Coetzee masterfully crafted and delivered a meta-fictional novella based on the heated debates on the rights of Animals at the Third Tanner Lecture sponsored by the Princeton University Center for Human Values. To his lecture, four thinkers and writers from diverse disciplinary backgrounds (namely Literature, Philosophy, Religious Studies, and Anthropology) reflected and wrote short pieces about their thoughts on Coetzee’s lecture.

Recommended to anyone who is interested in how literature challenges the rationale of philosophy.

“La vita degli animali” riunisce le Tanner Lectures tenute nel 1997 e 1998 presso l’Università di Princeton e riguardanti “la divisione in discipline” e “il malcontento che essa suscita”.
In questa occasione, Coetzee sceglie di affrontare un tema ricorrente in tutta la sua produzione letteraria: i diritti animali. Per farlo, sceglie di scrivere una conferenza nella conferenza, creando un racconto in cui è la sua protagonista, la scrittrice Elizabeth Costello, ad avere la parola in un contesto accademico.

Le riflessioni interessanti sono moltissime e toccano i temi più noti a chi si sia mai interessato di diritti animali: la poca trasparenza dei processi di creazione dei prodotti animali, il diffuso disinteresse per la questione, l’intervento dell’ecologia e dell’etica nella discussione, le riflessioni di tipo religioso e il pericolo che il movimento per i diritti degli animali resti “una questione occidentale”.

Tuttavia, il punto focale del discorso di Coetzee è quello che più si avvicina al tema generale della conferenza: la divisione del sapere umano in discipline specifiche e la creazione di una gerarchia precisa tra i campi di conoscenza che privilegia sempre e soltanto quegli ambiti che usano come unico strumento il ragionamento logico. In altre parole, ragione e immaginazione, filosofia e letteratura (in particolare, ci si concentra sulla poesia).

Coetzee – o meglio, Elizabeth Costello – mette in discussione la ragione come oggetto della nostra più totale devozione e come metro di giudizio universale. Ciò che noi chiamiamo “ragione”, quella ragione che riteniamo ci distingua dagli animali, corrisponde ad un sistema di pensiero che rispecchia un solo lato della mente umana e che, per essere esercitata appieno, deve essere elaborata attraverso un sistema di tradizioni accademiche umane, convenzioni, standard. Questa ragione viene descritta come “una grande tautologia” che si mostra infallibile perché giudica se stessa secondo il proprio metro di giudizio.

“Le spiegazioni razionali sono una conseguenza della struttura della mente umana […] Le spiegazioni che si danno gli animali sono in armonia con la struttura della loro mente, a cui noi non abbiamo accesso perché non abbiamo un linguaggio comune”

Noi non saremo mai in grado di comprendere davvero che cosa sia essere un pipistrello, non con la ragione che, nel campo dei diritti animali, si mostra uno strumento inadeguato alla comprensione. Possiamo e dobbiamo affidarci, invece, all’empatia e all’immaginazione. Alla letteratura invece che alla filosofia.

Proprio per questo, Elizabeth Costello appare spesso confusa, dà risposte puntuali ma non sempre del tutto soddisfacenti dal punto di vista logico e la sua stessa attività, il suo impegno sembra avere poco senso perfino ai suoi stessi occhi

" 'Credi veramente che le lezioni di poesia porteranno alla chiusura dei macelli?’
‘No’ ”

e tuttavia il suo discorso non perde mai in potenza proprio perché la sua coerenza sta in questo, nell’essere guidata dall’empatia e non dalla ragione logica che si è già valutata e riconosciuta come uno strumento inadeguato.

Nella seconda parte del libro troviamo le varie risposte a Coetzee nella forma di quattro interventi accademici di studiosi appartenenti agli ambiti di ricerca più diversi (proprio per tornare al tema della conferenza): una teorica della letteratura, un filosofo, una storica delle religioni e una primatologa, a dimostrare quanto sia necessario rivedere il nostro sistema di organizzazione del sapere. Questioni come la crisi ecologica e i diritti animali ci richiedono un intervento che deve prendere forma prima di tutto nel nostro modo di comprendere il mondo in modo complesso e completo. Credo che questo libro sia una buona indicazione della strada che va intrapresa presto e ad ogni costo.

The novelist J.M. Coetzee was invited to give a Tanner Lecture at Princeton University. As the invitee, Coetzee was permitted to speak on any topic he chose, and his choice was human mistreatment of animals. His lecture, however, was in the form of a fiction: one of the characters from his novels, Elizabeth Costello, is invited to give just such a lecture at a fictional university. This device allows Coetzee to express his own concerns, while at the same time having other characters challenge his beliefs from various points of view. For example, one academic who attends Costello's lecture boycotts a dinner given in her honor, because she has compared human treatment of animals to the Holocaust.

The text of Coetzee's lectures runs to only 69 pages, but there are supplemental "reflections" by four other authors: a professor of the history of religions, a professor of English, a professor of bioethics, and a professor of psychology and anthropology. All four of these discuss the lectures from the point of view of their own disciplines, but the standout essay, for me, was from the psychologist/anthropologist Barbara Smuts, who discusses her interactions with the baboons she studied. In later life, her relationship with her dog was informed by what she learned about the "personhood" of individual baboons in the wild. Smuts writes so well that I was hoping to find other popular books by her, but there isn't much, unfortunately. I did order a copy of her Sex and Friendship in Baboons (Evolutionary Foundations of Human Behavior Series).

you can’t read this without doubting yourself

3,5 stars

I really liked Barbara Smuts' reflections on her life among baboons, and her relationship with her friend, Safi, her wolf-hound domestic partner. These focus on their personhood -- an idea of the meaning of that ambiguous word that Smuts shares with the Jungian psychologist James Hillman.

Coetzee's two chapters from Elizabeth Costello are the subject of responses by Smuts, Wendy Doniger, Peter Singer and Marjorie Garber. Garber's essay is formal and buttoned-up; Singer emulates Coetzee by fictionalizing his response to Coetzee's essayistic fable. Doniger's essay is very smart. She begins with a summary of ancient Hindu thinking regarding the consumption of animals, but shifts to Costello's warranting assumption that the consciousness of animals is accessible to humans, and vice versa.

Coetzee, as Smuts points out, works out a brilliant set of discursive tableau in which the lives of animals are staked, but does not feature an animal in his two fables. Elizabeth Costello's story is told by her son, a physicist, who only dutifully attempts to understand his mother's passionate advocacy for the rights of animals. Coetzee leaves to the son's wife the sharpest critiques of Costello's inchoate outrage at the specie-genocide -- a calamity in which Costello admits complicity, as she compares her own ineffectuality to the Poles during World War II. She's old, she's confused, but she has an idea fixe -- that her own soul is staked in her attitudes toward the animal world. This is Barbara Smuts' point, too -- so it's altogether appropriate she concludes the book.

Interesting read. My version also had responses from several experts in their fields; my favorite was Barbara Smuts’ piece on interspecies friendship.

Hyper-intellectual yawn. Nothing about this little book flows. There is no poetry in it. For a potentially emotionally charged subject, it is cold and text book-ish. Thank goodness it was short. Two stars because I agree with the animal rights angle, myself a vegan. Otherwise, not a pleasurable read.

Una lectura interesante sobre algunas cuestiones acerca de los animales que no me había planteado hasta que el personaje de Elizabeth me interpelo sobre ellas. ¿Estamos todos siendo cómplices de una atrocidad? ¿Nos interesa ponerle fin al consumo desmedido de carne animal?. Con todo esto considero que los argumentos a favor de las personas que consumen carne están muy bien logrados. El texto permite que ambas posturas dialoguen sin llegar a una conclusión definitiva; esa tarea recae en el lector.

So here's the thing: I loved this for all the wrong reasons.

This is marketed as philosophical fiction that debates around the issue of animal-eating (and it was delivered as a lecture, I believe), in the context of fictional writer Elizabeth Costello going to deliver a lecture at her son's university (so meta, I know). While I commend Coetzee for this is a fine attempt which flowed nicely overall, philosophical fiction is hard to pull off and the inclusion of so many points of view leaves one wondering what the point actually was.

In this context, everyone of course fixates on whether the book was successful on doing what the back of the book says: does it make me reflect about animal-eating? Towards which side? It does, to an extent, but I was left with something entirely different.

The three main characters (Elizabeth, her son and his wife) are tied to academia and have quite interesting temperaments. The women hate each other on basis of their relationship to the son, but also on basis of their dietary beliefs. The son has a complex relationship with his mother: he respects her but doesn't wish to be under her shadow, he respects her but pities her, he is happy that she visits but only so she sees her grandchildren, he angsts over her lectures and wishes she wouldn't do them.

I wished this were a full novel with the issue of vegetarianism as a backdrop for this tense drama which honestly was right there waiting to be written. It could have exposed the same debate, but also been much more profound as we see how human relations are affected by dietary resolutions, how academic life works regarding status, and how this son tries to cope with two relationships that are honestly kind of messed up (by the way, we know nothing about the father, and what is his wife actually so angry about?)

This story is ingeniously written. Coetzee, invited to give two talks as part of a university lecture series, instead delivers a fictional story in two parts about a novelist who is invited to give a series of university talks. His lecturer, Elizabeth Costello, chooses to engage with the philosophies underlying vegetarianism and humane treatment of animals, rather than speak about her own work. Meanwhile, his protagonist (her son and a junior professor at the university), must navigate the social territory that accompanies the uncomfortable discussions his mother initiates.
The format of the piece is so smart-- Coetzee gives us the perfect fictionalized staging of these issues, using his narrative to avoid the common clichés and rhetorical format of discussions of animal welfare. The edition I read included response pieces from interdisciplinary scholars, each of whose approaches was forcibly broadened and questioned just by virtue of Coetzee's chosen style of address. A perfect strategy for writing, and, as a result, a magnificent book.

I picked this up on a bit of a whim to have something to read in bed, was that my best decision? Probably not. This little book covers a lot, topics ranging from animal rights and animal - human relationships to the meaning and function of fiction. I really enjoyed the set-up of this book and the topics discussed and would probably have gotten even more out of it if I hadn’t read it at 3am when I wake up unable to get back to sleep. A very interesting read ✨