"Miracles of Creation": Animals in J. M. Coetzee's Work

That J. M. Coetzee, one of the most consequential writers of our time, has taken up the issue of human exploitation and abuse of animals is a matter of considerable moment. A recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2003, the Booker Prize twice (the only writer to be so honored) and of widespread and deserved critical acclaim, Coetzee is arguably the first major modern writer to take the matter seriously. Concern about human treatment of animals is the primary focus in his most recent work, the novel Disgrace and the dramatic essay The Lives of Animals, both published in 1999, but it is apparent in his earliest work and is manifest as well in his autobiography, Boyhood (1997).[1] That his most recent protagonists equate human mistreatment of animals with the Holocaust suggests the severity of his moral opprobrium.

The question of humans' relationship with nature and with animals is already an issue in Coetzee's first novel, Dusklands (1974), which deals centrally with human colonization of the land. It recurs in subsequent works, such as Life and Times of Michael K (1983), his first Booker Prize winner, in which the protagonist, who is often likened to animals, develops a benign, respectful relationship to the natural world in which he

Many of Coetzee's protagonists seem similarly engaged-albeit unreflectively-in an attempt to relate in different, less destructive ways to the environment, whether it be social or natural.

Here I will focus upon what is possibly Coetzee's most significant novel, Waiting for the Barbarians (1980), widely regarded as a modern classic, and his two recent works, Disgrace, which won the 1999 Booker Prize, and The Lives of Animals, which tackles the issue of "animal rights" head on. In these works Coetzee's protagonists experience a kind of conversion to a heightened state of moral awareness through their growing sensitivity to animal abuse. This conversion, however, is accompanied by a fall in status from insider to outcast, from victimizer to victim, from relative power to impotence. Perhaps for this reason these characters are unable to act on their new moral knowledge, which may reflect the author's skepticism about the possibilities for human improvement.

Waiting for the Barbarians, in many ways a brilliant work, is a sort of allegorical fable in the tradition of Kafka,[3] about Western imperialism. It takes place in an outpost of an unspecified empire and concerns the imperial officials' attempts to "deal with" a tribe of "barbarians" whom they deem a threat to the empire; they use torture and ineffectual military excursions in their attempt to annihilate the barbarians. Caught in the middle is the narrator, the "Magistrate," an "homme moyen sensuel," who like many Coetzee figures has lived a life of moral apathy and lazy indifference before the campaign against the barbarians begins. Like many modernist protagonists (in the Existentialist tradition of the absurd)[4] the Magistrate is a passive, nonjudgmental figure content to let things drift until forced, in his case, by the evidence of imperial torture, to confront the problem of evil. He has a visceral, nonrational reaction against the use of torture and indeed nearly all of his reactions are visceral ones that he is unable to explain.

The sort of unmediated and otherwise inexplicable empathy he feels toward a young barbarian woman (referred to throughout as the "barbarian girl"), whom he tends after she's been tortured, is also seen in his sensitivity to the subjectivity of animals. Perhaps the most dramatic instance occurs in a hunting scene where the Magistrate finds he cannot kill a waterbuck he has in his gun sight: "My pulse does not quicken: evidently it is not important to me that the ram die." He wonders "what it is that has robbed the hunt of its savour." While he hesitates, "the buck wheels off and with a whisk of its tail and a brief splash of hooves disappears into the tall reeds." The moment seems to signify that a gradual process of "feminization" is occurring within the protagonist, effecting his transformation from one of the victimizers to one of the victims. In a later scene, once he's been accused of siding with the barbarians, part of the Magistrate's own torture entails a public shaming dressed in women's clothes, a final sign that he is now one of the scorned and despised, no longer an agent of the dominant caste.

The torturers are, unlike the Magistrate, successful hunters. Colonel Joll, the leading imperial "interrogator" (read torturer), boastingly describes a "great drive he rode in, when thousands of deer, pigs, bears were slain, so many that a mountain of carcasses had to be left to rot." His chief interrogation assistant is "a hunter who has shot pigs up and down the river all his life." In fact, overhunting and the expanding imperial settlement have depleted the area of animals: "A generation ago there were antelope and hares in such numbers," the Magistrate laments. Trapping is similarly described by him in pejorative terms. "By mid-morning they are back with huge catches: birds with their necks twisted, slung from poles . . . by their feet, or crammed alive into wooded cages, screaming with outrage."

The Magistrate's sensitivity to animals may also be seen in his adoption of an orphaned fox cub, whom he plans to rehabilitate and release. He jokingly tells the barbarian girl, whom he has also taken in, "People will say I keep two wild animals in my rooms, a fox and a girl." In fact, like the Magistrate (and like sympathetic characters in Coetzee's later novel Disgrace, where animal sensitivity becomes almost a sign of grace), the barbarian girl has a special talent in relating to animals. In a windstorm during the Magistrate's arduous trek to barbarian territory to return the girl home, she calms frightened horses by means of her special touch. She "stands with her arms stretched like wings over the necks of two horses. She seems to be talking to them: though their eyeballs glare, they are still."

On the same journey one of the horses collapses and has to be killed. As he approaches the animal, the Magistrate "swear[s] the beast knows what is to happen. At the sight of the knife its eyes roll." Later, when another horse collapses and as they are short of food, the Magistrate allows his men to slaughter the horse and eat it. He notes, "I give my permission but do not join in."

When he returns from this journey and is (wrongly) accused of having betrayed the outpost to the barbarians, he is imprisoned and tortured. Under this treatment he describes himself as an animal. "I guzzle my food like a dog. A bestial life is turning me into a beast." "Like a wounded snail I begin to creep along the wall." "Scuttling from hole to hole like a mouse I forfeit even the appearance of ignorance." After a beating "I trot around the room holding my face, whining like a dog." His cheek wound has a "crust like a fat caterpillar" on it; similar imagery is used to describe the torture scars on the eyelid of the barbarian girl. "There is no way of dying allowed me, it seems, except like a dog in a corner."

Other subjugated peoples are similarly figured as animals. The "fisher folk," an innocuous group who live outside the outpost and are rounded up and incarcerated during the obsessive search for barbarians, are treated "as if they were indeed animals." A group of barbarian prisoners are marched into town "meek as lambs" because of a hideous system of interlinking them with wires run through their cheeks.

After the Magistrate's torture and public humiliation he is released but treated as an animal pariah by the inhabitants of the outpost.

The latter comment indicates that in this novel Coetzee subtends an underlying pattern of domination: on one side are those victimized as "barbarian" by members of the "Empire." These include all who are deemed uncivilized from the perspective of patriarchal imperial authority: feminized men, alien tribes, and animals.

The Magistrate's drama is that he goes from being a member of the imperial order to one of its outcasts. The reasons for his transition lie in his innate sensitivity[5] to barbarians and animals-a feminine attribute. Such empathy leads him in a sense to join the ranks of these "others," which entails acknowledging the barbarian-woman-animal within himself ("the animal that skulks within every barbarian-lover"). It also leads to his being branded a barbarian-woman-animal by the imperial authorities, which legitimizes in their eyes his contemptuous treatment.

The Magistrate's moment of truth comes when he has a visceral reaction against the torture of the barbarians. An unpremeditated "No!" wells up from within him. "Look," he shouts, "We [humans] are the great miracle of creation!" He is then beaten and cannot remember what he was trying to say. "I pursue the thought but it eludes me like a wisp of smoke. It occurs to me that we crush insects beneath our feet, miracles of creation too, beetles, worms, cockroaches, ants, in their various ways." Thus, his moment of revolt entails a protest not just of the cruel treatment of other humans but implicitly of humanity's ruthless treatment of animals, also "miracles of creation." Both subjugations are legitimized by the same imperial mentality.

In one of his few analytical statements, the Magistrate blames this imperial mentality for the fallen state of the outpost (i.e., of humanity):

Like other Coetzee characters, the Magistrate longs to escape from the linear "progressive" narrative of history, because it entails an inauthentic rejection of mortality, which is projected onto an other-be it barbarian, animal, or woman-whom the imperial authorities (the beneficiaries of history thus conceived) must destroy in order to secure their own claims to immortal transcendence through historical triumph. So, while Coetzee seems to be advocating through the Magistrate an escape into "being" from "becoming" (as one critic has proposed Coetzee protagonists habitually do)[6]—and thus apolitical evasion—I suggest that, instead, he is offering a critique of the inauthentic uses to which history and politics may be put. (Coetzee probably has in mind here not just western imperialism, to which the novel clearly refers allegorically, but also Nazism and Communism, which similarly offered ideologies of historical redemption.)

The novel ends somewhat inconclusively with the imperial guard in strategic retreat, leaving the outpost to "wait for the barbarians" on its own. One of the last gestures of the withdrawing forces is to confiscate local livestock animals, in one case, "a cock and hen, the cock a magnificent black and gold creature. Their legs are bound, [the soldier] grips them by the wings, their fierce bird-eyes glare. . . . [H]e stuffs them into the oven"-an echo which anticipates the Holocaust allusions Coetzee develops in later works.

Like the Magistrate, the protagonist of Disgrace, David Lurie, falls from a more or less secure insider position of authority within the establishment to that of pariah—from victimizer to victim. Unlike the Magistrate, however, he doesn't seem to have an inborn sense of empathy for animals and other oppressed creatures; rather, that sensitivity awakens in part because of his own loss of status.

The reason for Lurie's fall into social disgrace (but paradoxically into a kind of spiritual grace) is an improper affair he initiates with a student (he is a 52-year-old adjunct professor of communications at a technical college in Cape Town, South Africa). The affair entails coercive sex, which parallels the gang rape of his daughter Lucy that occurs later in the novel. Of a sexual encounter with the student, Melanie Isaacs, Lurie thinks, "Not rape, not quite that but undesired nevertheless, undesired to the core. As though she had decided to go slack, die within herself for the duration, like a rabbit when the jaws of the fox close in on its neck" (my emphasis).

From victimizer Lurie soon finds himself victimized, as news of the affair becomes public and he is dismissed from his position. Media representatives "circle around him like hunters who have cornered a strange beast and do not know how to finish it off" (my emphasis).

To escape from Cape Town he arranges to visit his grown daughter Lucy, who runs a farm and a kennel in a remote rural area. Lucy is an "animal lover" and introduces him to Bev Shaw, who runs the local animal shelter where David comes to work as a volunteer. Initially, he is indifferent to the plight of animals; the most he can say is that "he has nothing against . . . animal lovers," and at times he finds their "do-good" attitude annoying, complaining facetiously that they're so "cheerful and well-intentioned . . . after a while you itch to go off and do some raping and pillaging. Or kick a cat." Even in the early stages of his exposure to animal caring, however, he exhibits an awareness of animal subjectivity, wondering, for example, if the kennel dogs are bored.

He has several discussions about animals with Lucy and Bev, but remains generally skeptical of their contentions. Lucy, for example, believes in "shar[ing] some of our human privilege with the beasts. I don't want," she says, "to come back in another existence as a dog or pig and have to live as dogs or pigs live under us." David feels she has lost "perspective" on the issue. She laments how humans treat dogs as "part of the furniture. . . . They do us the honour of treating us like gods and we respond by treating them like things."

The two discuss the question of whether animals have souls, with David reminding Lucy of the centuries-long debate on the subject by the Church Fathers, who "decided they don't have proper souls. . . . Their souls are tied to their bodies and die with them." Lucy says she doesn't believe in souls period: "I wouldn't know a soul if I saw one." He replies emphatically in one of his few declarative statements, "You are a soul. . . . We are souls before we are born." Thus, like the Magistrate (and like Coetzee-see note 5), David adheres to a Platonic ontology. By the end of the novel he has decided that animals do have souls: "The business of dog-killing is over for the day, the black bags are piled at the door, each with a body and a soul inside."

After this discussion and in reference to an abandoned bulldog, Katy, whom Lucy has decided to adopt, "a shadow of grief falls over [David], for Katy, alone in her cage, for himself, for everyone"-the first sign perhaps of his changing sensitivity. At this moment he decides to volunteer at the animal shelter. Initially, he remains skeptical of Bev's attribution of sensitivity and intelligence to animals. She tells him while holding the animals he should "'think comforting thoughts . . . [because] they can smell what you're thinking,'" an idea he rejects as "nonsense." Shortly thereafter he has to check himself from feeling that a dog has "an intelligent look"; "it is probably nothing of the kind," he tells himself.

What precipitates David's conversion is his own experience of being victimized by a gang of assailants who set him on fire and rape his daughter. As Bev treats his injuries he compares himself to a miserable goat he had helped Bev with earlier. "He recalls the goat . . . and wonders whether, submitting to her hands, it felt the same peacefulness." It is the recognition of his own suffering body seen as a shared condition with the goat that leads to David's metanoia or change of heart.

In an interview conducted in the early 1990s, Coetzee acknowledged that the suffering body is a kind of epistemological touchstone in his worldview, a point of authenticity that is immune in a sense to skepticism, to doubt. "The body with its pain," he states, "becomes a counter to the endless trials of doubt. . . . Not grace, then, but at least the body." He amplifies, "[I]t is not that one grants the authority of the suffering body: the suffering body takes this authority: that is its power. To use other words: its power is undeniable." Coetzee adds parenthetically, "I as a person . . . am overwhelmed . . . by the fact of suffering in the world, and not only human suffering."[7] Thus Coetzee accords the suffering body an authenticity and authority that supersede rational knowledge. He comes close to revising the Cartesian formula to read, "I feel pain, therefore I exist."[8]

It is in his unquestioned acknowledgment that animals can suffer, feel pain, and experience humiliation—and therefore may be afflicted with evil—that Coetzee parts company from most other authors who include animals centrally in their fiction. Although many modern writers-as documented by Marian Scholtmeijer and Margot Norris[9]-succeed in granting subjectivity to the animals who figure in their work, few-if any-of their human characters exhibit the intense empathetic identification with animal suffering and loss of dignity as do Coetzee's. This is what makes his work so original and groundbreaking in the area of fictional treatment of human-animal relations.

In the wake of his own suffering, David Lurie therefore undergoes an undoubted metanoia, the first sign of which is evident in the concern he registers shortly after his own victimization about some sheep who are tethered in Lucy's yard in preparation for their slaughter. He untethers them to allow them to eat and drink more comfortably, reflecting how "they were surely destined since birth for the butcher's knife. Well, nothing remarkable in that. . . . Sheep do not own themselves, do not own their own lives. They exist to be used, every last ounce of them, their flesh to be eaten, their bones to be crushed and fed to poultry." Despite this knowledge,

Thus, like the Magistrate, David Lurie, once awakened to the reality of suffering bodies, has a kind of epiphany in which he realizes the importance of animal suffering and of human communion with this pain in a community of suffering beings. He doesn't, however, take the next step—the one Coetzee's political critics would like-namely, to commit himself to changing the system that causes the pain. Despite therefore their manifest and striking ethical awareness of animal suffering, Coetzee's characters seldom go beyond passive awareness. Coetzee seems-and this is why politically minded critics have challenged him-to stop short of Albert Camus's famous political emendation of Descartes: Je me révolte, donc nous sommes[10] ("I rebel, therefore we exist"), meaning "I rebel against the fact that suffering and injustice continue, therefore we as a community exist." In the end Coetzee does not adopt Camus's vision of solidarity, of an awakened community engaged in political action. (Nadine Gordimer, his most trenchant critic, laments that Coetzee "denies the energy of the will to resist evil.")[11] Instead, he concludes the novel on a note that is more reminiscent of the absurdist fatalism of Samuel Beckett, another conspicuous influence, reflecting perhaps the author's cynicism about the ability of the average person (whom Lurie represents)-the non-saint—to make that level of commitment (rather than that he, the author, abjures such commitment).

Through David's job at the animal shelter, which is to comfort animals who are being euthanized and to dispose of their bodies, he comes to realize that most people bring their animals to the shelter as a convenient way of getting rid of them.

Lösung is the German word for solution—as in Endlösung, the Nazi term for the "final solution"—which draws an implicit association between human treatment of animals and the Holocaust.

David's shame is for the real disgrace the novel's title refers to, namely, the atrocious suffering inflicted upon animals by humans.

Like Bev, who is a kind of secular saint (she is compared to a saint at one point), exhibiting what Simone Weil called "attentive love,"[12] David commits himself to his task with no thought of ultimate redemption-either for himself, for humanity, or for the animals. In this, like certain of Camus's protagonists, notably Rieux in La Peste (The Plague), he approaches the status of absurd saint, carrying out a sense of obligation to relieve affliction, while not believing in any higher justification for such acts. A particularly absurd gesture is his determination to make sure the dogs' bodies are treated honorably in the cremation process. When workers bash at the dogs' stiffened limbs with shovels to make them fit more neatly on the oven's feeder trolley, he intervenes, feeling that such battering deprives them of dignity, and taking it upon himself to handle each body individually, reverentially.

Why is he doing this? "For his idea of the world, a world in which men do not use shovels to beat corpses into a more convenient shape for processing." He realizes this commitment to the dead animals has marked him as "a dog-man . . . a harijan," an outcast, a pariah.

The novel ends with a gesture of resignation. David yields up a dog with whom he has developed a relationship to the euthanasia needle. "[T]he dog would die for him, he knows," but "it cannot be evaded." He holds the dog "like a lamb" in his final moments. The phrase "like a lamb" has Christian overtones; however, in the interview noted above, Coetzee claims not to believe in sanctifying grace or any supernatural intervention, only in the efficacy of human "charity." "As for grace, no regrettably no: I am not a Christian, or not yet."[13] Rather, it appears that David's resigned attitude reflects the author's despair over humans' lack of charity, as seen in their callous treatment of animals, and pessimism about the likelihood that things will soon change.

This moment of pointless animal sacrifice-conceived as a betrayal of a devoted companion-serves to particularize the otherwise abstract mechanized slaughter of millions of animal companions that happens every day in animal shelters worldwide, just as Coetzee's particularizing of the sheep dramatizes individual cases of the otherwise routinely accepted mass daily slaughter of farm animals. As many literary theorists (most notably, Mikhail Bakhtin) have proposed, fiction, because of its unique capacity to dramatize instances of individual suffering, is uniquely able to evoke ethical responses in readers.[14] Coetzee's handling of the above scene illustrates the point.

In her study Animal Victims in Modern Fiction, Scholtmeijer notes that a deliberate ritualized sacrifice of an individual animal tends to trigger guilt in human participants—unlike in mechanized mass slaughter. To assuage the guilt, "mechanisms of justification must be deployed," Scholtmeijer stipulates.[15] That Coetzee abjures such justification is what makes the killing of the dog in Disgrace so ethically unbearable for many readers.[16] The guilt hangs palpably there but Coetzee does nothing to assuage it.

In The Lives of Animals, a thinly fictionalized philosophical dialogue presented in 1997-98 as the Tanner Lectures at Princeton, Coetzee extends Lurie's intimations into a full-fledged, hard-hitting, and unambiguous condemnation of human treatment of animals. He does so, however, through the vehicle of a problematic voice, that of Elizabeth Costello, an elderly, vaguely dotty, professor, who is invited to give a distinguished lecture, plus a seminar, at a small college. One senses that the position articulated in these presentations, which are on the subject of animal abuse, is probably that of the author-if only from the fact that Coetzee supplements the essay with twenty-three scholarly footnotes, all but three of which support Costello's views (also, of course, the character's name is similar to Coetzee). Yet, that he chooses as his mouthpiece so unauthoritative a voice suggests perhaps a realization of how marginalized and subversive her position is. Like the Magistrate and David Lurie, Costello is a social outcast.

The most incendiary point Costello develops in her first lecture is the one hinted at in Coetzee's use of Lösung in Disgrace, that the human treatment of animals is comparable with the Holocaust, and that the willful ignorance people display toward animal slaughter and suffering is similar to that shown toward the fate of the Jews by the Germans. Of the latter she notes, "they lost their humanity in our eyes because of a certain willed ignorance."[17] Similarly, she argues, Americans today live in willed ignorance of "drug-testing laboratories . . . factory farms . . . abattoirs . . . [which] are here. . . . They are all around us": "Each day a fresh holocaust." "Let me say it openly: we are surrounded by an enterprise of degradation, cruelty, and killing which rivals anything that the Third Reich was capable of, indeed dwarfs it."

Costello further claims, "the crime of the Third Reich . . . was to treat people like animals": 'They went like sheep to the slaughter.' 'They died like animals.' 'The Nazi butchers killed them.' Denunciation of the camps reverberates . . . with the language of the stockyard and slaughterhouse." Indeed, "it was from the Chicago Stockyards that the Nazis learned to process bodies."

Costello theorizes the attitude the Magistrate and David Lurie inarticulately exhibit, namely, that moral awareness depends upon a kind of visceral empathy. Dismissing "cool" rationalistic philosophical arguments pro and con animal rights, she claims, "reason is simply a tautology." What is needed is the understanding that "an animal . . . is an embodied soul." "To thinking, cogitation, I oppose fullness, embodiedness, the sensation of being . . . alive to the world"-attributes humans share with animals. "The horror" of the death camps, she concludes,

After her lecture Costello receives various criticisms, not least of which is an objection to the Holocaust analogy. These objections somewhat problematize her position in a way that raises once again the question of why Coetzee seems to feel compelled to destabilize coherent political assertion.

In her second presentation, a seminar, Costello extends her discussion of sympathy to include literary treatment of animals (she herself is the author of a celebrated feminist novel), noting that fiction-writing is preeminently an exercise of the "sympathetic imagination." Rejecting the metaphoric use of animal imagery, she urges that writers get inside the body of the animal. Citing Ted Hughes's jaguar poems as exemplary, she says that the poet "is feeling his way toward a different kind of being-in-the-world. . . . The poems ask us to imagine our way into [the jaguar's] way of moving, to imagine that body."

By expanding peoples' sympathetic imagination into the realities of animal lives, she hopes that thereby they might be awakened to an ethical awareness that will lead them to modify their treatment of animals. She is not sanguine about prospects for success, however; instead she concludes each lecture with an ominous prediction: the first ends with her venturing that humans will continue to allow the "daily holocaust" to continue and like the Germans "we will get away with it"; the second, with the observation that by "slaughtering and enslaving a race of divine or else divinely created beings," humans have brought a "curse" upon themselves.

In his latest work, Elizabeth Costello (2003), Coetzee goes so far as to have Costello envision a dog not unlike the one offered up for euthanasia in Disgrace, "an old dog, his lion-colored hide scarred from unnumerable manglings," "blocking" the gate to the beyond. In this piece, which is modeled on Kafka's "Parable of the Law" in The Trial, when asked by a panel of gatekeepers to name her beliefs (a requirement for passage), Costello can come up with only one: the frogs she recalls from her childhood. "At night you would hear the belling of tens of thousands of little frogs rejoicing in the largesse of the heavens." She remembers their cycles of hibernation in mud flats and their reemergence:

The human gatekeepers consider her answer inadequate and she is denied passage.

Coetzee's treatment of the animal issue suggests that although he is not an overtly political writer, he is not, as some have charged, an evasive one; on the contrary, he is acutely aware of the realities of creatural suffering and addresses attendant ethical issues forthrightly. In the end, his hope-if that is not too strong a word-appears to be for the kind of metanoia, or conversion of sensibilities, seen in the character David Lurie. What Coetzee leaves in doubt, however, is whether individualized ethical awakening will do much to change the world-especially since it leaves the individual so marginalized—unless such awakening moves said individual to take action, whether personal (Lurie could have adopted the dog he gives up for euthanasia, although, admittedly, such a gesture might not have been true to his character and it would have made for a less sophisticated ending) or political (joining with others to effect change).

To the extent, therefore, that Coetzee's protagonists allegorically represent humanity, their inability to move beyond absurd, ineffectual gestures and their failure to convert others to their moral vision—despite their own wakened ethical awareness-offers a very bleak vision indeed. Human beings' inability or unwillingness to change themselves, Coetzee seems to be saying, is the ultimate disgrace.

NOTES

Editions used in this essay are: Waiting for the Barbarians (New York: Penguin, 1980); Disgrace (New York: Viking, 1999); The Lives of Animals, ed. Amy Gutman (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999), which includes two essays, "The Philosopher and the Animals" and "The Poets and the Animals," that are reprinted (minus the footnotes) in Coetzee's latest book, Elizabeth Costello (New York: Viking, 2003).

1. The opening incident in Coetzee's Boyhood: Scenes from a Provincial Life (New York: Viking, 1997), recounts his revulsion at a grisly operation his mother performs on some hens: "The hens shriek and struggle, their eyes bulging. . . . [The boy] shudders and turns away." (2). The memoir details several similar episodes.

2. Michael Marais, "The Hermeneutics of Empire: Coetzee's Post-colonial Metafiction," in Critical Perspectives on J. M. Coetzee, ed. Graham Huggan and Stephen Watson (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1996), 77. I have characterized such a mentality as feminine in "Ecofeminist Literary Criticism: Reading the Orange," Hypatia 11, no. 2 (Spring 1996): 161-84.

3. See Patricia Merivale, "Audible Palimpsests: Coetzee's Kafka," in Critical Perspectives, 152-67.

4. Camus's Meursault in L'Etranger (The Stranger) is an antecedent and perhaps an influence.

5. He, indeed, like Coetzee, believes there is an inborn sense of justice: "all creatures come into the world bringing with them the memory of justice." In a later interview Coetzee commented that Waiting for the Barbarians "asks the question: Why does one choose the side of justice when it is not in one's material interest to do so? The Magistrate gives the rather Platonic answer: because we are born with the idea of justice." Similarly, he notes, one may ask why seek the truth when it may not be in one's interest to do so? "I continue to give a Platonic answer: because we are born with the idea of the truth." Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews, ed. David Attwell (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), 395.

6. Stephen Watson, in "Colonialism and the Novels of J. M. Coetzee," in Critical Perspectives, notes how Coetzee protagonists are "drawn towards placing a higher value on the notion of 'being' rather than 'becoming.'" (30)

7. Doubling the Point, 248.

8. Coetzee claims not to "assert the ethical superiority of pain over pleasure" (Doubling, 248), but I agree with Brian May that his fiction belies this claim ("J. M. Coetzee and the Question of the Body," Modern Fiction Studies 47, no. 2 [Summer 2001]: 404).

9. Margot Norris, Beasts of the Modern Imagination: Darwin, Nietzsche, Kafka, Ernst, and Lawrence (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985); Marian Scholtmeijer, Animal Victims in Modern Fiction: From Sanctity to Sacrifice (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993).

10. Albert Camus, L'Homme révolté (Paris: Gallimard, 1951), 36. The complete passage is:

11. Nadine Gordimer, "The Idea of Gardening," New York Review of Books, 2 February 1984, 6.

12. Simone Weil, La Pesanteur et la grâce (Paris: Librarie Plon, 1948), 121.

13. Doubling the Point, 250.

14. I provide an extensive discussion of this idea in Women and the Rise of the Novel, 1405-1726 (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999), 1-12. Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson, in Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), 27-28, 33, provide a useful introduction to Bakhtin's idea of the novel as a form of ethical knowledge.

15. Scholtmeijer, 92.

16. In a review in the New York Review of Books, 29 June 2000, 26, Ian Hacking, for example, writes of Lurie's act in Disgrace, "I cannot comprehend [it], and only barely feel it as possible." Coetzee does come close to aestheticizing evil in this scene; the man's gesture has a powerful dramatic effect and lacking an ethical perspective it risks becoming gratuitously sadistic, or pornographic—aesthetic exploitation of evil being inherently pornographic. I have chosen, however, to interpret the scene within the evident ethical context I believe Coetzee intends. Interestingly, Coetzee explores the issue of how the fictional treatment of evil risks becoming "obscene" in his discussion of "The Problem of Evil" in Elizabeth Costello, 156-183.

17. At the end of the essay Costello acknowledges that the "willed ignorance" of acquaintances has come to obsess her: "It's as if I were to visit friends, and to make some polite remark about the lamp in their living room, and they were to say 'Yes it's nice, isn't it? Polish-Jewish skin it's made of, we find that's best, the skin of Polish-Jewish virgins.' And then I go to the bathroom and the soap-wrapper says, "Treblinka-100% human stearate.'"

18. I have argued a similar point in "Attention to Suffering: Sympathy as a Basis for Ethical Treatment of Animals," in Journal of Social Philosophy 27, no. 1 (Spring 1996): 81-102; reprinted in Beyond Animal Rights, ed. Josephine Donovan and Carol J. Adams (New York: Continuum, 1996), 147-69.