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The

5. 1999
that makes a black man insane? One should anticipate that in the feeding frenzy around the Booker Prize, we will be served advance notices of the several new Indian entrants into the English fiction scene this year. To cite one instance, Picador has recently launched its Indian list under a new imprint, Picador India. The literary-ideologicalmap is truly changing. Indiasnuclear-test blasts have pretty much put to rest the myth of Indiansbeing peaceloving Gandhians. Is the new spate of successful Indian fiction going to prepare the ground for another stereotype-of Indians being great,writers? Can I foresee a day when one can stand at a street corner with a cup in hand and a sign hanging from ones neck Im Indian and I write, but Im not talented?

ed powers will starve you of music as themes of music and the Orpheus myth, surely as the damned. Leave music to those are going to be rivals for the Booker Prize. who can afford indulgences. In twenty As a part of this media attention, the words and years no butchers son will be a violinist, Indianyy Indians in the West will no, nor daughter neither..At these mo- be thrown around a lot. Seths and Rushments, Seth moves away from the romantic dies novels will inspire discussions also overvalorization of genius and the imagi- of music. As a public service announcenation-and becomes, as ment, one should remind readers that, esa whole, a sensitive and finely controlled pecially in the world of music, Indians in exploration of the structure of feeling that the West have beenvery active.InEngland, for example, groups like FunDaMenta1 words, music and love produce. and Asian Dub Foundation have raised In of earlier this year, V.S. Naipaul reminisced their voices against racist laws like the in a long essay about his early formationin 1994 Criminal Justice and Public Order Trinidad. There was a further world, he Act (CJA). Radical cultural theorist John wrote, of which our colonial world was Hutnyk has written of FunDaMenta1s only a shadow. It was this outside world Aki Nawaz (a k a Propagandhi) and his that sent to the Caribbean islands their gov- anti-CJA video calIed Dog Tribe, which ernors and their goods: smoked herring, begins with the words Whats the thing salted cod, condensed milk, Dr. Sloans liniment, the tonic called Six Sixty-Six and all the books that were so crucial in Naipauls making as a writer. ut the books didnt permit easy entry into their imaginative world. Naipaul explains why: Such social knowledge as I had-a faint remembered village India and a mixed colonial world seen from the outside-didnt help with the literature of the metropolis. I was two worlds away. I thought of Naipaul as I read Seth. A young writer in Trinidad today can read Naipaul or Sam Selvon, one in Nigeria can read Buchi Emecheta or Ben Okri, and in India, Seth, Amitav Ghosh or Arundhati Roy. Those who remain several worlds away are those who live and write, in those same places, in languages other than the one in which Barnes &Noble prints its ads. If Seth were to tell the story of his own fashioningas awriter, it would be of a world in which there is a greatermovement,across the global divide, ofworkers, students,tourists,bombs, software,arms and even books. Inequality reigns in horrifylng ways, and not everyone can even read, but the world of media and advertising withholds very little from the imagination of the dispossessed. Perhaps the marketing of his own book, too, would have to be apart of Seths story. To quote a news report from New Delhi: Orion has reportedly given details of an &80,000 hard-back campaign, a highprofile launch party and a special one-off ticketed evening at Londons Wigmore Hall to promote the book, which, it claims, will be the most widelyreviewedin 1999. A part of the media hype this literary season, of course, is the fact that Seths and Rushdies both written around the

Eat, Drink and Be Chary

BENJAMIN KUNKEL By Coetzee. Princeton. 127 pp. $19.95.

Edited by Kerry S. Walters and Lisa Portmess. S U N Y . 287 pp. Paper $19.95.

.M. Coetzees new novella, The Lives ofAnimaZs,must be some kind of first. Usually when a work of fiction comes to us wrapped inside critical essays like a knife inside cardboard, the work has been published many times and the author is long dead. But here is a novella surrounded, in its first
edition, with essays written by prominent academics.A literarycritic, a primatologist, a historian of religion and a theoretician of animal rights have all been called in to figure out what Coetzee is up to. If Coetzee, the South African novelist whose best and best-known book may be were an animal, he would be a fox-quick, aloof and crafty. In 1997 Coetzee was invited by the Princeton University Center for HumanValues to give a pair of lectures. Instead of doing so, he presented his audience with a novella about a famous novelist who is invited to speak at a prestigious American college. Rather than discuss literature, the fictional novelist-an Australian woman named Elizabeth Costello-lectures her audience on the importance of animal rights, the moral necessity of vegetarianism. Costellos audience is, as Coetzees was, a bit surprised.But while Costello is all over the place-here eloquentand astute, there slack in her reasoning and a bit hystericalis a writer a veg-

Coetzee is nowhere to be found. He sets the scene and retreats from it, and when, over an awkward dinner at the Faculty Club-only three people dare to order the fish-Costello defends her vegetarianism in strong terms and things threaten to t r un acrimonious, we have little idea of where Coetzees own sympathies lie. For all the metafictional high jinks, the self-reflexive character, of Coetzees story, there is no postmodern playfulness to it. The fewjokes are academic in-jokes. partakes of Coetzees usual clipped and somber moral seriousness, and in that sense, much as Coetzee may have surprisedhis audience,this book is of a piece with his others. Indeed, animal rights and ethical vegetarianism are natural subjects for him. The debate about them turns on questions of suffering, something to which Coetzees sensorium is pitched with particular keenness. The narrator of tells us what any Coetzee narrator might, that his ear is tuned to the pitch of human pain. Coetzees prose is able to register physical pain, and the wrack of moral confusion,

July 5,1999
so acutely that we must sometimes set his slim books down. The chicken-killing scene in o Iron is enough to show us f that his sympathy is not confined to human pain; and if the chief problem for animals, when it comes to suffering,is that they cannot ask for mercy, the inarticulateness of Coetzee's damaged Michael K (of & o f K ) is enough to show us that animals are not always alone in this.
lizabeth Costello has, like Coetzee, pricked'her ears up, she feels, to a sound that no one elsehears. How else couldthe colossal suffering of animals-"what is being done to animals at this moment in production facilities (I hesitate to call them farms any longer), in abattoirs, in trawlers, in laboratories,all over the world"-fail to evoke a universal outrage? It does not seem to her that the capacity to reason byitself confersrights on creatures,and, in any case, do we not teach experimental subjects the most cracked sort of reasoning?The subject ape is not encouraged to wonder, about his captor, "Why is he starving me?" but to think: "How does one use the crates to reach the bananas?'
From the purity of speculation (Why do men behave like this?) [the ape] is relentlessly propelled toward lower, practical, instrumental reason (How does one use this to get that?). ...A carefully plotted psychological regimen conducts him away from ethics and metaphysics toward the humbler reaches of practical reason.

33

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This is one of Elizabeth Costello's most interesting ideas, that experiments on our fellow primates should lead not to either party's enlightenmentbut to their intellectual, and our moral, corruption. The rest of Costello's arguments are less original. She is often vague and distraught, uttering commonplaces. The fascination of Coetzee's novella is not in its arguments but in how those arguments assort with character-something to which I will return. is not the first place to go in search of the vegetarian's rationale. The case for vegetarianismrests, at any rate, on f h l i a r arguments. Humans have been killing and eating other animals for an immemoriallylong time, and the opponents of this practice have.had the same expanse in which to work out their critique.Kerry Walters and Lisa Portmess's very useful and readable anthology consists of short excerpts from the writings of notable exponents of vegetarianism (not all of whom managedto forswearsteak) and ends up demonstratingthe substantialconti-

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34

Nation. nuity of vegetarianthought. The nineteenthcentury New England reformer William Alcott complains of the inefficiency of raising crops to feed slaughter-animalsrather than humans directly, much as Frances Moore Lapp6 will later do, with more statistical sophistication.Peter Singer (the Princeton bioethicist who responds in the Coetzee volume with a short story of his own) offers a glimpse of the veal-calf pen hardly less vivid and painful than Tolstoys account of a visit to a slaughterhouse. Plutarch finds that cruelty to animals fosters cruelty to humans; Carol feminist version of this argument is to suggest that we abstract meat from animals in a way analogous to our abstraction of sex from women. Over many centuries vegetarians have argued that meat-eating is cruel and inefficient; that it does nothing for our own physical health; and that slaughter and incidental torture, or the willful ignorance of the same, accustom us to a brutality not always reserved for brutes. What these arguments have going for them is power, not novelty. till, vegetarianism has a way of getting mixed up with other politics, of amassing all kinds of arguments around itself. Vegetarianism tends in our time to correlate with left or liberal politics, to prevail more among teachers than stockbrokers, to sport (leather) Birkenstocks more often than Kenneth Coles. By the same token, a place like New Yorks gel0 and Maxies steakhouse (Horrifying Vegetarians since tends to attract a rather conservative clientele, sells Cigar and has refused to recognizethe union its kitchen staff has formed. refers to vegetarians as vegemaniacs. It seems it was ever thus: Shelley was an atheist and an advocate of free love as well as a vegetarian; Tolstoy wanted to reform not only diet but Christianity and Russian agriculture; nineteenth-century animal-protection societies were founded by abolitionistsand suffragists.In Road to Pier, Onvell expressed his annoyance at vegetarians for leading the working class to associate socialism with food cranks. As usual, Onvell, while cranky himself, is on to something. Ethical vegetarianism, the kind that aspires to reduce not only cholesterol but animal misery, can easily become elitist, a form of invidiousdistinction. In Coetzees Elizabeth Costellos main adversary is her sons wife, Norma, a philosopher of mind who happens (like her husband) to teach at the college where Costellohas come to lecture. The ban on meat,Nom says, is only an

5. 1999

extreme form of dietary ban; and a dietary ban is a quick, simple way for an elite group to define itself. The bleeding heart rather than the purple heart is worn a badge of merit. But such a reservation only complicates, it hardly eliminates, the issue. espouse abolitionismmay have stoked the moral vanity of New Englands freethinking andunitarian elite,but that does not persuade us that their cause was not a just one. t would be comforting to think of vegetarianisms claim to expand our sympathy as something it had in its favor. But the comforts J.M. Coetzee offers tend to be colder than that. Elizabeth Costello is a great champion of sympathy, which allows us at times to share the being of another. William Alcott too, as excerpted in wants us to open the floodgates of sympathy; to him the world seems like one mighty slaughterhouseone grand school for the suppression of every kind, and tender, and brotherly feeling. Well, one does not go to school for no reason, and an excess of sympathy and knowledge would no more aid the meat industry (the United States second-largest manufacturing concern) than would the inclusion of feet, tail, fur and eyes in each package of ground round. We do not want to think about the source of these or other commodities,to remember what Marx said about capital coming into the world dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt. Similarlyvivid passages aside,just what is said in o f is not of primary interest; most of it has been said before. What is interesting is who says what, and Coetzees intimations of why. does not describe any animals at all-what is farther from the jungle thanthe university?-and one begins to suspect that its title refers mostly to the animal nature of human characters, the mute passions that knock them about. Indeed, why should it be that the mouthpiece for vegetarianism is a dramatically aging older woman who Iives alone with her cats? Why should her fiercest opponent be that womans daughter-in-law, a mother of two and a fierce and vigorous rationalist? Coetzee-not for nothing is he an admirer of D.H. Lawrence-makes us see the two womens intellectualcontest as also a contest over the man who is son to one and husband to the other. Most troubling,however, is the association, here as in of a scalding degree of compassion a figure who is isolated, infertile and soon dead. Does Elizabeth Costello rage Lea-like at the worlds

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The Nation.

35

wrong because she fears she is about to go tello cannot think of the quantum and the to the grave without her childs love? Or quality of animal suffering at human hands is it for herself, as it is for Age o Irons without thinking of us all as participants f Mrs. Curren, with whom she shares a great in a crime of stupefying proportion^.^^ Perdeal more than the initials EC? In that haps, her son concedes;butwhat good does protest do? Does compassion wound us to book, a late, terrible access of sympathyfor the homeless, for the children of apart- no purpose? Lives of Animals ends, heid-seems to come at the cost of ones rather severely, with Elizabeth Costellos own life, as if no one with children still to son soothing her with words we might say raise and a job still to hold down, and even to an animal being put down: There, air stillto breathe, could endure suchknowl- there, he whispers in her ear. There, there. edge as sympathy affords. Elizabeth Cos- It will soon be over. w

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Octopusy by Other Means

STUART KLAWANS

RFC seeks applications parentdcustodians fired, harassed, attacked, imprisoned because of their progressive activities. RFC makes grants for their children for camp, school, counseling, cultural activities. etc. Contact:

WHO

anymore, except when hes a guest. I didnt used to watch Saturday Night Live back when Mike Myers was on, because in high school my fiiends didnt really watch that program, or if we did we didnt admit it, because of its being on on Saturday night. But we knew about Mike Myers, especially from the second Wayne s World,and thats part of whats interesting about this new movie, in that its mostly about time travel, and old things like the sixties. In this paper, I will show that Spy Who Shagged completely summarizes Westem Civilization as Mr. Klawans has explainedit to us, making it an appropriate movie to be assigned for this final paper. First, Western Civilization was built to be Phall-o-Sentric. That was why in the Greek theater, which proceeded movies, they trademarked the original special effect, which got strapped on for comedies. After that, it was proved many times that nothing is funnier or delivers a bigger box office than this Phallus effect. There are two reasons. First, everybody in the locker room or wherever wants to look at a really big one, but nobody wants to stare. So when they strap on a special effect, you get to look at it right there in public, even though youre not supposed to, and you laugh out of appreciation. The second reason its funny is that when they strap on a Phallus, you see they

n the movie that has been assigned to us to write about, Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged M e , Mike Myers from Saturday N g t Live plays a secret agent ih named Austin Powers. He did this before, in the first Austin Powers movie, though not on Saturday Night Live,where he doesnt actually make appearances
could take it off again. I think this is what Mr. Klawans meant when he talked about the sense of detachment they had in certain parts of Greek culture. Now, as a movie about time travel and the sixties, Spy Who Shagged tells about detachment, and how Austin Powerss Phallus comes loose. Qnly they call it his m0j0,~ heres how it happens. and In the first Austin Powers movie, Austin Powers was an English secret agent and fashion photographer from London in the sixties who got frozen. By the time they thawed him out, in the nineties, he didnt know about AIDS or MTV. As a result, Austin Powers had to learn a lot about history and how people have changed, which I didnt completely know about myself, though the movie made it funny so I didnt mind. However, the idea for the new Austin Powers movie is this: Dr. Evil, who opposes Austin Powers, uses a time machine to go back to 1969, where he steals Austin Powerss sex drive. To recapture it, Austin Powers himself has to go back to 1969, where hes more comfortable anyway. But even back in the sixties, because his mojo has been stolen, he cant make a commitment to his new spy partner and girlfriend, Felicity Shagwell. The actress who plays her is namedHeather Graham, who accordingto Mr. Klawans was in some good movies

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