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Abstract
In this article, I argue that J. M. Coetzee’s multigeneric text, Elizabeth Costello (2003. London: Vintage Books), may be read as developing a voice for the new millennium. Coetzee can be seen to be approaching, through the figure of Elizabeth Costello, a new dimension in human/animal relations. This is one that refuses to subordinate animals to the power of human speech and writing. Moving equally away from anthropocentrism, and from notions of the ‘anthropological machine’, the dimension could be described as biocentrism, or as an approach to ecological ethics. Central to my argument is Jacques Derrida’s seminal essay ‘The Animal that Therefore I Am’ ([1997] 2002. Critical Inquiry 28 (2): 369–418) which I suggest is an intertext for Elizabeth Costello because its thinking is so congruent with Coetzee’s. I place my analysis of the Derrida text between my first and final sections on Elizabeth Costello, as the Derrida text throws light both on Costello’s initial anthropocentrism and, through Derrida’s concept of the animot, on the biocentrism towards which I argue Costello is moving.
Notes
1 Though animal ethics and environmental ethics both fit the description ‘biocentrism’, they are strangely at odds in the current literature:
By contrast with the holistic vision set forth by both feminists and quantum physicists, the goal of much of the literature in environmental ethics [as opposed to animal ethics] has been the establishment of hierarchies of value for the different parts of nature. It is assumed that hierarchy is necessary to aid us in making moral choices in our interactions with nature. (Donovan and Adams Citation1996, 18–19)
This, though, is strikingly not the case for the nonhierarchical ecocritical collection of essays put together by Glotfelty and Fromm (Citation1996), and quoted in this article. My argument is that Elizabeth Costello’s texts are slowly moving towards a biocentrism consistent with the ‘feminist and holistic’ worldview described by Donovan and Adams and endorsed by Glotfelty and Fromm. Northover similarly argues: ‘Costello’s position (and Coetzee’s and Midgley’s) has much affinity with ecofeminism, a form of feminism that radically challenges the basis of liberalism, in particular the masculine myth of the isolated individual, and which deplores all forms of oppression and exploitation’(2012, 22).
2 The text of Elizabeth Costello was assembled in 2003 from The Lives of Animals, or The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, delivered by Coetzee at Princeton University on October 15 and 16, 1997. Though the texts of The Lives of Animals and Elizabeth Costello are identical, the former contains invaluable footnotes on topics like ethics and animal rights. None of these are retained in the latter.
3 The close connection between author and character in this text has been recognized as an effective creative strategy for Coetzee. Szalai comments that Elizabeth Costello ‘allows Coetzee to pose questions without answering them’ (2004, 86) while James Wood observes that the fact that Coetzee ‘chooses to read a fiction in a lecture hall rather than a lecture enables him to pose the unspeakable instead of talking about the impossibility of speaking it’ (2003, 15). On ‘doubling’ between author and character see also Clarkson (Citation2009, 107) and Sanders (Citation2009, 44). But this closeness of author to fictional protagonist has also been criticized:
One negative response to Elizabeth Costello has been to complain that Coetzee uses his fictional creations to advance arguments – about the human relation to animals, about the value of the humanist tradition, about the morality of representing evil in fiction – without assuming responsibility for the arguments put forward in his fiction and is thus ethically at fault. (Attridge Citation2005, 197)
On Coetzee’s refusal to assume responsibility for these arguments, Cornwell comments thus: ‘I do think that Coetzee’s reluctance to be held accountable for his writings is extreme, bordering on the pathology generally known as paranoia’ (2011, 356).
4 Northover (Citation2012) discusses Costello’s ‘controversial’ use of reason to attack the rationalism of the Western philosophical tradition.
5 The term is coined by Giorgio Agamben: ‘Let us try to state the results of Western philosophy’s anthropological machine in the form of theses: 1. Anthropogenesis is what results from the caesura between human and animal’ (2004, 79). Smith traces the concept back to Plato: ‘The anthropological machine operates throughout Plato’s works. For example, in the Theaetetus, he has Socrates define philosophy precisely in terms of “what man is, and what is proper for man’s nature to do and suffer, as distinct from the nature of other things”’ (2011, 19). Smith comments: ‘to escape the anthropological machine , an ethical concern for nature, and the politics associated with it, would need to be an expression of a relation not predicated on whether or not such a concern is properly human’ By contrast, ‘An ecological ethics awakens us to the wider more-than-human world. It goes much further raising questions concerning the singular significance of beings other than animals, too: trees, fungi, rivers, rocks’ (2011, xix).
6 Costello’s position here is congruent with what Midgley says about the Enlightenment: if animals are irrational, and value and dignity depend entirely on reason, animals cannot matter. Reason plays the same role here that the soul does in Christian thought. The extreme form of this rationalist view was that of Descartes, who identified the human soul or consciousness so completely with reason as to conclude that animals could not be conscious at all, and were in fact just automata. (1983, 11)
7 In his ‘Voiceless’ speech Coetzee foregrounds the connection between ‘the transformation of animals into production units’ and the horrors of Nazi Germany, where ‘a group of powerful men . . . had the bright idea of adapting the methods of the industrial stockyard, as pioneered and perfected in Chicago, to the slaughter – or what they preferred to call the processing – of human beings’ (2007, 1).
8 Neither Coetzee nor Costello believes that animal rights, though of paramount importance, can be achieved in the ways the leading Animal Rights activist Tom Regan describes in his commitment to ‘the total abolition of the use of animals in science; the total dissolution of commercial animal agriculture; [and] the total elimination of commercial and sport hunting and trapping’ (1985, 13). Coetzee’s and Costello’s development of ‘the sympathetic imagination’ substitutes a caring or emotional response for Regan’s appeal to legislation to secure animal rights. Coetzee himself remarks: ‘Strictly speaking, my interest is not in legal rights for animals but in a change of hearts towards animals’ (in Northover Citation2012, 39). The concept of ‘the sympathetic imagination’ resonates strongly within the ‘feminist caring ethic for the treatment of animals’ described by Donovan and Adams (Citation1996). For example, Brian Luke notes:
justice-based arguments for animal liberation fail. But my own experience and the reports of others lead me to believe that direct responsiveness to need is more central to animal liberationism than concerns about consistency anyway. And contrary to the suppositions of the justice-oriented writers, the capacity to respond to animals is a deep and recurring feature of human life. (in Donovan and Adams, p. 99)
Northover remarks: ‘Costello’s position (and Coetzee’s and Midgley’s) has much affinity with ecofeminism, a form of feminism that radically challenges the basis of liberalism, in particular the masculine myth of the isolated individual and which deplores all forms of oppression and exploitation’ (2012, 22.).
9 Costello does not of course show us what it is like to be any of the animals she describes in the sympathetic imagination, because she recognizes this concept to be human-centred. Derrida similarly fails to answer Nagel’s question of what it is like to be a bat, because for Derrida animot are unknowable. We are more likely to discover animals’ mental experiences in Donald Griffin’s book on cognitive ethology, Animal Minds (1992).
10 As David Woods remarks:
One of the complicating factors in the ‘war on pity’ is that most people have a well-developed sense of pity; it’s just that we collude with each other to veil from ourselves the occasions that would surely solicit it. Much of the barbaric interface occurs behind closed doors – in abattoirs, laboratories, agro-industrial production units, at the end of long driveways. This suggests that we need a war on ‘deception’, on ‘self-deception’, and, yes, on the ignorance that knows many things but does not connect them. (2004, 14)
Derrida similarly observes:
War is waged over the matter of pity . . . To think the war we find ourselves waging is not only a duty, a responsibility, an obligation, it is also a necessity, a constraint that, like it or not, directly or indirectly, everyone is held to. (1997, 397)
11 Costello is again close to Midgley’s position: ‘what matters about people cannot be merely their ability to speak articulately. It must be what speech reveals and what makes speech possible. Mere not-speaking cannot therefore be enough to rule animals out of consideration’ (Midgley Citation1983, 88).
12 Derrida writes:
It is all too evident that in the course of the last two centuries . . . traditional forms of treatment of the animal have been turned upside down by the joint developments of zoological, ethological, biological, and generic forms of knowledge and the always inseparable techniques of intervention with respect to their object, the transformation of the actual object, its milieu, its world, namely, the living animal.. This has occurred by means of farming and regimentalization at a demographic level unknown in the past, by means of genetic experimentation, the industrialization of what can be called the production for consumption of animal meat, artificial insemination on a massive scale, more and more audacious manipulations of the genome, the reduction of the animal not only to production and over-active reproduction (hormones, genetic crossbreeding, cloning, and so on) of meat for consumption but also of all sorts of other end products, and all of that in the service of a certain being and the so-called human well-being of man. (1997, 394)
13 Huggan and Tiffin remark:
we have become increasingly aware of human rights and their manifold abuses. But we have made significantly less progress towards the realization, not so much that rights need to be extended to other species, but that the fundamental distinction between the human and the animal needs to be rethought. (2010, 201)
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Gail Fincham
GAIL FINCHAM is now retired from UCT’s English Department. She remains interested in modernism, particularly Joseph Conrad, on whom she has published extensively, on articulations between modernism and postcolonialism, on literature focusing on ecology, and on all aspects of narratology. Recently she has written about Tan Twan Eng’s The Garden of Evening Mists, Marlene Van Niekerk’s Agaat, Anne Landsman’s The Rowing Lesson, Shaun Johnson’s The Native Commissioner and Marina Warner’s Indigo. She is working at present on Mario Vargas Llosa and on non-fictional writing about the Amazon.