The Lives of Animals

She turns on him a tearful face. What does she want, he thinks? Does she want me to answer her question for her?

They are not yet on the expressway. He pulls the car over, switches off the engine, takes his mother in his arms. He inhales the smell of cold cream, of old flesh. “There, there,” he whispers in her ear. “There, there. It will soon be over.”

REFLECTIONS ¦

Marjorie Garber ¦

“We are here tonight,” he informed the audience, “to listen to a lecture.”

Kingsley Amis, Lucky Jim

THE TANNER LECTURES sponsored by the Princeton University Center for Human Values were organized this year with special attention to disciplinarity and its discontents. Novelist John Coetzee’s two lectures, “The Philosophers and the Animals” and “The Poets and the Animals,” met with responses from four scholars with widely different disciplinary (or interdisciplinary) trainings: an animal ethicist, a biologist, a historian of religion, and a literary critic.

Even within Coetzee’s lecture-narratives themselves, we might note, some characters express anxiety about disciplines and their authority. The college president, we learn, used to be a political scientist. (What is he now?) “That’s just anthropology,” scoffs Norma, the philosopher of mind, when the subject of dietary laws comes up. And novelist Elizabeth Costello is equally dismissive of certain social science experiments which she regards as mere imbecilities.

In view of these partitions of knowledge, I thought I had better pose some questions having to do with the disciplines I was trained in or might be supposed to know something about—disciplines like literature, psychoanalysis, gender theory, cultural studies, and Shakespeare (which has emerged in recent years as virtually a discipline unto itself ). Here were the questions that came to my mind.

• What does the form have to do with the content?

This is a central question for all literary critics, of whatever generation and vintage—and with a novelist of this skill and artfulness (I mean John Coetzee, not Elizabeth Costello) it’s a consistently rewarding one.

So, “What does the form of these lectures have to do with the content?” was my first question.

And my second, prompted by psychoanalysis, was:

• What does the form of these lectures displace, repress, or disavow? What is striking in its absence here?

• What are the relationships between the sexes, and between family members, in Coetzee’s narrative?

This was a third kind of question, a gender-and-sexuality question. Why should a classic sexual triangle of the human social and cultural world (mother-son-son’s wife) animate an argument about animals?

And this led me to yet another question, driven by my own recent interest in animal-human relations and what I’ve called “dog love”:{Marjorie Garber, Dog Love (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996).}

• What does the emphasis on animals tell us about people? You’ll see that in a way this is a version of the displacement question. But it is also built into the very form and content of Coetzee’s Lives of Animals, from the concern about Holocaust analogies to the framing of the whole narrative between references—at the beginning and the end—to the mother’s arrival at and departure from the airport and to her “old flesh.” If she’s flying, she’s also dying.

Finally, and most crucially perhaps for this occasion, which was, after all, a series sponsored by the Center for Human Values:

• What, if anything, is the “value” of literary study in today’s academy and today’s world? Is literary analysis a human value?

In the next few pages I will hazard some very brief answers to each of these sweeping questions.

LET ME BEGIN with the one particular moment in the lectures we heard that struck me especially forcefully with its experiential truth—the moment when the narrator, John Bernard, a young, untenured professor of physics and astronomy, imagines the kind of audience that will attend his mother’s second talk. “The English department is staging it,” he tells his wife. “They are holding it in a seminar room, so I don’t think they are expecting a big audience.” As a member of an English department myself, I easily recognized this note of skepticism about the size of audiences for literary topics. (On the occasion of the Tanner Lectures at Princeton, in fact, the large lecture hall was full.)

“Writers teach us more than they are aware of,” observes Costello. She is ostensibly talking about the poet Ted Hughes. And,“The book we read isn’t the book he thought he was writing,” she says. She is ostensibly talking about Wolfgang Kohler’s Mentality of Apes. But she is also—could anything be clearer?— talking about the author of The Lives of Animals. Who, like Elizabeth Costello, is a novelist addressing an audience of college students and faculty. Costello herself, like Coetzee, the author of Foe, is celebrated for her rewriting of a classic—in her case Joyce’s Ulysses.

The frame story—the metafiction so familiar and delightful to readers of Coetzee—is deftly established.

On the basis of her reputation as a novelist [she] has been invited to Appleton to speak on any subject she elects; and she has responded by electing to speak, not about herself and her fiction, as her sponsors would no doubt prefer, but about a hobbyhorse of hers, animals.

It’s perfect; even to the term “hobbyhorse,” which means both obsession and horse costume, the figurative and the literal bound up together in a way that will reveal itself as characteristic within these deceptively transparent lectures.

The debate with philosophy Professor O’Hearne is set up, we learn, rather like the Tanner Lectures. A text has been circulated in advance: “Since O’Hearne has had the courtesy to send her a precis beforehand, she knows, broadly speaking, what he will be saying.“ Broadly speaking indeed. Some things have been added and omitted— and such additions and omissions, such traces and overlaps, are the very stuff of literary analysis.

After Elizabeth Costello’s first lecture, “The Philosophers and the Animals,” her son concludes that the event has been an oddity: “A strange ending to a strange talk, he thinks, ill gauged, ill argued. Not her metier, argumentation. She should not be here.” Is this authorial self-abnegation? An escape clause written in advance by a novelist who has consented to speak in an academic venue? A droll resistance to an imagined critique? Or an explanation of the path not taken, a tacit rationale for the novelist’s decision to speak in and through a fictional frame?

These lectures and responses, in short—the lectures and responses that were initially presented to the audience in a Princeton University lecture hall—have already been anticipated, fictionalized, and appropriated. A lecture within a lecture; a response within a response. What is the strategy of such an appropriation? Among other