Elizabeth Costello and Culture: It's long, but bear with me

I’m not sure how to organize this so I’m going to start with some general observations, then delve into my reactions to specific things in each of the chapters.

1.) 1.) I really dislike Nora’s character for being so viciously close-minded. I suppose she simply has problems with Elizabeth because Nora fears she comes in second to her in matters of her son’s loyalty and submission -- but what seems to irk her more than anything is the mental intimacy John shares with his mother. He apologizes to his mother for Nora’s behavior and supports his mother’s against Nora’s attacks. While a lot of her sourness seems to be the result of insecurity, her mean-spirited, close-minded ignorance makes her a wholly unsympathetic character with an apparently dismissive attitude towards those whose opinions differ from hers. Though I do not buy the animal talk, I’m not so arrogant to at least consider my view is the result of ignorance in a matter so mysterious and so disputed. ((Had to get that out of the way))

2.) 2.) John is reeeeaaally perceptive throughout the entire book. This is particularly odd because his skills of perception are typically utilized to save his mother from danger, though the narrator repeatedly refers to her motherly flaws.

Beginning in the first chapter, it seems quite clear to me that Elizabeth Costello lacks a firm sense of cultural belonging and turns toward a sense of universal culture (whether she firmly believes in that notion or simply concocted the belief to comfort herself, I cannot say). The façade Elizabeth offers to the press at award ceremonies is consistently impersonal, which is, at all three speaking venues, what frustrates her audience and prevents her from connecting with them; this becomes clear when she fails to connect with the audience on the ship despite their similarity in age. She cannot connect with people, and that much is evident when the author recalls her fits of rage with her family and the constant isolation during her writing. She departs from the human culture surrounding her into a world of fiction, which Emmanuel asserts can only be “absorbed … in silence and in solitude” (45).

Beyond his views on literature, Emmanuel provides an interesting contrast for Elizabeth. Unlike Elizabeth, he emphasizes his homeland as the cradle of a culture (which Elizabeth reports is a romanticized fabrication). In fact, during he and Elizabeth’s initial reunion, Emmanuel says “who would have guessed that a country boy from Africa would end up like this, in the lap of luxury?” (37). Elizabeth’s response gives evidence of her disdain for cultural boundries: “I’m a country girl myself… Nothing exceptional about being from the country”(37). For Elizabeth, the traditional lines of differentiation are non-existent, and that appears to be the source of her profound ability to interject herself into so many different roles in her novels. Furthermore, she believes novels, the fruits of labor in her craft, have no innate belonging to the cultural from which they come, an idea crystallized on the cruise ship: “A novel about people who live in an oral culture is not an oral novel. Just as a novel about women isn’t a women’s novel” (53).

While she reports an initial hostility towards men, indirectly shown through her desire to “liberate [Molly] from that house… that bedroom,”(13) in her novel, she moves toward a more universal conception of culture as the shared thing that links all beings together, noting that “she has mellowed toward men as she has gotten older” (37). Thus her struggle throughout the book is to remove the human inclination (dictated by tradition) to obsess with differences in all things; something the narrator hints that she has “grown beyond” as she has aged (ironically, Nora deems this universality “infantile” in comparison to her “mature” take-things-as -they-are philosophy. This is especially obvious at the award ceremony in Pennsylvania where conversations focus on her perceived feminism. The obvious example is when her all-knowing son asks Susan (in their sex bed) if she ever considered that “my mother may have got beyond the man-woman thing? That she may have explored it as far as it goes, and is now after bigger game?”(25). That bigger game, evidently, is applying her principles of universality and same-ness to the entire animal kingdom, not just men and women.

During her final campaign in our reading assignment, Elizabeth is forced to topple the bulk of society’s view that culture is absent with animals because “They have no sense of shame” (85). During her grand speech regarding the rights of animals, Elizabeth has a very negative view of the effects of intellectual tradition, which she claims is defined by us as reason, but which falls short of being true reason or leading to ultimate truth. Instead, she claims, the tradition makes itself the central and final measurement of things even though it is merely a product of human culture, not a divine truth. I found it especially interesting that she calls traditional, human, conceptions of reason “… a rather narrow self-regenerating intellectual tradition whose forte is reasoning, in the same way that the forte of chess players is playing chess, which for its own motives it tries to install at the center of the universe” (69). By reasoning, I think she means “what we as humans have come to accept as reasoning.”

Now some other random observations:

1.) Though Elizabeth rails against the human constructs as an absolute measure of things, she is urging her audience to acknowledge the animals’ “… right to life, the right not to be subjected to pain or harm [and] the right to equal protection before the law” (70). Are man’s laws not insufficient, playing the artificial role of truth?

2.) She talks about what is lost from the ape when he assimilates into human culture, but does not directly address whether she thinks humans lose that same sort of freedom. I think she should, since Wunderlich points on (p. 90) that both babies and animals lack self-consciousness. Therefore, isn’t something “lost” by all humans as they are indoctrinated into the western cultural tradition (or whatever tradition they are born into)?

3.) I thought her point on page 79 that because we, as humans, possess the capacity of a heightened consciousness, we have an obligation to empathize (which I think is a better word than “sympathize” when she uses it to express putting yourself into someone else’s shoes) with all creatures in order to determine what is just and what is not.

4.) On page 86, I thought her notions of how God was conceived by man was a really really interesting argument, though I would most likely disagree.

5.) Dean Arendt says animals “live in a vacuum of consciousness” (89). I like that phrase because I think it encapsulates the ideas behind a lot of Elizabeth’s dissenters.

6.) Bottom of page 99, she mentions how we (humans) don’t claim the power of life and death over our own kind as we do animals. This immediately brought to mind the death penalty (though I am admittedly a proponent of it -- please no political response) and was another interesting passage.

Finally (I know, I know) A quick thought on the debate

1.) Elizabeth’s opponent made the point I would have made that “the best performance the higher apes can put up is no better than that of a speech-impaired human being with severe mental retardation”(107). But her response was amazing. That we are judging them by our standards (cultivated by human tradition) of how intelligence and understanding is expressed, though we, at the same time, acknowledge they are not a part of our culture or our tradition against which they are measured.