Fiction, Metafiction and the Process of Being: Ethical Responsibility towards Non-Human Animals in J.M Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello Anonymous College

Donna Haraway’s seminal posthumanist essay “A Cyborg Manifesto” engages with the argument that humans and non-human animals are not such disparate categories and that these the categories that reduce and restrict definitions are far messier than human reason and humanism would argue. J. M Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello participates in this resistance to reason with regards to animal rights. The eponymous protagonist Elizabeth Costello provides an argument for the consideration of animal rights as both a novelist and a public intellectual, much like Coetzee himself. The novel was, in fact, born from Coetzee’s contribution to the Tanner Lectures, The Lives of Animals. Though this developed into the reconfiguration of ‘lessons’ in the novel that became Elizabeth Costello, the lessons that explore the ethical obligations to animals in Coetzee’s fiction are, as Laura Wright argues, “performative rather than didactic” (195). It is, therefore, in this way that the text highlights the importance of being that is produced through fictionality. Fiction, in the text, is held up as a way to resist humanist reason and reduction that has led to the justifications of extreme cruelty that society inflicts on animals through laboratory...