J. Coetzee - Elizabeth Costello

'I don't know what I think,' says Elizabeth Costello. 'I often wonder what thinking is, what understanding is. Do we really understand the universe better than animals do? Understanding a thing often looks to me like playing with one of those Rubik cubes. Once you have made all the little bricks snap into place, hey presto, you understand. It makes sense if you live inside a Rubik cube, but if you don't…'

There is a silence. 'I would have thought -' says Norma; but at this point he gets to his feet, and to his relief Norma stops.

The president rises, and then everyone else. 'A wonderful lecture, Mrs Costello,' says the president. 'Much food for thought. We look forward to tomorrow's offering.'

It is after eleven. His mother has retired for the night, he and Norma are downstairs clearing up the children's mess. After that he still has a class to prepare.

'Are you going to her seminar tomorrow?' asks Norma.

'I'll have to.'

'What is it on?'

'"The Poets and the Animals". That's the title. The English Department is staging it. They are holding it in a seminar room, so I don't think they are expecting a big audience.'

'I'm glad it's on something she knows about. I find her philosophizing rather difficult to take.'

'Oh. What do you have in mind?'

'For instance what she was saying about human reason. Presumably she was trying to make a point about the nature of rational understanding. To say that rational accounts are merely a consequence of the structure of the human mind; that animals have their own accounts in accordance with the structure of their own minds, to which we don't have access because we don't share a language with them.'

And what's wrong with that?'

'It's naive, John. It's the kind of easy, shallow relativism that impresses freshmen. Respect for everyone's world view, the cow's world view, the squirrel's world view, and so forth. In the end it leads to total intellectual paralysis. You spend so much time respecting that you haven't time left to think.'

'Doesn't a squirrel have a world view?'

'Yes, a squirrel does have a world view. Its world view comprises acorns and trees and weather and cats and dogs and automobiles and squirrels of the opposite sex. It comprises an account of how these phenomena interact and how it should interact with them to survive. That's all. There's no more. That's the world according to squirrel.'

'We are sure about that?'

'We are sure about it in the sense that hundreds of years of observing squirrels has not led us to conclude otherwise. If there is anything else in the squirrel mind, it does not issue in observable behaviour. For all practical purposes, the mind of the squirrel is a very simple mechanism.'

'So Descartes was right, animals are just biological automata.'

'Broadly speaking, yes. You cannot, in the abstract, distinguish between an animal mind and a machine simulating an animal mind.'

'And human beings are different?'

'John, I am tired and you are being irritating. Human beings invent mathematics, they build telescopes, they do calculations, they construct machines, they press a button, and, bang, Sojourner lands on Mars, exactly as predicted. That is why rationality is not just, as your mother claims, a game. Reason provides us with real knowledge of the real world. It has been tested, and it works. You are a physicist. You ought to know.'

'I agree. It works. Still, isn't there a position outside from which our doing our thinking and then sending out a Mars probe looks a lot like a squirrel doing its thinking and then dashing out and snatching a nut? Isn't that perhaps what she meant?'

'But there isn't any such position! I know it sounds old-fashioned, but I have to say it. There is no position outside of reason where you can stand and lecture about reason and pass judgement on reason.'

'Except the position of someone who has withdrawn from reason.'

'That's just French irrationalism, the sort of thing a person would say who has never set foot inside a mental institution and seen what people look like who have really withdrawn from reason.'

'Then except for God.'

'Not if God is a God of reason. A God of reason cannot stand outside reason.'

'I'm surprised, Norma. You are talking like an old-fashioned rationalist.'

'You misunderstand me. That is the ground your mother has chosen. Those are her terms. I am merely responding.'

'Who was the missing guest?'

'You mean the empty seat? It was Stern, the poet.'

'Do you think it was a protest?'

'I'm sure it was. She should have thought twice before bringing up the Holocaust. I could feel hackles rising all around me in the audience.'

The empty seat was indeed a protest. When he goes in for his morning class, there is a letter in his box addressed to his mother. He hands it over to her when he comes home to fetch her. She reads it quickly then with a sigh passes it over to him. 'Who is this man?' she says.

'Abraham Stern. A poet. Quite well respected, I believe. He has been here donkey's years.'

He reads Stern's note, which is handwritten.

Dear Mrs Costello,

Excuse me for not attending last night's dinner. I have read your books and know you are a serious person, so I do you the credit of taking what you said in your lecture seriously.

At the kernel of your lecture, it seemed to me, was the question of breaking bread. If we refuse to break bread with the executioners of Auschwitz, can we continue to break bread with the slaughterers of animals?

You took over for your own purposes the familiar comparison between the murdered Jews of Europe and slaughtered cattle. The Jews died like cattle, therefore cattle die like Jews, you say. That is a trick with words which I will not accept. You misunderstand the nature of likenesses; I would even say you misunderstand wilfully, to the point of blasphemy. Man is made in the likeness of God but God does not have the likeness of man. If Jews were treated like cattle, it does not follow that cattle are treated like Jews. The inversion insults the memory of the dead. It also trades on the horrors of the camps in a cheap way.

Forgive me if I am forthright. You said you were old enough not to have time to waste on niceties, and I am an old man too.

Yours sincerely, Abraham Stern

He delivers his mother to her hosts in the English Department, then goes to a meeting. The meeting drags on and on. It is two thirty before he can get to the seminar room in Stubbs Hall.

She is speaking as he enters. He sits down as quietly as he can near the door.

'In that kind of poetry,' she is saying, 'animals stand for human qualities: the lion for courage, the owl for wisdom, and so forth. Even in Rilke's poem the panther is there as a stand-in for something else. He dissolves into a dance of energy around a centre, an image that comes from physics, elementary particle physics. Rilke does not get beyond this point – beyond the panther as the vital embodiment of the kind of force that is released in an atomic explosion but is here trapped not so much by the bars of the cage as by what the bars compel on the panther: a concentric lope that leaves the will stupefied, narcotized.'

Rilke's panther? What panther? His confusion must show: the girl next to him pushes a photocopied sheet under his nose. Three poems: one by Rilke called 'The Panther', two by Ted Hughes called 'The Jaguar' and 'Second Glance at a Jaguar'. He has no time to read them.

'Hughes is writing against Rilke,' his mother goes on. 'He uses the same staging in the zoo, but it is the crowd for a change that stands mesmerized, and among them the man, the poet, entranced and horrified and overwhelmed, his powers of understanding pushed beyond their limit. The jaguar's vision, unlike the panther's, is not blunted. On the contrary, his eyes drill through the darkness of space. The cage has no reality to him, he is elsewhere. He is elsewhere because his consciousness is kinetic rather than abstract: the thrust of his muscles moves him through a space quite different in nature from the three-dimensional box of Newton – a circular space that returns upon itself.