Review 2: On Not Sitting Silent, J.M. Coetzee’s Lives of Animals

In the Fall I attended an online conference entitled “The Culture of Grief: Philosophy, Ecology, and Politics of Loss in the Twenty-First Century.” It was underpinned by the question: “In what ways are grief and loss related to the ecological crisis?” While these issues are much-discussed these days and clearly relate to our course, I was drawn to the conference because one of the speakers was Jonathan Lear. You may recall Lear from Kim Tallbear’s talk and her reference to “radical hope,” a term she takes indirectly from a book by Lear of the same title. I was curious to hear him speak.

Lear’s talk, among other things, addressed a powerful moment in a Cora Diamond essay, “The Difficulty of Reality and the Difficulty of Philosophy,” in which the ability to convey one’s reality gives way. Many cultural works, one could argue, seek to prevent us from experiencing such moments; they build up reality and invest it with meaning. But some cultural works—and philosophical essays too—offer a window into what Diamond understatedly calls “the difficulty of reality.” For Diamond “the difficulty of reality” describes “experiences in which we take something in reality to be resistant to our thinking it, or possibly to be painful in its inexplicability, difficult in that way, or perhaps awesome and astonishing in its inexplicability. We take things so. And the things we take so may simply not, to others, present the same kind of difficulty—of being impossible or agonizing to get one’s mind round” (2-3).

Diamond is engaged with a number of philosophical questions that have to do with knowing other people’s minds and I won’t discuss those here. I’m interested, instead, in thinking about climate change in these terms: as something that is devastating and profoundly resistant to representation to some, and yet, to others, apparently presents no such difficulty or disturbance. I was interested in Diamond’s analysis both for how it invites us to think about the difficulty of reality (the former category) and how it helps us to navigate the divide between those who don’t experience such difficulty and those who do.

Diamond’s essay is anchored, in part, in a discussion of J. M. Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals. She presents Coetzee’s book so grippingly and compellingly that I decided to read it myself. Here, too, I’m going to sidestep many aspects of this novel that are relevant to our course (the frame narration, the focus on animal rights, the reflections on interdisciplinarity) and go straight to its relevance, as I perceive it, to climate change thinking. Here’s a short inadequate precis of the work: a mother who writes novels visits her son at the university where he teaches English; the son is a little embarrassed by his mother for her outspokenness on the issue of the cruelty to animals but also proud of her accomplishments as a novelist; the mother and the son’s wife do not get along; the mother delivers a lecture and a seminar on the treatment of animals and Coetzee’s book is mainly comprised of the delivery of these two speaking engagements interspersed with a few exchanges between mother and son. That’s it.

The novel is told from the son’s perspective; we are given his angle on the issue, to adopt the terminology of our course. He refers to his mother’s interest in the cruelty of animals as a “hobbyhorse” although he allows that she is “entitled to her convictions”; he attributes her singled-minded focus to the fact that she is in her “declining years”; and he uses the word “propaganda” to describe her views (16-17). In short, he does not promote her cause.

The mother, for her part, comes across as indifferent to the impression she makes on others. She wants only to convey her distress about the state of the world and its treatment of animals. She reflects on what humans know and what humans don’t, as well as on how we sometimes have a vested interest in not-knowing. She does not want her audience not to know. She makes a controversial connection to the Holocaust to drive home the point that her audience is surrounded by butchers—those who kill animals—and that they cannot say they do not know (20-21).

The son is baffled by his mother’s ineffectiveness as a speaker. He recalls that she was never good at telling “bedtime stories” (19). Her talks, he reflects to himself, are unlikely to bring her audiences around to her position. And so why does she do it? he asks her. “I just don’t want to sit silent,” she tells him (59).

The mother routes her arguments through poetry. She hopes that she can use examples from poetry to capture what an academic argument cannot. Specifically, poems can convey, sometimes only fleetingly, discordant modes of being: what it is to be alive and dead at once, for example. Or, perhaps more specifically, what it is to be the sort of animal that knows it will die. Or more specifically still, what it is to be an animal. Poems dislocate us. Or as the mother tells her son in their poignant closing conversation, “It’s that I no longer now where I am” (69).

The crux of the novel, from a climate change perspective, is this: how do you represent an issue that challenges the words and categories available to you? And how do you represent an issue, about which you are deeply concerned, to an audience untroubled by the things that compel and disturb you? We’ve been addressing these questions all semester and many of you took them up in your essays on storytelling.

Is philosophy, is thinking and reason, an adequate response to the climate crisis? Or does it, like the Holocaust (another topic taken up by the mother in The Lives of Animals), like animal cruelty, so defy human comprehension that it requires other categories and modes of thought all together? And, if so, where does one find those categories?

Coetzee has a wonderful sense of what the novel is capable of, the contradictions it can bring to life. It’s not that poetry and novels will solve the climate crisis but they do perhaps help us to feel its difficulty. Why is everyone not as shaken and distressed by animal cruelty as the mother? Coetzee’s novel asks its readers to inhabit that shaken-ness, not to dispel it.

The mother’s response in the close of the book is moving. She cannot understand how others do not see what she sees and respond as she does. People, very kind people, are doing terrible things that they know about. She doesn’t know what to do about. All she knows is that she cannot “sit silent.”

. . .

Some additional comments and questions: 1) The mother and son have names in Coetzee’s book—Elizabeth Costello and John—but I have retained these generic descriptors since they dominate Coetzee’s telling of the story. Does it matter that it’s a mother and son? How would the story be different with a father and son? Two friends? 2) Apropos our discussions of conversation and translation, it seems important that “the difficulty of reality” is taken up in different forms of conversation: between the mother and son; the mother and her audience; and the mother in a seminar, question-and-answer setting. Why does Coetzee choose the conversational mode? Why doesn’t Diamond? What is gained and what is lost by situating one’s ideas explicitly in a conversational format?