or even unacknowledged ethically, and can be treated purely instrumentally. This perspective resonates with what Plumwood asserts about contemporary societies: “the failure to see the non-human domain in the richer terms appropriate to ethics licences supposedly ‘purely instrumental’ relationships” (2001: 9). In her lectures, Elizabeth, like Plumwood, exposes the forms of instrumental rationalisations that view nonhuman animals as either external to humans and human needs, and thus effectively dispensable, or as being permanently in service to them, and thus an endlessly replenishable resource. These highly anthropocentric approaches “distort our perceptions and enframings” and “impoverish our relations” (Plumwood, 2001: 29) to nonhuman animals. The Lives of Animals reveals that by othering beings that are not human, their suffering is othered as well. Elizabeth reveals that distinctions between who counts as ‘properly human’, or comes closest to it, whether it be distinctions between race, species or language, boils down to some exclusionary and self-serving conception of reason:

To me, a philosopher who says that the distinction between human and nonhuman depends on whether you have a white or a black skin, and a philosopher who says that the distinction between human and nonhuman depends on whether or not you know the difference between a subject and a predicate, are more alike than they are unlike. (1999: 66)

The idea of distinction based on such specific lexical knowledge of subject and predicate implies the ridiculousness of such ‘reason’, which can be used to subjugate anyone who does not measure up to a set of narrowly constructed standards of ‘human’. This excerpt also represents the links between anthropocentrism and Eurocentrism as expressed in the text. Although not exclusive, the links between the two are inextricable and undeniable. Cruelty to nonhuman animals is a universal phenomenon, as is anthropocentrism. However, in reading The Lives of Animals, it is significant to note that Eurocentrism, defined as “the practice of viewing the world from a European perspective and with an implied belief, either consciously or subconsciously, in the pre-eminence of European culture” (Cloke, Crang & Goodwin, 2004: 7), is rooted in the same theories of nature, humanity and evolution, as anthropocentrism. In terms of colonialism, anthropocentrism underlies Eurocentrism in legitimating projects that see “indigenous cultures as ‘primitive’, less rational, and closer to children, animals and nature”

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(Plumwood, 2003: 53).76 This egocentric, patronising attitude legitimates the colonial greed for control, power, and the exploitation of the other, human or nonhuman. In this way, the text challenges the idea that human and nonhuman animal experiences and positions cannot or should not be linked. However, with this issue comes a questioning of what Twine calls “the humanist moral preoccupation around the ‘animalization of various human social groups’” (2010: 13). Animalisation of humans, specifically marginalised groups, is a sensitive topic, since “every theoretical racism draws upon anthropological universals”, in all of which “we can see the persistent presence of the same ‘question’: that of the difference between humanity and animality” (Balibar, 1991: 56-57). Negative Western attitudes towards other races and other animals stem from the same cause, according to Davies, Nandy and Sardar, suggesting a long history of “an anxiety-ridden perception about Other People, and about the natural world” (1993: 1, 25). This has had a negative impact on cultures that have been marginalised according to this discrimination, not only directly, but also in the way that it has caused a conditioned negative association between humans and nonhuman animals. This is a result of oppression of other humans “replete with instances of animal metaphors and categorisations frequently deployed to justify exploitation and objectification, slaughter and enslavement” (Huggan & Tiffin, 2010: 136). This explains why similitude and analogies between human and nonhuman animals are often rejected as offensive, and dualistic subjectivity employed. From a posthumanist perspective, it is argued that both human and nonhuman animal oppression uphold and maintain each other due to their linked and complementary roots. Plumwood argues that “hegemonic centrism” (2001: 4), which includes the “institutionalised speciesism used to rationalise the exploitation of animal (and animalised human) ‘others’” (2001: 8) is based on a “human and reason-centred culture” (2001: 8) that helped to secure and maintain European imperial dominance. The misinterpretation of evolutionary theory in the 19th century further fuelled Eurocentrism, with the idea that biological advancement worked on a linear scale which, simply speaking, the Western human was on the top of, and which all other life forms descended under in terms of development. Elizabeth’s arguments about human- animal relations resonate with Plumwood’s call for a “counter-centric ethic” that avoids dualism by resituating “humans in ecological terms and non-humans in ethical terms” (2001: 8-9). Elizabeth denounces both biology and philosophy for perpetuating a hierarchical

76 Huggan and Tiffin present the same fundamental argument throughout their book: Postcolonial Ecocriticism: Literature, Animal, Environment (2010).

67 segregation of humans from other animals (1999: 208) and rejects the unethical, objectifying conception of nonhuman animals as “thinglike” (1999: 23). Elizabeth’s commentary on objectification and exploitation of nonhuman animals in “production facilities” (1999: 19) revolves around systematic capitalist practices that are coextensive of and interconnected to both anthropocentrism and Eurocentrism. Huggan notes this in his discussion of the latent correlates that connect human-animal and postcolonial studies, observing that they share “historically situated critiques of capitalist ideology” (2004:720). Both capitalism and colonialism as intertwined systems rely on dualisms, or what Kar calls “an imperialism of discourse that facilitates the creation of binaries like Nature/Culture, animal/human in order to license economic exploitation” (2014: 13). In light of this exploitation, Elizabeth’s point about embracing human nature is significant: “you say there is nothing to do but embrace that status, that nature. Very well, let us do so. But let us recognize that, in history, embracing the status of man has entailed slaughtering and enslaving [fellow] beings” (1999: 57-58). This points to the violent nature of humans in general who have, throughout history, killed and enslaved each other and nonhuman animals. Without directly referencing historical colonial events or social systems, she reveals certain Eurocentric, anthropocentric, and capitalist attitudes as underlying the systematic violence against human and nonhuman ‘beings’. When Elizabeth expresses such interlinks between systems and victims she is not met with receptivity by her fictional audience. This implies an underlying and preconditioned mindset that produces scepticism about, rather than sympathy for, the other, who in this case is the nonhuman animal. DeLoughrey & Handley argue that the audience’s reaction “serves to censure the implicitly colonial taboo on feeling too much for the other – a taboo that we can theorize as a consequence of both imperialism and capitalism” (2011: 211). Elizabeth’s views resonate with the postcolonial critique of Eurocentric rationality and capitalism, while at the same time demanding that any critique of such systems must include considering the nonhuman animal.77 In this way, the text subverts certain humanist postcolonial studies,78 which often use nonhuman animals as metaphors for human oppression. The text, on the other hand, uses human subjects as allegorical vehicles to express nonhuman animal suffering, and dramatizes reactions to such a subversion. DeLoughrey and Handley argue that the text “enlist[s] our

77 Significantly, Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin observe that “[i]nterrogation and exploration of the relationships between powerful human groups and what they have traditionally designated as ‘animal’ is increasingly important in postcolonial studies” (2002: 214). 78 Saikia notes that “postcolonial criticism often risks taking an anthropocentric stand relegating nature to an inert, secondary position that does not need any a platform of expression” (2014: 1). 68 sympathies less with the history of political colonialism and more with the still-colonial lives of animals” and that while “decolonial movements have deployed animals as symbols to generate compassion for politically oppressed communities, The Lives of Animals dramatizes our resistance to the inverse strategy of deploying human bodies as symbols of animal suffering” (2011: 202, 213). This resistance is not exclusive to postcolonial contexts, but rather involves a universal ‘resistance’ to positioning human suffering as a symbol of nonhuman animal suffering. For example, the inability or unwillingness to imagine oneself in place of an-other leads Elizabeth to link contemporary Western culture, who she says turns a blind eye to the mass and cruel commodification of nonhuman animals, to the Holocaust executioners and the collective failure of empathy and action for others by the surrounding communities. Elizabeth says that during and after the Holocaust, the community were inextricably linked to the executioners through a collective failure of the sympathetic imagination, which brought their ‘humanity’ into question: “[t]hey lost their humanity, in our eyes, because of a certain willed ignorance on their part” (1999: 20). The construct of ‘human(ity)’ is brought into question by Elizabeth on multiple levels, revealing the inhumanity that only humans are capable of, and reflecting Coetzee’s destabilisation of the human-animal dualism using the sympathetic imagination. Elizabeth exposes the incapacity, or unwillingness, of humans to sympathise with any other if it involves exposing oneself to “more horrors by far than one could afford to know, for one’s own sake” (1999: 20). In this sense, disconnecting and distancing oneself from the other, human or nonhuman, is a defence mechanism against being affected by their unspeakable experiences. Both Elizabeth and Coetzee create controversy in their subversive approaches to human-animal representation. In The Dreaded Comparison: Human and Animal Slavery (1996), Marjorie Spiegel confronts the problem of human-animal representation, beginning her book with a forward by Alice Walker.79 Walker acknowledges the similarities between the oppression of human and nonhuman animals in relation to slavery, and says that such a comparison is,

even for those of us who recognise its validity, a difficult one to face. Especially if we are descendants of slaves. Or of slave owners. Or of both. Especially so if we are responsible in some way for the present treatment of animals – participating in the profits from animal research (medicine, lipstick,

79 Walker is a world-renowned African American author and activist who has “revived the slave tradition in [her] quest to reveal its dark underbelly and its continued effects” (Moniz, 2014: 35). This foreword can be seen as an important, if not essential element, as without this endorsement, the book would probably have had a very different reception. 69

lotions) or animal raising (food, body parts). In short, if we are complicit in their enslavement and destruction, which is to say, if we are, at this juncture in history, master. (Spiegel, 1996: 9)

Walker’s recognition of the reasons behind the difficulty of ‘facing’ the comparison between human and nonhuman animal oppression and suffering are significant in exploring the analogies made by Elizabeth in the text. The analogies, specifically involving the Holocaust, are shown to be unpalatable both for the ‘descendants’ of the human victims referenced, and those ‘complicit’ in the ‘enslavement and destruction’ of nonhuman animals that Elizabeth refers to. These are represented respectively by the Jewish poet, Abraham Stern, who boycotts Elizabeth’s lectures because of the Holocaust analogy, and by members of the audience, many of them meat eaters (1999: 39-43), who are said by John to have felt “acrimony, hostility, [and] bitterness” (1999: 67) by the end of Elizabeth’s lectures. Closer to Spiegel’s human-animal slavery comparison80 is Elizabeth’s argument that “that’s what our captive herds are: slave populations. Their work is to breed for us. Even their sex becomes a form of labor” (1999: 59). She does not express this in her lectures, but to her son, John, in a private discussion. John does not respond to this, which leaves readers to form their own thoughts and opinions about the metaphor. Spiegel sees such a comparison as ‘dreaded’ but valid, because “as diverse as the cruelties and the supporting systems may be [...] they share the same basic essence, they are built around the same basic relationship – that between oppressor and oppressed” (1996: 28). However, as will be shown, Elizabeth’s analogies re-instate human-animal disconnection to a certain extent by creating defensive attitudes. The analogy between Nazi death camps and factory farms is made by various philosophers, including Derrida (2003: 395). Nazism was built on a self-legitimatory, Eurocentric system of oppression that served to separate the conceived ‘elitist’ group of Aryans from the rest of humanity.81 In this sense, it can be argued that Nazism correlates with other types of oppression based on the idea of an ‘elite’ race. This is not to deny the importance of the Holocaust subject in any way, but rather to “state that it can be understood as part of a wider pattern of racism” (Biel, 2015: 7). According to Biel, Hitler’s ideas “derived from earlier, anti- black racists, in which white Europeans had risen to a position of mastery over nature, which

80 Spiegel likens the (mis)treatment of human slaves to that of nonhuman animals, arguing that even the transportation of nonhuman animals points to the appalling exploitation involved in slavery: “in the United States (as in much of the world), animals on the way to the slaughterhouse are usually not fed as this would “waste” food, the cost of which those in the industry would rather keep as profit” (1996: 53). 81 The ideology of Nazism was based upon the conception of the ancient Aryan race being a superior race, holding the highest position in the racial hierarchy and that the Germanic peoples were the most racially pure existing peoples of Aryan stock (Longerich, 2010: 6-7). 70 also implied mastery over other peoples” (2015: 7). This theme of mastery correlates with Walker’s point about being complicit in playing “master” (Spiegel, 1996: 9), and is central to Elizabeth’s critique against humans’ conceptions of nonhuman animals. To disturb the subjugation of the animal that grounds Eurocentric reason, Elizabeth focuses on language as a locus for re-imagining human-animal relations through exposing unconscious and contradictory tendencies in Western human(ist) thought. She employs the Holocaust to bring to light how the nonhuman animal functions as a crucial figure through which to evoke its atrocities:

They went like sheep to the slaughter [...] They died like animals [...] The Nazi butchers killed them [...] Denunciation of the camps reverberates so fully with the language of the stockyard and slaughterhouse that it is barely necessary for me to prepare the ground for the comparison I am about to make. The crime of the Third Reich, says the voice of accusation, was to treat people like animals. (1999: 20)

The expression that the victims suffered and died as though they were ‘nothing more than animals’ evokes a deserving sympathy for Jewish people, while at the same time demeaning and devaluing nonhuman animals and insinuating that their cruel slaughter is inconsequential. Yet, while the nonhuman animal has become the simile for the suffering victim, the metaphor is simultaneously employed in describing the brutality of the persecutors:

In our chosen metaphorics, it was they and not their victims who were the beasts. By treating fellow human beings, beings created in the image of God, like beasts, they had themselves become beasts. The human victims of the holocaust were treated like animals, but those who did the killing are animals. (1999: 21)

Here, the nonhuman animal as a simile is an expendable object, equated to tortured, human Holocaust victims. However, as a metaphor, the nonhuman animal is abhorred due to its animalistic brutality, compared to the Nazi murderers.82 This reveals the ambivalence of humanist thought in representing the animal and its association with good and evil, victim and persecutor. As has been mentioned, Elizabeth’s audience, and specifically Abraham Stern, do not engage with the analogy as such, and react negatively to the human-animal representation. Stern’s response to Elizabeth’s subversive analogy takes form in a letter, through which Coetzee shows an anticipation and understanding of a certain kind of critique:

You took over for your own purposes the familiar comparison between the murdered Jews of Europe and the slaughtered cattle. The Jews died like cattle, therefore cattle die like Jews, you say. That is a trick with words which I will not accept. You misunderstand the nature of likeness; I would even say

82 In a South African context, Rosemary Jolly examines how the transcripts of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission containing the testimony of victim-survivors of apartheid crimes in South Africa highlight the perversely ironic uses of nonhuman animals in place of humans, where “non-human animals are made to stand both as a marker of human kinds barbarity and a testament to human kinds innate humanity” (2010: 157). 71

you misunderstand wilfully, to the point of blasphemy. Man is made in the likeness of God but God does not have the likeness of man. If Jews were treated like cattle, it does not follow that cattle are treated like Jews. The inversion insults the memory of the dead. It also trades on the horrors of the camps in a cheap way. (1999: 49-50)

It is not Elizabeth’s call for a re-imagination of the animal that upsets Stern, but rather the relegation of human Holocaust victims to nonhuman animal status as a way of making a point in what he perceives to be a ‘cheap way’. Stern reveals his insistence on maintaining the dignified humanity of Holocaust victims in a world that has stripped the nonhuman animal of dignity, using ‘God’ as a way of delegitimating Elizabeth’s inversion. In this way, Stern, the poet, prioritises religious, historical and cultural values over poetics and language. The linguistic inversion of a simile threatens his idea of human(ist) reason, received by him as ‘trick with words’ that represents Jewish people as expendable. Stern’s objection is that Elizabeth is implying that the death of nonhuman animals is as important as those of persecuted Jewish people of whom he is a descendent. Rather than acknowledging the “horrors” (1999: 19) that nonhuman animals go through daily, or the resistance by Elizabeth to the systems which underlie both forms of oppression in her analogy, Stern immediately defends the human victims against being linked to nonhuman animals. From a posthumanist perspective, this involves a kind of hierarchical and anthropocentric conditioning. According to Singh, “Stern’s resistance also signals the limits of postcolonial thinking, which has historically baulked at the relegation of the colonized to animal status without accounting for the ways in which the human/animal distinction itself is deeply problematic beyond the human” (2013: 477). Stern’s defensiveness towards Elizabeth’s ‘relegation’ is ultimately what prevents him from being receptive to her call for sympathy towards the position of nonhuman animals, revealing the tension between different positions and beliefs and its effect on response. Such ‘deeply problematic’ conceptions call for a re- imagination of the animal, which in turn resists systems of thought which oppress humans and nonhuman animals. Although Elizabeth’s intention is to expose the double standard of anthropocentric, Eurocentric thought, and not, as Stern conceives, to make a cheap point at the expense of Jewish people, Stern’s position is entrenched in a traumatic history, and invested in his own need to preserve dignified representations. The problem with Elizabeth’s analogy is that for someone like Stern, it re-instates Nazi discourse in which Jewish people were conceived as subhuman and abhorrent. This points to the paradox of language in this instance: while Elizabeth uses it as a means to promote the sympathetic imagination, Stern is repelled from sympathising with Elizabeth or the nonhuman animals of which she speaks due to what he perceives to be her

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‘blasphemous’ linguistic ‘trick’. Such defensiveness can occur even if, as Borrell notes about Elizabeth’s analogising, “the concept is premised on anti-racism” (2009: 211). The text reveals the irony in human-animal representation, and how human-animal analogies, no matter how well intentioned, can in fact widen the gap between human and nonhuman animals through triggering defensive reactions based on (mis)conceptions. In this way, Elizabeth strays even further from her intention of promoting the sympathetic imagination for nonhuman animals. It is in the ways described above that the text questions our entire conceptualisation of the animal. As Jolly argues, it “investigates the fact that our representation of animals is the locus of a language through which human beings measure their ethical worth as humans” (2010: 151). The animal stands in dualist contrast against the human and has been used to bolster the human status. Elizabeth reveals how so many humans have turned off their sympathetic imaginations when it comes to nonhuman animals, which Jolly attributes to “our obsessions with reading human behaviour against what we perceive to be non-human, animal behaviour” (2010: 151). The internal contradiction of anthropocentric humanism’s paradoxical reliance on the conceptual otherness of the nonhuman animal to define human’s essence and precincts reflects that of the Eurocentric reliance on ‘non-white’ humans for elitist conceptions. This leads Borrel to argue that “both cultural and species relations are shown to require an adjustment of mindset, away from humanism” and that “[a]nimals’ foundational position within humanist discourse as an essential other makes them uniquely placed to disrupt it” (2009: 36). While The Lives of Animals offers no clear solutions to the questions it raises, it does point to this need for adjustment, pressuring readers to be less “secure in [our] humanity” (1999: 31). Through connecting humans and nonhuman animals, Coetzee reminds us that “we are all complicit in the subjugation of other beings, whether they are in the colonies, the camps or the ” (Borell, 2009: 209). In this way, Coetzee’s text highlights the need for thinking that goes beyond Eurocentric and anthropocentric preconditioning in order for a more aware, responsible and sympathetic re-imagination of the animal. As has been shown, making links between human and nonhuman animal positions does not necessarily mean equating them, animalising the human, or humanising the nonhuman animal. The defensive attitude towards connecting human and nonhuman animal suffering is rooted in derogatory conceptions of nonhuman animals, and a desensitisation towards their suffering. This leads Wolfe to argue that:

as long as this humanist and speciesist structure of subjectivization remains intact, and as long as it is institutionally taken for granted that it is all right to systematically exploit and kill nonhuman animals simply because of their species, then the humanist discourse of species will always be available for use by some humans against other humans as well. (2007: 6)

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In line with this posthumanist perspective, Coetzee’s text might be read as offering a space in which human and nonhuman animal positions can be re-imagined as connected and even complementary in working against oppression. Referencing Huggan (2004), Johnson argues that “Coetzee’s rhetorical function determines representation of the other, human or nonhuman” and that “instances where one group might be further marginalizing another return to connecting animal oppression to human oppression in terms of slavery, the Holocaust, feminism, etc” (2009: 111). Although Elizabeth’s human-animal analogies are controversial, they offer a posthumanist approach that serves to undermine the underlying, interconnected ideology of both human and nonhuman animal oppression, and represent how re-imagining the animal might positively affect both. At the same time, however, the text represents how comparisons and inversions of human-animal positions can also aggravate an existing disconnection. Traumatic histories and their terms are extremely powerful cultural memories and can be easily offensive if not referred to specifically and sensitively within the context of that particular traumatic event. They can imply the use of human trauma as a way of promoting nonhuman animal positions of suffering as over and above human experiences, thereby defeating the ultimate objective of developing sympathy for the nonhuman animal. In light of this, Armstrong proposes “discursive collaboration”, as “equations between the treatment of animals and humans fail to advance either postcolonial or animal studies very far” (2002: 114).83 This discursive collaboration rather focuses on “an alliance” against the “continued supremacy of that notion of the human that centres on a rational individual self or ego” (2002: 114). Such ideas point to the potential for a more receptive and reflective engagement with the topic of human-animal relations and representation and suggest that re-imagining the animal can offer a productive way of re-envisaging both Eurocentrism and anthropocentrism through the “development of a degree of humility” (Borrel, 2009: 66) fundamental to posthumanist perspectives. This humility might allow for a re-imagination of the distancing and defensiveness ingrained in an anthropocentric perspective and promote sympathy for nonhuman animals, for as Borrel observes, the “centrality of notions of difference and distance to this perspective is often inimical to sympathy” (2009: 7). Coetzee’s text reconceptualises the other by dismantling dualist human-animal distinctions and

83See Armstrong, P. 2002. The Postcolonial Animal. Society & Animals 10 (4). 413-19, for a more in-depth discussion of this discursive collaboration.

74 representing any other, human or nonhuman, as “the ‘another’” (1999: 35), to be re- imagined and sympathised with. Ultimately, Coetzee offers an alternative frame for approaching human-animal relations through revealing and questioning disconnections based on Eurocentric and anthropocentric identities. It might be argued that Elizabeth, and perhaps Coetzee, sacrifice their own human kinship in their powerful but controversial plea for a re-imagination of kinship with the nonhuman animal. This plea opens a space for new “discursive collaborations” (Armstrong, 2002: 114) based on an alternative, sympathetic, imaginative conceptualisation of human and nonhuman animal positions, rather than a competitive and dualist hierarchy among them. As Singh argues: “Although [Elizabeth’s] may necessarily be failed attempts, the sympathetic imagination is the means by which Costello strives to forge an ethics of non-subjugation beyond rational thought, which is to say toward the animal” (2013: 476). In this sense, the failure of Elizabeth’s appeals might serve to generate a more empathetic and self-reflective reading which looks beyond conventional constraints and preconceptions.

3.3. Reason versus Feeling

In The Lives of Animals, Elizabeth controversially uses reason to attack reason, rejecting the Western philosophical tradition and espousing the sympathetic imagination to positively develop human-animal relations. This section discusses her polemical approach to the relation between reason and feeling, analysing this disconnection’s significance in the text. Firstly, the text’s critique of a certain form of reason is discussed. This is followed by an analysis of Elizabeth’s contradictory representations of the relation between reason and feeling. Lastly, the significance and meaning of these contradictory representations is explored in relation to the text’s message about human-animal relations. Elizabeth’s rejection of philosophy to develop human-animal relations is based on a rejection of reason. She argues: “reason looks to me suspiciously like the being of human thought; worse than that, like the being of one tendency in human thought” (1999: 23). She also says that reason’s ‘totality’ means that it is self-legitimating, and thus cannot deconstruct itself: “of course reason will validate reason as the first principle of the universe – what else should it do? Dethrone itself? Reasoning systems, as systems of totality, do not have that power” (1999: 25). Though her outright rejection of reason is extreme, this section argues that she is criticising the self-elevating, self-legitimating nature of a dominant, hegemonic system of thought, challenging its authority, and questioning its relevancy in terms of relating to nonhuman animals. Moreover, her rejection of reason as a criterion to justify the unequal

75 treatment of nonhuman animals is justifiable and shared by many animal rights philosophers. In light of this, it is argued that Elizabeth’s rejection of a certain kind of reason84 leads her to dismiss reason itself. It might be argued that Elizabeth does not reject reason per se but rather an unqualified rationalism which she equates with traditional philosophical thought that is built on “those aspects of rationality said to express hidden power relations which could not themselves be grounded in anything rational” (Turnbull, 2010: 5). This kind of reason relies on rigid hierarchical distinctions within a dominant ‘rational’ framework that conceives humans as separate from and superior to animal, and has leaked through from the enlightenment period into current human(ist) thought. In other words, Elizabeth emphasizes that traditional Western reason has been steeped in inequality, and repression of the so called ‘irrational’, including sentiment and nonhuman animals. She challenges whether this kind of reason can in fact be regarded as reasonable from outside of this tautology. She, like many ecofeminists,85 denounces the way feeling and emotion have been portrayed as irrational and illegitimate according to such reason, arguing that such an approach to nonhuman animals has been highly detrimental to human-animal relations. She attacks traditional Western philosophy for its view of the nonhuman animal as living “as a machine lives” (1999: 33), stripped of feeling and designed for human gratification. She notes that for the renowned Western philosophers who wrote about nonhuman animals, such as “Saint Thomas [Aquinas], [l]ikewise Plato, likewise Descartes, how we treat animals is of no importance except insofar as being cruel to animals may accustom us to being cruel to men” (1999: 22) Essentially, she scrutinizes the highly anthropocentric and instrumental nature of such thought. It might be argued that Elizabeth is preoccupied with outdated philosophers and their outdated philosophies on the animal, and thus presents a redundant and reductionist argument.86 However, her argument brings into question how much has changed since the days of Descartes, and how much effect counter arguments have had with regards to thinking about nonhuman animals. Elizabeth exposes the fact that, to a significant degree, rationalist thought still underlies and maintains the mass commodification of nonhuman animals in current societies. This is not only in terms of “industrial farming”, but in all forms of animal

84 This resonates with Deleuze’s argument in Difference and Repetition (1968), in which reason/faulty reason/feeling is articulated in Deleuze’s idea of the ‘Image of Dogmatic Thought’. 85 See for example Gaard (1993) and Midgely (2002), who argue that traditional philosophical approaches, including to nonhuman animal studies, maintain a patriarchal, patronizing attitude towards feeling. 86 For example, Fromm argues that “Elizabeth Costello's selective derogations of reason and retreat to soul-saving feeling ignore the fact that [...] standards of behavior toward animals (apart from industrial farming) [have] improved during the past century” (2000: 342). 76

“production facilities” (1999: 19), which have grown in an age of consumerism. This includes the cruel experimentation on nonhuman animals in laboratories, as if they were “machine[s]” (1999: 33). The kind of reason Elizabeth seems to be targeting specifically involves a disturbing moral degradation, where “the progress of rationality turns into its opposite” (Gebauer & Wulf 1996: 292). For example, with regards to scientific behavioural experimentation on apes, Elizabeth views it not only as unnecessarily cruel, devout of feeling, and thus irrationally barbaric, but also as completely inadequate engagements with nonhuman animals, who have their own ways of thinking and feeling. She argues that in their “deepest being” they are “not interested” in the mundane tasks set before them to measure their ability to reason, and only “the experimenter’s single-minded regimentation forces [them] to concentrate on it. The question that truly occupies [...] animals trapped in the hell of the laboratory or the zoo, is: Where is home, and how do I get there?” (1999: 30). Rather than attempting to measure the ‘humanness’ of a nonhuman animal according to anthropocentric and scientific reason, and using this as a measure of their moral worth, she proposes that humans should not project our own behaviour and thoughts on to the consciousness of a being that we cannot fully understand. She asks that humans rather be empathetic to nonhuman animals’ shared existence with us (1999: 63), and receptive to their different feelings and experiences. She says that “this is where a poet might have commenced, with a feel for the ape’s experience” (1999: 30). She subverts the superior status of objective reason with regards to studying nonhuman animals and proposes that studying subjective feeling, such as through literature and poetry, might offer a more complex engagement. Also pointing to the relevance of Elizabeth’s arguments is Coetzee’s portrayal of Elizabeth’s daughter in law, Norma. She “is at present writing for a philosophy journal a review essay on language-learning experiments upon primates”, and attacks Elizabeth’s literature and her “opinions on animals, animal consciousness, and ethical relations with animals” from an anthropocentric, rationalist perspective, dismissing them as “jejune and sentimental” (1999: 17). Here, she sides with the old, traditional male philosophers, despite her youth, gender and recent “Ph.D. in philosophy” (1999: 17). Even her husband, John, notes this, saying: “I’m surprised, Norma. You are talking like an old-fashioned rationalist” (1999: 49). Norma defends herself, saying: “You misunderstand me. That is the ground your mother has chosen. Those are her terms. I am merely responding” (1999: 49). Norma blames her rationalist responses on Elizabeth’s arguments, but her reversion to such thought exposes the fact that it underlies much of philosophy, and that it creeps back in when the concept of reason, or at least Norma’s

77 concept of reason, is threatened. This points to the kind of self-legitimation Elizabeth refers to in her critique that reason cannot ‘dethrone’ itself. This kind of legitimation is critiqued throughout the text, not only by Elizabeth, but also through Coetzee’s characterisation of primary respondents to Elizabeth who patronize Elizabeth’s focus on feeling and the sympathetic imagination in different ways. Most notably these are Norma, a philosopher “of mind” (1999: 17), John, an “assistant professor of physics” (1999: 16), and O’Hearne, a “professor of philosophy” (1999: 59). All these characters have studied fields within the rational sciences. Significantly, in his work on postmodernism, Lyotard argues that “science [...] produces a discourse of legitimation with respect to its own status, a discourse called philosophy (1979: xxv). Coetzee’s critique of scientific and philosophical authority corelates with this postmodern scepticism of self-legitimatory discourses, or metanarratives. Out of all the responses to Elizabeth’s views on the animal in the text, O’Hearne’s most clearly illustrates what Lyotard refers to:

In my reading of the scientific literature [...] efforts to show that animals can think strategically, hold general concepts, or communicate symbolically, have had very limited success. [...] If so [...] isn’t there a certain wisdom in the traditional view that says that animals cannot enjoy legal rights because they are not persons? (1999: 62)

This approach is the epitome of what Elizabeth fervently rejects. It bases the conception and treatment of nonhuman animals on how ‘human’ they appear to be, rather than their own sentience. Feeling is completely overrun by objective and anthropocentric reason in two ways here: on the one hand, the human capacity for sympathy is not exercised for the other, and on the other hand, the nonhuman animal’s capacity to feel is not considered. O’Hearne is not willing to alter his perspective, which relies upon the metanarrative of traditional humanist philosophy, legitimated by anthropocentric scientific reason. Elizabeth replies in a way that briefly concludes this, saying: “let me just make one observation: that the program of scientific experimentation that leads you to conclude that animals are imbeciles is profoundly anthropocentric” (1999: 62). She asks her audience to go beyond such reason by opening their hearts (1999: 37) to nonhuman animals and their capacity for feeling. The idea that nonhuman animals do not experience feelings which one would conceive of as pain, sorrow, or happiness, relies on projective and reductive assumptions. Elizabeth expresses this and says that to assume that “the quality of [a] [nonhuman] [animal’s] being is not joy […] implies that a living being that does not do what we call thinking is somehow second-class (1999: 33). On this topic, she refers specifically to the philosopher Michael Leahy, not by name, but in a footnote. Leahy asserts in his Against Liberation, that "lacking language,

78 animal behaviour does not have meaning for them as it can for us", and thus a nonhuman animal does not merit equal moral consideration with a human (1991: 26). In response to Leahy’s approach, Elizabeth argues:

You say that death does not matter to an animal because the animal does not understand death. I am reminded of one of the academic philosophers I read in preparing for yesterday’s lecture. [...] Can we, asked this philosopher, strictly speaking, say that the veal calf misses its mother? Does the veal calf [...] know enough about missing to know that the feeling it has is the feeling of missing? A calf who has not mastered the concepts of presence and absence, of self and other – so goes the argument – cannot, strictly speaking, be said to miss anything. In order to, strictly speaking, miss anything, it would first have to take a course in philosophy. What sort of philosophy is this? Throw it out, I say. What good do its piddling distinctions do? (1999: 65-66)

Elizabeth bitterly and mockingly comments on the audacity of a human to delegitimize another animal’s feelings based on ‘piddling’ philosophical distinctions within narrow forms of reason. She asserts that just because a nonhuman animal does not speak our language or think like us does not mean they do not feel or that they are less deserving of moral treatment. This critique corelates with that of Jeremy Bentham, a moral philosopher of the 1800s whom Singer quotes in his critique of the speciesist rationalisations used to legitimate the exploitation of nonhuman animals: “[t]he question is not, Can they reason? nor Can they talk? but Can they suffer?” (Singer, 1975: 6). As has been mentioned, although Singer finds Elizabeth’s attack on reason unqualified (Coetzee, 1999: 85-91), he has similar views regarding this specific kind of reason and its ramifications for nonhuman animals. However, Elizabeth goes further into questioning the philosophical boundaries between human and nonhuman animals, and feelings and reason, than Singer, arguing that reason is not only restrictive in terms of ‘knowing’, but also ‘being’. She argues that "[r]eason is the being of a certain spectrum of human thinking" (1999: 23, my emphasis). She counters the preoccupation with abstract philosophical theory and reason by foregrounding “fullness, embodiedness, the sensation of being”, saying that an animal is an “embodied soul” and, as such, to “be a living [animal] is to be full of being” (1999: 33). She says that this “is precisely what Descartes saw and, for his own reasons, chose to deny” (1999: 33), for according to such traditional Western philosophy, a nonhuman “animal is no more than the mechanism that constitutes it; if it has a soul, it has one in the same way that a machine has a battery, to give it the spark that gets it going; but the animal is not an embodied soul” (1999: 33). She suggests that this attitude has bled through into contemporary societies, where nonhuman animals are dualistically separated from their own bodies as “soulless” (1999: 33), for humanity’s ‘own reasons’. She exposes what she sees as an exploitative reason’s self-serving justification of cruel practices, using the rationalisation that nonhuman animals lack a human soul, and can

79 thus be treated as disembodied, soulless mechanisms. Plumwood argues that this mode of rationalism “elevates to extreme supremacy a particular narrow form of reason and correspondingly devalues the contrasted and reduced sphere of nature and embodiment” (2001: 4). Like Plumwood, who argues that reason itself must be recovered from a humanist rationalism that constructs nonhuman animals strictly as passive objects, Elizabeth stresses the importance of the embodiment of all animals. Elizabeth takes ‘embodiedness’ as a grounding for a common and ethical life between human and nonhuman animals. This resonates with what Wolfe calls his “sense of posthumanism”, which

does not partake of the fantasy of the posthuman described by N. Katherine Hayles,[87] which imagines a triumphant transcendence of embodiment and ‘privileges informational pattern over material instantiation, so that embodiment in a biological substrate is seen as an accident of history rather than an inevitability of life’. On the contrary, [...] it requires us to attend to ‘the human’ with greater attention to its embodiment, embeddedness, and materiality, and how these in turn shape and are shaped by consciousness, mind, and so on. (2010: 120)

In this sense, Elizabeth, like Wolfe, subverts the rationalist philosophy of mind, which dualistically distinguishes reason from feeling, separating mind from body, culture from nature, and human from animal. She focuses on embodiment as interconnected commonality of feeling and sensation in all living animals, rather than trying to distinguish who feels what and to what degree. Ultimately, Elizabeth recognises the need for the human to re-imagine the ideological disconnect between body and mind, feeling and reason inherent in traditional Western philosophy, in order to re-imagine the animal. However, it must be noted that within her rejection of dualist accounts of human versus animal, and reason versus feeling, Elizabeth in fact re-instates these disconnections to some extent. Although she states that she refuses to “join herself” to the “vast tautology [of] the great Western discourse of man versus beast, of reason versus unreason” (1999: 25), she rejects reason, separating it from feeling in a way which re-instates the dualistic system of thought on which her rejection is based. But, Elizabeth’s outright rejection of reason suggests her anticipation of the rejection of feeling, and her self-conscious remarks about her lack of philosophical sophistry (1999: 22-23) reflect the elevation of a certain Western philosophical inheritance. In other words, she might be being facetiously polemical to make the point that the philosophical domain rests on an inverted polemic, thereby exposing its contradictory authority.

87 See How we became posthuman: Virtual bodies in cybernetics, literature, and informatics (Hayles, 1999). 80

Another contradiction in the representation of reason and feeling in the text is Elizabeth’s use of reason as a mode of critiquing reason. Elizabeth is not received positively by her audience due to her unsettling position and the contradictory use of that which she is rejecting: she “explicitly rejects philosophical discourse even though she simultaneously expresses her need for it” (Northover, 2009: 5). A response to Elizabeth by “Elain Marx of the English Department” (1999: 18) makes a significant point in this regard: “the very fact that you can be arguing against this reasoning, exposing its falsity, means that you put a certain faith in the power of reason, of true reason as opposed to false reason” (1999: 55). This is a fair observation, for as has been established, Elizabeth does not reject reason per se, but rather a specific kind of reason. She tries to explain her contradictory position, saying:

Although I see that the best way to win acceptance from this learned gathering would be for me to join myself, like a tributary stream running into a great river, to the great Western discourse [...], something in me resists, foreseeing in that step the concession of the entire battle. [However] [...] let me, to prove my good will, my credentials, make a gesture in the direction of scholarship and give you my scholarly speculations, backed up with footnotes” (1999: 25-26).

Elizabeth’s ironic use of philosophical reason, with theoretical ‘footnotes’ against the notion of reason itself, reveals how, because of the nature of reason and language, one has to use the very mode one is critiquing. Reason is the only tool appropriate, especially with an audience of scholars whose academic backgrounds are built on established theory and discourse, to be understood, taken seriously and hope to make any sort of impact. Elizabeth is attempting to ‘dethrone’, or at least destabilize a system of thought and present an alternative position, within that system, using that very system’s medium. She is trying to express to her audience something which affects her deeply without exposing her own feelings about it, but at the same time, is asking them to feel emotional about it. This might encourage readers to think about what affects their reception of information with regards to reason and feeling. In light of her seemingly contradictory use of reason, Elizabeth offers what she calls her philosophical “speculations” (1999: 26) in her struggle to avoid re-instating philosophical metanarratives, or what Wolfe calls the “philosophical protocols and evasions of humanism” (2010: xv-xvi). She asserts at the beginning of her lecture that her “dilemma this afternoon” is that “[b]oth reason and seven decades of life experience tell [her] that reason” is not the centre of meaning, but that she has to “resort to [...] philosophical language [and] bow to reason this afternoon and content [her]self with embroidering on the discourse of the old philosophers” (1999: 22). Her imagery of ‘embroidering’ here can also be read as contradictory. It suggests a feminine convention and creativity, which stands in contrast to patriarchal, rationalist modes of thinking. However, ‘embroidery’ can also mean embellishment or exaggeration. This

81 correlates with her ironically self-depreciating descriptions of herself as “a person whose sole claim to your attention is to have written stories about made-up people” (1999:22), her commentary on her lack of argumentative ability (1999: 22), as well as her dramatic and extreme rejection of reason. Elizabeth further complicates her position by saying that her own ability to reason is what has made her reject it. She asserts that: even the philosopher “Immanuel Kant, of whom I would have expected better, [...] does not pursue, with regard to animals, the implications of his intuition that reason may be not the being of the universe but on the contrary merely the being of the human brain” (1999: 23). Intuition is represented as an alternative form of reason here, as it holds the potential to counteract totalities inherent in dominant philosophical systems, which Elizabeth says Kant failed or refused to overcome. In this way, she is indirectly demanding a re-imagination of the term ‘reason’ itself, or what can be considered as ‘reasonable’. Furthering her seemingly contradictory approach, Elizabeth proposes the limitlessness of the sympathetic imagination but expresses her own limits to sympathise. She begins her argument for the power of the sympathetic imagination by entering into dialogue with the philosopher Thomas Nagel,88 specifically his essay: "What Is it Like to Be a Bat?" (1974). In this essay, he argues that it is not possible for us to understand what it is like to be a bat, because our minds are inadequate to the task. Ironically, his points correlate significantly with certain points that Elizabeth is trying to make, yet Elizabeth shows no sympathy towards or recognition of this. Rather than acknowledging her commonalities with Nagel’s posthumanist recognition of human limitation in understanding the consciousness of a nonhuman animal, she shuts him down in favour of the sympathetic imagination. Moreover, she admits that she does not sympathise with the philosophers she challenges in her lectures: “[d]espite Thomas Nagel, who is probably a good man, despite Thomas Aquinas and René Descartes, with whom I have more difficulty in sympathizing, […] [t]here are no bounds to the sympathetic imagination” (1999: 37). She concludes that there is no justification for the lack of empathy that humans display toward nonhuman animals and asks her audience to put abstractions or “principles” aside and “listen to what your heart says” (1999: 37). However, she then expresses an unwillingness to relate to or sympathise with her fellow humans, specifically philosophers.

88 Nagel is well known for his critique of material reductionist accounts of the mind, particularly in his essay What Is it Like to Be a Bat? (1974), and for his contributions to deontological and liberal moral and political theory. 82

Although Elizabeth’s views seem contradictory and even confusing, their significance with regards to the themes in the text is not. For instance, her rejection of the idea that one cannot sympathetically imagine what it might be like to be another is not based on science or consciousness. Rather, she is arguing that we can enter into relation with nonhuman animals and share, in a sense, something of its existence, through the faculty of imaginative sympathy. She, like Coetzee, agrees that we have our own individual and different forms of consciousness, and that in this way, “[m]an is different” (1999: 54), but also emphasizes that “we are all of one kind, one nature” (1999: 61), and thus sympathy is always a possibility. Elizabeth rejects the alienation of that which is not comprehensible according to scientific reason by making strong convictions about Nagel’s theory, which she says claims that “a bat is a fundamentally alien form of life, not as alien as a Martian but less alien than another human being (particularly, one would guess, were that human being a fellow academic philosopher)” (1999: 31). This tongue-in-cheek reference to what she sees as the exclusionary attitude of academic philosophers critiques the purely objective, feeling-less route that might be taken from such a position. She reveals how such distancing suggests a kind of ‘easy way out’ of having to relate to an-other, and how abstract claims that humans cannot relate to nonhuman animals may produce a self-fulfilling prophecy in real-life contexts. Moreover, Elizabeth challenges the idea that sympathy for a nonhuman animal should be any more difficult than for a human, especially considering that a nonhuman animal is incapable of the “self-conscious” (1999: 34) and premeditated cruelty humans are capable of. Moreover, sympathy is about subjectively feeling rather than objectively knowing, and thus does not require an understanding of another’s consciousness. As Johnson argues, “Elizabeth understands that, realistically, we are not capable of thinking our way into the life of a bat”, yet “we accept our capacity to think and/or feel our way into another human, hence the acts we call sympathy and empathy; therefore, when thinking of the animal, we must first accept the ability to empathize and sympathize with other humans as difficult at best” (2009: 111). Elizabeth’s proposal that the potential for empathy is not determined by human(ist) commonalities and consciousness reflects this: “The question to ask should not be: Do we have something in common – reason, self-consciousness, a soul – with other animals”, but rather whether we have the ability to sympathise with “the ‘another,’ as we see at once when we think of the object not as a bat (‘Can I share the being of a bat?’) but as another human being” (1999: 34-35). This being said, her own unwillingness to sympathise with those humans that she feels support cruelty to nonhuman animals, specifically ‘speciesist’ philosophers, is not so ironic: the promotion of speciesism and justification of cruelty should not, from a perspective that 83 values all animal life, be sympathised with. She does not feel she can sympathise with the position of those humans who do not exercise their sympathetic imaginations for fellow, suffering animals, especially when these humans know better and have the capability to sympathise, but choose to remain within their anthropocentric reason. Coetzee’s ironic use of reason by Elizabeth highlights the fact that it is dominant in most contexts, including the field of human-animal relations. Elizabeth is aware that she is not living up to this standard: “As if recognizing the stir of dissatisfaction [in] [the] [audience], [Elizabeth] resumes: ‘I have never been much interested in proscriptions, [...] laws. I am more interested in what lies behind them’” (1999: 37). Her interest lies in the feelings and virtues that exist independently from established discourse and principles based on anthropocentric reason. As Elizabeth says at the end of her lectures: “I was hoping not to have to enunciate principles. [...] If principles are what you want to take away from this talk, I would have to respond, open your heart and listen to what your heart says” for the heart “is the seat of a faculty, sympathy, that allows us to share at times the being of another” (1999: 34). Some real- life critics and the fictional audience within the text do not acknowledge that she is not attempting to add more regulations and principles regarding the ethical treatment of nonhuman animals to an existing discourse, but is suggesting an alternative route beyond established reason. Northover makes a relevant point with regards to this, commenting specifically on Peter Singer’s dismissal of Elizabeth’s concept of the sympathetic imagination as sentimental, impractical and unrealistic (Singer, 1975: 243; Coetzee, 1999: 85-91). Northover says that if philosophical arguments on the (mis)treatment of nonhuman animals based on reason, such as Singer’s, are “supposed to be so compelling on a rational level, one might ask why so many philosophers resist it and why speciesism is still the dominant attitude in western society. It is precisely because Coetzee suspects that reason is not compelling that he has Costello try a different approach” (2009: 7). Elizabeth’s approach suggests that the obstacles to sympathising with other animals are obstacles humans put there themselves, for: “[s]ympathy has everything to do with the subject and little to do with the object” (1999: 34-35). In this sense, it is not a lack within the other that produces its oppression and mistreatment, but rather a lack of sympathy and imagination in the oppressor. As is apparent, Elizabeth promotes the marginalised side of ideological dualities based on a certain kind of reason, thereby re-instating a disconnection between two constructs. To show the one-sided nature of rationalist thought, Coetzee has Elizabeth approach the animal from the polar end of the ideological divide, centralising feeling and ‘embodiedness’ as opposed to reason and abstract discourse. The reactions to her ideas expose a sort of rationalist 84 hypocrisy, in that people reject and patronize her claims based on the authority of their own, which are largely made up of dominant human(ist) and scientific discourse. Without saying it directly, Elizabeth challenges the idea that reason is always in fact reason(able) and attempts to offer alternative, posthumanist modes of reasoning that do not dismiss feeling and subjective experience. In this way, Elizabeth’s approach resonates with Plumwood, who asserts that “we need to seek out higher order forms of reason that can reflect critically on these failures and develop new forms” (2001: 18). Elizabeth, like Plumwood but in a different mode, argues for new kinds of reason that recognise nonhuman animals as subjects in their own right, and that acknowledge the value of feeling. Coetzee’s refusal to represent nonhuman animals solely in either emotional, sentimental terms, or objective, philosophical terms, complicates existing modes of thinking and preconceptions through exposing the limitations of polemical systems of thought, and demanding a re-imagination of these systems. This opens a space for new and ‘higher order forms’ of reason to be imagined in engaging with nonhuman animals.

3.4. Rationality versus Imagination

The Lives of Animals creates the potential for a re-imagination of the animal that includes exploring the relation between rationality and imagination. The text proposes that imaginative forms of thinking and writing be taken seriously in real life contexts, specifically in relation to human-animal relations. This section analyses the text’s representation of an ideological disconnection between rationality and imagination, specifically the marginalisation of imagination in favour of a narrow form of rationality. Firstly, the text’s commentary on traditional Western interpretations of imaginative literature versus rational philosophy is analysed. Secondly, there is a discussion of the ways in which Coetzee uses Elizabeth’s subversive yet contradictory arguments to reveal the contradictions in dualist interpretations of rationality versus imagination. Lastly, the significance of the representation of the relation between rationality and imagination in the text will be investigated as commentary on real approaches to human-animal relations. Considering that the Tanner Lectures generally take the form of philosophical addresses or academic essays, it might be argued that Coetzee’s metafictional approach to the event was a deliberate way to unsettle such conventions. Mulhall (2009:1) notes that an invitation to speak at the Tanner Lectures is seen as “a mark of real distinction in the philosophical world”, and thus argues that it is difficult to perceive Coetzee’s “way of responding to that invitation as anything other than a deliberate attempt to reopen [...] the [ancient] quarrel between [literature and philosophy]”. However, The Lives of Animals is not simply another debate about

85 philosophy and literature, but rather opens a space for a contemporary re-imagination of their positions, specifically in relation to rationality, imagination, and the animal. As Mulhall argues, Coetzee’s contribution is “not in any sense an attempt to revive a philosophically moribund debate; it is rather a contribution to an utterly contemporary controversy” (2009: 18). Through unsettling boundaries of imagination and reality, Coetzee urges his audience and readers to re- imagine what counts as ‘rational’ and why, and uses this in his approach to human-animal relations. In the history of the Western philosophical tradition, imaginative literature, specifically fiction or poetry, has been conceived as nonrational, and thus inferior to rational philosophical enquiry. Western Platonic89 philosophy is central to The Lives of Animals. However, Coetzee continuously assesses, extends and subverts Plato’s ideas, not only surrounding the animal, but also with regards to the relation between philosophy and literature. As has been discussed in previous sections, the text challenges traditional Western conceptions of reason developed by philosophers such as Plato, which harbour ideological disconnections based on dualist ideology and anthropocentrism. Northover argues that “Plato represents the academic establishment, where reason is a means by which authorities can assert their power” (2009: 48). This power was also used in dismissing imaginative literature as inappropriate for socio-political contexts. Mulhall notes that Plato’s tradition of thought sees literature as “an essentially nonrational activity, lacking any secure, transmissible, and impersonal body of knowledge or expertise that might ground a claim to any depth of understanding” (2009: 1-2). Plato’s analogy separates the ‘nonrational’ literary mode from the ‘rational’ philosophical mode in a way that dismisses the potential for imaginative literature to make any sort of positive impact on reality. Plato went as far as to say that imaginative literary capacities are “amoral” (2009: 2). This distinction has been challenged by various counter theories throughout the history of Western thought, including poststructuralist and postmodern philosophy. However, such dualistic conceptions have bled through into current thought and practices, specifically in academia and ethics, which is what Coetzee brings under scrutiny. It can be argued that dualist conceptions of philosophy and literature prove repeatedly to be contradictory in some sense, and although the debate between them is ancient, it is ongoing. For example, Mulhall discusses a recent exchange between philosophers Cora

89 Plato is considered to be the father of Western philosophy and had enormous impact on the development of Western thought. His works, including his most famous work, the Republic, blend political philosophy, ethics, moral psychology, metaphysics, and epistemology into a systematic, interconnected philosophy. For a compilation of Plato’s complete works see: Cooper, J. M. & Hutchinson, D. S. (eds). 1997. Plato: Complete Works. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company. 86

Diamond and Onora O’Neill. In Diamond’s view, morally attuned forms of literary fiction attempt to enlarge the moral imagination of its readers; it does not assume that its “readers’ hearts are already inclined in the way [the] [author] would like, but rather work[s] to change their prevailing inclinations and assumptions, to lead them to a more sympathetic way of looking at [subjects]” (2009: 3). Through presenting readers with the world as viewed from the perspective of the narrator or characters, literature aims to get readers to attend to a subject as a centre of a distinctive worldview. This correlates with Coetzee’s project with The Lives of Animals which, as discussed in chapter two, uses fiction as a driving force in its intervention into human-animal relations. It also links directly to Elizabeth’s arguments about the power of literature to develop the sympathetic imagination, and specifically her plea with her audience to “open [their] heart[s]” (1999: 37). On the other hand, O’Neill’s preference for theoretical principle over intuition, her relegation of the heart’s concerns to the realm of mere persuasion, and her conception of literary situations and characters not only as mere simulacra of the real but also as directing us away from moral reality rather than closer to it, resembles those originally imposed by Plato (Mulhall, 2009: 3). In this way, the ‘ancient quarrel’ between imaginative literature and rational philosophy is (re)opened once again. Both views contain legitimate and arguable points. However, as Mulhall rightly asserts, what is “not legitimate is for philosophers to bring their own, equally disputable, opposing views about these matters to bear in such a way as to imply that their view is the only conceivable one” (2009: 12). It is this illegitimate, self-acclaimed authority of a narrow form of rationality that Coetzee subverts in his self-conscious, metafictional representation of a protagonist who rejects rational(ist) philosophy as a means to build ethical human-animal relations. Elizabeth proposes literature as an antidote not only to anthropocentrism, but to the lack of empathetic influence in established animal ethics. As Aaltola (2010: 119) notes, she avows “poetry, virtues, emotion, and letting the animal speak to us”. Imagination, intuition, feeling, and receptivity are proposed, rather than what Elizabeth sees as the anthropocentric and detached attitudes which underlie rational(ist), human(ist) philosophical studies of the nonhuman animal. This argument resonates with Wolfe’s posthumanist perspective that “just because we study nonhuman animals does not mean that we are not continuing to be humanist – and therefore, by definition, anthropocentric” (2009: 568). A clear example of such an argument by Elizabeth is when she discusses the famous scientist and psychologist “Wolfgang Köhler”, who in 1917 “published a monograph entitled The Mentality of Apes describing his experiments” (1999: 29). She goes on to say that he “was probably a good man. A good man

87 but not a poet” (1999: 29). Here, she implies that a poet has a heightened moral capacity, subverting Plato’s ideas about the amoral nature of imaginative literature.90 Elizabeth’s views regarding the ability of the sympathetic imagination, her rejection of detached rationality, and her emphasis on approaching the nonhuman animal with a “feel” for their “experience” (1999: 30) correlate with Romantic91 approaches. Romanticism was partly a reaction to rationalist discourse, and its appeals “threaten to undermine the ideals of civility that champions of the Enlightenment fought to secure” (Steiner, 2010: 173). And yet, as Steiner points out with regards to this ‘civility’, “the anthropocentric terms of liberalism virtually define human beings as superior to animals” (2010: 203). Elizabeth is challenging an ideology in which the nonhuman animal, like imaginative literature, is marginalised as part of a ‘nonrational’ category. She exposes a certain ‘rational’ worldview that promotes a narrow form of ‘liberalism’ or ‘civility’ that conceives and treats nonhuman animals as inferior others. It can be argued that the same way in which the centralised human self relies on the other for its autonomous conceptual existence,92 philosophy has relied on literature for its acclaimed superiority. Literature, specifically poetry, is in fact the “means by which philosophy distinguishes itself for the first time as an autonomous form of intellectual inquiry” (Mulhall, 2009: 1). This brings into question whether literature depends on and is thus secondary to philosophy, or the other way around in Coetzee’s text. As Bell asks, is “fiction here in the ancillary role of serving a philosophical exposition, or is what we think of as philosophical thought shown to be dependent on subjective factors such as character, or on intuitions achieved only through myth and metaphor?” (2013: 47). This question remains elusive in a space in which philosophy and literature, and rationality and imagination, might be re- imagined as complementary and mutually dependent on one another for their individual existence, as autonomous but inter-related. This requires both faculties to reconceptualise themselves as “internally related”, confronting “the challenge of reconceiving their self- images, and so their defining aspirations” (Mulhall, 2009: 3). The relation between philosophy

90 This resonates with Kristeva who privileges literature, poetry in particular, because of its willingness to play with grammar, metaphor and meaning, revealing the fact that rational language is at once arbitrary and “transmitted in a social contract of communication" (1982: 38). 91 Romanticism is very difficult to define. Nonetheless, there are some key themes that connect the movement’s central thinkers and make it possible to speak of Romanticism as a movement. Chief among these themes is the rejection of dualism, and the attempt to reinscribe human existence within the context of nature without sacrificing human freedom (Steiner, 2010: 173). Some regard the Romantics to be the earliest examples of ecocritics, particularly because of their descriptions of nature and nonhuman animals. 92Judith Butler maintains that being and becoming human requires passing into a field of discourse and power that “orchestrates, delimits and sustains” that which qualifies as ‘human’. She suggests that being human in a fundamental sense, means ‘not-being-animal’ and that the exclusion of the animal is constitutive of the human community (1993: 76). 88 and literature, like that of human and nonhuman animals, must be re-imagined in a way which disrupts dualist and hierarchical disconnections. Coetzee’s space for such a re-imagination offers a more inclusive and potentially effective approach, where the realm of ethics might be considered one of imaginative literature’s ‘defining aspirations’. To complicate the dualistic interpretation of the relation between rationality and imagination and reveal its inevitable contradictions, Coetzee creates his own contradictory disconnections in the text. He has Elizabeth, who rejects rational philosophy, expose her reliance on it in her promotion of the imagination. This is not only in terms of content, but also form. Elizabeth says that the language she is looking for is not rational, philosophical language that can distinguish “between mortal and immortal souls, or between rights and duties” (1999: 22), but rather an imaginative, sympathetic language that can communicate what it might be like to “feel like Red Peter” (1999: 125). Yet, her language in her lectures is non-imaginative, and “lacks animation” (1999: 23). As is discussed in the next chapter, Elizabeth relates herself to Kafka’s fictional ape, Red Peter, showing her interpretation of what it might feel like to be another animal through the literary imagination, yet uses platonic and rational argument to do so. Moreover, Elizabeth uses the form of rational philosophical argument, but refuses to engage with philosophical approaches which resonate with her own arguments, such as posthumanist or ecofeminist philosophy, in an effort to promote imaginative literature. This highlights that dualist interpretations of literature and philosophy as forms of understanding and communication “seem in deep contradiction with their content” (Mulhall, 2009: 8), as they rely on each other as means of expression. Significantly, Plato himself uses “striking quasi- poetic imagery in conveying his message of the superiority of philosophy to literature: Plato’s favoured medium [...] is that of the dialogue: he stages his condemnation of theatre in the form of dramatized conversations” (2009: 2). Elizabeth subverts this ironic use of the very mode one is critiquing and uses rational language and philosophical arguments in her attempt to express the superiority of the imagination and literature. In this way, although from inverted perspectives, Plato and Coetzee both indirectly express the interdependence and complementarity of philosophy and literature through platonic dialog. In light of this, it might be argued that the “Platonic dialogue is the perfect medium for the combination of the rational and the imaginative” and that “Coetzee chose it for The Lives of Animals, not to displace reason, but to achieve a proper balance between reason and imagination” (Northover, 2012: 40). This ‘balance’ is constantly questioned throughout the text, both in terms of its content and metafictional form. As mentioned in chapter two of this study, the two chapters that make up 89 the text, titled ‘The Philosophers and the Animals’ and ‘The Poets and the Animals’, are interwoven with rational philosophy and imaginative literature, also obscuring the duality and exposing its contradictions. Further complicating this duality through contradictory representations, Coetzee has Elizabeth criticise imaginative literature as well. She starts off by promoting poetry in what seems to be an absolute way, but then contradicts this by criticising it as also being limited and anthropocentric. Initially, it seems she is using Ted Hughes’ poem, ‘The Jaguar’, as an example of an ideal poetic engagement with the nonhuman animal (1999: 50). However, she goes on to say that:

What is peculiar about poetic engagements of this kind is that, no matter with what intensity they take place, they remain a matter of complete indifference to their objects. In this respect they are different from love poems, where your intention is to move your object. Not that animals do not care what we feel about them. But when we divert the current of feeling that flows between ourself and the animal into words, we abstract it forever from the animal. [...] It falls within an entirely human economy in which the animal has no share. (1999: 51)

In this way, she reveals the limitations within her own polemical convictions about the superiority and power of literature in engaging with nonhuman animals. She makes the point that once feelings are manifested in language and writing, they have no effect on the nonhuman animal, whether it be rational or imaginative language. No form of imaginative literature about nonhuman animals, no matter how well intentioned, can have a direct effect on it. She says that in this way, literature about nonhuman animals has a similar kind of irony to that of the study of ecology: “[t]he irony is a terrible one. An ecological philosophy that tells us to live side by side with other creatures justifies itself by appealing to an idea of a higher order than any living creature [...] which no creature except Man is capable of comprehending” (1999: 54). What Elizabeth is painfully and repeatedly pointing out is the inescapable anthropocentrism involved in studying and writing about nonhuman animals, regardless of its form. She realises this, saying “I’m sorry to go on like this” (1999: 54), revealing her own feelings of powerlessness and uncertainty regarding the matter. Yet another representation that uses contradiction to complicate the relation between rationality and imagination in the text is the scenario involving Abraham Stern, a well-known Jewish poet “who was the missing guest” at Elizabeth’s lectures (1999: 49). In regard to his absence, Norma asks John: “Do you think it was a protest?” (1999:49). John replies: “I’m sure it was. She should have thought twice before bringing up the Holocaust” (1999: 49). What is significant about this scenario in terms of the relation between rationality and imagination is that a poet, rather than a philosopher, rejects Elizabeth’s metaphorical analogy between humans

90 and nonhuman animals. This irony reveals how everyone has their personal guards up according to their backgrounds and their own positions, and that no position is truly objective to an idea, whether that person is regarded a ‘rational’ philosopher or a ‘nonrational’ poet. Rather, as Elizabeth says, “the question is, what do we make of [the] [idea]?” (1999: 56). In this way, Coetzee demands for interpretation to be pushed beyond the limits of normative or accepted conventions and conditioned emotions or defences. He does this by revealing the inevitable limitations and contradictions in every facet of human representation and understanding, specifically of the animal. In light of this, it might be argued that Elizabeth’s tone and message is one of hopelessness, and that “the main theme of her lectures [is] the impossibility of representing animal expression and subjectivity” (Barret, 2014: 127), in any form. It might be argued that her struggle to speak represents her own impossible position, and “thematizes the struggle for a language that disrupts [anthropocentrism]” (2014: 127). Elizabeth brings many anthropocentric ideas and practices into question, but does not actually provide any definitive answers. However, one point she is certain about is the power of the sympathetic imagination, which she says can be developed through imaginative literature. She acknowledges its limitations, saying that not everyone is capable of or willing to engage with it, but says that apart from this, there are no limits to the extent to which one can imagine themselves “into the being of another” (1999: 35). Ultimately, Coetzee is acknowledging the limits of every form of thinking, expression and communication, specifically in relation to nonhuman animals. However, he is also expressing the idea of the limitlessness of the imagination if one pushes oneself as far as possible beyond preconceptions and constraints of a certain kind of rationality. It is from this point of departure that he demands a re-imagination of the animal. Coetzee’s space for re-imagination includes considering that there might be ways of convincing others of a vision of human-animal relations that are not traditionally ‘rational’, but valuable and progressive nonetheless. This includes exploring faculties that have been supressed or downplayed by rational approaches, including the imagination. Mulhall argues that these ways are “nonargumentative and yet capable of engaging with, and embodying, genuine thoughtfulness”, and involve “convictions of the heart, [...] overcoming their repression, establishing their purity, and giving them more concrete structure and substance as ways of making rational progress” (2009: 5). Through his fictional representation, Coetzee reveals the struggle to rationally express the power and value of the sympathetic imagination and imaginative literature. Elizabeth tries to explain this to her audience:

91

If I do not convince you, that is because my words, here, lack the power to bring home to you the wholeness, the unabstracted, unintellectual nature, of that animal being. That is why I urge you to read the poets who return the living, electric being to language. (1999: 51, 65)

Here, she passionately appeals to the audience to go beyond the rational language and thought that is limiting her in her own expression and use their ability to imagine as a way to develop sympathy for nonhuman animals. She says that poetry has the power to develop such imaginative sympathy, as it uses language in such a way that rational philosophy cannot. John patronizes his mother’s views on the matter, failing to relate to her approach: “Do you really believe, Mother, that poetry classes are going to close down the slaughterhouses?” (1999: 58). Elizabeth replies by saying: “John, I don’t know what I want to do. I just don’t want to sit silent” (1999: 59). It seems that Elizabeth, and Coetzee, are trying to express that they cannot live in complicity with the mass suffering of nonhuman animals, and that imaginative literature offers an alternative platform and means of approaching a problem that has not been solved by purely ‘rational’ approaches. The Lives of Animals does offer some kind of hope in its opening up of an alternative means of thinking about nonhuman animals, in which literature might promote empathy through imagination and trigger self-reflection. It does this through its own multi-layered literary representation, where fictional arguments and situations might spur one to question one’s own preconceptions surrounding the animal and literature. As Mulhall (2009: 3) argues, Elizabeth creates a space in which to “open just these ideas and assumptions to question; but she does so in ways that can properly be understood only if we understand that our primary relation to her is as a literary creation”. Such a reading becomes possible in acknowledging that the work, although an enquiry into philosophical thought, is ultimately a work of imaginative literature. Mulhall goes on to say that The Lives of Animals is:

an attempt by a master of literature to put philosophy in question; and whatever philosophers ultimately come to think is the right way to answer the questions this text poses, they will have failed altogether to meet that challenge if they fail to take seriously the fact that the questions themselves are at once possessed of a recognizable philosophical warrant, and yet irreducibly posed by and through literature. (2009: 3)

Through bringing both sides of a dualistic argument into question by playing on the uncertainty of all categories and conventions, Coetzee challenges anthropocentric understandings of the animal from the root up, recognising the interconnected ideology which underlies all exclusionary and hierarchical thought, including that of the imagination and rationality. DeLoughrey & Handley go as far as to say that “Costello challenges the anthropocentric priorities of both ethics and literature more thoroughly than established arguments in philosophy” (2007: 208). However, Coetzee is not trying to offer his readers a new set of

92 principles or hierarchisations. Rather, he opens a space in which an alternative means of connection to and imaginings of the nonhuman animal can take place. Imaginative literary engagements with nonhuman animals may have the potential to shape real life situations, choices and interactions between human and nonhuman animals in a unique way. It might be argued that in order to be receptive to what Elizabeth says about literary (re)imagination and the animal, however, always and inevitably involves philosophical (re)thinking, as the two are inseparable. Coetzee’s representation of Elizabeth’s own struggles and flaws reveals the difficulty of achieving balance, but at the same time, his metafictional intervention points towards the possibility of a more inclusive, less rigid, more imaginative utilisation of modes of thought and practice regarding human-animal relations. Coetzee is highlighting the fact that literature and the imagination deserve to be taken seriously in socio- political and ethical contexts, specifically surrounding human-animal relations. Moreover, imaginative literature is more accessible to the general public than academic philosophical essays and studies, for example, and has further potential to reach a larger and more varied audience. In light of this, Borrell argues that Coetzee is “emphasising that the question of human-animal relations can also be treated seriously within writing which is for public consumption” (2009: 25). In this work of imaginative literature, rationality and imagination are utilised in a way which exposes their contradictions, but also showcases their potential, revealing their complementarity, and expressing how they can work together in positively developing human-animal relations. In The Lives of Animals, literature and reality become interconnected, as Coetzee’s literary experimentation with real issues surrounding the animal might have an ethical force in the real world of human-animal relations. Bell notes this, saying: “as a fiction [the] [text] has significance beyond the topic of Costello’s lecture[s] and transforms the truth claims of her argument. At the same time, its force as a fiction also derives from its real-life situatedness” (2006: 173). The text intertwines fiction and extra-fictional concerns in such a way that it creates a ‘force’ stemming from its hybridity and unsettling play on boundaries. It blurs the distinction between fiction and reality, creating an “interface between fiction and the world of extrafictional responsibilities” (2006: 174). The text exposes the contradictions within language, and the instability of the term ‘rational’ itself, revealing discomforting truths about the limitations of certain conventions and ideology. Bell notes that in Coetzee’s texts the “literary proves over and over again to be a radically discomforting, albeit indispensable, category for a certain kind of truth telling” (2006: 173). Imaginative modes of thinking might push one to go beyond rational and limiting preconceptions. It might provoke a resistance to 93 what Wolfe (2010: xv-xvi) calls “the cultural repressions and fantasies, the philosophical protocols and evasions, of humanism”, and encourage a posthumanist re-imagination, which requires “a new mode of thought that comes after” (2010: xvi) the constraints of humanist rationality. Philosophy and literature as forms of rhetoric are brought into question through both the content and form of The Lives of Animals. It offers literature as a powerful mode for addressing the realm of ethics, specifically in human-animal relations. It demands a rethinking that includes both intellectual and imaginative elements, deconstructing a rigid understanding of the term ‘rational’, and demanding a re-imagination of ideological disconnections between rationality and the imagination. It is a powerful resistance by Coetzee against traditional categorisations and discourses, but also an outcry by a fictional character who recognises and attempts to subvert the dominant position of a certain kind of ‘rationality’ in a predominantly anthropocentric society. Coetzee’s literary work has an ethical force in its demand to extend empathy, in this case, to nonhuman animals, through an interconnected utilisation of the rational and imaginative faculties in re-imagining the animal.

3.5. Conclusion

Rational argument is undoubtedly a powerful tool in understanding the world and how we should live in it. However, as this chapter has discussed, the term ‘rational’ has been used to legitimate what can in fact be considered quite irrational. This brings into question whether supposedly rational arguments based on reason are often themselves constructions based on certain imaginary, emotive and self-serving assumptions. It enquires whether the issue is that rational argument is always devoid of emotion, or that rational philosophy cannot admit that it is perhaps not as objective as it claims. Coetzee explores and exposes such matters through his fictional representation of characters who are personally and socially tied to their philosophical worldviews. As Elizabeth tries to express, anthropocentric humanism, based on what Western philosophers and scientists have claimed to be rational, progressive thought and reason, in fact harbours conceptions and attitudes which might encourage and allow us to behave in a systematic, but irrationally impulsive and destructive, inhumane manner. Coetzee’s metafictional, self-conscious representation of Elizabeth’s partial and contradictory re-instatements of dualities and disconnections from a subverted perspective exposes the human tendency to approach complex matters dualistically, even in attempting to rectify a problematic dualism. However, it also serves to reveal the often self-legitimating and one-sided nature of dominant systems of thought and discourse through challenging their

94 acclaimed authority and central positions. In this way, the text resonates with posthumanism, defies dualism, and “deconstructs the dichotomy on which [dominant] discourse relies” (Bartosch, 2013: 266). As is apparent in this chapter, Elizabeth promotes the marginalised side of ideological dualities based on a certain kind of reason. Although her positions and arguments seem contradictory and even confusing, their significance with regards to the themes of deconstruction and subversion in the text is not. This chapter has argued that Coetzee offers an alternative frame for approaching human-animal relations through revealing and questioning ideological disconnections based on Eurocentric and anthropocentric identities. Philosophy and literature as forms of rhetoric are brought into question through both the content and form of the text, which offers literature as a powerful mode for addressing the realm of human-animal relations in rational contexts. Coetzee’s literary work has an ethical force in provoking reflection and extending empathy to nonhuman animals through an interconnected utilisation of the rational and imaginative faculties. With these disconnections taken into account, chapter four establishes connections in the text, based on a receptive and affirmative reading of some of Elizabeth’s arguments.

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Chapter Four: Establishing Connections in The Lives of Animals

4.1. Introduction

Although Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals is built on significant ambiguities and disconnections, the space for re-imagination that it creates involves the potential for establishing unforeseen and affirmative connections. It might be argued that the text’s uncertainty propels readers to form their own thoughts and opinions, and reflect on the subject of the animal in new and unexpected ways. As Northover argues about the Lives of Animals, Coetzee “purposefully avoids a straightforward approach in order to get his readership to view the subject from new perspectives and to make new and unexpected connections” (2009: i). The following chapter establishes connections in the text, specifically between human and animal, rationality and feeling, and reality and imagination. This is achieved through re- imagining rigid and dualistic interpretations of these constructs that the text critiques and complexifies. Section 4.2 focuses on the connected relation between human and animal in the text. Connections are made between Elizabeth and the animal, both in terms of Elizabeth’s own animal being, and her linkages to the nonhuman animal. Although it is noted that Elizabeth cannot be compared directly to nonhuman animals, her marginalisation, due to what has been interpreted as her unintelligibility, is explored as a way of connecting her to the nonhuman animal. Section 4.3 discusses interconnection in the text, focusing on the interconnection of rationality and feeling, and how this relates to the interconnection of human and nonhuman animals. The aspects of Western humanism that Elizabeth rejects are built on a hierarchical disconnection between these constructs, which has proven to be problematic and destructive in various ways for human-animal relations. The notion of ‘interconnectivity’ is offered as an affirmative approach to the concerns that Elizabeth raises about human-animal relations. Interconnectivity is based on an approach of rationality and feeling, and recognises their inseparability in a real-life context of human-animal relations. Lastly, section 4.4 explores the potential for imaginative realities in the text, establishing connections between reality and imagination, and deconstructing dualistic interpretations. Through analysing Elizabeth’s arguments about the power of the sympathetic imagination, this section explores the imaginative ways of engaging with the nonhuman animal that the text brings to light. The potential for imaginative literature to push its readers to imagine and re-imagine preconceived boundaries in human-animal relations is discussed. In

96 this sense, imaginative approaches are proposed as valid counter-centric modes and are suggested as holding real value in their potential to contribute to positively developing human- animal relations, not only imaginary, but also in a real-life or extra-textual context.

4.2. Elizabeth and the Animal

One cannot compare Elizabeth’s position to what she calls “the horrors of [nonhuman] [animals’] lives and deaths” (1999: 19) directly. However, links can be made in differing contexts and to different degrees. In this section, connections are made between Elizabeth and the animal, both in terms of Elizabeth’s own animal being, and her linkages to the nonhuman animal. Elizabeth’s marginalisation, due to what has been interpreted as her unintelligibility, is explored as a way of connecting her to the nonhuman animals she talks about. Firstly, Elizabeth’s identification with the fictional nonhuman animal character, Red Peter, is explored. Secondly, links between the positions of Elizabeth and the nonhuman animal are discussed as representing an interruption of dualist disconnections between human and animal in the text. Lastly, there is an investigation into the voicelessness of these linked positions, and their relation to (lack of) receptivity. Throughout The Lives of Animals, Elizabeth is represented as an outsider, isolated and misunderstood. She relates strongly to the author Franz Kafka, and specifically his nonhuman animal character, Red Peter, as alienated figures in an anthropocentric society. In opening her first lecture, Elizabeth says that her current position in front of an audience leads her to identify with the ape in Kafka’s “Report to an Academy” (1999: 18). Kafka’s “educated ape, Red Peter” (1999: 18), offers an account of his development from an ‘nonrational’, nonhuman animal “beast” (1999: 18), to a rational, speaking subject in front of an academic human audience. He has attained a degree of recognition, and what Bell calls a “limited freedom” (2006: 181) by performing an imitated ‘humanness’. However, his ultimate goal was not to become human. Rather, he used his imitation of ‘humanness’ as a way to escape his imprisonment in captivity. Elizabeth too feels that she has to perform a certain accepted mode of ‘humanness’, not in order to escape literal imprisonment from a cage, but in order to be recognised or heard. This is a form of metaphorical imprisonment: she is bound within a certain standard of rational(ist), human(ist) discourse and enquiry, for what else would ensure that she is not perceived as “generally mak[ing] a monkey of [her]self?” (1999: 23). Like Red Peter, Elizabeth feels that she is an animal that has to perform according to a certain standard of human reason in order to be considered by her academic audience.

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Red Peter’s gaze upon his human audience reflects back the overlooked disconnection caused by the anthropocentric logic of reason. His gaze is met by an audience of such ideological alterity that they only recognise him for his performance of human characteristics. Through the character of Red Peter, Kafka and Elizabeth subvert the gaze of the active human onto the passive nonhuman animal, exposing anthropocentrism in a way which can be linked to Derrida’s posthumanist speculations in The Animal That I Therefore Am (2008). Derrida's story of his pet cat staring at his naked human body deconstructs the human-animal dualism, expressing the power of the nonhuman animal's "bottomless gaze", which exposes "the abyssal limit of the human" (2008:12). Both Red Peter and Elizabeth are outsiders in their own paradoxical performances, as they have to perform the very ‘humanness’ that they are questioning, struggling to express its ‘abyssal limit’. On another level, Coetzee may be revealing, through his multi-levelled representation of Elizabeth and Red Peter, what he felt was his own outsider position at his Tanner Lectures performance. Elizabeth is, like the nonhuman animal, marginalised and alienated according to humans and discourses that deem her unintelligible. She identifies with Red Peter in her isolated position, as a “figure of her own alienation” (Bell, 2006:181). She says that, like Red Peter: “I am an animal exhibiting, yet not exhibiting, to a gathering of scholars, a wound, which I cover up under my clothes but touch on in every word I speak" (1999: 26). Elizabeth’s marginalisation due to her struggle to ‘exhibit’ or intelligibly articulate her position and the position of nonhuman animals to her audience and family can be read as a ‘wound’. This wound involves a specific woundedness of the anthropocentric, disconnected human condition. Faivre describes this “woundedness” as the “foundational break with nature and the animal which defines the human: the acquisition of language and reason” in the “imaginary of the humanities” (2012: 3). Due to their ideological separation from the nonhuman animal and an “estrangement from their fuller [animal] being” (2012: 3), the other human characters display an unawareness of this woundedness. This woundedness manifests in the inhumane and self- destructive behaviour of humans in their treatment of the nonhuman animal discussed in previous chapters. Elizabeth’s awareness of this woundedness wounds her further, and is part of the reason she feels she is performing to an audience of unaware, alien beings. As Faivre argues, she is performing not so much a “critique as a felt polemic against rational language (philosophy) and the way it wounds the sensitive animal” (2012: 4). In this sense, Elizabeth is revealing the damaging effects of rational(ist) human(ist) reason on both human and nonhuman animals, thus connecting human and nonhuman animal positions.

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In the text, Elizabeth’s own son displays the incapacity to recognise and empathise with his mother’s woundedness. This becomes most apparent in the tragic scene at the end of Coetzee’s text, analysed in section 2.4 of this study. Here, Elizabeth exposes her emotional and psychological turmoil, only for her son to abandon her there. According to Bartosch, this scene “perfectly literalises the woundedness of the posthumanist character” (2013: 271) of Elizabeth. Her son cannot comfort her in her position of alienation. He can, however, smell the decaying deathliness of ‘flesh’ on her when he takes her in his arms in an attempt to comfort her: “He inhales the smell of cold cream, of old flesh” (1999: 69). The term ‘flesh’ is used frequently throughout the novel. On the opening page of the story, for example, it is stated that: “[Elizabeth’s] flesh has grown flabby” (1999: 15). At first it is used to describe Elizabeth, a “fleshy” (1999: 16) woman, but later to describe the nonhuman animal bodies that humans ingest. In this way, it subtly but powerfully connects the bodies of nonhuman animals to the human body, specifically Elizabeth’s, creating a thought-provoking, unsettling connection. Coetzee destabilizes the rational dichotomy of human and nonhuman animal through a simple play on words, highlighting the contradictions, power relations and violence inherent in language. His specific employment of the term ‘flesh’ also hints at the abjectification93 of the female and nonhuman animal forms. This brings to light the anthropocentric, patriarchal ideology inherent in dominant systems of thought and language, and how they are connected. Elizabeth is an elderly woman, her “hair, which had had streaks of gray in it, is now entirely white; her shoulders stoop; her flesh has grown flabby” (1999: 15). This might incline the reader to sympathise with her as a vulnerable old woman, but also to discredit her because of her age and sex. In the text, Elizabeth is a well-known and respected writer, and although there are instances of discrimination against her age and sex by other characters, they are not central in her overall reception. Rather, it is her challenge to normative standards and expectations which causes her to be rejected and subordinated, and her external characteristics, such as age and sex, are used as possible reasons for projecting incredulousness onto her. Elizabeth’s audience and family members are shown to treat her as a nonsensical old woman who has lost her way only after attending her lectures. Norma, who finds her “opinions on animals, animal consciousness, and ethical relations with animals” outrageous, is met by John’s patronizing defence that “[s]he’s confused! [...] She’s old, she’s my mother” (1999: 36).

93The abject refers to the human reaction (horror, vomit) to a threatened breakdown in meaning caused by the loss of the distinction between subject and object or self and other. Kristeva refers to the moment in our psychosexual development when we established a border or separation between human and animal, and culture and that which preceded it. The female body, like the animal, has been abjectifiied: repressed, deemed as unclean or improper, marginalised and reduced to material function by dominant patriarchal culture (Kristeva, 1982). 99

However, the confusion she is accused of is more to do with the views she expresses, and how she expresses them. Although, as Kompridis points out, “there is some suspicion raised about the condition of her mind in what is unsaid and implied”, the implication of her treatment is rather that she is “out of her depth, intellectually, confused about what the issues are, confused about what is required to discuss them with the requisite clarity” (2014: 208). It is a certain display of reason, and her inability or unwillingness to fully “bow down” (1999: 23) to it that excludes Elizabeth from the rest of the human characters. This standard of reason is what underlies the marginalisation and exclusion of Elizabeth and nonhuman animals. To a certain extent, however, Elizabeth does “bow down” (1999: 23) to reason, and offers herself, despite what she knows it may do to her reputation, as a spokesperson for those animals who cannot speak. This is hinted at in the reference to her second lecture as “tomorrow’s offering” (1999: 45). As Bell notes, Elizabeth is not “merely speaking for the animals but is putting herself in their place, effectively sacrificing herself as a public persona” (2006: 189). In this way, Elizabeth becomes animal. In a posthumanist reading, the suffering of the animal that the story represents, includes what Diamond calls “the wounded animal that the story has as its central character” (2008: 48). Elizabeth’s ‘sacrifice’ for nonhuman animals adds to her ‘woundedness’, as she is further alienated in her attempt to speak for those who cannot. The characters in the text display a failure or unwillingness to relate to Elizabeth and what she is trying to communicate about nonhuman animals. As discussed in chapter two, most of them respond to her according to their preconceived notions of nonhuman animals and animal rights, and demand clarification regarding “principles” (1999: 37) and “rules” (1999: 62). Elizabeth questions why interrogations about the knowledge and ‘rules’ surrounding a nonhuman animal and its suffering, including definitions and hierarchisations, can become more important than acknowledgment of the suffering itself. She says that “[r]ight now, in our midst, somewhere, not far away at all, down the street perhaps, are drug-testing laboratories, factory farms, abattoirs. They are all around us as I speak, only we do not, in a certain sense, know about them” (1999: 21). The sense in which one does not ‘know’ about the suffering of nonhuman animals reveals the difference between knowledge and acknowledgement. According to Stanley Cavell,94 acknowledgement “goes beyond knowledge [...] in its

94 Cavell was a renowned American philosopher in the fields of ethics, aesthetics, and ordinary language philosophy. Although trained in the Anglo-American analytic tradition, Cavell frequently interacted with the continental tradition, and included literary study in philosophical inquiry. He addresses topics such as language use, metaphor, skepticism, tragedy, and literary interpretation (Fischer, 1989: 7-20). 100 requirement that I do something or reveal something on the basis of that knowledge” (1969: 257). In other words, acknowledgment includes a kind of internalisation of and answerability to the knowledge, in this case, of suffering. Elizabeth is trying to express that the rationalisation of cruelty through exclusionary, anthropocentric reasoning blinds humanity to their own inhumanity, as they may ‘know’ about nonhuman animal suffering, but do not have to acknowledge it. In this sense, Elizabeth is trying to emphasize that it is the human complicity in the cruelty that is the problem. As Diamond argues, Elizabeth is “a woman haunted by the horror of what we do to animals, wounded by this knowledge, this horror, and by the knowledge of how unhaunted others are” (2008: 48). Elizabeth expresses disbelief about how seemingly good, kind people, such as her own family, can be so ‘unhaunted’ by their own complicity in the mass cruelty towards nonhuman animals. She laments to her son: “I look into your eyes, into Norma’s, into the children’s, and I see only kindness, human-kindness” (1999: 69). Her use of the word human to describe the type of kindness she is referring to here is significant: it describes not only the nature and being of those expressing the kindness, but also that of who might receive the kindness. Elizabeth sees it as an unacknowledging, inadequate, and incomplete kindness, as it fails to consider its own anthropocentric limitations. It is a kindness which refuses to acknowledge and thus excludes not only nonhuman animal suffering, but also Elizabeth’s suffering, which is largely a result of her feelings about the suffering of nonhuman animals. Bell argues that Elizabeth’s position seems not to be a “conviction that is passionately held so much as a true passion in the sense of a condition that is helplessly suffered” (2013: 43). Although incomparable in direct terms, Elizabeth’s suffering is deeply connected to the nonhuman animals’ suffering. The damaging effects of this connected suffering on Elizabeth are subtly hinted at throughout the novel. She is described as looking weary and fragile, specifically after engaging with an audience who do not seem to recognise or empathise with her or the nonhuman animals she talks about. At the end of her second lecture, she is described by her son as “gray and tired and confused” (1999: 44). Her confusion is also a sign of self-doubt caused by her alienation. This is shown most clearly in her self-questioning: “[e]veryone else comes to terms with” the systematic mass cruelty to nonhuman animals, “[w]hy can’t you? Why can’t you?” (1999: 69). Her behaviour in this scene points to the impact that her marginalisation has had on her: it has damaged her sense of certainty and validity. She finds herself “intolerably implicated in the injustice” (Kompridis, 2014: 208) against nonhuman animals in which not only most of society, but her own family is complicit. This alienates her to the point where she begins to believe that 101 she is the problematic element, due to her inability to come to terms with that which other humans seem to regard as part of everyday life. Her inability to articulate her feelings to other humans means that Elizabeth is rendered voiceless on a certain level. Like Red Peter, her position involves a wound that she is unable to truly exhibit to her audience in words. The limitation of language to articulate what Elizabeth is trying to express becomes clear when she says: “When I think of the words [...] they seem best spoken into a pillow”, which leads her son to ask: “I don’t follow. What is it you can’t say?” (1999: 69). Elizabeth feels she cannot say the unspeakable things she feels about the mistreatment of nonhuman animals, but also recognises her inability to be truly heard, even by her own son, in the way she intends. This puts her in a position where she feels lost for words. Even if she did have the words, they would best be spoken into a pillow, because they would not be related to or empathised with. Elizabeth’s position can be related to a condition Cavell investigates in which “words are called for” but “there are no words” (1990: xxxvii). In his discussion of moral theory, Cavell notes that certain standards of intelligibility “seek to deprive others of expression, of their voice, in choosing the […] ideas, of their lives” thereby causing “self-obscurity, [in] the demand for intelligibility” (1990: xxxvi). The words Elizabeth uses in her attempt to express to herself to her audience are perceived as either unintelligible, or as intelligibly absurd, and thus shameful, “best spoken into a […] hole in the ground” (1999: 69).95 Therefore, Elizabeth is ‘deprived’ of ‘expression’ by a standard of ‘intelligibility’ that causes her to experience ‘self-obscurity’ and doubt. This standard and members of her audience wish to “control her voice, dictate what it may utter and the manner in which it may utter it” (Cavell, 1990: xxxvi). Her utterances and the reception of these utterances are controlled by dominant, exclusionist ideology surrounding what it means to be a human or nonhuman animal. In this way, Elizabeth is metaphorically voiceless. She is repressed by a system of thought which renders her voiceless despite her ability to speak. Her inability to make her suffering intelligible is what Kompridis calls a case of “inarticulate suffering” (2014: 204). Kompridis argues that there is “something like a failure of recognition here, for the life of a particular human being has been rendered invisible, and, indeed, voiceless, in the very struggle to make it visible, to find the words in which to voice it” (2014: 204). Elizabeth, like the nonhuman animals she talks about, suffers as a result of humans’ inability or unwillingness to

95 This metaphor of speaking into a hole in the ground is linked to the fable King Midas, in which a shameful secret is whispered into a hole in the ground. The full fable can be found in: Graves, R. 1955. The Greek myths. Baltimore: Penguin Books. 102 empathise with her position or recognise her attempts to communicate her position. Similarly, nonhuman animals are voiceless due to their inability to ‘reason’ and communicate according to human standards. Their voicelessness, due to a human failure to empathise with them, continues to justify the systematic abuse and exploitation of them. For both Elizabeth and the nonhuman animal, whether they remain voiceless or not is related directly to receptivity. The kind of receptivity focused on in this study involves attending to voices that have been subordinated, deemed as unrecognisable and thus remained unheard. In this way, receptivity is interconnected to the sympathetic imagination. Slote argues that certain ethicists and psychologists of moral development believe that empathy is necessary to the development of genuinely altruistic concern about others, human or nonhuman, but that the kind of empathy that is required for this itself always entails and involves a kind of receptiveness to others (2013: 12). A posthumanist receptivity involves an inclusive compassion, which has at its base a re- imagination of dualist, rationalist conceptions of the animal, and “an acceptance that we are all of one kind” (1999: 61). This entails being open and listening to other animals, human or nonhuman, in ways that go beyond certain rational constraints and preconceptions. Though Elizabeth says that humans once had to listen to the voice of the nonhuman animal, “the roar of the lion, the bellow of the bull”, this was at a time when the conceived superiority of the human was not yet definite, but now “[a]nimals have only their silence left with which to confront us” (1999: 25). The word ‘silence’ used by Elizabeth might be questioned here. From a posthumanist perspective, it is not the nonhuman animal’s lack of communication that renders it voiceless, but rather the human’s lack of receptivity. Interestingly, in the Reflections section of the text, Doniger challenges Elizabeth’s use of the term ‘silence’. She contends that nonhuman animals are not silent, linking her argument to mythology: “the myth of the human among wild animals [...] always tells us how they manage to speak to one another [...] Only by speaking their language will we really be able to know how we would think and feel if we were fish or horses” (1999: 105). She argues that the nonhuman animal repeatedly speaks a language that we simply refuse to listen to. In this study’s reading, Elizabeth is implying exactly this, and uses the word ‘silence’ as a way of expressing how humans have silenced the nonhuman animal through failing to be receptive and use their sympathetic imaginations in relating to them. She expresses this idea in a story about Albert Camus:96

96 Camus was a renowned French philosopher, author, and journalist. His views contributed to the rise of the philosophy known as absurdism: the conflict between the human tendency to seek inherent value and meaning in life and the human inability to find any (Schrift, 2006: 109). 103

As for animals being too dumb and stupid to speak for themselves, consider the following sequence of events. When Albert Camus was a young boy in Algeria, his grandmother told him to bring her one of the hens from the cage in their backyard. He obeyed, then watched her cut off its head with a kitchen knife, catching its blood in a bowl so that the floor would not be dirtied. The death-cry of that hen imprinted itself on the boy’s memory so hauntingly that in 1958 he wrote an impassioned attack on the guillotine. As a result, in part, of that polemic, capital punishment was abolished in France. Who is to say, then, that the hen did not speak?” (1999: 63)

Here, Elizabeth challenges the idea that speaking human language is the only way for humans to communicate with or be affected by other animals. Camus was so affected by the hen’s ‘death cry’, or its display of trauma, that it changed the way in which he thought about human death. This subverts the traditional humanist approach of active human versus passive nonhuman animal, and expresses a receptivity towards nonhuman animal experience which in turn had an active effect on human experience and practices. It suggests that by pushing the boundaries of communication through being open to different modes of listening, one might learn from the nonhuman animal and its effects on us. It is through acknowledging “a voice that is not heard precisely because another voice refuses its recognition that we can critically consider the productive potential of silence [and] exceed the limits of humanism” (Singh, 2013: 104). A posthumanist receptivity involves dulling out restrictive, anthropocentric voices of reason in order to be able to recognise other kinds of voices. A posthumanist receptivity towards the beings and voices of nonhuman animals involves pushing oneself beyond ones comfort zone and being open to new ways of listening and experiencing. This resonates with Singh’s assertion that we “must insist upon listening to voices that appear voiceless in order to produce new forms of engagement with and beyond ourselves” (2013: 104). This means going beyond anthropocentric limits of established meaning and beliefs, and listening to a language that Doniger states “need not be even the signing of chimps, let alone the whistles of dolphins … it may be no more than the silent language of the eyes ... and the language that is denied by people who defend the right to treat animals as things, through a self-serving tautology” (1999: 104). In this sense, Doniger extends the concept of language through including other modes, such as eye contact, rather than just deconstructing it. Though their approaches are slightly different, both Elizabeth and Doniger assert the fundamental importance of receptivity to the nonhuman animal. While Elizabeth pleads with her audience to use their imaginations and listen to their hearts rather than focusing on reason and principles, Doniger suggests that other (nonhuman animal) languages must not only be heard by the human, but interpreted: “[t]his is the language we must learn to read” (1999: 104). Since the acts of reading and interpretation are imaginative in all cases, they also offer the potential for a re-imagination of our relations to an-other, which might involve the

104 development of empathy, and a more inclusive compassion. As Singh (2013: 479) argues, as long as we “refuse to open ourselves (our ears) and our imaginations toward the animal [...] we cannot even begin to entertain the possibility that the animal is not ours” with whom to do what we please. In this sense, humility, empathy and receptivity are closely connected. Elizabeth’s marginalised position, voicelessness, and need for receptivity connect her to the nonhuman animals of which she speaks, who experience these in their own contexts. A posthumanist reading recognises Elizabeth as an animal, wounded by the mistreatment and suffering of nonhuman animals, and by both of their different forms of voicelessness. Through displaying the failure of Elizabeth’s audience and family to relate to her, and their inability to sympathise with her suffering, Coetzee disrupts the species divide and represents the importance of receptivity in relating to another, human or nonhuman.

4.3. Rational Feelings and Human-Animal Interconnection

The Lives of Animals represents interconnection in both its form and content. Coetzee’s multimodal metafictional experimentation with genre and categories reveals, as outlined in chapter two of this study, that they are interlinked and interdependent. In terms of content, the parts of Western humanism that Elizabeth rejects are built on a hierarchical disconnection between constructs of human and animal, and rationality and feeling. This section argues for an approach based on interconnection between these constructs by taking some of Elizabeth’s arguments as alternative and potentially affirmative suggestions for approaching human- animal relations. Firstly, Elizabeth’s arguments, although often ambiguous, are analysed as highlighting interconnection, specifically of feeling and rationality, and self and other. Secondly, the ambiguities in her arguments are explored as significant cues about the nature of human thought and morality, specifically with regards to human-animal interconnection. Lastly, the notion of interconnectivity is explored as an affirmative and resonant approach to the concerns Elizabeth raises, as it involves a more holistic approach to the relations between rationality and feeling, and human and nonhuman animal. The Lives of Animals unsettles dominant ideological constructions of human-animal relations in anthropocentric Western discourse, which has marginalised not only the animal, but also alternative ways of thinking and feeling about human-animal relations. In rational(ist) human(ist) thought, the repressed parts of the human, including the animal and feeling, are designated as “primitive, infantile, and incomplete” (McClintock, 1984: 46). It is this discourse, based on a “discontinuity [...] between animals and human beings” (1984: 46) that Elizabeth says is what is in fact “incomplete” (1999: 61). The idea that such discourse is ‘incomplete’

105 stems from her rejection of rationalist scientific and philosophical discourses on the animal which she sees not only as totalising, but also stripped of feeling. This involves the hyper- separation of human from animal, the disembodied intellect, and the intellectualisation of morality. She sees these as part of the disconnected, unfeeling nature of “reason” which can “most painfully and effectively harm the being of the other” (1999:34). She challenges the so- called rationality of a certain rational mindset which involves a self-serving desensitisation to nonhuman animal life, resulting in harmful and unsustainable practices and behaviour. Elizabeth highlights the power of social and cultural conditioning with regards to hyper- separation and desensitisation in human-animal relations, noting that “children all over the world consort quite naturally with animals. They don’t see any dividing line. That is something they have to be taught” (1999: 61). This points to the ideological power of dominant, rationalist Western thought, which has denied the interconnectedness of human and nonhuman animal life, and subsequently harmed both. With regards to this, Plumwood argues:

The illusions and blindspots of the centre about the extent of their power have caused many empires to crumble. Masters of the universe suffer from systematic distortions in their perceptions of safety, vulnerability, dependency and autonomy. [...] [S]ecurity is likely to be perceived as lying in tightening control over the hyper-separated and subordinated other rather than in achieving mutuality with them based on negotiating our interconnected needs. (2001: 236)

The ideological ‘illusions’ and hyper-separation of human from animal have created ‘distortions’ in perceptions of human-animal relations, creating a false sense of autonomy and inconsequentiality in humans. As discussed in chapter one of this study, such (mis)perceptions have had destructive consequences for both human and nonhuman life. In this way, rationality becomes irrationally (self)destructive, as all life is intrinsically interconnected. This resonates with Plumwood’s argument that “a strategy can seem rational when applied in a hypothetical context of hyperseparation but be completely irrational when applied in a real-world context of interrelationship” (2001: 34). This is what Elizabeth alludes to in her criticism of our ‘humanness’. She says that embracing the status of “man has entailed slaughtering and enslaving a race of divine or else divinely created beings and bringing down on ourselves a curse thereby” (1999: 58). This ‘curse’ of destruction and moral degradation in harming fellow ‘divine beings’ is what brings the construct of ‘human’ itself under scrutiny and assesses what it has meant for the interconnected lives of animals, human and nonhuman. Elizabeth’s use of the word ‘divine’ to describe nonhuman animals challenges “the argument that, because man alone is made in the image of God and partakes in the being of God, how we treat animals is

106 of no importance” (1999:22). Such hierarchical hyper-separation of human from animal presupposed in Christian-rationalist approaches97 polarises the animal and the divine. The Lives of Animals counteracts the hyper-separation of human versus nonhuman animals by interrogating how we might relate to them not as companions, commodities, or symbols that serve human interests, but as fellow embodied subjects. Elizabeth proposes an embodiedness that interconnects all living beings, which “contrasts starkly with Descartes’ key state, which has an empty feel to it” (1999: 33). This feeling of shared embodiment with other animals goes beyond ideological denials of the interconnected lives of all animals, but without denying the differences between human and nonhuman animals. Ultimately, it focuses on connection rather than disconnections. Elizabeth says that “[m]an is different” (1999: 54) to nonhuman animals, but that to “be alive is to be a living soul. An animal – and we are all animals – is an embodied soul” (1999: 33). It might be argued that this feeling of an interconnected embodiedness is, practically speaking, more rational than the rationalist denial of it. This can be read as correlating with Plumwood’s assertion that the “monological denials of dependency and interconnectedness are major sources of the irrationality of rational egoism and the rationalist economics based on it in the context of real, ecologically embodied life” (2001: 34). Elizabeth observes that the disconnected, ‘monological’ self seems unaffected, and thus acts irrationally and without remorse: “I return one last time to the places of death all around us [...] to which, in a huge communal effort, we close our hearts. Each day a fresh holocaust, yet, as far as I can see, our moral being is untouched. We do not feel tainted” (1999: 35). This ‘untouched’ state is a lack of feeling that reflects a disregard, repression or “ignorance” (1999: 20) of an interconnectedness that Eckersley argues can provide “a greater sense of compassion for the fate of other life-forms” (1992: 28). It is in this sense that Elizabeth says that humans need to open their hearts to nonhuman animals as fellow, interconnected “beings” (1999: 54), rather than disembodied, hyper-separated, “thinglike” (1999: 23) others. In light of this, it might be argued that Elizabeth is asking for a morality based on connection rather than disconnection, or on the “heart” (1999: 34) rather than abstract “principles” (1999: 37). In her book, In a Different Voice (1993), Carol Gilligan speaks of two different moral voices: one based on concepts such as justice, rights, autonomy and insisting

97 Traditional Christian thinking degraded nonhuman animals, believing God had created animals for humans to use, and that they were distinctively inferior to humans, worth little if any moral consideration as they did not have souls or reason. For more on nonhuman animals in traditional Christian thought see: Preece, R & Fraser, D. 2000. The Status of Animals in Biblical and Christian Thought: A study in Colliding Values. Society & Animals, 8(3): 245-263.

107 on the importance of principles and regulations, and the other on personal connection with and caring about others, human or nonhuman, that downplays the role of rules and principles in the moral realm. She highlights the segregation of moral thinking into two different and even opposing systems of thought: one stresses connection, and the other autonomy and therefore (rights of) separateness. The latter system of thought is roughly that of (Kantian/liberal) moral rationalism, while the former roughly corresponds to ‘care ethics’ (Gilligan, 1993:17-24). This relates directly to conceptions of self and other, rationality and feeling, and the notion of interconnectedness. Posthumanist ecofeminist Greta Gaard argues that different “conceptions of self are […] the foundation for different ethical systems: the separate self often operates on the basis of an ethic of rights or justice, while the interconnected self makes moral decisions on the basis of an ethic of responsibilities or care” (1993: 2). This responsibility and care stresses the notion of a shared existence and a recognition of the biological and spiritual ties between, in this case, specifically human and nonhuman animals, and involves “a sense of self most commonly expressed by women and various other non-dominant groups – a self that is interconnected with all life” (Gaard, 1993: 1). It seems Elizabeth is an advocate for such an approach, while her audience is of the opposing mindset. However, as will be shown, Coetzee complicates this duality through the ambiguous and elusive arguments and statements made by Elizabeth. It might seem that Elizabeth is promoting ‘care ethics’, but there are instances in the text which reveal such a reading to be an over simplification. As has been mentioned in previous chapters, the text has no nonhuman animal characters, and does not mention any kind of interaction between Elizabeth and a nonhuman animal. Furthermore, Elizabeth is portrayed as a cold and distant character in terms of human interaction, even with her own son. In this way, the very transformative power of feeling that Elizabeth so emphatically promotes is not what the text itself is built on. In fact, the text and all relations within it paradoxically leave the reader cold. To add to this irony, her arguments for an embodied connection with nonhuman animals cost her human kinship, leaving her disconnected from other humans. Danta reads Elizabeth as isolated from other humans due to her “staunch” advocacy for a “philosophy of the body” that puts humans on a radical continuum with all other animals (2007: 727-728). For instance, by imaginatively embodying Kafka’s ape, Red Peter, and also inverting typical species analogies in discussing slavery, the Holocaust, and nonhuman animal commodification, Elizabeth causes reactions of hostility. As DeLoughrey and Handley argue: “Elizabeth evokes outrage from her audience precisely because she disturbs the priority of the human in ethical discourses of animals by aligning herself with other creatures, ranging from 108 literary figures” to “the who inhabit confined feedlots” (2011: 209). In this way, the character of Elizabeth dismantles any clear promotion of a specific system or approach. Elizabeth gives no clear solutions to the state of contemporary human-animal relations, offering only the sympathetic imagination as a way of approaching the concerns she raises. This uncertainty is not only present in her arguments, but also her actions. The discussion between Elizabeth and President Garrard of Appleton College is a clear example of this:

“But your own vegetarianism, Mrs. Costello,” says President Garrard, pouring oil on troubled waters: “it comes out of moral conviction, does it not?” “No, I don’t think so,” says his mother. “It comes out of a desire to save my soul.” [...] “Well, I have a great respect for it,” says Garrard. [...] “I’m wearing leather shoes,” says his mother. “I’m carrying a leather purse. I wouldn’t have over much respect if I were you.” “Consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds. Surely one can draw a distinction between eating meat and wearing leather.” “Degrees of obscenity,” she replies. (1999: 43-44)

Elizabeth exposes herself here. It is unclear whether she thinks that eating nonhuman animals is worse than wearing their skins, as she does not seem to want to hierarchise practices or morality. Yet she does say that these are ‘degrees of obscenity’. One could begin to argue that the leather production industry practises nonhuman animal cruelty much the same as the meat production industries, so why does Elizabeth comply with it? Perhaps because it is not an ongoing process of consumption and support on her part. She calls meat production and nonhuman specifically “an enterprise of degradation, cruelty, and killing which rivals anything that the Third Reich was capable of, indeed dwarfs it, in that ours is an enterprise without end, self-regenerating, bringing rabbits, rats, poultry, livestock ceaselessly into the world for the purpose of killing them” (1999:21). However, this rationalisation of one form of nonhuman animal commodification over another involves a hierarchisation of suffering and distinctions which Elizabeth so blatantly rejects. Rather, it might be argued that Coetzee’s representation of ambiguity reveals the imperfect, dynamic nature of humans, and the limitations in any human ideals of moral perfection, whether it be based on feelings of care or rational regulations. As is evident, Elizabeth is not following rules or regulations, and is herself guilty of some of what she so passionately rejects to a certain degree. However, she is not consistently contributing “[e]ach day [to] a fresh holocaust” (1999: 35), and more importantly, she is not “sit[ting] silent” (1999: 59). She is trying to make some sort of contribution towards nonhuman animal lives on a larger degree than not buying a pair of shoes or a purse, and like Coetzee, uses her status as a respected author to do so. Moreover, her vegetarianism, she says, is not a

109 regulation in her life, but “comes out of a desire to save [her] soul” (1999: 43). This statement can be seen as the most significant statement Elizabeth makes in terms of her moral positioning. It eradicates all set principals or rational philosophical constructions which may be attributed to her debates on vegetarianism, yet is not based purely on feelings of care for another. Rather, it involves care for oneself in connection to one’s treatment of another. It points to a kind of ‘selfish-selflessness’, an obligation to self and other which involves treating others as inseparable from the self, and basing morality on interconnection rather than on either objective regulations or subjective feelings of care. This disrupts the duality of obligation to self versus to other which lies at the core of Western moral philosophy. In the text, Professor O’Hearne displays such a dualist mindset in his Eurocentric assumption that the “notion that we have an obligation to animals themselves to treat them compassionately – as opposed to an obligation to ourselves to do so – is very recent, very Western” (1999: 60). This is arrogant in its implication that care for the nonhuman animal is a Western trend and fails to acknowledge a broad and complex history of human-animal relations from a position which disrupts Eurocentrism. Moreover, O’Hearne does not consider complexities which disrupt the dualist approach to moral obligation. Elizabeth replies to O’Hearne that “kindness to animals – and here I use the word kindness in its full sense, as an acceptance that we are all of one kind ... has been more widespread than you imply” (1999: 61). She argues that kinship between human and nonhuman animals is not a recent “Western fad” (1999: 61), and that various cultures and alternative knowledge systems or approaches to human-animal relations are based on the inclusive, interconnected lives of animals. This can be linked to Plumwood’s observation that there are a significant number of indigenous philosophers who have “mounted powerful critiques of the human-centredness of western spirituality and its denial of ecological inclusion and interconnection” (2001: 225).98 The dualist separation between body and spirit, feeling and rationality, and human and nonhuman animals that Elizabeth rejects, presupposed in Christian-rationalist approaches, differs

98 For example, Australian Aboriginal philosopher Bill Neidjie “stresses our kinship with non-human elements of the world and our embodiedness” noting that the “dominant spiritual culture of the west has not faced up to the basic facts about ecological life and death on earth, facts which, as he rightly perceives, it mostly behaves as if it does not know” (Plumwood, 2001: 225). Similarly, Kai Horsthemke, in his book, Animals and African Ethics (2015: 4) asserts that “although the general character of African ethics is anthropocentric (or human-centred)” in terms of a focus on communal wellbeing, “it emphasises respect towards the nonhuman (animal and natural) world”, a more ecocentric recognition of the “interconnectedness of all life”. In referring to pre-colonial African religions, Opoko notes that “since these [indigenous] [people] believed themselves to be interconnected with, and interdependent on all that existed, they did not consider themselves as separate beings” (Waldau & Patton, 2006: xxv). 110 significantly from alternative cultural belief systems and human-animal relations.99 To say that these alternative approaches are actually practised by all the people that belong to these cultures, or to call them posthumanist or non-anthropocentric, is too simplistic. However, they are relevant in the aim to transform human(ist) supremacism, (hyper)separation, and disembodiedness in human-animals relations. Taking alternative perspectives seriously provides valuable contributions, not just in terms of ideas, but as a destabilisation of central systems. This destabilisation is not necessarily from external or other cultures, but also from within the dominant culture, such as in countercultural lines of thought. Elizabeth says that the rejection of Western progress and rationality and the call for “recovering an attentiveness that our faraway ancestors possessed and we have lost” (Coetzee, 199: 52) is nothing new or unique, and that there is a whole “line of poets who celebrate the primitive and repudiate the Western bias toward abstract thought” (1999: 52). She acknowledges the limitations in such countercultural movements, specifically with regards to contemporary contexts, but acknowledges the value it holds with regards to human-animal relations, particularly in an age that has been stripped of such values and conceptions. In the ‘primitive’ line of thought that she refers to, killing and eating an animal is not wrong as such, “but make it a contest, a ritual, and honor your antagonist [...]. Look him in the eyes before you kill him, and thank him afterwards. Sing songs about him” (1999: 52). This ritualisation process includes the kind of respect and reciprocity involved in a more interconnected approach that the commodification process strips from the killing and consumption of nonhuman animals in contemporary capitalist societies. Such ‘traditional’ approaches have been deemed primitive by capitalist rationalism, as it undermines the efficiency of instrumental killing, production and consumption, and acknowledges the nonhuman animal as a fellow embodied being. Elizabeth argues:

We can call this primitivism. It is an attitude that is easy to criticize, to mock. [...] But when all is said and done, there remains something attractive about it at an ethical level. It is also impractical, however. [...] We have become too many. There is no time to respect and honor all the animals we need to feed ourselves. We need factories of death; we need factory animals. (1999: 53)

Although the contemporary context in which we live cannot practically adopt mass practices which include and paying respect to the nonhuman animal before it becomes disembodied ‘meat’, the ideology behind ‘primitivism’ can be seen as something current

99 This approach risks implying that all non-Western cultures are ideal models for human-animal relations. However, this study is not romanticising but rather acknowledging the value in studying alternative approaches to the animal and human-animal relations, specifically in terms of decentring dominant Western approaches. 111 societies lack in attitudes toward commodified nonhuman animals. The ‘ethical level’ which Elizabeth refuses to dismiss is the acknowledgement of the shared life of the human consumer and the once living nonhuman animal, and resonates with Willet’s call for “[i]magining ourselves not merely like, or at one with, but also interconnected with other animal species” (2014: 21). Ultimately, certain core values which have been conceived as ‘irrational’ and primitive might in fact be necessary, and ecologically as well as ethically progressive. Such ambiguous and complex viewpoints reveal that no discourse is perfect, but that disrupting dominant anthropocentric discourse holds value in itself, opening up a space for re- imagination. This re-imagination might point towards the notion of interconnectivity. Interconnectivity is a broad term used widely in various contexts, including human- animal relations. Basically, it is the idea that all elements of a system, which interact with one another in what might be described as a metaphorical ‘web of life’, cannot be analysed if considered as separate or disconnected (Allen & Pierpaolo, 2018: 11-33). Although Elizabeth does not use the term interconnectivity, she unquestionably rejects hyper-separation and disconnection of human versus nonhuman animal life, as well as the disembodiedness of the animal and of morality. Interconnectivity is closely related to the ideas of interconnectedness and interdependence discussed above. However, interconnectivity in human-animal relations involves but also goes beyond what Elizabeth calls the “[p]latonic” recognition of interconnected, interdependent ecology from an abstract rationality, where “[o]ur eye is on the creature itself, but our mind is on the system of interactions of which it is the earthly, material embodiment” (1999: 54). From such a perspective, feeling is lost in the (hyper) awareness that the “whole is greater than the sum of the parts” (1999: 53), which involves its own form of disembodiedness due to a focus purely on materiality. While this ‘material’ awareness is integral to interconnectivity, so is Elizabeth’s idea of “fullness, embodiedness, [and] the sensation of being” as a base for an “embodied” (1999: 32) interconnectivity that involves feeling, or what one might call a more spiritual recognition that to “be alive is to be a living soul” and that although we are all different, we share “the substrate of life” (1999: 35). Her approach resonates with Donna Haraway’s posthumanist moral vision which revolves around a multi-species interconnectivity that encompasses all animals, who are bonded in “significant otherness”, stating that if “we appreciate the foolishness of human exceptionalism, then we know that becoming is always becoming with – in a contact zone where the outcome, where who is in the world, is at stake” (2007:244). Rather than a dualist denial of either kinship or difference, rationality or feeling, a multi-species interconnectivity recognises the complexity of intricately interconnected lives and 112 vulnerability of all animals from a bio-social point of view. It acknowledges the ripple effect of actions within an interrelated ‘contact zone’. Interconnectivity is a rational feeling that is symbiotic in the sense that we either heed the “ecologies of all mortal beings, who live in and through the use of one another’s bodies” (2007: 79), or suffer the consequences. This suffering involves more than a purely ecological or a solely sentimental suffering and is rather a recognition of the inseparability of the two, for as Elizabeth says, we all share the same “substrate of life” (1999: 35). Coetzee’s refusal to attempt to represent the nonhuman animal on human terms shows his recognition of the complexities of human-animal relations. However, his representation of Elizabeth’s position and suffering with the nonhuman animal deconstructs (hyper)separation, and points to an interconnectivity in human-animal relations that Elizabeth sees as largely unfelt, forgotten, or denied by contemporary societies and a certain kind of rationality. Significantly, Willet argues that even animal rights workers overlook the importance of interconnectivity, and “given their narrow, negative focus on alleviating animal suffering, can lose sight of complex biosocial forms of solidarity required for meaningful existence as participants, if not cocitizens, of multispecies communities” (2014: 7). In terms of this ‘meaningful existence’, Elizabeth says that the animal rights discourses are largely preoccupied with “proscriptions” (1999: 35) and “principles” (1999:37) based on what have proven to be problematic worldviews, rather than redefining these in a way that includes the more meaningful feelings and virtues that underlie them. Similarly, she argues that in studying nonhuman animal life, “[t]here is something self-stultified in the way in which scientific behaviorism recoils from the complexity of life” (1999: 62, 63). The projection of anthropocentric discourse onto nonhuman animals, as (hyper)separate or other, deflects the interconnected complexities of ‘multi-species communities’ that require new and different modes of thought. In addressing these complexities, Willet calls for an

interconnectivity that [...] takes the coevolving other species point beyond generosity or compassion to a more ordinary dynamic of ‘call and response’, [an] antiphonal calling, rather than the sublime verticality of compassionate response, articulates an ethical charge in the mundane ebbs and flows of biosocial communities. (2014: 13)

This argument reveals that there is a need for a rational, ethical treatment of nonhuman animals that goes beyond the established singularities of regulations, of care, and of obligation only to self or only to other, and involves a more complex understanding and feeling, where all of these elements are interconnected. As Elizabeth says: “[w]e understand by immersing ourselves and our intelligence in complexity” (1999: 62). This complexity includes what Willet calls an

113

‘antiphonal calling’, or an intrinsic feeling, felt by those who are receptive or attuned to it. This being said, Elizabeth’s attempt at a rational, phonal call for such understanding or attunement through the imaginative, sympathetic faculties might be critiqued as ‘romantic’ or unpragmatic, but points to an arguably necessary and repressed part of human culture and spirituality. As Willet argues, although the “agonistic politics of the rough-and-tumble social field of interspecies life requires [...] a critical pragmatic approach [...] any romance of cosmic attunement can be spiritually regenerative and politically revolutionary” (2014: 12). In this way, feeling and rationality become inseparable in approaching the complex, interconnected lives of animals. The Lives of Animals pushes its readers to re-imagine deceptively obvious distinctions between one and another, whether it be rationality and feeling, or human and nonhuman animal, in order to open a space for new, more holistic modes of understanding. As Singh insightfully observes, The Lives of Animals propels us to “foster new modes of thinking-feeling which aim toward world dynamics that refuse not only the supremacy of certain humans over others, but the thinking of supremacy as such” (2013: 481, my emphasis). The text’s display of interconnection in its content and form posits the possibility for a similar approach to real human-animal relations, based on a recognition of interconnectivity.

4.4. Imaginative Realities and Human-Animal Relations

Through her arguments about the sympathetic imagination, Elizabeth suggests the potential for imaginative realities, deconstructing the duality of human and animal, and reality and imagination. This section explores the imaginative ways of engaging with the nonhuman animal that the text brings to light. Firstly, the text’s representation of imaginative narrative as involving a fundamental and invaluable form of engaging with the real and complex lives of nonhuman animals is discussed. Secondly, the process of imaginative embodiment that Elizabeth attempts to share with her audience is investigated. Lastly, the discussed imaginative approaches are proposed as valid counter-centric ideas and are suggested as holding value in their potential to contribute to positively developing human-animal relations in real contexts. It has so far been established that the text’s play on the inseparability and often indistinguishability of philosophy and literature, and nonfiction and fiction, brings rational constraints separating reality and imagination into question. Coetzee represents the imaginative faculties as a realm to be taken seriously in real contexts, specifically human-animal relations, suggesting that cognition and philosophical or scientific discourses are interconnected with the imagination and imaginative narrative. Such a perspective resonates with Cave’s argument

114 about “literary processes”, in which he explains that all forms of “storytelling, fiction, poetry, song, drama, and their offshoots” are interconnected to and inseparable from “cognitive processes” usually associated with rational philosophy and sciences (2017: 235). Furthermore, he says that “a history of cognition and of reflection on cognition might be traced through imaginative literature rather than through a history of science, philosophy, or ideas”, and that imaginative literature can offer “insights into the embodied interconnectivity of cognitive process with a critical language which is enactive, context oriented, [and] sensitive to the conditions of live cultural ecologies” (2017: 235). Cave is expressing the idea that imagination and cognition cannot be dualistically separated in the search for meaning and understanding, specifically in terms of the interconnected relation between culture and ecology, which includes human-animal relations. As will be shown in this section, Coetzee’s text suggests a similar line of thought, specifically in the search for meaning and the development of the sympathetic imagination in human-animal relations. Singh argues that Elizabeth, “refusing as a novelist to speak only the language of fiction and instead engaging in the language of philosophers and poets [...] insists that our disciplined modes of thinking limit our capacity for universal compassion” (2013: 480). Ultimately, Coetzee reveals the limitations of rigid thinking and discourse, highlighting dualistic, rational(ist), human(ist) thought about the imagination and its effects on the human’s (lack of) relations to and feelings about nonhuman animals. Elizabeth proposes the power of the imagination in relating to and sympathising with another animal by pointing out that people seem so easily to relate to and sympathise with “made-up” (1999: 5) beings, such as the characters in her own novels for instance, yet cannot (or will not) do the same with fellow real beings, based on the fact that they are not of the same species. Basically she is saying that if one can imagine one’s way into the life of a character that is not real, one must be able to imagine one’s way into the lives of real, living animals, human or nonhuman: “[i]f I can think my way into the existence of a being who has never existed, then I can think my way into the existence of a bat or a chimpanzee or an oyster, any being with whom I share the substrate of life” (1999: 35). For Elizabeth, the imaginative part of the sympathetic imagination is imperative to the sympathy, whether it be for a fictional or real human or nonhuman animal being. This argument is valid from the point of view that relating to or empathising with what it might be like to be anyone, human or nonhuman, always involves, among other processes, the imagination. It “require[s] us to read signs, the expressions, behaviours, brain structures, etc., of other animals, and to make imaginative leaps” (Oerlemans, 2007: 195). Elizabeth proposes a form of imagination that goes beyond preconditioned limits according to science, discourse and exclusionary conceptual constraints, 115 focusing on the shared life of living beings. This correlates with McInturff’s argument, in which he positions Elizabeth’s notions of sympathy and the “kinship of living beings [on] the ability of human beings to recognize a kinship with imaginative and fictional beings”, seeing it as an “extension of Judith Butler’s argument on the Limits of Sovereignty” (2007: 2). Butler articulates the practices involved in draining, restraining, or even destroying ‘life’, and analyses possible ways to resist the restrictions and limitations imposed upon culture by hegemonic conditioning, disciplinary regimes and norms, to make possible ‘livable lives’.100 Elizabeth’s focus on the shared lives of all animals, human and nonhuman, takes Butler’s perspective a step further by including and emphasizing a multi-species ‘livable life’. Ironically, in her argument for an inclusive imagination, Elizabeth excludes herself on a certain level. She asserts that her imaginative abilities as an author are ultimately what have gained her respect and admiration and are the reason she was invited to speak at the prestigious Appleton College, but that not everyone is willing or even capable of sympathetic imagination: “there are people who have the capacity to imagine themselves as someone else, there are people who have no such capacity (when the lack is extreme, we call them psychopaths), and there are people who have the capacity but choose not to exercise it” (1999: 35). This conviction runs the risk of being perceived as arrogant or exclusionary, and as her son John repeatedly insinuates, “his mother’s ‘powers’ to feel for and think her way into ‘other existences,’ which define her novelistic practice, also threaten to rupture her filial ties” (Deloughrey & Handley, 2011: 203). However, rather than a superiority claim or a deliberate self-alienation, it seems Elizabeth is appealing for her audience to push the powers of their imagination, understanding and empathy beyond their ideological limits, much in the same way as reading or writing imaginative literature, but in the real context of human-animal relations. As Singh argues, Elizabeth “denies the notion of ideology, suggesting that writers, and by extension readers, have the capacity to think beyond the discourses in which they operate” (2013: 474). Elizabeth challenges the constraints that certain rationality and ideology puts on the power of the imagination. Though Elizabeth presents these arguments against such reason using platonic language for the most part, there are specific instances where she frames certain points in imaginative or poetic terms. For instance, her proclamation that human beings have brought “down on

100 Butler uses the concept ‘livable life’ in much of her work. In Gender Trouble (1990) and Bodies that Matter (1993) life takes the form of gendered life. Excitable Speech (1997) reflects upon damage inflicted on lives by speech acts. In more recent work, such as Precarious life (2004) and Giving an Account of Oneself (2005) she complicates claims made upon life by the ethical and political spheres and reveals their discursive and material limitations. 116 ourselves a curse” (1999: 58) through the rapacious treatment of other lives, and specifically nonhuman animals, sounds almost mythological. She goes further in her use of imaginative or mythological narrative, using this image of a ‘curse’ to express the consequences of the corruption of the human spirit and the abuse of nature in discussing the Greek myth of Odysseus and Thrinacia. In this myth, Odysseus and his men ‘conquer’ the island of Thrinacia and slaughter all of its nonhuman animal inhabitants, in the form of sacred cattle. For this “they were mercilessly punished by the god [Apollo]. And that story, in turn, seems to call on older layers of belief, from a time when bulls were gods and killing and eating a god could call down a curse on you” (1999: 57). This alternative representation of human-animal relations in ancient mythology subverts the active human versus passive nonhuman animal and involves a (super)natural consequence to the unconstrained instrumentalisation and destruction of nonhuman animals. This is what Elizabeth is referring to in her acknowledgement of a certain value in these “older layers of belief” (1999: 57). Significantly, in his book, African Literature and the Environment (2015: 60), Iheka notes that there are countless examples of ancient nonhuman animal mythologies in African cultures that express a similar message, and that “in this economy of seeing, these nonhuman others are moved away from the instrumental status they occupy in the anthropocentric mode”.101 Ultimately, there is an archetypal message in these ancient imaginative or mythological narratives that resonates with what Elizabeth is trying to express to her audience about human-animal relations, which she says can only hope to be conveyed through the power of imaginative forms of communication. Due to her paradoxical predicament discussed in previous chapters of this study, Elizabeth’s lectures generally lack imaginative language use despite her being an imaginative literary author and promoting fiction and mythological, poetic approaches to the nonhuman animal. Rather, Elizabeth refers her audience to writers who she says might inspire an imaginative sympathy for the nonhuman animal through their poetic language:

If I do not convince you, that is because my words, here, lack the power to bring home to you the wholeness, the unabstracted, unintellectual nature, of that animal being. That is why I urge you to read the poets who return the living, electric being to language; and if the poets do not move you, I urge you to walk, flank to flank, beside the beast that is prodded down the chute to his executioner. (1999: 65)

Here, Elizabeth expresses the sympathetic imagination as a tool of the writer to ‘bring home’ to readers the ‘unabstracted, unintellectual nature’ of the lives of nonhuman animals through

101 Similarly, an example of a pre-colonial myth which can be found in many African communities, varying in certain details but sharing a common message, is that of the punishment by the God’s, spirits or higher powers of nature of a human who abuses their power over nature and nonhuman animals, subsequently causing an upset to the natural balance (Iheka, 2015: 60). 117 the power of their ‘living, electric’ language use. If this does not have any kind of impact on or appeal to the reader’s own imaginative sympathy for nonhuman animal lives, she suggests experiencing its real-life suffering, face-to-face. This suggests her belief that imaginative literature might not be able to move all who read it as powerfully, for not all have the ability to imagine oneself as another. However, it also suggests that if the reader is receptive, pushes his or her imaginative capability, and “allows himself to be moved” then through “the sympathetic imagination both author and reader gain access to the minds and bodies of others in the form of a positive engagement, which then potentially leads to an empathy effect” (Heister, 2015: 16). Elizabeth says that the ability to relate to and empathise with imaginary beings illustrates the unlimited potential for and of imaginative sympathy: “there is no limit to the extent to which we can think ourselves into the being of another” (1999: 35). In this sense, the sympathetic imagination is limited only by the imaginer, not by the imagined. Elizabeth is proposing an embodied engagement with nonhuman animals, involving thinking oneself ‘into the being of another’, and says that this becomes more possible in literary imagination than in rational philosophical thought. This idea can be linked to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s poststructuralist perspective on challenging rationalist views of the human-animal relation, in what they call ‘becoming-animal’. As they assert in their essay, Becoming Animal (1988), this does not mean imitation, and should not be thought of as identification with a nonhuman animal: "[m]imicry is a very bad concept, since it relies on binary logic to describe phenomena of an entirely different nature"(1998: 11). For them, nonhuman animals rupture notions of rational identity and sameness.and thus, it must not be imagined that the subject has literally to be “like an animal” (1998: 11). It is possible, for example, to step into the stream of “animal-becoming” through an act such as writing (1998: 11). Elizabeth’s ideas about the imagination and human-animal relations correlate with this notion in her proposal of poetic embodiment, which includes writing one’s way into the body of an animal. In Elizabeth’s view, imaginative embodiment is a significant element in connecting to imaginary and real others who have their own unknowable consciousnesses. Donovan calls this “visceral empathy” (2004: 85): empathy experienced primarily through the body that points to the importance of shared embodiment with regards to processes of understanding and compassion. In Elizabeth’s argument for imaginatively embodying the nonhuman animal, she analyses Hughes’ nonhuman animal poetry:

By bodying forth the jaguar, Hughes shows us that we too can embody animals-by the process called poetic invention that mingles breath and sense in a way that no one has explained and no one ever

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will. He shows us how to bring the living body into being within ourselves... It is much like the mixture of shamanism and spirit possession and archetype psychology that [he] himself espouses. (1999: 51)

Such ‘poetic invention’, which cannot be explained by and goes beyond established ‘rational’ meaning, is what Elizabeth says allows one to imagine what it might be like to be another animal, through imaginatively embodying them. This idea is not new or unheard of and has been expressed by various writers. For instance, Schilden says that “[p]oetic language, particularly metaphor, can make us ‘feel’, the precise capability that modern philosophers have suggested aligns humans with animals [...] metaphor offers us this insight – to perceive, think, feel, even perhaps be or become like another” (2003: 331). Similarly, Elizabeth asks her audience to stretch their minds and imaginations in order to be receptive towards the possibility of sympathising with and as the nonhuman animal. As DeLoughrey and Handley (2011: 202) argue, the text “impl[ies] that compassion for animals -and, above all, for the globally traded bodies of livestock – depends on our ability not just to think about animals or just to codify their rights but also to imagine our bodies in terms of theirs”. In this way, the poet’s imaginative embodiment of the nonhuman animal allows the reader to tap into that embodiment through the sympathetic imagination. This may open up the possibility for similar experiences beyond that literary moment, and may be one of the ways in which, as Elizabeth says, “writers teach us more than they are aware of” (Coetzee,1999: 53). Such imaginative encounters might spur on a feeling or change in a reader that Elizabeth struggles to explain in rational terms.102 Such transformational experiences are not bound to literature or poetry, however. Elizabeth sees Hughes’ poetry as primitivist, “mingling shamanism, spirit possession, and archetype psychology with an essentially ecological vision of individual animals as transitory occupants of the quasi-Platonic form of its species, of its niche in the interacting systems of Gaia” (Mulhall: 114). This vision of an attuned interconnectivity discussed in the previous section of this chapter, or the ‘systems of Gaia’, is what Elizabeth links to spiritual and shamanic embodiment. She says these experiences are not completely unfamiliar to us, as they are “experience[s] held in the collective unconscious” (1999: 51), but are inexplainable in rational philosophical or scientific terms. This links to her view that imaginative literature and poetry has the potential to manifest that which is similar to the unconscious “dream- experience” (1999: 51). Her view follows a line of thought about the unconscious in psychology and literature which theorises about such experiences that “being unconscious,

102 As has been mentioned in chapter three of this study, this issue of being unable to articulate certain feelings and experiences in rational language and using imaginative forms of expression to get closer to expressing them is dealt with extensively by philosophers Julia Kristeva (1980) and Deleuze and Guattari (1998). 119 their existence can only be deduced indirectly by examining behaviour, art, myths, images, dreams, religion etc” (Reppen, 2006: 719-721). Shamanic embodiment, an ancient archetypal103 practice involving the unconscious, is “the oldest religious complex and involves a visionary transformation that conflates human and animal selves and a trance or dual consciousness of spiritual and terrestrial worlds; animals also were thought to experience these transformations” (Willet, 2014: 207).104 Literary accounts of such engagements exist in traditional mythological fables, which deconstruct and cross boundaries of imagination and reality, and human and nonhuman animal.105 Significantly, Huggan calls The Lives of Animals a “meta beast fable” (an ecocentric, anti-Eurocentric fable), that “tests the very limits of the human” (2002: 3). Elizabeth is appealing to her audience to test these limits, and perhaps transform “toward a different kind of being-in-the-world” (1999: 51), where the sympathetic imagination is not set against reason and rationality. She is offering imaginative literature as a means by which to push these limits. Coetzee’s use of the imaginative mode, and Elizabeth’s argument for it with regards to human-animal relations and the sympathetic imagination, suggests the value and potential of imaginative literature in positively developing real and ethical human-animal relations. This idea has been explored in various contexts, including psychology, and correlates with a line of thought exemplified in a psychological study by Barbara Beierl (2008) on the potential of imaginative literature to develop empathy in real life human-animal relations.106 Such an approach brings what Plumwood calls the contemporary “crisis of rationality, morality, and imagination” (2001: 98) to light through subverting normative distinctions between rationality and imagination. It exposes the “rationalist imaginary” (2001: 26), or the delusions of rationalist thought, and argues for a more flexible and complimentary relation between the concepts and practices of rationality and imagination, such as literature and philosophy, or

103 Archetypes are highly developed elements of the collective unconscious, “inherited potentials which are actualized when they enter consciousness as images or manifest in behavior on interaction with the outside world”. Carl Jung understood archetypes as universal, archaic images, practices and patterns that derive from the collective unconscious and are the psychic counterpart of instinct (Reppen, 2006: 719-721). 104 See Lingis’ Excesses: Eros and Culture (1983) and Stone’s The Jaguar Within (2011) where shamanic trance experiences, as “compassionate no-self, eyes open upon the universal impermanence” (Lingis, 1983: xi) are explored in relation to human-animal relations in indigenous cultures and mythology. 105 Write links Elizabeth’s argument for such embodiment to Schopenhauer’s “metaphysic that not only entails a rapprochement between modern western philosophy and eastern tradition” but also “holds out the possibility of conciliating the so-called animist thought-ways of Africa” (2008: 29). 106 According to this study, “[i]maginative literature, featuring both human and animal characters, conveys [human-animal] [relations] to the reader through sympathetic imagination and becomes an effective vehicle through which to support both psychological shifts and cultural changes in the reader’s perceptions. The psychological shifts produce greatly heightened empathy and a deepening of the human-animal bond in the individual reader; the cultural shifts result in the growth of a less anthropocentric sensibility toward animals in the larger society” (Beierl, 2008: 213). 120 myth and discourse. This can be linked to Plumwood’s (2001: 228) call for “a science for once friendly and not opposed to the richness of mythic narrative that is the outcome of meeting the world dialogically” rather than rigidly. This resonates with arguments such as Messay Kebede’s, who gives “myth a prominent place in the generation of rational thinking” (2004: ix). These arguments also highlight the hypocrisy of ‘rational’ Western discourse. Kebede emphasises how “Western thought has had a mystical period [...] that set the stage for Cartesian and other modern philosophies. [...] The idealism that permeates [current] Western thought is based upon myth” (2004: x). In other words, all cultural and religious beliefs can be categorised as ‘myth’ when looked at from such a perspective, but have been labelled differently according to dominant discourses.107 In light of this, Elizabeth’s commentary on the limits of Western scientific and religious discourse is significant. She calls scientific reason a “tautology” (1999: 25), and in terms of Christianity, says that before “Adam and Eve: the founding myth, […] we were all just animals together” (1999: 40). This suggests that certain myths are harmful, and it is this ‘founding myth’ that Elizabeth says lies at the root of Cartesian, rationalist, dualist interpretations of human-animal relations. From a posthumanist perspective, the continuing effects of such harmful ‘myths’ in contemporary reality “points toward the necessity of new theoretical paradigms, a new mode of thought that comes after the cultural repressions and fantasies, the philosophical protocols and evasions, of humanism as a historically specific phenomenon” (Wolfe, 2010: xv-xvi). In this sense, Elizabeth might be read as a kind of revolutionary for new ways of thinking about two marginalised and interconnected elements: the nonhuman animal and the imagination. Elizabeth’s arguments suggest that imaginative literature should privilege posthumanist realities, or take readers beyond certain human(ist) constraints of rationality. The posthumanist characteristic of receptivity and inclusivity regarding human-animal relations, together with imaginative literature, are fundamental elements in what Aaltola calls Coetzee’s “alternative animal ethics” (2010: 119), which holds transformational possibilities and might “guide imagination in the search for a more wholesome participation” with the real nonhuman animal (Meeker, 1974: 122). This ‘more wholesome participation’ that Meeker argues Coetzee’s text might encourage includes re-imagining one dimensional, anthropocentric understandings of

107 This includes scientific discourse. In her book Science as Salvation: A Modern Myth and its Meaning (1992: i), Mary Midgely argues that scientific discourse is “given to a myth-hungry public who turn to science now that religion has lost its ability to create myth” and “examines the need for and the use of myth in science, and how science and religion are related”. 121 the animal. It resonates with Oerlamans’ argument that imaginative literature “can make us believe in the possibility that animals [...] have complex emotional and spiritual lives, and equally, make us aware of all that we do not and cannot know about these lives, that they are rich beyond our imagining” (2007: 195). Through an awareness of human limitation, one can push one’s limits in imagining the complexities of nonhuman animal life. This may seem romantic or imaginary, but arguably holds real potential in changing centric thought surrounding what it means to be human, our imaginative capabilities, and our relations to nonhuman animals. Plumwood argues about such approaches that they may appear to be unrealistic, but that people can still “apply counter-centric criteria to help them make imaginative choices […] with a view to achieving more earth-friendly and counter-hegemonic forms of spirituality” (2001: 228). Coetzee appears to recognise the potential for imaginative literature to push its readers to recognize the limits of rational(ist), human(ist) beliefs about the animal, to imagine and re-imagine preconceived boundaries in human-animal relations, and perhaps move towards a less harmful and more spiritually attuned “kind of being in the world” (1999: 51). The Lives of Animals offers alternative, imaginative ways of envisioning human-animal relations to those of dominant humanist approaches. In order to make any kind of impact, such ideas require a receptivity to that which goes beyond ‘rational’ or normative Western understandings and associations. Such counter-centric ideas have the potential to create individual and cultural shifts through the use of imaginative mediums, which, as Coetzee suggests, hold affirmative value in their ability to push readers to re-imagine the animal. This re-imagination includes what Singh calls a “wholly new sense of being with and as animals” (2013: 479, my emphasis), which might have a positive and transformational impact on reader’s approaches to human-animal relations in the real world.

4.5. Conclusion

The Live of Animals challenges ideological disconnections between constructs in certain rational, anthropocentric thinking by exposing their contradictions, and creating a space in which they can be re-imagined. This chapter has established connections in the text which involve being receptive to the complex and interconnected lives of all animals, human and nonhuman. It has explored the richness of imaginative and empathetic approaches to human- animal relations, which blur lines between reality and imagination, and rationality and feeling. Elizabeth is an imaginative tool that Coetzee uses to get various messages across, including the disruption of dualist interpretations of human versus animal. Elizabeth’s

122 marginalisation, voicelessness, and need for receptivity connect her to the nonhuman animal. She not only acts as a spokesperson for those who cannot speak, but suffers with them in her own form of voicelessness. A posthumanist reading recognises The Lives of Animals as referring to the interconnected lives of all animals, including the human animal at the centre of the text. Through displaying the failure of Elizabeth’s fellow humans to relate to her, and their inability to sympathise with either her suffering or the nonhuman animal’s, Coetzee disrupts the species divide and represents the importance of receptivity in relating to an-other, human or nonhuman. Coetzee’s text pushes its readers to re-imagine deceptively obvious distinctions between ideological constructs, including that of rationality and feeling, in order to open a space for new, more holistic, interconnected modes of understanding. The text’s display of interconnection in its content and form posits the possibility for a similar approach to human- animal relations, based on interconnectivity rather than (hyper)separation or hierarchisation. Despite the lack of receptivity shown by her academic audience, or what Singh calls the “inevitable failure of her appeal”, Elizabeth reveals the importance of feeling in rationality, and “insists that everyone – most urgently perhaps academics by virtue of their being custodians of knowledge – must move beyond empirical knowledge into the realm of feeling” (Singh, 2013: 474). In this way, feeling and rationality are represented as inherently interconnected. The Lives of Animals offers imaginative and alternative ways of envisioning human- animal relations to those of conventional approaches. Such counter-centric ideas and modes have the potential to create individual and cultural shifts through imaginative mediums, such as literature, which Coetzee represents as valuable in its potential to push readers to re-imagine the animal. This re-imagination might have a transformational impact on their approach to human-animal relations in the real world, as is discussed in the upcoming conclusion to this study.

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Conclusion

This study has explored the interconnected complexities of the form and content of Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals by unpacking the multi-layered representation in this work. This includes the subversive and unsettling nature of the text, which crosses generic boundaries in its arguments and its mode of (re)presenting these arguments. Of course, the fact that Coetzee’s work is a multimodal metafictional text, playing on the relationships between fiction and nonfiction, imagination and reality, speech and writing, and literature and philosophy, does not mean that the topic of human-animal relations is only a vehicle for this experimentation. In my reading, there is no question that human-animal relations are the focus in The Lives of Animals. Coetzee hones in on the human in order to foreground the limitations of conceptions and representations of the animal from an anthropocentric perspective, as well as the difficulties involved in trying to escape anthropocentrism. This foregrounding of human limitation, specifically with regards to studying nonhuman animals, is fundamental to my argument that the text resonates with posthumanism – which is based on harbouring a certain humility in approaching human-animal relations. Coetzee brings dominant human(ist) constructs surrounding the animal and literature into question, providing no certainty or unequivocal answers to what he problematises. This provokes readers to rethink their conceptual sureties and creates a potential space for a self-reflective re-imagination. This study has shown how such a re-imagination of the animal is valuable in its potential to make readers more aware of anthropocentric limitations and the harmful effects they can have when used to rationalise the subordination and exploitation of “the ‘another’” (1999:35). Chapter one of this study outlined problem areas in human-animal relations research by showing how seminal philosophical contributions to this field have been critiqued for maintaining fundamental and problematic humanist, dualist reasoning. Following this, it discussed Coetzee’s contribution to the field of human-animal relations with The Lives of Animals. This included exemplifying how Coetzee portrays the difficulty and limitations involved in any attempt to study or represent the nonhuman animal, including literary representations, thereby foreshadowing the ambiguities and ironies in the text, which are dealt with in the other three chapters. This chapter outlined the specificity of my posthumanist reading of the text, which involved elements of postcolonialism and ecofeminism, as well as the notion of receptivity. The Lives of Animals and posthumanism are complex, controversial and difficult to define, as both uproot preconceived certainties and push for an embrace of uncertainty from a point of humility. The specific constellation of perspectives used in my

124 posthumanist reading resonates with Coetzee’s project, which requires receptivity to new or unsettling ideas, and involves postcolonial and ecofeminist elements that cannot be ignored in a holistic reading of its deconstructive and subversive approach to canonical discourses. Chapter two of this study explored the multi-faceted nature of The Lives of Animals with regards to representation, reception and response. Coetzee’s metafictional anticipation of certain kinds of response in the text was shown to relay a message about the effects of preconceptions and proscriptions on the reception of ideas and the form in which they are (re)presented. Reception of and responses to the text were linked to Coetzee’s unsettling representations, which cross boundaries of mode and genre, and have caused uncertainty and controversy in the text’s critical reception. These responses, or what Bell calls the “hostility and impatience [Coetzee] sometimes arouses” (2013: 33), might be a reflection of Coetzee’s own conscience and frustrations, in this case with the difficulties surrounding human-animal relations in contemporary societies. As this chapter evinced, these frustrations become apparent in studying Coetzee’s nonfictional essays and interviews concerning human-animal relations. In The Lives of Animals, these manifest in an elusive and deliberately provoking literary expression of the limitations of humanity, and the mass and systematic suffering of nonhuman animals. Chapter three of this study discussed the ‘disconnections’ in the text, specifically between human and animal, reason and feeling, and rationality and imagination. It was argued that Coetzee’s deliberate and self-conscious representation of Elizabeth’s partial and contradictory re-instatements of ideological dualities and disconnections from a subverted perspective exposes the human tendency to approach multi-faceted matters dualistically. However, it was also shown in this chapter how Elizabeth’s arguments serve to reveal the often self-legitimating and one-sided nature of dominant discourses through challenging their acclaimed authority and central positions. Coetzee offers an alternative frame for approaching human-animal relations through revealing and questioning ideological disconnections based on Eurocentric and anthropocentric identities. Rather than attempting to define the relationships between human and animal, reason and feeling, and rationality and imagination, Coetzee leaves them open for re-imagination. In the final chapter of this study, it was argued that although The Lives of Animals is built on significant ambiguities and disconnections in terms of both its content and form, it also creates the potential for readers to establish unforeseen and affirmative connections. Chapter four established connections in the text based on the relations between the constructs of human and animal, rationality and feeling, and reality and imagination. It argued that Coetzee’s 125 representation of these elements is thought provoking and provides alternatives to conventional approaches to human-animal relations. These alternatives are valuable in their counter-centric approach and, as Marchino argues, reflect “the need for a change in consciousness in human attitudes and practices regarding animals” (2000: 2). The text represents this transformational potential as involving an ontological questioning of the self and what it means to be human, as well as a deeper recognition of our interconnected, spiritually embodied selves. Significantly, ecofeminist Birkland argues about human-animal relations that “reverence for, and empathy with, nature and all life (or "spirituality") is an essential element of the social transformation required” (1993: 13). The possibility of being receptive to this kind of transformation involves an attempt to overcome preconceptions that produce sceptical attitudes to new and imaginative ways of thinking about the text and the animal itself. The Lives of Animals can be read from multiple perspectives due to its lack of commitment to established discourses. A posthumanist ‘way of reading’ this text involves a receptivity to new and alternative ways of thinking about the animal and imaginative literature. As Herbrechter & Callus note, this way of reading requires one “to sympathise and empathise with a position that troubles and undoes identity while struggling to reassert what is familiar and defining” (2008: 96). A posthumanist reading involves trying to sympathetically re- imagine normative constructs by pushing the boundaries of thinking, while simultaneously trying not to lose oneself in this ‘unthinkability’. Diamond says that Coetzee’s demand for a re-imagination is one that “pushes us beyond what we can think” (2008: 8). Due to Coetzee’s pushing of conceivable boundaries, Diamond asserts that sometimes one’s “concepts, our ordinary life with our concepts, pass by this difficulty as if it were not there” (2008: 8). In order to engage with this ‘difficulty’, one is required to ‘unlearn’ one’s own preconceptual constraints, at least to some degree, to the point that one can “feel oneself being shouldered out of how one thinks, how one is apparently supposed to think, or to have a sense of the inability of thought to encompass what it is attempting to reach” (2008: 8). An awareness of one’s own limitation is fundamental to any kind of transformational effect on oneself and, as Coetzee brings to light, a basis for positively developing human-animal relations. Through destabilizing any predominant authorial perspective, Coetzee demands that his readers push their thinking beyond their comfort zones. Because Coetzee and Elizabeth serve to deconstruct, rather than construct, one cannot assume that he or she is right or wrong. Rather, the text creates a space where readers can make their own connections and reflect on what motivates the ability or willingness to sympathise with an-other. Elizabeth’s challenge to authority and her appeal to the sympathetic imagination questions how people can accept or be 126 complicit in what is happening to nonhuman animals daily in the name of humans. The text questions this desensitisation to the lives of nonhuman animals, and reveals how the marginalisation of nonhuman animals, feeling, and imagination are inherently interconnected. Coetzee uses his authorial power and status to express what appear to be some of his innermost struggles with and passions about humans and their treatment of nonhuman animals. In this way, he writes for his readers, but also for his own conscience, which grapples with the mass and systematic suffering of nonhuman animals in contemporary societies. As Danta argues, “Coetzee expresses the Janus face[108] of literary authority: the sense in which the writer is paradoxically turned outward towards his or her community, but also inward towards the higher authority of his or her own conscience” (2011: xv). In line with this, Coetzee is also writing for nonhuman animals, who lack any form of authority in contemporary societies. This study has argued the need for receptivity to what has been seen by many critics to be Coetzee’s ‘game playing’, and his apparent lack of certainty or ‘authority’. There is an elusive yet undeniable power in this refusal to adhere to or display authority. As Danta argues: “to write without authority is rather to make authority a question in and through one’s writing” (2011: xiii). Coetzee’s questioning of authority through the power of experimental literature in terms of content and form might be recognised as part of the “transcendental duty” of the literary author, in which “the writer gains authority […] by losing it, by opening his or her poet- self to some higher authority […] exposing himself and his audience to what we might call the ‘bare life’ of literature” (2011: xv). In light of this, my reading of the text has argued for an embrace of rather than a resistance to what Coetzee’s text exposes in both the writer and the reader by adopting a stance of receptivity towards ‘bare’, unsettling representations, and what they might teach us about ourselves and our preconceptions, specifically surrounding the animal. Such a reading involves taking Coetzee’s and Elizabeth’s contradictions as a deliberate message about the limitations of the human, even at its most well intentioned. This encourages a self-reflective re-imagination of presuppositions that one might not have previously questioned, for it represents challenges to normative thinking and assurances surrounding the animal. In line with this, Kompridis suggests that “becoming receptive to those challenges entails seeing what is new in them, seeing that something or someone is calling for a new response […] that also requires, manifests, a freer relation to ourselves” (2014: 209). The

108 ‘Janus’ alludes to the name of the ancient Roman god, who’s image has two faces (Rüpke, 2016: 87). The metaphor describes something that has two contrasting aspects. 127 unsettling, thought-provoking potential of the text has been argued to be its fundamental power in demanding a re-imagination of our relation to the animal, through demanding a re- imagination of our relations to ourselves. The Lives of Animals demands the use of the (sympathetic) imagination in that it offers no clear pictures of nonhuman animal suffering, yet assures us of the severity of it, leaving it up to the readers to decide or look further into what this might entail, and how it might make them feel. Elizabeth does not offer poetic descriptions of the cruelty against and suffering of nonhuman animals, as one might expect from a novelist who expresses a proclivity for poetic language. Neither does she offer a stance on animal rights. Rather, the text tackles the ideological positions underlying both of these issues through revealing the danger in projecting certain limited, anthropocentric thought onto the lives of nonhuman animals, no matter how well intentioned. This resonates with Wolfe’s posthumanist argument that human-animal relations can be “addressed adequately only if we confront them on two levels: not just the level of content, thematics, and the object of knowledge (the animal studied by animal studies) but also the level of theoretical and methodological approach (how animal studies studies the animal)” (2009: 568). Coetzee demands that his readers question the fundamental systems of thought which underlie both the problems and the proposed solutions in the field of human- animal relations, as well as the way in which these problems and solutions are communicated. Coetzee’s approach does not tackle the problem of cruelty against nonhuman animals from the top downwards, but rather from the bottom upwards, attempting to identify inherent underlying causes, rather than treating symptoms with the very systems of thought that underlie them. Coetzee reveals the ideological disconnections involved in dominant anthropocentric thought, most importantly between human and animal, as primary to the human complicity in what Elizabeth calls “the horrors” (1999: 19) of the treatment of nonhuman animals “in production facilities […], in abattoirs, in trawlers, in laboratories, all over the world” (1999: 19). At the same time, Coetzee questions whether we can really escape anthropocentrism, or simply deconstruct it, and whether we can really escape duality, or merely disrupt it, using limitation as a basis for his challenge. In this sense, the text is not a challenge to anything specific, but is rather challenging because it does not lay out a clear or dualistic challenge. It is not based upon a utopian ideal of transcending conceptions of human and nonhuman animal difference, or a denial of the inevitable anthropocentricism involved in attempting to represent the nonhuman animal and its suffering. Rather, it serves as an interruption of dominant anthropocentric thinking and unearths alternative, more receptive ways of thinking about human-animal relations. 128

Ultimately, this study has shown that The Lives of Animals is a valuable contribution to the field of human-animal relations in its alternative, thought-provoking approach, and its proposal of the power of imagination and feeling in reconceptualising, and thus re-imagining the animal. The form and content of The Lives of Animals are inseparable in their mutually intertwined rhetorical purpose in this literary work. Coetzee’s intervention into human-animal relations utilises intellectual and imaginative material to bring everything surrounding what one may think they know about the animal and human-animal relations into question. Through deconstructing the notion of the animal and offering alternative ways of thinking about and relating to nonhuman animals, Coetzee’s text offers an important intervention, which begins with a re-imagination of the interconnected lives of all animals. Coetzee asks us not just to learn, but primarily to ‘unlearn’, in order to re-imagine the animal. In light of this, it is recommended that further literary studies are undertaken concerning how one studies human-animal relations. This involves the recognition of the power and influence of rhetoric, as well as approaching human-animal relations not purely as a form of thematics, but from a position that challenges the established schema of the ‘knowing’ human subject and the anthropocentric underpinnings that are reproduced in current disciplinary protocols of philosophy and literature. The unique approach by a master of literature to the topic of human-animal relations in The Lives of Animals generates ideas and hope for further studies of human-animal relations such as this in imaginative literature.

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