J. Coetzee - Elizabeth Costello

Wunderlich speaks again. 'The Greeks had a feeling there was something wrong in slaughter, but thought they could make up for that by ritualizing it. They made a sacrificial offering, gave a percentage to the gods, hoping thereby to keep the rest. The same notion as the tithe. Ask for the blessing of the gods on the flesh you are about to eat, ask them to declare it clean.'

'Perhaps that is the origin of the gods,' says his mother. A silence falls. 'Perhaps we invented gods so that we could put the blame on them. They gave us permission to eat flesh. They gave us permission to play with unclean things. It's not our fault, it's theirs. We're just their children.'

'Is that what you believe?' asks Mrs Garrard cautiously.

'And God said: Every moving thing that liveth shall be meat for you,' his mother quotes. 'It's convenient. God told us it was OK.'

Silence again. They are waiting for her to go on. She is, after all, the paid entertainer.

'Norma is right,' says his mother. 'The problem is to define our difference from animals in general, not just from so-called unclean animals. The ban on certain animals – pigs and so forth – is quite arbitrary. It is simply a signal that we are in a danger area. A minefield, in fact. The minefield of dietary proscriptions. There is no logic to a taboo, nor is there any logic to a minefield – there is not meant to be. You can never guess what you may eat or where you may step unless you are in possession of a map, a divine map.'

'But that's just anthropology,' objects Norma from the foot of the table. 'It says nothing about our behaviour today. People in the modern world no longer decide their diet on the basis of whether they have divine permission. If we eat pig and don't eat dog, that's just the way we are brought up. Wouldn't you agree, Elizabeth? It's just one of our folkways.'

Elizabeth. She is claiming intimacy. But what game is she playing? Is there a trap she is leading his mother into?

'There is disgust,' says his mother. 'We may have got rid of the gods but we have not got rid of disgust, which is a version of religious horror.'

'Disgust is not universal,' objects Norma. 'The French eat frogs. The Chinese eat anything. There is no disgust in China.'

His mother is silent.

'So perhaps it's just a matter of what you learned at home, of what your mother told you was OK to eat and what was not.'

'What was clean to eat and what was not,' his mother murmurs.

'And maybe' – now Norma is going too far, he thinks, now she is beginning to dominate the conversation to an extent that is totally inappropriate – 'the whole notion of cleanness versus uncleanness has a completely different function, namely, to enable certain groups to self-define themselves, negatively, as elite, as elected. We are the people who abstain from A or B or C, and by that power of abstinence we mark ourselves off as superior: as a superior caste within society, for instance. Like the Brahmins.'

There is a silence.

'The ban on meat that you get in vegetarianism is only an extreme form of dietary ban,' Norma presses on; 'and a dietary ban is a quick, simple way for an elite group to define itself. Other people's table habits are unclean, we can't eat or drink with them.'

Now she is getting really close to the bone. There is a certain amount of shuffling, there is unease in the air. Fortunately, the course is over – the red snapper, the fettucine – and the waitresses are among them removing the plates.

'Have you read Gandhi's autobiography, Norma?' asks his mother.

'No.'

'Gandhi was sent off to England as a young man to study law. England, of course, prided itself as a great meat-eating country. But his mother made him promise not to eat meat. She packed a trunk full of food for him to take along. During the sea voyage he scavenged a little bread from the ship's table and for the rest ate out of his trunk. In London he faced a long search for lodgings and eating houses that served his kind of food. Social relations with the English were difficult because he could not accept or return hospitality. It wasn't until he fell in with certain fringe elements of English society – Fabians, theosophists, and so forth – that he began to feel at home. Until then he was just a lonely little law student.'

'What is the point, Elizabeth?' says Norma. 'What is the point of the story?'

'Just that Gandhi's vegetarianism can hardly be conceived as the exercise of power. It condemned him to the margins of society. It was his particular genius to incorporate what he found on those margins into his political philosophy.'

'In any event,' interjects the blond man, 'Gandhi is not a good example. His vegetarianism was hardly committed. He was a vegetarian because of the promise he made to his mother. He may have kept his promise, but he regretted and resented it.'

'Don't you think that mothers can have a good influence on their children?' says Elizabeth Costello.

There is a moment's silence. It is time for him, the good son, to speak. He does not.

'But your own vegetarianism, Mrs Costello,' says President Garrard, pouring oil on troubled waters: 'it comes out of moral conviction, does it not?'

'No, I don't think so,' says his mother. 'It comes out of a desire to save my soul.'

Now there truly is a silence, broken only by the clink of plates as the waitresses set baked Alaskas before them.

'Well, I have a great respect for it,' says Garrard. 'As a way of life.'

'I'm wearing leather shoes,' says his mother. 'I'm carrying a leather purse. I wouldn't have overmuch respect if I were you.'

'Consistency' murmurs Garrard. 'Consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds. Surely one can draw a distinction between eating meat and wearing leather.'

'Degrees of obscenity' she replies.

'I too have the greatest respect for codes based on respect for life,' says Dean Arendt, entering the debate for the first time. 'I am prepared to accept that dietary taboos do not have to be mere customs. I will accept that underlying them are genuine moral concerns. But at the same time one must say that our whole superstructure of concern and belief is a closed book to animals themselves. You can't explain to a steer that its life is going to be spared, any more than you can explain to a bug that you are not going to step on it. In the lives of animals, things, good or bad, just happen. So vegetarianism is a very odd transaction, when you come to think of it, with the beneficiaries unaware that they are being benefited. And with no hope of ever becoming aware. Because they live in a vacuum of consciousness.'

Arendt pauses. It is his mother's turn to speak, but she merely looks confused, grey and tired and confused. He leans across. 'It's been a long day, Mother,' he says. 'Perhaps it is time.'

'Yes, it is time,' she says.

'You won't have coffee?' enquires President Garrard.

'No, it will just keep me awake.' She turns to Arendt. 'That is a good point you raise. No consciousness that we would recognize as consciousness. No awareness, as far as we can make out, of a self with a history. What I mind is what tends to come next. They have no consciousness therefore. Therefore what? Therefore we are free to use them for our own ends? Therefore we are free to kill them? Why? What is so special about the form of consciousness we recognize that makes killing a bearer of it a crime while killing an animal goes unpunished? There are moments -'

'To say nothing of babies,' interjects Wunderlich. Everyone turns and looks at him. 'Babies have no self-consciousness, yet we think it a more heinous crime to kill a baby than an adult.'

'Therefore?' says Arendt.

'Therefore all this discussion of consciousness and whether animals have it is just a smokescreen. At bottom we protect our own kind. Thumbs up to human babies, thumbs down to veal calves. Don't you think so, Mrs Costello?'