Persian Sheep, Hawksbill Turtles andVodsels:The Ethics of Eating in Some Contemporary

Narratives

Wendy Woodv^ard

CONVENTIONALLY, novelists have represented meals where meat is eatenuncritically: such meals tend to generate experiences of bonding betweenthe characters. The animals whose bodies are served are unacknowledged

as the humans ignore or deny the ethics of their culinary practices. In the lastdecade or so, however, a number of writers have chosen to engage with the ethicsof eating nonhuman animals in their representation of camivorous meals. J.M.Coetzee's Disgrace (1999), Michel Faber's Under the Skin (2000), JonathanSafran Foer's Everything Is Illuminated (2002) and Yann Martel's Life of Pi(2002) all merit analysis in this regard. In substance and tone the books vary inthe attention given to conventional habits of eating: Coetzee's novel resonatesthroughout with the ethics of human-animal interactions, of which eating isjust one; Foer's tale has a character's vegetarianism as a significant factor inhis travels; eating and the getting of camivorous meals are a central concem ofFaber's and Martel's texts.

In their representations of eating animals, these writers challenge almostuniversally held dualistic notions of humans and animals by situating the readerontologically so that s/he cannot avoid the ethical content of the text. To whatextent the ethical sensibilities of the reader might be attuned to what StephenMulhall terms 'the moral force of literature' (7) will vary of course, but in allthe texts eating is significant to the narrative. Eating animals is, of course, one ofthe most dramatic ways we differentiate humans fi-om animals, and the primaryrelationship that most urban dwellers have with animals is consuming them.Cora Diamond, in her essay 'Eating Meat and Eating People', emphasises theontological implications of this primacy: 'We leam what a human being is in -among other ways - sitting at a table where we eat them. We are around the tableand they are on it' (98). But arguments for vegetarianism, as Diamond pointsout, tend to have a 'nagging moralistic tone' (97), although such a tone may bejustified, as she acknowledges.

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In deploying various literary genres, the writers mentioned above are skilñilenough not to alienate readers by taking the moral high ground or by being didactic.Through defamiliarisation, or what Coetzee refers to, via Viktor Shkolovsky, as'the estranged eye' (Diary 63), the writers make strange unreflective habits ofeating. Significantly, westem conventions of eating are defamiliarised throughhaving their characters engage with the ethics of other cultures: Coetzee and Foerforeground differences between westem and African, and westem and eastemEuropean cultures respectively, while Martel locates his character predominantlywithin Hindu culture. Faber's strategies go further, geographically speaking, withbeings from another planet implicitly or explicitly critiquing the denial of animalsubjectivities and suffering on earth.

For Matthew Calarco, '[f]ollowing Levinas, ethics can be generally defined asan intermption of my egoism coming from the face of an Other that transformsmy being in the direction of generosity' (78). Calarco suggests that reacting toan animal's face will result in 'an enacted responsibility' (78). Coetzee, in adebate with Calarco and others in The Death of the Animal (Cavalieri), framesthe ethical moment differently, even metaphysically, whilst also making recourseto Levinas. He speaks of a 'conversion experience' but denies the power of thewritten word over an embodied encounter in his favouring of the 'mute appeal of... the look, in which the existential autonomy of the Other becomes irrefiitable -irrefutable by any means, including rational argument' (Coetzee, 'Comments' 89).Such acknowledgement of a nonhuman animal Other will, of course, challengeone's own ontological stability. But when this Other is accorded subjectivity, thelook, or the gaze (which imbues the interchange with more committed focus forboth participants) is even more affirmative and unambiguous, as I have arguedelsewhere. Because an animal who engages with a human being is an individual,most of the characters in the novels under discussion develop a strong sense ofwhat Jacques Derrida succinctly calls 'this irreplaceable living being' (9).

In Disgrace, J.M. Coetzee represents the ethical import of animals as subjectswho are about to be slaughtered: Professor David Lurie, who has fled CapeTown and the justified claims of sexual harassment brought against him by ayoting student attending the institution where he has taught, is now living withhis daughter Lucy on her small-holding near Salem in the impoverished EastemCape. Here he becomes uneasy when Petrus, his daughter's neighbour and one-time labourer, brings in two black-faced Persian sheep to be killed for the partyin celebration of Petrus's new status as land-owner. Coetzee has Lurie muse onthe lives of sheep:

Twins, in all likelihood, destined sinee birth for the butcher's knife .... Sheep do not own themselves, do not own their lives. They exist tobe used, every last ounce of them, their flesh to be eaten, their bones tobe crushed and fed to poultry. Nothing escapes, except perhaps the gallbladder, which no one will eat. Descartes should have thought ofthat.The soul, suspended in the dark, bitter gall, hiding. (123-24)

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Facing these two embodied subjects, Lurie finds the conventions of animal slaughteralien. Not only does he defamiliarise such everyday practices, he imagines theanimal body somehow triumphant, with the spiritual unassailably extant.

Although Lurie admits that he would be hard pressed to recognise these sheepin a flock he feels that a 'bond' has grown between him and the animals. As hetries to befriend them, however, they appear nervous and he remembers, withapparent envy and some admiration, the ease of Bev Shaw's 'communion' withan injured goat. His attempts to alleviate the sheep's suffering by tethering themclose to the dam so that they can eat and graze are fmitless, for they are soonretumed to their former place by Petrus and tied tightly on a 'barren patch' (125).Lucy, instead of being impressed that her conventional, omnivorous father isimbued with concem for the sheep, challenges his hypocrisy when he complainsto her about Petms:

'I'm not sure I like the way he does things - bringing the slaughter-beasts home to acquaint them with the people who are going to eatthem.'

'What would you prefer? That the slaughtering be done in an abattoir sothat you needn't think about it?' [Lucy replies]

'Yes.'

'Wake up, David. This is the country. This is Africa.' (124)

Lurie's honesty in response to his daughter's catechism conversely highlights thehypocrisy of modemity's insistence on the invisibility of animal deaths - a factwhich Coetzee has Lucy caustically remind her father (and the reader) of.

Bulliet usefully differentiates between what he calls 'domestic' communities,which live with animals and are close to their births, mating and deaths, and'postdomestic' communities, which consume animal products excessively but aredivorced fromanimal lives although they experience guiltabouttheircommodificationand killing (3). Throughout the novel, Lucy is compassionate about the lives ofanimals and critical about those who engender their suffering. It is significant,then, that Coetzee has Lucy berate her father about his burgeoning sensibilities inrelation to animals when she unsentimentally prefers, or so it appears, the practicesof domestic rural Xhosa culture which lack the pretences of postdomestic westemurban convention. If the deaths of animals are unavoidable, it is surely kinder forthem to have to die on a smallholding, rather than in the company of thousands ofother condemned beasts in a sequestered slaughter-house; at least this is what Lucyimplies, in her favouring of African over westem practices.'

When Lurie decides that he will not attend the party, in order not to have toeat the sheep, Lucy responds with the ironic 'God moves in mysterious ways,

1 Jennifer Wentzel, in reviewing essays on Coetzee in a recent issue of Safundi, suggests that 'itis difficult not to hear the urgencies of the spectral question posed in South Africa (and so manyother places), "how to eat enough?'" (129). Pressing though this question may be, it should notforeclose discussion on the treatment of animals who are to be slaughtered - which seems to be theposition that Coetzee takes.

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David' (127), but in the event he accompanies her. Once at the party his antipathyto consuming the meat of the sheep to whom he had felt some attachment issuperseded by the imperative of accepting hospitality.^ Yet Coetzee has Lurie,perhaps after Lucy's earlier admonition, prefer to respect cross-culturalhospitality in this instance. Looking at the mutton on his plate he decides: 'Iam going to eat this, he says to himself I am going to eat it and ask forgivenessafterwards' (131). Ontologically he has shifted after being confronted by thesheep and his caring for them in their particularities - although he has held tohis characteristic cynicism that animals cannot lead 'properly individual lives'(126), as he now engages with an ethical discourse about 'forgiveness', quitefrom whom is not clear, but presumably from the sheep themselves. It appearsthat after this experience he does not eat meat, although when he is living on theperiphery of society in the final denouement he eats spaghetti and meat balls,as well as fish, from a tin. Whether Lucy, given her non-hierarchical views onnonhuman animals, is a vegetarian is not specified in the narrative. After her rape,however, she adamantly 'refuses to eat meat' (121), which suggests that she hasnow negated any potential niceties of (cross-cultural) hospitality because of herembodied correlating of violence to nonhuman animals and to women.

If Lucy and her father's ethics of eating are represented with high seriousness,in Foer's Everything Is Illuminated the plight of a vegetarian in Eastem Europeis indubitably comic. The character 'Jonathan Safran Foer' travels fi-om NorthAmerica to the Ukraine in search of his Jewish grandfather's village and insearch of Augustine, who had helped him escape during the Second World War.The narrator is Alexander Perchov, the Ukrainian guide who unwittingly manglesthe English language, proudly convinced of his erudition and discrimination, andwho, with his grandfather, the driver, and the dog Sammy Davis Junior Juniorattempts to escort the foreigner on his quest. When Jonathan informs his guidesthat he is a vegetarian they are incredulous, interrogating him about every formof meat to ascertain if he will eat any. When he confesses that he does not eveneat sausage their bemusement is complete but they take him to a restaurant:

'What do you mean he does not eat meat?' the waitress asked, andGrandfather put his head in his hands. 'What's wrong with him?' sheasked ... 'It is only the way he is.' The hero asked what we were talkingabout. 'They do not have anything without meat' I informed him. 'Hedoes not eat meat at all?' she inquired me again. 'It is merely the wayhe is,' I told her. 'Sausage?' 'No sausage,' Grandfather answered to thewaitress ... 'Maybe you could eat some meat,' I suggested to the hero,'because they do not have anything that is not meat.' 'Don't they havepotatoes or something?' he asked ... 'You only received the potatoeswith the meat,' she said. I told the hero... 'Couldn't I get two or threepotatoes, without meat?'... 'Ask him if he eats liver,' Grandfather said(Foer 65-66).

2 Foer, in Eating Animals, stresses the irony that those who are motivated to eat ethically may bemore likely to cause offence and to undermine gestures of hospitality (32).

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When the 'hero's' plate arrives he asks Alex to remove the meat as he doesnot like to touch it. Then a combination of the dog's antics and Jonathan'sinadvertently knocking the table leg sends one of the two potatoes onto thefilthy floor. They all 'remain[] silent, witnessing the potato' (Foer 67) untilGrandfather picks it up and divides it into four, with one section for SammyDavis Junior Junior. 'Welcome to the Ukraine' Grandfather says to Jonathan andthey all laugh 'with much violence for a long time' (Foer 67). Only much laterAlex 'understanded [sic] that each of us was laughing for a different reason,for our own reason, and that not one of those reasons had a thing to do with thepotato' (Foer 67).

Foer has Jonathan make a different ethical choice from David Lurie who, in anarguably more socially sensitive way, decides to respect cross-cultural differencesof eating and to deal with his conscience later. The humour engendered byJonathan's hunger can also be turned against him for he is, of course, breaking thelaws of hospitality by insisting on his choice of food and by being immoderatelysensitive in not wanting to touch the meat on his plate. As Alex is the narrator onecan only surmise why Jonathan laughs - at the impossibility of being understoodfor the ethical choice he has made, at the loss of half of his feeble meal. Foerdoes not make a moralistic point here about Jonathan going hungry, nor about hiscommitment to not eating meat, but he defamiliarises vegetarianism through theUkrainian point of view so that the reader, I would argue, is compelled to relate tothe position of Jonathan whose unwavering commitment to vegetarianism leaveshim with a hunger that cannot be catered for within eastern European conventionsor economics - the staple sausage is third rate re-cycled meat.

Foer in Eating Animals notes how a choice not to eat animals 'tends topolarize' and that '[t]he choice-obsessed modem West is probably moreaccommodating to individuals who choose to eat differently than any cultureever has been' (Foer 32). In Everything Is Illuminated the potential polarisingof Jonathan's ethical insistence on not eating meat is deflected by the communallaughter of Jonathan, Grandfather and Alex after the dividing of the potato.Foer proposes that such cultural and culinary differences between NorthAmerican and Ukrainian habits of eating may be overcome through humour,but subsequently Alex and his grandfather neglect to rouse their charge forbreakfast as they cannot imagine that he will find anything to eat, an act whichundermines their initial camaraderie.

Both Foer and Coetzee have become identified with debates in relation tohumans and other animals.^ Michel Faber, on the other hand, has not onlypreferred not to do so, but has chosen to undermine the ethical resonance of hisnovel Under the Skin. In an interview with Ron Hogan, Faber concedes that hisnovel is a 'moral parable' but is reticent about any putative message, claimingthat 'at its heart it's a character study'. He continues:

3 Both have written about the ethics of eating, in Eating Animals and The Lives of Animalsrespectively.

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The book is an invitation for people to make up their own minds aboutcertain issues and to find peace with the choices they've made. It'scertainly not a tract for vegetarianism ... I don't think what this book isabout is to dissuade people from doing anything.

The 'invitation' is diplomatically framed; his demurral is surely connected withmarketing (who will buy a vegetarian tract after all?), for the dust jacket alsorefuses any ethical message and proclaims that Under the Skin is a 'grotesqueand comical allegory'. The 'allegory' of the novel may be 'grotesque', but italigns with horror rather than comedy as it interrogates categories of animality.Comedy, in my reading, is singularly lacking as the narrative contradicts Faberand the blurb in powerfully inverting Cora Diamond's critical taxonomy ofutilitarian thought: the moral agent vs the suffering animal as well as challengingontological commonplaces of who gets to eat whom.

As the novel opens, the focaliser Isserley sits uncomfortably in her car,trawling little-driven roads for male hitchhikers: 'Isserley might catch a glimpseof his buttocks, or his thighs, or maybe how well-muscled his shoulders were' sothat she could ascertain if this was 'a male in prime condition' (Faber 4). As sheadmires the man 'following the curves of his brawny shoulders or the swell of hischest under his T-shirt', she 'savour[s] the thought of how superb he'd be oncehe was naked' (5). Initially, the reader assumes, Isserley is hunting for sexualinteraction with a heavy-set male; instead, she is sizing him up quite literallyfor his meat. Once he is seated in her car, she dopes the hitchhiker and retumswith him to Ablach Farm where he has his tongue and testicles removed andis then fattened up with similar victims in subterranean stalls, ultimately to beconsumed. Isserley and her fellow-workers, it transpires, are from another planetwhich has a taste for 'vodsel' meat.

In his tale, Faber reverses conventions of predator and prey; his representationof humans being transformed into meat highlights the ethical dimensionsof factory farming through the reduction of the human body to its vulnerableanimality and to its edibility. Diamond complains that 'it is normally the case thatvegetarians do not touch the issue of our attittide to the dead' (97), although theSinger-Regan utilitarian argument is based 'on the assumption that we all agreethat it is morally wrong to raise people for meat' and morally wrong to eat ourdead even if they have died in accidents (see Diamond). The reader cannot denythe moral wrong of eating humans as Under the Skin adroitly switches the humanand animal positions in the meat industry. The cross-over between human andanimal flesh, at least in appearance, recurs in Diary of a Bad Year when Coetzeehas JC comment ironically:

Animal flesh looks much the same as human flesh (why should it not?).So, to the eye unused to carnivore cuisine, the inference does not comeautomatically ('naturally') that the flesh on display is cut from a carcass(animal) rather than a corpse (human). (63)

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Given that JC is talking about a cookery programme on tv few viewers will seemeat with an 'estranged eye', but we as readers are challenged to imagine theresulting 'inference'.

Faber more extensively undermines the culinary convention of human-animaldualities as he critiques the pitiless practices of the meat industry through hisrepresentation of the suffering of the doctored human males, who have beenabducted by Isserley. When some vodsels escape after a door has been deliberatelyleft open by Amlis Vess, Isserley and Esswis have to find them. As they are'shaved, castrated, fattened, intestinally modified, chemically purified' ( 103), theycannot survive outside of their pens in the winter and soon Isserley and her fellowworker encounter a runaway: 'eyes met across the forest floor: four large andhuman, two small and bestial' (106). The 'bestial' gaze is that of a human in thereader's terminology, while the 'four large and human' eyes are those of Isserleyand Esswiss. The ongoing reversal of nomenclature in Under the Skin constitutesan ontological source of dis-ease for the reader throughout the novel.

Human-animal dualism is further dislodged as boundaries between identitiesbecome blurred. Isserley herself was four-legged and had suffered through manyoperations to transform her body to an approximation of a large-breasted, two-legged one. In her opinion Amlis Vess, who visits from 'home', is the 'mostbeautiñil man she had ever seen' (117): he stands 'naked on all fours' with a'prehensile tail'; he has a 'vulpine snout', his 'large eyes' are 'positioned on thefront of his face' and he is 'covered in soft fiar' (117). On a clandestine outingthey encounter some sheep whom Isserley had attempted to communicate withby leaming some words of their language, but Amlis shocks Isserley when heasks why they do not eat sheep. She responds 'they're on all fours' and theyhave 'ñir - tails - facial features not that different from ours' (253). The novel'ssubplot is an abortive love story between the aristocratic Amlis Vess and Isserleywho, in circumstances never quite clarified, had been 'petted and then discardedby the Elite' (175), although she avoided the Estates by coming to work on theplanet earth.

Isserley understands that she has been eminently exploitable and exploitedon a class level, but at the same time she had appreciated having a role, for itliberated her from a life of misery back home. She begins, however, to questionthe ethics of the murderous position constructed for her and which she initiallyaccepts. Isserley's growing awareness constitutes a central narrative tension, asshe becomes increasingly discomfited by her role in the meat industry. Habitually,she is unable to eat vodsel meat. Amlis, who is the son of the 'man' who hasengineered Ablach Farm, is ethically against its practices, particularly after hefinds that the 'animals' have language. Faber has Amlis say about humans andanimals 'We're all the same under the skin' (176), and the description of Isserleybeing cajoled by the chef to eat some particularly delectable cuts of meat, whileAmlis berates her for doing so, underscores the ethics of eating what the readerwould term 'human flesh'. Because she is the dominant focaliser, Isserley's

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growing reservations about her role in entrapping the hitch-hikers underscoreethical concems. When she drugs an older man, she is acutely aware of his agingvulnerability, and when she receives a demand from Vess Incorporated to 'supply[] them with a vodsel female preferably one with intact eggs' (285), some nascentgender solidarity motivates Isserley to reject her complicit role. She decides toleave Ablach Farm for an uncertain future on a planet she has come to appreciateas beautiful.

If the central female character is victimised in Under the Skin, she is alsoan integral part of the meat industry at Ablach Farm. Coetzee also correlatesfemininity and meat-eating in the opening pages oí Boyhood: A Memoir, whenhe has the central character, John, connect blood and motherhood: 'He thinks ofhis mother slapping stewing-steak down on the kitchen counter ... he thinks ofher bloody fingers' (Coetzee 2), a memory which contradicts dominant notionsof matemal love as seamlessly nurturing. Brian Luke suggests, in relation to theconsumption of meat within the family, that '[t]hough femininity is threatened bythe [woman's] complicity in violence against animals, it is ultimately salvagedby understanding her actions as prototypically feminine submission to theimperatives of manhood' (Luke 17), a convention that Ruth L. Ozeki illustratesin My Year of Meat which has Japanese housewives being seduced by a tv serieson American meat-eating.

In Boyhood, John opposes the 'imperative of manhood' in relation tocamivorism. Similarly, the eponymous character in Yann Martel's Life of Piconsistently reftises violence against non-human beings. His 'quasi-realist'narrative (Huggan and Tiffin 172), which is the dominant one, is framed bythat of the writer who interviews him and that of two Japanese insurance agentsinvestigating the shipwreck. Steeped in Hindu tradition. Pi is an Indian adolescentwho takes great pride in his heritage; he focuses on the spiritual aspects, claiminginitially that 'the universe makes sense to me through Hindu eyes' (Martel 48)and revering the expression of the Brahman divine 'not only in gods, but inhumans, animals, trees' (48). Subsequently, however, he becomes Muslim andChristian as well as Hindu, to the bemusement of his agnostic parents as wellas his spiritual advisors. His father keeps a zoo in Pondicherry which Martelhas Pi vindicate as a place 'of diplomatic peace' (19), a safe home for animalsbeyond the prédation and violence of living in the wild. When the family decideto emigrate to Canada to escape Mrs Gandhi's draconian laws they take withthem a number of large animals for zoos in North America. But the ship sinksin the Pacific for no clear reason. Pi is saved, ironically, by being tossed into alifeboat by Japanese sailors; only later does he realise that they were hoping todistract the hyena hiding in the boat and possibly clear the way for their ownsafe passage. From the start of his shipwreck experiences, then. Pi is made toembody potential prey. The presence of Richard Parker, the Royal Bengal tigerwho clambers onto the lifeboat, compounds his predicament."

4 The tiger acquired the name of a professional hunter who had been searching for a man-eatingpanther near the Sundarbans. When the hunter darted a female tiger and her cub, who were then

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What follows is a gruesome description of the hyena consuming the zebra,who has a broken leg from his fall onto the lifeboat, eating him 'from the inside'(125) so that the deck is awash with his blood. To Pi's horror, the zebra remainsalive long after the hyena has feasted on his intemal organs. Then the hyena tumsto slaughter the orang-utan who had floated onto the boat from her bunch ofbuoyant bananas but who is helpless to defend herself against a predator. Finallythe hyena is dispatched by Richard Parker who 'killed without a sound' (150).The remainder of the narrative deals with Pi's existence as a castaway on thelifeboat in the company of the tiger, until they are washed up on a life-threateningisland and then finally land on a beach in Mexico.

For Pi to remain alive he must not only tame the tiger and make him believethat he is still in a zoo with its bounded territories, but he has to find food for thecamivore so that he. Pi, does not become the tiger's prey. Most of the subsequentnarrative is driven by Pi not wanting to be eaten and by the ingenuity an erstwhilevegetarian has to deploy to feed a grown tiger in the middle of the Pacific Oceanfor 227 days. The ethics of eating may seem an effete luxury in a situation wheresurvival is at stake, yet Martel has Pi constantly aware of the practices he isforced into; when Pi finds the emergency rations on the lifeboat the biscuitscontain 'baked wheat, animal fat and glucose' (143). He rationalises that 'giventhe exceptional circumstances the vegetarian part of me would simply pinch itsnose and bear it' (143), but he does notice the ingredients and is self-reflexiveabout overcoming his scruples.

Martel never suggests that dispensing with vegetarian ethics is a thoughtlessgiven.' When the lifeboat is assailed by a school of flying fish and many aremarooned on deck. Pi has to kill one of them so that he and Richard Parker caneat. The process is excmciating for him: unable to look at the face of the fish, hewraps it in a blanket, but even then cannot bring the hatchet down.

Such sentimentalism may seem ridiculous considering what I hadwitnessed in the last days, but those were the deeds of others, ofpredatory animals. A lifetime of peaceful vegetarianism stood betweenme and the wilful beheading of a flsh ... The idea of beating a soft,living head with a hammer was simply too much. (183)

Ultimately, Pi breaks the fish's neck with tears 'flowing down [his] cheeks' (183).But he has changed irrevocably and can no longer think dualistically about killersas 'predatory animals' as he becomes one himself:

I wept heartily over this poor little deceased soul. It was the flrstsentient being I had ever killed. I was now a killer. I was now asguilty as Cain. I was sixteen years old, a harmless boy, bookish and

sent to the Pondicherry Zoo, a shipping clerk transposed the human name onto the juvenile tiger,and the name remained.

5 Philip Armstrong's reading is very different from mine. He argues that 'Pi's relinquishing ofhis native vegetarianism is presented less as a necessity than as an opening up to the omnivoroustaste for difference that characterises a truly modem, global disposition'. See What Animals Meanin the Fiction of Modernity (London: Routledge, 2008) 179.

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religious, and now I had blood on my hands. It's a terrible burden tocarry. All sentient life is sacred. I never forget to inelude this fish inmy prayers. (183)

In hybridising Christianity and Hinduism, Pi aspires to an ethics of compassionfor all sentient beings; by portraying himself as Cain who had murdered hishuman brother. Pi elevates the dispatching of the fish, failing to differentiatespiritually between the killing of any being, be it human or nonhuman.

Through the report of the slaughter of various nonhuman animals includingthose of the zebra, the fish, the turtles as well as that of a human adrift on a boatwho tries to murder Pi, the reader is put into an uneasy position, one whichinvites ethical self-reflection in relation to the defamiliarising of one's own eatingpractices and the unthinking purchase of packaged meat or fish. As Martel hasPi realise, killing a fish with one's own hands is very different from buying fishin a market. Similarly, Pi's encounter with a turtle, a hawksbill, before he startskilling them, stresses the creature's subjectivity and the force of the animal gaze.The turtle has 'black eyes that stare[] at me intently' as he accompanies the boatuntil Pi tells him: "Go tell a ship I'm here. Go, go", and he swims off 'backflippers pushing water in alternate strokes' (123). Pi's actual killing of his firstturtle is described minutely as it foregrounds the trauma of slaughtering a sentientcreature who examines Pi 'with a stem expression' (201). Pi is compelled to getthe salt-free liquid (the survival manual praises turtle blood as a 'good, nutritious,salt-free drink' [200]); so desperate is he for food that, in this instance, RichardParker becomes secondary.

While Pi triumphs in keeping the tiger fed. Martel represents him as neverceasing to find killing painful. The adult narrator remains remorsefial:

Lord, to think that I am a strict vegetarian. To think that when I wasa ehild I always shuddered when I snapped open a banana because itsounded to me like the breaking of an animal's neck. I descended to alevel of savagery I never imagined possible. (187)

In contrast with his 'savagery', the bamacles, crabs and animal life on the boatappear to move about 'with the sweet civility of angels' (198). Thus Pi never,on an ultimate, spiritual level, justifies his killing of sea creatures although itmay be imperative on the level of the quotidian for his own survival and that ofRichard Parker.

In an extraordinary, phantasmagoric yet humorous encounter. Pi, who is nowblind from lack of nutrition, meets up with another blind man in the middle ofthe ocean. Initially Pi believes that the voice emanates from his own mind, butonce the voice begins listing all the parts of nonhuman animals he would like toeat. Pi is aghast at the food being 'non-veg' (244) and is convinced that it must beRichard Parker who is speaking to him. But when he hears that the holder of thevoice has killed two human beings, and it dawns on him that the speaker has aFrench accent - he reasons that Richard Parker, as a native Bangladeshi raised inTamil Nadu, would not have such an accent - Pi understands that another human

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being is in his vicinity. Naively he welcomes onto his boat a man whose onlymotivation is to kill and eat him, but Richard Parker attacks and partially eatsthe interloper. Pi survives to use his flesh for fishing and even, he confesses, toconsume little dried strips of this human flesh which 'looked like ordinary animalflesh'. Pi says that he 'pray[s] for his soul everyday' as he did for the first fish hekilled (256).^

The novel ends with the transcript of the tape of Tomohiro Okamoto andAtsuro Chiba from the Maritime Department in the Japanese Ministry ofTransport interviewing Pi in Mexico in order to establish the cause of the ship'ssinking. They find his story impossible to believe and, in response to their demandfor a factual account. Pi spins a narrative of cannibalism and gothic horror: thecook marooned in the lifeboat murders Pi's mother and a sailor; Pi, in tum, killshim, motivated by 'selfishness, anger, mthlessness' (311). But, ultimately, theinvestigators decide that they prefer the story which includes Pi's relationshipwith Richard Parker and the other animals. For them, this is 'the better story', onethat 'goes with God' (317), in Pi's words, rather than the cannibalistic narrativewhich has both Pi and the cook as 'evil' (311).

Martel's novel is a fitting one with which to end this essay, no matter howfabricated Pi's story may be. Its ethics are very clear: to eat a nonhuman animalis tantamount, on a spiritual level, to eating a human animal. The beings hekills (the fish, the turtle) have subjectivity and he is confronted by their gazes.Ontologically, the narrative thus disturbs conventional dualistic practices ofanimals served on the table with the humans at the table, to recall Diamond's point.Similarly, Under the Skin, through what the reader would define as cannibalism,defamiliarises accepted practices of factory farming as Faber dramatises theparallels between eating humans and eating animals. Jonathan Safran Foer'smeal in the Ukraine in Everything Is Illuminated humorously cajoles the readerto think ontologically of what it means to be human - without having to eatanimals. In Disgrace, Coetzee has David Lurie, in his response to the Persiansheep as embodied animals, defamiliarise conventional practices of slaughteringsheep in both domestic and postdomestic societies. Not one of these narrativesdeploys a 'nagging' or 'moralistic tone'.

V\/ORKS CITED

Bulliet, Richard W. Hunters, Herders and Hamburgers: The Past and Future of Human-Animal Relationships. New York: Columbia UP, 2005.

Calarco, Matthew. 'Towards an Agnostic Animal Ethics.' In Cavalieri, 73-84.Cavalieri, Pao la, ed. The Death of the Animal: A Dialogue. New York: Columbia UP,

2009.Coetzee, J.M. Boyhood. London: Vintage, 1988.

-. 'Comments on Paola Cavalieri, "A Dialogue on Perfectionism".' In Cavalieri,85-87.

. Diary of a Bad Year. London: Vintage, 2008.

6 Huggan and Tiffin's analysis of the novel engages substantially with cannibalism (171-75).

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. Disgrace. 1999. London: Vintage, 2000.

. The Lives of Animals. Ed. Amy Gutmann. The University Center for Human ValuesSeries. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1999.

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