The Lives of Animals

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?)

And here is the authors’ argument against what they call “false metaphor”—an argument that speaks directly to the use and abuse of literature and literary analysis in culture:

While sociobiologists inherited royalty and slavery in ants from nineteenth-century entomology, they have made the false metaphor a device of their own. Aggression, warfare, cooperation, kinship, loyalty, coyness, rape, cheating, culture are all applied to nonhuman animals. Human manifestations then come to be seen as special, perhaps more developed, cases.{Ibid., 250.}

Let me illustrate this observation with a passage that has always particularly fascinated me from E. O. Wilson’s book Sociobiology (1975) on the question of what Wilson terms “reciprocal altruism” in nature—a passage that, as you will see, seamlessly incorporates tautology, a spectacular example of quotation out of context, and a definition (all too familiar) of poetry as the unproblematic and timeless truth of human nature:

Selection will discriminate against the individual if cheating has later adverse effects on his life and reproduction that outweigh the momentary advantage gained.

And how does E. O. Wilson support this assertion? He quotes Shakespeare:

Iago stated the essence in Othello: “Good name in man and woman, dear my lord, is the immediate jewel of their souls.”{E. O. Wilson, Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975), 58.}

Here Shakespeare quoted out of context equals human nature. Never mind that Iago is lying through his teeth.

“DO YOU really believe, Mother, that poetry classes are going to close down the slaughterhouses?” asks Coetzee’s John Bernard, and his mother answers, “No.” “Then why do it?” he persists. That is indeed the question.

Poetry makes nothing happen, W. H. Auden once wrote. But is that true? And must it be true? What has poetry to offer, what has language to offer, by way of solace, except analogy, except the art of language? In these two elegant lectures we thought John Coetzee was talking about animals. Could it be, however, that all along he was really asking, “What is the value of literature?”

Peter Singer ¦

WHEN Naomi comes down for breakfast, her father is already at the table. Though there is a bowl of muesli in front of him, his attention is on a typescript that is lying on the table beside him.

For Naomi the only unusual aspect of this scene is the depth of her father’s frown. She fills her own bowl with muesli, covers it with soymilk, flicks a dangling dreadlock out of it, and breaks the silence:

“Let me guess… It’s a paper from that graduate student who majored in cultural studies before turning to