humAnImAl dIspossessIons 137that reason looks to her “suspiciously... like the being of one tendency
in human thought” (Coetzee 1999, 23). Like the acts of vulnerable reading
and writing, Costello opens herself to an experimental mode of knowing
across experience and through language. In a crucially postcolonial gesture,
she insists that reason partitions thought by forcefully policing its specious
(and species) borders.
Costello begins her first lecture by evoking Red Peter, Kafka’s fictional
ape from “A Report to an Academy” (1971).^4 In the story, the educated ape
recounts to the academy his ascent from life as a beast in the jungle and
his postcapture emergence as a thoughtful being whose ability to speak
intelligently renders him almost human.^5 In order to gain human status
and rights, however, Red Peter must perform particular tasks in a disci-
plined manner to satisfy his audience. Like the scholar who works to mas-
ter her field and forget what lies beyond her intellectual terrain in order to
be validated by disciplinary interlocutors, the captive animal must in turn
captivate his intellectual audience by proving his human likeness. Collaps-
ing the distinction between herself and Red Peter as she stands before her
audience, Costello declares: “Now that I am here... in my tuxedo and
bow tie and my black pants with a hole cut in the seat for my tail to poke
through (I keep it turned away from you, you do not see it), now that I
am here, what is there for me to do? Do I in fact have a choice? If I do not
subject my discourse to reason, whatever that is, what is left for me but to
gibber and emote and knock over my water glass and generally make a
monkey of myself ?” (Coetzee 1999, 23). Costello posits herself here as an
animal who, like Red Peter, stands before intellectuals and is expected to
conceal her “tail” (her animality) by submitting her “tale” (her lecture) to
the discourse of reason. Without a disciplined engagement with Western
rational discourse, she will—like her animal double—remain unheard
and dismissed (even dehumanized) by her audience. “Becoming” animal
in this moment, Costello in one sense plays on the fact that as an aging
woman she is already in some sense less than fully human. But there is
also a fascinating and doubled gender switch at play here, since Coetzee
“becomes” the female Costello, who herself “becomes” the male ape, Red
Peter. There is something provocative about these ambiguous masquerades
that persistently co-implicate sex with species. This returns us to Animal,
whose overactive sexual impulses situate him paradoxically as “animal” (he
cannot control himself ) and as a “proper” heterosexual man who desires