At the Nobel Prize Banquet held in Stockholm in 2003, the “6,730 pieces of porcelain, 5,384 glasses and 9,422 pieces of cutlery” that would adorn the 65 tables for the year’s laureates must have been of less weight for the banquet organisers than a simple question: would JM Coetzee be there?
The Nobel banquets are perhaps the only award ceremonies that have inspired a restaurant, the Stadshus Kalleren in Stockholm, which replicates the menus from banquets past. Deciding on the Nobel menu, for the organisers of the prize dinner, is understandably complicated: with 65 tables to serve, the dishes must be mass-produceable, limiting the chef’s options, but they must also be dazzling. A typical menu from the first decade of the 1900s might feature, according to the Nobel website, poached fillet of brill, fillet of beef imperial and breast of hazel grouse.
By the 1950s and 1960s, more local meats were being used — elk, reindeer-and the fowl course might include black grouse or capercaillie (wood grouse). In the 1990s, berry-cured salmon and pate of smoked eel appeared, in a nod to Scandinavian tradition. As the banquets crossed a century, the chefs had often catered to vegetarians, but perhaps not to one of Coetzee's stamp. The menu for 2003, the year Coetzee won the Nobel prize for literature, shows signs of a presumably happy compromise. The Swedish delicacies that were served as the first course contained several vegetarian options; fricassee of legumes with a potato gateaux was offered to Coetzee in lieu of the guinea fowl served to other diners, and the menu seems far lighter than the standard trinity of fish, fowl and beef of previous years.
Coetzee, expected to be one of the stars of this year's Jaipur Literature Festival, placed his arguments for vegetarianism and animal rights in the mouth of a literary character, Elizabeth Costello. Of the eight chapters or Lessons of the eponymous book, two had been published before by Coetzee as part of a lecture series he gave at Princeton on ‘The Lives of the Animals’. Costello, a much-feted, now ageing writer wrestling with a need to find some sort of substantial meaning to her life, is, like Coetzee, a vegetarian. She struggles to explain how horrifying she has come to view the act of meat-eating, to convey that she cannot help seeing the apparently normal people around her as “participants in a crime of stupefying proportions” as they eat “fragments of corpses that they have bought for money”.
Elizabeth Costello, published in the year of Coetzee’s Nobel win, was a puzzling novel, often demanding in its pages of theoretical exposition; a weariness suffuses the main character’s voice, and the chapters are indeed Lessons. But eight years later, the debate over vegetarianism and meat-eating has become less hysterical and more nuanced. And perhaps it is now possible to see Elizabeth Costello as a prescient polemic rather than a novel, setting forward the intellectual rather than the emotional argument against eating meat.
In the last few years, the world has begun to move towards a pragmatic quasi-vegetarianism. This is fuelled less by Costello’s passionate sense that we treat animals the way we formerly treated slaves, as the victims of a senseless massacre, and more by a grim realisation of the dangers of eating meat.
From the fishing industry, news of shrinking stocks and overfishing accompanies horror stories of fish sold in the markets that has been frozen for months. The debate over the ethics of killing animals for meat has shifted to a concern for the condition in which our lunch, or dinner, is being raised, and that in turn has led to a debate over what, if any, meat is safe to eat. Eight years after he first made his case, in the words of a fictional writer, JM Coetzee may have found the audience he had hoped to reach.
Nilanjana Roy is a Delhi-based writer
