J.M. Coetzee

J.M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello is about animal rights and animal Ethics. In this novel, an aging novelist gives a series of lectures about animals and their moral status. Elizabeth Costello takes issue with the tradition of Western philosophical thought which is based on the binary opposition between reason and emotion. In Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, Olga Tokarczuk’s Janina Duszejko is also an elderly woman haunted by the horror of what human beings do to animals. The present interdisciplinary study -a library-based qualitative research- reviews the similarities between these two characters and aims to show that Duszejko could be seen as Costello’s alter ego. It surveys the writers’ choice of sentience over reason, the way the texts have undermined the arguments of their major characters, and the similarities between animals and prisoners of concentration camps. Findings show that Coetzee and Tokarczuk do not uphold the Western tradition that divides experience into reason/emotion, masculine/ feminine, justice/ love, and public/ private. In both novels, the writers avoid binary oppositions and through Costello and Duszejko ask the readers/audiences to open their hearts and become one with their victims.

The present paper studies J.M. Coetzee’s Life & Times of Michael K (1983) and Jafar Modarres Sadeqi’s Gavkhuni ( The Marsh ) (1362 [1983]) through a spatial perspective. To this end, the study avails itself of a constellation of concepts formed around Edward Soja’s Thirdspace, Michel Foucault’s heterotopia, and Mikhail Bakhtin’s chronotope. Reading the selected novels through these key terms shows that despite striking differences concerning the nature and manifestation of space, both novels configure space as belonging to the realm of the father. In Life & Times of Michael K , Michael begins a journey across South Africa to escape this paternal realm, while the unnamed narrator of Gavkhuni , having failed to escape the memory of Isfahan even after moving to Tehran, starts to write to get rid of his nightmares about his father. At the end of the novels, both protagonists return to their first places: Cape Town and Tehran, respectively. However, as the beginning and ending points of the novels, these cities do not remain the same for them: Michael preserves his identity as a gardener even in Cape Town, and the narrator of Gavkhuni reconciles with the ever-present image of the father and Zayandehrud in Tehran through writing.