things, it is a strategy of control.
I CONFESS that I have always been a great fan of metatextual fiction—fiction about fictions, fiction that embodies and builds itself around a hall of mirrors, a mise en abime. So it was with a special flush of pleasure that I recognized these two lectures as belonging to that most accomplished and most maligned of modern literary genres, the academic novel. (Or in this case, perhaps, the academic novella.)
The academic novel is one of the most brilliant minor genres of our time. I say “minor” without intending any disparagement: there is no more pleasurable reading, at least for academics. The acknowledged classics of the genre are Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim and Randall Jarrell’s Pictures from an Institution, both of them, as it happens, published in 1954, one in England and one in the United States. No one who has read “Lucky” Jim Dixon’s account of “Merrie England,” delivered (at the behest of his tenured senior colleague) as his first—and perhaps last— public lecture, is likely to forget it. “The point about Merrie England is that it was about the most un-Merrie period in our history.”{Kingsley Amis, Lucky Jim (1954; London and New York: Penguin Books, 1992), 227.}
Some of my other favorites from recent years are David Lodge’s Changing Places (in which American Morris Zapp of Euphoria College and Briton Philip Swallow of the University of Rummidge exchange jobs and wives); Robert Barnard’s murder mystery The Old Goat, in which a pompous and ill-tempered English academic visits Australia; and Carolyn Heilbrun’s Death in a Tenured Position, in which the first tenured woman in the Harvard English department comes to an untimely end. (This particular text has had a special significance for me; on the occasion of my own arrival at Harvard in 1981, where I was—as it happens— the first woman to take up a tenured appointment in the Department of English, I received several copies of Heilbrun’s novel in the mail. I would like to believe that they came from well- wishers.)
In any case the tendency of the academic novel to merge with the murder mystery (think of Dorothy Sayers’s Gaudy Night or Michael Innes’s Death at the President’s Lodging or Rosamond Smith’s Nemesis) is itself a symptom of culture. The familiar elements of the genre include a beleaguered or bemused junior faculty member, usually from a department of the humanities, a pompous senior colleague, an oblivious college president, several other faculty members including at least one with a German name and another with an exotic European accent, and one or two fresh-faced undergraduates.
Perhaps closest to Coetzee’s Appleton College (located in the town of Waltham—a conflation, perhaps, of Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin, and Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts) is poet Randall Jarrell’s inspired description of the barely fictional Benton College for women (think southern Vermont). In Pictures from an Institution a wickedly witty female novelist, spending a year teaching creative writing, takes the occasion to write a tell-all academic novel. “Gertrude felt that the rhythms of academic conversation have been neglected by novelists; that whatever you say against novelists, you have to give them credit for that.”{Randall Jarrell, Pictures from an Institution (1954; Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 41.} Thus she resolutely submits to a conversation with the college president, who insists on talking to her about novels (“now she was Collecting for the Book”), {Ibid., 44.} and goads the resident painter, who paints feral animals in jungles and marshes, to reveal the identity of his favorite writer, D. H. Lawrence. (“Gertrude smiled and said to him, ‘You’re older than I thought.’”){Ibid., 233.} As in The Lives of Animals, a young male junior professor and his wife are what used to be called the “focalizers”—the people through whom we see events unfold.
THE English department of Appleton College holds its seminars in a room in Stubbs Hall, named, we can perhaps imagine (though the text never tells us so) after George Stubbs, the great English painter of horses, dogs, and their keepers. The first draft of John Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals was full of quiet jokes of this kind, some of which have been amended or edited in the later process of writing. The president’s elegant wife, Olivia Garrard, was orginally named Renee Garrard (not the same as a certain male comparatist at Stanford); the dean is a man called Arendt (not the same as a certain female philosopher). There is a scholar named Elaine Marx (with an x, as in Louis Marx Hall, the home of the Princeton University Center for Human Values), who is not the same as Elaine Marks, the translator of Modern French Feminisms but is instead the chair of the English department, a feminist who writes about women’s fiction—a description that might fit Princeton English professor (and former department chair) Elaine Showalter. These are “in” jokes for literary scholars—jokes I would call “academic” if the word were not so consistently ironized throughout.
For novelist Elizabeth Costello seems to have little time for “academics.” She describes the short and unhappy life of the mathematician Ramanujan, who, “unable to tolerate the climate… and the academic regime” in Cambridge (England) died pre-maturely at the age of thirty-three. She tells the tale of Kafka’s domesticated ape Red Peter, who demonstrates a command of “lecture-hall etiquette and academic rhetoric.” She deplores the academic totalitarianism with which an “orthodox” interpretation of Swift’s Modest Proposal is “stuffed down the throat of young readers.” She alludes twice, drily and unmistakably, to what she calls “academic philosophers.” “Academic” is clearly a suspect term.
The genre of these lectures, then, is metafiction, and together they constitute a version of the academic novel, though crucially this one is suffused with pathos rather than comedy. The effect is to insulate the warring “ideas” (about animal rights, about consciousness, about death, about the family, about academia) against claims of authorship and authority. They are put in play by characters who—precisely because they are “academics”—can be relied upon to be unreliable: both too vehement and too wishy-washy, expert in debaters’ points and classroom hyperbole. “Sincerity,” assuming it to be a value, cannot be assumed in this contest of faculties. We don’t know whose voice to believe.
BUT WHY is the debate about the “lives of animals” so clearly staged as a debate between poetry and philosophy, and why does philosophy seem so clearly to dominate, if not to win? Another familiar genre to which Coetzee’s lectures are related is, of course, the philosophical dialogue. It is Plato who most famously invites the comparison of poet and philosopher, and not to the advantage of the poet. On the other hand, poet John Keats once wrote in a letter that poetry “is not so fine a thing as philosophy— For the same reason that an eagle is not so fine a thing as a truth.”{John Keats, letter to George and Georgiana Keats, 14 February–3 May 1819, Letters of John Keats, ed. Robert Gittings (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), 230.}
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
