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September 1999 A Challenge to the Faculties Book Review By Martin Rowe

 

The Lives of Animals by J. M. Coetzee (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999). $19.95 hardcover. 128 pages.

The Ticking Tenure Clock: An Academic Novel by Blaire A. French (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998). $24.95 hardcover. 256 pages.

Ever since Socrates gathered his eager students to sit under the plane trees and discourse on the nature of existence, the ideal of academic life has been to pursue knowledge, enlightenment, or the Ideal disinterestedly, courageously, and with an acceptance that you might be wrong. It remains, it seems, an unreachable ideal. For, not only did Socrates and his followers blindly believe that women and slaves were less than human and that animals were only here for our use, but they were probably subject to the same diseases that infect academic life today: careerism, back-biting, prejudice, sexism, and a pathological fear of change.

In their very different ways, The Lives of Animals and The Ticking Tenure Clock are damning indictments of the self-delusion of The Academy and the anxious professionals who live in and from it. Both explore this theme through the issue of animal rights—which acts as the ultimate challenge to academic orthodoxy: it demands that knowledge directly affects life. In other words, after we discover that there is no intellectual justification for what we do to animals we are challenged to change that behavior.

The Lives of Animals consists of two works by novelist Coetzee, who was invited to give the annual Tanner Lectures at Princeton University on a philosophical issue of his choice. Instead of presenting formal papers, Coetzee created a narrative about the fictional Elizabeth Costello, a well-known feminist novelist and critic, who is asked to give the (fictional) annual Gates Lecture on philosophy at (fictional) Appleton College in Waltham, Massachusetts. To the consternation of her son John, a professor of physics at Appleton, Costello chooses to speak about what we do to animals—a “hobbyhorse” of hers that has alienated her from Norma, John’s wife. Norma is a philosopher of the mind who considers Costello’s vegetarianism faddist and her advocacy for animals inconsistent and irrational.

Costello is a frail, distracted, and somewhat cantankerous advocate. She refuses to abide by academic niceties and alienates her audience by speaking poorly, insistently comparing factory farming to the Holocaust, and either not answering questions properly or refusing to engage academic colleagues in suitably intellectual terms. Costello apologizes for being a novelist and not a philosopher, but brusquely adds that if Appleton had wanted a reasoned argument the college should have asked a philosopher to lecture and not her.

There are, of course, multiple ironies and issues at work here, and the four “reflections” by real-life academics that follow the Costello narrative in The Lives of Animals explore a few of them. Literary critic Marjorie Garber looks at Coetzee’s narrative strategy; philosopher Peter Singer explores Costello/Coetzee’s arguments concerning animals; sociologist of religion Wendy Doniger examines the mythic identity of animals; and primatologist Barbara Smuts offers details of her own personal interaction with animals—something she notes Costello doesn’t do. Ironically, all have problems dealing with Coetzee’s strategy of fictionalizing these lectures. Singer opts out of engaging Costello’s ideas because he doesn’t know where Costello ends and Coetzee begins; instead, he breezes through his own “fictional” narrative explanation of the equality of interests among species. Garber engages with the narrative strategy from a literary and psychological perspective, but does not show how the strategy illuminates our relationship with animals or even casts light on the character of Costello. Doniger is clearly more sympathetic to the tenor of Costello/Coetzee’s ideas and places them in a useful historical and religious context, while Smuts avoids the issue of narrative entirely.

This glossing over or avoidance of Coetzee’s fictionalization of his lectures is too bad, for to anyone who has advocated an “unpopular” position, especially that of animal rights, the character of Elizabeth Costello is both familiar and troubling. Costello is tired. Her passionate belief in speaking out against the cruelties visited by us upon animals (“I just don’t want to sit silent,” she tells John) has become enervated and slightly bitter. She acknowledges her own hypocrisy (she wears leather shoes and carries a leather handbag) and, when pressed, is uncomfortable about espousing particular “principles”. In response to a questioner who asks what she advocates, she replies weakly: “Open your heart and listen to what your heart says”. Costello is skeptical of her hosts’ interest in the subject and is wary of the Academy’s examination of her ideas. It is not that she is not convinced of the reasonableness of her defense of animals (such as it is), but that she believes reason is only another self-defining feature of human beings and as such, is irrelevant to knowing the “embodied beings” who are other animals.

For Costello (and perhaps Coetzee) the writer, not only is it possible to imagine oneself as another being, and thus to empathize with that being’s suffering (the absence of which she feels was the Nazis’ greatest crime), but through the poetic mind we can “bring the living body into being within ourselves”. This offers us a more profoundly transformative experience of animals than that discovered through philosophy. Costello acknowledges the irony that this experience does not mean we have to treat animals better, merely that we depict them and ourselves in a truer, less self-deluding light.

Costello and her ideas are constantly being commented on by other characters, whose responses to both range from outright hostility to covert sympathy. Coetzee, with enormous skill and great subtlety, presents an embattled, fatigued, and sensitive elderly woman who is no longer able to exist in the fog of willful forgetfulness and ignorance that society—and the Academy—demands of her and us. While John is driving her to the airport, Costello breaks down. Everywhere she looks, she tells him, she sees animal corpses bought for money by good people—people like her son, her grandchildren, and others—all involved “in a crime of stupefying proportions.” She’s tried to forget it: “Calm down, I tell myself. Everyone else comes to terms with it, why can’t you? Why can’t you?” Her son has no answer except to tell her that “it” (her tears, her suffering, or her life, if not animal slaughter) “will soon be over.”

John, anxious that his mother’s “difficult” behavior might somehow cloud his future in the Academy, would fit in well at Patrick Henry University in Virginia, the venue for Blaire French’s very readable satire on academic life. The hero of The Ticking Tenure Clock is Lydia Martin, a political scientist who like John is a junior faculty member but, apparently unlike John, still not tenured. At 33, Martin has written one book—a study of the political effectiveness of the environmental movement—and has just discovered that one book will not be enough to get her tenure (paradise for all academics). So she has to find a topic for another book, and accidentally runs into an animal rights group on campus, a former member of which excites her non-academic interest.

Initially, the crowd of animal advocates Martin comes across (from the hippie radical Hathor to Amy, the rich kid rebelling against her family; from earnest cub reporter Kathy to former activist Charlie who is forced from the group when he experiments on dogs as part of his pre-med training) is depicted fairly stereotypically. This too is a nice narrative irony: for Martin the first person narrator is dismissive of most people and groups that advocate social change. As it turns out, Martin is forced to put her career and priorities on the line when what actually happens in the laboratories funded by the university is broadcast on television.

French is brilliantly persuasive in her acidic description of the competitive self-involvedness of academic life and the arrogant high-handedness and sycophantic cowardice, respectively, of tenured and non-tenured faculty alike. Martin is no exception: she too is self-deluding and decidedly indifferent to the social movements that “interest” her; obsessed with the ins and outs of who is or who is not on track for tenure, she appears to have no convictions or grounding principles. The ending of The Ticking Tenure Clock is rather too neat to be true, although it is by no means clear that Martin has understood why animal advocates think or do what they think or do, or even if she is more sympathetic to their cause.

Both The Lives of Animals and The Ticking Tenure Clock, however, brilliantly depict an enclosed world where ideas (no matter how challenging or radical) are mere formal exercises for self-advancement, where passions are stripped of their relevance to become competitive theories for ego-drenched debates, or simply material for another book, and where the possibility of social change is stifled all the more cruelly because we on the outside believe the Academy actually cares about it. How delicious the irony then that university presses have published both!