A Writer's Life: J. M. Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello
DEREK ATTRIDGE
Elizabeth Costello. By J. M. Coetzee. Viking, October 2003. $21.95
I was lucky enough to be in the auditorium at Princeton University on October 15, 1997, when Professor John Coetzee rose to deliver “The Philosophers and the Animals”—the first of two Tanner Lectures on Human Values he was giving that year under the general title “The Lives of Animals.” This was, of course, J. M. Coetzee the novelist, but his presence in an academic setting made one particularly conscious of his status as Professor of General Literature at the University of Cape Town. There had been indications in a few of Coetzee's publications of a concern with the question of human responses to animal suffering, most notably the passage about the chained dog in The Master of Petersburg. Readers of Doubling the Point would have been struck by a moving passage in parentheses in one of the interviews: “Let me add . . . that I, as a person, as a personality, am overwhelmed, that my thinking is thrown into confusion and helplessness, by the fact of suffering in the world, and not only human suffering” (248). (Disgrace had, of course, not been published at this point.) There was also the fact, known to many, of his vegetarianism, comically represented in “Meat Country.” Now, it seemed, he was going to spell out in two lectures his views on animal rights and the ethics of human-animal relations.
I was lucky enough to be in the auditorium at Princeton University on October 15, 1997, when Professor John Coetzee rose to deliver “The Philosophers and the Animals”—the first of two Tanner Lectures on Human Values he was giving that year under the general title “The Lives of Animals.” This was, of course, J. M. Coetzee the novelist, but his presence in an academic setting made one particularly conscious of his status as Professor of General Literature at the University of Cape Town. There had been indications in a few of Coetzee's publications of a concern with the question of human responses to animal suffering, most notably the passage about the chained dog in The Master of Petersburg. Readers of Doubling the Point would have been struck by a moving passage in parentheses in one of the interviews: “Let me add . . . that I, as a person, as a personality, am overwhelmed, that my thinking is thrown into confusion and helplessness, by the fact of suffering in the world, and not only human suffering” (248). (Disgrace had, of course, not been published at this point.) There was also the fact, known to many, of his vegetarianism, comically represented in “Meat Country.” Now, it seemed, he was going to spell out in two lectures his views on animal rights and the ethics of human-animal relations.
