Abstract
Kyoko Yoshida
Cannibalism and Vegetarianism: Eating (Dis)Order in J. M. Coetzee's Fiction
This paper will call attention to recurring images of eating in J. M. Coetzee's fiction and explore the ethical anxiety in the context of colonialism. We will observe how eating, well before the publication of The Lives of Animals (1999) and Elizabeth Costello (2003), has been a central problem in Coetzee's fiction.
In Foe (1986), Friday is suspected of cannibalism. On the surface, this is a critique of the colonizers' naming the Other cannibals to be civilized. Beyond this postcolonial discourse of oppression, through Susan Barton's futile attempt to understand Friday, we become increasingly obsessed with his mutated body, his missing tongue and possibly his penis. The mutation is an unmistakable trace of violence inflicted on him and paradoxically suggests the possible violence he could have caused on others. This reciprocity imprinted on Friday's body arouses Susan's sexual imagination.
Foe is the only book that refers to cannibalism, but similar eating situations permeate Coetzee's other books. Once the idea of eating some-body becomes the fear of eating any body, one is forced to make a conscious decision of eating no body. Subsequently, any act of eating suggests innate cannibalism. Examining specific instances of cannibalism ( Foe ) and vegetarianism ( Life & Times of Michael K, Disgrace, Elizabeth Costello ), the paper analyzes how these representations are associated with violence inflicted on bodies, sexual desire, colonials' pursuit for animal protein, the colonized Other, and the relationships between human rights and animal rights, and between body and language.
From these specific imageries of cannibalism and vegetarianism, the discussion proceeds to the literary symbolism of communion, the “breaking of bread,” another frequent element in Coetzee's fiction. Communion is, in its most elementary sense, a link between the aforementioned two eating behaviors, for it literally means feeding on bread as Christ's body. In the broader imagination, it symbolizes human bondage through the act of eating. Communion is an act of feeding each other on each other through corpus Christi .
In Waiting for the Barbarians (1980), the Magistrate's disgust for Colonel Joll is expressed by his refusal to break bread with Joll. The Magistrate wonders how Joll can dine after the day's work of interrogating his prisoners through violent means. The Magistrate associates wounded bodies with meal. Both in Disgrace (1999) and Elizabeth Costello (2003), the communion imagery is dramatized at the dinner table, the former as an occasion for reconciliation between David Lurie and Melanie's father Mr. Isaac, and the latter as an opportunity for Professor Abraham Stern to protest against Elizabeth by his absence at the dinner table. First of all, these dinner tables are a setting to make peace. Secondly, behind these scenes, bodies are at stake once again: the massacred bodies (animals in the meat factories, Jews in the death camps) and the violated bodies (Melanie and Lucy). In a way, the members of the dinner party are making peace, compromising, trying to reach equilibrium by feeding each other on a substitute for the wounded bodies.
Coetzee's vegetarianism is widely known, but this exploration will not depict the author as a “hunger artist;” it neither tries a biographical approach to the subject, nor does it consider the problem of eating in Coetzee's literature a manifestation of his personal apprehension. Through the analysis of cannibalism, vegetarianism and communion, the paper will shed light on the ethical dilemma that eating poses on colonizers and colonials. This anxiety is endless and self-consuming since one can convert from a carnivorous diet to a vegetarian diet, but one can never stop eating.