114 Materiality and the Modern Cosmopolitan Novel
the existing norms” through which we approach the category of the
human being and to see the individual as a unique living creature.^62
In a sense, then, reading the novel becomes a process of reenacting
the same degree of attentiveness to the individual that Lurie learns
to bestow on the other living beings, both animal and human, that
figure in his life.
The role of animals in ethics is a subject that is much more pro-
nounced in Elizabeth Costello , which engages unequivocally with the
moral veracity of animal-rights issues. For the eponymous Costello,
humans and animals are ethically linked by their corporeality,
which grants spirituality to both: “To be alive is to be a living soul.
An animal—and we are all animals—is an embodied soul” (p. 78).
Echoing Lurie, she also attacks the Cartesian preoccupation with
what she sees as cold and detached “rational” thought, accusing it
of justifying reason-based anthropocentrism (p. 78). For Costello,
embodiment and the capacity to suffer ought to ground our ethi-
cal obligations: “An animal lives, said Descartes, as a machine lives.
[... ] ‘Cogito, ergo sum’ he famously said. It is a formula I have
always been uncomfortable with” (p. 78). Costello then proposes,
in opposition to the logocentric philosophy of Descartes, prioritiz-
ing “fullness, embodiedness, the sensation of being—[... ] of being
a body with limbs that have extension in space, of being alive to
the world” (p. 78). This critique of a rationally grounded system of
ethics is an integral part of her philosophy, which favors “the sym-
pathetic imagination” over the more conventional appeal to logic
as a basis for mutual recognition and exchange (p. 80). But what
makes the sympathetic imagination a particularly powerful faculty
in this regard is that it allows us “to feel [and... ] think our way
into the being of another” (p. 80). It provides the opportunity to
appreciate (at least through our subjective mental faculties) what it
is like to experience life as another being, and not only those that
are human.
Costello’s ethical “message” also relies upon, and is bolstered by,
the stylistic and formal composition of the novel itself. As in Disgrace ,
the protagonist’s characterization plays an important role in remind-
ing the reader of the singularity of the human being who features
in the story. In the case of Lurie, this singularity is conveyed by the