Blasphemous Likenesses: J.M. Coetzee's The Lives of Animals, America, and the Holocaust

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Notes

¹Coetzee, The Lives of Animals, 21. Hereafter abbreviated as LA.

²Critics have not completely dismissed the significance of the Holocaust in Coetzee's narrative. Cora Diamond grants that “references to the Holocaust … are of immense significance in Coetzee's lectures” (Diamond, “The Difficulty of Reality,” 49), while Michael Bell goes a step further, asserting that The Lives of Animals's “central theme is the Shoah itself with the animal theme as an analytical device for unsettling conventional ways of thinking it” (Bell, “What Is It Like To Be a Nonracist?,” 76). While I agree that Coetzee is interested in “unsettling” how we think about the Holocaust/Shoah, Bell is mistaken to reduce the work's “animal theme” to an analytical device.

³Novick, The Holocaust in American Life, 133.

⁴Singer, “Reflections,” 91.

⁵Attwell, “The Life and Times of Elizabeth Costello,” 36 (emphasis added).

⁶Durrant, “J.M. Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello, and the Limits of the Sympathetic Imagination,” 119.

⁷Horsman, “Like a Dog,” 152.

⁸Woessner, “Coetzee's Critique of Reason,” 225.

⁹Head, The Cambridge Introduction to J.M. Coetzee, 15.

¹⁰Jolly, “Writing Desire Responsibly,” 99.

¹¹McDunnah, “‘We Are Asked Not to Condemn,’” 16.

¹²Diamond, “The Difficulty of Reality,” 57.

¹³Ibid., 49.

¹⁴Obviously, such a claim cannot ignore the reprehensible practice of Holocaust denial; however, the extent to which Holocaust denial has gained a foothold in mainstream thought is highly questionable.

¹⁵Oddly enough, as Novick observes, even Holocaust deniers participate in this “broad consensus”: “‘If it happened,’ they say in effect, ‘we would deplore it as much as anyone else. But it didn’t, so the question doesn’t arise’” (The Holocaust in American Life, 13).

¹⁶Fallace, The Emergence of Holocaust Education in American Schools, 74.

¹⁷Doneson, The Holocaust in American Film, 4.

¹⁸Rosenfeld, “The Americanization of the Holocaust,” 120.

¹⁹Novick, The Holocaust in American Life, 13.

²⁰The place of the Holocaust in American consciousness has altered dramatically in the decades after the event. See Cole, Selling the Holocaust, Novick, The Holocaust in American Life, and Rosenfeld “The Americanization of the Holocaust.” Fallace's The Emergence of Holocaust Education in American Schools offers a more specifically focused approach that pays attention to the curricular development of Holocaust education—which he characterizes as a “grassroots phenomenon initiated by practicing teachers” (5)—and provides a strong alternative to Novick's top-down emphasis on the role of Jewish elites in raising American Holocaust consciousness.

²¹Rosenfeld, “The Americanization of the Holocaust,” 120.

²²Bartov, “Spielberg's Oskar,” 46.

²³Cole, Selling the Holocaust, 75.

²⁴Ibid, 2.

²⁵Ibid, 98.

²⁶Auschwitz is a synecdochical referent in the sense that, as one particular site of the Holocaust, it signifies the location of the Holocaust. Auschwitz is also a metonymic referent because it connotes a specifically Nazi form of violence.

²⁷Young, “America's Holocaust,” 72.

²⁸Cole, Selling the Holocaust, xv, 154.

²⁹Young, “America's Holocaust,” 73.

³⁰Cole, Selling the Holocaust, xv, 154.

³¹Loshitsky, Spielberg's Holocaust, 5.

³²Browning, “Ordinary Men or Ordinary Germans,” 55.

³³Browing, Ordinary Men, 188–9.

³⁴Goldhagen, Hitler's Willing Executioners, 14.

³⁵Caplan, “Reflections on the Reception of Goldhagen in the United States,” 157.

³⁶Ibid., 159.

³⁷Goldhagen, Hitler's Willing Executioners, 28.

³⁸Coetzee, “Critic and Citizen,” 111.

³⁹It is worth noting that Coetzee's concern with American imperialism and with American foreign policy is neither a new development in Coetzee's fiction nor one that ends with The Lives of Animals. Dusklands, Coetzee's first published fiction, imaginatively links the work of Eugene Dawn—a propagandist working to further American aims in the Vietnam War—to the adventures of Jacobus Coetzee, an explorer from South Africa's eighteenth-century colonial history. In Diary of a Bad Year, the work's protagonist, a novelist by the name of JC, comments scathingly on the conduct of the United States and its allies in fighting the so-called War on Terror.

⁴⁰In a text about the injustices animals face, Coetzee is remarkably reticent about representing animal suffering and death. I suggest that this decision reflects concerns similar to restrictions made against Holocaust representation: while it is Costello who explicitly compares the treatment of animals to the Holocaust, it is Coetzee who seeks to validate Costello's position in his representational practice.

⁴¹Although, as I argue, the USHMM performs ideological work similar to that of Schindler's List or Hitler's Willing Executioners, it is in regard to the positioning of its audience that the USHMM parts ways with Spielberg's film and Goldhagen's book, as visitors to the USHMM are issued identity cards linking them to concentration camp prisoners.

⁴²Rosenfeld, “The Americanization of the Holocaust,” 143.

⁴³Caplan notes that the reception of Hitler's Willing Executioners took shape largely along generational lines. This generational gap was apparent in the United States but to an even greater degree in Germany “where the gap between academics and public was also a gap between the generations” (Caplan, “Reflections” 154).

⁴⁴Langer, Admitting the Holocaust, 7.

⁴⁵Examples of it are abundant in American representations of the Holocaust from as far back as the 1950s. The stage and screen adaptations of the Diary of Anne Frank, for example, exemplify the discourse of consolation. Goodrich and Hackett end their adaptations of Frank's diary with an upbeat message. Taking a quotation from the primary source out of its proper context, the authors place reassuring words in the mouth of Anne Frank. Twice Anne tells us, “In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart” (Goodrich and Hackett, The Diary of Anne Frank, 168, 174). Given the subject of the play, this affirmation of humanity's inherent goodness seems radically misplaced. In a similar vein, the decision of American publishers to rename Primo Levi's Holocaust memoir Survival in Auschwitz—it was originally entitled If This Is a Man—is indicative of an American desire to see the Holocaust as an event that ends happily.

⁴⁶Cole, Selling the Holocaust, 77.

⁴⁷Ibid., 162

⁴⁸The shift in emphasis is explainable, in part, by the popularity of survivor testimony; yet, survivors’ stories need not necessarily function to privilege survival as a Holocaust outcome. Primo Levi, in particular, is quite clear that his story, as well as the stories of other survivors, should not be taken as representative accounts. Levi writes, “we, the survivors, are not the true witness” (The Drowned and the Saved 63); for Levi it is the “drowned,” those murdered in the genocide, who are the true witnesses.

⁴⁹Though I haven’t the space in this essay to address this particular issue, I contend that in The Lives of Animals Coetzee suggestively links the failure of the animal rights movement, with its philosophical underpinnings rooted squarely in the liberal tradition, to a wider failure on the part of political liberalism to offer a sufficiently powerful philosophical ground capable of enabling the ethical treatment of that which is radically other.

⁵⁰Coetzee, “Jerusalem Prize Acceptance Speech,” 98.

⁵¹Poyner, J.M. Coetzee and the Paradox of Postcolonial Authorship, 13.

⁵²Coetzee, “Jerusalem Prize Acceptance Speech,” 98.

⁵³Gordimer, “The Idea of Gardening,” 139.

⁵⁴Dovey, The Novels of J.M. Coetzee; Gallagher, A Story of South Africa; Attwell, J.M. Coetzee. Each of the authors of these studies, among the first monographs published on Coetzee's writing, offers in his or her own way a defense of Coetzee's writing that refutes the criticisms directed against it by demonstrating its relevance to the contemporary South African situation. Of course, each of the critical studies I’ve mentioned were written and published prior to the democratic elections of 1994 which marked the final stage of South Africa's transition to post-apartheid rule; as such, the critical focus of each can be explained by its immersion in either the formal apartheid or transitional eras of South African history. As time has passed, critical accounts of Coetzee's apartheid-era fiction have been relatively freer to explore Coetzee's work outside the immediate South African context. Nevertheless, the turn away from context-sensitive readings of Coetzee's early fiction in contemporary Coetzean criticism has not rendered the works of Dovey, Gallagher, and Attwell outdated, and a significant portion of contemporary criticism continues to recognize the importance of the apartheid context to Coetzee's earliest work.

⁵⁵Published the same year as Disgrace, a novel recognizably set in contemporary South Africa, The Lives of Animals actually pre-dates the better-known, Booker Prize-winning novel with which it is often paired.

⁵⁶Christie, The South African Truth Commission, 22.

⁵⁷Barnard, Apartheid and Beyond, 17.

⁵⁸Posel, “The TRC Report,” 149.

⁵⁹Mamdani, “A Diminished Truth, 59: the TRC's “version of truth was established through narrow lenses, crafted to reflect the experience of a tiny minority; on the one hand, perpetrators, being state-agents; and, on the other, victims, being political activists.” Such an approach denied what was, for Mamdani, the basic truth that “the violence of apartheid was aimed less at individuals than at entire communities.”