The Lives of Animals

warta przeczytania, nie narzuca poszczególnych poglądów tylko daje pole do refleksji aby samemu zastanowić się, która ze stron bardziej do nas przemawia

Coetzee escribe bonito y creo que esta especie de ficción no ficción tiene su punto. Pone a la literatura y a la filosofía bastante juntas, pero la filosofía no es lo bastante dura. La literatura sí, y creo que ese es precisamente su fuerte: un discurso con un fuente componente perlocutivo, aunque carezca de argumentos fuertes. Según mi parecer, esta era su intención.

response for class:

It’s always interesting to me when I like a piece of writing and can’t really figure out why. The Lives of Animals should be, on all accounts, frustrating: the characters circle themselves in contradictions and confusions, the delivery of the philosophy through lectures and debates and awkward arguments complicates everything to such a muddying extent, and the writing itself seems to double-back and retread a lot of the same ground it makes in earlier sections (the repetition of the “reason” debate in “The Poets and the Animals” felt unnecessary on first read, for example). But there’s something here I like. I think this interest clarifies itself in the character of Elizabeth, who I found myself connecting to way more than I expected. I didn’t “sympathize” with her, at least in the way she describes it as “everything to do with the subject and little to do with the object” (34-5). Relying on sympathy feels more one-sided than I actually experienced it. Should it not be a conversation, something deeper than empathy? Like trying to know as much as I can about her by placing myself as close as I can to her? Specifically, her saying that “Everyone else comes to terms with it, why can’t you? Why can’t you?” really sunk deep into me and cast the entire book in a different light (69). Elizabeth can’t help it. It’s just something she cannot stop noticing, something she’s opened herself to and can’t close off again. And I felt this reverberate in all the moments she admits that she doesn’t know what change or effect she’s trying to produce. She’s not sure what she knows at all. She’s more interested in the moral questions underpinning our laws and customs and social attitudes; she’s relying on her questioning in and of itself. “It is time,” she says (44). It all feels very moment-to-moment, very authentically so. She sees something and says it, wanting to change some minds, but letting us — her lecture’s audience and her son and us readers — explore what could or should happen next.

The entire format of these chapters reminded me of the Ostriker poem, “The Change.” I can envision Elizabeth saying, “You are too old. You remind [him] of frozen mud” about her son. I think there’s something here to explore — something about how time makes the order of things, the turning of them, more apparent to those who have lived longer. Elizabeth is constantly degraded by John; when he meets her at the airport, he says “her flesh has grown flabby” (15). He lets Norma disrespect her. He says she’s rambly, she’s embarrassing. And as I read, I’m left wondering what it would feel like to live a life, notice a pattern, speak of that pattern, and be called embarrassing for it. And I found myself nearly convinced with most of her points — I thoroughly enjoyed her explanation of the “right thinking” and “wrong thinking” when it comes to science, how we expect test subjects to lower their thinking into the practical beneath the “whys” and “how comes.” She’s strong-willed but also self-aware; she admits that she’s “wearing leather shoes” and “carrying a leather purse,” and there are “degrees of obscenity” (43-44). Nothing about her behavior feels altogether obtrusive or worthy of the coldness thrown her way, just like Ostriker’s narrator. All the iciness feels so unnecessary.

My favorite part of these chapters is when she talked about Hughes and Rilke. Her speech reminded me of Gerard Manley Hopkins’ “selfing”. Movement allows us to recognize life: ourselves as moving things having the panther’s or jaguar’s shared ability to move. The poetry allows to “imagine our way into that way of moving, to inhabit that body,” Elizabeth says (51). She says of the jaguar, “he is us” (53). So maybe when the humpback whale jumps out of the water, it is not only selfing — expressing its existence beyond “expression,” fuller than that — but it is also allowing us to inhabit it. Maybe it’s letting us in. I think we’re always looking for opportunities to be known; the fact that we can’t be known inside-and-out, 100% completely, can hurt us — I know it can hurt me. We had to start this course by confronting this hurt and redefining it as a kind of optimistic discovery. But what Elizabeth seems to be saying is that through this language of poetry, we can actually inhabit one another and know each other through the commonality of our moving bodies. It’s less about discovery and more about openness and the “system of interactions” (54). As Elizabeth says, it feels Platonic — we see the creature in front of us but it is somehow representative of the larger roles of creatureness, and it is through this that we not only “sympathize” with the panther or jaguar, but maybe even sympathize with ourselves in them. This feels strange to say, and I don't know if this conveys what I'm thinking very well, but it feels as if we — as in all instances of life — all somehow express ourselves incompletely, and it is through this shared incompleteness that we can actually express ourselves completely. We may not all have "reasonable" language to get it all across, but we do all have instinct and impulse to pick up the slack.

yep. vegetarian for sure now.

Not only is the self-consciously irrational moralistic grandstanding an annoyance that is nearly impossible to stomach, Coetzee's characters are predictable, two-dimensional, depthless stereotypes. Throughout the book, as if he wanted to add insult to aesthetic-intellectual injury, Coetzee follows Costello's incoherent ramblings with thinly-disguised apologies for just how poorly written her diatribe actually is.

There is no brilliance to this work. It's an even worse faux-novel than Nietzsche's Zarathustra. At least Nietzsche could convincingly plead insanity in his defense. Coetzee is just a bad writer.

The Lives of Animals is a book I can confidently recommend to anyone in my life who is willing to wrestle with their own responsibility in societal shortcomings concerned with animal rights.

South African author J.M. Coetzee’s 1999 novella is a repackaging of the two night presentation he gave for the Tanner Lectures at Princeton University two years previous. Asked to speak on any topic related to human values, Coetzee instead wrote a short metafiction centred on the fictional Australian novelist Elizabeth Costello who has been invited to speak at the fictional Appleton University where her son is a tenured professor. Costello, late in her career and life and now harbouring a sense of urgency in her work is going to present a two night series of lectures on animal rights, and she’s not going to hold back. “I say what I mean,” she states near the start of her first lecture. “I am an old woman. I do not have time any longer to say things I do not mean” (18).

What follows (and what briefly precedes) is a narrative about a mother visiting her son and trying to see in him, his wife and their children the human kindness that she expects in those who move through modern society with passable benevolence and decency. But she is also tortured by the other realisation - that they, like most of human society, are guilty for their involvement in “a crime of stupefying proportions”, namely the systematic degradation, murder and the immediately and residually harmful rendering of animals into food.

What makes Coetzee’s work here so widely readable for herbivores and carnivores alike is his willingness and ability to include and honour myriad views on the subject of animal consumption and domestication. Though he has come out in more recent years to speak about his own vegetarianism and championing of animal rights, and though Costello functions as a fairly clear surrogate for Coetzee, his narrative scope will not allow Costello’s views to go unchallenged. The best example of this is when, before a post lecture dinner on the first night of Costello’s presentation, she receives a letter from an Appleton professor who explains why he will not be in attendance; The professor has been affronted by Costello’s comparison between the Holocaust and the processing of animals for human consumption.

The discussion continues over dinner. The various presented entry points to the debate each have degrees of merit and truth. Coetzee appears at times to refuse to be solely siding with any of them, and his cast of concerned and curious intellectuals cover a significant amount of philosophical and emotional ground. Though the novella is brief, it is rich with accessible, compellingly articulated, precisely referenced, personal, and essential dialogue about how animal rights are essential to consider and address in any discussion about human values. One of Costello’s more truthfully simple and poignant call-ins comes in the form of a reminder that, historically, in her own society, human social rights activism led naturally to the abolition of slavery, to suffrage, to expanded civil rights, to establishment of the SPCA. These, to her, are each natural extensions of human awakening to kindness and morality.

Costello, as an ageing and increasingly articulate yet regressively understood figure in her world and among her family brought to mind Olga Tokarczuk’s protagonist in Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead. Society doesn’t listen well to women. This is only truer as they age, and our tendency to dismiss them is often commensurate to the veracity with which their truths are spoken.

Though the juxtaposition of livestock agriculture with the Holocaust is an understandably repellent notion to some, Coetzee’s Costello, like some in Jonathan Glazer’s recent film The Zone of Interest, reminds us of how “[Germans] lost their humanity, in our eyes, because of a certain willed ignorance on their part” (20). The same sentiment applies to most who might choose not to read this novella because the truths laid bare here are not easy to confront honestly.

For the more courageously honest amongst us, Costello’s referenced arguments include from Plutarch’s moral essays the following passage: “You ask me why I refuse to eat flesh. I, for my part, am astonished that you can put in your mouth the corpse of a dead animal, astonished that you do not find it nasty to chew hacked flesh and swallow the juices of death-wounds” (38). She also argues for the voices of animals as communicated through interspecies communication:

“‘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?” (63).

Coetzee’s arguments, however, also include the words of psychologist and anthropologist Barbara Smuts whose patient and experiential reflection of Coetzee’s lecture will speak clearly to anyone who has allowed themselves to love and be loved by an animal companion. Smuts writes of a “joyful intersubjectivity that transcends species boundaries” as she recalls negotiating life with her dog, relinquishing her personhood in deference to an equal relationship, how she taught her dog to communicate when it was time to go out, but how her dog in turn taught her when it was time to lie down and to rest.

Coetzee, through Costello, is positing that consideration of animal rights isn’t a turn to insanity, though it may sometimes seem that way in the context of how little these rights are considered in wider society. Costello verbally wonders whether she is going mad in her obsession with something that seems invisible to nearly everyone else. Costello's own doubt reminds us that madness can be perceived to accompany the uncovering of even the clearest truths if said truths are still dormant to those opting out of the discovery.

Coetzee is also recognizing through Costello the limits of arguments that are intentionally unheeded. He is using human philosophy and language to remind us that both can be insufficient in the face of human emotion:

“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” (64).

Czy można napisać świetną książkę, w której rozprawia się na temat wegetarianizmu? Owszem. Coetzee pod przykrywką prozy prowadzi dialog, dyskusję między dwiema stronami, prowokuje, filozofuje, odnosi się do moralności, ale także historii, literatury. Bardzo prosta koncepcja, a jednocześnie szczena opada. Jestem pod ogromnym wrażeniem tego autora, bo nazywa to, czego ja nie umiem. Podstawia mi pod nos myśli, których nie mogłam w pełni wykształcić i daje perspektywę, którą mogłam pominąć.
5/5

this short work cleverly uses the platform of a fictive academic lecture -- which coetzee later presented, metatextually, at princeton -- to condense many familiar and unfamiliar arguments about eating and treating animals. is Costello, the impassioned novelist and lecturer in the book, a mouthpiece for Coetzee? probably not. that ambiguity is likely what allows coetzee to lay out such a morally charged and ultimately irresolvable exchange.

the impasse in which humans find themselves when it comes to animals is fully (and usefully) captured here. love the cheap shots at reason, such as the fact that Costello's antagonistic daughter-in-law, herself an analytic philosopher, is named Norma. also, how Costello speaks of the "piddling distinctions" of analytic philosophy.

choice quote:

"...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."