The Lives of Animals by J. M. Coetzee

Author:J. M. Coetzee
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Princeton University Press

Marjorie Garber

“We are here tonight,” he informed the audience,

“to listen to a lecture.”

Kingsley Amis, Lucky Jim

THE TANNER LECTURES sponsored by the Princeton University Center for Human Values were organized this year with special attention to disciplinarity and its discontents. Novelist John Coetzee’s two lectures, “The Philosophers and the Animals” and “The Poets and the Animals,” met with responses from four scholars with widely different disciplinary (or interdisciplinary) trainings: an animal ethicist, a biologist, a historian of religion, and a literary critic.

Even within Coetzee’s lecture-narratives themselves, we might note, some characters express anxiety about disciplines and their authority. The college president, we learn, used to be a political scientist. (What is he now?) “That’s just anthropology,” scoffs Norma, the philosopher of mind, when the subject of dietary laws comes up. And novelist Elizabeth Costello is equally dismissive of certain social science experiments which she regards as mere imbecilities.

In view of these partitions of knowledge, I thought I had better pose some questions having to do with the disciplines I was trained in or might be supposed to know something about—disciplines like literature, psychoanalysis, gender theory, cultural studies, and Shakespeare (which has emerged in recent years as virtually a discipline unto itself). Here were the questions that came to my mind.

• What does the form have to do with the content?

This is a central question for all literary critics, of whatever generation and vintage—and with a novelist of this skill and artfulness (I mean John Coetzee, not Elizabeth Costello) it’s a consistently rewarding one.

So, “What does the form of these lectures have to do with the content?” was my first question.

And my second, prompted by psychoanalysis, was:

• What does the form of these lectures displace, repress, or dis-

avow? What is striking in its absence here?

• What are the relationships between the sexes, and between

family members, in Coetzee’s narrative?

This was a third kind of question, a gender-and-sexuality question. Why should a classic sexual triangle of the human social and cultural world (mother-son-son’s wife) animate an argument about animals?

And this led me to yet another question, driven by my own recent interest in animal-human relations and what I’ve called “dog love”:1

• What does the emphasis on animals tell us about people?

You’ll see that in a way this is a version of the displacement question. But it is also built into the very form and content of Coetzee’s Lives of Animals, from the concern about Holocaust analogies to the framing of the whole narrative between references—at the beginning and the end—to the mother’s arrival at and departure from the airport and to her “old flesh.” If she’s flying, she’s also dying.

Finally, and most crucially perhaps for this occasion, which was, after all, a series sponsored by the Center for Human Values :

• What, if anything, is the “value” of literary study in today’s academy and today’s world? Is literary analysis a human value?

In the next few pages I will hazard some very brief answers to each of these sweeping questions.

LET ME BEGIN with the one

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