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"Greening" Postcolonialism: Ecocritical Perspectives

Huggan, Graham, 1958-

MFS Modern Fiction Studies, Volume 50, Number 3, Fall 2004,

pp. 701-733 (Article)

Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: 10.1353/mfs.2004.0067

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MFS Modern Fiction Studies, Volume 50, number 3, Fall 2004. Copyright © for the Purdue ResearchFoundation by the Johns Hopkins University Press. All rights to reproduction in any form reserved.

"GREENING" POSTCOLONIALISM:

ECOCRITICAL PERSPECTIVES

Graham Huggan

What do a polemical report on dams, a (pseudo-)philosophicaltreatise on animal welfare, and a novel about elephants have in com-mon? They are all legitimate objects of the practice of ecocriticism,both a critical method and an ethical discourse that "takes as itssubject the interconnections between nature and culture, specifi-

cally the cultural artifacts of language and literature" (Glotfelty xix).With "one foot in literature and the other on land," ecocriticism isprimarily a "study of the relationship between literature and the physi-cal environment"; but its mandate also extends to the fields of envi-ronmental philosophy and bioethics, where "as a theoretical discourse,[it] negotiates between the human and the nonhuman [worlds]"(Glotfelty xviii–xix). And what if the works in question are by anIndian, a South African, and a Canadian writer, respectively? What if each, in its own way, articulates resistance to authoritarian habits of

thought and value-systems, connecting these clearly to the domi-nating practices of imperialist and/or neocolonialist regimes? Clearly,there are grounds here for a productive overlap between the tasks of ecocriticism and those of postcolonial criticism, opportunities for afruitful alliance between the two critical/theoretical schools that opensup new aesthetic horizons, as well as offering food for political thought.

By comparing three recent postcolonial works—Arundhati Roy'sThe Greater Common Good (1999), J. M. Coetzee's The Lives of

Animals (1999), and Barbara Gowdy's The White Bone (1998)—thatoffer insight into ecological issues and relationships, this essay asks

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what contemporary postcolonial and ecologically oriented literary/cultural criticism might have to offer one another at a time of globalenvironmental crisis. Deep ecologists might argue that postcolonial

criticism has been, and remains, resolutely human-centered (an-thropocentric); committed first and foremost to the struggle for so-cial justice, postcolonial critics have been insufficiently attuned tolife-centered (eco- or biocentric) issues and concerns.1 A growingbody of work exists, however, to suggest a convergence between theinterests of postcolonial and ecologically minded critics (see, for ex-ample, Adams and Mulligan; Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin; O'Brien;Platz ["Greening" and "Literature"]; Sluyter). From recent reports onthe devastating impact of transnational corporate commerce on lo-

cal/indigenous ecosystems (Young) to more theoretically orientedreflections on the efficacy of postcolonial literatures and/or literarycriticism as vehicles for Green ideas (Head), postcolonial criticismhas effectively renewed, rather than belatedly discovered, its com-mitment to the environment, reiterating its insistence on the insepa-rability of current crises of ecological mismanagement from histori-cal legacies of imperialistic exploitation and authoritarian abuse.

Conversely, recent evidence can be cited of a "postcolonial turn"in environmental criticism and philosophy that combats the tenden-cies of some Green movements toward Western liberal universalismand "[white] middle-class nature-protection elitism" (Pepper 246),and that rejects the lunatic-fringe misanthropy that hovers at theedges, and threatens to discredit, some of the more radical schoolsof ecological thought (Curtin 18–20).2 Deane Curtin's Chinnagounder's

Challenge: The Question of Ecological Citizenship is a paradigmaticexample here, arguing that moral debates about land use, bioethics,and the rights of (threatened) indigenous peoples are always cultur-ally coded, and that cross-cultural understanding is needed as muchas an ability to decide what is right or wrong in any given event.

"What makes sense as a preservation strategy in the first world,"argues Curtin, "often has disastrous consequences in the third world"(5). Curtin's concern echoes frequent complaints from Third Worldscholars (for example Gadgil and Guha; Guha; Shiva) that First Worldenvironmentalism, in assuming that its protest rhetoric and pallia-tive measures are universally applicable, runs the risk of turningitself into another, late-capitalist form of "ecological imperialism"(Crosby; see also Curtin 5–7, 18–20). No one would dispute thatWestern environmental groups have been effective in attracting nega-

tive publicity for, say, technocratic World Bank/IMF-sponsored devel-opment programs, several of which (the Green Revolution, for in-stance) have ironically emerged as examples of cultural arrogancemasquerading as global philanthropy. But in seeking to foist their

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ethical/intellectual agenda onto non-Western peoples and cultures,some of these groups risk being seen as arrogant in their turn; or, atbest, as distractingly naive in their ritual invocation of

anthropocentrism as the root-cause of the world's ills (Arnold andGuha 19; see also Curtin 100).

This essay takes its cue from Curtin's conviction that global"ecological citizenship" requires commitments to human, as well aswider ecological justice, engendering the recognition that nature hasextrinsic, as well as intrinsic value for us all. (After all, as Curtinsays, "the view [held by several prominent radical ecologists] thatnature has only intrinsic value is strangely anti-ecocentric since itimplies that humans are not part of nature" [189].)3 It also tries to

answer Curtin's call for a carefully case-based, historicallycontextualized analysis of contemporary social and environmentalproblems. My analysis, therefore, weighs the advantages of a plural-istic "cross-cultural ethical discourse" against the implicit arroganceof First World (neo)liberalism (164) and seeks to add ecocritical per-spectives to a number of fundamental postcolonial debates. Amongthese are what Gayatri Spivak calls the "worlding" of the Third World(Spivak, In Other Worlds ), the ambivalent role of thepostindependence state in brokering national economic development,and, not least, the value of imaginative writing as a site of discursiveresistance to authoritarian attitudes and practices that not only dis-rupt specific human individuals and societies, but might also be seenas posing a threat to the entire "ecosphere" and its network of inter-dependent "biotic communities" (Naess).4 The essay also gives arecent postcolonial twist, acutely conscious of its cultural location, tothe longstanding debate within environmental ethics on the reconcil-ability or not of (liberal) animal-rights and (radical) ecocentric posi-tions.5 Finally, it offers some thoughts on the cultural construction of the "ecological subject" (Dobson 54–55), and on the implications for

postcolonial, as well as ecological criticism of entering into the imagi-native world—the collective consciousness—of other sentient crea-tures.

Ecocriticism, at present, is a predominantly white movement,arguably lacking the institutional support-base to engage fully withmulticultural and cross-cultural concerns (Glotfelty xxv; see, how-ever, Buell, especially Writing ; Murphy; Slaymaker). Similarly, eco-logically related contributions to postcolonial criticism have tendeduntil fairly recently to focus on the former (also predominantly white)

"settler cultures," taking in such issues as the use of territorial meta-phor to reflect changing patterns of land use and spatial perception,the geopolitics of colonial occupation and expansion, the rival claimsof Western property rights and Native/indigenous title, destructive

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encounters between conflicting ecosystems, and the mutual entangle-ment of biological and cultural factors in providing the ideologicalbasis for imperial rule (Carter; Crosby; Darian-Smith et al.; New).

Several of these studies are arguably motivated, at least in part, bya sense of collective historical guilt and vicariously experiencedtrauma, and are not always sufficiently alert to the temptations of "imperialist nostalgia"—a closet ideology the practitioners of whichare given to mourn what they themselves have helped destroy(Rosaldo 69–70).6

It seems useful, in this context, to turn to contributions fromnon-Western environmental scholars, as well as to case studies fromother parts of the world that explore the intersections between

postcolonial and ecological concerns. Unsurprisingly, predominantlyliterary scholars are outflanked here by those working in other—oracross other—academic disciplines. Within the vast interdisciplinaryfield of South Asian studies, for instance, the sociologist RamachandraGuha's historical account of the Chipko (Himalayan peasantantideforestation) movement in the 1970s, and the ecofeminist-ac-tivist Vandana Shiva's analysis of the disastrous consequences of theGreen Revolution for subsistence-farming communities in late-twen-tieth-century Punjab, serve as twin reminders that ecological disrup-tion is coextensive with damage to the social fabric; and that envi-ronmental issues cannot be separated from questions of social justiceand human rights. In documenting histories from below, both schol-ars mount an indirect challenge to what Ania Loomba (followingSpivak) has called the "overworlding" of the Third World—to thatwell-intentioned, but unmistakably Western-elitist construction of theThird World as a locus of anti-imperialist resistance, the overpower-ing rhetoric of which risks silencing the very masses on whose behalf it claims to speak (Loomba; see also Spivak [Critique ; In Other

Worlds ]; and O'Hanlon).7 Yet Guha's and Shiva's primary concern is

less with the West or Western imperialism per se than with the neo-colonialist imperatives of the postindependence Indian state. This"centralized management system," in pursuing "a policy of planneddestruction of diversity in [both] nature and culture" (Shiva 12), hasactively sought to impose a homogenizing late-capitalist vision of economic progress most obviously beneficial to the nation's rulingelite (Guha 195–96). The state's coercive allocation and manage-ment of natural resources can be seen as a postcolonial version of ecological imperialism in which it becomes clear that "the forced march

to industrialisation" has had disastrous cultural, as well as ecologicaleffects (Guha 196). For Shiva, there are thus two symbiotically re-lated crises in postcolonial India: an ecological crisis brought aboutby the use of resource-destructive technological processes and a

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cultural/ethnic crisis emerging from an erosion of the social struc-tures that make cultural diversity and plurality possible (12, 235).

Guha and, particularly, Shiva stand behind the work of Arundhati

Roy, whose fulminating essays "The Greater Common Good" (1999)and "The End of the Imagination" (1998), capitalizing on the run-away success of her Booker prizewinning novel The God of Small

Things (1997), probably represent the most eye-catching ecocriticalintervention to date by a recognized postcolonial writer. The essays—first published separately as cover stories for two mainstream En-glish-language Indian magazines, Outlook and Frontline , and laterrepackaged for the international mass market as The Cost of Liv-

ing —are clear attempts to reach out both to a local readership famil-

iar with their controversial issues (the Narmada Valley Project in thefirst essay, India's decision to go nuclear in the second), and to aninternational audience possibly unaware of, and probably uninformedon, either issue, but sufficiently attuned to Roy's success to granther work another look.8 The essays are deliberately designed, thatis, as a politically motivated publicity venture that, riding on theback of Roy's recently accorded literary celebrity status, seeks toattract and, ideally, convert large numbers of readers both in herhome country and elsewhere. Now, it would be easy here to catego-rize Roy as another media-hungry Indo-Anglian cosmopolitan celeb-rity (Brennan; Mongia), or to see her as placing a well-timed stake inthe latest popular humanitarian cause. Certainly, in the first essaymentioned above (on which I shall concentrate here), Roy takes rhe-torical liberties with her disempowered Adivasi subjects, convertingthem into mythologized victims in her own highly personal moralcrusade against the tyrannies of the modern Indian state. And cer-tainly, she is aware throughout the essay of the constitutive, but alsodistortive, role of the global media in constructing the latest, highlyvisible human/ecological catastrophe as a newsworthy "event"

("Greater" 47, 50, 63; see also Rowell 282–86).9 But Roy, as in herprevious work, is not only interested in manipulating publicity for herown, and other people's, interests, but in showing how publicity—or,in this case, the mediated language of the common good, the na-

tional interest—achieves its magical effects. Hence the ironic title of her essay, which reflects on the ways in which a centralized state hasnot only commandeered national assets and resources, but has alsosought through media channels to convey the fiction of a carefullymonitored "national progress." The fiction of "national progress" de-

mands that government be "abstracted out of the messy business of politics," thereby releasing it for the utopian task of "receiving inputsfrom all parts of society, processing them, and finally allocating theoptimal values for the common satisfaction and preservation of soci-

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ety as a whole" (Chatterjee 160). Technological know-how is an es-sential instrument of the "magic of the State" (Taussig, Magic ). Andsuch expertise, in the hands of the few, requires the self-sacrifice of

the many:

Place all your prayers at the feet of the sarkar , the omnipo-tent and supremely enlightened state, and they will beduly passed on to the body of experts who are planning forthe overall progress of the country. If your requests areconsistent with the requirements of progress, they will begranted. (Chatterjee 160)

These, in Partha Chatterjee's appropriately sardonic terms, are

the grounds for Roy's ecological fable of the Narmada Valley Project:the ill-fated postindependence irrigation scheme, affecting hundredsof thousands of lives, that is usually considered to be "India's Great-est Planned Environmental Disaster" (Roy, "Greater" 44), and that issometimes seen, in "the congealed morass of hope, anger, informa-tion, disinformation, political artifice, engineering ambition, disin-genuous socialism, radical activism, bureaucratic subterfuge, [and]misinformed emotionalism" that surrounds it ("Greater" 9), as ametonymy for the self-consuming narrative of modern India itself

(Preface n. pag.).A few facts may be helpful here. India is the third largest dambuilder in the world, having built over three thousand big dams inthe fifty-odd years since independence (Roy, Preface n. pag.; McCully).Of these dams, several of the largest and best-known belong to thestate-administered Narmada Valley Project, spanning three states(Gujarat, Maharashtra, and Madhya Pradesh) in central India. Thishugely ambitious project, first dreamed up more than forty yearsago and still—despite massive protests and a legal stay, now lifted,against further construction—10 considered to be a viable proposi-

tion, conceives of building "3,200 dams that will reconstitute theNarmada [river] and her forty-one tributaries into a series of stepreservoirs—an immense staircase of amenable water." Two of thesedams, the giant Sardar Sarovar in Gujarat and the Narmada Sagar inMadhya Pradesh, will hold "more water [between them] than anyother reservoir on the Indian subcontinent" (Roy, "Greater" 33). Theproject aims to provide electricity and safe drinking water for mil-lions, while irrigating millions of hectares of infertile farming land.From its inception, however, the project has been fraught with prob-

lems, proving in many people's eyes to have been massively miscon-ceived. Hundreds of thousands of local people, mostly Adivasis, havebeen ousted from their land, with irreparable damage being done totheir daily lives, their economic self-sufficiency, and their culture.

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Evidence suggests that the project may consume more electricitythan it produces, and that its state-of-the-art flood-warning and irri-gation systems have had a damaging—in some cases, devastating—

effect on the very land the dams sought to protect, the very crop-yields they promised to increase. The astronomic cost of the project,heavily subsidized by the World Bank until its forced withdrawal inthe early nineties, has helped push "the country [further] into aneconomic bondage that it may never overcome" (Roy, "Greater" 35).Widespread dissent, mobilized around the powerful Narmado BachaoAndolan (Save the Narmada Movement), has been violently sup-pressed. All in all, as Andrew Rowell summarizes it, the NarmadaValley Project,

conceived in the dinosaur development era that deemedmegaprojects the panacea for the world's energy prob-lems, has been nothing short of a human and ecologicalcatastrophe, . . . an example of the neglect of local com-munities' needs and views in the development equationand the state repression against dissent when communi-ties want to have their voices heard. (282)

But the story, as Roy knows, is not limited to the facts, de-

pressing though these may be. For the project and, particularly, thebig dams at its center have also played a symbolic role in the devel-opment of India as a modern nation (Roy, "Greater" 15; McCully 1).As Patrick McCully puts it,

Perhaps more than any other technology, massive damssymbolize the progress of humanity from a life ruled bynature and superstition to one where nature is ruled byscience, and superstition vanquished by rationality. Theyalso symbolize the might of the state that built them, mak-

ing huge dams a favourite of nation-builders and auto-crats. When a dam is given such a powerful symbolic role,its economic and technical rationale and potential nega-tive impacts fade into insignificance in the decision-mak-ing process. (237)

Big dams, in other words, suggest a potentially deadly alliance be-tween the modernist ideology of technological gigantism and repres-sively authoritarian politics of state ownership and control (Roy, "Greater"91–92). This alliance is further cemented by transnational commer-

cial interests. The international dam industry, as Roy points out, is

worth $20 billion a year. If you follow the trails of Big Damsthe world over, wherever you go—China, Japan, Malaysia,

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Thailand, Brazil, Guatemala—you'll rub up against the samestory, encounter the same actors: the Iron Triangle (dam- jargon for the nexus between politicians, bureaucrats and

dam construction companies), the racketeers who call them-selves International Environmental Consultants (who areusually directly employed by dam-builders or their subsid-iaries), and more often than not, the friendly neighbourhoodWorld Bank. ("Greater" 35–36)11

The national allegory of statist abuse Roy constructs aroundthe Narmada Valley Project thus gradually widens out into an eco-logical "war for the rivers and the mountains and the forests of theworld" ("Greater" 52). At the same time, the narrative Roy spins outtakes on the dimensions both of antistatist fable, quasi-Dickensianin its moral intensity—"[The state is] a giant poverty-producing ma-chine, masterful in its methods of pitting the poor against the verypoor" ("Greater" 28)—and of cautionary tale on the ecological priceto be paid when "human intelligence . . . outstrips[s] its own instinctfor survival," and "twentieth-century emblems" such as big damsand nuclear bombs become "malignant indications of a civilisationturning upon itself" ("Greater" 101).

If Roy's message is crystal-clear, unashamedly partisan in its

intentions, her text remains a curiously unresolved mixture—parthard-headed investigative report, part sentimental political fable,12

part historically situated postcolonial allegory, part universal Greenmanifesto and call-to-arms. The different narrative strands cut acrossand contradict one another. Facts are needed to illustrate the enor-mity of the story, but its teller also complains of suffocating statisticsand the state's own version of "Fascist Maths" ("Greater" 72). Thebreathless language of fable is ironized on numerous occasions—"Nobody knows this, but Kevadia Colony is the key to the World. Go

there, and secrets will be revealed to you" ("Greater" 73)—only tobe reinstated, writ doubly large, on just as many again:

Who knows . . . what the twenty-first century has in storefor us. The dismantling of the Big? Big bombs, big dams,big ideologies, big contradictions, big countries, big wars,big heroes, big mistakes. Perhaps it will be the Century of the Small. Perhaps right now, this very minute, there's asmall god up in heaven readying herself for us. ("Greater"12; see also God of Small Things )

Complex social, political, and ecological systems—as if to counterthe technocrat's with the storyteller's magic—are repeatedly reducedto the black-and-white dramatics of the children's morality tale("Greater" 15, 24, 41). In the end, the standard format of the eco-

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logical heroes-and-villains story, however ironically manipulated,proves to be no match for contemporary postcolonial realities.13 In-deed, it raises the question of whom Roy believes herself to be speak-

ing for (Adivasi "oustees"? The Narmada Bachao Andolan? Interna-tional environmental activists and "eco-warriors"?14 The Indianpeople?)—an open question that blurs the boundaries between theunderclass victims of ecological disaster and their privileged sup-porters (Gadgil and Guha), and that makes Roy vulnerable to thecriticism that she is silencing those on whose behalf she wishes tospeak. Roy's tirade against the state seems to want to claim a vic-tory for the people ("Greater" 48–49). But which people? As othercommentators have pointed out, it is already oversimplified to say

that the political battle in the Narmada Valley is a basic conflict be-tween "the state" (in the Blue Corner) and "the people" (in the Red);there are also numerous conflicts between different sections of thepeople and different branches of the state, while even within theNarmada resistance movement there are factional splits betweendifferent groups, each of which sees itself as acting in the people'sinterests (Singh 1; see also Fisher and Omvedt).15 Roy's text thusdraws attention to at least two different modes of the "worlding" of the Third World to be found in certain postcolonially inflected formsof environmental protest writing: the first of these launches a right-ful attack on a quintessentially neocolonialist "Iron Triangle" (politi-cians, bureaucrats, and corporations, with International Aid back-ing), which has exploited the progressivist ideologies of Third Worldeconomic development for its own immediate ends; the second risksamounting to a further subalternization of some of the Third World'spoorest people, whose stories are told—in English—so that we privi-leged First-Worlders, and our Third World middle-class counterparts,might help them "resist." "The Greater Common Good," for all itsoverdramatized pieties, remains a highly intriguing text—not least

because, like the autocannibalizing tiger that provides its first andmost arresting image (Roy, Preface n. pag.), it effectively deconstructsmany of its own best arguments by drawing attention to itself as aplayful piece of highly literary investigative writing.16 This raises thelarger question of how to harness the resources of aesthetic play toreflect on weighty philosophical/ethical issues, as well as to serve avariety of "real-world" needs and "direct" political ends. This dilemmahas been central to the work of the South African writer J. M. Coetzee;and it is to Coetzee's staged philosophical debate-cum-ecological trea-

tise, The Lives of Animals , that the essay brings me next.The Lives of Animals , although initially given in 1997–98 as a

pair of university lectures, is characteristic of Coetzee's work in pre-senting complex philosophical/ethical debates in self-consciously fic-

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tional terms. The main body of the text consists, accordingly, of twomock-lectures—"The Philosophers and the Animals" and "The Poetsand the Animals"—given by a fictive Australian novelist (Elizabeth

Costello) at an equally fictitious college (Appleton University) in theUnited States. The lectures, amply documented, use the expositorydiscourses of philosophy and literary criticism to offer a scatteredseries of provocative comments on contemporary bioethical abuses,the self-justifying claims of philosophy, and the case for animal rights.The simulated form of the lectures allows Coetzee to reflect ironi-cally on the gap between ivory-tower academicism and real-worldsocial practice while drawing together, at the same time, a numberof fictional (literary) and non-fictional (scientific) sources to produce

a cannily displaced apologetics for the sympathetic imagination.17

Itis the more particular form on which the lectures draw, namely thebeast fable, that interests me most here, since, as I will suggest, it isby means of this traditionally anthropocentric genre that Coetzee isable to explore contradictions in the competing moral and intellec-tual discourses that surround ecological debates on the exploitationof nonhuman resources in the postcolonial world today.

It seems fitting, then, that Elizabeth Costello should choose tobuild the first of her lectures, "The Philosophers and the Animals,"around a kind of counterbeast fable, Kafka's satirical "Report to anAcademy" (1925), in which a learned discourse on the evolutionaryprocess is presented by that most urbane but also most melancholyof figures, Red Peter, a civilized African ape. The subversive potentialof Kafka's fable has not been lost on postcolonial critics, probablymost notably the American anthropologist Michael Taussig, who usesit both to attack those historical "othering" processes that helpedproduce, and justify the domestication of, "colonial wildness" (Mime-

sis xviii), and to celebrate the sympathetic magic of an "ape apinghumanity's aping"—the dizzying, but also enabling, spiral of

postcolonial "mimetic excess" (Mimesis 245).18 And it is not lost ei-ther on Elizabeth Costello, who in recasting herself as a late-twenti-eth-century, antipodean version of Red Peter, diverts the anthropo-centric axioms of beast fable away from their usual targets—thefrailties of humanity—using them instead to test the very limits of the human: the capacity for reasoned thought (Coetzee 40). Thecontinuing mistreatment of animals, Elizabeth suggests, is insepa-rable from the arrogant belief in sovereign reason, a belief that hashistorically been used to legitimize dominion over the entire animal

kingdom, as well as over large numbers of allegedly "inferior" mem-bers of the human race (Coetzee 22–23, 98–99; see also Singer231–32 and Wise, especially chapter 1). The whole history of West-ern philosophy, she further implies, can be read as a litany of ex-

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cuses, justified in the name of reason, that have permitted the treat-ment of animals and, by extension, the "natural world" as areplenishable human resource (Coetzee 23–25, 29). Reason, for all

the philosophers' claims, is neither "the being of the universe nor thebeing of God"; on the contrary, it may be no more than "the being of a certain spectrum in human thinking" (Coetzee 25). Yet Elizabeth isfaced here with the seemingly insuperable task of arguing againstreason while remaining bound within it. Her unsympathetic daugh-ter-in-law Norma, a professional philosopher of mind, is dismissiveof her efforts: "There is no position outside reason where you canstand and lecture about reason and pass judgment on reason"(Coetzee 80); while even Elizabeth herself recognizes that "reason

will [always] validate reason as the first principle of the universe—what else should it do? Dethrone itself?" (29–30). It is here that thedouble coding of the fable and its moralizing counterparts, the par-able and the allegory, come in useful. For while beast fables aretraditionally thought of as bodying forth the universal truths thatmight provide grounds for moral action, those such as Kafka's (or, ina different context, Swift's—see the postlecture discussion of Gulliver's

Travels in Coetzee's 96–99), aim rather, to interrogate the episte-mological procedures by which such truths are revealed. In the pro-cess, the fable secretes its secondary meaning as "a fiction inventedto deceive" ("Fable" def. 1d) sovereign reason, while hardly dethroned,is at least effectively challenged by drawing on a speculative form of moral discourse that ironically illustrates the inadequacies and apo-rias of Western logical thought.19

There is more, however; for Coetzee—as in all his work—is notonly concerned to challenge the certitudes of reason, but also toundermine those "discourses of power" that claim reason for theirown (Huggan and Watson 4–5). Anthropocentrism emerges as oneof these discourses; colonialism is a second; "phallogocentrism" is a

third (Derrida).20 At the same time, the lectures reveal the difficultyof speaking on behalf of animals who, as Elizabeth Costello senti-mentally puts it, "have only their silence left with which to confrontus" (Coetzee 30); of speaking the international language of human/animal rights from a "marginal location" (Attridge 171);21 and of speaking at all without falling into the familiar patterns of speech,and repeating the same self-serving clichés, that validate the view of those who believe the world is theirs, and language theirs to shapeit. In this last context, the graphic analogies Elizabeth draws (for

instance, between the mass slaughter of farm animals and the geno-cide of the Jews—[Coetzee 20–21, 82–83]) arguably betray a star-tling lack of cultural sensitivity;22 while even the most convincing of her critiques reveal authoritarian traces of their own. Hence the irony,

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presented by one of her opponents, the philosophy professorO'Hearne, that the animal-rights movement she so fiercely supports,deriving as it does from other Western philanthropic movements,

risks becoming "yet another Western crusade against the practicesof the rest of the world, claiming universality for what are simply itsown standards" (Coetzee 103–04). Hence the irony, acknowledgedby Elizabeth herself, that "[a]n ecological philosophy that tells us tolive side by side with other creatures justifies itself by appealing toan idea, an idea of a higher order than any living creature . . . [an]idea, finally, . . . which no creature except Man is capable of compre-hending" (Coetzee 91).23 And hence the irony that her discourse, forall its altruistic sentiment, frequently betrays self-interested motives,

not least by offering a confused mixture of liberal do-goodism andChristian eschatology in which the mission to save lives becomes adisplaced quest for self-redemption, and the triumph of the spirit isimaged in symbolic hierarchies of self-denial—from vegetarianism toasceticism, from the abjuration of meat to the mortification of theflesh (Coetzee 65, 107,117–19).

The lectures can be seen, in fact, as another of Coetzee's for-ays into the guilt-ridden, occasionally death-driven, territory of lib-eral thought. Like her closest literary descendant, Elizabeth Currenin Age of Iron (1990), Elizabeth Costello appears to embrace herown extinction as the member of an endangered species, a self-acknowledged "dying breed" (Huggan, "Evolution"). Certainly, herlectures are permeated with the smell of death, most of all her own(Coetzee 43). As O'Hearne surmises, "there is . . . a collapse of theimagination before death . . . [which provides the] basis of our fearof [it]" (Coetzee 110). This is the condition, he implies, from whichthe septuagenarian writer is suffering—a suggestion apparently con-firmed in the final scene in which her son John, taking his exhaustedmother in his arms and attempting to console her, whispers ambigu-

ously in her ear, taking in "the smell of cold cream, of old flesh.'There, there,' he whispers in her ear. 'There, there. It [Your life?]will soon be over'" (Coetzee 122). Transformed into another of herown long-suffering animals, Elizabeth herself becomes the subjectfor a fable—the ironic terminus of a locked debate that, begun in thespirit of defiance, ends on a plaintive note of self-defeat.

Yet if the argument for animal rights seems to rest, here aselsewhere, on human insecurity, the sympathy that Elizabeth invokes,and in turn attracts, is not so easily dismissed. She is sentimental to

a fault, but her sentimentalism can still engage us—as in her haltingattempt to explain the utopian gesture of embodying animals "bythe process called poetic invention that mingles breath and sense ina way that no one has explained and no one ever will" (Coetzee 89).

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The literary representation of animals, she suggests in her secondlecture, has historically been dominated by anthropocentric conven-tions. One of these is fabular abstraction, "where the animals stand

for human qualities: the lion for courage, the owl for wisdom, and soforth" (Coetzee 83); another, romantic primitivism, disdains abstractthought in the search to represent embodied experience, yet de-pends upon it nonetheless (see the discussion of Ted Hughes's "jag-uar" poems in Coetzee's 89–90). The attempt to represent the "naturalworld" is inescapably Platonic; no surprise, then, that Elizabeth'sown literary-critical discourse is caught in similar traps. While herwork is primarily concerned with the representation of fictional ex-perience (as in her "pathbreaking" feminist novel on Joyce's literary

antiheroine Marion [Molly] Bloom),24

she believes that her success inrendering this experience into words provides conclusive evidencethat she can "think her way into the existence" of any living being:

If I can think my way into the existence of a being who hasnever existed, then I can think my way into the existenceof a bat or a chimpanzee or an oyster, any being with whomI share the substrate of life . . . [T]here is no limit to theextent to which we can think ourselves into the being of another. There are no bounds to the sympathetic imagina-

tion. (Coetzee 49)

This optimism, however, proves to be largely unfounded. The Pla-tonic dilemma remains: in her first lecture, for instance, she be-comes, not Red Peter himself, but the idea of Red Peter—as if toconfirm her own suspicion that there is no access to embodied expe-rience other than through the channels of abstract thought. The iro-nies begin to multiply again: fables, pushed to their interpretive lim-its, turn into versions of themselves, thus generating other fables;ecologism itself becomes a fable of the impossible attempt to escape

anthropocentric thought (Coetzee 91–93, 99).These conundrums, as so often with Coetzee, have no rational

solution; rather, they require, if the fiction of intersubjective experi-ence is to be sustained, a leap of imaginative faith. In this context,Elizabeth, for all the irony at her expense, may yet be validated. Inher first lecture, she quotes disapprovingly from an essay by theAmerican philosopher Thomas Nagel, who maintains that the re-sources of the human mind, powerful though these are, cannot suf-fice for us to know what it is like to be another, to grasp "a funda-

mentally alien form of life" (Nagel 168, qtd. in Coetzee 42). Nagel isright, up to a point, but are animals (his main example is a bat)necessarily alien to human consciousness? And what is the imagina-tive faculty if not the attempt, defying the limitations of human con-

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sciousness, to enter the experiences—even the inner experiences—of lives other than our own? "The poet and the philosopher": it seemslike the setting for another of Coetzee's ironic fables. But as Nagel

grudgingly admits, "It may be easier than I suppose to transcendinter-species barriers with the aid of the imagination" (172, note 8).In this sense, at least, Elizabeth's claims on behalf of the sympa-thetic imagination are neither as naive nor as eccentric as some of her opponents might like to think. Turning now to Barbara Gowdy'sprodigiously imaginative novel about the lives of African elephants—and taking a leap of faith myself—I shall ask not so much whether

she can "think her way into the existence" of other creatures, buthow she can, and what might be at stake.

In Coetzee's text, animals are functionalized in a drama of hu-man mortality and suffering—one in which the attempt to reach outto the animal world, to inhabit the mental and emotional space of animals' lives through a sustained act of sympathetic imagination, iscounteracted by the ironic awareness of animals as objects of hu-man desires and needs: objects of exploitation and abuse, objects of charity and affection. This unresolved dilemma points, in turn, to theproblematic of animal representation, registering a tension betweenwhat the visual theorist Steve Baker calls (after the philosopher KateSoper) "animal-endorsing" and "animal-sceptical" views of art. Theformer view, says Baker, "will tend to endorse animal life itself (andmay therefore align itself with the work of conservationists or . . .animal advocacy)"; the latter "is likely to be sceptical not of animalsthemselves (as if the very existence of nonhuman life was in ques-tion), but rather of culture's means of constructing and classifyingthe animal in order to make it meaningful to the human" (9). Thistension, everpresent in Coetzee's text, is also maintained in Gowdy'snovel, which confronts the impossible task of making animals speakwithout humans speaking for them, of rescuing animals from the

"instrumental characterisation" to which human history (Baker 175)—including literary history—has consigned them, converting them frompassive objects for human use into self-willed "ecological subjects"(Dobson 54–55).25

Gowdy goes about her aim, in part, by transforming the literarygenre of the animal fable, a genre deployed traditionally to supportmoralistic, often highly conservative views of the human educationalprocess and, more recently, to prop up the social hierarchies anddisciplinary regimes that legitimize imperial rule (Fernandes 7–49;

see also Vance). More specifically, Gowdy draws on a source in whichboth of these aspects come together—Kipling's popular miscellaniesfor children, the Just So Stories (1980) and Jungle Books (1894–95). Gowdy's elephants have much in common with Kipling's cel-

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ebrated jungle creatures: they talk, debate, and interact with oneanother within a stratified social structure; they inhabit a quaintlyhonor-bound, quasi-Biblical realm of religious legend and cosmogenic

myth. But there the resemblance ends. For one thing, Gowdy's el-ephants, unlike Kipling's beasts, are endowed with a painful con-sciousness of their condition—a consciousness largely shaped by thememory of who they (individually) are, and what they (collectively)must once have been (Gowdy 83,148). And for another, unlike Kipling'sdutifully rewarded colonial subjects, they are condemned to movethrough a shiftless postimperial world defined as much by human asanimal savagery—a world in which the fragile network of ecologicalalliances on which they previously depended for their safety has been

thrown violently, perhaps irrecoverably, out of place:

The emergence of humans did not, as is widely assumed,initiate a time of darkness. On the contrary, in the firstgenerations following the Descent [the advent of humanbeings, originally descended from elephants], The Domain[Earth] was a glorious place, and this is partly becausehumans back then were nothing like today's breed. Theyate flesh, yes, and they were unrepentant and wrathful,but they killed only to eat [and there] weren't any massa-

cres or mutilations. There was plenitude and ease, andbetween she-ones [elephants] and other creatures was arare communion, for . . . all she-ones were mind talkers,and the minds of all creatures were intelligible. (42–43)

Instead, the elephants now inhabit a fallen world in which theircollective existence is threatened, and "a new and stunningly vora-cious generation of humans," their minds impenetrable, appears in-tent on their destruction (56, 43). This world, for all its obvious mythicresonances, recalls certain parts of postcolonial East Africa. Here,

elephants, while no longer officially endangered, must compete forterritory with rapidly increasing human populations, producing a "con-flict of space [that gradually] compresses them into smaller andsmaller areas," and threatens to reduce their viable habitat to therelatively protected enclaves of the wildlife parks (Douglas-Hamilton256). (Ironically, the mythical Safe Place that Gowdy's elephantsseek is envisioned at one point in terms of the modern tourist indus-try, as a wildlife park where peaceful "hindleggers [humans] . . .[g]ape at she-ones [elephants] . . . [a]ll day long," as if, by "star[ing]

at us hard enough, they [might] inflate back to what they were.Grow their ears and so on" [74]). Meanwhile, the brutal massacresof the herds—nightmarishly rendered in Gowdy's novel (85–90)—might also be linked to the crisis of the 70s and 80s, when a sudden

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rise in ivory prices, allied to the increased availability of guns acrossthe African continent, led to a potentially cataclysmic escalation of the East African ivory trade (Gavron 121).26

In the main, however, Gowdy prefers to maintain a guarded,sometimes a deftly ironic, distance from both indirect historical analo-gies and directly cited documentary sources. This is in part becauseher elephants are mythical as much as world-historical creatures;but it is clear they are also both, and she steers clear by and large of the temptation that some of the self-appointed elephant experts onwhose work she draws appear unable to resist—the signal urge tocoopt elephants into the type of neoprimitivist morality play in whichthe elephant becomes a "noble victim" in a traditional society thrown

disastrously off kilter (Baker; see also Scholtmeijer), and the con-tinuing assault on African wildlife contains within it a history of Euro-pean imperialist greed. This sentimental view is endorsed by theEnglish journalist Richard Gavron, whose travelogue The Last El-

ephant is listed as one of Gowdy's sources (Gowdy 339), and forwhom the elephant is nothing less than "a flesh-and-blood symbol of . . . the most important question of all for Africa: the struggle of ancient traditions and resources to survive and contribute in themodern African world" (Gavron 3). After independence, Gavron claims,

the first instinct of Africans was to turn around and wipeout their elephant populations: not merely to use the ivoryto buy modern material goods, but also, it seems to me, todestroy their world's wildness and danger, to eradicate whatmany Africans regard as a primitive and shaming past.(xii)

Gavron's view, besides being smugly Eurocentric, risks relegat-ing animals once more either to commodities—the exchangeable tro-phies of postimperial conquest—or to the romantic embodiments of

an atavistic "wildness" in which the ambivalent inscriptions of West-ern modernity on the African continent are strategically erased. WhileGowdy's novel is by no means free of the rhetoric of sentimentality—indeed, she makes it clear that she wishes to engage with it (Gowdy2)—her aim is neither simply to reproduce the kind of fateful"declensionist narrative" (Vance 172) in which animals are seen, alongwith humans, as inhabiting an irreversibly postlapsarian wilderness,nor to revert to the type of mock-historical fable in which animals areenlisted for the nostalgic production of a lost precolonial past. Rather,

she is concerned to show how both sets of myths may be imagina-tively redeployed to articulate a collective nonhuman consciousness,a unique—and by no means wholly unrealistic—vision of the worldcaptured from the "elephant point of view." Filtered through the con-

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sciousness of several members of the extended herd (including itslegendarily gifted "visionaries," "link-bulls," and "mind talkers"),27

the elephant worldview presented in The White Bone balances its

faith in a universe saturated with cosmic meaning ("everything ex-ists for the purpose of pointing to something else" [135]) against anecology of melancholic remembrance in a landscape touched withdespair. Precious links to the past have been lost, and different spe-cies are now sealed off against one another. The land, previously"trembling with mystic revelation," has fallen silent; afflicted withthe worst drought in living memory, it conjures only visions of "corpsesand dust above which the roar of planes pours down from an illimit-able emptiness" (145, 75). Memory, meanwhile, records a litany of

losses, while also giving shape to the fleeting visions that link thebeleaguered modern herds to a heroic ancestral past:

"Every moment is a memory," [the matriarch, She-De-mands, tells two of the young calves in the herd.] . . ."Everything has been ordained by the She" [the first el-ephant and mother of all elephants]. . . . "Therefore ev-erything must already have been imagined by the She. Welive only because we live in Her imagination. Your life, asyou experience it, is the She recollecting what She has

already imagined. We are memory. We are living memory."(83)

Epic memory counteracts the constant fear of annihilation, asthe remaining members of the extended herd renew their search forthe Safe Place that might guarantee the future of their species. Memo-ries are an elephant's hold on life, the narrator explains, for "theyare doomed without it. When their memories begin to drain, theirbodies go into decline, as if from a slow leakage of blood" (1).28 Andyet memories are also reminders of death, reconfirmatory visions of

a seemingly preordained destruction, as if each individual elephantwere made to carry the burden—were branded with the imprint—of devastating communal loss (148, 270). Memory is mourning, a patho-logical condition already suggested by the novel's epigraph, takenfrom Rilke's Duino Elegies :

Yet in the alert, warm animal there liesthe pain and burden of an enormous sadness.for it too feels the presence of what oftenoverwhelms us: a memory, as if the element we keep pressing toward was oncemore intimate, more true, and our communioninfinitely tender. (qtd. in Gowdy n. pag.)

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Rilke's poem, paradigmatically melancholic, uncovers the incurablynostalgic impulses behind the sympathetic imagination. But how isthe epigraph to be read in the context of the novel? Is this self-ironic

evidence of "the luxury of pity" that comes from sentimentalizingsuffering animals (Scholtmeijer 119), or of the paradoxical detach-ment that marks attempts to solicit sympathy for animals by making"them" seem more like "us," by making their plight our own? Ordoes it mark the outset of a narrative that attempts to break withanthropocentric/anthropomorphic conventions by presenting the ex-perience of creatures in a language that can never fully be theirs,nor yet unequivocally our own? As the American ecofeminist criticLinda Vance warns,

Crafting narratives that will give voice to animals and makehumans care about them in appropriate ways is no easytask. We want to avoid anthropomorphizing animals eventhough that has proven itself an effective tactic for mobi-lizing public sympathy toward them. We need to be faithfulto their stories, not our own. The goal is not to make uscare more about animals because they are like us, but tocare about them because they are themselves. (185)

If this is the task—and I believe it is—that Barbara Gowdy hasset herself in writing The White Bone , then it is in the very groundsof its impossibility that it contrives to achieve its goal. For The White

Bone enacts a variation on the utopian narrative in which the "envi-ronmental imagination" takes on the force of a performative (Buell,The Environmental Imagination ), conjuring up a semimythic, largelynonhuman world that both presents and transcends ecological ca-tastrophe, and that in so doing gestures toward the conditions underwhich our own world might be transformed.29 The nightmare of thepresent contains within it the dream, now partially occluded, of a

possible future (Gowdy 326–27). This dream, already foretold, of aspace beyond existing spatiotemporal boundaries requires a new lan-guage that reanimates nature in accordance with "ecotopian" ideals(see Devall and Sessions; also Manes).30 In The White Bone , theseideals appear to correspond to certain strands within Western (Anglo-American) ecofeminism, whose universalist agenda includes the im-perative to create greater dialogue between humans and animals by"translating animal consciousness into a form [that] humans canapprehend" (Vance 183). Certainly, Gowdy's novel has little difficulty

matching Vance's requirements for "ethically appropriate ecofeministnarratives" (182). Narratives about animals, suggests Vance,

should be informed by both observation and imagination . . .An animal's life history can be told in factual ways, and it

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can be told in mythic ways as well. [While] mythologizinghas so often been used to objectify animals, . . . that ob- jectification . . . is more a function of the world view of the

mythmakers than of mythology itself. In dreams, in fanta-sies, in visions, animals often speak to us—and who is tosay that this is not a form of communication? (183)

Similarly, the standard ecofeminist association between thedomination of animals and the subjection of women (Warren 4–5)finds echoes in the crude triumphalism that surrounds the halluci-nating scenes in which elephants are slaughtered in The White Bone :

The human strolls over and raises his gun again. "I don'tbelieve I've had the pleasure!" She-Sees trumpets, extend-ing her trunk in the greeting gesture. When the human isclose enough she wraps her trunk around the barrel. Thehuman fires, then prances back from the red spray. Still,She-Sees does not fall. The chain-saw human shouts, andMud looks toward the shallows. The chain-saw human holdsthe tiny tusk of She-Scares between his legs. He pumpshis hips. More shots from downshore, and then a tremen-dous shuddering underfoot as She-Sees drops to theground. (89)

The tone of moral condemnation, here as elsewhere, is unmistak-able; but Gowdy generally avoids the ethical universalism thatecofeminist accounts such as Vance's are apt to underscore. Obvi-ously committed to a version of "animal-endorsing" artistic idealism,Gowdy also reserves the right to a more "animal-sceptical" (Baker 9)awareness of the significant cultural differences that ecologically ori-ented writers and critics often overlook in their well-intentioned ef-forts to cross the human-animal divide. The setting of the novel, forinstance, draws attention to a different kind of "othering" process,

uncovering the hubris behind Western cultural constructions of amythicized "Africa" that has historically been manufactured as a pro- jection-screen for European anxieties and desires (Mudimbe). Onceagain, then, postcolonial and ecocritical imperatives enter into pro-ductive conflict. From a postcolonial perspective, cultural incommen-surability is elided in the project of ecological convergence (Curtin).Aware of this, Gowdy chooses, like Coetzee, to articulate both a pow-erfully inclusive ecological vision and a critique of the tacit ethnocen-trism that sometimes underlies attempts to create imaginative con-

nections with species other than our own.What lessons might be learned from the yoking of postcolonial

and ecologically oriented criticism? This essay has identified a num-ber of overlapping fields in which a critical dialogue between the two

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schools—still relatively new—might usefully be pursued. The first of these fields, more explicitly activist, takes in historically situated cri-tiques of capitalist ideologies of development; the second, more text-

based, foregrounds the traditional discourses of environmental rep-resentation. Both fields combine a political concern for the abuses of authority with an ethical commitment to improving the conditions of the oppressed. (Hence Roy's, Coetzee's, and Gowdy's revisionist con-tributions to a genre—the fable—that is made to reveal its historicalinsufficiencies without surrendering its contemporary relevance as avehicle for social and environmental critique.) A third field concernsthe (cross-)cultural implications of current ecocritical debates. Here,postcolonial criticism, despite what might still be seen as an unduly

anthropocentric bias, offers a valuable corrective to a variety of uni-versalist ecological claims—the unexamined claim of equivalenceamong all "ecological beings" (Naess), irrespective of material cir-cumstances, and the peremptory conviction, itself historically condi-tioned, that global ethical considerations should override local cul-tural concerns.31 A fourth field addresses the problem of therationalism/emotionalism dichotomy in postcolonial and ecologicaldiscourses. This field suggests the need for a more properlyhistoricized, self-reflexive debate on the rhetorical function, as wellas direct material effects of Western-oriented discourses of intercul-tural reconciliation and anti-imperialist resistance, for a critical reas-sessment of the ideological work performed in romanticizing exploitedindigenous peoples, endangered animals, and the encroachment of modernity on "the wild" and for a sustained challenge to the domi-nance of instrumental reason as a means of justifying authoritarianbehavior, both now and in the (colonial) past, both within and be-yond the (human) species. A fifth field, partly contained within thefourth, concerns the representation of the "other." Here, the crucialquestions of who speaks and for whom require constant critical at-

tention, particularly in cases where "othering" is the inadvertent re-sult of an act of well-intentioned political advocacy (Roy), or wherethe attempt to reach out to one oppressed group runs the risk of further marginalizing another (Gowdy, Coetzee). Finally—and despitethe problems mentioned above—it seems necessary to reaffirm thepotential of the environmental imagination to envision alternativeworlds, both within and beyond the realm of everyday human expe-rience, which might reinvigorate the continuing global struggle forsocial and ecological justice. To be sure, the utopian aspirations of

postcolonial criticism might well conflict, rather than coincide, withthose of ecocriticism, while the early history of the twenty-first cen-tury, already darkened by a series of preventable human/ecologicaldisasters, might well suggest that there is little room left for utopian

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thought. For all that, some form of active exchange between thecritical projects of postcolonialism and ecologism now seems urgentlynecessary—not just as collaborative means of addressing the social

and environmental problems of the present, but also of imaginingalternative futures in which our current ways of looking at ourselvesand our relation to the world might be creatively transformed.

Notes

1. The anthropocentric versus biocentric dichotomy is central to thedifferent versions of what is generally known as "deep ecological"thought. One version of the deep ecological view is presented asfollows by John Porritt: "The belief that we are 'apart from' the restof creation is an intrinsic feature of the dominant world-order, aman-centred or anthropocentric philosophy. Ecologists argue thatthis ultimately destructive belief must be rooted out and replacedwith a life-centred or biocentric philosophy" (206). Deep ecologists,or "Dark Greens," usually like to distinguish themselves from envi-ronmentalists ("Light Greens"), whom they see as being less radical,and as seeking a primarily "managerial approach to environmentalproblems" (Dobson 13). (See also Glotfelty, who argues that the

prefix "enviro-" is "anthropocentric and dualistic, implying that wehumans are at the center, surrounded by everything that is not us,the environment" ["Introduction" xxl].) But as Andrew Dobson, amongothers, has pointed out, there is a tension between the radical aimsof deep ecology and "the reliance on traditional liberal-democraticmeans of bringing [change] about" (23). See also Pepper for a use-ful, if overstated, Marxist critique of deep ecology's "bogus radical-ism," and of the misguided—even misanthropic—tendencies of "one-world" eco- or biocentric philosophies that "ignore the importance of struggle to change the social order" (141). For a more balanced viewof deep ecology, which acknowledges both the diversity within its

ranks and its collective commitment to social transformation, seeMerchant, as well as note 31 below. See also Curtin, who endorsesweak anthropocentrism as a means of combining agendas for eco-logical freedom and human justice, and who sees the traditionalbinaries of environmental philosophy (including that betweenanthropocentrism and biocentrism) as outdated.

2. One of Curtin's examples here is Garrett Hardin's notorious "ethicsof the lifeboat," which elevates First World environmental assets (forexample wilderness areas) over and above the value of human life inthe Third World, preferring to see the latter as the primary source of

the world's potentially cataclysmic "population crisis" (Curtin 18–20).For a somewhat intemperate attack on the view of overpopulation asa, or even the , fundamental threat to "global ecological balance"—which he considers to be sometimes little more than a euphemismfor First World economic/environmental security—see also Pepper.

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3. The "intrinsic" versus "extrinsic" or, more commonly, the "intrinsicvalue" versus "instrumental value" dichotomies are a staple of envi-ronmental philosophy: see, for example, the essays in Elliot and

Gare, Callicott, and Pojman. For more relativistic positions, see Curtinand Pepper, the latter of whom attempts—not entirely convincingly—to rescue Marxism from the charge of instrumentalism.

4. The notions of the "biotic community" and the "ecosphere" (alsocalled "biosphere") are associated first and foremost with the workof Arne Naess, the Norwegian founder of deep ecology. The "bioticcommunity" is a constellation of interconnected human and nonhu-man entities; its balance must be preserved, not just for its ownsake but to protect the principle of "biospheric egalitarianism"—andto secure the future of the "ecosphere" as a whole. Naess's nature

mysticism goes beyond everyday environmental considerations, reg-istering a Buddhist-inspired commitment to the nonharming of all"beings," human and nonhuman, sentient and nonsentient alike.Naess's followers, however, are divided on the practical consequences of his philosophy; critics such as Andrew Dobson have pointed outthat Naess's emphasis on ontology rather than ethics suggests thedifficulty of bridging the gap between (deep) ecological theory andsocial practice (54–55).

5. Disagreements between animal-rights and eco/biocentric advocateswithin environmental ethics and philosophy usually revolve aroundthe latter's view that all nature, sentient or not, must be consideredas having intrinsic value. Deep ecologists are therefore always likelyto be uneasy with an ethical discourse derived, sometimes explicitly,from human duties and rights (see, for example, Regan). For anoverview of the issues at stake, see Dobson, especially chapters 1and 2; see also the later discussion in this essay of animal-welfareapproaches in Coetzee's and Gowdy's work.

6. "Imperialist nostalgia," in the words of the anthropologist RenatoRosaldo, revolves around a paradox:

A person kills somebody, and then mourns the victim. In moreattenuated form, someone deliberately alters a form of life,and then regrets that things have not remained as they wereprior to the intervention. At one more remove, people destroytheir environment, and then they worship nature. In any of itsversions, imperialist nostalgia uses a pose of 'innocent yearn-ing' both to capture people's imaginations and to conceal itscomplicity with often brutal domination. (69–70)

Imperialist nostalgia is antithetical, of course, to the contemporarydiscourses of environmental protest and postcolonial apology; it sur-faces from time to time, nonetheless, in functionalized celebrationsof "non-interventionist" precolonial cultures, or in self-serving lib-eral attitudes toward "endangered" cultures/species, intercultural"reconciliation," and the protection of "universal" human rights.

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7. The debate on how to articulate resistance without eitheressentializing the dominant society/culture or monumentalizing theoppressed has been integral to the so-called "Subaltern Studies

Project," the collective efforts of a group of mostly Indian and/orIndian-based scholars committed to the task of reversing the tradi-tionally elitist biases of South Asian historiography. For a fairly re-cent collection of essays in which Subaltern Studies practitionersreflect on the extent to which the project has been complicit in thevery "worlding" of the Third World it originally set out to counteract,see Chaturvedi. See also Guha, who suggests that the Subalternists,in obsessively theorizing their own procedures, have gradually losttouch with the historical experiences of peasants and workers, andthat their work has effectively been taken over by environmental historians and scholars—such as himself (222).

8. It has been suggested, somewhat uncharitably perhaps, that the"postcoloniality" of Roy's work owes as much to its success on theinternational market as to its capacity to generate historically situ-ated anti-imperialist critique. However, this is less an accusation of "selling out" than a recognition of the function of the contending"regimes of value" that surround postcolonial works and regulatetheir reception in different parts of the world (Appadurai 4, 14–15).For a more detailed discussion of postcolonial "regimes of value,"see Huggan (The Postcolonial Exotic 4–8, 28–33); for an incisiveanalysis of the reception of Roy's work, and the construction of Roy

herself as a mythologized literary celebrity, see also Mongia.9. In his study on Chipko, Guha mischievously observes that "the ba-

ton has passed" to Narmada Bachao Andolan (NBA) as India's mostglobally visible environmental movement (200). Rowell points out,similarly, that Narmada has become a "national and internationalhot-spot of controversy" (282), and that the media have played aleading role in conferring glamour on the players of India's own ver-sion of the NBA. But as Roy notes, rather more sourly, "[Narmada is]no longer as fashionable as it used to be. The international cameracrews and the radical reporters have moved (like the World Bank) to

newer pastures. The documentary films have been screened andappreciated. Everybody's sympathy is all used up. But the dam goeson. It's getting higher and higher" ("Greater" 50).

10. For up-to-date news, as well as useful records, on the conflictedhistory of the Narmada Valley Project, various websites can be con-sulted—for example the Narmada Bachao Andolan (NBA) homepageat http://www.narmada.org/html and the site for River Revival (In-ternational Campaign for River Restoration and Dam Decommission-ing) at http://www.riverrevival.org/html.

11. See Vandana Shiva's similar view of the dam-building industry in

general, and the NVP more specifically, as a consortium of "free trade. . . institutions, . . . transnational corporations and . . . developmentinstitutions like the World Bank, who are also acting on behalf of corporations, because for every dam they build they are basically

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generating contacts for the turbine manufacturers and the construc-tion companies" (qtd. in Rowell 286).

12. It is worth noting that while the ninety footnotes to "The GreaterCommon Good" are all to nonfictional sources (scientific studies,economic reports, etc.), Roy's essay continually draws attention toitself as a literary artifact. Various intertexts come to mind, includingDickens's novels and Swift's satires, but in its combination of righ-teous indignation and storytelling verve, the essay most recalls thework of Rushdie, particularly the cross-over political allegory/fable/children's-tale-for-adults, itself drawn from multiple sources, that isHaroun and the Sea of Stories (1990).

13. For an extended documentary version of the heroes-and-villains ro-mance to which radical environmental writers-activists seem par-

ticularly susceptible, see Rowell; for a more nuanced, but equallyromanticized account of "TNCs-against-the-people," see also Kane.

14. The self-conferred heroism implicit in media-friendly terms such asthe "eco-warrior" (although generally avoided by environmentalists)has done little to enhance the credibility of the environmental move-ment as a whole. Roy, although her tongue is clearly in cheek, sim-ply cannot resist: "All sorts of warriors from all over the world, any-one who wishes to enlist, will be honoured and welcomed. Everykind of warrior will be needed [in the war "for the rivers and themountains and the forests of the world"]. Doctors, lawyers, teach-

ers, judges, journalists, students, sportsmen, painters, actors, sing-ers, lovers . . . The borders are open, folks! Come on in" ("Greater"52).

15. See Gadgil and Guha's (hyper)sociological distinction between "eco-logical refugees," who comprise as much as one third of India's totalpopulation, "ecosystem people," perhaps comprising half of the popu-lation, who depend on the local natural environment to meet theirmaterial needs and a small minority ("omnivores"), who have ben-efited from processes of national economic development while con-tinuing to "enjoy and consume the produce of the entire biosphere."

According to Gadgil and Guha's schema, Roy occupies the role of the"socially-conscious omnivore," a subcategory of mostly urban omni-vores who are concerned about the environment, and some of whomhave played a valuable role in mobilizing resistance to human rights/environmental abuses (98). For a more critical view of the role of "urban omnivores" in assuming control of—and representational rightsto—rural "people's" movements, see also Omvedt, for whom theNBA, in particular, is much less democratic than many of its middle-class supporters like to think.

16. Play has of course become a tried-and-tested strategy of radical

(especially anarchically inclined) Green movements, which havecoopted the language, and some of the attributes, of Carnival totheir fervent anticapitalist cause. Play, at least since Bakhtin, hasbeen seen as a powerful force for social disruption; to call Roy'sessay "playful," in this respect, is not to trivialize her arguments, but

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rather to place them within a wider context where humor and, occa-sionally, violence meet (see Buettner on Carnival motifs in the con-temporary rhetoric of globalization). The self-conscious infantilism

that sometimes surfaces in "The Greater Common Good" arguablybelongs to this category of play; even so, it appears at times as if Roy's penchant for aesthetic play might have got the better of her,diverting her text from the material priorities on which it otherwisewishes to insist.

17. Following Michael Taussig, I shall define the sympathetic imagina-tion here as the human capacity—flying in the face of rational lim-its—to "yield into and become Other" (Mimesis xiii). Speaking as and through the Other raises the irresolvable dilemma of simulta-neously speaking for the Other—a dilemma explored in these "ven-

triloquized" lectures and, indeed, throughout the body of Coetzee'swork. The sympathetic imagination, as Coetzee makes clear, hasprofound implications for both the exercise and the dismantling of colonial authority (see also Taussig, Mimesis 250–55); it also marksthe contradictions of much liberally oriented animal-rights philoso-phy, where claims made on behalf of animals—particularly suffering animals—are contingent on the ability to intuit their experience and,feeling for them without necessarily thinking as them, to somehowmake them speak.

18. "Mimetic excess," for Taussig, is "a form of human capacity potenti-ated by post-coloniality," which "provides a welcome opportunity tolive subjunctively as neither subject nor object of history but as both,at one and the same time." Mimetic excess, claims Taussig, "pro-vides access to understanding the unbearable truths of make-be-lieve as foundations of an all-too-serious serious reality"; it invokes"the [magical] power to both double yet double endlessly, to be-come any Other and engage the image with the reality thus imagized"(Mimesis 255). While much of Coetzee's work—including these "made-up" lectures, filtered through another—strikes a chord with Taussig'stheories, it bears reminding that the "magic of mimesis" is not just aresource for postcolonial freedom, but also a source of colonial abuse

(see also Huggan, "(Post)colonialism " 8). The Lives of Animals thusmoves, characteristically for Coetzee, between a celebration of thepossibilities of sympathetic magic and an ironical awareness thatthese possibilities may be more limited, dangerous, and ultimatelymore irresponsible than Taussig seems to think.

19. See, by way of comparison, Benjamin's poignant essay on Kafka'sfables and parables, which he reads, not in terms of metaphysicalhope, but a kind of radiant epistemological despair (144–45). Eliza-beth Costello's empathy with Red Peter may be seen, in this respect,less as a gesture of defiance than as an admission of failure, stillmore as a confession of shame at her own atrophied condition: "Be-ing an animal presumably meant to [Kafka] only to have given uphuman form and human wisdom from a kind of shame—as shamemay keep a gentleman who finds himself in a disreputable tavernfrom wiping his glass clean" (Benjamin 144). For essays that explore

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the connections between Kafka's and Coetzee's work, see Huggan("Is There a K?") and Merivale; see also Dovey for perceptive com-ments on the allegorical dimensions of Coetzee's novels (The Novels

of J.M. Coetzee ; "Waiting for the Barbarians").20. Coetzee's work, as several commentators have pointed out, is obvi-

ously underpinned by poststructuralist understandings of the radicalinstability of language and of the systems of authority—often explic-itly or implicitly masculinist—that are made possible by language(Huggan and Watson, Introduction, 5). For examples of critical workon Coetzee informed by poststructuralist linguistic/philosophical theo-ries, see the essays by Attridge and Parry in Huggan and Watson.

21. As several of Coetzee's critics have pointed out, there is a tension inboth his fiction and his critical work, between the desire to enter the

global mainstream of intellectual debate (as represented, for ex-ample, by the various international schools of [post]modernism),and the awareness of being geographically and culturally isolated, of speaking from what Derek Attridge calls "a marginal location." Hencethe decision, I would argue, to filter his views—with considerableironic distance—through the figure of an Australian writer: a mem-ber, like Coetzee, of a Western-oriented "settler" culture with uncer-tain links to an exploitative colonial past.

22. The work of some animal-rights activists, notably Peter Singer, ismarked by a similarly loose—and potentially dangerous—use of an-

thropomorphic analogy. In his book Animal Liberation , for example,Singer sees vivisection in the same perspective as "the atrocities of the Roman gladatorial arenas or the eighteenth-century slave trade"(91); even more controversial is the assertion that "[a] chimpanzee,dog, or pig . . . [has] a higher degree of self-awareness and a greatercapacity for meaningful relations with others than a severely re-tarded infant or someone in a state of advanced senility" (22). Theimplication behind many of Singer's arguments—that we humansshould treat animals better because they are "like us"—ignores con-siderable social, as well as individual differences in animal behavior;several of his analogies also assume that there are normative stan-

dards in human physiology and behavior, thus laying him open tothe accusation of a form of "speciesism" against members of his ownkind (7). For a convincing critique of Singer's often utilitarian argu-ments from within liberal animal-rights philosophy, see Regan. For adefense of the right to make analogies between different forms of animal and human mistreatment, see Spiegel.

23. Elizabeth attacks ecologism on the grounds that it is implicitly an-thropocentric. Animals themselves, she says, "are not believers inecology"; it is rather we humans, "the managers of the ecology,"who "understand the greater dance [and can therefore] decide how

many trout may be shed or how many jaguar may be trapped beforethe stability of the dance is upset. The only organism over which wedo not claim this power of life and death is Man. Why? Because Manis different. Man understands the dance as the other dancers do not.Man is an intellectual being" (Coetzee 92–93). Elizabeth's emotion-

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alism, however, is arguably just as anthropocentric, being based ona media-friendly "empathy" with animals as objects of human pityand affection (Coetzee 93). To conclude, as Elizabeth's son John

does, that the animal-rights movement as a whole is prey to woolly-liberal sentimentality is, however, unduly simplistic. For a criticalanalysis of the reductive binary thinking that so often underlies popu-lar views both of and within environmental movements("anthropocentrism" vs. "ecocentrism," "intellectualism" vs. "emo-tionalism," "animal-rights liberalism" vs. "ecological radicalism," etc.),see Dobson, chapters 1 and 2; see also note 1 above.

24. Coetzee is obviously poking fun here at the self-congratulatory as-pects of the academic fashion-industry (just as he pokes fun else-where at the hypocritical protocols of the university lecture and the

shallow one-upmanship of academic debate). This playful anti-aca-demicism belongs, however, to a more serious attack on the arro-gance of Western rationalism; Coetzee is also making a point here—however tongue-in-cheek—about the writer's capacity to enter andextend the range of other people's creations: a capacity well demon-strated in the prolific intertextuality of his own work. The Lives of Animals is no exception, alive with traces from a variety of literarysources, including Coetzee's own novels (notably Waiting for the Barbarians [1980], Life & Times of Michael K [1983], and Age of Iron [1990] and engaging several of the themes that traverse his largebody of critical work. Special mention should probably be made here

of Coetzee's justly acclaimed novel Disgrace , published in the sameyear (1999) as The Lives of Animals . With its fictional—frequentlyironic—engagement with the consolations of animal welfare and thedisplaced (Old Testament) symbolism of retribution and sacrifice,Disgrace constitutes a useful companion-volume to the more osten-sibly "academic" text.

25. An "ecological subject," according to Dobson, belongs to a largerbiotic community marked by a diversity of life forms and intercon-nected ecological "spheres" (54). The postulation of the nonhumanecological subject implies that "the [entire] biosphere . . . has moral

standing" (Dobson 55), and that interactions between different spe-cies are part of a larger environmental drama in which humans playa contributing, though by no means an inevitably determining, role.Gowdy's elephants are ecological subjects, not just in the sense of being members of an identifiable—and increasingly threatened—bi-otic community, but also insofar as they are endowed with a finelytuned capacity for moral discrimination that sheds light on codes of environmental practice (and their abuses) as a whole.

26. On the horrors of the ivory trade, see also Ritvo and Eltingham. Thetrade is now banned in parts of Africa (Kenya, for instance, whichlost two thirds of its elephant population in the 70s alone); poach-ing, however, remains an everpresent threat, with changing mar-kets, allied to more fully developed military and transportation tech-nologies, ensuring that the demand for ivory and other elephantproducts can produce sometimes spectacular economic success.

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27. A "visionary," according to Gowdy's elephant mythology, is a "cow orcow calf who is capable of seeing both the future and the distantpresent"; a "link-bull" is one who has special insight into "omens,

signs and superstitions"; a "mind talker" is "a telepathic cow or cowcalf," able to read not just other elephants', but also other animals',if not humans', minds (335–36, 338). Gowdy's elephants, thoughrendered biologically and culturally plausible, can thus be seen assemimythic subjects for a form of zoological primitivism, inhabitinga fully fashioned tribal world of ancient superstitions and ancestralbeliefs.

28. Gowdy's use of pronominal shifters, allied to her glossary and bat-tery of "explanatory" footnotes, suggests her ironic awareness of the impossibility of explaining elephants' lives either from the "out-

side" (analytical human) or the "inside" (self-reflexive elephant) pointof view. Rather, Gowdy (like Coetzee in Lives ), uses an array of fic-tional, as well as historically verifiable sources to create the comfort-ing, but by definition self-deceiving illusion of a nonhuman worldamenable to human understanding.

29. See Buell's Environmental Imagination for an in-depth study, mostlydevoted to American nature writing, of the capacity of the "environ-mental imagination" (Buell's term) to counteract environmental cri-sis by "finding better ways of imaging nature and humanity's rela-tion to it" (2). For Buell, as for Gowdy, the environmental imagina-tion requires not only a transformative social/ecological vision butalso a rethinking of basic assumptions about the nature or represen-tation itself (2). Gowdy's radical revision of the animal fable is a casein point here (as, for that matter, is Coetzee's use of the fable toreflect on the ethical, as well as aesthetic dilemmas posed by "tradi-tional" ways of representing animals in literature and art).

30. In their book Deep Ecology , Bill Devall and George Sessions defineecotopia "in the broad sense of all visions of a good society placed inthe context of deep ecological norms and principles." Ecotopian vi-sions, according to Devall and Sessions, are like other utopian vi-sions in that they "help us see the distance between what ought to

be and what now is in our technocratic-industrial society" (162).Gowdy's novel complicates this picture in several ways, not least byfiltering such visions through the worldview of nonhuman speciesand by stressing the need to account for specific cultural circum-stances (for example those in postcolonial Africa) rather than simplyasserting global "technocratic-industrial" norms. Devall and Sessions'sbook, first published nearly twenty years ago, needs to be seen of course in its own historical context, and several of its generalizationswould now likely be contested by other deep ecologists: see note 31below.

31. It would be both inaccurate and unfair, of course, to accuse ecologi-cal/environmental criticism in toto of culture-blindness. Many con-temporary ecocritics are conspicuously attentive to social and cul-tural differences (particularly those associated with social ecology,

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ecosocialism, and the environmental justice movement, but also atleast some of those associated with deep and/or spiritual ecology,holistic movements whose practitioners continue, despite their obvi-

ous commitment to egalitarianism and social justice, to get a badpress). To some extent, "Third Worldist" critiques of First World en-vironmental practice suffer from similar tendencies toward overstate-ment: see, for example, the introduction to Guha and Martinez-Alier'sVarieties of Environmentalism , which while rightly questioning thecrude opposition between the "full-stomach" environmentalism of the North and the "empty-belly" environmentalism of the South, stilltends toward an overdrawn distinction between First World conser-vationist and/or managerial practices and Third World ecological re-sistance movements, which the authors bracket under the catchyheading of the "environmentalisms of the poor" (Introduction xxi).

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