On the occasion of the awarding of novelist J. M. Coetzee with the 2024 Nancy Regan Arts Prize, CAF convened a webinar with three leading scholars to discuss Coetzee’s “The Lives of Animals,” which was published 25 years go this year. The following is a lightly edited transcript of the webinar.

https://youtu.be/kN3sUBTMLNA

Martin Rowe (MR): Thank you for joining us today. My name is Martin Rowe, and I’m the Executive Director of the Culture & Animals Foundation, or CAF. Welcome to this webinar celebrating the work of J. M. Coetzee, recipient of the 2003 Nobel Prize for Literature, winner of the Booker Prize twice, as well as many other eminent prizes. Now, to cap John Coetzee’s lifetime of achievement, CAF has awarded him the 2024 Nancy Regan Arts Prize, which we offer to those who have made a substantial commitment to animal rights. It is named after Nancy Regan, who with her husband Tom, co-founded CAF in 1985.

This prize, which is the fourth we’ve given, comes with some money, and our awardee has graciously bestowed his on the Karoo Animal Protection Society in South Africa. For links to that organization, books by our contributors and articles by them and other works by J. M. Coetzee, please visit CAF’s YouTube site, to which this webinar will be uploaded. We also have placed some information in the “chat” section of the webinar.

John Coetzee and the Regans share a long history. Coetzee, who is a member of CAF’s Advisory Board, read from his novel Disgrace at the 2001 International Compassionate Living Festival, which Tom and Nancy organized in Raleigh, North Carolina for 17 years, beginning in 1990. Tom’s name makes an appearance in The Lives of Animals, which, like Disgrace, was published 25 years ago, and which also concerns itself with the lives and deaths of animals. On receipt of the Regan Award, John said, “Tom Regan’s pioneering work in the 1980s did much to give shape to the animal rights movement. Since his death, and Nancy’s, their work has been ably carried further by the Culture & Animals Foundation. It is an honor to be associated with the names of the Regans.”

There’s a further connection here. Toward the end of his life, Tom turned his hand toward what he said was his first love, literature, writing and publishing two volumes of short stories, Maud’s Place and Other Southern Stories, and A Better Life and Other Pittsburgh Stories. In some ways, he once told me, philosophy was a distraction from what he felt was his true calling as a writer of fiction. It seems apt, therefore, that one of the themes of The Lives of Animals as a book is the limits of fiction and philosophy in describing our obligations, or responses, to the lives and deaths of animals. So that’s something we’ll be discussing today.

The Lives of Animals consists of two lectures that John Coetzee gave at Princeton University on October the 15th and 16th, 1997, so 27 years ago to the day. Buttressing the lectures are essays on the work by moral philosopher Peter Singer, literary theorist Marjorie Garber, primatologist Barbara Smuts, and religion scholar Wendy Doniger, as well as a foreword by Amy Gutmann, who was the founding director of the Center for Human Values at Princeton. Coetzee’s lectures take the form of the lead up to, delivery, and aftermath of two lectures given at the fictional Appleton College by the fictional Elizabeth Costello, an aging feminist novelist known for her biography of Molly Bloom, herself a reimagination of Penelope from Homer’s Odyssey, in James Joyce’s Ulysses. So, as is already clear from this description of the inner content of The Lives of Animals and the academic apparatus that surrounds Coetzee’s narrative, the book is an elaborate construction of fiction, metafiction, scholarship, and academic discourse. The fictions and metafictions don’t end there. Elizabeth Costello appears in a number of other works in Coetzee’s oeuvre.

The Lives of Animals has been written about extensively in the last 25 years, and it would be impossible to encompass all those ideas and scholars in this short period of time. But we’re very lucky to have with us three scholars who will help us begin to unpack this remarkable work.

Robert McKay is Professor of Contemporary Literature at the University of Sheffield, U.K., and the author, among other works, of “Metafiction, Vegetarianism, and the Literary Performance of Animal Ethics in J. M. Coetzee’s: The Lives of Animals.” He is currently revisiting The Lives of Animals for a book project on literature and species politics.

Alexandra Boehm is Senior Lecturer at the University of Erlangen and curator at the German National Museum in Nürnberg. She is co-author of Animal Encounters: Contact, Interaction and Relationality with Jessica Ullrich, who is also a CAF Advisory Board member, and “Lawyers, Intellectuals, Writers: J. M. Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals: Between Engagement and Autonomy”; “Species Trouble: Uncertainties about the Human–Animal Boundary in Vegan Narratives in Contemporary Literature: J. M. Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals, Han Kang’s The Vegetarian, and Jacob Hein’s Wurst und Wahn: Ein Verständnis,” which translates, I think, to “Sausage and Madness: A Confession”; and “Teaching Empathy and Emotions: J. M. Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals and Human–Animal Studies.”

Finally, Richard Alan Northover is Professor of the Theory of Literature at the University of South Africa in Pretoria. He is the author of J. M. Coetzee and Animal Rights: Elizabeth Costello’s Challenge to Philosophy, and “Animal Ethics and Human Identity in J. M. Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals.”

I’d like to start with your first encounter with The Lives of Animals as a book. What was your reaction to or thoughts on it? Let’s start with you, Robert, and then we’ll go on to Alexandra and Alan.

Robert McKay (RM): I was thinking about this. I found the book on a bookshelf in a shop in Sheffield, just when it came out. I was two years into a Ph.D. about animals and contemporary literature, and I was blown away. I think my first reaction was over-identification with Elizabeth Costello and under-identification with [her son] John Bernard. What I mean by that, is at that point in my intellectual development, I was developing a sense of my own vegetarian or vegan life as a form of exile from the flow of normative human existence. I immediately warmed to Elizabeth’s haunting sense of being inside and outside her family; inside and outside of intellectual history, the academy; and humanity generally, what she calls “kindness, human kindness.” So I agreed with lots of things that Elizabeth says. Her views, her conceptual coordinates, her literary coordinates all chimed with mine. I probably loved her too much. I over-identified with her tragedy, but I hadn’t yet properly learned, I don’t think, from writers like Carol Adams or Josephine Donovan or Val Plumwood, about the extent to which male privilege shapes ideas and feelings and discourses about animals, right down to the matter of who has a right to speak about them.

That’s what I mean when I say I under-identified with John Bernard, because I’m not Elizabeth. She’s a strange, wild, fictive creation who makes us think about who’s included and excluded from our world, and why, and how literature imagines that world for us. The Elizabeth we see is in large part John’s fictive creation of her. His consciousness shapes what we know about her. I didn’t realize how much my love for her ideas and identifying with them was maybe my own form of appropriation of them and a failure to acknowledge just how strange she is as a fictional creation. That’s it: over-identification with Elizabeth, under-identification with John.

MR: Thank you. Alexandra, how about your first experience of The Lives of Animals?

Alexandra Boehm (AB): Well, I was planning a course on the limits of the human after I read [Giorgio] Agamben and his book The Open. I was planning that with a colleague from Philosophy, and we were looking into texts that would be suitable for our seminar. We read [Jacques] Derrida’s The Animal That Therefore I Am. And after that, I found Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals. I had this reading of Derrida’s text first, and then I had a very intellectual access to the text. Of course, I loved it because it was great to find the text we already had in mind, like Kafka’s Report to an Academy. As a German scholar, this is a seminal text for me, and all those texts were in this lecture. I thought it was just great, amazing. I was totally excited about it.

That was my first reading. What I found really strange, and this goes further to the article I wrote two years ago about teaching The Lives of Animals, is that I always assumed the students would love the text as well. As you said, Robert, it’s an amazing text, and it’s so deep, so complex. This persona of Costello is just . . . I think she’s amazing. I don’t think she’s that weird creature as you made her out. I think she’s rather . . . Well, she’s excessive, let’s put it like that.

What I found is that the students really didn’t like the text. They repudiated it. It was a rejection, a denial. They were arguing, “It’s all too polemic, and you can’t use the Holocaust like that.” Of course, it’s German people; it’s different, I think, in a German class: but you get the gist. It’s been a strange experience to see the text that you love so much, teaching it yourself, and students being really critical of it. I was trying to explain in the text I wrote, “How does that happen?” Why are students so critical and negative and reject the text so much. I think it’s because there are so many threshold concepts that really change your perspective: that if you take them seriously and let them get to yourself, then you can’t be the same after reading the text.

MR: That’s a fascinating extra dimension: of the German teaching The Lives of Animals in Germany. So, Alan, tell us your response to the book when you first encountered it.

Robert Alan Northover (RAN): I like Robert’s word, “mind-blowing.” It’s one of those texts that is so multidimensional, so rich; it’s got such an intertextual power to it. I was looking for a doctoral topic at the time, and a friend of mine pointed out that text to me and suggested animal rights and J. M. Coetzee. So that was how I was exposed to it. At the time, I was a teacher working at the German school in Pretoria, so there was a German connection, too. And it was interesting sharing ideas with my German colleagues. Of course, for us, a lot of the German literature, we see it in English translation. It’s not just Kafka, it’s also “The Panther,” the poem by [Rainer Maria] Rilke. We don’t really see it in the German, but it’s interesting to see how Coetzee engages with it. So much of my Ph.D. thesis is based on The Lives of Animals and analysis of Elisabeth Costello. Yes, and she is an enigmatic creation. Early critics didn’t quite know what to make of her and how to relate her to J. M. Coetzee. As I said, it must be one of my most favorite texts. It’s just so incredible.

MR: Thank you. Robert, let’s go back to you. You’ve had your first reaction to The Lives of Animals. Now, 25 years later, you’re revisiting The Lives of Animals as a way of thinking about species politics. You’ve obviously talked a little bit about the change in you to become more like the son, or recognizing the son. Tell me what you’re thinking now.

RM: Yeah. Recognizing that I had underplayed the way in which we, as readers, can reproduce the way that John relates to his mother, and then needing to learn myself as a reader how to then step to the side of that approach, because I think he has some very questionable attitudes about his mother, and he imagines her for us in ways that really frame her. Grappling with that is one of the challenges of the text, I think.

You mentioned the book project. The book project I’m working on, which I’m hoping will come out with Edinburgh University Press, it about what I call anthropofugal fictions. It’s a horrible long word, but basically what I mean by that is the opposite of anthropocentric: things that are in flight from, rather than centering, the human. It’s about texts that center on characters who reject norms of human life in various ways, either by rejecting or compromising sociality with humans to embrace sociality with animals, or by rejecting their human identity to embrace an animal identity. I’ve been trying to think about Elizabeth really under that rubric.

But these texts, the anthropofugal fictions I’m interested in, are also particularly bothered about how the space of literature, that strange other reality that literary writing reveals, participates in this process of flight from the human, because it shows us how being human is never straightforwardly something that we are. Instead, it’s something we say we are, over and over again. There’s lots of saying, identifying as human. It’s something that we’re recognized as being by others, or not recognized as being in some cases, and Elizabeth is subject to that a little bit. It’s something that we do.

Early on, when I was researching animals in literature, this taboo on anthropomorphism came up over and over again. Students still say, “I don’t like this representation, because it’s anthropomorphic.” I always say to them, “The humans, as you call them in this literature you’re looking at, are anthropomorphic, too. They’re patterns of ink and light strung together to generate figments of imagination in human shapes. That’s how we know what humans are. They’re beings that we recognize in a humanoid shape.” My current thinking about The Lives of Animals really foregrounds something that appears quietly in my earlier work on the text, but foregrounds it now, which is this: Elizabeth as a threshold or abject figure who’s, by her very nature, testing and stretching the boundaries of what it is to be human, to have a humanized life.

The book’s called The Lives of Animals, and one way of reimagining human life anthropofugally is to reorient what it is to have that life around an animal identity. There’s a very powerful moment when Elizabeth says, “To be alive is to be a living soul, an animal, and we are all animals as an embodied soul.” Also, in the book, she tries to reject principles by way of the more gnomic idea of “an open heart.” You mentioned earlier, Martin, the word compassion, and that’s there in that open heart, and that maybe the open heart is a space where we’re connected with animals. I’ve been trying to think about these moves as ways of Elizabeth reconfiguring her identity away from being human into a kind of other space, trying to work out how to live with others not grounded in the human.

MR: We’ll be continually returning to this fascinating person that is Elizabeth Costello. Alexandra, I’d like you to talk a little bit about The Lives of Animals and how it plays with perceptions of advocacy and power, particularly around animals. You’re talking a little bit about species politics as well. How would you see it address the politics such as animal suffering and the Holocaust? It does it through deflections, side glances, and personae. A little bit about how you feel The Lives of Animals works its way through difficult issues, as it were.

AB: Let’s go back to 1999. At this time, postmodernism was still an issue: people were criticizing texts that spoke through deflections, didn’t address directly in a normative language what they wanted to say. It was a reproach: “It’s a postmodern game, it’s arbitrary; it’s ambiguity, it’s not really akin to commitment.” What Coetzee’s text does is combine the autonomy of art with commitment. This I would like to see as the text’s politics. That, on the one hand, it’s a constant transgression and provocation what Elizabeth Costello does in her diegetic. But there’s also a meta-diegetic level where there is constant transgression—for example, of genre questions, of taboos, and all that decorum which she’s constantly violating.

I think on a different level, the text is not having this advocacy that we assume for animal rights. It’s not speaking for animals. On the other hand, it’s making its way to letting the animal speak themselves. This is very basic to understanding the text: that Costello doesn’t want to take a stance. She does not argue with norms and principles. She wants to give a voice to animals.

For example, when you think of the Red Peter story: Red Peter is the fictive character by Kafka. What Costello does is give him a story. She gives him a subjectivity. By this, he gets a voice of his own. This is different from speaking for animals. I think the text politics is really that you do not appropriate the other by speaking for it, but give the other a voice of its own. This is what I think happens as well in her discussion on Ted Hughes’ poem [“The Jaguar” and “Second Glance at a Jaguar”]. And Rilke, on the other hand, Costello says, “He’s looking at the animal but not taking its perspective,” which would be a fascinating point to discuss because you could read Rilke in a different manner, too. What is also characteristic is that there is no effective and transparent language that can be used for arguing for animal rights. Elizabeth is quite opaque in her ideas and in her whole manner. I think this is what Coetzee is also well known for: not taking outright positions, but arguing on the whole through deflections and different personae, polyphonic talk.

MR: Yes, it’s such a fascinating book. When I think about everything that is included, all of the languages that are used of persuasion—whether it’s poetry, or fiction (or description, I should say), or the lecture, or the essay, or the book itself—there’s also the fact of what isn’t included. The poems themselves aren’t included. The second lecture is stumbled upon; so we don’t know what’s happened before that. There are these lacunae, these absences of voices of argumentation or poetry or writing. There’s so much that is excluded deliberately and willfully from the book, including other conversations.

RM: Can I ask Alexandra a question, Martin? It was to ask within that, in response to what you were saying, what you make of the book’s interest in failure: Elizabeth’s dejection, the way that the moment at the end of the lecture where it just seems to fizzle out; then the closure of the book as being this moment where she just breaks down, and is unable to articulate her point and win—not so much as articulate her point, but feel that sense of recognition and understanding from her son about her views. The book seems to be very interested in the failure of persuasion, the failure of that mode of engagement.

AB: Sorry. What’s the question?

RM: What do you think of that interest? It simultaneously reveals to us: it tries to speak for animals in various ways, but shows us very often the failure of that persuasiveness.

AB: I think that the whole gist is that it’s not that you persuade someone, but that you keep constantly transgressing and promoting. That is my personal opinion. Of course, Elizabeth is in total danger of losing herself, because she’s so empathic. This is her main mode of behavior. Because she’s so empathic, she’s on the verge of losing herself. What the text shows as well is that it’s constantly transgressing limits and borders, but on the other hand, they are also important, maybe.

RM: Well, this is the opening line: “He was standing at the gate when her flight came in.” It’s thematizing exactly this issue: that she’s an interloper who comes and transgresses boundaries, and he is a person who manages them, who guards them. Obviously, it has this weird echo of the pearly gates, of a moment of death, too: that he’s standing at the gate to see where she’s going to get to.

AB: Exactly. Of course, he is the person who sticks to norms as does his wife, Norma, and he has no opinions one way or the other. That’s why he constantly tells the reader and asks why she [Costello] can’t stay at home and open her heart to her cats. Of course, she is the transgressive person who violates norms and spaces and ideas and everything. I would agree to that.

MR: John, the son, is also in some ways, I guess, what people would expect John, the author, to be. John, the straight-laced person who keeps the authorized text and authorized conversation taking place, and his mother continually overwhelms that. Alan, you’ve written a Ph.D. thesis on Elizabeth Costello; you have spent all these years thinking about her as a character and a literary device and her challenge to philosophy. If you could summarize your thinking about her as a character and why she is and how she is a challenge to philosophy.

RAN: That’s a big question, and we have limited time. I recommend people read my Ph.D. about that. But I can try to summarize. Firstly, we know that the two sections are “The Philosophers and the Animals,” and then “The Poets and the Animals.” So already, Coetzee through Costello invokes, or evokes I should say, the battle between the poets and the philosophers from Plato’s Republic. The Platonic and Socratic goes much deeper than just that. He engages not just with the literature figures, but also the philosophical figures. An interesting intersection is the work of Mikhail Bakhtin, who was famous for talking about polyphony and dialogism. He’s an important influence on Coetzee, a very important influence.

I argue in my thesis that Coetzee actually represents a Socratic figure, a fallible figure, a figure who doesn’t come up with final answers or solutions, but a figure who is, like the historical Socrates, the gadfly, the gadfly of Athens. She’s the gadfly of the audience. That’s why they react badly to her, just as the Athenians did to Socrates’ constant questioning. She doesn’t have the answers, but she’s got the questions. She’s trying to get people to question their prejudices. She’s trying to lay bare the assumptions that they’re making. She’s trying to get them to question their anthropocentrism. That’s why she’s very unpopular.

This distinction from Bakhtin—of course, Coetzee admires the work of [Fyodor] Dostoevsky, as does Bakhtin—is the idea that you can create a character who is independent of the author, which is part of Coetzee’s attack on the author. He doesn’t believe the author is the final authority over his or her own stories. Using Bakhtin helps him develop that idea. I think if you look at Elizabeth Costello and you look at what Bakhtin writes about the Socratic dialogues as opposed to the Platonic . . . the middle–late dialogues where Plato is the artist as well as the philosopher, which you must not forget. Coetzee does complicate this distinction that he sets up between the poets and the philosophers, because Plato was a great artist as well as a great philosopher. But Socrates is the real influence here: the fallible figure, the one who doesn’t come up with hard conclusions, the one who questions, gets people to question.

When Bakhtin discusses the Socratic dialogues, he mentions several features which she [Costello] fits very well. The one is the wise fool. Another is the presence of laughter. In The Lives of Animals, laughter becomes more like irony; it’s quite muted. But we can all agree that it’s extremely rich in irony in all kinds of ways. The other feature of a Socratic figure is [they are] hugely respected but also misunderstood, and so on. If you look at what Bakhtin writes about the Socratic figure, I’d say Costello does come very close to that.

The big difference, of course, is that whereas Socrates believed in a rationalist argumentative mode, Costello has eschewed that, and she actually promotes narratives and imagination, instead. So her mode is different, but the effect of her approach is the same: to get people to question the prejudices and hopefully to think about things. She doesn’t give answers, but she hopefully provokes.

MR: I would open up to our guests. Do you have any thoughts about her as a Socratic gadfly? Alexandra?

AB: I would really like to comment on Bakhtin, because I’ve been working a lot for ages with Bakhtin’s theory, and I used it for my reading of The Lives of Animals as well. But not [Bakhtin’s] Socratic one, but his work Rabelais and His World, which, of course, you know as well. I think you could use it here very well: with the contrast between the grotesque body and the classical body. Elizabeth Costello represents the grotesque body that, in Bakhtin’s notion, is open and has fissures and the bodily-ness: the creatureliness of the grotesque body is emphasized. Whereas Norma represents exactly the opposite, the classical body, and of course, her son, because they are closed. They have their surface, which is completely clean and normal, and they are not open to the world. Would you say that you could use this concept in your reading of Bakhtin and The Lives of Animals?

RAN: I think that’s a great idea. You mentioned Rabelais and his World, but of course, there’s the idea of the carnivalesque. I applied it to the dinner after the lecture, and it works very well there, too, because everyone is equalized, everyone is allowed to express an opinion, and it leads to an exchange of ideas that would not have been possible in a different context, in a purely lecture context. Yes, I think Bakhtin is extremely fruitful for an analysis of Coetzee.

RM: One thing I would like to say about it, and I think it touches on this in some interesting ways, is that there’s a very rich discussion of the novella spinning out of Cora Diamond’s work on it, and Stanley Cavell and Cary Wolfe’s reflections on those. That very much focuses on the question of vulnerability and Costello’s enactment of vulnerability in the text. I think in lots of the responses to Costello, there is a focus on this question of embodiment as, in a way, a moment of alignment with animal life. Animals are sentient beings. Elizabeth Costello as an embodied soul is a sentient being, too. You can see a connection there to Tom Regan’s work around the “subject of a life,” and these things.

What’s really central to my reading of the book is how much John is projecting lots of that onto his mother. We see her through his eyes, and there isn’t a lot of firm evidence; just because someone is old doesn’t mean they are suffering. This is a partly a projection from him. In my reading, it’s awful for a son to worry about his mother’s mortality, and he is slightly too desperate to see it, if you see what I mean.

Where the vulnerability does lie, and I think this is part of Wolfe’s reading, is that she’s [Costello’s] vulnerable to be interpreted. This is one of the things about the gadfly: the gadfly is constantly being read and made sense of by others. Certainly that’s something that Coetzee opens up with Costello. She says her things, but what we see is people responding to them, and people misinterpreting her; the fact she doesn’t have control over how what she says is understood, and that’s the world in which arguments for animal rights emerge. They don’t emerge in a world where you can determine—and this is Bakhtin again—how your message is received. Your message is dialogically produced by the person who’s receiving it. That vulnerability is really powerful, I think, in the text, and also in the free play between Elizabeth Costello and John Coetzee that emerges most powerfully (I wish I could have been there) in the moment when he was reading it. I think it would have been very powerfully ambivalent who was saying these things and what authority they had.

MR: I’m going to go to you, Alexandra, next. As we all know, Tom Regan was criticized in the response to The Case for Animal Rights and other writings from ecofeminists and ethic-of-care feminists, who felt that he privileged reason too much as an argumentative format. You’ve already touched on this, Robert, in thinking about how your reading has changed through the works of ecofeminists like Carol Adams. I’d be interested, Alexandra, in you teaching it as a woman (we’ve already touched on this as a German), as somebody who has a long sense of the history and tradition. Of course, the book, as we’ve discussed, contains or points to German language writers, such as Rilke and Kafka. I wonder if you bring in those dimensions of her and thinking about her as a vehicle for knowledge, and yourself communicating her words or her ideas to your classes.

AB: Well, gender, I think, plays a huge role in the novella. What I think is indeed very complicated is that Elizabeth Costello is at once an intellectual: she intervenes into the public sphere. Of course, when you’re teaching, you’re public as well. But she leaves her métier, which is communicated twice, I think, John says, “No, this is not her métier,” what she’s talking about. She is that intellectual that intervenes, and at the same time, she’s a feminist.

As a feminist who applies—you just mentioned Carol Adams—as a feminist, I think she is, and of course, Coetzee is familiar with the “care” theory that was in the ‘90s a huge branch of theory—what we can see with her is that she rejects the Logos. I think there are some uncanny coincidences with, as I mentioned before, Derrida’s The Animal That Therefore I Am, because Derrida is also criticizing the role of the Logos and that we should actually take into account that not we are the ones looking at the animal, but that the animal is also looking at us. What makes Costello—and subsequently, when you’re teaching it—so intriguing is that, we had it before, that there are those huge gaps where we don’t really get information from her only in dialogues, and we see her just through the lens of her son, John, is that it is really difficult to identify with her because we have no internal view of her.There’s no empathy the reader can really develop because she’s a character whom we get only through the lens of her son. Coming to your question: she’s been criticized for her sentimental views and her hysterical rant and the inefficacy of her presentation. What I think what you get when you teach her, or teach the text, is—and I come relate to my department here—that if you are actually an advocating for animals, you are denounced as being sentimental. I think this is a huge point that is really a problem that we associate care for animals and especially an emotional take, as is Elizabeth Costello’s, with being sentimental.

And here we come back to Tom Regan and the critique of the rational. If you choose to take a different stance on animals to the rational and the Logos, you are always in danger of being criticized as historical and sentimental. This is also what, if I may quote him, what Peter Singer claims is that, “the portrayal of those who protest against cruelty to animals as sentimental emotional animal lovers has had the effect of excluding the entire issue of our treatment of non-humans from serious political and moral discussion.”

I think this is the conflict we’re dealing with here. Of course, it is even more difficult if you are—maybe you can correct me—a woman who teaches animal studies. Sorry, that’s been so long.

MR: Well, Robert, I know you touch on Derrida and the whole carnophallogocentric dimension of it. Do you want to just develop that in terms of also what you’re talking about in your recognition of John’s editorial stringency in all of the voice of Elizabeth Costello?

RM: Yeah. I think it’s a complicated and difficult part of the book or aspect of the book. Not least, that what we’re encountering is a male-identifying author voicing a female author. So there’s, in a way, gender-switching happening in the presentation of the text. One of the things that I think is very difficult about The Lives of Animals is that Coetzee’s absolutely classic narrative technique is to use this embedded third-person focalization that’s very tightly connected to a particular consciousness in the text, usually a male consciousness.

So what we don’t have is any external view that can validate anything that we see. Fictions often insert that in: There’s a narrative voice that gives us a bit of a steer about how we’re to interpret things. So we never quite know if things that are being said about Elizabeth are accurate or whether they are being projected onto her by the consciousness in the narrative. The way I respond to that often is that I think the fabric of Coetzee’s writing is exceptionally rich. You mentioned the irony earlier on and lots of ironies in the text. And he embeds into the writing little moments of irony that allow us to, just perhaps, develop a little critical viewpoint on some of the ideas about Elizabeth that circulate.

That allows us to see when responses to her are not based on the actuality of what she says, but instead based on prejudices of the people responding to her. A great moment is when Norma describes Elizabeth’s “delicate sensibilities.” That’s a nasty little comment to suggest that any pro-animal viewpoint is itself over the top, is excessive, is just not being ordinary. And the word delicate suggests too fine, but has the echo of the word delicatessen, the idea of being too interested in meat. There’s a little irony there that I think Coetzee drops in to ask us to step back and actually read the kinds of patterns of prejudice that Alexandra was talking about: the kinds of normativities or carnophallogocentrism imaginings that the world has to run along a particular human-centric, male-centric, language-having-centric set of expectations.

MR: Yes, because Norma is a particularly normative, right?

RM: Exactly. She’s particularly normative. On the other hand, in my first response to the book, again we’re seeing Norma through John’s eyes often. There’s a little moment in my essay on the book where I think, well, “Does he just delight a little bit too much in being caught between his wife and his mother?” There’s something that says the man is at the center of everything. If what really is going on is two women are fighting, there’s something a bit misogynist in the way that that comes through. I think it finds little ways to see these things.

MR: I will just say, bring my own expertise to bear as a former publisher: on the one hand, one reason why they had all of those essays was undoubtedly to fill out the book. Same reason why Faber & Faber asked T.S. Eliot to put huge amounts of unnecessary notes at the end of “The Wasteland,” so they could get the proper signature. I imagine that this slender volume needed a lot of buttressing. The effect, of course, is provide the piece which deconstructs the academic exercise with the whole range of academic buttressing—we could also say academic swaddling—to make sure the piece forms enough of a coherent whole to be “the academic book,” or indeed, “the book,” the authorized version of this subject. In some ways, it’s instructive that Elizabeth Costello quite literally refuses to be confined within The Lives of Animals. She keeps on appearing in these other works and then ultimately gets a book with her name on the cover. She finally gets the authority that she deserves.

RM: The crucial thing is she doesn’t necessarily think the same kinds of things in the different texts. There are some texts where you wouldn’t really know she was an animal advocate from things she says. That comes back to Alan’s point earlier on, that, in a way, she’s a fictional strategy. She’s not a single human being. She’s a textual artifact, and she exists in different ways. She’s not one person in all of these texts. She’s different in each text she appears in.

MR: Let’s go to the question, Robert that you ask—and we can all ask and answer these questions—in your article, “Metafiction, Vegetarianism, the Literature and Performance of Animal Ethics in J. M. Coetzee’s Lives of Animals”: “Can literature find a way to get beyond itself in order to respond ethically to the animal?” That’s a very packed and loaded question. Why don’t you start, and we’ll move on to Alexandra and Alan to see if they can grapple with it.

RM: I’m really glad you pushed that comment of mine back to me, Martin, because I think it is a moment in my working life where I’m not sure it does the book justice, actually, or doesn’t do the disruptive potential of literature justice. I think I’m now of the view that the great thing about literature is there isn’t really an anthropocentric self in there for literature to get beyond. The problem instead is that we read literature in a world of Normas. By that, I sadly don’t mean Norma Jean Baker, because Marilyn Monroe was herself an animal advocate, but Norma in the novel. People read literature and come to it with expectations, beliefs, fantasies, and the needs to confirm ourselves in the exceptional nature of humans. Around my university, people constantly say things about literature teaching us what it means to be human, and I always think that it teaches us how to get away from a lot of expectations about being human. Instead, I think literature is an insight into the wonderful life-giving discovery of common worlds with animals, with other animals, whatever species category we put them in.

The Lives of Animals is only one of thousands of works that ask us and help us to re-imagine ourselves in an ethical relation to the animals around us. The problem is we live in an age where the kind of slow attention to others that literature can make possible, indeed demands, is systematically undermined, minimized, attacked.

I remember seeing Coetzee present “As a Woman Grows Older” at the Minding Animals Conference in Utrecht. He introduced that text connecting it to—Alexandra might be able to help me with this—a German tradition of didactic literature, is how he put it. It does feel to me that The Lives of Animals is trying to engage with a really huge discussion that is the education of what it is to be human that’s been going on in and outside the academy for about 400 years. It’s that epochal. It’s trying to engage in this ongoing process of convening what human life is and trying to complicate it, to ask difficult questions about it.

I think literature needs to be part of that conversation, but it needs support from other places to, in a way, allow for the kind of reading that Coetzee’s work demands of us. If we live in a world that’s constantly attacking that reading, minimizing it, then texts like Coetzee’s will never be able to do their work. I think that’s my take on whether literature can get beyond itself. It’s more, “Can we get beyond the frames in which we’re reading to allow the text to act on us the way that it’s trying to?”

MR: Thank you, Robert. So, Alexandra, why don’t you go next and answer that question. “Can literature find a way to get beyond itself in order to respond ethically to the animal?”

AB: Well, we have to go back, I think, to the time around 1800, when literature became an autonomous system. (I’m referring here to Niklas Luhmann’s system theory.) That was a huge gain for literature because it became an autonomous system. With that, it wasn’t connected anymore to being in charge of doing something. There’s a gain of freedom. On the other hand, when a system is autonomous, it doesn’t interfere with anything. It becomes a little like, “Okay, literature is nice to have, but if you don’t have it, who cares?” I think this is the problem we’re dealing with today: that literature is a system that has to intervene into the public to get an ethical meaning. I think Coetzee is dealing with this problem really well because, on the one hand, there is lots of intervention in the text, but on the other hand, he’s not taking sides. He’s not propagandizing; he’s mentioning slaughterhouses, but he’s not giving any pictures. He’s not giving the stories of the slaughterhouses, but he’s talking in circumferences around the whole subject of animal exploitation.

I think this is exactly the point. What we need in literature is to have really powerful texts that change your perspective, that let you see the world in a different manner. That is what I can say about my work at the museum now: people come, we have talks about how narratives and pictures and artwork and literature can change our behavior, our way of dealing with the world, with animals, with nature. It’s really important to have those powerful texts that give you a different perspective. I think this is what Lives of Animals does.

MR: Thank you, Alexandra. Alan, you’ve heard all of that. What’s the answer?

RAN: No, I can just skip problems. The problem of the anthropocentric perspective is how do we escape it? Because even literature is part of the human world of storytelling. Still, I do see many authors writing about animals, relationships with animals, even adopting the animal perspective. I think that’s the way to go. To go back to The Lives of Animals: that’s partly what Coetzee means about the sympathetic imagination, to enter the experiences of others. The irony is he doesn’t really do that in The Lives of Animals. The person who does it best is, in fact, in one of those additional essays—Barbara Smuts, the primatologist’s stories of her time spent with baboons and with her dog.

So, yes, that type of literature, I think, moves more than other types. Maybe on a final note, I must say my conversion to vegetarianism was not actually because of The Lives of Animals. It was Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation. But it wasn’t the philosophical argument; it’s very abstract in that. I could understand it and I agree with it. What moved me were his descriptions of what happens on the animal farms, what happens in the laboratories where animals are experimented on. That wasn’t his most philosophical thing. Just these descriptions were vivid. They were not emotional or anything. He described what happened in these facilities. That’s really what convinced me that our relations with animals is totally unacceptable.

MR: I’m going to ask one final question, and then we will wrap up. One of the reasons I relate very strongly to Elizabeth Costello is the exhaustion she feels having to answer other people’s questions and demand her intellectual consistency as well as emotional consistency around the positions that she takes. I’m going to ask you, whatever the assumptions are regarding your family members and your colleagues, how do you manage those human relationships, given the positions you may hold regarding animal welfare, or vegetarianism, or veganism? I’m going to start with you, Alan. Do you share her exhaustion or have you managed it extraordinarily well?

RAN: Yes, it’s a difficult one. I think your friends change. My experience is that some people have accommodated my vegetarianism. My wife is also converted to vegetarianism: I didn’t ask her to, but she did it. My mother, my niece. So it happens. There’s a slow ripple effect. Some family members are hardened against it, but a lot of them I found were quite open. I think just setting an example: it’s not what you say, it’s what you do that counts. And vegetarianism is a very strong statement about how to relate to the world more ethically.

MR: Thank you, Alan. So Elizabeth Costello should have shut up and just been a good vegetarian, right? Alexandra, what are your ideas?

AB: This is the time of making confessions. I’ve been a vegetarian for over 30 years, and it didn’t have to do with any books or text. It was just empathy, I think. It was really what Costello is all about. If you open your heart, you cannot, by any means, eat another living being. This is my background. I am sorry, again. What was your question?

MR: The difficulty that she has with family members.

AB: The difficulty, yes. In the beginning, it was always people asking me whether I’ve come across a sect or something. “You must be vegetarian now because you have met the wrong people,” and stuff like that. It really got on my nerves. It’s always when you’re at a dinner with friends or whoever that the subject comes up about vegetarianism. But over the last 30 years, it really changed. Because people now, at least in Germany, when they hear you’re a vegetarian or a vegan, always say, “Oh, I don’t eat meat very often. I really agree with you. It’s just a little bit of animal I’m eating.” This has really changed, because in the beginning, it was more like a total rejection, and now it’s more accepted. At least, the people I meet know what they’re doing is not ethically right. Let’s put it like that.

MR: I imagine these days, if she had dinner with her faculty, the faculty would be seeking to provide her with reasons to salve their conscience so she would say, “You are blessed. Do not worry. You are okay as you are. Your conscience is okay.” Robert, what about you?

RM: I would counsel Elizabeth to embrace the possibility of exile and just think you don’t have to choose your family, choose your friends. One of the things that’s happening when you become a person who won’t or can’t eat animals, the world is working very hard to exile you and to stop you doing that, to bring you back into the fold. One element of self-care is to allow yourself to not meet that demand, to resist that demand. I certainly make choices to avoid situations where that thing can happen. And I think that’s okay. Another thing I see in Elizabeth, which I admire and adore, is something I call “radical exaggeration.” She needs to overspeak sometimes: in a way, the Holocaust analogy is a little bit part of that. It’s that actually she has to say more than she needs to say as a way of coping with the fact that she’s silenced in these views. I think that that’s okay. People are allowed to say things that are excessive sometimes, and that is something that is actually produced by the world that she’s in, not by her. “It’s not her bad,” is the way that I would put it. Those are my two takes. Radical exaggeration and embracing the exile.

MR: Well, thank you, everyone, for your contribution. I feel as though we could do another session. We would ask all sorts of different questions of this very slender volume that has managed to capture our imaginations and our attention for 25 years. Thank you very much, Alexandra Boehm, Robert McKay, and Richard Alan Northover.