The Community of Sentient Beings: J. M. Coetzee's Ecology in Disgrace and Elizabeth Costello

Abstract

C'   arises in relation to one of the most troubling suggestions in the fi ction of his later career. Already in Disgrace (), but still more starkly and disturbingly in Elizabeth Costello (), the modern human community associates itself with a normalization of atrocity; indeed, atrocity seems to situate itself at the very core of the modern. Coetzee's writing registers and then counters this atrocious modernity by opening and extending the ethical bounds of human community, by envisioning animals as fellow beings deserving the consideration and protection that more typically are accorded only to the human being.  is extension of entitlement, however, necessarily impugns the typical economy of modern human collectives. As novelist Elizabeth Costello observes to a gathering of academics, her tour of their American college town has included "no horrors, no drug-testing laboratories, no factory farms, no abattoirs. Yet I am sure they are here.…  ey are all around us as I speak" (Coetzee, Elizabeth ). In denouncing these unacknowledged but omnipresent horrors, Elizabeth voices a deep questioning of how we moderns understand ourselves and our relationships with other living beings.

Coetzee’s Postmodern Bodies: Disgrace between Human and Animal Bodies

“…Don Randall (2007) writes that "Coetzee"s writing registers and then counters this atrocious modernity by opening and extending the ethical bounds of human community, by envisioning animals as fellow beings deserving the consideration and protection that more typically are accorded only to the human being" (p. 209). Randall contends that Coetzee employs animals toward social, political, and ecological ends: "Intensified focus on the animal enables Coetzee to write in a zone of intersection between sociopolitical and ecological concerns, to elaborate an ecologically oriented ethics that sharpens the critique of modern political regimes that dominate and exploit fellow beings both human and non-human" (p. 210).…”