This paper addresses the vexed question of animal and human rights by focusing on J. M. Coetzee’s “trilogy” connected with Elizabeth Costello’s lecturing and experiencing, from her anti-Cartesian stances advocated in The Lives of Animals (1999), through the more ambiguous “eight lessons” (Elizabeth Costello, 2003) which the fictitious author delivers and frantically goes over like a “circus seal”, or even happens to be taught, up to Slow Man (2005), where she turns into the waspish, vulpine “Costello woman” preying on the tortoise-like Paul Rayment.
A parodied version of St. Paul, Rayment is being confronted with a terrible life change when run over by a car. Having one leg amputated, elderly and lonely “P. R.” (his initials mockingly relating him to a “Public Relations” man) feels now as a faulty human being, and things get worse when Irish-Australian Mrs. Costello settles down in his flat, encroaching upon his freedom and teasing him into action. The bitter twist, as far as animal and human interrelated rights are concerned, is given by her losing track of the 1999 novel’s heated debates on animals as “embodied souls” and “divinely created beings”. She can instead be progressively seen as entering a tricky zone of fumbling speculation, as plunging into a grotesque zoo arena where “defective humans” ultimately resemble Kafka’s branded Red Peter. In the protagonist’s words: “You should open a puppet theatre, or a zoo […]. Buy one, and put us in cages with our names on them. Paul Rayment: canis infelix”.