The Inner Agony of Elizabeth Costello: The War on Animals

Vrinda Sheth LIT 4930 Final Paper Sarah Mitchem March 19, 2011 The Inner Agony of Elizabeth Costello: The War on Animals When I was eight, I realized that my grandmother was a perfect example of a compassionate meat-eater. I had chewed the sweetness out of my gum and was preparing to throw it out the car-window. While I was convincing the gum not to stick to my fingers, my grandma noticed what I was about to do and cried out. Quickly she handed me some tissue to put the gum in. “Don’t ever spit gum out the window,” she cautioned, “never throw it on the ground.” “Why not?” I asked. “The ants get stuck in it and die a slow horrible death.” I imagined a giant pink blob, the gum as the ant would see it. “It’s awful,” my grandma concluded with a shudder. At that point, I looked at her with wide eyes. Momentarily I thought of asking her why she cared about the life of an ant? Why didn’t she care about the life of a fish, a cow, or a pig? Even then, it seemed so contradictory, I didn’t know what to make of it, how to ask her the question. It would remind my grandma about that invisible line between us since I didn’t eat meat. My mother always wrote detailed instructions listing the foods I was allowed to eat at my grandma’s. It was only at her house that I ever saw meat on the table, that I encountered meat as something to eat. And because my grandma’s home and heart were always a refuge of love for me, the blurred line between consuming animals while being a compassionate person was never more apparent to me than in her case. Though I, as a life-long vegetarian, represent a minority, most people who choose a vegetarian diet will at some point question the ethics and indeed compassion of those who don’t. At the crux of this essay stands a person who not only questions the ethics of meat-eaters but who is unable to comprehend any justification for that choice. The person in question is the fictitious aging novelist, Elizabeth Costello, the brain-child of renowned novelist J.M. Coetzee. When Coetzee was called upon to deliver two lectures at Princeton University, he allowed Costello and her fictional life-situation to speak for him. The result is the academic metafiction novella The Lives of Animals whose compelling format I will discuss in more detail. There is reason to believe that Costello is Coetzee’s spokesperson; they are both strict vegetarians, novelists, and public-speakers at prestigious venues, to name a few similarities. Another view, the one that I favor, is that Coetzee is Costello’s amanuensis, just like Franz Kafka was Red Peter’s (Coetzee 26). We are encouraged to believe, therefore, that Costello’s views are her own and discouraged from making the tempting parallels between what Costello says and where Coetzee might stand within them. It is, to cite the example above, Costello, not Coetzee, who is drawn to Red Peter, Kafka’s ape. Costello introduces us to Red Peter as an old friend, someone she feels tremendous affinity for, with whom she identifies with more than any fellow human being. Because Costello is unable to reconcile human kindness with eating animals, she identifies with animals and forms a barrier against humans, leading to an unbearable feeling of schism within her. Since Costello is a character in a book (or a lecture as it were), the reader is displaced from the intensity of her feelings for animals and the personal ramifications those truths might have for humankind. Being a highly acclaimed novelist and a Nobel Prize winner, the format Coetzee choose for his lectures at Princeton University may not be highly surprising. In fact, Coetzee’s lectures did not abide by the expected format of the philosophical essay usually presented in the Tanner Lectures (Gutmann, Coetzee 3). Since we are “overwhelmed by an ongoing cultural and political commitment to meat eating” (Adams 32, 33), the facts about animals, or philosophical discussions about them may not reach the heart of the matter. “But place facts in a story,” Jonathan Foer says in Eating Animals, “a story of compassion or domination, or maybe both – place them in a story about the world we live in and who we are and who we want to be – and you can begin to speak meaningfully about eating animals” (14). And that’s what Coetzee decided to do. In the printed version that ensued, Coetzee’s offering is followed by four scholar’s commentaries, some of which I will consider. By framing his ethical argument in a fictional way, Coetzee did, in a sense, what he does best: bow to the power of fiction. Coetzee pulls us in with a story about an aging woman and her family: an estranged son, John Bernard, a critical daughter-in-law, Norma, and two unnamed grandchildren that stay very much at the periphery. We met Costello at the airport where her son picks her. Mother and son have not met in quite a while when Costello is invited (by chance it seems) to lecture at the university where her son works. When Bernard first sees her, he is “shocked at how she has aged” and scrutinizes his mother’s “flabby flesh” (Coetzee 15); he is at best ambivalent about her visit, thinking to himself several times that “she should not be here” (Coetzee 36, 37). Bernard has mixed feelings about his mother, proud on one hand that she is an accomplished novelist and ashamed on the other by her uncompromising views on eating animals. The lectures Costello gives are sporadically interrupted by Bernard’s and Norma’s judgments; Coetzee seems to invite the reader/audience to assess their own thoughts about Costello and what she says. This fictional framework then was created among other reasons as “a strategy of control” (emphasis in original), created by Coetzee in order to distance himself from his presumed critics (Garber, Coetzee 76) and “to avoid taking full intellectual responsibility” for the claims presented (Diamond 5). So it is Costello, not Coetzee, who stands before a gathering of scholarly people taking on the case for animals in its complexity. “I feel like Red Peter,” Costello says at the outset, identifying herself with Franz Kafka’s educated ape (Coetzee 18). Throughout her lecture she uses Red Peter to illustrate more directly what her own experiences are. In order to survive laboratory experiments, Red Peter was forced to subjugate his instincts and feelings to become a proper intellectual being (Coetzee 27). If this is what rationality presumes to do, Costello wants little to do with it: “Something in me resists, foreseeing in that step the concession of the entire battle” (25). There is a battle to be fought, Costello posits, and she isn’t quite sure if reason is on her side. Yet as a human being, she feels helpless against the inevitable concession to reason’s deadening embrace. If Red Peter were standing in her place before them, she suggests, he would have no option but to play the game: “Now that I’m here, says Red Peter…now that I am here, what is there for me to do? Do I in fact have a choice? If I do not subject my discourse to reason, whatever that is, what is left for me but to gibber and emote and knock over my water glass and generally make a monkey of myself?” (Coetzee 23). She gives Red Peter a dialogue but then seems to appropriate it for herself. Though she makes a living through words, Costello instinctively feels that language itself has been used to perpetrate or perpetuate prejudices towards animals. “She is someone,” philosopher Cora Diamond writes, “immensely conscious of the limits of thinking, the limits of understanding, in the face of all that she is painfully aware of” ( Diamond 7). Though Costello speaks very rationally against reason, she is highly resistant to using language and reason as her allies. The acquisition of reason comes at a great cost, Costello says, because ultimately it suppresses all that is most important, in short the “fullness of being” (Coetzee 33). Red Peter is her first example, but Costello introduces us also to Sultan, “in a certain sense the prototype of Red Peter” (Coetzee 28). Costello wants to think that the fictional story of Red Peter was based on the real-life experiment on apes done by psychologist Wolfgang Kohler. Costello bases her assumption on the fact that both Kafka’s and Kohler’s works were published in the same year, but Kohler’s The Mentality of Apes appeared before Red Peter’s story in ‘Report to an Academy.’ Red Peter and Kohler’s apes both “underwent a period of training intended to humanize them” (Coetzee 27). In a passage that to me was elucidating and convincing, Costello enters Sultan’s mind and brings forth his thought-process as he is subjected to these “humanizing” experiments: Even a more complicated thought – for instance: What is wrong with him, what misconception does he have of me, that leads him to believe that it is easier for me to reach a banana hanging from a wire than to pick up a banana from the floor? – is wrong. The right thought to think is: How does one use the crates to reach the bananas?” (Coetzee 28). Aside from criticizing the limiting premises of many scientific experiments, Costello begins to demonstrate her willingness to imagine herself into the being of another (Coetzee 32). When she talks about the ability to imagine oneself into the being of a bat, the previous reader of my copy of the book has scribbled his or her only note: “she is crazy.” If Costello is crazy, then she’s crazy the way an animal is. Sultan, for example, doesn’t care about the bananas, all he wants to know is “Where is home, and how do I get there?” (Coetzee 30) - an echo, we might well imagine, to Costello’s plight. Because of a certain alienation from her own kind, Costello finds refuge in animals, specifically through identifying herself as an animal. Indeed the problem with reason is one of the primary causes for Costello’s “profound disturbance of the soul” (Diamond 11). As mentioned earlier, Costello states point blank in the beginning of her lecture that she feels like Red Peter (Coetzee 18). Although Kafka-scholar Frederick R. Carl reads Red Peter as an allegory of Kafka himself as a Jew, Costello insists on reading the story literally (Coezee 18); to her, Red Peter is really an ape, and she herself feels affinity towards him as a “branded, marked, wounded animal.” She states, “I am not a philosopher of mind but an animal exhibiting, yet not exhibiting, to a gathering of scholars, a wound, which I cover up under my clothes but touch on in every word I speak” (Coetzee 26). The wound can be seen as the unhealed battle-scar from the war between reason and emotion. Given the fact that Costello openly identifies herself as an animal, it’s notable that none of the four commentaries in the book highlight this. In her article “The Difficulty of Reality and the Difficulty of Philosophy.” Cora Diamond describes the lectures “as presenting a kind of woundedness or hauntedness, a terrible rawness of nerves” (Diamond 4); this, however, “is not how the commentators on the lectures describe them” (5). Diamond further argues that to miss the centrality of Costello as a wounded animal is to miss the core of Coetzee’s lectures entirely (5). Unassuming as Costello may seem to be, at least in the eyes of her son through whom we see her, she bravely sets out to wage a war on reason, who for its own purposes has installed itself at the center of the human universe (Coetzee 25). “The justification for eating animals,” Foer writes in Eating Animals, “and for not eating them are often identical: we are not them” (63). There is moreover a tremendous and ongoing effort to protect the dividing line between humans and animals, to the point of using the animal to discriminate against other humans based on race or cultural practices (Elder 72). In slowly unraveling her problems with reason, Costello says, “frankly – I have not the courage” to refuse communication with anyone eating animals. She is, however, disinclined to engage with those who rely on reason to make “piddling distinctions” (Coetzee 66). Costello rejects “the whole long philosophical tradition…stretching back to Descartes and beyond Descartes through Aguinas and Augustine to the Stoics and Aristotle” (Coetzee 67). One of the key figures of modern taxonomy, Carl von Linne, for instance, was explicit about his feeling that “to study the works of Creation with intelligence is the exclusive privilege of man, and highly exalts his dignity above that of all other animated beings” (quoted in Ritvo 15). Costello says that if reason is the last common ground she has with these philosophers and others like them, “if reason is what sets me apart from the veal calf, then thank you but no thank you, I’ll talk to someone else” (Coetzee 67). This is indeed the last utterance of her final speech, ending, according to her son, with “acrimony, hostility, bitterness” (Coetzee 67). What stands out is Costello’s bravery to take on the giants of Western thinking and beyond; instead she aligns herself with a seemingly insignificant, powerless baby calf. Although theories on animals as automata – “veritable wind-up toys” – now seem highly implausible and few people believe this anymore, “we still behave like true Cartesians” (Speigel 24). Costello responds by taking one step further across the invisible divide by choosing not to speak, much like the animals don’t anymore (Coetzee 25). Jonathan Lamb claims in “Sympathy with Animals and Salvation of the Soul.” that it’s Costello’s “ strong intuition that she and Kafka’s ape are mid-way on reverse trajectories, he moving from ape-life to human while she is getting closer to the lives of animals” (74). This metamorphosis Costello is experiencing is moreover highlighted by her dissonance with language itself, almost as if she in becoming an animal can’t fully understand language anymore. While Coetzee indicates that Costello has friends (at least one) who is intimate with her likes and dislikes (Coetzee 31), she does not directly rely on the work of other activist to bolster her case. Even within the animal rights movement, or those who are giving animals a voice, reason is privileged. Reason, intelligence, and rationality have long been used (among other things like tool-making, culture, and language) to draw a line between humans and animals. Cathryn Bailey writes in her article “On the Backs of Animals – the Valorization of Reason in Contemporary Animal Ethics.” that contemporary philosophical animal ethics legitimizes reason, “a kind of legitimacy that could only be wrought on the backs of animals” (3). Bailey’s specific critique is that animal right’s scholars like Tom Regan and Peter Singer are “riding a wave of philosophical history that has neglected and vilified emotion” (Bailey 11). Temple Grandin weighs in on this in Animals in Translation with her pragmatic voice: “In my experience, people become more radical when they’re thinking abstractly. They bog down in permanent bickering where they’ve lost touch with what’s actually happening in the real world” (29). Whether you eat meat or advocate for animals, Costello’s point of contention is that reason is used to widen the gap between oneself and animals. This distance can only rupture us because “today, at stake in the question of eating animals is not only our basic ability to respond to sentient life, but our ability to respond to parts of our own (animal) being” (Foer 37). To closely safeguard the wholeness of her own being, Costello inadvertently splits in another way. If reason is on one side, sentimentality is on the other. Sentimentality has been labeled as suspect, a “specifically feminine form of emotional indulgence” (Menely 244). It’s fascinating, therefore, that given the bias towards female activism, Coetzee chose to create a female spokesperson. The devaluation of emotion has zealously guarded the human/animal divide, “a border disrupted by the cross-species sympathies widely promoted within sentimental culture” (Menely 249). Considering that eminent animal-rights advocates have carefully stripped themselves of all emotional appeal (Bailey), Coetzee seems to carefully construct a woman who has a “bleeding heart” but who can’t be dismissed as merely sentimental. Costello speaks with great passion and conviction, yet she is presented as a un-animated, tired, aging, person who engages in social interactions amicably enough but who is nevertheless reserved, even with her own children (Coetzee 15, 19). By casting his animal right’s activists as a women, who can hold her own when it comes to philosophy, but who isn’t overly emotional, Coetzee goes against the stereotype and begins to subvert the myth that women are sentimental in their sympathy towards animals. Saying that Costello’s inner turmoil is caused by how we treat animals, however, is to take away the complexity of the situation that Coetzee presents in such a nuanced way. She feels strongly about animals, but she is confused how to handle her own feelings on the topic. When Costello’s son, for example, questions what she actually wants to accomplish by her activism, she replies, “John, I don’t know what I want to do. I just don’t want to sit silent” (Coetzee 59). That her stance is unusual is hinted in within the book; usually we expect vegetarians to want to converts us (Adams 84-85). After her first lecture, the one question she receives ignores the depth of her exploration and goes straight to the typical questions that demand action: “Are you saying that we should close down the factory farms? Are you saying we should stop eating meat? Can you clarify?” (Coetzee 36). But Costello doesn’t want to “enunciate principles (Coetzee 37). She might even partly agree with Norma’s acrimonious assessment that “she has no self-insight at all” (Coetzee 67), for in this she would be equal to an animal. She has, in a sense, become less than human, yet more than an animal (Lamb 78), her metamorphosis incomplete, “leaving her faculties at war with each other” (Lamb 74). Hence, human social interactions are confusing and even painful to her as she struggles with a “divided and uneasy sense of self” (Lamb 74). Another deep-seated reason for Costello’s inner turmoil arises from seeing others able to reconcile what is to her irreconcilable. Costello cannot fathom what justifies the atrocious use of animals as food. This strange double standard we live with was addressed recently in The New York Times where columnist Mark Bitman remarked, “in short, if I keep a pig as a pet, I can’t kick it. If I keep a pig I intend to sell for food, I can pretty much torture it” (“Some Animals Are More Equal Than Others.”). Aside from an unspoken hypocrisy in our pet-keeping, most people don’t necessarily think there is a war going on against animals, nor do they feel enough for the animals slaughtered to change. Costello’s own son is uneasy throughout the story anxious that his mother is going to “throw down the gauntlet” and challenge those around her with her vegetarianism. He dreads “what he and Norma call the ‘Plutarch Response,’” where she quotes Plutarch by heart, referring to the “hacked flesh” and “juices of death wounds,” a real conversation-stopper (Coetzee 38). The tension between vegetarians and non-vegetarians is visible here between Costello and her estranged family, a tension that a survey of twenty-seven real-life activists also testifies to (Gaarder 10). Despite Bernard’s obvious aversion towards what he views as his mother’s extreme stance, he somewhat ironically says the following to her on their way to the airport: “It’s been such a short visit, I haven’t had time to make sense of why you have become so intense about the animal business.” Although, as we’ve seen, he’s known all too well her the intensity of her point-of-view, he pinpoints the “animal business” as the cause of the strain in their relationship. Costello, however, frames the issue in a slightly different way; it’s not the “animal business” that has caused a rift as much as her inner agony over people’s inability to share her insights on the matter. Costello chooses to gloss over the horrors of the slaughterhouse, which other authors like Jonathan Foer in Eating Animals meticulously document. What she does instead is draw an analogy to fully conjure up her horror over the current animal situation. The comparison between the meat-industry and the Holocaust, also called “the dreaded comparison” (Spiegel), looms largely over Costello’s ethical argument. In looking at her statements about the Holocaust, I kept close to me the awareness that the only reason she brings up this tragedy is because of the striking parallels she sees there to the current animal slaughter. The Germans, she says, “lost their humanity, in our eyes, because of a certain willed ignorance on their part…In Germany, we say, a certain line was crossed which took people beyond the ordinary murderousness and cruelty of warfare into a state that we can only call sin” (Coetzee 20). By eating animals, humans are losing their humanity and their own right to be the animals they are, and transforming into something foul, and nameless. When Costello says, “Only those in the camps were innocent” (Coetzee 20) she means that only animals are innocent today. With this statement in mind, Costello’s reasons for identifying as an animal starts becoming clearer. Although we as a culture may not believe in sin or pollution, “we do believe in their psychic correlates,” and anyone participating in the meat-industry is tainted. In the very signs of normalcy (healthy appetites, healthy laughter), Costello sees “how deeply seated pollution is in them” (Coetzee 21). In case her comparison was too oblique and managed to make any meat-eaters feel safe and not targeted, she says: Let me say it openly: we are surrounded by an enterprise of degradation, cruelty and killing which rivals anything that the Third Reich was capable of, indeed dwarfs it, in that ours is an enterprise without end, self-generating, bringing rabbits, rats, poultry, livestock ceaselessly into the world for the purpose of killing them (Coetzee 21). It would be hard to disagree given that the annual number of animals killed globally is fifty billion, nine of which belong to the United States (Foer 137). These number are calculated with “the utmost meticulousness” and “are studied, debated, projected, and practically revered like a cult object by the industry. They are no mere facts, but the announcement of a victory” (Foer 137). Costello wants to believe that every morning the Germans (= meat-eaters) wake up from nightmares and have psychosomatic symptoms like cancer gnawing at them from the inside out (Coetzee 35). But “the evidence points in the opposite direction; that we can do anything and get away with it; that there is no punishment” (Coetzee 35). Although the comparison to the Holocaust takes Costello onto slippery ground, it’s important to realize that she as a human feels more like an animal; this Holocaust imagery gives us a sense of “what it is to have nothing but the comfort of sleep and death” when you are struggling to survive (Diamond 10). In the latter part of The Lives of Animals, Costello is confronted with the alleged normalcy and naturalness of meat eating, which indirectly challenges her choice to identify as an animal rather than human. A character named Elaine Marx asks Costello: “Is it not more human to accept our own humanity – even if it means embracing the carnivorous Yahoo within ourselves – than end up like Gulliver, pining for a state he can never attain, and for a good reason: it is not his nature, which is human nature?” (Coetzee 55-56) Instead of tackling the question directly, Costello complicates Gulliver’s story pushing the fable to its limits and concludes, “in history, embracing the status of man has entailed slaughtering and enslaving a race of divine or else divinely created beings and bringing down on ourselves a curse thereby” (Coetzee 57-58). Being a man, a human, is a fraught position, like being damned. Marx’s question indicates that human nature is inherently carnivorous, neither of which Costello wants much to do with it seems. This question is one that Foer weaves through his book with testimonials by organic farmers or the farmers who claim to do their job with utmost humanity. Highly surprising to me, in this regard, is Grandin’s endorsement of eating animals in face of her passionate love for animals. She dwells briefly on this at the end of Animals in Translation saying that cows are the animals she loves best, and that she has felt conflicted by her own work in designing “humane slaughter” (307). The justification she offers us (and herself) seems weak and half-hearted stating that “none of [these animals] would even exist if human beings hadn’t bred them into being… we’re responsible for them” (307). She feels that we owe the animals a “good life” but I’m fairly certain that I represent Costello in the following question: how effective is a translation of an animal’s thoughts, if the animal’s desire to live is not acknowledged? At the end of Coetzee’s novella, we are left hanging on the note of human kindness. Costello admits to her son that while she sees kindness in the eyes of the people around her, she is repelled by the knowledge that they are “participants in a crime of stupefying proportions” (Coetzee 69). Choosing vegetarianism herself hasn’t comforted her; Costello remains tormented and utterly confused by the contradiction she sees in the people around her. Yet, it cannot be reduced to a discussion of compassion although that’s the starting point of her dilemma: “…every day I see the evidences. The very people I suspect produce the evidence, exhibit it, offer it to me. Corpses. Fragments of corpses that they have bought for money” (69). Because she can’t reconcile meat-eating with compassion, however, she turns on herself - “Am I fantasizing it all? I must be mad!” She questions herself, revealing her inner torment, “’everyone else comes to terms with it, why can’t you? Why can’t you?” (69) Costello has removed herself from “the story of meat” so much so that she can’t see the beginning, middle, or end of this story. The first and then the final section of Foer’s book is entitled “Storytelling” which indicates how important he concludes that stories are in our conception of meat. The dominant views on meat are intimately tied to the stories we share because “we are a species who tell stories” (Adams 92). Though narratives we confer meaning upon life and what we consume within our lives. Meat derives its meaning from the stories we tell. “The idea that carnivorousness is central to humanity is an old one,” Jovian Parry writes in “Oryx and Crake and the New Nostalgia for Meat.” “and it became popularized and disseminated though narratives of human evolution that posited that hunting and meat-provisioning was the key innovation that spurred the ever-upward ascent of ‘man’ from ‘his’ primeval beasthood” ( Parry 252). As far as stories go, “we have chosen slaughter. We have choosen war. That’s the truest version of our story of eating animals. Can we tell a new story?” (Foer 244). Considering the rapid growth of meat consumption, there is a “new nostalgia for meat” (Parry 243) today. Although anthropologically speaking, we as a people are not inherently cruel, we have developed tools that enable extreme cruelty (Fuentes 130). Changing the story of meat is going to be “a human enterprise from beginning to end” (Coetzee “A Word from J.M. Coetzee – Voiceless: I Feel Therefore I Am.”). Helplessness or indifference aren’t really options anymore, because “in the case of animal slaughter, to throw your hands in the air is wrap your fingers around a knife handle” (Foer 226). Is Costello’s agony the same one anyone would face if they dared to stand in front of the Truth of animals with open eyes? As I’ve explored in this essay, facing the truth of animals has created a gaping rift within Costello and has pushed her closer to her animal-being, in her resistance to reason, language, and her fellow humans. One of the fascinating aspects that Coetzee presents through the life of Costello is her insistence on the fullness of being, acknowledging and praising that embodied state of the animals. She yearns for that state. Simultaneously, however, we read about her decaying body, her aging flesh, her status almost as an unwanted animal. The contradiction that is created is the impossibility of what she yearns for in the body that she currently possesses. Perhaps this is way Coetzee ends the novella with Bernard’s words of comfort to her: “There, there. It will soon be over” (Coetzee 69). Given Costello’s age and her strong feelings on animals, can her soon possibly mean anything but death in this case? Although it seems chilling to us, this is perhaps the truth of the story. Costello wishes to break free from the bonds of human life and the best choice she envisions is the innocent life of an animal. However, the embodied, pure, and uncomplicated state of full being and joy that Costello yearns for are beyond her body, beyond any bodily limitation, be they human or animal. Works Cited: Adams, Carol J. The Sexual Politics of Meat – A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory. New York: The Continuum Publishing Company, 1990. Print. Bailey, Cathryn. “On the Backs of Animals: The Valorization of Reason in Contemporary Animal Ethics.” Ethics & The Environment 10.1 (Spring 2005):1-17. Print. Bittman, Mark. “Some Animals Are More Equal Than Others.” The New York Times. March 15, 2011. Web. March 25, 2011. Coetzee, J.M. The Lives of Animals. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2001. Print. Coetzee, J.M. “A Word from J.M. Coetzee – Voiceless: I feel therefore I am.” Voiceless February 22, 2007. Web. March 10, 2011. 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