Living Like People, Loving Like Animals

Getting meta about human and animal rights

One of Middlebrow’s funnier follows on Twitter remarked this morning that if you haven’t read Fahrenheit 451 not to bother because you’re somewhat living in it. The difference, Middlebrow replied, is that in Bradbury, the government burns books while in our timeline, people ignore books in favor of simpler and ubiquitous online pleasures.

Middlebrow Musings excepted, of course.

Online media has its benefits, but longer form writing, particularly books, can create empathy that more transient media consumption cannot. For example: The Lives of Animals by JM Coatzee, which Middlebrow plucked from Scholar Wife’s stack this week.

This slim volume has more layers than a Balthazar Bakery croissant.

The book, published in 1999, is built from two lectures the novelist gave at Princeton, both concerning human treatment of animals. But rather than deliver a pair of lectures, Coetzee wrote a piece of fiction about a novelist named Elizabeth Costello, who has won acclaim for writing a novel retelling James Joyce’s Ulyssesi from the point of view of Marion Bloom, wife of Joyce’s protagonist. Having spent her life emobodying the psyches of fictional characters, Costello has made the leap from wondering why, if she can imagine the mental state of a woman who doesn’t exist, living in a time before her own, that she can’t also embrace the perspective of a cow, dog or oyster.

It has a bit in common with Consider the Lobster by David Foster Wallace but where Wallace outright considers the perspective of his shellfish, Coetzee distances himself from the argument by characterizing a woman considering an oyster’s point of view. We don’t know what Coetzee believes, just what he says Costello does. Her explorations have led her towards a kind of radical animal rights philosophy that she has not fully integrated into her life. She has embraced vegetarianism, but still wears leather, for example.

She’s also turned strident, offending one of her hosts at fictional Appleton College by comparin factory farms to concentration camps. Costello’s son is an untenured physics professor at the school and is torn by loyalty for his mother and embarassment by her point of view. His son’s wife, a philosopher of mind who is unemployed but writing for academic journals, looks down on disciplines like anthroplogy and can barely tolerate her mother in law.

So, we have a pair of lectures about animal rights, but delivered through the form of a fictitious family drama with a touch of campus politics thrown in, and all of this had been delivered by Coetzee as a lecture.

Now comes another layer — the preface by Amy Gutman, founding director of Princeton’s University Center for Human Values, puts Coetzee’s writing in context. Then, just as in the lecture that Costello gives, and as with the lecture that Coetzee delivered about that fictional lecture, we get three responses to the text.

Religious historian Wendy Doniger puts Costello’s work in literary and traditional context and incidentally reminds us that it is Lewis Carroll’s Red Queen who introduces the joke of introducing a person to the meat they will eat (later embellished by Douglas Adams at Milliways: The Restaurant at the End of the Universe.)

We hear from Marjorie Garber, a Shakespeare scholar who speaks up for the role of poets in ethical debate. Anthropologist Barbara Smuts reminds us that though the rights of animals are dealt with abstractly in this story that none of Coetzee’s characters actually try to befriend any non-humans, seeming to accept Thomas Aquinas’ assertion that such a relationship would be impossible. Smuts counters this with her personal tales among primates alongside Diane Fossey and with stories of her own dog.

Peter Singer, a bioethicist who is probably closest to Costello’s beliefs, responds with his own fiction — a charming short story about him discussing Coetzee with his daughter.

In the end, what we talk about when we talk about animals is what it means to be human. Costello comparing the horrible things that humans do to animals to the horrible things they do to each other provokes the question of whether we can consider the lobster if we can’t even consider our neighbors.

Meanwhile, Coetzee has created a metaverse for us to explore that’s more complex than anything that Zuckerberg will ever be able to match. The question is, can Coetzee still command attention in 2022?