The Wounded Animal by Stephen Mulhall;

Author:Stephen Mulhall;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2022-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

Singer and Garber

So much for another poet’s attempts to articulate the otherness of animals. But of course, Costello’s seminar was just as much designed to underline the mysteriousness of literature as that of animality. She persistently pictures its manifestations in poetry as fundamentally obscure phenomena—ones that depend upon an enigmatic capacity to understand nonexistent beings, and to understand their nonexistence as internally related to real beings, and in particular to the real being of their authors, and of the literary, cultural, social, and historical contexts within which they are all embedded. Appreciating the contours of her lecture and seminar from this perspective thus returns us to one of the examples she deploys in her lecture to illustrate the incomprehensible comprehensibility of animal modes of being—her comparison between thinking one’s way into the being of fictional characters, and thinking one’s way into the being of other living creatures.

It is worth recalling that this is a point that Singer’s central character, Peter, cites only in order to dismiss, in his fictional response to Costello’s lecture. The dismissal occurs towards the end of the tale in which he stars, immediately after he has used the example of the Kahlua bottle to criticise Costello’s talk of fullness of animal being:

That’s not the worst argument, either. Listen to this. Costello is talking about a book she has written in which she thinks herself into the character of Joyce’s Marion Bloom, and then she says,

“If I can think my way into the existence of a being who has never existed, then I can think my way into the existence of a bat or a chimpanzee or an oyster, any being with whom I share the substrate of life.”

Naomi is glad to leave the topic of Kahlua: “You don’t have to be a philosopher to see what is wrong with that. The fact that a character doesn’t exist isn’t something that makes it hard to imagine yourself as that character. You can imagine someone very like yourself, or like someone else you know. Then it is easy to think your way into the existence of that being. But a bat, or an oyster? Who knows? If that’s the best argument Coetzee can put up for his radical egalitarianism, you won’t have any trouble showing how weak it is. (LA, 90–91)

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