It’s hard to know exactly where Keats’s admiration and his irony reside.
Coetzee’s first lecture is titled “The Philosophers and the Animals,” and the second “The Poets and the Animals.” But a good half of the second lecture, and a third of Elizabeth Costello’s performance schedule at Appleton College, is given over to discussing philosophy or philosophers, since after her appearance at the English department she takes part in a debate with philosopher Thomas O’Hearne. (Can he be a relative of animal poet and philosopher Vickie Hearne?).
Within the family, too, there is a parallel debate, between the novelist and the philosopher, between Elizabeth and Norma. What are they really fighting about? What is the structural relationship between the mother and the wife—which is to say, between literature and philosophy? Norma’s resistance is staged as competition with the mother, and in the closing moments there is an insistence on the word “normal”—defined as life without the famous mother on the scene. (Or perhaps life without literature?) And is the mother—the famous mother—above the battle? I don’t think so. John arrives late at his mother’s English department seminar, and the minute he comes in she begins to talk about his subject, physics, in connection with Rilke’s panther poem. Actually, John Bernard and his wife don’t really seem very interested in animals—and they don’t know a lot about them if they think an older dog is more trouble than a puppy.
A GREAT DEAL of the tension at Appleton College seems to revolve around what Freud called “the seduction of an analogy.” This is a matter that goes straight to the heart of the humanities and of literary and cultural studies. I made a list of figures of speech that appeared in these lectures: donkey’s years, scapegoat, close to the bone, stew in their own juice, prick up my ears, easy to digest, baby potatoes. I’m sure I’ve missed some. Whoever it was who coined the phrase “dead metaphor” could hardly have been more wrong. Is the comparison of human beings to animals venal? Patronizing? A mode of false consciousness? A blasphemy? A necessary mediation? Viewed in literary terms, this is the challenge to humanism.
But there is a larger question: the function of analogy in the posing of some of the most urgent ethical and political questions. At the beginning of “The Poets and the Animals” we are offered the quiet anger of a poet who objects to Elizabeth Costello’s analogy between the murdered Jews of Europe and slaughtered cattle. “If Jews were treated like cattle,” he says, “it dos not follow that cattle are treated like Jews. The inversion insults the memory of the dead.” In protest he absents himself from the dinner in her honor. At the end of “The Poets and the Animals” Elizabeth herself returns, as if compelled, to the horrific image of the Holocaust. She confesses to her son that sometimes she thinks the entire population of the meat-eating world are “participants in a crime of stupefying proportions.” And she imagines visiting friends and admiring a lamp in their living room, only to be told that the shade is made of Polish-Jewish female skin.
Whether the Holocaust could ever be part of any analogy, much less this one, has been regularly debated and disputed. It is the event beyond analogy, many people say. And yet it is part of oblique and not so oblique analogies every day. Here is an example from recent popular culture.
The children’s film Babe, about an intelligent and sensitive pig who learns to herd sheep, begins with a scene in a factory shed that directly evokes both German expressionist film and the specter of the Nazi death camps. Low-angled cameras and glaring lights illuminate men dressed in ankle-length lab coats that are evocative of storm-trooper trenchcoats. The men are carrying cattle prods. They descend upon a nursing sow and her piglets and drive her into a truck. The film’s voice-over speaks ironically of pig heaven, the place to which all pigs must desire to go, since those that have gone before them seem so content never to return. Suddenly a mechanical milking spigot descends like a bomb in the midst of the remaining piglets. They, too, are marked for slaughter. Babe, the runt, is the only one to survive—and even he narrowly escapes being made into chops and ham in his new life on a family farm. Is this a trivial analogy? Even an insulting one, since pigs, after all, are distinctly nonKosher? The Holocaust is one profound challenge to the use of analogy.
Coetzee’s philosopher O’Hearne alludes briefly to another seductive and painful analogy between animal suffering and human suffering when he dismisses the animal-rights movement as “Western” and falsely universalist. For the animal-protection societies that arose in the nineteenth century were in fact founded by the same social activists who founded the antislavery and woman’s suffrage societies. In the United States the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 was followed by the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865; a year later the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals was founded. A similar pattern can be found in Britain, where those who campaigned against slavery were also active in the anticruelty movement. Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty, published in 1877, was hailed as “the Uncle Tom’s Cabin of the horse” by the president of the American Humane Society, George Angell. This analogy—to a horse called black beauty, after all—was surely capable of giving offense to many American blacks. Again human suffering seems (perhaps) demeaned by comparison with animal suffering. Is this, too, the seduction of an analogy?
But the dangers of figurative language are perhaps most effectively evoked in Coetzee’s text through the references to sociobiology, or what Elizabeth Costello refers to as “ethnobiology.” In Not in Our Genes authors Richard Lewontin, Steven Rose, and Leon J. Kamin argue that one of the errors of sociobiology is to take metaphors for real identities, and to forget (we might say “naturalize”) the source of the metaphors. Here they cite in particular two ideas that predate sociobiology but are incorporated into it: the idea of caste in insects and the phenomenon of “slavery” in ants.
These ideas, they say, are transferences from the human realm to the animal or natural realm. (What in linguistics and in literary study is called back-formation, the creation of a new word through the deletion of what is mistakenly understood to be an affix from an existing word: for example, laze, a back-formation from lazy on the model of haze and hazy.) “There is a process of backward etymology in sociobiological theory in which human social institutions are laid on animals, metaphorically, and then the human behavior is rederived from the animals as if it were a special case of a general phenomenon that had been independently discovered in other species,” they point out. “Does an ant queen (once called a king, before her sex was realized), a totally captive, forcefed, egg-bearing machine, have any resemblance to Elizabeth I or Catherine the Great, or even to the politically powerless but exceedingly rich Elizabeth II?”{R. C. Lewontin, Steven Rose, and Leon J. Kamin, Not in Our Genes: Biology, Ideology, and Human Nature (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), 249.} (Angels and Insects, anyone?)