The Wounded Animal: J. M. Coetzee and the Difficulty of Reality in Literature and Philosophy

by Stephen Mulhall

In 1997, the Nobel Prize-winning novelist J. M. Coetzee, invited to Princeton University to lecture on the moral status of animals, read a work of fiction about an eminent novelist, Elizabeth Costello, invited to lecture on the moral status of animals at an American college. Coetzee's lectures were published in 1999 as The Lives of Animals , and reappeared in 2003 as part of his novel Elizabeth Costello ; and both lectures and novel have attracted the critical attention of a number of influential philosophers--including Peter Singer, Cora Diamond, Stanley Cavell, and John McDowell.


In The Wounded Animal , Stephen Mulhall closely examines Coetzee's writings about Costello, and the ways in which philosophers have responded to them, focusing in particular on their powerful presentation of both literature and philosophy as seeking, and failing, to represent reality--in part because of reality's resistance to such projects of understanding, but also because of philosophy's unwillingness to learn from literature how best to acknowledge that resistance. In so doing, Mulhall is led to consider the relations among reason, language, and the imagination, as well as more specific ethical issues concerning the moral status of animals, the meaning of mortality, the nature of evil, and the demands of religion. The ancient quarrel between philosophy and literature here displays undiminished vigor and renewed significance.

Genres: Philosophy

272 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2008

Reviews

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is the most brilliant thing I have read on Coetzee and I am not surprised since I already admire everything I have read by Mulhall. He really goes into the depth of Elizabeth Costello's lessons and shows their philosophical import in dialogue with Plato, Wittgenstein, Heidegger and several contemporary theorist (Cora Diamond, Peter Singer, etc.). The first half of the book is about animals and the second half is more or less about the relationship of literature and philosophy. I was suprised to find that philosophers like David Wiggins and Stanley Cavell are publishing articles on Coetzee's Costello, thus making her/him a living breathing discussion in contemporary philosophy. Who would've thought?

[Martin Rowe · Rating 4 out of 5]

A decade after her arrival in our consciousnesses, I don't think we've plumbed the depths of Elizabeth Costello—the curmudgeonly, exhausted, and elderly Australian novelist who populates a number of the fictions of J. M. Coetzee. She complicates and ironizes Coetzee's LIVES OF ANIMALS and (naturally) ELIZABETH COSTELLO, and she pops up to excoriate "John" in SLOW MAN. For me, Costello is the welcome voice of literature and unregulated (even inadmissible) feeling in the dry and argumentative discourses of both analytical and Continental philosophies, and Mulhall's is a timely and exhaustive analysis of Elizabeth Costello as device and persona. Mulhall's sentences can be frustratingly opaque and baroque, and I didn't find his excursus into theories of modernism and art to be particularly helpful. Nonetheless, he recognized that Coetzee is challenging philosophical thinking about animals in ways that (many) philosophers seem ill-equipped to respond to, especially given the many shades of irony that tint Costello's characterization and presence within the books.

As an animal activist myself, I see myself in Costello—with all my faults and tics. I recognize her exhaustion, her recognition of her inadequacy and inconsistencies, her shocked irritation that others cannot see what she sees, her envy at their comfort, and her sense that any contribution (whether written or in her life) that she might make is wholly inadequate to the horrors that surround her. That embodiedness cannot be rationalized, which is why the novelist or poet (as Costello might say) is better able to explore our animality than the philosopher.

Mulhall's book is a bit of a slog but well-worth the time and effort and I look forward to reading it again.

[jeremiah]

The last sentence of this book is where everything just comes together, since Mulhall sometimes gets a little lost in summarizing and philosophically situating Coetzee's work:

"For it is only a Kafkaesque realism such as Coetzee's that can hope to convey an accurate impression of the various difficulties of reality, and willing to put in question any prevailing philosophical conventions concerning that enterprise that appear at present to block or subvert its progress, including the convention that philosophical realism is no more literature's business than literary realism is any concern of philosophy's—will be capable of being properly, genuinely impressed by Coetzee's achievement."

In light of claims such as this, Mulhall makes good on Diamond's generous blurb on the back of the book: his project ambitiously argues that philosophical conceptions of what is 'real' or 'true'—and perhaps philosophical thinking more generally—can be changed in a way that is modeled after the change of those terms in the arts, specifically literature, brought about by modernism in the 20th century.

[Paul Johnston · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a complex book that covers a lot of ground. Its starting point is philosophy's attack on literature for focusing on the imagined rather than the real and for engaging our emotions rather than our reason. Mulhall uses Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello to mount a brilliant defence, indeed, counter-attack on behalf of literature. For example, in relation to animal rights it is the philosophers with their narrow conceptions of what constitutes an argument who fail to engage with reality, ignoring the horrors of the meat-production industry and showing no capacity at all to think about what animals might actually be experiencing. By contrast, literature is constantly trying to capture the real but recognises that its goal is impossible or almost impossible. Mulhall implies that philosophy would do well to emulate literature's constant self-questionning as to whether its search for the truth remains genuine and alive and be more ready to cast aside conventions that have become hindrances rather than aids. He suggests we should embrace a philosophy that is both realist and modernist, but it is not clear (to me at least) exactly what this would involve. In fact, Mulhall's argument is so convincing that one is tempted to conclude that there is more food for thought in literature than in philosophy, but since Mulhall's argument presumably counts as philosophy that conclusion itself would seem a paradoxical one. Anyway, certainly a wide-ranging and thought-provoking book.

[A L]

It demonstrates the kind of hybrid forms of writing and thinking it calls for.