In his acceptance speech for the Jerusalem Prize in 1987, J. M. Coetzee discusses the peculiar form in which the “masters of South Africa experience their unfreedom,” which is their incapacity to love—the overall inability to build an empathic, mature, and reciprocal human relationship with the Other (97). This is in essence a failure of “
Over a decade later when Coetzee published
Indeed, the most conspicuous plot in the novel is David’s transformation as he cultivates a new sensibility that is more attentive to the lives of nonhuman beings.
It is only after this deadly incident through which he experiences utter vulnerability and indignity—a degradation that nonhuman animals might experience on a regular basis—that animals and their suffering become a concern to David more explicitly. The brutal violence that nearly kills him and his daughter compels David to be more sensitive to the animals that suffer from the same kind of brutal, inexorable, and inexplicable violence. David’s change takes place subtly as he spends time with characters like Lucy and Bev Shaw whom he works with at the animal welfare center to attend the sick and euthanize stray dogs. He grows curious about how a “communion with animals” takes place (126), and sheds tears as he engages daily in the act of putting down the dogs (142-43). In a frequently noted scene, David volunteers to carry the euthanized dogs to the incinerator and put each body into its entry himself; this is to save the corpses from the indignities of being beaten “with the back of the shovel” so that they could fit the mouth of the incinerator (144). Thinking that “[h]e is not prepared to inflict such dishonour upon them” (144), he resolutely performs this funereal ritual, describing himself as becoming a “dog-man: a dog undertaker; a dog psychopomp; a
There is, then, a change in view since 1987 when Coetzee stated in the prize acceptance speech that animals are among the “least likely to respond to love.” For in
But even with the understanding that animals reciprocate human love, sometimes in much more compelling and powerful ways than the humans, Coetzee questions the ethical and political potency of this human-animal rapport, for there is a possible collapse in the distinction between the ethics for nonhuman animals and ethics for humans, which gives the illusion that compassion for animals is somehow interchangeable with compassion for humans, when in fact the two require different kinds of commitment and principles. I do not mean to suggest that the two issues of caring for animals and humans are mutually exclusive, for they are based on the same assumption that all lives deserve respect. Indeed, one of the key questions that the novel asks is how coexistence could be envisioned among all sentient beings in the context of growing consensus that, as one character suggests, there is no realm of “higher life” allocated to humans and that it is necessary to “share some of our human privilege with the beasts” (74). But the equally important concern the novel raises is the troubled
Notwithstanding David’s self-redemption via newly acquired humility and ethical sensibility, therefore, the problem is that David’s “expanded sympathies…[are] complicated somewhat by a distinctive feature of a deeply embedded racism” that is “zoomorphic”—the kind that tends to project animal characteristics onto black people (Herron, 488). In addition, considering the fact that the “authorial arrangements of events” in the novel feature “blacks who perform acts of cruelty and whites who clear up the mess,” David’s narrative is “pervaded with racial anxiety and barely suppressed aggression” (489). There is then a possibility that David’s animal ethics might be grounded on racialized and racist understanding, which proves inadequate in addressing both the animal
Some critics have thus noted on the dubiousness of David’s ethical transformation: for example, Katherine Hallemeier suggests in “Shame and Cosmopolitanism” (2013) that although the novel “shames” David by depriving him of privilege (113), because David’s determined self-renunciation also resembles “the extreme asceticism and cynicism espoused by Diogenes,” David’s supposed transformation leaves room for a doubt that “like Diogenes,” David enacts a kind of “paradoxically prideful shame” (114). Kenneth Reinhard, too, states in “
It is with this understanding that the story of Petrus—the African peasant who is at once Lucy’s hired help and neighbor—must be given more attention, for throughout the novel he carries a very different sensibility towards animals. To this end I discuss what is arguably one of the significant statements in the novel, uttered by Petrus at a party he holds to celebrate his recent land transfer: “‘No more dogs. I am not any more the dog-man’” (129). In the wake of his acquisition of Lucy’s land and the securement of political autonomy, this can be read as Petrus’s declaration of emancipation, in which he ceases to be Lucy’s hired help—the “gardener and the dog-man” (64)—and becomes an upwardly mobile citizen entitled to the same rights as Lucy. The statement is also interesting if juxtaposed with David’s claims about himself becoming a dog-man, which he first states to Lucy, asking her whether she needs a “new dog-man,” since the “scandal” that will keep following him will make him unemployable, except for “obscure” jobs like “ledger clerk” or “kennel attendant” (88).
Considering that David brings up the idea of becoming a dog-man as a way of expressing humility, one can infer that it is Petrus’s aspirations to better his social status that compels him to cast out dogs in his life. Petrus’s turn away from the dogs, then, is less a sign of his speciesism than his social desire to make himself economically and politically respectable. Moreover, given the context of colonial settlements in rural areas where dogs were both physical and symbolic sentinels of the white hegemony, the response against being a dog-man is a rejection against reinforcing such practices. It also indicates Petrus’s wish to disassociate from the legacies of blacks being tied to the realm of animals and animality. It is perhaps not a coincidence that among many identities Petrus used to assume, including the dog-man, “the dig-man, the carry-man, [and] the water-man” (151), he chooses to let know of his changed status by disengaging from the dogs first.
David, too, is well aware that “dogs are bred to snarl at the mere smell of a black man” in South Africa (110), an observation that is very much in line with the history of the use of dogs as a controlling apparatus. Lucy, too, recognizes the use of dogs as a controlling tactic and its racist and colonial implications. The dogs she herself keeps in her kennel are indeed “watchdogs,” such as “Dobermanns, German Shepherds, ridge back, bull terriers, [and] Rottweilers” (61). Thus, when asked by Lurie whether she was “nervous by [her]self,” Lucy answers that “dogs still mean something. The more dogs, the more deterrence” (60). Dogs in South Africa therefore evoke a particular modern colonial history in which they were “trained or even manufactured by the state security apparatus” (xx) for disciplinary and surveillance purposes, as Van Sittert and Swart note in
The backdrop of such uses of dogs is what is indeed on David’s mind as he guesses that the murder of Lucy’s dogs by the three intruders may be an act of retaliation, “exhilarating” and “heady, like all revenge” is (110). David imagines that they might well have been saying, in the midst of their crimes: “
This listing of varied hostilities between blacks and dogs is not to suggest that their relationships are always inevitably antagonistic in South Africa: as Tim Maggs and Judith Sealy state in “
Nonetheless, one cannot deny the ways in which the history of colonialism complicates further the human-dog relationship, in many cases for the worse, as numerous literary works recounting the experiences of colonization do. It is indeed a familiar experience for black people across the colonized African continent to be denied the human sympathy that is in fact generously offered to nonhuman beings. J. Nozipo Maraire’s
Many times, it is not only African people who are demoted through the elevation of dogs, but also dogs in Africa that are put to denigration and segregation—during the colonial period for example the native African dogs now widely referred to as the
Seen in this light, David’s self-identification as a dog-man and a
To a certain degree, David’s reservations about Petrus is understandable: Petrus seems especially unsympathetic and even suspicious, for example, when he lets one of the men who allegedly raped Lucy attend his party, thereby frightening Lucy and enraging David. There are also aspects of Petrus that fail to convince that he is a transformative figure fit for setting the future direction of South Africa. Although David once remarks that Petrus is the “new Petrus” who work “all very swift and businesslike: all very unlike Africa” (151), and hints that there are many things to admire about him, he is not a readily likable character. He is, for example, a patriarch with sexist perceptions and shows parochialism by sticking to his own clan. As a peasant in an agricultural milieu, for instance, he wishes that one of his wives gives birth to a boy, because a “girl is very expensive” and means “[a]lways money, money, money” (130). Petrus, at least according to David’s perceptions, seems crass and insensitive towards the welfare of others, both humans and animals. The rise of Petrus then could mean, as Slavoj Zižek suggests in
Still yet, from Petrus’s perspective, David’s annoyance at the bleating sheep seems unfair: to ventriloquize, might Petrus not wonder why David is reluctant to offer him the same kind of consideration that he extends to the sheep? Moreover, the very radical humility and passivity that David and Lucy embrace appears to go against Petrus’s aspirations to attain and achieve more. What is the reason that David states that he is becoming a dog-man shortly after he hears Petrus’s declaration of being no longer a dog man (146)? Given the timing, it is not far-fetched to suspect that David is being deliberately antithetical, obstructing Petrus’s aspirations for success, however materialistic they may seem to David. In addition, Lucy’s assertion that “there is no higher life” for humans because “[t]his is the only life there is. Which we share with animals” (74) also contradicts Petrus’s overall inclination to disassociate from dogs and to promote himself. Of course, there is no question about the sincerity of David’s and Lucy’s ethical positions: when Lucy declares to maintain a state of self-abnegation by giving up the negotiating “cards,” “weapons,” “property,” “rights,” and “dignity” (205), David understands her, thus offering to explicate that she means to be “like a dog,” to which Lucy agrees (205). As Herron states, David fulfills Lucy’s “zero-degree checklist of survival through humiliation in dark times,” which includes a “call to become minor, indiscernible, and animal” (486).
But I want to note on the layout of the novel which has Lucy’s story of the renunciation of rights and dignity and David’s tacit agreement to it overlap with Petrus’s story of claiming them, which diminishes the significance of all that Petrus struggles to attain and achieve. David’s articulation of himself as a dog-man, too, has the effect of making Petrus’s detachment from dogs look somewhat anachronistic and speciesist. Especially with David’s tendency to offer pedantic observations, he moves himself, unknowingly, to a higher moral ground, from where he insinuates that human ontology cannot be separated from animals and their mortal vulnerability. It seems important to speculate on the political ramifications of David’s and Lucy’s announcement that they are dog-men or are “like a dog.” Despite David’s sincere intentions and Lucy’s radical expiation, their commitment and humbleness outside the usual parameters of jurisdiction and political language has the effect of removing the already fading confidence in South Africa as a well-functioning, reliable polity. In other words, by suggesting that for whites in South Africa, the only viable way to be is to be “like a dog,” they deny the political potency of South Africa as a nation. In this David and Lucy do not differ too much from another neighbor Ettinger, who tells that he “never go[es] anywhere without [his] Beretta” because the police are not going to save you, not any more” (100). Thus, in post-apartheid South Africa, and especially in the rural area, whites either carry guns because “the best is, you save yourself” (100), or one becomes an animal, retreating from the realm of human politics.
III. Animal Ethics and Its Discontents
This finally brings us to the problem of becoming a neighbor and establishing fraternity, for a resolution to become like a dog, while expiatory, humble, and sacrificial, does not seem to magically open ways for humans to become fraternal or be neighbors to each other. Ettinger, for example, says of Petrus and his kind: “Not one of them you can trust” (109). David, too, “spies Petrus out at the dam,” thinking it “odd” that Petrus has been away when the intrusion and rape occurred (114). At any rate, it is quite clear in the novel that the kind of commiserating, heartfelt, and reciprocal communion David establishes with dogs fails to materialize in his relationship with fellow humans. Indeed, an ethical relationship with fellow humans—one that is empathic, reciprocal, and mutually respectful—is something that David struggles to establish throughout the novel, wondering at times whether he even wishes for it. David feels “elemental rage,” for example, when he catches one of the men who allegedly raped Lucy peeping at her through the bathroom window. Shouting “
Of course, the rage David feels for both the boy and Petrus is understandable, given the boy’s alleged involvement and Petrus’s alleged complicity to the crime involving his daughter. Yet, the anger is also intensified by the fact that Petrus can talk back at David and taunt him in ways dogs or other animals do not. Petrus, for example, with calm and prudence that maddens David, tells him that David is “not wrong” to want legal justice (119). The peeping boy also piques David, by shouting “We will kill you all!”— “you” here referring to David and Lucy, and possibly Katy the dog (207). As the plural pronoun “we” uttered by the boy suggests, there is the dichotomous logic of “us” and “them” that the boy mobilizes, through which he further creates a sense of threat. To the boy there is no ambiguity regarding whose side he is on and whom he affiliates himself with: it is clearly him and his people against white people like David, Lucy, and Ettinger. In a different passage, Petrus, too, deploys the similar logic by defending the boy, telling the accusing David that “‘he is a child. He is my family, my people’” (201). To this “naked” answer, David thinks to himself, “Well, Lucy is
It is true that David’s equally clannish, antagonizing response is thrown in the heat of the moment: elsewhere when in a poised state, he more open-mindedly reflects on how the end of the apartheid is changing the nature of social relationships between blacks and whites, thinking that “[t]he word that seems to serve best” to describe Petrus is “
David’s feelings for Petrus as a neighbor is still complex, combined with the humane wish to be tolerant of Petrus on the one hand and feeling vaguely threatened on the other hand. Although he admires Petrus’s showing of “patience, energy, [and] resilience,” he also thinks that Petrus is a “peasant, a
As Reinhard notes, this relationship is “fundamentally contingent” because the parties involved do not encounter each other with obligations to the law that dictates the terms of neighbor relations (103). Human ethics under the new post-apartheid democracy is something new—it is a “new world they live in,” David thinks, which “Petrus knows…and he knows...and Petrus knows that he knows” (117). Under such circumstances, the step toward establishing proper neighbor relation is to accept that it entails radical contingency that might even bring violence, in that neighbors are unfree from the feelings of animosity in post-apartheid South Africa (101).
If is for these reasons that the fact that Lucy is claiming that she is disowning the ideals of dignity, liberty, and rights so as to start with nothing, like a dog, delays further the development of neighbor relations and fraternity rather than expedite it. Rather than meet Petrus in a political arena, Lucy chooses to step away from it and precludes the chance for political recognition and negotiation. The alliance that Petrus proposes that he and Lucy form through marriage is also troubling and far from what ideal coexistence among neighbors should be like—it may be a practical choice in that Petrus gets to own Lucy’s farm in return of providing Lucy a protection, but her unwillingness, not to mention her preference for women, makes this a forced pact.
The only times when David’s mistrust of and reservations about the human Other are removed are when David has sex, as he does with Soroya, Melanie, and Bev, as well as with the” German girl” long time ago (192), and with a “tall girl in a minute black leather skirt” (194). In fact, for David, the idea becoming a neighbor and establishing fraternity among the humankind, a process that necessitates an open-mind and the readiness to bear contingences that Reinhard speaks of, does not sit well with him; when Lucy accosts him as he might be a mere visitor, David welcomes this new status, which although is a sign of a “new footing [and] a new start,” further removes him from the immediate ethical imperatives to go through the trouble of developing human relationships (218).
As a matter of fact, David is grossly mistaken to believe that if there is “force that drives the utmost strangers into each other’s arms, making them kin, kind, beyond all prudence,” it is sex with women of different race and origin (194). When Melanie’s boyfriend tells David to “[s]tay with your own kind,” David thinks that it is an impossible request, one coming from a lack of understanding of the strong “drive” that draws strangers to each other’s arms, ending up creating kinship (194). As true as this might be, the new, post-apartheid South Africa that Coetzee envisions is one that is
Confronted with the daunting task of becoming a neighbor and establishing fraternity among the neighbors that does not entail sexual attraction and erotic impulses, David’s attention is turned to righting his relationship with animals, which although crucial, is something private, and even a compromised action in the light of human, political context. In the very last scene of the novel where David decides to euthanize his beloved, limping dog, he makes a gesture of radical self-humiliation and renunciation that is akin to Lucy’s determination to let go of her human, white privileges. This courageous decision to take a full responsibility of the dog, denying himself gratification that comes from keeping the dog by his side, entails an ambiguity despite its dignified aspect, in that he has the dog in his arms “like a lamb” (220) being carried to an altar, which at once makes him a sacrificial but also priestly figure who propitiates meantime, in contrast to what might be even called as David’s spiritual communion with animals in this passage, his relationships to humans retain the status quo, alluding in fact to more challenges and troubles that lie ahead. To recall the words of Coetzee’s Jerusalem Prize acceptance speech again, no amount of love expressed for the South African landscape and the animals that populate it can actually replace love not yet expressed for the fellow humans. Love for animals is not by necessity a passage to love for humans—there is more to be worked on in the world of