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127 PAGES

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By Douglas Cruickshank

June 25, 1999 | I love animals and I also love eating them and that's a problem -- especially for the animals. For them it's a matter of life or death, while for me it's merely an ethical dilemma I can usually avoid pondering -- a way of coping with moral contradictions that works well for me (and legions of others), not so well for the animals. Besides, there is a longstanding, well-reasoned hierarchy on Earth ("might is right" being its ideological basis) and we humans, being the most reasoning of creatures, sit atop it and are therefore due a degree of deference (and sustenance) from the other beasts, aren't we? Absolutely not, says Elizabeth Costello.

Costello is the central character in "The Lives of Animals," J.M. Coetzee's new novella, and a novelist herself. She has been asked to take part in the Tanner Lectures, sponsored by the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University, where her son, John, is a physics professor. But instead of discussing her fiction, she chooses to lecture (and I do mean lecture) on human cruelty to animals and the ethical issues surrounding the production and consumption of meat, somewhat to John's discomfort and with the unbridled contempt of his wife, Norma, who has no use for Elizabeth or what she sees as her mother-in-law's fluffy thinking.

To complicate matters, as novelists like to do, the novella is published with an introduction and a series of commentaries by various real-life scholars; and Coetzee first presented this story by reading it last year at Princeton, when he was invited to deliver the Tanner Lectures. The introduction is by political philosopher Amy Gutman, and the responsive essays that accompany the novella are by religion scholar Wendy Doniger, psychologist and anthropologist Barbara Smuts, literary theorist Marjorie Garber and moral philosopher Peter Singer, author of "Animal Liberation." Frankly, there are going to be some who say this is the sort of exercise that gives intellectual discourse a bad name, and while I'm sympathetic to the cause, I'll have to agree with them -- with the glowing exception of Smuts' essay, this is arid, didactic stuff.

Coetzee's novella, and Costello's cause, are not helped by the fact that the minor figure, Norma, tends to be the most appealing, if not on the ethical issues, then certainly in her view of Elizabeth, who comes off as something of a pill, a piece of work, a monopolizer of oxygen and presumably no treat as a mother-in-law. But "The Lives of Animals" is a fable -- moral instruction -- and these are iconic characters, employed as vehicles for differing perspectives, rather than as personalities whose subtle interactions generate drama, emotion, transcendence. Coetzee puts his characters into a lecture hall, and later around a dinner table, and lets them have at each other "Nightline"-style.

Calling on Descartes, Kant and Swift among others, Costello lays out her case, setting herself up by drawing the oft used (and sure to provoke) parallel between the Holocaust and the meat industry. Meanwhile, her opposite, Thomas O'Hearne, a professor of philosophy who boycotts her first lecture, later challenges her in a debate. "Thomas Aquinas says that friendship between human beings and animals is impossible, and I tend to agree," says O'Hearne. "You can be friends neither with a Martian nor with a bat, for the simple reason that you have too little in common with them."

Next page | Where are the damn animals?