The Lives of Animals

On reading J.M. Coetzee's "The Lives of Animals", the central idea I take away is that there is an extent to which people have to be willing to admit that rationality itself is imperfect if significant change in the treatment of animals is to occur.  Several times in the "story" people use the example of babies or the mentally challenged as human analogues to animal consciousness, and thus as representatives (in that we treat them as equals) of the argument for the better treatment of animals.  By the end of the "story" though, we see Elizabeth herself essentially admit to having relinquished reason, as she says she often feels she "must be mad", and that she doesn't understand why she can't come to terms with the world like everyone else does.  At this point, rather than react to her as he would towards a dog on account of her operating outside of rationality, John reacts the way most people would at seeing their mother in distress, with compassion.

This serves as a rather telling example of the fact that a great deal of human behavior, babies and the handicapped aside, is not rationally motivated, including the feeling of empathy for the suffering of others.  John in fact sets aside his own rationality at this point as well, as he first asks himself what his mother wants, ventures a question as an answer to his own question, then pulls over to hug her in light of his inability to generate satisfying answers.  Elizabeth's own revelation as to her motivations in supporting animal rights also exposes rationality itself as being a kind of afterthought, a construction implemented as a kind of band-aid in order for consciousness to have a means of explaining its own unconscious drives, which the conscious being must account for out of fear of the very unconscious, alien nature of these drives.

By thus undermining the central argument of his own story, Coetzee seems to be implying that the rationality behind any argument is on some level irrationally motivated.  In this case, he seems to ask if it even matters whether or not its rational to treat animals more respectfully.  He and those who share his views are being vocal about an issue that causes them suffering, rational or not, and we, like John, can either respond with compassion or not.  He rather obviously urges his audience towards compassion, as he suggests it as a primal response to the breakdown of reason and the suffering this can cause.  Ultimately I feel this is the purpose of having John rather cynically tell his mother "it will be over soon," as this immediately invokes our own compassion towards Elizabeth, given her son's rather fatalistic mindset in comforting her.  In this way it seems like Coetzee delivers a challenge to the audience, to first feel compassion for a fictional character (Elizabeth), and then to do better than John's intellectually empty (though poignant) pity for her by understanding the irrational nature of that compassion,  and then realizing that this very irrationality must motivate us to sustain this irrational compassion for the irrational in reality as well.

Is the other silent in Foe?

There are two key moments in Foe that I feel provide a great degree of insight into the novel's thematic structure, as they seem to specifically inform one another.  One of these is the novel's ending, which doesn't make much sense by itself, until looked at from the perspective of Susan's thoughts on the nature of her relationship with Cruso.  As she's trying to figure out the meaning of their sexual encounter, she reflects on the way individual agency sometimes seems absent in retrospect, as she says:

"What are these blinks of an eyelid, against which the only defence is an eternal and inhuman wakefulness?  Might they not be the cracks and chinks through which another voice, other voices, speak in our lives?  By what right do we close our ears to them?  The questions echoed in my head without answer" (30).

This seems to address the topic of whether or not the "other" can have a voice, answering in the affirmative as it asserts the presence of voices beyond the narrator's.  What it suggests though is not just that the "other" can have a voice, but rather that the "other's" voice is always the voice we don't hear.  This begs the question then of whether the subaltern is really even being silent or if it just communicates in ways beyond the awareness of an individual.  This can also be taken to imply that the "other" is not necessarily that which we perceive to be the other, in fact it should always be that which is not perceived at all.

This is why when "Friday" speaks at the end of the novel, neither the reader or the narrator really hears anything.  What they experience is more like some kind of unbreakable, all-encompassing force rather than words.  This is further compounded by the fact that Friday's identity here is ambiguous.  The Friday in the wrecked ship could not be the same Friday who scattered the petals which the narrator is presently swimming through, as Friday is presently "half-buried" in sand (157).  I'm also relatively certain that this whole scenario is some kind of dream, either that or our narrator is Aquaman or has gills.  Either way, this Friday seems to specifically be a representation of Friday drawn from someone else's perceptions of Friday.  Essentially this means what we get from Friday's "voice" is just some vague articulation of meaning as an incomprehensible yet present force, much in the same mode as that in which many of the other characters perceive the meaning of Friday and his actions.  Thus, this notion of Friday as the possessor of some kind of truth is revealed to be an imaginary notion in the mind of the narrator; but at the same time Friday has clearly succeeded in subverting the agency of the narrator as he has been inserted as a false identity within the the symbolic construct of the narrator's world.  This subversion of agency aligns with Susan's earlier remarks that it is in these lapses of agency that we experience these unheard voices, that we experience the unperceived.

Something like an introduction

Well, if you've found your way to this page then the odds are that this is not your introduction to Mr. Coetzee's work, but I'll say a couple things about him anyway for the sake of framing the rest of this paragraph.  Mr. Coetzee is a postmodern anti-imperialist author hailing from South Africa with a particular interest in the personal, political, and social dynamics of oppression.  Among other things.  Or so he would seem to have us believe.  Anyway, his work is like a literary critic's Gordian knot, and with no Alexander to come cut it in two for us, we literati are just going to have to put our thinking-caps on and get our hands dirty if we want to try and figure it out.  To that end, this blog is intended to be a place for the dirtying of hands, as I, and anyone who may feel so inclined, share freely our critical observations of his work.  Hopefully we can all come away from this with something resembles an understanding of his writing, or at the very least that warm, fuzzy feeling that we all surely get from engaging in focused literary critical discourse.