MISE EN ABYME


Otto, detto Casotto.

In La vita degli animali Coetzee sguazza nella metaletteratura come un ippopotamo nel fiume fangoso, e io con lui, sguazzo e godo da fan della narrativa sulla narrativa quale sono.
Very post-modern: ma credo che sentirsi definire così spingerebbe Coetzee a storcere naso e bocca rischiando un attacco allergico.
Gioco di specchi potrebbe stargli meglio: e probabilmente romanzo accademico anche di più.
Ma suppongo che Coetzee, come la maggior parte degli artisti, preferirebbe non essere etichettato, circoscritto, catalogato.


Otto, detto Casotto.

Ha poca importanza l’argomento, la vita degli animali, i loro diritti, il nostro rapprocciarci a loro, capirli o meno, sentirlo o meno, condividerli o meno, la sofferenza che noi animali umani infliggiamo agli animali non umani.
Ha di certo poca importanza per me che avrei goduto leggendo un libro così anche se avesse discusso del sesso degli angeli, di lana caprina, del peso dell’anima, dell’angoscia del portiere prima del calcio di rigore o della perplessità degli artisti sotto la tenda del circo.


Otto, detto Casotto. Lo so, sembra innocuo, dolce, remissivo: ma era un coccodrillo. Molto amato.

Conosco la personale opinione di Coetzee sul tema in questione, eppure è così abile a destreggiarsi che riesce a enunciarla senza sbilanciarsi, senza favoritismi, lasciando che venga contraddetta con argomenti altrettanto credibili e solidi, al punto che si può perfino dubitare sul suo pensiero e sentimento autentico.
Le varie posizioni sono esposte da personaggi che sono tutti accademici, docenti universitari e ricercatori, i quali danno la garanzia di essere ben documentati: etologia, ecologia, poesia, filosofia, religione…
Al punto che alla fine possiamo chiederci se Coetzee abbia davvero parlato degli animali e non invece ‘solo’ del valore della letteratura.

Uwielbiam prozę Coetzeego za jej nieoczywistość i zdolność uwierania czytelnika podczas lektury. Żywoty zwierząt to oryginalny pomysł autora na narracyjny wykład do wygłoszenia którego został zaproszony na uniwersytet w Princeton. W którym, za pomocą wymyślonych postaci pozwolił sobie na odważne tezy w kwestii traktowania zwierząt przez ludzkość, jednocześnie sytuując się w bezpiecznej odległość od osi dyskursu, który prowokuje. Koniecznie muszę sięgnąć po pozostałe książki noblisty z główna bohaterką w roli głównej.

"'Cogito ergo sum,' [Descartes] also famously said. It is a formula I have always been uncomfortable with. It implies that a living being that does not do what we call thinking is somehow second-class. To thinking, cogitation, I oppose fullness, embodiedness, the sensation of being ... - a heavily affective sensation - of being a body with limbs that have extension in space, of being alive to the world. This fullness contrasts starkly with Descartes's key state, which has an empty feel to it: the feel of a pea rattling around in a shell.
"Fullness of being is a state hard to sustain in confinement. Confinement to prison is the form of punishment that the West favors and does its best to impose on the rest of the world through the means of condemning other forms of punishment (beating, torture, mutilation, execution) as cruel and unnatural. What does this suggest to us about ourselves? To me it suggests that the freedom of the body to move in space is targeted as the point at which reason can most painfully and effectively harm the being of the other. And indeed it is on creatures least able to bear confinement - creatures who conform least to Descartes's picture of the soul as a pea imprisoned in a shell, to which further imprisonment is irrelevant - that we see the most devastating effects: in zoos, in laboratories, institutions where the flow of joy that comes from living not in or as a body but simply from being an embodied-being has no place." - Elizabeth Costello, pp. 33-34

The Lives of Animals is a metafiction novella written by the J. M. Coetzee, featuring reflections from Marjorie Garber, Peter Singer, Wendy Doniger, and Barbara Smuts. First presented in a two-part discourse at the 1997-1998 Tanner Lectures in Princeton, later condensed into a novella in '99. The narrative deals with Elizabeth Costello, a seasoned fiction writer, who, amidst tackling animal cruelty, touches into the realm of the significance of literature. Coetzee orchestrates a duel of wits, Science Vs. Literature, pitting philosophy and poetry against each other in a form I have not come across since reading Calvino. The storyline functions through The Distinction Between Animals and Humans, dissecting life's value in interesting and engaging debates on animal rights. Dysfunctional Families and Power unravel as Elizabeth navigates relationships with her son John and his wife Norma. Coetzee follows this with a subsequent book, "Elizabeth Costello" (2003), a continuation of Elizabeth's animal rights orations which I haven’t read yet but likely will.

In this story, Elizabeth Costello, camps with her son John and his partner Norma Bernard. Invited as a guest lecturer at Appleton College, tensions brew as John frets over the impact of Elizabeth's visit, and Norma opposes her vegetarian preaching to their kids. Despite being a fiction writer, Elizabeth serenades on animal rights during her lectures.

Chapter one, "The Philosophers and the Animals," crescendos with a nod to Kafka's "A Report to an Academy," embodying Elizabeth's estrangement. Holocaust parallels jolt the audience, as Elizabeth asserts reason isn't superior, our humanity sprouting from empathy. Science's subjectivity is unmasked, erasing the line between humans and animals. Elizabeth's mic-drop asserts animal lives match human value. The encore being an abstract evasion on guiding principles.

Post-lecture at dinner one man protests Elizabeth's Holocaust analogies. The table talk swings back to the human-animal abyss, indicting gods and religion as humanity's scapegoat. Elizabeth, defending her vegetarian creed as soul-saving, echoes reason's relativity. Norma and John disagree about some of the subject matter that night. John pessimistic about the next lecture's attendance, "The Poets and the Animals."

Chapter two deals mostly with poetry and language to discuss and portray the issue of animal sentience and what constitutes rights in the eyes of perceived consciousness and its contents.

The final showdown pairs Elizabeth with Thomas O'Hearne in a philosophy vs. animal rights duel. O'Hearne’s claims paint vegetarianism as Western arrogance and animals as rights-ignorant. Elizabeth counters, berating anthropocentrism, defending animal life's fight. O'Hearne's final point regarding animals untroubled by death, irks Elizabeth and she ends the debate.

Norma and John's contention that evening paints John as Elizabeth's apologist. While John deems her sincere, Norma fearing Elizabeth's influence on young minds, believes Johns mother is speaking out of pocket at her lectures. The airport drive becomes a moment of apology from John and a glimpse into Elizabeth's feeling of being surrounded by blindfolded criminals. John's mysterious "soon be over" hug closes the main story of this book.

This chronicle is complemented by Marjorie Garber, deciphering the text's implicit meanings. Peter Singer, an activist and bioethics professor who I personally regard as one of the main philosophical voices on this subject, engages in metafiction exploring the animal-human gap. Wendy Doniger, aligns with Elizabeth, citing compassion from Hinduism and Asian cultures. Lastly, Barbara Smuts, pens a personal essay countering O'Hearne, urging readers to forge bonds with animals, unveiling the beauty and worth of these kinships.

I read this book for my writing course, Our Animal Selves. Coetzee writes about a famous author, Elizabeth Costello, who is invited to give a talk at a university. Coincidentally, her son works there. While there, Costello doesn't given an expected speech about literary works, but about human-animal relations. The next day she gave a seminar about poets and animals and finished her visit with a debate with a philosophy professor.

It was kind of hard to pick apart the arguments Costello used since she was very convoluted, especially in her first speech. She refers to a lot of other stories and poems, so if you are not familiar with them, the book may lack some depth. I had read Kafka's story about Red Peter, and "The Panther" by Rilke but haven't read Gulliver's Travels and there was a substantial question about that after her seminar. In a way I found her debate with the professor (O'Hearne) to be the clearest medium of her points.

At the end of the book are four responses to Coetzee's work. A primatologist, a philosopher (Peter Singer, no less), someone who wrote a literary analysis and a religious professor. For class I only had to read the response by Barbara Smuts, the primatologist, who responded very specifically to a curious lack in Costello's speeches and responses.

Costello does use the comparison of slaughter houses to the Holocaust, and doesn't eat meat, while still wearing leather and having a leather purse. She's vegetarian, then, not vegan. Costello was a hard character to relate to, because of her brusqueness. We also pondered in class if Coetzee used a work of fiction to relay his point of views, without having to directly answer to critiques of his arguments, since it wasn't a scholarly paper.

Had to read this for my Environmental Issues philosophy class in college. Top notch read!

4.5 ⭐️

There is a job opening, the lead in a book, and a story and an essay are up for it. They make their case, each telling the writer who should be in the lead, all very, very civilized of course. This becomes heated, in an academic way, and the fight gets a little physical, a few blows, a few kicks, a little blood gets spilled, still, all in a very, very civilised way. And then all of a sudden the writer has a winner, the essay. He congratulates the essay for having won the lead, while the story lurks in the corner with a bloody nose, and a limp.

That's kind of what I think happened in this book by J.M. Coetzee. The back story of this book is that in 1997 Coetzee got invited to Princeton hold an lecture as part of the Tanner Lectures on Human Values. Instead of holding a usual lecture he wrote two short stories, "The Philosophers and the Animals" and "The Poets and the Animals" and read those instead of holding a lecture.

The plot revolves around the fictional Australian novelist Elizabeth Costello, who has been invited to give a guest lecture to the fictional Appleton College in Massachusetts, and has chosen animal rights as the subject of her lecture.

With this Coetzee seems to be distancing himself from what he wants to discuss in his talk, animal rights, by creating a fictional character as a medium to deliver this. The main problem I have with this is that the story doesn't really work. It is a lecture, with a little bit of fiction at the beginning, and end of the first story, and a little bit more integrated fiction in the second one. There is too much of the essay, or the lecture in this for it to actually work as a story for me.

There is a strange thing that happens in this book. As with all Tanner Lectures on Human Values that Princeton holds, it gets four people to respond to Coetzee's stories. One of them is the philosopher Peter Singer, who has among other things written a book called Animal Liberation. His response is a fictional conversation about Coetzee's ideas, and the thing is, that story actually works as a short story, despite the fact that Singer hasn't ever been a writer of fiction. It even has some humor to it, especially the end.

But even though it may sound like it, I'm actually not saying that this is a bad work by Coetzee. No, it is an interesting one. It's interesting as an essay on our relationship with animals, or non humans. He raises a lot of interesting questions, some he tries to answer, others are left more or less open. So for someone interested in animal rights, this is actually a nice book to start with.

I still haven't talked about the other three people that respond to Coetzee's work. They are Marjorie Garber, Wendy Doniger, and the anthropologist Barbara Smutts. Out of these three, I liked Barbara Smutt's respond the most. She talks about her work, and interaction with different kinds of apes, and then in the second part with her dog. I thought that was really fascinating essay, to be honest.

So all in all, I thought this was an interesting work, even though I didn't think much it as a novella.

"Es como si fueses a visitar a unos amigos y fuera a hacer un comentario de cortesia sobre la lampara que tienen en el cuarto de estar y ellos me contestaran: "Si ¿a que es bonita? Esta hecha de piel de judio polaco, y hemos tenido la suerte de encontrar incluso la mejor, la piel de las jovenes virgenes judias de Polonia"...


Excelente libro, para que todos lean y reflexionen un poco, y sobre todo tomen decisiones y acciones en pos de una vida un poco menos cruel con los animales.

The novella itself is worth reading. It's philosophical yet dramatic, meta-fictional in an effortless way. I'm interested less in the main character's, Elizabeth Costello's, views on animal rights as I am in the sadness and humanity that must have pushed her to such extremes. Not to say she doesn't make good points—she does as often as she doesn't.

In my view, the four responses to the novella are not ancillary but *essential* reading. That's not to say they're all good. The literary theorist was pretty forgettable, the anthropologist interesting but probably too scholarly in her approach for a lay reader, and Peter Singer's response was bafflingly bad. He's annoyingly glib and seems to willfully misunderstand the exercise and perhaps the role of art in general. But the Barbara Smuts essay is a gem. It's a beautiful revelation that deserves to be read on its own. Her surprisingly poetic (she's a biologist by profession) exposition of baboon and canine subjectivity and the personal relationships we can enter when we open our hearts to such "non-human persons" is movingly persuasive in a way that transcends the vegetarian vs. omnivore debate.

Changed how I go about daily life in an immediate and lasting way—a very rare, highly sought after outcome for reading a book.

While insightful read for anyone interested in philosophical reflections on vegetarianism, the characters, and interrelations of this book is likely to leave anyone cold. Nevertheless, I found it an interesting read which poses some important questions. The fact that Coetzee is a vegetarian (and a rather silent animal rights spokesperson), makes the only relatable character Mrs. Costella slightly more sympathetic.

Especially during times when many people opt for vegetarianism because of environmental reasons, it is still extremely relevant to contemplate the moral dilemmas underlying meat consumption. Mrs. Costello's vegetarianism is a result of 'an attempt to save her soul', which implies, although still very quietly, that what we choose to consume for nutrition is also a matter of spirit.

You are what you eat, again and again, no matter how much we dislike hearing it. However, I am very glad about the progress regarding worldwide opinions towards vegetarianism. Some twenty years ago this book was a revelation, today it would hardly stand out. Hopefully, humanity's capacity for compassion is increasing with as accelerating rate as our levels of consumption.

I really disliked this book. I am a vegetarian, and I think this book could only provoke even more hate and disapproval towards vegetarians, because of poor and inconclusive arguments. Also, philosophy is not a good framework for this, because it is too abstract for something so real, so painful and so tangible, so touchable. Extremely not convincing and just plain old "doing it wrong".