Lives of their Own: Animal Death and Animal Flesh in J.M. Coetzee’s Writings

Abstract

Any attempt at looking for overt, clear-cut themes of veganism in J. M. Coetzee’s works might prove not only frustrating but also futile, as despite his scrupulous vegetarianism,¹ in his fiction, Coetzee approaches the issue of eating animals only in an oblique way. In his 1995 essay “Meat Country,” published in the special food issue of the Granta, Coetzee rather intriguingly writes, “The question of whether we should eat meat is not a serious question … [The craving for meat] is a given, it is the human condition.”² But, at the same time, many of Coetzee’s novels present us with characters in the process of reconsidering their perception of animals as well as their food habits. Coetzee’s most celebrated work in this respect is undoubtedly his fictionalized 1998 Tanner Lectures on Human Values, published in 1999 under the title The Lives of Animals. This work, along with his highly acclaimed Booker prize winning novel of the same year, Disgrace, has “become crucial to the new animal studies.”³ However, even in The Lives of Animals, Coetzee’s fiercely vegan protagonist, Elizabeth Costello, whose veganism is a constant source of anxiety and unease for the other characters, tells her audience,⁴ “I have never been much interested in proscriptions, dietary or otherwise. Proscriptions, laws. I am more interested in what lies behind them.”⁵ Like his own character, in “Meat Country,” Coetzee too expresses his own lack of “interest in making converts” to his own “diet without flesh.”⁶