Materiality and the Modern Cosmopolitan Novel

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120 Materiality and the Modern Cosmopolitan Novel


sense of affection for his emotionally distressed mother. We also
come to feel a sense of empathy for Costello, which appears to ema-
nate from another character and does not entirely feel our own. As
in the case of Lurie, in Disgrace , the form of empathy this generates
is somewhat paradoxically intensified by a sense of distance between
ourselves and the protagonist (Costello). As with Lurie, we develop
a view of Costello’s emotional suffering, as a physical and singular
living being, from the outside. Such a vision echoes the material
basis of Costello’s ethical ideals and simulates the kind of generous
empathic leap toward the other that she thinks is necessary for uni-
versal ethics to take root.
The formal and stylistic techniques Coetzee employs to char-
acterize Costello are integral to what Elisa Aaltola describes as the
novel’s power both to communicate and to “persuade” the reader of
the moral validity of animal ethics.^66 For Aaltola, Coetzee’s novels,
particularly Elizabeth Costello , present proof positive that, in its abil-
ity to offer a potent and persuasive case for animal rights, fiction is
in a unique position to succeed where conventional philosophy fails.
Such persuasive powers are also attributed to Costello’s capacity
(and willingness) to shock her listeners or readers. Perhaps the most
salient example can be seen when she draws the highly controversial
analogy between the meat industry and the Nazi death camps of
the Second World War. “Let me say it openly,” she tells her audi-
ence: “We are surrounded by an enterprise of degradation, cruelty
and killing which rivals anything that the Third Reich was capa-
ble of, indeed dwarfs it, in that ours is an enterprise without end,
self-regenerating, bringing rabbits, rats, poultry, livestock ceaselessly
into the world for the purpose of killing them” (p. 65). While it
would be incongruous to make a simplistic equation of Costello’s
beliefs, vis- à -vis animal rights, with Coetzee’s own, one can find
moments in the latter’s writing that appear to suggest similar ethical
concerns. In 2004, the author wrote a statement that was read out
at the inaugural ceremony of the Australian animal-rights group,
Voiceless, which vociferously denounced the practice of “treating
fellow beings as mere units of any kind.”^67 Indeed, in one part of his
address, Coetzee deployed a similar analogy as Costello’s, compar-
ing the Nazi genocide to the practices of the modern meat industry.

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