Elizabeth Costello

Elizabeth Costello’s morality when it comes to the treatment of animals seems to be based on her desire to save her soul (89). What does saving the soul mean, and does she believe that through kindness to animals and vegetarianism she could really save her soul?

Elizabeth Costello believes that humans have the ability to imagine themselves (infinitely) into the ‘being’ of another. It is this ability that should allow humans to ‘feel’ for others and therefore make them refrain from causing others pain. Yet, she is surrounded by people who don’t believe that imagining oneself into the being of a bat, for example, is the same as being on the same level as the bat. In other words, the fact that humans could imagine what a bat must ‘feel’ doesn’t make humans and bats creatures of equal importance. If anything, this fact puts humans higher than any other creatures, because no other creature is capable of this act. A bat, then, remains a lower creature, one whose death has just as little importance, if any, as its life.

Elizabeth dismisses the ability to reason (i.e. imagine) as a deciding factor in this dilemma. She focuses on the soul instead. Even if scientists can prove that non-human animals can’t imagine (or reason), no one can prove that they don’t feel. Kant says that we can only understand things through our own facilities. If this is true, then humans can only understand what we humans ‘feel’, which means that we can’t prove that other animals don’t feel (the same or something similar). If we can’t prove the absence of something, then we can’t ignore the possibility of its existence.

It is the acknowledgement of this possibility that gives Elizabeth Costello the “desire to save [her] soul”, for to keep eating meat (to focus on her vegetarianism, for example) would mean reinforcing the killing of animals, who potentially feel what we humans would feel as we were being killed. By ‘separating’ herself from the killers, she is attempting to save her soul, but even she realizes that this isn’t enough, because knowing about them and their actions makes her an accomplice for as long as she doesn’t have a way to stop them. It is the knowledge of the truth that makes her feel ‘guilty’ of a crime she doesn’t commit. 

 Animals killed in Ohio

 Photo by Trish J. Louis

Foe: The Triangle of Depreciated Opression

"Is there something in the condition of slavehood that invades the heart and makes a slave a slave for life...?"(85)

            The oppressor/oppressed theme is present in all of the Coetzee novels discussed thus far in this blog. In Foe, this theme takes a new shape- it is not a binary, but a triangle-relationship, I would argue: Crusoe --> Susan Barton--> Friday. Susan’s role in this triangle is dualistic- she is both an oppressor and an oppressed. Though ‘saved’ by Crusoe, she is also ‘enslaved’ by him, yet she doesn’t recognize her position of a slave. Instead, she feels ‘indebted’ to fate for abandoning her on his island instead of one “infested with lions and snakes, or on an island where rain never fell…” (25) This ‘depreciation’ of oppression is present throughout the novel. After Cruso’s death, Susan takes Friday to England with her, where he lives as her servant. Though she openly expresses doubt regarding her intentions behind any communication with Friday, unsure of whether she talks to him to “educate” him or to “subject him to [her] will” (60), Susan still refuses to consider him her servant, and by doing so, she refuses to consider herself his master. She says, “Friday was not my slave but Cruso’s… He cannot even be said to be a servant, so idle is his life.” (76)

            Even Cruso doesn’t consider himself a slave-owner, nor does he consider Friday’s situation unfortunate for Friday, for him, or for anyone else for that matter; after all, who would be left to “pick the cotton and the sugar-cane… [if Providence didn’t] sometimes wake and sometimes sleep…” (23) And, just like Susan looks for the ‘silver lining’ in her story, Cruso finds one in Friday’s story; after all, Friday could have found himself “under the planter’s lash, or in Africa, where the forests teem with cannibals”, but instead he found himself a “lenient master” (23).

             This triangle of oppression operates as a system hereditary rule, in which Friday is at the bottom of the hierarchy, and though we aren’t quite sure who is at the very top in the whole picture of things (as Friday was handed down to Cruso by someone else), within this triangle- Cruso is at the top. 

            

If we were to read Foe metaphorically, yet universally and not just specifically in the South African context, couldn’t we then easily assign values to A, B and C:

a)     A= Great Britain, B= Newly formed United States, C= Natives

b)    A= Portugal, B= Brazil, C= Natives

c)     A=Europeans- British and Dutch, B= South African government, C= Natives

      Etc….

Note how ‘Natives’ always occupy ‘C’?

 

Michael K's journey Into the Wild (or away from it?)

"What a pity that to live in times like these a man must be ready to live like a beast" (99). 

Michael K. is yet another one of Coetzee’s peculiar characters, whose journey into the wild we witness in Life & Times of Michael K. But is this really a journey into the wild or a failed attempt at escaping from the wild?  Coetzee plays this make-believe game again: just like in Waiting for the Barbarians, at the surface, a distinction between the civilized and the uncivilized is drawn, but when we dig a little deeper, the boundaries between the two become fuzzy. We are left to wonder where civilization stops and barbarianism begins, where true wildness lies.

From the moment of his birth, Michael K is different, he is an other. Abandoned by society, and even by his own mother until she needs him, Michael leaves the so-called ‘civilization’ and goes into the mountains.  In his “Toward an Ethics of Silence: Michael K,” Duncan McColl Chesney explains, “The times force K into bestiality…” K is the product of the society that rejects him. What’s so peculiar about his case, is that, unlike many ‘outcasts’, Michael doesn’t recognize himself as a victim, as an outcast; he deals with things in a matter-of-fact, at times instinctive way. Michael’s journey comes to a full circle when he is returned 'home' to Cape Town. There, lying on a cardboard, he thinks, “I am more like an earthworm…Or a mole…But a mole or an earthworm on a cement floor?” (182)
How can a ‘gardener’ survive concrete?

Reading this novel, I was reminded of the 2007 movie “Into the Wild”, where the young protagonist, Christopher, sets off on a journey across the United States, settling in Alaska. Leaving civilization behind, he searches for a new meaning in life, and believes to have found happiness in a remote place, in the wild away from wildness. He dies at the end, alone and starved, paying for his new-found freedom with his life. His ashes are returned 'home'.

Is there no escape from the concrete grip of ‘civilization’, from its wildness, is there no escape from society, even when you reject it, even when it rejects you...

Photo by Stefan Janeschitz