144 chApter four
posable object that is likened to the Holocaust victim as tortured subject.
As metaphor, however, the animal is loathed by virtue of its violent nature.
Our language reveals an ambivalent need to claim and decry the animal, to
make it evoke both innocence and evil.
If for Costello poetic language offers us a crucial “feel” for the animal’s
experience of the world (Coetzee 1999, 30), it is also the figure of the poet
in The Lives of Animals that refuses outright her attempts from within lan-
guage to move us toward a humanimal politics. The respected (fictional)
poet Abraham Stern is, like Costello, invested in language, form, and func-
tion. But he categorically refuses her use of rhetoric to develop her case
for an animal ethics. Responding in written form to her analogy between
concentration camps and slaughterhouses, between the slaughtered Jews
and factory- farmed animals, Stern writes to Costello:
You took over for your own purposes the familiar comparison between
the murdered Jews of Europe and the slaughtered cattle. The Jews died
like cattle, therefore cattle die like Jews, you say. That is a trick with
words which I will not accept. You misunderstand the nature of likeness;
I would even say you misunderstand willfully, to the point of blasphemy.
Man is made in the likeness of God but God does not have the likeness
of man. If Jews were treated like cattle, it does not follow that cattle are
treated like Jews. The inversion insults the memory of the dead. It also
trades on the horrors of the camps in a cheap way. (49– 5 0)It is not Costello’s desire to rethink the animal that affronts Stern but rather
that she relegates Holocaust victims to animal status in the service of her
argument. He is not so much “against animals” as he is invested in the pres-
ervation of the exalted humanity of Holocaust victims. Here God guaran-
tees the unidirectional movement of the simile; Stern must leave behind the
language of poetry for the preservation of religious and cultural identity.
Yet his refusal of rhetorical language to invert the “familiar” simile between
Jews and slaughtered cattle reveals more than his position as an affronted
Jew. As with the enormous chasm between animal similes and metaphors
in Holocaust rhetoric, language poses a vital interpretive problem. For
Stern, the reversal of the simile—from Jew treated as animal to animal
treated as Jew—bears down on memory, history, and the murdered Jew.
Describing the Holocaust victim as one sacrificed like an animal therefore
signals the force and horror of the act. To reverse the simile threatens rea-