ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the fictions of the farm, with special attention to those where not animals but humans are harvested. It focuses on Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go, J. M. Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello, Coetzee's own The Lives of Animals and Michel Faber's Under the Skin. Toward the end of the nineteenth century as well as the end of his writing career, Friedrich Nietzsche famously outlined in his Twilight of the Idols a six-step process of intensifying loss. The final pages of Never Let Me Go, move beyond dialogue and pointedly take readers to the one-sided landscape of Franz Kafka's "Before the Law". A crucial text for literary animal studies, The Lives of Animals contains what will become in slightly altered form Lessons 3 and 4 of Elizabeth Costello. Both Never Let Me Go and Elizabeth Costello contain penal colonies within landscapes that exist somehow before the law.
