Eat, Drink and Be Chary (Page 2)

Still, vegetarianism has a way of getting mixed up with other politics, of amassing all kinds of arguments around itself. Vegetarianism tends in our time to correlate with left or liberal politics, to prevail more among teachers than stockbrokers, to sport (leather) Birkenstocks more often than Kenneth Coles. By the same token, a place like New York's Angelo and Maxie's steakhouse ("Horrifying Vegetarians since 1982") tends to attract a rather conservative clientele, sells Cigar Aficionado and has refused to recognize the union its kitchen staff has formed. National Review refers to vegetarians as "vegemaniacs." It seems it was ever thus: Shelley was an atheist and an advocate of free love as well as a vegetarian; Tolstoy wanted to reform not only diet but Christianity and Russian agriculture; nineteenth-century animal-protection societies were founded by abolitionists and suffragists. In The Road to Wigan Pier, Orwell expressed his annoyance at vegetarians for leading the working class to associate socialism with "food cranks."

As usual, Orwell, while cranky himself, is on to something. Ethical vegetarianism, the kind that aspires to reduce not only cholesterol but animal misery, can easily become elitist, a form of invidious distinction. In Coetzee's The Lives of Animals, Elizabeth Costello's main adversary is her son's wife, Norma, a philosopher of mind who happens (like her husband) to teach at the college where Costello has come to lecture. "The ban on meat," Norma says, "is only an extreme form of dietary ban; and a dietary ban is a quick, simple way for an elite group to define itself." The bleeding heart rather than the purple heart is worn as a badge of merit. But such a reservation only complicates, it hardly eliminates, the issue. To espouse abolitionism may have stoked the moral vanity of New England's freethinking and Unitarian elite, but that does not persuade us that their cause was not a just one.

It would be comforting to think of vegetarianism's claim to expand our sympathy as something it had in its favor. But the comforts J.M. Coetzee offers tend to be colder than that. Elizabeth Costello is a great champion of sympathy, which "allows us at times to share the being of another." William Alcott too, as excerpted in Ethical Vegetarianism, wants us to open the floodgates of sympathy; to him the world seems "like one mighty slaughterhouse--one grand school for the suppression of every kind, and tender, and brotherly feeling." Well, one does not go to school for no reason, and an excess of sympathy and knowledge would no more aid the meat industry (the United States' second-largest manufacturing concern) than would the inclusion of feet, tail, fur and eyes in each package of ground round. We do not want to think about the source of these or other commodities, to remember what Marx said about capital coming into the world "dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt."

Similarly vivid passages aside, just what is said in The Lives of Animals is not of primary interest; most of it has been said before. What is interesting is who says what, and Coetzee's intimations of why. The Lives of Animals does not describe any animals at all--what is farther from the jungle than the university?--and one begins to suspect that its title refers mostly to the animal nature of its human characters, the mute passions that knock them about. Indeed, why should it be that the mouthpiece for vegetarianism is a dramatically aging older woman who lives alone with her cats? Why should her fiercest opponent be that woman's daughter-in-law, a mother of two and a fierce and vigorous rationalist? Coetzee--not for nothing is he an admirer of D.H. Lawrence--makes us see the two women's intellectual contest as also a contest over the man who is son to one and husband to the other.

Most troubling, however, is the association, here as in Age of Iron, of a scalding degree of compassion with a figure who is isolated, infertile and soon dead. Does Elizabeth Costello rage Lear-like at the world's wrong because she fears she is about to go to the grave without her child's love? Or is it for herself, as it is for Age of Iron's Mrs. Curren, with whom she shares a great deal more than the initials EC? In that book, a late, terrible access of sympathy--for the homeless, for the children of apartheid--seems to come at the cost of one's own life, as if no one with children still to raise and a job still to hold down, and even air still to breathe, could endure such knowledge as sympathy affords. Elizabeth Costello cannot think of the quantum and the quality of animal suffering at human hands without thinking of us all as "participants in a crime of stupefying proportions." Perhaps, her son concedes; but what good does protest do? Does compassion wound us to no purpose? The Lives of Animals ends, rather severely, with Elizabeth Costello's son soothing her with words we might say to an animal being put down: "'There, there,' he whispers in her ear. 'There, there. It will soon be over.'"

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