22 February

Coetzee’s Gulliverism

2007 Literature is in its essence national property – ‘English Literature’, ‘American Literature’, ‘French Literature’. In Pictures of an Institution, Randall Jarrell imagines a small South American country whose ‘great author’ is called Gomez. The inhabitants think of Shakespeare as ‘the English Gomez’. When Saul Bellow asked (there is some doubt that he ever did), ‘Who is the Zulu Tolstoy?’, he was making a chauvinistic point about nationalism as much as any point about literature. In other words, that great nations (alone) have great authors.

J.M. Coetzee is indisputably a great author. Who owns him? It is a tricky question. He was born into an Afrikaans family, but one which spoke principally English (there was also a dash of Polish in his background). He was brought up and educated in South Africa (a phase of his life chronicled in his fictionalised memoir, Boyhood). Arguably the Zulus, after Mandela, could mount a claim on the basis of country of residence.

In his early twenties, unwilling to live under apartheid, Coetzee moved to London where, having studied maths and English as a university student, he was one of the first generation of IBM computer programmers (this phase of his life is chronicled in Youth).

Coetzee moved on to America in 1965, where he studied and later taught English at university level. He applied to be naturalised in the US, but was rejected by the Immigration and Naturalization Service for having taken part in violent anti-Vietnam protests. Coetzee returned to South Africa in 1971, to take up a university post in Cape Town. On his retirement in 2002, he migrated to Australia. In 2006, he became an Australian citizen.

All these national locations, and affiliations, find reflection in Coetzee’s fiction – both geographically and thematically. But ‘nation’, one suspects, means less to Coetzee – one of the most enigmatic writers of his time – than ‘species’. He seems, like Gulliver at the end of his travels, to have decided that his true kinship is with animal-, not human-kind.

In a series of books, articles and speeches from the mid-1990s onwards Coetzee proclaimed his zoophilia. In his 2003 novel Esther Costello he put into the lead character the belief that humans’ factory-style husbandry of animals was not merely the equivalent of the Jewish Holocaust but – in terms of numbers and the fact that it is ongoing – much worse. In a novel this opinion could be attributed to the fanaticism of a fictional character: no more the author’s personal views than are Savonarola’s extremities in George Eliot’s novel, Romola.

But on 22 February 2007, in a lecture to the ‘Voiceless’ animal protection society in Sydney, Coetzee proclaimed as his personal belief ‘the Holocaust on your breakfast plate’ (as satirical journalists called it):

The transformation of animals into production units dates back to the late 19th century, and since that time we have already had one warning on the grandest scale that there is something deeply, cosmically wrong with regarding and treating fellow beings as mere units of any kind. This warning came so loud and clear that one would have thought it impossible to ignore. It came when in the mid-20th century a group of powerful and bloody-minded men in Germany hit on the idea of adapting the methods of the industrial stockyard, as pioneered and perfected in Chicago, to the slaughter – or what they preferred to call the processing – of human beings.

Of course we cried out in horror when we found out what they had been up to. We cried: What a terrible crime, to treat human beings like cattle! If we had only known beforehand! But our cry should more accurately have been: What a terrible crime, to treat human beings like units in an industrial process! And that cry should have had a postscript: What a terrible crime, come to think of it – a crime against nature – to treat any living being like a unit in an industrial process!

In the 1960s (the period in which the novelist entered adulthood) the cry had been ‘one race – the human race’. For Coetzee, in the years of his maturity it is ‘one species, the animal species’.