Jack Amos-Tutorial 11.

April 17th, 2023.

B00937889

Tutor-Nicole Go

Chronicle Apes:

An Interpretation of Anomaly Genre in Coetzee’s Canon That’s Positions Literature as a

Cultural Alternative to Reason.

In The lives of animals Coetzee offers an interpretation of reason that not only critiques it

but challenges the legitimacy of its culturally perceived form. Through analyzing the structure of

Coetzee’s novel (Which in all actuality is a lecture) I will parallel Peter Singer’s narrative

response to it I hope to unite reason with its anthropological source; literature, and defining it in

the context of a genre I hope to draw out the actuality of Costello’s criticism of reason, which is

to question as to whether or not our rational faculty deserves all of the value we place on it.

I will first examine the nested structure of implicated narrative that Coetzee plants within

the text and how it’s meaning becomes manifest in fictions the characters themselves tell; before

contrasting Coetzee’s alter-ego Costello with the ancient literary device of a Socratic figure to

unite our cultural and societal methods of discerning truth as literary genres, as opposed to being

solely reason. With these arguments I wish to offer an interpretation of the lives of animals that

posits reason as type of literary genre.

 To begin it is necessary to define the terms used to justify this interpretation, as both are

being used in a broad sense. Literature can be contextualized as a type of knowledge that deals

with a specific concern. Just as the academic can achieve high degrees of literacy, so too can a

computer programmer become literate with code, just as a woodsman becomes literate with the

land that he lives on. It can be thought of as specific knowledge, whereas what type of genre that

knowledge is, things alter a little.

A genre is defined as a conventional response to a rhetorical situation; a type of

information that arises in response to the meaning within a particular circumstance. Science-

Fiction arises from the implications of human curiosity combining with their species combined

technological success, Romance arises from socio-sexual situations, and reason arose from the

many situations in that it was required. The thing about genre is that it is created on an individual

level, but when the situation is multiplied enough times throughout multiple different

individuals, it becomes cultural, and that is when it becomes a fully actualized genre. It is

information that has arose from a repeatedly encountered circumstance that demands it’s

production. So literary genres are conventional bodies of cultural knowledge that are centred

around specific concerns.

As stated in the introduction The Lives of Animals began genesis as a lecture, delivered

at Princeton in ****. The peculiarity of this situation, however, is that the lecture itself was about

Coetzee’s alter-ego Costello giving lecturing on the whether reason can justify our treatment of

animals (page number). Responding to this in the reflections, printed after the lecture in my copy

of the book, Peter Singer writes about a fictional conversation between an academic father and

daughter pair, discussing Coetzee’s lecture one morning over breakfast, exemplified best in this

short exchange:
 “This is his lecture. Except it isn’t a lecture at all. It’s a fictional account of a female

novelist called Costello giving a lecture at an American University.

“You mean he’s going to stand up there and give a lecture about someone giving a

lecture? Tres post-moderne” (85).

Post-modern could be the best term for this nesting of narratives that blurs the line

between fact and fiction and serves to compound the interpretation of the text. In her talk,

Costello goes on to use metaphors (A literary device) and samples circumstances from both

fictional and historical narratives. From this structuring a mosaic like effect can take place while

reading LA, one where every paragraph is wholly reasonable and legitimate on its own, but

compared to the surrounding sentences it immediately becomes contradictory. The effect is used

to corrupt the illusion we culturally perceive reason as; instead of a tool of efficient elegance that

distinguishes us from other animals it becomes an arbitrary method of arranging value when used

within proximity of other versions of itself. I believe Coetzee intended for this to be the effect;

as Costello’s lecture uses references to the works of Kafka, Thomas Nagel, and Kant to compare

the concentration camps of the holocaust to the abattoirs and slaughterhouses of the industrial

age (19, 23, 24). The effect is not to persuade one to Costello’s side, but rather to draw attention

to structure; nested narratives cram rational thought processes on top of one another and in close

confines to replicas of themselves; and the result produced is inconsistency. With the repetitive

use of reason inconsistency repetitively crops up in the contradictions between the very bodies of

reason. Kafka, Nagel, Costello, and the myriad of other characters who weave narratives to

contest or support Costello’s all engage in rationality, to no end at all. The mess of incompatible

stories and opinions that one is left with at the end of the book is a far more nuanced and eery

reflection of the intricacies that accompany human experience, than anything produced solely by
reason itself. To remain with the ethos of the paper, it wasn’t reason alone that creates the effect

produced reading the Lives of Animals, but rather a highspeed convergence of literary genres

compounded within a single novel/lecture. While many characters in the book and indeed in our

world history claim that reason is what separates us from other animals, I ask whether we would

have developed faculties for reason without our capacity for literacy? Just such are the questions

dripping of philosophical genre that are evoked by reading of Coetzee’s work.

Which would be, if one were to interpret Costello as the primary mouthpiece for the

author in the text, that reason alone cannot meet the demands we place upon it. That it, so long as

we continue to use reason with the total absoluteness for every task of resolve or progression, so

long as it is the primary tool with which we use to interact with the world on the level of a

species, is devastatingly insufficient for the work we have employed it to complete. Costello

proposes the use of emotive imagination, or sympathetic imagination, as a supplemental

alternative to reason; (DANIEL BRANDES LECTURE) in that one must feel and think at the

same time to be fully human. She says that the act of being able to think and feel her way into the

being of any other thing that “occupies the substrate of life” (29) is what makes her human, not

the capacity to calculate rationally.

While Costello argues for the use of sympathetic reason to usurp or be used hand in hand

with reason, I feel that Coetzee’s message is somewhat deeper. Through the narrative is

structured like a mosaic, the style encroaches on that of the platonic. That is the essence

proposed in the paper Elisabeth Costello as a Socratic Figure by Alan Northover. In it Northover

examines the language used in contrast with that of the Socratic Socrates and the Platonic

Socrates; in that she is a controversial figure being used to publicly examine a very complex and

nuanced issue. He writes that the book has been described “as a cross between a campus novel
and a Platonic dialogue" writing that “In Lessons Three and Four, 'The Lives of Animals,' comes

closest to the Platonic dialogue form" (Northover, 38). This is relative as these dialogues can be

seen as an early genre of philosophical literature. Comparing Coetzee’s canonical work to Plato’s

is important because, as Northover writes, “Costello and Coetzee are novelists, and the Socratic

dialogue according to Bakhtin, one of the precursors of the novel” (42). Coetzee blends his

cultural canon and issues into a novel that occupies a somewhat unique genre, as Northover

established, a book that isn’t quite a lecture, isn’t quite a novel, and isn’t quite a platonic

dialogue, while coming incredibly close to being all those genres. Because the novel is a literary

genre, and because the nature of the novel is unique, Coetzee architects a new genre of literature

that contains a critique of a cultural value; the perceived value that enables the critique in the

first place. But this is not what the lives of animals is about; it is about the notion that without

literature we wouldn’t be able to value reason to the atmospheric extent that we do; in Costello’s

lecture Coetzee forwards the idea that our value of reason, is no more than a story we’ve told

ourselves to justify our acts. In doing so, he implicates reason itself into question; if the value we

place on it is fictional, what about the concept itself? While not being exclusively fictional, it is

suggested through the nuances within the text that reason as a faculty is a literary genre. How

else could it take such a multitude of inconsistent forms?

The reason I incorporated Northover’s thesis into this paper was to contain the Socratic

figure and by implication the platonic dialogue, under classification as literary genres; in that

they are specific texts concerned with the exploration of our world and use fictional exchanges

and situations to try and convey truth. The bizarre caveat with these genres, however, is that they

are fictional tales trying to use reason to tell truth. Plato abandoned the world of physicality to

understand it, and in doing so he sought to tell reason through fiction. I read The Lives Of
animals as a fictional tale trying to tell the truth about reason, with the arguments of the

characters along with their reactions (72) to show just how inconsistent with the human

experience the rational process is. Because of its inconsistency with different forms of itself,

because it is such a territorial beast of a concept, the overall ethos of the lives of animals is that

one should place less value on it, have less faith in its ability to successfully negotiate one’s

imagination with reality, less value in it as our main special distinguishing feature, and instead

embrace the full scope of our faculties. In a way, the telos of the interpretation is to disengage

with the narrative that reason is the value of being human, and instead engage with one’s own

capacity for creating narrative. Such is exemplified by the many characters using responding

with various narratives concerning Costello’s controversial stance. It is as if the sum of all he

writes points towards creating one’s own genre of literature through which to view the world,

rather than a systematic formula of logical inference. To emphasize the importance of genre as

the substitute for reason that is at the heart of the text, Hayden White’s Anomalies of Genre: The

Utility of Theory and History for the Study of Literary Genres provides an excellent insight on

the role of this concept. He talks of adopting a historical approach to understanding genre over a

theoretical one; the parallels of tension between reason and genre and genre and theory are

evident. The way to resolve this conflict in to look at the history of genre, rather than genre as a

mechanical phenomenon concept (White, 598). He writes that there is a tension further still

though, as “we are still enthralled by an ideal of purity that promises relief from the

contradictions we must live between theory and practice and the paradoxes that attend our efforts

to live as both individuals and members of communities. It is no accident that the quest for this

ideal often takes the form of a liberation from speech, language, even thought and recourse to the

refuge of. . . silence. In any event, it is not theory that is the problem here; it is a refusal to see
that theoretical discourse is the best we can hope for in those areas of human inquiry where

science will not, because it cannot, go” (White, 602). The conflict between reason manifest in

theory and reason, with theory being incapable of confining genre because of the limits imposed

by its rational foundation. White resolves this conflict by turning theory itself into a genre; that

of discourse confined by theory and says that it is the best alternative reason and the scientific

method fail us.

It is using this same method of reasoning that White compounds his historical approach

to understanding genre; he writes that,

“The historical approach lets you simply show the ways genre works in different times

and places in the development of literature, without having to raise the vexing theoretical

question of the value typically assigned to specific genres, various notions of genre, and the idea

of a hierarchy of genres in both culture and society at large. Everyone recognizes that the notion

of generic purity is a supreme value among aristocratic, conservative, and reactionary social

groups and political parties. So, one might be inclined to think that the notion of genre purity in

literary criticism serves much the same function as the notion of species purity in racist notions

of humanity and history” (White, 599).

Similarly, to Hegel (White, 600) he sees history as being a cultural source of individual

reason, however in the same way he confined theory to genre in discourse, White does the same

to history, and like Coetzee he implicates reason in his scope of analysis. If reason is history, and

if history can be a genre, then so can reason. And with that Coetzee’s meta-novel-lecture

embraces its structure and transcends its narrative, becoming a genre of novel all on its own. A

mosaic of literature that reflects that of the colliding human perspectives so at work in real life,
and uses itself to ask if the way it is structured, the manner in which it is arranged, is the best it

possibly could be? For we are, after all, ultimately dealing with a matter of ethics.

As one of the main interpretations of Coetzee’s text is as an argument for the rights of

animals and life in general, I think that he is asking if the way in which we structure our

perspectives is as moral as it could be. Systems operate according to the structure and nature of

their components, and we as humans behave according to our worldviews, compiled from the

literary genres we have identified with and understood, clung onto to justify wrongs experienced,

and piled on top of one another until we’ve fashioned the narratives into a lens through which to

peer out and cast judgement at our surroundings.

Genre is a conventional response to a rhetorical situation but sometimes, as in the case of

Coetzee, it isn’t always so conventional. Sometimes it’s an odd, amalgamated version of itself

that criticizes and challenges the very process that produces it; just as White confined history to

genre Coetzee does so with reason. Wrapping it up in the product of itself, and having turned it

inside out, in The Lives of Animals, he exposes it for all to see.

 Work Cited

Coetzee, J.M. The Lives of Animals. Princeton University Press, 1999.

Northover, Alan. Elizabeth Costello As a Socratic Figure.

Hyde, White. Anomalies of Genre: The Utility of Theory and History for the Study of Literary

Genres