Empathy in the works of J.M. Coetzee

In Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews, edited by David Attwell, author J. M. Coetzee says of his upbringing in apartheid South Africa that in his youth “he ha[d] perhaps seen more of cruelty and violence than should have been allowed to a child” (394). Perhaps this is why in many of his novels, speeches and non-fiction works, Coetzee explores the human capacity for cruelty and violence – against animals, against Hottentots, against barbarians – or perhaps more accurately the lack of empathy needed to carry out acts of cruelty and violence. In Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals, a publication of Coetzee’s 1997-98 Tanner Lectures at Princeton University, he addresses the issue of empathy through a metanarrative in which a character, author Elizabeth Costello, debates the issue of animal cruelty at a series of academic lectures. In one academic speech, Costello makes a comparison between the killings of Jews in the Holocaust to the killings of animals in slaughterhouses. Costello, via Coetzee’s words, contends that in both cases it is lack of empathy that allows humans to treat Jews and animals in these inhumane ways.

Coetzee addresses the lack of empathy inherent in those who commit acts of violence in his fictional works, as well. In Dusklands, the character Jacobus describes a rural tribe of Hottentots in animalistic terms, thereby rendering them subhuman and worthy of death and cruelty. In Waiting for the Barbarians, Colonel Joll reduces the “barbarians,” to subhuman status in order to justify his acts of torture against them. In the novel In the Heart of the Country, Magda compares herself to rats as a way to justify her father’s cruel treatment. In all of these works, the common thread is the connection between lack of empathy and inhumane treatment. Coetzee contends that humans must dissociate themselves from the feelings of others in order to execute acts of violence without conscience. This is shown through lack of empathy, rationalization and reduction of the subject to subhuman status.

Coetzee contends that humans must separate themselves from human suffering in order to commit acts of violence. In The Lives of Animals, Elizabeth Costello contends that this lack of empathy stems from people’s inability to imagine themselves as sufferers of inhumane treatment – whether they are Jews in concentration camps or animals in cattle-cars: “The horror is that the killers refused to think themselves into the place of their victims, as did everyone else. They said, ‘It is they in those cattle-cars rattling past.’ They did not say, ‘How would it be if it were I in that cattle-car?’” (34). This inability of others to step into the shoes of their victims, Coetzee contends, is what allows people to turn a blind eye to cruelty. In the same way, Jacobus in Dusklands has no sympathy for the Hottentots he tortures. He says of a Hottentot victim whom he is torturing that “His eyes apologized like a dog’s. I was not upset. He was coming along” (103). This statement shows not only Jacobus’ lack of empathy but his sadistic enjoyment of power over another. The Empire soldiers that torture the Magistrate in Waiting for the Barbarians also lack empathy for pain: “My torturers were not interested in degrees of pain. They were interested only in demonstrating to me what it meant to live in a body … which very soon forgets [notions of justice] when its head is gripped and a pipe is pushed down its gullet” (115). In other words, the Empire soldiers have no empathy for the Magistrate’s suffering. They are interested only in punishing the Magistrate for his subversive acts. Finally, in the novel In the Heart of the Country, Magda shows her father’s lack of empathy to her suffering through her relating of his actions toward her: “I was absent. I was not missed. My father pays no attention to my absence. To my father, I have been an absence all my life” (2). The fact that Magda’s father “pays no attention to her,” shows his lack of empathy to her loneliness and suffering.

Coetzee also asserts that perpetrators of violence must rationalize their acts of violence in order to live with their consequences. In The Lives of Animals, Costello gives many rationalizations for the poor treatment of animals, the most prominent being that animals lack human awareness; therefore they are expendable: “[Animals] have no consciousness therefore. Therefore what? Therefore we are free to use them for our own ends? Therefore we are free to kill them?” (44). Here, Costello points out the folly of the rationalization that animals are worthy of killing because they have no consciousness. By the same token, in Dusklands, “Jacobus” convinces himself that the Hottentots have no awareness because it allows him to treat them like objects. Jacobus says of his servant Klawer, for example, that “we had lived much the same outward life; but he understood nothing. I dismissed him” (80). Jacobus rationalizes his cruel treatment of Klawer by contending that “he understood nothing,” an indication that Jacobus believes Klawer to lack normal human awareness. Similarly, in Waiting for the Barbarians, Colonel Joll rationalizes his torturous acts is by saying that in order to protect his people, he must force the truth from the barbarians: “I am probing for the truth, in which I have to exert pressure to find it. First I get lies, you see – this is what happens – first lies, then pressure, then more lies, then more pressure, then the break, then more pressure, then the truth” (5). If the Colonel convinces himself that the barbarians are lying and that by extracting the truth from them he can protect his people, then he can justify in his own mind, his barbarous acts. In a similar way, Magda in the novel In the Heart of the Country, demonizes herself as a way of justifying her father’s cruel treatment: “He believes that he will begin to prosper once I am out of the way. Though he dare not say so, he would like me to take to my bedchamber with a migraine and stay there” (34). By rationalizing her father’s cruelty with her own justifications, she can understand, though in a warped way, the reasons for his neglect.

A final way that Coetzee contends that humans dissociate themselves from the feelings of others in order to commit acts of cruelty is in the way that perpetrators reduce their victims to subhuman status. In Costello’s speech in The Lives of Animals, she discusses this practice with regard to animal cruelty in many ways. She quotes Descartes as saying: “An animal lives … as a machine lives” (33), thereby implying that the animal is an object and is therefore expendable. Jacobus in Dusklands does the same thing to the Hottentots – he refers to them as animals so he can justify his treatment of them: “Heartless as baboons they are, and the only way to treat them is like beasts” (58). By reducing people to animal-like status, Jacobus objectifies them and therefore condemns them to subhuman treatment. In Waiting for the Barbarians, Colonel Joll reduces the barbarians to subhuman status first by calling them “barbarians,” which implies that they are wild, untamable and therefore a subhuman threat to humanity. In addition, he reduces the barbarians to subhuman status by treating them like animals: “At the end of the rope, tied neck to neck comes a file of men, barbarians, stark naked, holding their hands up to their faces in an odd way as though one and all are suffering from toothache … a simple loop of wire runs through the flesh of each man’s hands and through holes pierced in his cheeks” (103). The way in which the men are corralled together, stripped naked and subjected to inhumane treatment shows that Joll does not see them as equal to him in human stature. In a similar fashion, in the novel In the Heart of the Country, Magda reduces herself to subhuman status as a result of her father’s cruel treatment. When daydreaming about having children, for example, she says of their birth: “emerging into the light of day at the head of a litter of ratlike, runty girls, all the spit image of myself” (42). Here, her comparison of herself and her children to “rats” implies that her father’s treatment has given her the impression that she is in fact subhuman and therefore deserves the cruelty he inflicts.

Nearly all of Coetzee’s works examine the subject of empathy in some fashion, but it is through his two speeches in The Lives of Animals that he truly brings the issue into acute focus. Perhaps it is because the fictional metanarrative, which ties the two talks together, is not a complex story but more of a forum in which to engage in philosophical discussion. This forum then gives Coetzee more freedom to focus on the single topic of animal cruelty and to debate the larger related topic of empathy freely instead of using it as a thematic backdrop for a larger narrative account. Regardless of the reason, the examination of empathy in The Lives of Animals brings clarity to the examination of the same topic in Coetzee’s larger fictional works, thereby unifying his body of work with a single overriding thematic focus. But as always, in all of these works Coetzee does not provide answers to the question of empathy and its role in society. He merely opens the topic up for discussion -- and leaves the audience to form their own conclusions.

Works Cited

Coetzee, J.M. Dusklands. 1974. United States of America: Penguin Books, 1983. Print.

---. In The Heart of the Country. 1976. United States of America: Penguin Books, 1982. Print.

---. The Lives of Animals. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1999. Print.

---. Waiting for the Barbarians. 1980. United States of America: Penguin Books, 1982. Print.