How to be good?
I recently spent
a week at the National Humanities Center for a summer institute lead by Robert Pippin (philosophy giant at the
University of Chicago) on form and politics in the works of J. M. Coetzee. Ok, so I have to give mad props to the
NHC, an entity that I didn’t even realize existed until a colleague placed a
flyer for the institute in my mailbox during the fall of last year. I applied and was accepted, but I
wasn’t really sure what I was in for until I got there. The seminar consisted of 14 scholars,
all of whom, as per the NHC’s stipulation, had completed their phds in the past
10 years. As is not unexpected for
any group of people who consider Coetzee’s work in terms of its ethical
implications, I was one of several vegetarians in the group – the only vegan,
to be precise – and I was the oldest member of the cadre, attending for the
first time in my penultimate year of eligibility, which was a strange and
enlightening experience for me.
An aside: it’s
an increasingly unfriendly world for those of us in the humanities, as was
apparent in the job search narratives of the newly minted phds attending the
institute. At one point during the
seminar, Robert asked, “how much longer will they let us teach literature and
philosophy before they stop us?” and then answered – rightly, I think, “maybe a
generation or two longer.”
Yeah, we've all seen this, but it's worth watching it again, if you have any aspirations in this direction.
The deal was
awesome: we were paid $1500 to be there, to attend five, three hour seminars
over the course of the week, to talk about the work of J. M. Coetzee. The institute fed us two meals a day,
reimbursed us for travel, provided us with office space for the week, and provided
us with transportation to and from the Chapel Hill Inn – a place that’s so full
of its old south charm as to be offensive in a self-satisfied, not at all
ironic sort of way (I rode up on the elevator with an African American family,
the father of which looked at me and said, “well, this is like going back in
time, isn’t it?” I said, “yeah,
maybe a time we’d rather not go back to”).
That building in the background is the Inn. OK, not really.
We covered a lot
of material during the week, starting with Waiting for the Barbarians
and Life & Times of Michael K and ending with Coetzee’s most recent
work Summertime. On
Wednesday, we discussed Disgrace and Elizabeth Costello (specifically the “lessons” that comprise The
Lives of Animals), and I found myself, quite to my surprise, on the
verge of both constant outbursts of anger and on the verge of tears – tears!! –
for most of the discussion. Here’s
why (with apologies to Robert Pippin): I have a deep investment in both of
these texts, having written about them extensively,[i]
and I realized that day that I clearly have a sense of propriety over
them. Actually, I felt this way
about most of the texts that we were covering during the course of the week:
that they were somehow mine – mine because they changed my life in ways that
are activist and NOT intellectual, and
most certainly in ways that have left me stunned and speechless when I see them
not changing the lives of others.
By and large, our discussions of these works had situated Coetzee’s
literature as philosophy – and that’s an approach that I both appreciate and
understand, coming, as it obviously was, from our seminar leader, a philosopher
who is not a literary scholar.
But what was bugging me – what had worked its way beneath my skin – was
what had started to feel over the course of the week like a systematic dismissal
of the ways that certain works of literature perhaps require both an analysis
of their engagement with real sociohistorical instances of institutionalized
and normalized racism, sexism, and speciesism and – and this one is all
me – a defense of our action or inaction in the face of such injustices. When I say that Disgrace and The
Lives of Animals changed my life, I mean that reading these two texts
constituted part of a transformative process that I underwent around 2000, when
I decided, first, that I would write my dissertation on Coetzee rather than
pursue my original goal of the study of women’s literature and, second, that I
would become vegan. To be clear:
reading Coetzee didn’t cause me to become vegan, but reading Coetzee did
contribute to that decision.
Some brief background on Coetzee, if you don’t know his work and are
still reading at this point: most, if not all of Coetzee’s novels end with
characters having changed only through their acquisition of negative knowledge,
or, perhaps even more problematically, by virtue of their realization that they
haven’t changed. At the end
of Waiting for the Barbarians, the Magistrate finds himself on “a road
that may lead nowhere” (156); at the end of Life & Times of Michael K,
Michael imagines subsisting on teaspoons of water taken from the earth. Disgrace is Coetzee’s most
famous work, a novel that details the life of white South African former
literature professor David Lurie’s downfall after his questionably consensual
sexual relationship with a female student, his daughter Lucy’s subsequent gang
rape by three black men, and David’s “service” in the disposal of the corpses
of unwanted euthanized dogs. The
novel ends with David, burned, robbed, and jobless, “giving up” a crippled dog
to the needle.
The Lives of
Animals, published in
1999 – the same year as Disgrace – is often read as a kind of companion
piece to that novel. Lives
is complex in terms of its metanarrative import, consisting of two lectures on
animals given by the (fictional) aging Australian novelist Elizabeth Costello
at the (fictional) Appleton College.
Coetzee read Lives as his 1997-1998 Princeton Tanner Lectures,
and critics have endlessly tried to ascribe Costello’s animal rights position –
that the treatment of livestock animals in industrialized societies is
synonymous with the treatment of Jews during the Holocaust – to Coetzee. Whether Costello’s opinions reflect
Coetzee’s (and I suspect that they do on some accounts and don’t on others) is
of little concern to me. What is
of concern is what we, as readers, teachers, scholars, and, yes, activists, do
with the dialogic debates engendered by her opinions.
Within the
context of Lives, Costello’s assertion generates outrage among members
of her audience at Appleton, as such an assertion, in any context, is apt to
do. At the end of Lives,
Costello says to her son John, “I no longer know where I am. I seem to move around perfectly easily
among people, to have perfectly normal relationships with them. Is it possible, I ask myself, that all
of them are participating in a crime of stupefying proportions? Am I fantasizing it all? I must be mad! Yet everyday I see the evidences. The very people I suspect produce the
evidence, exhibit it, offer it to me.
Corpses. Fragments of
corpses that they have bought for money” (114).
When she
mentions the “crime of stupefying proportions,” Costello is, of course,
speaking of the treatment of animals in the industrialized world. The question is, what do we do with the
information Costello provides us?
Do we interpret what happens to animals as “crime”? Do we conscience a comparison of that “crime”
to the “Holocaust”? If so, then
what allows us to keep participating in such a crime? And if not, how do we make sense and how do we narrate what
is happening to animals in our midst?
Pippin asserted
that Coetzee’s work constitutes an act of preparing the way as opposed to
bringing about a change. He
further offered that human beings can’t make themselves find important things
that they don’t find important. I
can buy both of these things, to a point.
With regard to a kind of inherent inability to find important that which
one does not find important, I turn to the subject of golf. There are days when I am completely
aware of the fact that I should find it important, that I should learn to play it
even, because doing so would allow me access to a largely male cultural
practice that embodies and enables access to certain modes of power.
But I don’t care about golf, and I have no interest in playing it, and
no amount of knowing that it might be in my best interest to do so is going to
change the utter lack of interest that I feel with regard to golf. But I’m relatively certain that there’s
not an ethical component to my lack of interest in golf in the same way that I
feel the same degree of certainty that there is an ethical component in, say,
not being interested in the suffering of animals. Or maybe you could counter that, as a woman, it is my
ethical obligation, no matter how interested or disinterested I am, to learn
to play golf in order to further women’s chances as ever being anything other
than second-class citizens. If that was your counter, then touché.
Yes, this image exists.
How about this
as a counter argument to the claim that we can’t make ourselves care about
things that we don’t care about: to begin, I gather, first and foremost that we’re
working with a tautology (“I don’t care because I don’t care”). A colleague who has researched and
written extensively about the horrific suffering of factory-farmed chickens
continues to eat chicken (he’s also repeatedly told me that I’m a “better
person” than him for not eating chickens, a statement that sounds laudatory but
is ultimately dismissive – and lets him off the hook). His knowledge of the suffering of
chickens is not enough for him to find their plight important, at least not in
the sense of refusing to participate in it. To write about it, certainly. To think about it, likewise. Further, if an awareness of animal suffering is not important enough for most
people (and it isn't), neither is the environmental toll of meat: the meat industry is already
responsible for 18% of all greenhouse gas emissions – and global meat
consumption is predicted to double by 2050 (McHugh 185). But what if the counter argument to “I
don’t care because I don’t care” is “despite not caring, you can – and should –
do X anyway.” Bad logic? Well, so’s the original argument, so
I’m working with what I’ve got.
* Look at
me! I’m philosophizin’!
OK, so back to
the seminar and Pippin’s other claim, that “Coetzee’s work constitutes an act
of preparing the way as opposed to bringing about a change.” Coetzee’s work does do that. It does get the reader to the point
just prior to a potential (but highly unlikely) shift in a way of thinking or
acting. But I find that assertion
just another cop out – and I said so, right at that moment when I couldn’t sit
quietly by any longer. I mean,
good for us to sit around and analyze what Coetzee’s works say about the
horrors of what’s done to animals, and good for us to pat ourselves on the
backs for figuring out the true nature of Coetzee’s fictions . .
. and then proceed to lunch and eat BLTs.
Coetzee has prepared the way; we don’t have to change. And I realize that change, particularly
with regard to the act of not eating animals, is always a fraught prospect,
even among the most enlightened of folks.
After discussing Disgrace and Lives, I ate an ALT
(avocado, lettuce, and tomato) and admitted to being vegan, and much of the
discussion over lunch was about vegetarianism. Over lunch, I got these questions from the same person:
1. What about Hitler’s vegetarianism?
2. What about abused children? Hey, for that matter, what about
plants? Didn’t I know that plants
have feelings, too?
I’ve addressed
the red herring of the Hitler issue elsewhere in this blog, and I don’t want to
waste another word on the subject.
In response to the second issue, I offered up Carol J. Adams’s notion of
“retrograde humanism.” Adams
notes, “”when people learn that I’m a vegan . . . they react with such
vehemence and accuse me of not caring for (1) abused children, (2) the homeless,
(3) the hungry, (4) battered women, (5) the environment, and (6) workers, among
many other things. . . . Sometimes
I laughingly claim that my veganism has prompted more people to announce their
concerns for human suffering than my activism ever did.” Retrograde humanism,
she notes, happens when people who aren’t vegetarian assert their own humanism
in the face of feeling confronted by what feels like, well, a dietary
confrontation: “finding out they might be doing more, they accuse vegans of
doing less” (127). In such a construction, animal activism
or vegetarianism or veganism functions to lead one into an infinite ethical
regression: the only way to be “genuine” or “good enough” in such a formulation
is not to do anything, because as soon as you do something, you’re held
to a standard (to which others don’t hold themselves) that immediately assumes
that you’re not doing enough.
So at the end of
the day – and at the end of the seminar – I’m still, despite lots of evidence
to the contrary, of the belief that thinking is good, but doing is better. And if anyone out there does become a
vegetarian after reading Coetzee (or reading this blog), I’ll learn to play
golf. Swear it.
Notes
“‘Does He Have it in Him to be the
Woman?’ The Performance of Displacement in J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace.” Ariel 37.4 (2006): 83-102.
“In Defense of Elizabeth Costello: Rants
from an Ethical Academic on J. M. Coetzee’s The
Lives of
Animals.” J. M. Coetzee and the Idea of the Public Intellectual. Ed. Jane Poyner. Athens: U of Ohio P, 2006. 193-216.
Writing ‘Out of All the Camps’: J. M.
Coetzee’s Narratives of Displacement. New York: Routledge
Press, 2006 and
2009.
Works Cited
Adams, Carol J. “What Came Before The Sexual Politics
of Meat: The Activist Roots of a Critical Theory.” Species Matters: Humane Advocacy and
Cultural Theory. Eds. Marianne
DeKoven and Michael Lundblad. New York: Columbia UP, 2012. 103-138.
Coetzee, J. M. Disgrace. New York: Penguin, 1999.
---. Elizabeth
Costello. New York: Viking, 2003.
---. Life
& Times of Michael K. New York: Penguin, 1985.
---. Waiting
for the Barbarians. New York: Penguin, 1980.
McHugh, Susan. “Real Artificial: Tissue-Cultured Meat, Genetically Modified
Animals, and Fictions.” Configurations
18.1-2 (2010): 181-197.
