The Lives of Animals

JOANNA ZIELIŃSKA

In the Lives of Animals, Things, Good or Bad, Just Happen [1]
 

Who is Elizabeth Costello?

Renowned in literary and academic circles, the 66-year-old Australian writer Elizabeth Costello travels the world giving lectures on animal life and censorship. What do we know about Costello? She is the author of nine novels, two volumes of poetry, a book on the life of birds, and many journalistic articles. She was born in Melbourne and still lives there, although she spent the years 1951–1963 abroad in England and France. She has been married twice and has two children, one from each marriage. Her son, John Bernard, is an associate professor at Appleton College in the USA, where he and his wife Norma are raising their children. Elizabeth also has a sister, Blanche, whom she has not seen for a long time. Blanche lives in Africa and serves as a Marian nun. The sisters have little in common and their relationship is rather cold.

Elizabeth Costello is a vegetarian. She is disgusted by the industry that experiments on animals and kills them. As time passes, she is increasingly touched by existential issues related to aging and transience. She wonders who she has become over the years. She questions her priorities in life, her faith, vegetarianism, sexuality, language, and the nature of evil. She has dedicated her entire life to writing, often neglecting not only her own needs but also those of her children, dedicating all her energy to her work. Recently, she has not met with any understanding among her audiences, in academic and literary communities, or even within her own family. Her views on vegetarianism and animals provoke strong opposition, and perhaps even embarrassment, not just from John and Norma. Why can’t she be like any other older woman? The truth is that she herself does not know the answer to this question. Undoubtedly, she talks about things people don’t want to know about. Given her status and age, Costello stirs up a hornet’s nest. She won’t back down from being painfully honest, while simultaneously feeling an unpleasant gap between herself and her listeners. During lectures about animals, the author appeals to her audience:

(...), open your heart and listen to what your heart says. [2]

Two Lessons on Animals 

The Lives of Animals (1999) blurs the line between essay and fiction. In it, the South African writer J.M. Coetzee has created something akin to a unique philosophical dialogue, a fictocritical novel about animal rights. At the heart of the story is the fictional character Elizabeth Costello. A significant portion of the narrative is devoted to her two lectures on animal cruelty, which she delivers at Appleton College as part of an annual literary seminar.[3]

 It is worth mentioning that her son, John Bernard, did not play a role in bringing his mother to the campus of the university where he works. In fact, the authorities at Appleton had no idea they were related. From the moment John learned of the invitation extended to Costello, he knew that his mother’s views would likely be polarizing and controversial. The debate becomes particularly heated when Thomas O’Hearne, a philosophy professor, steps into the fray, calling the fight for animal rights a “Western crusade”.

In her lectures, Costello discusses the foundations of morality by analyzing what could lead people to commit violence against animals. The author appeals to the ethics of compassion, rather than rationality, in our treatment of animals, directly addressing her audience:

Sympathy has everything to do with the subject and little to do with the object, the ‘another’, as we see at once when we think of the object not as a bat (‘Can I share the being of a bat?’) but as another human being. There are people who have the capacity to imagine themselves as someone else, there are people who have no such capacity (...) and there are people who have the capacity but choose not to exercise it. [4]

At the beginning of her first lecture, entitled The Philosophers and the Animals, Costello immediately deploys heavy artillery by drawing an analogy between the Holocaust and the exploitation of animals by humans, calling the practice of killing animals a “disproportionate crime”. She also dismisses reason as the primary distinguishing feature of humans and questions the assumption that animals lack reason. Since science cannot prove that animals think abstractly, it also cannot prove that they do not. Costello suggests that people can understand the nature of animals through sympathetic imagination.

The Works of Hope
 

Hello to you all, how do you live? 

RABBIT: We live in small groups, have no fixed partnerships. Build widely branching tunnel systems, in which our young are born, naked and blind. We still reproduce when imprisoned. 

HARE: I live solitary. Sleep in a shallow hollow. My offspring are born with fur and open eyes. I have never been domesticated. 

HUMANS: We don’t quite know. Until we have found out, we wage wars.[5]

This is one of many stories written by Lin May Saeed: fables that are funny and sad at the same time. Like Elizabeth Costello, Lin considered animals to be an extremely important subject in her work, though from the perspective of a visual artist, not a writer. Also like Costello, she did not eat animals, treating them with compassion and kindness. She believed that, in the future, people would stop harming animals. Lin’s studio was located in Berlin, but she was born in Würzburg. Before settling in Berlin, she studied art in Düsseldorf. Her father, who died prematurely, was of Iraqi descent. Since childhood, she had been preoccupied with the attempt to situate herself in relation to her own cultural heritage. Many years after her father’s death, she tried to learn Arabic. Letters resembling the Arabic alphabet appear on some of her reliefs. Lin was particularly interested in moments in history when humans and animals lived in harmony. She was fascinated by the Neolithic period, the Epic of Gilgamesh, and the Garden of Eden. Supposedly, it all started when she sculpted two rabbits in her studio. In the early stages of her work on the theme of animals and humans, she also wrote fables, like the one quoted above. She created pencil and ink drawings in a similar manner, as if they were visual sketches to go with those short, witty stories. She said:

I like the idea that stories and fables can be used to imagine a kind of time travel with a focus on the human-animal relationship. And I believe that looking into the past can help us to think about our common future.[6]

Although one might not get that impression from a first encounter, Lin had a great sense of humor. On the other hand, she took the issue of animal liberation very seriously, by being involved as an activist in several protest movements. She did not feel comfortable blocking public spaces and demonstrating, preferring instead to spend time in her studio. Once she stated:

I don’t show suffering, exploitation and killing animals. I don’t have expressions for this. I can’t work on that. I can’t show it but I can show the act of liberation. And I can show utopia. [7]

Lin’s world seemed to have two dimen­sions: past and future. It was indeed a kind of captivating utopia where people and animals lived together in harmony and concordance. Her imaginarium was inhabited mainly by ideas of multispe­cies solidarity and animal revolution. Sometimes, Lin May Saeed called her creations “the works of hope”.[8]

My favorite daydream comes to mind involving how climate change is solved. Animals and aliens give a master class for homo sapiens called: How Not To Mess It Up.[9]

She liked to work in polystyrene, often using recycled construction waste. This gave her significant freedom. Some may consider this material as not very “natural” but, in her studio, it took on completely unique forms. However, the artist spoke of it as problematic, being a symbol of the Anthropocene era, which from an environmental point of view should not exist. Her choice of material was influenced by her work with costumes and theatrical scenography. When she finished high school, her initial idea was to study scenography. For some time, she worked in the theater in her hometown, Wiesbaden, Germany, on theatrical and opera productions. She went to the Academy of Arts in Düsseldorf to study scenography. At the same time, she began to engage in issues related to animal rights. Despite her great love of theater and opera, it became clear to her that performative forms of art focus exclusively on humans: there are no animals in theater. However, if we think about it, Lin May Saeed’s works are somewhat theatrical and possess many compelling narrative elements. In the first year of her studies in Düsseldorf in the 1990s, she discovered sculpture, quite by accident. She noticed that it was a field historically dominated by men, not only ideologically. Practically speaking, it was also about physical strength. Sculpture is like a competitive sport. It’s not enough to touch something once; you have to work on the material for weeks, physically and with your own hands. Works have to be moved, carried, rotated. Styrofoam turned out to be a material that allowed her to work independently as a sculptor without the help of assistants and advanced tools.[10]
Thus the art of Lin May Saeed came into being. It emerged from a deep engagement with animal liberation issues, in an extremely consistent process of studying sculptural materials and themes, in search of her own language of expression. This process was interrupted by a terminal illness. The artist passed away a year ago at the untimely age of 50. The Arrival of Animals Elizabeth Costello’s lectures and the sculptures of Lin May Saeed are primarily connected by the need for sympathy and tenderness towards animals. Both stances are uncompromising. The controversial Costello appeals to “sympathetic imagination”, and “poetic invention”, whilst the artist Lin May Saeed speaks of “works of hope” that depict new, futuristic spaces of coexistence where humans and animals live in harmony. Both grapple with many dilemmas and different ways of defining otherness. The exhibition The Lives of Animals takes the complexity of coexistence between humans and animals as its starting point. Concepts outlined by Lin May Saeed and Elizabeth Costello respond to the need to view the world of humans and animals from a new perspective. Today, in an era of climate crisis, technological advancements and industrial processes, it is more necessary than ever to rethink the topic of animals, reevaluating our conclusions about who we are, who they are, and how we are all interconnected. In her excellent book Thinking Animals. Why Animal Studies Now?, Kari Weil writes:

Why animal studies now? It has become clear that the idea of “the animal” — as an instinctive being, with presumably no access to language, text, or abstract thinking — has functioned as an unexamined foundation on which the idea of human and hence the humanities have been built. ... As our improved understanding of animal lives and cultures changed, so must we change our view of the nature of human and of humanities. [11]

The present exhibition proposes aban­doning the view of animals from a conformist, comfortable position, and entering a world of dilemmas and crit­ical empathy. I suggest that we might follow the ethos Lin May Saeed evoked when she said:

It is true that animals are usually not able to participate in their liberation, but they behave differently when they are liberated and have better living conditions. [12]

[1] J.M. Coetzee, The Lives of Animals (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016), 44.
[2]  Coetzee, The Lives of Animals, 37. 
[3] The novel The Lives of Animals consists of two chapters, The Philosophers and the Animals and The Poets and the Animals, delivered by Coetzee as guest lectures at Princeton on 15 and 16 October 1997, as part of the Tanner Lectures on Human Values. The Princeton lectures consisted of two stories (chapters of the book) featuring a recurring character, the Australian novelist Elizabeth Costello, who may be Coetzee’s alter ego. The character is invited to give a guest lecture at the fictional Appleton College in Massachusetts, just as Coetzee is invited to Princeton and decides to discuss not literature but animal rights.
[4] Coetzee, The Lives of Animals, 34–35
[5] “Hello to you all, how do you live?,” Lin May Saeed (website), consulted on May 25, 2024, www.linmaysaeed.com.
[6] “Lin May Saeed on Art and Activism,” The New Institute, consulted on May 25, 2024, www.thenew.institute/en/media/the-freedom-of-bees.
[7] “Thousand Other Worlds Exist. A conversation between Fahim Amir, Melanie Bujok, Lorenzo Giustri and Jochen Lempert,” Mousse Magazine, issue 84, Spring 2024, 87.
[8] “Lin May Saeed on Art and Activism.”
[9] “Speaking Beyond Language: Lin May Saeed Interviewed,” by Osman Can Yerebakan, Bomb Magazine, February 11, 2021, www.bombmagazine.org/ articles/2021/02/11/speaking-beyond-language-lin-may-saeed-interviewed/.
[10]  “Lin May Saeed on Art and Activism.”
[11] Kari Weil, Thinking Animals. Why Animal Studies Now?, (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 23.
[12] “Speaking Beyond Language: Lin May Saeed Interviewed.”