Crazy for Coetzee

This is by far the most interesting book, structurally speaking, that I've read this first semester. It's form, a meta-fiction, poses so many puzzles that it seems, at times, like a rubiks cube; if we can align all the colours, a solution will be found and peace - mental peace - will reign. But I think that the Rubik's cube analogy I've just used is wrong; it's tempting to think that there's a solution, but is there one?

And analogy is the tool used for the greatest effect in the story. As suggested by Marjorie Garber in her post-logue, we are being held in thrall by what Freud called the "the seduction of an analogy".

In class, the two analogies that were most discussed were the one about maze experiments with mice, the idea that we drop mice into sterile mazes, but never question that a lab scientist dropped into the jungles of Borneo wouldn't last a week.

The other, more infamously, compares the slaughter of cows in industrial slaughter houses to the slaughter of Jews in the Nazi concentration camps.

The first thing that occurs to me about the maze analogy is that a mouse bred for lab experimentation dropped into the same jungle in Borneo would likely last far less time than the scientist before being devoured by a snake or bat or other predator. Possibly only minutes, let alone a week. The other thing is that maze experiments were, to the best of my knowledge, constructed to examine learning and motivation in a species whose brain biology closely resembles that of man (sad, but true). I don't know that they were created to test a mouse's ability to survive in a hostile environment. Finally, the maze is a controlled environment, purposefully designed to test specific stimuli, whereas a jungle is, well, by definition an uncontrolled environment.

The point of all this isn't to pick at details, but rather to argue that I don't think the two are even remotely analogous. Further, with the analogy failing, all it really leaves us is a suggestion of moral superiority and revenge. Both, admittedly, seductive things if we are emotionally attached to the argument against animal experimentation.

Then the holocaust analogy. The two are analogous in a very limited sense, but it's a dangerous one in my mind. Because if we do equate the slaughter of cows to the slaughter of Jews, then the only conclusion that we can arrive at is to unequivocally state that the slaughter (by slaughter I mean the killing of cattle for the purposes of processing them into food, as opposed to the slaughter of Jews which was politically motivated and evil in intent and by nature) of cows is under any circumstances, for any reasons, absolutely immoral. To admit to the possibility of moral or ethical reasons the slaughter cattle, as Elizabeth Costello does - say, perhaps a ritualistic killing, or perhaps that we only slaughter in smaller scale, or devise a more humane way of killing them - would necessarily imply that we then might accept the holocaust if, perhaps, they had simply culled the bad Jews out, the ones who were really responsible for evil in Europe, or the bankers, or the ones who wouldn't assimilate the way the German Jews had. Or simply, if the killings had been more humane or ritualized. Ugly arguments indeed, but equally analogous if we accept the original analogy.

It is pointed out by Peter Singer that Issac Bashevis Singer (a character created by Singer the author being used by a character in a story by Singer, the philosopher?) used a similar analogy in a story, but did so to outline that they both share in common the abuse of the powerful over the disenfranchised. But I dare even to disagree with Bashevis Singer, pointing out that he was a survivor of the pogroms in Russia, and that perhaps he didn't want to separate the Holocaust from the other persecutions the Jews suffered throughout history. But that is exactly what Holocaust survivors hold onto so vehemently: that the slaughter of Jews in Europe by the Nazis, for which the work Holocaust was invented, is a singular event in human history, and that any appropriation of the term to other events is done to elevate the other event, deny the Jews any claim to the uniqueness of the persecution, which was and still is part of the politics of antisemitism, and thus denigrates the Holocaust as just another example of genocide. Although, perhaps if we're not diligent, there will yet be another example that will make it seem so.

The other tool that she uses is the idea that we are capable, because of our natural empathy, to imagine the being-ness of other animals, including other humans. But the weakness here is the supposition, argued by everybody from Aristotle to Kant and beyond, that we are at all capable of being so objective as to assume to know a reality outside of our own perceptions. I think the two things I rely on, which put me at odds with academia to a degree, is that I'm challenging the notion to objectivity, and wish to refer to personal experience to do so.

The first notion, that we can be so objective as to imagine another reality separate from our own, seems, on a phenomenological level, impossible. We may wish we can, but how can we ever know, no matter what we feel, that we are indeed seeing the world through anothers' eyes, feelings and thoughts, rather than a version of our own? How can we ever be sure, no matter how complete an out of body experience we feel that we're having, that we are experiencing life as a bat?

As an actor, there's always been a debate, although it's been rendered moot over the past fifty years, of whether an actor, if he is playing King Lear must become the king, or if they must act as if they were a king. For me, I have always felt the more powerful performance comes from using the "as if" because it allows for the possibility of engaging in the reality of the experience, and for expressing something essentially human about the character we play. In other words, rather than trying to reconstruct a human being, we are a human being under specific imaginary circumstances.

I suggested in class that perhaps her anguish at facing what was obviously a deep sense of alienation from the world around her caused her to focus her anxiety on the animals right movement rather than face herself. As a writer and poet who feels what she knows to be an unpopular point-of-view on a subject, she is, in a way is being brought to slaughter by the academic system she is facing. Is this such an objectionable idea? She mentions Kafka frequently; isn't this idea about his personal sense of alienation infused in his work commonly accepted about his writing? Certainly the idea of transference isn't new to psychologists. I'm not arguing that she is sick, or intellectually weak, but merely that she is human, and an artist. Personally, I think this kind of deep use of the imagination is what makes great works of art. It is not our ability to become something else, but our ability to use something else to express something so deep about ourselves. To try to express the alienation and anger she feels directly would make it pedestrian, academic. It would be philosophy, or therapy. Not art.

And this is the point. I think what I'm saying is that she's wrong on so very many different levels. And yet her argument and point of view is also unassailable! As a reader, I can't help but feel that she's right about animals, and that we must become conscious and debate what we do to them and why we do it. Isn't that an irony, that as she suggests that poetry cannot move people to action on the issue, but this story evokes a sense of urgency in us, the reader, to engage with it and ourselves?

Perhaps the real issue, one that seemed to be implicit in the classroom discussion, at any rate, that it is the mass production, genetic modification focusing on yield and industrialized slaughter of animals that we object to so deeply. The way we eat has been radically altered over the past fifty years by the food marketing corporations, and it has all been done simply in the name of profit and market share, rather than sustainability and quality of the food supply.

There are many movements in the food world on this very notion, started and sustained by restaurants... and the food television industry, of all things... and that is now leeching into the public consciousness and many of the places we buy food: How much meat should we eat? Where should we get the meat from? Do you know the source of the food you eat? Was it raised/grown ethically? Was it harvested ethically and brought to market in a timely way that didn't rely on chemical additives? What are we putting in our bodies?

This brilliant story posits all the questions that we've been asking ourselves over this entire course: can we find any answers using only reason, or only passion? Can philosophy raise us to the place of the gods? Does passion separate us from the animals? Rather than a Rubik's cube, this story is more like an Escher drawing. It climbs the stairs, seeming to move up to a higher level, but we end up back at the bottom despite our effort. The basic questions remain no matter how much we progress as a species and a society.