Superfície de control

Coetzee draws upon the dialectical idea of the harmony of opposites throughout his work both by granting independence to the other and by providing discursive space for its own voice, without subduing it to Western narrative paradigms.¹³⁸ While advocating for the marginalized, underprivileged, and abused, he allows narrative room for the perpetrators, passive observers, and people who contribute to others' plight not necessarily because of spite or bad will, but, more likely, out of fear, ignorance, or opportunism. Moreover, he presents his ideological opponents with respect and seriousness; his criticism is not intended to ridicule, but to test their ideas by encouraging dialogue and comprehensive introspection into their inconsistencies and limitations. It could be argued that Coetzee's dialectical juxtaposition of various points of view is an expression of his effort to “awaken the countervoices.”¹³⁹

An aspect of Coetzee's dialectics is his absconding from the position of authorial power. In Slow Man, Paul Rayment opposes Elizabeth Costello, a stand-in for Coetzee, criticizing her inquisitiveness:

You treat me like a puppet […]. You treat everyone like a puppet. You make up stories and bully us into playing them out for you. You should open a puppet theatre, or a zoo. There must be plenty of old zoos for sale, now that they have fallen out of fashion. Buy one, and put us in cages with our names on them. […]

Rows and rows of cages holding the people who have, as you put it, come to you in the course of your career as a liar and fabulator. You could charge admission.

[…] Parents could bring their children at weekends to gawp at us and throw peanuts. Easier than writing books that no one reads.¹⁴⁰

137 Ibid., 45.

138 Cf. Sławomir Masłoń, Père-Versions of the Truth: Novels of J. M. Coetzee (Katowice: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śląskiego, 2007), 9.

139 John Maxwell Coetzee, Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews, ed. David Attwell (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1992), 65.

140 John Maxwell Coetzee, Slow Man (London: Secker & Warburg, 2005), 117.

By depicting Costello, an author figure, as an oppressor, not as a sympathetic writer, Coetzee testifies to his own self-criticism and openness to other points of view, even to those he does not support.

An aspect of Coetzee's self-subjugation to scrutiny is Costello's inconsistency. On the one hand, she criticizes the exploitation of animals, on the other hand, however, she wears leather and, at times, she appears to be in favor of hunting and bull fighting, claiming that

“there remains something attractive about [them] at an ethical level.”¹⁴¹ Costello reproaches herself for her inconsistencies, but she is reluctant to renounce them. President Garrard, one of the organizers of the event at which Costello speaks, defends her by arguing that “[c]onsistency is the hobgoblin of small minds.”¹⁴² He refers to the following idea of the American poet and thinker Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882):

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day. […] Is it so bad then to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.¹⁴³

Emerson does not criticize consistency; rather, he maintains that innovative ideas frequently seem mistaken not because they are wrong, but because they exceed the existing paradigms of thought and feeling. It could be argued that Garrard considers Costello as one of the visionaries who broaden the horizons of knowledge and moral sensitivity even at the cost of their own credibility.¹⁴⁴

Costello's self-contradictions can be explained by referring to Alasdair MacIntyre (b.

141 Coetzee, The Lives of Animals, 52.

142 Ibid., 44.

143 Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-Reliance,” in Basic Readings in U.S. Democracy, ed. Melvin Irving Urofsky (Washington: United States Information Agency, 1994), 96.

144 See Alan Richard Northover, J. M. Coetzee and Animal Rights: Elizabeth Costello's Challenge to Philosophy, (PhD diss., Pretoria: University of Pretoria, 2009), 158,

http://repository.up.ac.za/bitstream/handle/2263/24686/00front.pdf?sequence=1.

1929), a Scottish political philosopher who, in his 1981 study After Virtue: A Study in Moral Philosophy, argues that a situation, traditions, family, and history always influence what people do and think; the influence occurs mostly beyond their control and consciousness. When the circumstances change, so do people's views, which for those unaware of the change in the context may seem like a failure of consistency. In order to avoid such a misunderstanding, one needs to consider change and inconsistency as part of a bigger and harmonious picture. MacIntyre's approach to inconsistency resonates both with the type of dialecticism advocated by Nisbett and with Coetzee's openness to other voices.¹⁴⁵

It can be claimed that Coetzee presents Costello as an “intermediary between opposites,”¹⁴⁶ that is, as advocating dialogue with those who disagree with her, although she is not always enthusiastic about their views. According to Mike Marais, a Rhodes University scholar, the reason for Coetzee's adaptation of the dialectical approach is to avert the danger of dominating and to eradicate the other by failing to respect its alterity.¹⁴⁷ As already noted, apart from giving voice to the victims of social oppression, Coetzee allows narrative room for the culprits and the beneficiaries of such oppression, among them Eugene Dawn, Elizabeth Curren, and David Lurie. As for The Lives of Animals, despite its aim of promoting animal ethics, the novella is narrated from the perspective of John Bernard, Costello's son, who seems rather unsympathetic for animals:

[…] you won’t get a bunch of Australians standing around a sheep, listening to its silly baa, writing poems against it. Isn’t that what is so suspect in the whole animal-rights business: that it has to ride on the back of pensive gorillas and sexy jaguars and huggable pandas because the real objects of its concern, chickens and pigs, to say nothing of white rats or prawns, are not newsworthy?¹⁴⁸

145 Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, 3rd ed. (1981; Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007), 222.

146 Lucy Graham, “Textual Transvestism: The Female Voices in J. M. Coetzee,” in J. M. Coetzee and the Idea of a Public Intellectual, ed. Jane Poyner (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2006), 225.

147 Mike Marais, “The Possibility of Ethical Action: J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace,” Scrutiny2: Issues in English Studies in Southern Africa 5, no. 1 (June 2000): 59.

148 Coetzee, The Lives of Animals, 55.

John's trivialization of the pro-animal movement reveals not only his ignorance of what his mother tries to say, but also a lack of sensitivity to animal suffering. It also testifies to the failure of his imagination. While occasionally sympathetic for Costello, he is similar to his wife, Norma, who openly dislikes her mother-in-law.

Importantly, despite her speciesist views, Norma is presented as a strong character whose strength is demonstrated in the following extract:

[R]ationality is not just, as your mother claims, a game. Reason provides us with real knowledge of the real world. It has been tested, and it works. You are a physicist. You ought to know.¹⁴⁹

In the above passage, Coetzee presents a convincing argument for rationalism, despite his own condemnation of reason as the unquestionable basis of all meaning and value. What he achieves by presenting Norma's arguments, however strong they may be, is the assurance that opposites can co-exist as long as they are independent and eager to respect one another.

Another strong voice in The Lives of Animals belongs to Abraham Stern, a fictional poet who absents himself from the dinner with Costello out of his feeling insulted by her views. Significantly, he informs about his withdrawal in a letter, thus granting his stance the authority of a written word. It could be claimed that he resorts to the means which Coetzee, an author conveying his ideas through writing, trusts the most. Despite their diverging attitudes, Coetzee acknowledges Stern as a serious and powerful representative of anthropocentric humanism.

Arguably, the most radical voice in The Lives of Animals belongs to Thomas O'Hearne, a fictional philosopher, at times identified with Vicky Hearne (1946-2001), an animal rights activist and philosopher,¹⁵⁰ although he is more likely to stand for Michael P.

149 Ibid., 48.

150 Ian Hacking, “Our Fellow Animals,” review of The Lives of Animals, by J. M. Coetzee, and of Ethics

T. Leahy, an American critic of the animal rights movement, author of the 1991 study entitled Against Liberation: Putting Animals in Perspective, deemed to be the antithesis to Peter Singer's seminal Animal Liberation. Among O'Hearne's claims, the most radical seems to be the idea that animal rights are man's authoritarian imposition on animals, similar to the human rights movement, becoming “yet another Western crusade against the rest of the world, claiming universality for what are simply its own standards.”¹⁵¹ According to O'Hearne, the horror of animal death is an instance of people's anthropocentric, “very Western, and even very Anglo-Saxon”¹⁵² view of animals:

To animals, death is continuous with life. It is only among certain very imaginative human beings that one encounters a horror of dying so acute that they then project it onto other beings, including animals.¹⁵³

Costello recognizes the above argumentation as accurate. Yet she discards O'Hearne's other claims; she particularly objects to his support for laboratory tests on animals, observing that such research is reductionist and inconclusive. She eventually refuses O'Hearne's ideas of humane slaughter of animals and of hunters' community with wildlife.

When O'Hearne speaks of humane slaughter, or when he defends hunting as a means of collecting food and preserving traditional lifestyle, he proves ignorant of the realities of modern slaughterhouses, factory farming, milk farms, and events like hunting safaris in Africa for the rich from the developed world. It is not Costello who is naive and misinformed; it is O'Hearne who has apparently not verified the empirical realities of animal exploration. Lacking confirmation in real life, O'Hearne's stance is abstract and redundant. However, Coetzee references O'Hearne's ideas to approved academic sources so that the readers of The Lives of Animals can check themselves the views of the critics of

into Action: Henry Spira and the Animal Rights Movement, by Peter Singer, The New York Review (June 29, 2000): 24.

151 Coetzee, The Lives of Animals, 60.

152 Ibid.

153 Ibid., 64.

the pro-animal movement. Coetzee allows his ideological opposition a due voice, consideration, and a serious treatment.

Coetzee's idiosyncratic reinterpretations of Albert Camus's story of a hen, narrated in Camus's 1957 essay entitled “Reflections on the Guillotine,” and of Jonathan Swift's “A Modest Proposal” can also be perceived as an attempt at inviting multiple perspectives and unconventional modes of thinking. It could be argued that by advancing his own interpretation of canonical texts, Coetzee “challenges authoritative interpretations and provokes readers to listen to the polyphony of voices in great works of literature,”¹⁵⁴ destabilizing complacent certainties and encouraging a critical rethinking of the binding thought paradigms.

An aspect of the encouragement is that apart from Coetzee's two “Lessons,” The Lives of Animals is composed of five other essays by various authors. While some of the essays provide philosophical or empirical support for the ideas expressed by Coetzee, others are critical, if not entirely condemning. That Coetzee allows for opposite views testifies to his dialectical approach to the animal rights discourse. The most critical essay is by Peter Singer who designates reason rather than sympathy and imagination as the basis for establishing reliable animal ethics. Although they differ on the role of rationality, Coetzee acknowledges Singer, confirming his notion of a dialectical juxtaposition of ideological opposites.

In addition to the “Reflections,” Coetzee's dialectical harmony of opposites can also be identified in the variety of sources which he references in the text and in the footnotes o f The Lives of Animals. He mentions both his ideological allies and opponents. The polyphonic character of the debate is stimulated by references to the philosopher Thomas Nagel and to the cornucopian denialist of animal rights Michael P. T. Leahy. There are mentions of such pro-animal activists as John Berger, Mary Midgley, Peter Singer, Paola

154 Northover, J. M. Coetzee and Animal Rights, 163.

Cavalieri, and Gary F. Francione. Coetzee refers to poets and writers, among them William Blake, Rainer Maria Rilke, Ted Hughes, D. H. Lawrence, Franz Kafka, and Fyodor Dostoevsky. There are also references to scientists: the literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin, the historian of science Paul Davies, and the primatologist Barbara Smuts.

Coetzee's use of these sources is dialogical because each of the authors referenced is invoked as an independent voice, neither favored nor trivialized, significantly enriching the novella's diversity of approaches.¹⁵⁵

The inclusion of contrasting voices may be misinterpreted as Coetzee's self-contradiction, escapism, or even plagiarism. According to Michael Bell, a University of Wisconsin-Madison scholar, Costello “unwittingly plagiarizes the very writers she excoriates.”¹⁵⁶ However, the aim of introducing multiple viewpoints is to prompt a dialectical debate encouraging the readers to consider the discussed issues on their own.

As a further means of stimulating the abate, Coetzee does not allow any of his characters to dominate his work, even Costello. When she compares Kafka to Red Peter, Norma interrupts the narrative with “a sigh of exasperation,”¹⁵⁷ snorts, and continual criticism. No voice is thus privileged, which not only prevents monologue, but it also conforms to what Nisbett calls a dialogue of contradictions, thus improving rather than diminishing understanding.

Coetzee explains his choice of dialectics as follows: “[w]hat dialogism means is, at a technical level, that you don’t write from the position of one who knows the answer. That would be, so to speak, to write in a monologue or monologically. In other words, writing dialogically means writing in a manner which respects the knowledge of all who participate in the fiction.”¹⁵⁸ He also refers to the Bakhtinian notion of polyphonic novel

155 Ibid., 108.

156 Michael Bell, “What is it Like to be Nonracist: Costello and Coetzee on the Lives of Animas and Men,”

in J. M. Coetzee and the Idea of a Public Intellectual, ed. Jane Poyner (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2006), 176.

157 Coetzee, The Lives of Animals, 32.

158 John Maxwell Coetzee, “The Sympathetic Imagination: A Conversation with J. M. Coetzee,” by

when defining the ground for his use of multiple voices:

Again, bear in mind that monologue is not necessarily monological, if I understand Bakhtin. Nor is dialogue dialogical. There’s a certain kind of monologue in which various voices are evoked and contested and played with that is part of the dialogical. So if I’m interested in monologue, it’s not just at a formal level. On the other hand, it’s not at the level of whatever it is Bakhtin is talking about, which, I suspect, is finally a religious level.¹⁵⁹

What Coetzee finds particularly convincing in Bakhtin's theory is his emphasis on the complementarity of opposing voices, without designating any of them as dominant.¹⁶⁰

Coetzee engages in dialogue with his adversaries also by creating conflict in his novella. Next to the animosity between Costello and her daughter-in-law Norma, there is tension between Norma and her husband John, and between Costello and John. The conflicts are mostly repressed, and they usually appear through the characters' passivity.

Examples include John's silencing of Norma during their discussion following his mother's lecture, and his own inaction when Costello prompts him to support her with one of the questions from the audience. While Norma is critical of Costello, John is ignorant or at least ambivalent of his mother's ideas.

There also seems to be a conflict between Coetzee and his Costello persona. Apart from exposing her to O'Hearne's criticism, he ridicules her, distancing himself from her views. Coetzee's mockery of Costello can be seen when he makes her speak of rebellious rats which “haven’t surrendered. They fight back. They form underground units in our sewers. They aren’t winning, but they aren’t losing either.”¹⁶¹ Another instance of the mockery is when Coetzee calls his persona a “paid entertainer.”¹⁶² Richard Alan

Eleanor Wachtel, Brick: A Literary Journal 67 (2001): 44.

159 Joanna Scott, “Voice and Trajectory: An Interview with J. M. Coetzee,” Salmagundi: A Quarterly of the Humanities and Social Sciences, no. 114/115 (Spring-Summer 1997): 89,

http://www.jstor.org/stable/40548963.

160 Cf. Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1981), 30-31.

161 Coetzee, The Lives of Animals, 59.

162 Ibid., 41.

Northover, a scholar of the University of South Africa, Pretoria, argues as follows:

The idea of a paid entertainer also trivialises the seriousness of her [Costello's]

message. Perhaps Coetzee is implicitly criticising both her audience as well as readers who read his work merely for the pleasure but remain untouched by it ethically.¹⁶³

In contrast to Coetzee's subtle and balanced voice, heard in his public speeches, critical writings, and interviews, the voice of Costello is emotional, at times offensive, and even hysterical. By juxtaposing the Holocaust with eating meat, she antagonizes her audience, spoiling the primary purpose of her lecture, which is to sensitize people to animal suffering. Her hostile conclusion of the argument with O'Hearne also damages her credibility; it is an uncontrolled rant, not a poised argument. Although she is Coetzee's mouthpiece, by exposing her drawbacks, Coetzee takes distance to the ideas he himself supports, thus avoiding the uncritical categoricalness of Western reason.

Verifying his own stance, Coetzee seems to engage in a dialogue with the philosophical tradition he is embedded in, namely that of treating reason as the only normative center of meaning and moral worth. By multiplying countervoices, he questions the categorical view of reason, and replaces it with a dialectical one, arguing for the need of supplementing reason with paralogical modes of thinking, especially imagination and sentiment. Like Kant, he attempts to awaken people from their “dogmatic slumber”¹⁶⁴ with regard to the suffering of animals. To achieve this, one needs to consider various points of view on equal basis, refute the idea of infallible reason, and approach rationality from a position of paralogy, that is, a viewpoint which Lyotard perceived as refining rationality with non-rational modes of cognition.

The tenet of Coetzee's dialectics with reference to animals is that he does not reject

163 Northover, J. M. Coetzee and Animal Rights, 144.

164 Cf. Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, trans. and ed. Lewis White Beck (1783;

Indianapolis: Bobbs–Merrill, 1950), 5.

reason itself but the idea of its dogmatic infallibility. Through the dialectics of The Lives of Animals, Coetzee exceeds the norms of self-sufficient rationalism, and he strives for a harmonious exchange of ideas, leading to one's humanistic improvement as well as to successful animal ethics. The purpose of the extended rationality could be referred to as a harmonious inclusion of animal ethics into general ethics.

Conclusion

In the twentieth century, there has been an observable return to Kant's ideas both in natural

In the twentieth century, there has been an observable return to Kant's ideas both in natural