A bold fresh piece of corpse

I've been reading a lot about J.M. Coetzee and his novels lately. One part of it has to do with my interest in borderlands: in the past dozen years, he seems to have bared down hard on the arts of the not-really-an-autobiography-autobiography, the not-really-a-novel-novel and the not-really-a-self-satirizing-formal-experiment-formal-experiment-in-self-satire. The other part is that he seems to have solved the problem of simultaneous interestingness and popularity. He writes what are clearly interesting books, yet they simply can't stop winning prizes, two Bookers and a Nobel included. As (former Marketplace of Ideas guest) James Wood wrote, "Coetzee is undoubtedly one of the best novelists at work in English, yet prize juries are known, more often than not, for their invincible wrong-headedness."

One of Coetzee's interesting and popular "novels" — its essayistic form confuses people — is 2003's Elizabeth Costello. The eponymous protagonist, an aging novelist deep in the opinion-spouting circuit, is given lots of preposterous things to say. Some of her views are poses, some are untestable, and some are only a mere dozen or so revisions away from reasonability. Here is Costello, a vegetarian animal-rights type like Coetzee himself, on the omnivores who surround her:

I no longer know where I am. I seem to move around perfectly easily among people, to have perfectly normal relations with them. Is it possible, I ask myself, that all of them are participants in a crime of stupefying proportions? Am I fantasizing it all? I must be mad! Yet every day I see the evidences. The very people I suspect produce the evidence, exhibit it, offer it to me. Corpses. Fragments of corpses that they have bought for money.

It is as if I were to visit friends, and to make some polite remark about the lamp in their living room, and they were to say, "Yes, it's nice, isn't it? Polish-Jewish skin it's made of, we find that's best, the skins of young Polish-Jewish virgins." And then I go to the bathroom and the soap wrapper says, "Treblinka — 100% human stearate." Am I dreaming, I say to myself? What kind of house is this?

I find myself notice the form of argument implied here more and more often, especially when vegetarians talk about everyone else. "If only they could see it how I see it," the line goes. "If only they could see that it's not beef, it's cow; it's not venison, it's deer; it's not a carcass, it's a corpse. If only they stopped forgetting that the sandwiches they're eating were once living, breathing things, they'd give up meat just like I have!"

Well, no, not really. It's not as if I suspect these claims are made in bad faith; I just doubt they'd ever move anyone not already inclined toward vegetarianism. There are plenty of people who adopt meat-free diets — permanently or, more often, otherwise — on the strength of a behind-the-slaughterhouse scenes PETA video or two. But, speaking as an omnivore who has seen countless many of these grainy, surreptitiously recorded montages of chicken-debeaking and cow-dropping, I guess I just don't care. Not only do they never make me consider giving up meat, I'd bet folding money that I could eat a fresh-grilled piece of corpse while watching them.

(And I'm not even terribly attached to meat. I often think how little I would mind if I woke up one morning to a world that has turned completely vegan. I'm no fan of vegetables, true, but presumably I could avoid my leafy greens almost as easily if all of humanity was producing and consuming an infinite variety of vegan cuisine rather than the unappealing subset now available.)

Abortion, another issue in which I have no real sake, gets tied up in this semantic nonsense as well. The "If only they could see that it's not a fetus, it's a person!" side must see types like me as an irritating obstacle indeed, since I both (a) have no objections whatsoever to abortion and (b) don't see fetuses as "not people." Once again, I arrive at the tentative conclusion that, if you come to declare a belief to the external world, you probably internally "believed" it, in some sense, already.

Comments

[John S.]

Yes vegetarians are fond of saying that we'd all be vegetarians if we had to kill the animals ourselves, or if we knew what went on in the slaughterhouse. But I don't think the "ick" factor is a reliable barometer of morality. Seeing someone cut open on an operating table turns my stomach too, but my squeamishness would certainly not prevent me from having a necessary surgical procedure myself.

[Sean Landis]

(1) I'm not sure Coetzee's guilty of this "If only..." line of reasoning. A more charitable reading of the excerpt suggests that he's simply wondering why there are vastly different moral reactions to the same situation. Perhaps it's radically disparate perspectives, or perhaps it's different emotional wiring, or perhaps Costello's deluded (unlikely, sure, given Coetzee's leanings), or perhaps others are all slaves to custom... From what I can tell, Coetzee hasn't drawn a conclusion to explain the phenomenon; he's just noticed it.

(2) Maybe I haven't been reading your blog long enough to fully understand the last sentence of this post, but I worry that depending on how you interpret it, your claim is either true but uninteresting or interesting but false. Sure, there's a sense in which we're predisposed to believe whatever we wind up actually believing based on whatever evidence winds up convincing us. That sounds like a psychological tautology.

But if you're making the stronger claim that we're unshakably constrained by our intuitive reactions to new evidence, that seems mistaken. Sure, our involuntary emotional-physical responses play a large role in governing our beliefs and actions, but to say we can't ever make judgments that go against them in individual cases strikes me as overboard.

(3) Perhaps you're merely making the claim that these responses play a bigger role in our belief formation than we think. If so, do you worry about your indifferent emotional reactions? When emotional responses differ, it's not clear that the less emotional response is typically more reliable. (Preferring less emotional responses seems to overvalue masculine stoic approaches to ethics.)

(4) Have any arguments for vegetarianism stirred you from indifference? As an omnivorous reader, I'm guessing you're familiar with some of these. How about arguments against abortion?

[coach handbags]

Just for today I will be happy. This assumes to be true what Abraham Lincoln said，that "Most folks are as happy as they make up their minds to be."