In the midst of the worst violence Europe has known since 1945, the issue of animal rights may seem an irrelevance. While human beings still slaughter, rape and "ethnically cleanse" (a phrase that should never be used without the moral cordon of quotation marks), surely, we may say, it is a waste of intellectual energy to wrestle with the question of how we should behave towards animals. Yet it is possible to entertain Milan Kundera's contention that our mistreatment of animals, rather than our mistreatment of human beings, is what absolutely condemns us as a species.
J.M. Coetzee, one of the subtlest and most serious novelists at work today, was invited to deliver the 1997-98 Tanner Lectures at Princeton University, and The Lives of Animals is the result. Although the lectures normally consist of philosophical discourses followed by formal commentary and debate, Coetzee, to the mild consternation of his hosts and respondents, chose to frame his contribution in the form of two short fictions, "The Philosophers and the Animals", and "The Poets and the Animals", in which the eminent Australian novelist, Elizabeth Costello, arrives at Appleton College - obviously based on Princeton - to deliver the Gates Lectures; her son, John, is a physicist at the college, and Elizabeth spends an uneasy three days staying at his house with him and his wife Norma and their children. Elizabeth and Norma do not get on; Norma, a philosopher, believes Elizabeth's "opinions on animals, animal consciousness, and ethical relations with animals are jejune and sentimental". Elizabeth is a vegetarian, though the term is inadequate: she is not interested in diet or in healthy eating; probably she does not even have any particular love for animals. Asked if her vegetarianism comes out of moral conviction, she replies: "It comes out of a desire to save my soul." Her terrible and, to her, unbearable suspicion is that in their treatment of animals, the majority of the human race "are participants in a crime of stupefying proportions".
She opens her first lecture, to an audience drawn mainly from the philosophy department of Appleton, by declaring that she will pay her listeners the honour of "skipping a recital of the horrors of [animals'] lives and deaths" and what is being done to animals "in production facilities (I hesitate to call them farms any longer), in abattoirs, in trawlers, in laboratories, all over the world". Instead, she goes on immediately to make a direct comparison between our treatment of animals and the Nazis' treatment of Jews. (In protest, a Jewish poet attached to the college refuses to attend a formal dinner in Elizabeth's honour, and in a letter to her insists that "If Jews were treated like cattle, it does not follow that cattle are treated like Jews. The inversion insults the memory of the dead.")
Elizabeth is an awkward person, and ill-suited as a lecturer; as her son thinks, "Not her metier, argumentation." The argument she puts forward is vague and unfocused - "I was hoping not to have to enunciate principles" - and she appears not to care about, or for, her audience, or to be much interested in their opinions. She means to have her say, and to say what she means: "I am an old woman. I do not have the time any longer to say things I do not mean." All the same, her lectures remain stubbornly fuzzy. She is against the hegemony of reason - mere reason - yet all she can recommend in its place is the "heart" - "open your heart and listen to what your heart says" - but what, we may ask, and some of her audience and her respondents do ask, is the heart?
Yet if she is oblique in her arguments, she can also be subtle and vigorous. She dismisses behaviourist studies which value "being able to find your way out of a sterile maze, ignoring the fact that if the researcher who designed the maze were to be parachuted into the jungles of Borneo, he or she would be dead of starvation in a week". True understanding comes through "immersing ourselves and our intelligence in complexity. There is something self-stultifying in the way in which scientific behaviourism recoils from the complexity of life."
She rejects the Cartesian principle that a creature which "does not do what we call thinking is somehow second-class":
To thinking, cogitation, I oppose fullness, embodiedness, the sensation of being - not a consciousness of yourself as a kind of ghostly reasoning machine thinking thoughts, but on the contrary the sensation - a heavily affective sensation - of being a body with limbs that have extension in space, of being alive to the world. This fullness constrasts starkly with Descartes's key state, which has an empty feel to it: the feel of a pea rattling around in a shell.
Yet what are we to do with the animals, and how are we to live with them? The essential question is put to her by one of the college faculty:
Are you not expecting too much of humankind when you ask us to live without species exploitation, without cruelty? Is it not more human to accept our own humanity - even if it means embracing the carnivorous Yahoo within ourselves - than to end up like Gulliver, pining for a state [like that of the gentle but life-denying Houyhnhnms] he can never attain, and for good reason: it is not in his nature, which is a human nature?
In other words, does honesty not compel us to accept the tragic predicament in which we find ourselves, blessed and cursed with consciousness, including the consciousness of death, which sets us above the rest of the natural world? Elizabeth's response is an extended, intricate meditation on Swift and Gulliver's Travels, ending with the ringing but surely evasive assertion that we must "push Swift's fable to its limits and recognize that, in history, embracing the status of man has entailed slaughtering and enslaving a race of divine or else divinely created beings and bringing down on ourselves a curse thereby".
John Coetzee does not seek to provide answers, but to stimulate questions. Indeed, the first of his four respondents, the literary critic Marjorie Garber, sees The Lives of Animals as an extremely sly exercise in postmodernism in the form of a piece of "campus fiction". She delights in the allusiveness, and elusiveness, of the piece, and wonders if it is about animals at all, or rather if Coetzee is really asking "What is the value of literature?" To this question, the only possible postmodernist response is, Yes and no.
Peter Singer, author of the highly influential Animal Liberation, responds with a brief fiction of his own, which acknowledges the post-modernity of Coetzee's stories, and in which he gets his own back by casting his response to The Lives of Animals in the form of a brief but richly ambiguous discussion between himself and his daughter on the topics Coetzee raises. Odd as it may seem, Singer the animal liberationist feels Coetzee/Costello goes too far in arguing for the absolute rights of animals.
The other respondents are Wendy Doniger, a professor of the history of religions, who sets the argument into its historicoreligious context, and Barbara Smuts, an anthropologist, who divides her response between brief, fascinating and moving vignettes of her time working among a troupe of baboons in the wild, and an account of her relationship to her pet dog, Safi. Smuts's little essay is a model of simplicity, depth and sincerity. "Personhood," she observes, is usually taken to be "an essential quality we can `discover' or `fail to find' in another", but to her it connotes
a way of being in relation to others, and thus no one other than the subject can give it or take it away. In other words, when a human being relates to an individual nonhuman being as an anonymous object, rather than as a being with its own subjectivity, it is the human, and not the other animal, who relinquishes personhood.
The Lives of Animals is a stimulating and worrying book. It is hard to imagine anyone coming away from it without a new perspective on our relation not only to animals but to the natural world in general, and, indeed, to ourselves. From Copernicus to Michael Foucault, much of science and philosophy has been engaged in the attempt to nudge man away from his overweening conception of himself as, literally, the centre of the universe. Coetzee gives the process another little shove. In our arrogance we long ago - perhaps as long ago as Eden - lost sight of our true place in the natural order. As a result, we range across the world, destroying and polluting as we go, the most dangerous species the world has ever known. As Nietzsche says, the animals regard man as a creature of their own kind which has in a highly dangerous fashion lost its healthy animal reason - as the mad animal, as the laughing animal, as the weeping animal, as the unhappy animal.
John Banville is a novelist and Chief Literary Critic and Associate Literary Editor of The Irish Times