Reading Animals in Kafka and Coetzee a DISSERTATION SUBMITTED to the GRAD

Home , Jackals and Arabs

NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY

Secretaries of the Negligible: Reading Animals in Kafka and Coetzee

A DISSERTATION

SUBMITTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS

for the degree

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Field of Comparative Literary Studies

Sonia H. Li

EVANSTON, ILLINOIS

September 2018

ABSTRACT

This dissertation approaches J. M. Coetzee’s work through the lens of critical animal studies. Puzzling out the frequent appearances of animals in his work, numerous scholars have attempted to answer the following question: What is Coetzee writing about when he writes about animals? But while many have engaged with the problem of animal rights and representation in his oeuvre, no one has done so in the terms which I propose. This project takes as its point of departure the writerly connection between Franz Kafka and Coetzee, which the latter has frequently evoked through explicit references in his fiction and personal utterances, as well as in his themes and language.

My work undertakes a sustained analysis of the relationship between the two authors, which brings to the fore questions of allegorical and literal interpretation. In particular, I explore embedded scenes of performance in Elizabeth Costello and “Ein Bericht für eine Akademie” and argue that Coetzee lays out a blueprint of human/non-human relationality that depends not on language, but on the body as a vehicle for performance. This, I argue, is different from the theories of embodiment that scholars such as Elizabeth Anker and Donna Haraway have outlined. Keeping this in mind, I question existing readings of Disgrace that interpret the protagonist David Lurie’s slow change throughout the novel as a moral transformation that is assisted by his relationships with animals. Interrogating the double-sided nature of representation as both advocacy and depiction, I draw attention to the uneven power dynamics inherent in Lurie’s often well-intended representations of others—particularly the dogs in his life.

Finally, this dissertation zeroes in on the tendency that Kafka and Coetzee share of using transcendental language to describe a secular world. Though some scholars have understood

Coetzee’s use of terms like “salvation” and “grace” to come hand-in-hand with an embrace of animal life, I show how any positive association between animals and “redemption” in Coetzee is in fact troubled by their relationship to violence. Meanwhile, the animal rhetoric he employs serves to highlight key distinctions between the “literal” and the “literary.”

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

First and foremost, I would like to thank Anna Parkinson for her invaluable feedback and unflagging belief in me over the past four years. Without her, I may never have encountered Milo and Rotpeter, whose curious stories served as the inspiration for this dissertation; likewise, it was in her 2015 seminar on affect that I read Coetzee for the first time. My deepest thanks go out as well to Evan Mwangi and Jörg Kreienbrock for the generous gift of their time and support. Finally, this project would not have been possible without Aximili and Nala.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Abstract | 3

Acknowledgments | 5

Introduction | 7

Chapter 1: Performance | 18

Chapter 2: Representations | 76

Introduction | 76 The Limits of Fürsprache | 78 Affect and representation in Disgrace | 82 Conclusion: sacrifice and self-interest | 104

Chapter 3: Professions | 106

Conclusion | 147

References | 155

INTRODUCTION

At the beginning of Boyhood, J. M. Coetzee’s fictionalized childhood memoir, a young

John suggests a game with his schoolmates in which they are all to recount their first memory.

Impatiently sitting through a friend’s lackluster story, he reflects on what he would like to share:

He is leaning out of the window of their flat in Johannesburg. Dusk is falling. Out of the distance a car comes racing down the street. A dog, a small spotted dog, runs in front of it. The car hits the dog: its wheels go right over the dog’s middle. With its hind legs paralysed, the dog drags itself away, squealing with pain. No doubt it will die . . . (30)

It is a bleak first memory—however, considering what will follow in the young boy’s life, it is hardly a coincidence that his first recollection is of an animal’s violent death. Shortly after this episode, he happens upon a photograph of his mother as a child with a beautiful Alsatian dog. With tears in her eyes, she tells him how the dog died from eating poisoned meat that was left out for jackals. This does not quell her desire for another dog, however, and on the next page the Coetzees are welcoming a new dog named Cossack into the family. Unfortunately, Cossack meets a similar end when he eats ground glass that someone has put out for him, and it is up to John to bury him.

His final reflection in this passage is that “[h]e does not want them to have another dog, not if this is how they must die” (50). Except for a brief run-in with a farmer’s Alsatian during an episode of childlike mischief, this is the last mention of dogs in Boyhood.

What is curious is how eager he is to share this first memory with his friends—despite (or perhaps because of) its questionable veracity. Upon telling the story, he thinks: “It is a magnificent first memory, trumping anything that poor Goldstein can dredge up. But is it true? Why was he leaning out of the window watching an empty street? Did he really see the car hit the dog, or did he just hear a dog howling, and run to the window?” (30) Already at this age he is plagued with

8 writerly concerns: How does one know what is true? Is it necessary to tell the “truth” in order to tell a true story? In fact, he has another first memory, but it is one that he “would never repeat,” and certainly not to his schoolmates. Riding the bus with his mother one day, he remembers letting a sweet-wrapper out the window. He admits to himself: “This is the other first memory, the secret one. He thinks all the time of the scrap of paper, alone in all that vastness, that he abandoned when he should not have abandoned it. One day he must go back to the Swartberg Pass and find it and rescue it. That is his duty: he may not die until he has done it.”

Although Coetzee does not explicitly draw a connection between his younger alter-ego’s conflicting stories, the two versions have more in common than one might initially think. In the first story, John witnesses a dog being run over by a car, hears its squeals of pain—but does nothing; tells no one, even knowing that it will die. The second story, the one that feels truer, also involves loss but betrays a more congealed sense of regret. Although the paper that he lets “fl[y] up into the sky” may be trash in the world’s eyes, he nonetheless considers it “abandonment” and declares it his life’s duty to “rescue” the scrap.

Furthermore, even though he does not explicitly use the word “shame” in the context of either of these memories, it is the unspoken word that binds the two together. The fact that John finds himself preoccupied with feelings of shame from an early age (the word appears nine times within the first short chapter)1 renders the word a ghost that haunts the stories of the spotted dog’s death, the scrap of paper released to the wind, his mother’s Alsatian, and Cossack. He seems to be in the process of discovering that encountering vulnerability—of objects, animals, people—evokes in him a sense of responsibility. The shirking of this responsibility, in all its forms, leads to a

1 Coetzee, Boyhood: 6, 7, 9-10.

“shame [that] still hangs, waiting to return to him, but it is a private shame, which the other boys need never be aware of” (10). This is a thread that will continue on through Youth, the autobiographical sequel to Boyhood, with an older John Coetzee defending his decision to leave

South Africa as fleeing an “atrophy of the moral life. From shame” (231).

Although Boyhood and Youth will not be the main focus in what follows, both offer excellent illustrations of the delicately interwoven layers of concerns that persist in virtually all of

Coetzee’s work: the problem of animal suffering and death; the public and private nature(s) of shame and its place in the moral economy; the duties and difficulties of writing as an act of storytelling; and, deeply related to all three, the question of human response and responsibility. It is my contention that through the lens of critical animal studies, the relationship between these four main themes can be made clearer, even if at times this line of questioning will seem to spark more questions than answers.

Over the past two decades, critical animal studies has grown from a quirky offshoot of postmodernism and posthumanism into a vibrant field in its own right. Although people have been writing about animals for millennia, literary and philosophical criticism about animals—as creatures in their own right, and not simply as points of comparison or symbols—was not taken seriously until much more recently. Some of the major thinkers whose work has gone a long way towards establishing the status of the field include Jacques Derrida, Giorgio Agamben, and Donna

Haraway. Since 1989, when Haraway published Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science, she has followed up with several works that explore animal life, including Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (1991), The Companion

Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness (2003), and When Species Meet

(2007). Derrida’s late work in particular has cast an outsized shadow on the field, with his 1997 lecture on “the autobiographical animal” eventually published as the oft-quoted The Animal That

Therefore I Am (2008). Like him, Agamben—with his biopolitical theories of “bare life” and the

“homo sacer”—has attempted a similar historical retelling of the West’s relationship with animals and animality in The Open: Man and Animal (2004). In this dissertation, I will engage with the theories of all three thinkers, though often in different capacities and contexts.

The question still remains, however: Why animal studies, and why now? Kari Weil attempts to address this question in her exploration of “the animal turn,” in which she “trace[s] the emergence of the ‘animal question’ by focusing on three trends or moments in literary and critical theory for which the animal has become a test case: the linguistic turn, a counterlinguistic or affective turn, and the ethical turn” (7). While this is correct, it is also interesting that she refers to

“the animal” as “a test case.” The skepticism that she later expresses towards the many scholars who have used the figure of the animal as an experimental subject, or limit case, in an intellectual sense (as both Derrida and Agamben do, despite their best intentions) is, I believe, warranted. For this reason, I argue that it is necessary to remain vigilant about the ways in which we both read and write about animals. Even Derrida, who sees himself as the only philosopher to take issue with the term “the Animal” on principle arguably commits the same error by engaging with the subject of animals on a mostly abstract, generalizable level (The Animal That Therefore I Am 40). (It is perhaps telling that the only flesh-and-blood animal whom he mentions in the entire text is his cat, whose gaze serves as the launching point for his subsequent reflections.)2 Keeping this in mind, a

2 Even then, he generalizes what is presumably his cat into “a cat” and “the cat,” eschewing personal pronouns and specificity and thus using even this relationship as an example—a test case (The Animal That Therefore I Am 4).

11 question that I will continue to pose throughout this study regards the differences between allegorical, rhetorical, and what I will describe in Chapter One as “literal” interpretation. And while Weil does not follow this line of questioning per se, she does begin her book with examples from the two authors that together form the backbone of this dissertation: Franz Kafka and J. M.

Coetzee. While writing at opposite ends of the twentieth century, both are known for their enigmatic prose and interest in animals on and off the page, and the fact that Coetzee has so self- consciously drawn from Kafka in his own work has naturally enticed comparison.

Chapter One, entitled “Performance,” explores the connection between these authors via two works that enter into a lively dialogue (or arguably, monologue)3 with each other: Kafka’s

“Ein Bericht für eine Akademie” (1917) and Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello (2004). By examining the many overlapping, interweaving scenes of performance in these two texts—including Kafka’s ape narrator Rotpeter, who performs in front of the academy as well as on the variety show stage; passionate animal advocate Elizabeth Costello in lectures at two universities; and Coetzee himself, who frequently chooses to read aloud stories rather than speak with his own voice—I demonstrate several things. First, I examine the contradictions inherent in Costello’s denial of allegory in the likeness she claims to Rotpeter. To better understand them, I engage with theories of irony, as well as with outlines of how non-allegorical modes of reading and meaning might (or might not) function. I propose that “literal” reading, which scholars such as Derek Attridge have encouraged as a richer, more ethical method of interpretation,4 can be aligned with a language of the body, and

3 I say monologue, because while Coetzee’s works frequently engage with Kafkan themes and intertexts, Kafka as an author obviously cannot reply in kind. 4 Derek Attridge, J. M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading, The University of Chicago Press, 2004: 39.

12 that the means by which this language is communicated is performance. From there, I trace the history of Kafka’s “Bericht” from E. T. A. Hoffmann to Charles Darwin and exotic animal trader

Carl Hagenbeck in order to show how the themes present in it (e.g. the civilized ape, the status of art and language, the place of humans in a changing world) have evolved throughout the centuries and through to Elizabeth Costello. Drawing on Walter Benjamin’s essays on mimesis, language, and authenticity, I show how Kafka’s story reflects—and perhaps even instantiates—an irreversible shift in the way humans relate to language and conceive of meaning. (Tellingly,

Costello uses the example of Kafka to lament this change in the chapter “Realism.”)

In response to both stories, the concept of embodiment has often been evoked as a potential approach to relating to animals more ethically, particularly through an emphasis on shared vulnerability or suffering. Elizabeth Anker, for example, sees “Costello’s recognition of a shared human-animal predicament of corporeal woundedness [as] provid[ing] an alternate basis for obligation both to animals and to other human beings” (“Elizabeth Costello, Embodiment, and the

Limits of Rights” 170). Examining what this stance of mutual woundedness might look like in the concrete setting of the laboratory, Haraway discusses the problem of medical and scientific experimentation on animals (animals as true “test cases”). Reverting to religious language, she declares that her “suspicion is that the kind of forgiveness that we fellow mortals living with other animals hope for is the mundane grace to eschew separation, self-certainty, and innocence even in our most creditable practices that enforce unequal vulnerability” (Haraway 75). However, while there is much to be said for the notion of embodiment as a remedy for human arrogance and ignorance vis-à-vis their animal counterparts, I remain suspicious of any theory that boils down

13 the potential for mutual human-animal respect to their shared potential for suffering.5 Like Weil, who expresses wariness of any wholly positive interpretation of the ending of Disgrace (1999) and questions the fact that the novel’s protagonist claims to experience love “in the company of animals and in the act of killing them” (xviii), I maintain a critical eye towards readings that propound salvation through suffering. The question I seek to answer is whether a nuanced theory of human- animal relatedness centered around the body must gain its traction from suffering. With this in mind, I argue that bodies in the act of performance are a more fitting vehicle with which to probe the likenesses and circumstances that bind human and nonhuman animals together.

Whereas Chapter One deals with the unique difficulties posed by animal interpretation and explores the implications of allegorical, rhetorical, and literal reading, Chapter Two delves more deeply into the problem of representation. Entitled “Representations,” it is concerned with the double meaning of the term as elucidated by Gayatri Spivak. (As she points out, representation can mean both “proxy” and “portrait.”)6 The questions that drive this chapter include: How are hierarchical relations between human and nonhuman animals created and reinforced by means of representation—even when the motives are benevolent? And in what ways can “speaking-for”— both in the sense of advocacy and in the sense of silencing—be considered an act of violence?

5 In fact, I see a relationship between this kind of reasoning and the religious culture that Elizabeth Costello so despises in the Catholic Church, epitomized by her sister, Sister Blanche. Whereas Costello wonders why Christians fetishize images of a wounded, suffering Jesus on the cross instead of glorifying human potential and physicality as the Greeks do, she cautiously subscribes to a theory of embodiment that hinges upon an animal’s capacity to suffer. My question is thus: is there a religious flavor to the trend toward breaking down human-animal commonalities to our shared vulnerability, rather than our shared potential? See Elizabeth Costello, “The Humanities in Africa” and “The Lives of Animals: The Poets and the Animals.” 6 See Gayatri Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. by Lawrence Grossberg and Cary Nelson, U of Illinois Press, 1989: 71.

To this end, I zero in on specific relationships between the protagonist of Coetzee’s

Disgrace, David Lurie, and the animals he encounters. While many critics have taken his slowly changing behavior throughout the novel as evidence of a moral transformation (one that is assisted by his increasing attunement to animal life), I instead argue that the ventriloquism in which he engages—from assigning affects and desires to dogs, to speaking over his daughter Lucy’s voice, to ascribing moods to inanimate objects—does not wholly disappear by the end. Instead, it shifts into another mode of relationality that remains troubling. This is best encapsulated by the relationship he develops with an unnamed dog at the animal shelter where he volunteers. To illustrate my point that his “transformation” is more akin to a transmutation, I analyze the importance of name-giving and name-withholding in the novel in order to show how deceptive the concept of “charity” (caritas, as Costello calls it)7 can be.

Finally, Chapter Three picks up several of the threads that are touched on but not fully developed in Chapters One and Two: namely, the question of allegory and its relationship to animals in Kafka and Coetzee; the disconnect between characters who resist believing in anything but freely use the language of religion; and the relationship between “the literal” and literature.

Taking as a point of departure Costello’s claims about what her “profession” as a writer does and does not enable her to do, I use this word to connect reflections on the nature of private beliefs and public professions to the contradictory role of the professor. A former professor himself, Coetzee frequently writes about the act of writing and the academic world. Called “Professions,” this chapter takes a closer look at a piece of Coetzee’s own scholarship on Kafka in order to show how the themes and language he uses in his academic role carry over into his fiction.

7 Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello: 154.

I begin with a brief exploration of Kafka’s “Schakale und Araber” as a counterpoint to “Ein

Bericht für eine Akademie,” showing how the former is also concerned with human and nonhuman animal bodies despite the trove of (often reductive) allegorical readings speaking to the contrary.

From there, I turn to a rarely discussed review that Coetzee wrote of a translation of Kafka’s Das

Schloss, in which he simultaneously critiques religious readings of the text while himself using the language of transcendence. Lastly, I return to both Elizabeth Costello and Age of Iron and examine the many scenes where the “figure of the dog” comes into conflict with living, breathing dogs.

Drawing from Benjamin’s reflections on Kafka, I argue that what Coetzee proposes in his work— both fiction and non-fiction, and on and off the stage—is a conception of literature that is organic.

By inviting allegorical readings only to challenge them, he draws attention to the richness that literal reading—which I show is paradoxically linked to physical experience—can offer.

Overall, the “red thread” that holds this project together through its twists and turns is a set of questions that share a common purpose and directionality. In my analysis of several animal-rich works by Kafka and Coetzee, I address questions such as: How has the human-animal divide been conceived of in the past; how is it being defined now by scholars in various fields; and what possibilities for change exist for the future? And perhaps more importantly, to what end are these questions being asked? Seizing on Weil’s discussion of “the linguistic turn, a counterlinguistic or affective turn, and the ethical turn” as the historical progression of critical theory, I ask how the literary texts I have chosen in fact challenge notions of language, affect, and ethics—especially when it comes to nonhuman animals. My goal in doing so is not to treat them as a “test case,” but to encourage awareness of the particular difficulties that readers face when they must rely on the sympathetic imagination (a term of Elizabeth Costello’s) in place of scientific fact; where science

16 cannot (yet) elucidate the inner workings of animal minds, imagination must suffice. Chapter One in particular takes pains to show the overarching similarities that exist between human and nonhuman animals and thus reconfigures the very question of the “human-animal divide” and the premises on which it rests.

My contribution to the field takes several forms. First of all, I propose a version of embodiment that focuses less on the shared experience of physical pain—Jeremy Bentham’s famous question: “[c]an they [animals] suffer?”8—than on the body as a medium through which both human and nonhuman animals communicate. Secondly, my chapter on Disgrace intervenes in Coetzee scholarship by arguing that understanding Lurie’s relationship with the dog Katy, his only named animal companion, is essential to interpreting the famed final scene in which he provides Lösung9 to a nameless dog. While some critics have pointed out that Lurie’s development throughout the novel is far from straightforward—a claim with which I agree—none have yet drawn a line connecting the significance of the ending to his relationship with individual dogs and his decisions to name or not name them. Finally, although allegory and animals have often found themselves at the center of Coetzee criticism, and while several scholars have pointed out

Coetzee’s use of religious terminology in passing,10 few have undertaken a sustained analysis of the way these three themes coalesce. To this end, I consider not just his fictional works, but commit to reaching a fuller understanding of the way profession functions by reading his essay on

8 Qtd. in Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am: ix. 9 Lösung can mean solution or dissolution, but here it refers to euthanasia. It is also hard not to think of the related term Erlösung (redemption) in this context. See Chapter Two for a more detailed analysis. 10 See Haraway (When Species Meet), Michael S. Kochin, Jonathan Lamb, Justin Neuman, and Louis Tremaine.

17 translating Kafka alongside his literary work. In each of the following chapters, I strive to demonstrate the possibilities opened up by a thoroughly intertextual reading of Coetzee.

CHAPTER ONE – Performance

Introduction

On September 11, 2017, J. M. Coetzee reprised a role familiar to many of his readers. At a conference in Buenos Aires on “The Work of John Maxwell Coetzee in Latin America,” he read aloud an excerpt entitled “The Glass Abattoir” from his forthcoming book, set to feature recurring character Elizabeth Costello. Since November 1996, when he introduced Costello to the world for the first time at Bennington College through the short story “What is Realism?”, Coetzee has on numerous occasions chosen to speak through her—the most famous instance being his eccentric performance at Princeton University in 1997. As a speaker for the Tanner Lectures on Human

Values, he caught his audience off guard by reading aloud two stories—“The Philosophers and the

Animals” on October 10 and “The Poets and the Animals” the following day—rather than speaking in the first person with his own voice. Since the publication of these two Costello stories as The

Lives of Animals in 1999, he has continued to fill in the gaps of her fictional life. In 2001, Coetzee combined further lectures with The Lives of Animals to create Elizabeth Costello; she plays an important role in the metafictional Slow Man (2003) as the author behind the protagonist’s existence; and we are now to expect a third installment called Moral Lessons.

In “The Glass Abattoir,” the aging Costello has become singularly obsessed with two things: the horrors she sees humankind committing against animals, and preserving her authorial legacy. For the most part, her perspective is filtered through the lens of her son John as he communicates with her by telephone and reads journals and fragments written by her throughout the years. She later explains that she posted these documents to him (which arrive at his home with no explanation) while in a “panic” brought on by the first stages of memory loss. “I have made an

19 appointment with a neurologist,” she confesses to him, “but in the meantime, I am trying to put my life in order just in case. I can’t begin to describe the mess on my desk. What I sent you is only a fraction of it. If something happens to me, the cleaning woman will throw it all in the trash.”11

The writer’s customary prickliness appears to have given way to anxiety. She is anxious about old age’s tendency to forget, and the fact that the scribblings she has deemed important enough to send to her son all have to do with animals suggests that these thoughts are the most urgent for her. At the end of the short piece, Costello tries to answer John’s question of what is wrong with her by describing a television show she watched the night before about how chicks are sexed—the males separated from the egg-laying females and ground up into a paste to be fed to other animals or the earth. Reflecting on what she saw, she tells him:

For the most part, I don’t know what to believe any longer. What beliefs I used to have! Seem to have been overtaken by the fog and confusion in my head. Nevertheless, I cling to one last belief: that the little chick who appeared to me on the screen last night, appeared to me for a reason. He and the other negligible beings whose paths have crossed mine on the way to their respective deaths, it is for them that I write. Their lives were so brief, so easily forgotten. I am the sole being in the universe who still remembers them.12

Her words here are highly reminiscent of the eighth “lesson”13 of Elizabeth Costello, called “At the Gate,” in which, like Josef K. in Franz Kafka’s “Vor dem Gesetz,” she is denied passage to a vague “beyond” unless she can give a satisfactory “statement of belief” (Coetzee, Elizabeth

Costello 212). In one failed attempt, she declares belief in the “little frogs” that come alive again each spring with the new rains (217). In another, she pleads exemption from the requirement on

11 https://johannesburgreviewofbooks.com/2017/09/25/the-jrb-daily-jm-coetzee-reads-a-new- story-the-glass-abattoir-and-announces-a-new-book-to-feature-elizabeth-costello/ 12 I transcribed this story from the video embedded in the website cited in footnote 1. 13 Curiously, Coetzee divides Elizabeth Costello into eight “lessons” instead of chapters. It seems clear that he is at once testing the boundaries of form in fiction and driving a didactic point home.

20 the grounds of her occupation, claiming: “I am a writer, and what I write is what I hear. I am a secretary of the invisible, one of many secretaries over the ages” (199). But while her evocation of

“the life cycle of the frog” (217) is couched within a language of hopefulness, her belief in the

“chick who appeared . . . on the screen last night” no longer stems from the certainty of life, but from the machinery of death. Elizabeth Costello, whom Coetzee dubbed secretary of the invisible in 2001, has in 2017 become a secretary of the negligible—the dispensable.

Given the ratcheted pace of Coetzee’s animal rights activism in recent years (e.g. denouncing animal cruelty at the invitation of an animal rights group in Madrid in 2017,14 sending a letter to the Spanish government on behalf of PETA in 2013), now more than ever it is tempting to conflate the author with his characters. Indeed, Karen Dawn and Peter Singer provide ample evidence that the distance that Coetzee has long curated between himself as a private person and his characters as public personae has in fact grown shorter. Diary of a Bad Year (2007), for example, revolves around a character named “C” who, on top of being an elderly South-African born writer now living in Australia, is also the author of Waiting for the Barbarians (Coetzee’s third novel). Dawn and Singer also index Coetzee’s utterances in rare speeches and interviews

(with Swedish animal rights magazine Djurens Rätt, for example) against the polemical opinions voiced by Costello in order to ascertain how closely their views align. But while their speculations are both fascinating and convincing, it is not my goal to make necessarily inconclusive arguments about Coetzee’s personal life and beliefs. Instead, I propose that a much richer, more complex reading can emerge from a careful study of these acts as form—in particular, as mimetic acts of

14 https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2016-07-01-nobel-laureate-j.m.-coetzee-speaks- against-animal-cruelty/#.Wk_gGVSpnUo

21 performance that nullify the “dualism between form and content.”15 Without attempting to comment on the personal life and beliefs of a notoriously reticent author, I question how the publication history of the Costello stories overlaps and interacts with Coetzee’s own performances of authorship, as well as why animals seem to play such an important role in both. To highlight the possibilities opened up by this line of questioning, I now turn to a particular moment in The

Lives of Animals (later republished as Lessons Three and Four of Elizabeth Costello) in which the issues of interpretive ethics, animal embodiment, and performance come to a head.

Urszene

In Part One of The Lives of Animals (Coetzee’s second performance as Costello), she has been invited to give a lecture at Altona, the small Pennsylvania college where her son John teaches.

A celebrated author, she has been given free rein to discuss whatever she likes. Much to her son’s chagrin, she uses this opportunity to pontificate on “a hobbyhorse of hers, animals” (EC 60).

Perhaps even odder than her choice of subject, however, are her frequent and heavy-handed allusions to a story by Kafka. In her opening address, she sets up a comparison between herself and Kafka’s creature that forms the Urszene, or primal scene, of this chapter:

“Ladies and gentlemen,” she begins. “It is two years since I last spoke in the United States. In the lecture I then gave, I had reason to refer to the great fabulist Franz Kafka, and in particular to his story ‘Report to an Academy,’ about an educated ape, Red Peter, who stands before the members of a learned society telling the story of his life – of his ascent from beast to something approaching man. On that occasion I felt a little like Red

15 In his article “Benjamin, Wittgenstein, and Philosophical Anthropology: A Reevaluation of the Mimetic Faculty,” philosophy scholar Blair Ogden compares how Walter Benjamin and Ludwig Wittgenstein’s conceptions of mimesis have been influenced by Heinz Werner’s gestalt psychology. Here, he is discussing the transformation of mimesis that both philosophers identify—breaking with Plato, the difference between original and copy ceases to matter (65).

Peter myself and said so. Today that feeling is even stronger, for reasons that I hope will become clear to you.

“Lectures often begin with light-hearted remarks whose purpose is to set the audience at ease. The comparison I have just drawn between myself and Kafka’s ape might be taken as such a lighthearted remark, meant to set you at ease, meant to say I am just an ordinary person, neither a god nor a beast. Even those among you who read Kafka’s story of the ape who performs before human beings as an allegory of Kafka the Jew performing for Gentiles may nevertheless – in view of the fact that I am not a Jew – have done me the kindness of taking the comparison at face value, that is to say, ironically.

“I want to say at the outset that that was not how my remark – the remark that I feel like Red Peter – was intended. I did not intend it ironically. It means what it says. I say what I mean. I am an old woman. I do not have the time any longer to say things I do not mean.” (62)

Despite Costello’s insistence that she means what she says, a closer look at her exact words reveals a more complicated picture. First, let us look at the equivalency that she sets up when she says: “I did not intend it [my remark] ironically. It means what it says.” At first, her words appear to reflect common sense. Naturally, irony is opposed to straightforward signification; therefore, a close opposite of meaning something ironically is expecting one’s words to mean what they say. Yet in the previous paragraph, she contradicts herself by claiming that her audience has “done [her] the kindness of taking the comparison at face value, that is to say, ironically.” From one sentence to the next, her conception of ironic meaning shifts from “taking something at face value” to words not meaning what they say. But how is it possible for taking something at face value to be the opposite of meaning what one says? Already, the reader has reason to doubt the very claims that she claims to mean. Continuing on, the clever near chiasmus of “[i]t means what it says. I say what

I mean” features a shift in subject from “it” to “I” that goes unexplained. For a woman who has built a career out of carefully chosen words, her casual leap from one axiom to the next cannot be taken lightly; rather, it encourages the reader to approach her with some skepticism. Within the

23 span of ten words, she goes from assuming that a collection of words can be self-identical with its meaning (“it means what it says”), to claiming that she, as an agent possessing language, can shape these words to accurately reflect her meaning (“I say what I mean”).16 While it is certainly possible that by highlighting these contradictions, Coetzee is pointing out the very instability of irony, the character through which he speaks seems to be in earnest.

Of course, the concept of irony has itself been far from immutable. Tracing definitions of irony through the Western tradition that Costello invokes in citing Kafka (as well as the Realist movement, which I will discuss later), one might begin with the irony of Socratic dialogue as captured by Plato, continue on to the “infinite absolute negativity” of Hegel’s German Idealism17 and the “permanent parabasis” of Friedrich Schlegel, and land somewhere near Paul De Man’s assertion that “irony is the permanent parabasis of the allegory of tropes” (De Man 179).18 The term parabasis—which in Greek comedy referred to a point in the play when the actors left the stage and the chorus addressed the audience directly, and which De Man uses to mean the interruption of discourse by a shift in rhetorical register—19 is particularly interesting when juxtaposed against the context in which both Coetzee and Costello are speaking. By interrupting his own discourse at Princeton through the rhetorical move of reading Costello’s story, Coetzee is enacting the very “performative function” that De Man assigns to irony in what is almost a reverse

16 Of course, her utterances also assume that she, as a speaking subject—an “I”—is an independent agent even though the “I” is always constituted by the language it purports to command. 17 Reed Merrill, “‘Infinite Absolute Negativity’: Irony in Socrates, Kierkegaard, and Kafka,” Comparative Literature Studies, vol. 16, no. 13, 1979: 222. 18 De Man’s definition of irony is a revision of Friedrich Schlegel’s designation of it as “permanent parabasis.” 19 De Man: 178.

24 parabasis (De Man 165). Similarly, Costello’s vacillation between different modes of rhetoric (the allegorical conceit of transposing Rotpeter’s “Hohe Herren der Akademie!” to “Ladies and gentlemen,” replaced by the sudden call to literal meaning) signals (ironically) an irony of presentation which she repeatedly denies.

Given these inconsistencies, it is worth examining the remark in question more closely.

The fact that Costello specifically points out one of the most popular allegorical interpretations of

Kafka’s “Ein Bericht für eine Akademie,” only to dismiss it, points to her preference for allegory’s opposite: literal reading. In his chapter “Against Allegory” in J. M. Coetzee and the Ethics of

Reading, Derek Attridge argues for such a literal reading, which he defines as “grounded in the experience of reading as an event” (39). However, while largely convincing, Attridge’s argument—that the reader should treat each encounter with the text as a singular event—suffers from its generality. Even though he does closely examine Coetzee’s animals figures elsewhere, he does not explain how literal reading might function or break down when applied to animal others.20

Though critics have long fluctuated on whether Kafka should or should not be read allegorically,

Costello’s reference to “Kafka’s story of the ape who performs before human beings as an allegory of Kafka the Jew performing for Gentiles” is a deliberate nod to one of the prevailing viewpoints in the mid-twentieth century: that Rotpeter (Red Peter) was a stand-in for Kafka as a Jew.21 By

20 See Derek Attridge, “Age of Bronze, State of Grace,” J. M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading. 21 In Rotpeters Ahnherren: der gelehrte Affe in der deutschen Dichtung (1982), Patrick Bridgwater sums up the critical consensus of the time as such: “Rotpeter ist also Kafka, der Jude, der sich selbst als ‘unrein’ betrachtet” (461). Writing “Kafka’s Ape: Heel or Hero?” in 1962, Leo Weinstein disagrees with this judgment but shows how the leading interpretations of the story since its publication were either as a “satire on man”—which was Max Brod’s opinion—or as “dealing with a Jewish problem: that of the Jew who has forgotten or forsaken his heritage,” a reading first proffered by Heinz Politzer in 1934 (75). Other critics who espoused these allegorical views include William C. Rubinstein and Robert Kauf.

25 claiming that she does not mean the comparison ironically, she seems to reject the primacy of allegorical interpretation—for if Costello can say she feels like Rotpeter without any figurative gymnastics, it follows that perhaps Kafka too is capable of meaning exactly what he says. In reading this same passage in Coetzee, Ido Geiger concludes that “this must mean that we are to read Costello as Costello reads Red Peter. Indeed, it is in this reading and in this reading alone that we find Costello not merely proclaiming her moral imperative or naming the literary corpus it has engendered but fully trying to think her way into the being of another. We are, then, to read her reading her way into Red Peter” (156). While I agree for the most part with Geiger, he does not ask whether it is even possible for Costello to take Rotpeter literally, or unironically—and, by extension, whether it is necessary that Kafka meant him to be taken so—in order for us as readers to take her at her word. Since Kafka’s ape story is distinctly ironic (which is not necessarily to say allegorical), the earnestness with which Costello’s applies a “literal” reading to the story in Lesson

Three strikes one as oddly incongruous. The comparison of herself to Rotpeter, upon which she builds her claim to unironic meaning, is thus a faulty one.

Continuing on in the same lecture, Costello confesses: “like most writers, I have a literal cast of mind, so . . . When Kafka writes about an ape, I take him to be talking in the first place about an ape” (EC 76). And yet, in her very first sentences she refers to Kafka as “the great fabulist” and describes Rotpeter’s story as an “ascent from beast to something approaching man.” In light of the criticism she levels throughout the novel at any kind of top-down hierarchy between humans and animals, her use of the word “ascent” must be understood ironically.22 Likewise, her

22 In fact, just a few pages later she reverses herself and refers to Rotpeter’s transformation as a “descent”: “Red Peter took it upon himself to make the arduous descent from the silence of the beasts to the gabble of reason in the spirit of the scapegoat” (EC 71, emphasis mine). Here, the

26 nonchalant identification of Kafka as a writer of fables seems at odds with her self-proclaimed preference for literal reading.23 It also begs the question of whether she can switch between literal and ironic valences from sentence to sentence within the same lecture—and if so, whether such shifts in rhetorical register render her performance ironic, at least in a Schlegelian or De Manian understanding of the term. Furthermore, the labeling of Kafka’s animal stories as “fables” would seem to go against her plea that animals be taken seriously (and that her audience take her, as an old-woman-animal, literally). As Jacques Derrida points out in The Animal That Therefore I Am,

“We know the history of fabulization and how it remains an anthropomorphic taming, a moralizing subjection, a domestication. Always a discourse of man, on man, indeed on the animality of man, but for and in man” (37). Although he does not provide more details on “the history of fabulization” in this particular work, it is perhaps worth a brief foray into the world of talking animals.

Of all genres, the fable has been most explicitly associated with animals. Because the primary purpose of fables was to communicate moral lessons, they have traditionally been read didactically and allegorically—and not allegorically in the way that Kafka has been read, with many possible readings of his stories clamoring for dominant status, but typically with a single intended interpretation: a one-to-one code, if you will. In Aesop’s Fables, for example, written in ancient Greece between 620 and 564 BCE, each brief animal story ends with an unequivocal lesson. In the famous instance of “The Dog and his Reflection,” a dog carrying a bone sees his

hierarchy is flipped around, with the “silence of the beasts” deemed higher than the human “gabble of reason.” 23 It is also at odds with Kafka’s decision to publish the story as one of “Zwei Tiersgeschichten” in Der Jude—not parables or fables, but stories.

27 reflection in the river and jumps in after the mirror image, losing his bone in the process. The moral of the story is a simple one-liner: “It is very foolish to be greedy.”24

Centuries later, Biblical exegesis would encourage allegorical readings of classical literature alongside the creation of new fables, with the aim of assigning Christian meanings to secular works and natural phenomena. The hugely popular bestiaries of medieval England, with their fable-like descriptions and illustrations of animal meanings and behavior, also provide a fascinating look into the way people viewed their fellow creatures. In his introduction to the MS.

Bodley 764 bestiary, medieval historian Richard Barber explains that “the object of the bestiary is not to document the natural world and to analyse it in order to understand its workings,” but rather

“the edification and instruction of sinful man” and to illuminate “the mystical significance of each creature, as reflected in Holy Scripture” (7). Even the famous, more contemporary fables of La

Fontaine (1694), Charles Perrault (1781), and the brothers Grimm (1812) have enchanted generations of children while keeping the goal of “edification,” whether religious or secular, at their core. We are thus left with a few questions. First, if Kafka is indeed a fabulist, what lessons does Costello believe him to be conveying through his stories? Next, is it possible to call a story a fable and also take it literally? And finally, if Costello does contradict herself by using rhetorical devices such as irony, what implications does that contradiction have for the way we read the four texts at hand—Rotpeter’s/Kafka’s and Costello’s/Coetzee’s? The first two questions I ask simply to provoke the reader into approaching Costello’s claims with greater scrutiny. The third, however,

I will attempt to answer in this chapter.

24 See http://read.gov/aesop/026.html for the original text available in the public domain, accessed 2/13/18.

If allegory is fixed in the idea—for example, the idea that Rotpeter is Kafka the Jew—and literal interpretation fixed in the word, I argue that our understanding of literalism as a tool for reading animals can be extended to the body as well, especially if one accepts the assertion made by some scholars that direct physical experience can act as a counter to the abstract idea.25 Drawing the connection between animal bodies and word bodies, Derrida writes that “the question of the animal response often has as its stakes the letter, the literality of a word, sometimes what the word word means literally” (8). This is all well and good, one might say—but what implications does

Derrida’s enjoinder to respect the literality of animal response have for actual engagement with animals, or for reading animal figures? While a number of scholars have pointed to the possibilities that a philosophy of embodiment26 can open up in terms of ethical engagement with human and nonhuman animals27 in Coetzee and Kafka, I propose that the role of performance and its relationship to the body is vital to the way we understand animal figures in their work.28

25 Lucy Graham, “‘Yes, I Am Giving Him Up’: Sacrificial Responsibility and Likeness with Dogs in JM Coetzee’s Recent Fiction,” Scrutiny2: Issues in English Studies in Southern Africa, vol. 7, no. 1, 2002: 5. 26 See pp. 26-7 of this chapter for a more detailed analysis of theories of embodiment. 27 Though Michael Peterson makes the excellent point that the term “nonhuman animals” ends up putting emphasis on the not-humanness of animals despite its intent to underscore the shared animality of humans and animals, I still believe that the term is helpful in defamiliarizing the word “animal” (34). 28 Una Chaudhuri draws a similar link between embodiment and performance in her article “(De)Facing the Animals: Zoeësis and Performance,” TDR: The Drama Review, vol 51, no. 1, 2007: “The ethical value and urgent need for an approach to animals that is imbued with the traits of performance—embodiment, presence, expressive encounters in shared time-space—is suggested by one of the contemporary classics of animal studies, J.M. Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals (1999), a work that adds generic distortion to the disciplinary disturbances characteristic of this field” (9-10). However, she does not discuss Kafka, which seems to me an oversight given the importance of “Bericht” to The Lives of Animals.

The connection I draw between the linguistic (words) and the physical (bodies) may not at first seem intuitive. However, similarly to how Derrida links animal response [réponse]—with all the ambiguity vested in the word—to the letter, Judith Butler discusses the relationship between language and the body in Excitable Speech (1997). In her analysis of hate speech and the curious ability of words to inflict pain, she combines the “performativity” of J. L. Austin’s speech act theory with Louis Althusser’s theory of the interpellated subject. She shows that both versions of speech-as-action are parallel to, if not overlapping with, the body. “To claim that language injures,”

Butler writes, “or that ‘words wound’ is to combine linguistic and physical vocabularies. The use of a term such as ‘wound’ suggests that language can act in ways that parallel the infliction of physical pain and injury” (Excitable Speech 4). Because there is no vocabulary in the English language to refer specifically to linguistic pain, the language of the body must be used instead.

Furthermore, “[l]anguage sustains the body not by bringing it into being or feeding it in a literal way; rather, it is by being interpellated within the terms of language that a certain social existence of the body first becomes possible” (5). According to Butler, violence is not only not limited to the realm of the physical, but certain functions of the body are only made possible through language.

The question she poses, but does not answer fully, is whether we only use the language of physical violence as a substitute to express linguistic violence in the absence of a specific vocabulary to describe the wounds inflicted by language. In other words, are violent words and physical violence simply analogous, or is there a way in which language can actually cause material injuries? The fact that both Rotpeter and Costello—performing, speaking bodies—keep circling back to their various “wounds” would seem to point to the latter.

Though I am certainly not the first scholar to comment on the “exceptional literary space” created by Coetzee’s mirroring effect, my intervention lies in a careful examination of performance as that which brings these texts and intertexts together. And so, while Geiger is right when he identifies “the significance of the exceptional relation of texts . . . the dizzying mise en abîme down which Coetzee casts us” as “precisely a relation of embeddedness . . . and, more generally, the embeddedness of life in writing” (158), I argue that this embeddedness—closely related to embodiment, which I will discuss further on—is given shape by acts of performance as well as performative acts. Of course, there are many complex layers of performance embedded in this scene alone: on the outside we have Coetzee, bringing to life Costello on stage in his lecture at

Princeton University; then Costello, who herself is lecturing to an academy as she compares herself to Kafka’s ape Rotpeter; and Rotpeter, who is performing in front of another fictional academy but also (by some interpretations) playing Kafka himself.29

Given the centrality of “performance” to this chapter, a brief explanation of the word and how I mean to use it will be helpful. As a noun, as a verb, as an academic discipline (i.e.

“Performance Studies,” or the closely related “Theaterwissenschaft”), the term itself has been subject to diffuse definitions and usages. Summing up the genealogy of an interdisciplinary discipline, Shannon Jackson traces the way “performance” has been understood by various fields and subfields before offering the enigmatic conclusion that “performance is about doing, and it is about seeing; it is about image, embodiment, space, collectivity, and/or orality; it makes community and it breaks community; it repeats endlessly and it never repeats; it is intentional and unintentional, innovative and derivative, more fake and more real” (14-5). While it is true that the

29 See Bridgwater, Weinstein, and Iris Bruce.

31 very overdeterminedness of the word offers a sense of richness that matches the embedded complexity of the ways Kafka and Coetzee both engage with performance, directly and indirectly, it may be useful to provide a few comments on my usage of the word. First of all, the simple etymological gloss that Jackson provides aligns quite well with the theme of this chapter. “The word performance,” she explains, “derives from a Greek root meaning ‘to furnish forth,’ ‘to carry forward,’ ‘to bring into being.’ In this guise, the term foregrounds not only instances of making but also the active and processual aspect of that making” (13). (“Theatre,” by contrast, has its linguistic origins in the visual.) As I will show, the performances analyzed in this chapter are not so much finished products as pieces continually in the making. Moreover, this chapter will explore how the active, verbal (in both senses of the word) nature of performance is closely related to

Walter Benjamin’s concept of mimesis as well as interpretations of Kafka that focus on the theatrical machinery whirring away behind the stage upon which he sets his characters.

Lastly, I would like to distinguish briefly between “performance” and “performativity,” as both terms are essential to my argument. The term performativity stems from Austin’s speech act theory, by which uttered words can either be illocutionary (the words themselves enact the effect, such as in promise-making) or perlocutionary (the words bring about effects, but as a byproduct).30

Other scholars, such as Butler, later expanded the concept of performativity to extend beyond speech acts; most famously, she argued in Gender Trouble (1990) for the performativity not only of gender, but also sex (33). However, an important distinction that Butler felt compelled to draw between the two terms in 1993 is that performativity is involuntary, whereas performance assumes

“will” or “choice”; she further clarifies that “the reduction of performativity to performance would

30 See J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, Harvard University Press, 1975.

32 be a mistake” (qtd. in Jackson 189). I agree with Butler here, but I will also show in my analysis of Kafka’s animals and Coetzee’s animal lovers how the concept of “will” is blurred by the constructed line between humanity and animality, and how certain scenes of performance actually belong more aptly within the realm of performativity.

Before delving into these problems, however, it is important first to understand the origins of Kafka’s ape story in order to appreciate more fully the subtle connections among these texts, authors, and characters. By going through key moments in the history of the educated ape, or gelehrten Affen, my goal is to put into context Kafka’s and Coetzee’s interventions in the debate over the human-animal divide that has long united—and in more recent years, challenged—

Western scientific, literary, and cultural thought. From there, I will examine the concept of embodiment as it has been proposed by Costello, Coetzee, and his critics, including its supposed efficacy in disrupting anthropocentrism and its relationship to “literal” modes of reading. Next, I unpack individual scenes of performance in “Bericht” and Elizabeth Costello, preserving a critical eye for differences between the two lectures—similarly staged—in which Costello refers to

Rotpeter. Finally, I turn to Kafka’s “Ein Hungerkünstler” and read the titular hunger artist as a foil for Rotpeter. Although the two appear on the surface to be opposites—a human taking the stage to perform his humanity, an ape performing his animal nature in front of some crowds and his human nature in front of others—they actually share much in common.

Genealogy of “Ein Bericht für eine Akademie”

“Ein Bericht für eine Akademie” tells the story of a chimpanzee named Rotpeter who is kidnapped from his home in the Gold Coast and brought to Europe by the Hagenbeck Company,

33 which dominated the exotic animal trade in the mid- to late-1800s. Told from his perspective,

Rotpeter’s tale takes the form of a report commissioned by the scientific academy on his life as an ape in Africa. Ironically, he is unable to fulfill this task, as he can no longer remember life before his capture. In lieu of an information-based briefing, then, he recounts the process of his

“acculturation.” (It is unclear whether this report is then presented orally, or only in written form.)

His transformation is a result of discipline administered by the ship’s sailors as he is imprisoned and tortured in transit—for, realizing that his only way out (Ausweg) is to adapt to his circumstances, he begins to imitate the humans around him. He starts with simple things—spitting, smoking—before eventually mastering the difficult task of drinking schnapps, at which point he also utters his first human words. Faced with a choice between becoming a variety show performer or continuing his caged existence in a zoological garden, he “zöger[t] nicht” and emphatically chooses the former (Kafka 331).

In the course of her lecture, Elizabeth Costello attempts to draw a link between “Bericht” and psychologist Wolfgang Köhler’s The Mentality of Apes given the fact that the former appeared three months after the latter. However, her “gesture in the direction of scholarship” is part of a longer dialogue surrounding “Bericht” (EC 71). Though many scholars have speculated

(inconclusively, for the most part) on the origins of Kafka’s famous ape story, it has been established that “Bericht” was not groundbreaking in its subject matter—at least in its broad strokes. In fact, the theme of the gelehrten Affen stretches back centuries. In thirteenth-century art and sculpture, for example, the figure shows up repeatedly—“vor allem an Stellen, wo es sich um eine Travestie des Intellektuellen handelt” (Bridgwater 447). But while apes have long held the fascination of Western society, it was during the Enlightenment that interest in simians gained

34 traction in both popular and academic circles.31 Naturally, given the renewed attention, literary representations of apes began to surge as well as writers capitalized on the public’s attention.

Among these, Rétif de la Bretonne’s Lettre d’un singe aux êtres de son espèce (1781) stands out for a few reasons. For one, it was the first fictional text in European-American literary history to depict an ape exploring the land of homo sapiens rather than the other way around.32 It is also a clear precursor to Kafka’s “Bericht,” with both fictional texts centered around the first- person report of an ape.33 In his letter, de la Bretonne’s unnamed ape critiques human society from an outsider’s perspective and offers reflections on human-animal differences. Chief among these differences, the ape claims, is the way humans and animals perceive death. Describing the animal way of life, he writes: “En effet, ignorer les peines d’esprit, que je commence à connaître, c’est ne les pas sentir, ou ne les sentir qu’à l’instant où elles arrivent. Ignorer la mort, comme je l’ignorais naguère, et comme vous l’ignorez encore, ne voir que l’instant, ne sentir que lui, c’est être immortel” (de la Bretonne 7). With these words, he points out the irony of humankind’s obsession with, and fear of, death. Only animals can be truly immortal, as they cannot ponder death: “Ils sentent le coup, mais non l’attente du coup, plus cruelle que lui, mais non l’humiliation, le dépit, la honte, la haine” (11). Although the ape codes this lack of awareness as positive, his observations appear at first to be firmly rooted in Cartesian thought: animals are little more than machines and,

31 Indeed, in 1713 the Earl of Shaftesbury famously commented on the popularity of the topic, calling apes a “hieroglyph for the universities” (Bridgwater 447). 32 Patrick Bridgwater, “Rotpeters Ahnherren: Der gelehrte Affe in der deutschen Dichtung,” Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte, vol. 56, 1982: 449. 33 Unlike the version of “Ein Bericht für eine Akademie” published during Kafka’s lifetime, however, de la Bretonne’s titular letter is bookended by comments from a fictional editor, thus adding another layer of metafiction.

35 as Martin Heidegger will later claim, cannot die, but rather perish.34 Taking these comments at face value, one would be tempted to attribute these opinions to the narrator. However, as the story develops, so does the reader’s perception of its philosophical stance. After decrying human cruelty for many pages, the letter-writing ape declares: “L’homme, mes frères, l’homme qui nous domine tous, est un ridicule animal!” (14) With these words, he inverts Descartes’ claim that man is a rational animal, labeling him instead a ridiculous animal. From this story, we can see that normative hierarchical relations between human and nonhuman animals were already being questioned in 1781 by way of authors imagining themselves into the mind of an ape.

If curiosity about apes was already in vogue in eighteenth-century Europe, the 1800s ushered in a veritable explosion of interest among scientists, philosophers, and artists, as well as the general public. The publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species in 1859 and The

Descent of Man in 1871 only fueled the ongoing debate over mankind’s provenance. Were humans truly descended from apes? And if so, how were they different from the “livestock, the creatures that move along the ground, and the wild animals” supposedly created by God on the sixth day?35

For some, the epistemological break exemplified by (and in some respects, caused by) Darwin’s theories brought with it a new energy and excitement; others experienced it with anxiety. As a

34 In Aporias, Heidegger writes: “Then again, we can only determine the animality of the animal if we are clear about what constitutes the living character of a living being, as distinct from the non-living being [im Unterschied zum Leblosen] which does not even have the possibility of dying [das nicht einmal die Möglichkeit hat zu sterben]. A stone cannot be dead because it is never alive [Ein Stein kann nicht tot sein, weil er nicht lebt]” (qtd. in Derrida, 154). In the unpublished “The Glass Abattoir,” Coetzee’s Costello also devotes much thought to Heidegger’s views on animals. One of the pieces that she sends John is entitled “Heidegger” and begins as follows: “Concerning animals, Heidegger observes that their access to the world is limited or deprived. The German word he uses is arm, poor. Their access is not just poor in comparison with ours, it is absolutely poor” (see footnotes 1 and 2). 35 Genesis 1:24 (NIV).

36 result of the popularization of evolutionary science catalyzed by Darwin, literature about apes and evolution became even more ubiquitous36—to the extent that, as Hanna Engelmeier suggests, in the early years of his reception (1860s) more people read popular fiction about apes and evolution than read Darwin himself.37 But if his work forever changed the way that scientists interpret our physical environment, it also had enormous implications for religion, anthropology, philosophy, and aesthetic theory.

Of particular relevance to this study are Darwin’s observations on the drive to imitate in animals, as the problem of imitation versus mimesis has long animated the conversation surrounding who (or what) is capable of creating art. Furthermore, the negative association of apes with imitation stretches back centuries—as reflected in the pejoratively connoted verb “to ape” (in

German, nachäffen). It is true that Darwin associated imitation with beings of a “lower order”; he often pointed out that “microcephalous idiots” love to imitate anyone and anything (46), that “the principle of Imitation is strong in man, and especially . . . with savages” (93), and that women are particularly adept at imitation (629). Nevertheless, given the question of where mimicry ends and mimesis begins—contested over the years by philosophers such as Plato, Aristotle, Schlegel, and

36 For example, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s “Green Tea” (1872), Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s Diderot in Petersburg (1873), Wilhelm Busch’s Fipps, der Affe (1879), and Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886). Horst-Jürgen Gerigk argues that von Sacher-Masoch’s book influenced Kafka in his writing of “Bericht” (Gerigk 17). 37 In Der Mensch, der Affe: Anthropologie und Darwin-Rezeption 1850-1900 (Böhlau, 2016), Hanna Engelmeier meticulously examines the figure of the ape through the lens of Darwin reception. Of literature, she writes: “Eine zweite Voraussetzung für den Erfolg der Abstammungsthese beruht auf dem Umstand, dass sie von Autoren aufgegriffen wurde, die populärwissenschaftlich schrieben und damit den Zugriff der Literatur und Kunst auf ihre Anliegen vereinfachten. Von diesen Autoren erfuhren in den ersten Jahren der Darwin-Rezeption (und vermutlich auch danach) mehr Leserinnen und Leser von den möglichen Implikationen der Evolutionstheorie als von Darwin selbst” (13).

Eric Auerbach—his enumeration of the extraordinary ways animals (including human animals) imitate in nature provided potential for renegotiating the human-animal border.

Critical responses to Darwin began in Germany in 1860 with the first German translation of On the Origin of Species.38 For example, Margot Norris argues that his influence can be seen in the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, who in turn has been said to have influenced Kafka. In her view, “as the author of a theory of imitation that reverses the Aristotelian aesthetic by showing life itself to be mimetic under certain condition,” Darwin played an important role in shaping

Nietzsche’s attitude toward imitation and mimesis (Norris 1232).39 By explaining how certain animals, such as insects, frequently use imitation as a method of self-defense, Darwin showed that

“imitation belongs to the realm of nature rather than culture, to the inhuman as well as the human

. . . that its teleology might be political rather than aesthetic, and that it may serve as a pivot of historical change,” all “implications [which] inform a radical revaluation of mimesis and theater in the works of Friedrich Nietzsche and Franz Kafka” (1233). Norris then goes on to trace the

“mimeophobia” that she perceives in Nietzsche through to Kafka and his ape story in particular— though whether this is a fair assessment or not, I will discuss further on (1243).

Attitudes toward imitation and mimesis—including the debate over whether they are the same or opposites40—are important to this chapter in several ways. First of all, many scholars have

38 Engelmeier: 8. 39 Engelmeier points out that “Nietzsche unterschied das Nachäffen vom Nachahmen, um Letzteres als Teil seiner Anthropologiekritik zu verwenden, die den Menschen nur dann retten kann, wenn sie ihn zum Tier-Werden auffordert und ermutigt” (25). 40 Though there has never been a consensus on the difference between imitation (sometimes called mimicry) and mimesis, Graham Huggan offers a useful working definition of each: “In mimicry, the dominant function is that of mischievous imitation—the kind of imitation that pays an ironic homage to its object. Mimesis . . . usually refers to a wider process of representation

38 read stories of gelehrten Affen as allegories about the relationship between imitation and mimesis, as well as between the artist and the fraud. Secondly, the dualism imitation/mimesis has often been mapped onto others, such as animal/human, nature/culture, African/European.41 Moreover—and the stakes of this line of questioning will become clearer—both terms are interdependent with the idea of the authentic. By tracing imitation and mimesis through ape stories, as well as stories that reference ape stories, my aim is to show how the evolution of aesthetic philosophy can be seen in the works of literature I examine. Although aesthetics is not the focus of this chapter, it is important to understand the discussion that Kafka is joining—and by extension, Costello and Coetzee—in order to appreciate the ways in which they play and often break with preceding tropes and traditions. Moreover, I argue that in an increasingly industrializing/industrialized world, it is in animal stories such as “Bericht” that the dualisms mentioned above, including the literal/allegorical, begin to lose their meaning and power.

With this goal in mind, I turn to another predecessor of Kafka’s ape story, E. T. A.

Hoffmann’s “Nachricht von einem gebildeten jungen Mann.” Published in 1814 as part of the musical collection Kreisleriana, the story has many similarities with de la Bretonne’s Lettre d’un singe, including its pre-Darwinian stance towards animals. Like Kafka’s “Bericht,” “Nachricht” is told from the perspective of a named ape narrator; however, as in Lettre d’un singe, the ape Milo’s narration takes the form of a letter to another ape. But whereas de la Bretonne’s unnamed ape uses his letter to critique humankind, Milo’s concerns are much more narcissistic (and Hoffmann’s tone satirical). Like Rotpeter, Milo briefly explains the circumstances of his capture; however, his tale

that involves the mediation between different worlds and people—in essence, between different symbolic systems” (“(Post)Colonialism, Anthropology, and the Magic of Mimesis” 94). 41 See Engelmeier: 17, 38.

39 is less about survival than artistic cultivation, or Bildung (a word that appears twelve times in various forms in the course of the brief text). His continual boasts of having achieved more in science and culture than his human counterparts are peppered with allusions to the secret of his success: his drive to imitate. “Jener Nachahmungstrieb,” he says, “der unserm Geschlecht eigen und der ganz ungerechterweise von den Menschen so oft belacht wird, ist nichts weiter als der unwiderstehliche Drang, nicht sowohl Kultur zu erlangen als die uns schon inwohnende zu zeigen.

Dasselbe Prinzip ist bei den Menschen längst angenommen, und die wahrhaft Weisen, denen ich immer nachgestrebt, machen es in folgender Art” (Hoffmann 422). Yet unlike Costello, Milo does not implore his audience to take him at his word; nor does Hoffmann ask his readers to take him at his. The general critical consensus on “Nachricht” has been that its author is not in fact going back on centuries of “mimeophobia” and promoting aesthetic windbaggery, but is rather critiquing the artistic culture of his time.42 So when Patrick Bridgwater asserts that the story’s “Thematik ist nämlich nicht so sehr der Affe als Künstler, als vielmehr der Künstler als Affe,” his inverted interpretation of the artist as ape, rather than the ape as artist, reflects the broader trend of reading stories about gelehrten Affen allegorically (452).

Although Hoffmann’s story has many outward similarities with Kafka’s “Bericht,” perhaps the most conspicuous difference between the two is the former’s grim portrayal of the body as a

42 Despite his self-stated decision not to write about allegorical apes in Der Mensch als Affe, Gerigk sees Milo as pure metaphor and refers to the story as a “Satire” (40): “Das ‘Schreiben Milos’ hat seine Eigenart darin, zugleich als fingiertes Schreiben eines naiven Verfassers und als reales Schreiben eines reflektierten Verfassers zu uns zu sprechen. Der naive Verfasser ist der gebildete junge Mann, der ja von seiner Verfasserschaft gar nichts weiß und als realisierte Metapher vor uns hintritt; der reflektierte Verfasser ist der Kapellmeister Kreisler, der uns mitteilt, was er sieht, indem er einen eitlen Affen zum Sprechen, oder besser: zum Schreiben bringt . . . Kreislers Pointe ist eindeutig: Das wahre Ideal des herrschenden Kulturzustands ist der gelehrige eitle Affe” (36, emphasis mine).

40 site of suffering, rather than limitless potential. Whereas Milo vaunts “die etwas länglichen Finger, welche [ihm] die Natur verliehen” and with which he can outplay any human on the piano

(Hoffmann 424), Rotpeter describes his cage on board the Hagenbeck ship with characteristic matter-of-factness: “Das Ganze war zu niedrig zum Aufrechtstehen und zu schmal zum

Niedersitzen. Ich hockte deshalb mit eingebogenen, ewig zitternden Knien, und zwar . . . zur Kiste gewendet, während sich mir hinten die Gitterstäbe ins Fleisch einschnitten” (Kafka 325). In a similar way, Milo’s exultant question—“Hat diese Gefangenschaft uns nicht die größte Freiheit gegeben?” (Hoffmann 421)—finds its own inverted mirror in Rotpeter’s reflections on freedom.

Explaining his mental and emotional state in captivity, he clarifies: “Ich sage absichtlich nicht

Freiheit . . . Als Affe kannte ich es vielleicht und ich habe Menschen kennen gelernt, die sich danach sehnen . . . Nein, Freiheit wollte ich nicht. Nur einen Ausweg” (Kafka 326). Despite the fact that Hoffmann and Kafka write about similar subjects, using similar catchwords (“Freiheit,”

“Bildung,” “Urteil”), the ideological chasm separating Milo from Rotpeter, infinite possibility from caged escape is due in part to the fact that the two texts are separated by over a century. Milo is clearly the product of Romanticism, whereas Rotpeter is arguably a subject of Modernism.

In tracking the figure of the ape in his (always his) process of civilization through these literary and scientific examples, it becomes clear that Kafka’s “Bericht” occupies a threshold position within the history of the gelehrten Affen. On the one hand, Kafka is clearly adding his voice to the chorus of those who came before him, interacting with and building on stories such as de la Bretonne’s Lettre d’un singe and Hoffmann’s “Nachricht.” Heralding the new century,

Rotpeter is the logical next step in the evolution of the literary ape, a Milo version 2.0 in a world forever changed by scientific and technological innovation. Yet Kafka’s story also represents a

41 break in the historical chain of apes, ape-men, and men-as-apes.43 Whereas Hoffmann’s pre-

Darwinian story uses allegory to critique imitation parading as mimesis, Kafka’s “Bericht” operates within a society in which the difference between humans and animals has become one of degree, and the difference between imitation and mimesis has ceased to matter. Benjamin seems to perceive this subtle shift when he points to “die wachsende Hinfälligkeit des mimetischen

Vermögens” and observes that “offenbar enthält die Merkwelt des modernen Menschen von jenen magischen Korrespondenzen und Analogien, welche den alten Völkern geläufig waren, nur noch geringe Rückstände. Die Frage ist, ob es sich dabei um den Verfall dieses Vermögens oder aber um dessen Transformierung handelt” (97). Benjamin’s conception of the mimetic faculty (as mimetisches Vermögen has usually been translated)44 is not commensurate with the soulless aping of Plato’s or Nietzsche’s; rather, it can be understand more loosely as the human imagination’s drive to perceive similarities in all things, whether people, objects, or ideas. If the magic of language lies in imagination, however, the other, more prosaic side of language is its semiotic function. For Benjamin, the dwindling of magic is thus linked to the failure of imagination that has accompanied the modern age, and his philosophy is “guided by a large-scale theory about the changed structure of experience (Erfahrung) and perception” (Hanssen 55).

Blair Ogden provides evidence that child psychologist Heinz Werner, whose work

Benjamin read in the 1930s, was instrumental in shaping Benjamin’s understanding of the

43 Engelmeier also sees the publication of Sigmund Freud’s Traumdeutung in 1900 as a monumental moment: man is “nichts anderes und nichts besseres als die Tiere, er ist selbst aus der Tierreihe hervorgegangen…” (qtd. in Engelmeier 19) Although the debate over evolutionary theory did not end in 1900, she argues that it was at that point where anthropologists split off. 44 Blair Ogden argues that despite the fact that “Vermögen” in Kant is also translated as “faculty,” “force” or “capacity” better reflects the historical dynamism of Benjamin’s use of the term (57).

“mimetic faculty” (Ogden 58). He argues that in his work on Gestalt psychology, Werner turned from a conception of mimesis as representation towards one of mimesis as expression. In the mimetic act, meaning and appearance coincide in a totality. This is why he (and later Benjamin) turned to the word “physiognomy” to describe this synthesis of emotional expression and physical features as found in the face (58-9). Ogden asserts that for both Werner and Benjamin, “[m]imesis is always to be understood as an activity, a point of conversion between perception and praxis”

(60). In other words, Benjamin views the mimetic faculty as a thing to be exercised, not just possessed, and thus always active. However, I would like to expand on this point and suggest the following: that mimesis in the modern age can be seen as a melding of form and practice, appearance and emotion, that is perhaps best encapsulated by performance—for example, in

Coetzee’s breaking of novelistic and academic forms in his unorthodox lectures at Princeton.

Writing his own way into modernity, Kafka poses a similar question to readers with his story of an ape who learns to be human by mimicking his captors, and whose drive to survive outweighs all else. Because Kafka clearly takes up and coopts the story of the gelehrten Affen as popularized by the likes of de la Bretonne and Hoffmann, who seem to use the trope to comment on aesthetic philosophy, are we to understand Rotpeter’s transformation as a commentary on the death or transformation of mimesis? Or have we moved beyond such terminology and into uncharted territory? It seems to me that this question of transformation—or metamorphosis, if you will—is in fact vital to Kafka’s ape story, and perhaps to his oeuvre as a whole.

Erica Weitzman does not address this question explicitly, but she does identify performance and theatricality as key to Kafka’s work (102). In her chapter “Slap Happy: Comic

Kafka,” she points out that “what is at stake in Kafka’s novels (perhaps most of all in the novels)

43 is a laying bare—and occasionally, as in the extreme case of ‘In the Penal Colony,’ a dismantling— of the machinery of theatricality/ritual itself” (106). If Benjamin’s perception of a decline in the mimetic faculty is linked to the disappearance of magic from the world, is there a way in which we can read Rotpeter’s transformation (and performance of said transformation) as a mimesis that has been stripped down to its bare bones? Though Kafka seems to depict a world that has not been entirely deprived of magic (the mimetic faculty’s former reliance on imagination), what magic is left functions only to reveal the monstrous “machinery” that takes place behind the curtains. Thus we do not learn much about Rotpeter’s present life (the finished product) or his life in Africa, which was meant to be the subject of his report, but rather about the process of his transformation.45

Although Rotpeter does provide a sketch of the events surrounding his capture, these are not his own recollections; they are instead a reconstruction cobbled together from “fremde Berichte”

(Kafka 323). It is no coincidence that his first true memory is of a cage—the human machinery designed to break and contain him. He narrates: “Nach jenen Schüssen erwachte ich – und hier beginnt allmählich meine eigene Erinnerung – in einem Käfig im Zwischendeck des

Hagenbeckschen Dampfers. Es war kein vierwandiger Gitterkäfig; vielmehr waren nur drei Wände an einer Kiste festgemacht; die Kiste also bildete die vierte Wand” (324). More memorable than his former home or the gunshots themselves is the exact configuration of the technology used to break him, turning him into a docile, trainable body. Furthermore, the halting syntactic rhythm of this description (semicolons are rarely used in the German language) renders the memory all the more striking. This is not the florid language of Milo, whose first words are full of feeling: “Mit

45 In her analysis of Kafka’s “Naturtheater von Oklahoma,” Weitzman writes that “such emphasis on process over product is to be found in the vast majority of Kafka’s works” (103).

44 einer Art von Entsetzen denke ich noch an die unglückselige Zeit, als ich Dir, geliebte Freundin, die zärtlichsten Gesinnungen meines Herzen nicht anders, als durch unschickliche, jedem

Gebildeten unverständliche Laute auszudrücken vermochte” (Hoffmann 419). In juxtaposing these two moments, it is evident that Kafka has left the language of Romanticism far behind.

This is one of the points that Costello implicitly makes in Lesson One of Elizabeth Costello.

In this first lesson, Costello addresses another academic audience with a lecture called “What is

Realism?” Though I will discuss further on her references to Rotpeter in this lecture and how they differ from the Urszene with which I started, for the moment I would like to draw attention to her frenzied conclusion. Pointing out the many possible, at times competing interpretations of

“Bericht,” she laments: “There used to be a time when we knew. We used to believe that when the text said, ‘On the table stood a glass of water,’ there was indeed a table, and a glass of water on it, and we had only to look in the word-mirror of the text to see them. But all that has ended. The word-mirror is broken, irreparably, it seems . . . The words on the page will no longer stand up and be counted, each proclaiming ‘I mean what I mean!’” (EC 18) In light of the fact that stories about the gelehrten Affen written before and after Darwin reflect an epistemic shift (the allegorical becoming more literal, the “animal” becoming more “human”), is there a way in which we can read Elizabeth Costello as signaling another break? I would sum up the point of Costello’s lecture as the following: that we are experiencing a crisis of epistemology, and that this crisis is rooted in language. For language, Benjamin writes, “wäre . . . die höchste Stufe des mimetischen

Verhaltens,” but it is “ein Medium, in welches ohne Rest die früheren Kräfte mimetischer

Hervorbringung und Auffassung hineingewandert sind, bis sie soweit gelangten, die der Magie zu liquidieren” (99). If Kafka is describing a realm in which old categories of nature and culture have

45 become radically unstable, and where life is experienced as serial observations punctuated by halting semicolons, then it seems that by presenting readers with a character so paradoxically concerned with meaning what she says, Coetzee is writing on behalf of a humanity that has lost belief in that final quality that set it apart from the animals: language.

Reading beyond language: embodiment and performance

Those who read “Bericht” “as an allegory of Kafka the Jew performing for Gentiles,” to borrow Costello’s words, do so not without reason. After all, the story was published in Martin

Buber’s monthly magazine Der Jude in 1917, not long after a period when Kafka was exploring an interest in Jewish education and theater.46 However, like Derek Attridge, who writes “against allegory” while acknowledging that the allegorical reading of literature has a place and purpose, I endeavor to approach the text from a more “literal” perspective. After establishing the self- reflexive nature of Coetzee’s work, with its many references to the writing process itself, Attridge asks “what happens if we resist the allegorical reading that the novels seem half to solicit, half to problematize, and take them, as it were, at their word. Is it possible to read or discuss them without looking for allegorical meanings, and if one were to succeed in this enterprise would one have emptied them of whatever political or ethical significance they might possess?” (35, emphasis mine) Far from stripping literary texts of their political or ethical significance, I believe that reading beyond allegory can help to sharpen our understanding of what the ethical is. Keeping this in mind, my argument has two parts. First, I argue that when it comes to animals, the so-called “literal”

46 See Rainer Stach, “Actors, Zionists, Wild People,” Kafka: The Decisive Years, S. Fischer Verlag, 2005: 54-70.

46 reading that Attridge proposes is not just an alternative interpretive strategy, but a necessary part of interrupting the tradition that for millennia has “tr[ied] to find an idea in the animal” (EC 96).

Secondly, I argue that just as letters make up the words that allow for signification, physical bodies, their movements, and responses make up the gestural language used by all creatures to communicate meaning. To read literally, to take a creature at its word, therefore requires scrutinizing not just the letter, but also the body. As Martin Puchner convincingly argues, viewing these texts from the perspective of theater can illuminate the connection between language and bodies. Writing against the tradition by which animals are placed outside language, he contends that “expanding the notion of language to include embodied communication opens up a domain somewhere between mimesis and gesture” (28). It is thus no coincidence that Costello’s references to Rotpeter are centered around the performing body; like Rotpeter, she is “an animal exhibiting, yet not exhibiting, to a gathering of scholars, a wound” (EC 71).

As I noted earlier, a number of scholars have argued that the body, along with the state and act of embodiment, is key to understanding the frequent references to animals and appearance of animal figures in Coetzee’s work. Some, like Anat Pick, have assigned salvific properties to it, arguing that embodiment can act as a “powerful antidote to anthropocentrism” (6). Others have approached the topic with less optimistic language, instead focusing on the bodily suffering and vulnerability to which both human and nonhuman animals are subject.47 In her article on Elizabeth

Costello, for example, Elizabeth Anker lays out a vision of embodiment that distinguishes itself from the philosophies of thinkers such as Derrida and Emmanuel Levinas who see animals as

47 In the introduction to Thinking Animals: Why Animal Studies Now?, Kari Weil explains how Derrida, Donna Haraway, and Cora Diamond all show how any animal ethics must grow out of bodily vulnerability (xxii).

47 either signs of radical alterity or as testing grounds for the limits of ethical response. To her, embodiment is cutting existence down to that which we share with animals: our mutual “corporeal woundedness” (Anker 170). Furthermore, she draws a connecting line between embodiment and affect via the philosophy of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, showing how affect is deeply rooted in the body’s physical response. Both human and nonhuman animals are “embodied souls,” as Costello puts it,48 and the shared experience of suffering can offer a new, defamiliarizing lens through which to examine the human-animal relationship.

Donna Haraway approaches this concept of sharing in more concrete terms in When

Species Meet, employing the phrase “bodily webbed mortal earthly being and becoming” to flesh out what an ethical, “webbed” (similar to Geiger’s “embedded”) relationship between scientist and laboratory animal might look like (72). While she refers to Coetzee’s Disgrace (1999) to illustrate several points, her examples extend beyond the literary: “the sense of sharing [she is] trying to think about is both epistemological and practical.”49 Likewise, Lucy Graham examines Disgrace in terms of the mostly exploitative relationships the protagonist, David Lurie, has with dogs and women. Writing at the nexus of feminism and critical animal studies, she reads a “potentially

48 See Louis Tremaine, “The Embodied Soul: Animal Being in the Work of J. M. Coetzee,” Contemporary Literature, vol. 44, no. 4, 2003: 596. 49 Haraway’s work distinguishes itself from that of many of these scholars in that her questions about animal ethics do not remain constrained to the pages of literature or theory. She asks: “What happens if we do not regard or treat lab animals as victims, or as other to the human, or relate to their suffering and deaths as sacrifice? What happens if experimental animals are not mechanical substitutes but significantly unfree partners, whose differences and similarities to human beings, to one another, and to other organisms are crucial to the work of the lab and, indeed, are partly constructed by the work of the lab? What happens if the working animals are significant others with whom we are in consequential relationship in an irreducible world of embodied and lived partial differences, rather than the Other across the gulf from the One” (72) While her questions vary in abstractness, she supports them with examples of real animals and real laboratory experiments.

48 radical political agenda in his [Coetzee’s] latest fiction” (4): namely, she believes he “proposes that the body, with its frailty and suffering, is a counter to the endless scepticism that is a feature of both secular confession and textual analysis” (6). Extrapolating from these accounts, then,

Coetzee—like Kafka, and unlike Hoffmann—identifies vulnerability, not possibility, as the mutual language of human- and animal-kind. However, I go a step further than these scholars in proposing that for Coetzee, it is not only the body or site of injury that can act as a portal between humans and the rest of the animal kingdom, but the body as a vehicle for, and product of, performance.

In the context of actual stage performances involving actual animal actors, Michael

Peterson asks some questions that help to frame my more literary (if not literal) argument. His work focuses on what he calls the “animal apparatus,” or the machinery of technology and training behind animal performances—a machinery which I have established above as instrumental to reading Kafka. Whereas apparatus theory in general “insists on the importance of the physical, technical infrastructure,” the animal apparatus “asks how nonhuman animals are made part of the means of theatrical production, but also how performance can produce the concepts of ‘animal’ or ‘animality’” (34, emphasis mine). He argues that in fora such as circuses, the dancing, hat- wearing bears and balancing elephants serve to reinforce the human spectators’ sense of superiority in the face of the superficially humanized animals (superficially, because as he argues, these performances are actually dehumanizing) (42). With Peterson’s question in mind, then, I argue that both Rotpeter and Costello produce concepts of animality and humanity through their performances—though whether these concepts are more different than similar remains an open question.

Failed performances: Hagenbeck’s “people shows”

While literary critics have tended to favor reading Kafka’s “Bericht” as an allegory for the author’s Jewishness, other disciplines have had their own favored allegorical readings. Historian

Nigel Rothfels has approached the story as an allegory for, and commentary on, the exotic animal trade. Upon first glance, this reading has more textual support than the former. Whereas Kafka does not mention Judaism at all in the ape story, he does refer explicitly to Carl Hagenbeck, the

German businessman who dominated the nineteenth-century exotic animal trade.50 He has also been widely accepted as the father of the modern zoo, with its glass enclosures and simulated habitats geared more towards assuaging the spectators’ scruples about the animals’ quality of life than towards actual humane treatment. Shifting the discussion from art to history, Rothfels writes that “[w]hile admittedly it is the general theme of the relation between art and freedom which drives the narrative of this story—a theme taken up again by Kafka in such other animal works from the early 1920s as ‘Josephine the Singer,’ ‘The Burrow,’ and ‘Investigations of a Dog’—it is important to remember that in ‘A Report’ Kafka is also, in fact, discussing the capture, transport, and exhibition of exotic animals” (45). In his book Savages and Beasts: The Birth of the Modern

Zoo, Rothfels thus acknowledges and accepts the literary tradition of reading Kafka’s animal stories allegorically while making a different point. As a historian, the purpose of his frequent references to Rotpeter is to shed light on Hagenbeck’s legacy and a particular historical moment rather than to evaluate the text as a literary object. Nevertheless, his work is helpful in contextualizing “Bericht” and providing a fresh angle from which to interpret it. But where

50 Rotpeter is caught on “Eine Jagdexpedition der Firma Hagenbeck” (Kafka 323) and is kept “in einem Käfig im Zwischendeck des Hagenbeckschen Dampfers” (324).

Rothfels primarily uses Kafka’s ape story as a cultural anecdote for the nineteenth-century exotic animal trade, I believe that his analysis of the rise and fall of “people shows” in Europe can also apply to the way we read scenes of performance.

As the animal trade slowed in the mid-1870s, the Hagenbeck Company attempted to grow their business by displaying “primitive” (i.e. non-Western) humans in “people shows” (Rothfels

81). Capitalizing on the public’s growing curiosity about animal species and human races, galvanized in part by the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species in 1859 (111),

Hagenbeck marketed the shows as offering a “true copy of life in nature” (87).51 Over the course of “ten short years, Hagenbeck’s ‘people shows’ had developed from a small ‘Lapland’ exhibit presented in the back court of the Hagenbeck property in Hamburg to huge productions touring all the major cities of Europe and patronized by hundreds of thousands of visitors” (86). But this boom was not to last. Once the novelty wore off, spectators mainly complained that the “primitives” did not behave as expected. Indeed, the time spent in transit put many “natives” on “a disappointing process of ‘civilizing’” (89). Moreover, “[t]he ‘savages’ themselves ceased to exist when the indigenous people in the exhibits refused to play their roles” (194, emphasis mine). To sum up

Rothfels’ research, the “people shows” ultimately failed when Hagenbeck could no longer find

“genuine natives” willing to come back to Europe who fit the public’s expectations of nativeness

(143). Of course, the fabulous irony of this situation lies in the fact that the spectators desired the

51 Other types of people shows were also popular at the time, though they often erred on the side of being “freak shows” rather than “nature shows.” For example, Engelmeier details the fascination with “Affenmenschen” in nineteenth-century Europe. Black microcephalous men were trained to perform as apes and called “nondescript” instead of “negroes” (132). A particularly fascinating case study of hers is Krao the “Affenmädchen,” a woman covered in hair but with “normal” cognitive function, who was paraded around zoos and aquariums (132-3).

51 sheen of “authenticity” over authenticity itself—as can be seen in the relative success of shows where “natives” were trained like actors to deliver a curated image. In other words, the illusion of authenticity demanded by the “people shows” relied on a performance of authenticity rather than authenticity itself.

The slowdown in business was thus due in large part to the fact that the Hagenbeck

Company could not deliver on its double promise to offer a “true copy of life in nature”: first, that its rendition would be faithful to the original; and second, that this copy could somehow still reflect a higher truth. Even if the public was aware of the paradox contained in their desire to see this

“true copy,” it had little effect in tempering their disappointment. Although these events took place slightly before the proliferation of mass media technologies at the turn of the century, the reason behind the company’s failure was nonetheless prescient, reflecting a shift in attitudes towards imitation and mimesis (discussed above) as well as towards concepts/constructs such as

“authenticity” and “originality.” In much the same way as Benjamin noted a change that had taken place in the mimetic faculty in his 1934 essay “Über das mimetische Vermögen,” he also concerned himself with these questions in “Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen

Reproduzierbarkeit,” written shortly after in 1935. Despite the fact that his focus in this essay is on art—in particular, the impact of film and photography on known aesthetic categories—his observations are deeply pertinent to the matter of “authentic performance” at hand in Kafka’s

“Bericht,” Costello’s lectures, and Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello. As Jackson shows, the historical relationship between performance and authenticity has been just as fraught as (inter)disciplinary understandings of what performance itself is and does. To some, theatre (not quite the same as performance, but certainly related) is associated with the Platonic devaluation of imitation and

“derivative conformity,” while for others, theatre is “authentic” and “real”—especially in contrast to the “presumably ‘less real’ practice of scholarly research” (14-5).52

Approaching the problem from a different angle, Benjamin perceived that in the modern age, when records, images, and films are subject to mass reproduction, the historically tight bond between terms such as the original/copy and authenticity has loosened.53 Just as Darwin’s theories sapped supposedly antithetical categories such as human/animal of some of their power, Benjamin does not so much weigh into the debate over the value of art that is “imitative” versus “original,” but rather changes the terms of the debate. In his words: “Von der photographischen Platte z. B. ist eine Vielheit von Abzügen möglich; die Frage nach dem echten Abzug hat keinen Sinn. In dem

Augenblick aber, da der Maßstab der Echtheit an der Kunstproduktion versagt, hat sich die gesamte soziale Funktion der Kunst umgewälzt. An die Stelle ihrer Fundierung aufs Ritual hat ihre

Fundierung auf eine andere Praxis zu treten: nämlich ihre Fundierung auf Politik” (Gesammelte

Schriften VII 57, original emphasis). By the 1930s, Benjamin would connect the waning importance of authenticity to a shift in art’s social function: the social ritual would become

52 Jackson’s helpful summation, in full, reads: “Some theorists, spurred by recent cultural theory, link performance to innovative realms of creation and resistance; others, reproducing new versions of older Platonic condemnations, link performance to derivative realms of conformity and tertiary imitation. Finally, the occupants of many theatre departments use a language of the actual, the real, and the authentic to distinguish their practices of artistic production from a presumably ‘less real’ practice of scholarly research. Their rhetoric contrasts starkly, sometimes obliviously, with the long-held assumptions of theatre’s fakery, artifice, and inauthenticity that still circulate in most other wings of the university.” (14-5). 53 A genealogy of “authenticity” and “originality” would be helpful here. To name a few of the more influential thinkers on the value and meaning of authenticity, Plato reveals in Chapter 10 of The Republic his mistrust for art due to its tendency to imitate without any requirement of knowledge of the thing itself. By contrast, centuries later Denis Diderot defends the actor’s right to imitate for the sake of performance as an art in “The Paradox of Acting” (1820) by arguing that avoiding originality and spontaneity guarantees more consistency.

53 political. During the mid-1870s, however, the demand for a “ritual” of authenticity was still alive and well, creating lasting problems for Hagenbeck’s “people shows.”

While the “natives” conscripted by the Hagenbeck Company, like Rotpeter, quickly adapted to new manners, tastes, and technologies, their continued survival in this new world depended on how well they performed the role given to them. In the case of the “people shows,” this was often the role of the noble savage; for Rotpeter, it means being asked to perform his apishness in front of the academy while playing up his humanness on stage at the variety show; and though Costello “has been invited to Appleton to speak on any subject she elects,” she has chosen not to speak on the topic for which she is known, even though her son John implies to the reader that her audience does not really want to hear about animals (EC 60). Yet in all three cases, failure to perform the desired role does not necessarily translate into a failed performance. In fact,

I argue that it is in the act of failure—in the interstices of what is expected and what is performed, the authentic and the mimetic—that both Kafka and Coetzee point to the very constructedness of what it means to “be human” or “be animal.”

Rotpeter cannot deliver on the academy’s request “einen Bericht über [s]ein äffisches

Vorleben einzureichen” because their “Affentum . . . kann [i]hnen nicht ferner sein als [ihm] das

[s]eine” (Kafka 322-3). (At least, that is his claim.) Although Lessons One and Three of Elizabeth

Costello (in which the title character invokes Rotpeter) are focalized through her son John, she too appears to know that she goes against her audience’s will and expectations in her choice of lecture subject. What I have referred to above as failed performances, however, Martin Puchner calls

“negative mimesis” (21). He argues that Elizabeth Costello and “Bericht” have a “common project: showing how our understanding of the human depends on our conceptions of animals.” In his

54 view, both Kafka and Coetzee resist the “anthropological machine” as conceived by Giorgio

Agamben, by which “the outside is produced through the exclusion of an inside and the inhuman produced by animalizing the human” (Agamben 37). The performances of Rotpeter and Coetzee- as-Costello can be seen as negative mimesis because they “invert the perspective of representation; they mark the gap between humans and animals; they demonstrate the extent to which the very distinction between humans and animals is the product of projection and representation” (21).

Reversing the formula by which animals are only capable of mimicry, not mimesis, Puchner’s concept of “negative mimesis thus names a critique of anthropocentrism as it occurs in the sphere of theatre and performance, initiating a displacement or decentering of the human.” Going a step beyond proponents of embodiment such as Tremaine and Graham, Puchner writes that “it is as if the question of embodiment and sympathy, like the question of the animal more generally, was yearning to break out of the domain of literature and thus of human language and into the domain of theatre and performance” (28). The theater is an ideal place to challenge the “dividing line between the animal and the human,” he argues, because of “its dependence on nonverbal, physical communication, on an expressive language of gestures.” In other words, it is on the stage that the common substrate of human and nonhuman animal life comes into focus: the body.

While I do not claim to propose a solution to anthropocentrism in this chapter, Puchner’s supposed challenge of it is still relevant. Because a large part of the scholarly corpus on Elizabeth

Costello is written from the perspective of critical animal studies—which, as Kari Weil rightly points out, has been particularly entwined with “the linguistic turn, a counterlinguistic or affective turn, and the ethical turn” and often purports to challenge human primacy (7)—the topic must be addressed. Given that charges against and of anthropocentrism are difficult to separate from any

55 well-rounded discussion of animals in Kafka and Coetzee, it is helpful to evaluate the various critical and ethical stances that have emerged in response to these literary works.

While Puchner makes a compelling case for negative mimesis as a strategy for “undoing anthropocentrism,” his intervention remains stubbornly (and ironically) anthropocentric (21).

Despite expressing admiration for literature by Kafka, Coetzee, and Samuel Beckett that challenges the anthropological machine, he follows Agamben in framing the ethical stakes of the human/animal divide around what it means for humans. Just as Agamben goes through the history of “the animal” in Western philosophy in order to show how it is necessary to understand the outlines of the category “human” before human rights can be attempted, Puchner justifies writing about animals by offering in conclusion: “Perhaps it is only by taking animal rights seriously that we can preserve the rights of humans” (31). Although this is not untrue, I would like to point out two problems with such a viewpoint. To start, Coetzee himself has been known for showing skepticism towards rights discourses in both his fiction and non-fiction. In the first half of

Disgrace, for example, middle-aged professor David Lurie defends the rape of his student Melanie

Isaacs as an expression of his “rights to desire” (89). As the novel progresses, however, his moral education seems to align with a death of belief in such legalistic, rational concepts as “rights.” By the end, he claims to have embraced a life with “no cards, no weapons, no property, no rights, no dignity,” choosing instead to live “like a dog” (205). The fact that Coetzee has frequently, if subtly, leveled critiques at the rights discourse—for humans as well as animals—renders Puchner’s conclusion problematic. Even more, his utterances reveal a troubling inconsistency that shows up with alarming frequency in animal studies: How can one deconstruct the intellectual tradition that

56 has long rated animals as second-class beings, only to argue that the importance of such questioning lies in its applicability to or benefit for humankind?

Marjorie Garber, one of the original respondents to Coetzee’s 1997 lectures at Princeton, epitomized this tendency when she began her reflections by boiling Costello’s story down to the question: “What does the emphasis on animals tell us about people?” (Coetzee, The Lives of

Animals 74) Her closing statement is equally allegorical, though in a different way: “In these two elegant lectures we thought John Coetzee was talking about animals. Could it be, however, that all along he was really asking, ‘What is the value of literature?’” (84, emphasis mine) While I certainly think that it is possible for Coetzee to write about people and literature at the same time,

Garber’s addition of the italicized adverb “really” implies an either/or relationship: either he is writing about animals, or he is writing about literature. Her conclusion thus exemplifies one of the limitations that allegorical reading often runs into: that in the search for a one-for-one correspondence of signifier to signified (as in early Christian exegesis of the Bible and classic works of literature),54 it is easy to pass over the space that literature opens up for the other,55 and for a multitude of coexisting meanings. Though such readings may not be incorrect in themselves,

I argue that they are inherently allegorical—a mode that often fails to capture the fullness of the reading experience, particularly when the text in question concerns animals. By reducing the ethical implications of reading animals to matters that directly affect humankind, critics such as

Garber, Puchner, and Agamben end up re-allegorizing “the animal” all over again.

54 In his brief but convincing history of “the fortunes of allegory,” Attridge describes its preeminent early use as “a medieval Christian technique of reading (originally developed as a method for extracting New Testament meanings from the Old Testament, and Christian meanings from Classical literature)” (38). 55 Attridge: 64.

Fleshly wounds and free will

Let us return to the scene where Costello elaborates on her connection to Rotpeter by drawing attention to their mutual woundedness. After pointing out the similarities between what goes on in the slaughterhouses to what happened in the concentration camps, she takes up her initial analogy once more: “Red Peter was not an investigator of primate behavior but a branded, marked, wounded animal presenting himself as speaking testimony to a gathering of scholars. I am not a philosopher of mind but an animal exhibiting, yet not exhibiting, to a gathering of scholars, a wound, which I cover up under my clothes but touch on in every word I speak” (EC

71). Tellingly, she declines to read Rotpeter as “an investigator of primate behavior” (despite this being the task assigned to him), focusing instead on his body. Furthermore, the words she uses to describe him all have to do with violence. He is “branded, marked, wounded”; like the officer in

Kafka’s “In der Strafkolonie,” Rotpeter’s suffering is written on his body. And what does this animal do with his captive audience? He “presents” himself in lieu of information, “exhibits” his wound as an essential part of his “testimony.” Because he no longer has access to the information the academy wants of him, the only genuine evidence he can show that he was indeed raised among his own kind are his scars; his wounds.

In her lecture at Appleton College, Costello shocks by making a direct comparison between the Holocaust and the meat industry (EC 65-6). Unsurprisingly, one of the faculty members in the audience excuses his absence the next day with a handwritten note, in which he writes: “You took over for your own purposes the familiar comparison between the murdered Jews of Europe and slaughtered cattle. The Jews died like cattle, therefore cattle die like Jews, you say. That is a trick with words which I will not accept. You misunderstand the nature of likenesses” (94). Keeping in

58 mind the incommensurability of such comparisons, I would like to return briefly to the ways in which Kafka’s story has been read allegorically—for if “Bericht” has lent itself to allegories of

Jewishness and the animal trade, yet another allegorical reading is glaringly obvious: Rotpeter’s journey to an unspecified land (most likely Europe) evokes the human slave trade and its notorious

“Middle Passage.”56 Although Hortense Spillers focuses on the black female enslaved subject and not animals in “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book” (1987), many of her remarks and observations—including the legal equation of enslaved persons in this historical period with “beasts of burden, all and any animal(s), various livestock, and a virtually endless profusion of domestic content from the culinary item to the book” (79)—can serve to destabilize

Kafka’s story, casting it in a different light. Whether one reads “Bericht” allegorically (as a representation of the slave trade, Hagenbeck’s exotic people industry, or Kafka the Jew) or literally

(as a single animal’s experience in captivity), the distinction that Spillers makes “between ‘body’ and ‘flesh’” can be helpful in understanding the effect of violence and coercion on the living body

(67). I wish to make clear that, unlike Costello, I am not condoning an equal comparison between the experiences of slaves and transported animals. Rather, I am interested in the dialogue that these works of literature themselves initiate by provoking allegorical readings (in the case of Kafka) or self-consciously pointing out the hazards of allegorical reading and wide-sweeping, morally equivocal comparisons (as in Elizabeth Costello).

Even as the stolen African men, women, and children experienced “a theft of the body”

(here I intentionally use the word “stolen” rather than “kidnapped” to mirror Spillers’ choice of

56 See Katja Garloff, “Kafka's Crypt: W. G. Sebald and the Melancholy of Modern German Jewish Culture,” The Germanic Review, vol. 82, no. 2, 2007: 123-40.

“theft,” which implies the possession of property), “flesh” is unique in its vulnerability: “its seared, divided, ripped-apartness, riveted to the ship’s hole, fallen, or ‘escaped’ overboard.” Seen in this way, Rotpeter’s referral to his own body as “Fleisch” (in its double meaning of “meat” and “flesh”) while crammed into his deliberately too-small cage on the Hagenbeck ship takes on a darker valence, despite his tone of ironic jocosity57 (Kafka 325). Whereas the “captive body” is subject to the more abstract torture of a “willful and violent . . . severing . . . from its motive will, its active desire,” the language of flesh is pure physicality (Spillers 67). Moreover, the quotation marks encircling Spillers’ reference to overboard “escape” are remarkably evocative of Rotpeter’s own reflections on freedom and the impossibility of any true escape while in transit. “Ich habe Angst,” he confesses, “daß man nicht genau versteht, was ich unter Ausweg verstehe” (Kafka 326). The difference he elucidates between a “way out” [Ausweg] and an “escape” [Flucht] is of paramount importance. Early on in his captivity, he realizes “daß dieser Ausweg aber nicht durch Flucht zu erreichen sei,” since even if “es wäre [ihm] gelungen, [sich] bis aufs Deck zu stehlen und über

Bord zu springen, dann hätte [er] ein Weilchen auf dem Weltmeer geschaukelt und wäre ersoffen”

(328). For Rotpeter, any kind of “escape” must necessarily remain between quotation marks; when on board a ship, the body’s only “way out” is the destruction of the flesh.

This conundrum, along with several others, places Rotpeter within several liminal zones.

For example, in explaining why he cannot remember his former ape life, he reasons: “Gerade

57 Directly after the description of his cage and how it cut into his flesh, Rotpeter says: “Man hält solche Verwahrung wilder Tiere in der allerersten Zeit für vorteilhaft, und ich kann heute nach meiner Erfahrung nicht leugnen, daß dies im menschlichen Sinn tatsächlich der Fall ist” (325). Although it is clear to the reader that he has been tortured, he maintains an ironic distance to his own suffering, even acknowledging the “advantageousness” of the measures the sailors took to break him.

Verzicht auf Eigensinn war das oberste Gebot, das ich mir auferlegt hatte; ich, freier Affe, fügte mich diesem Joch” (322). However, a contradiction appears to exist between his “Verzicht auf

Eigensinn” and his self-conception as a “freier Affe.” Is one really free if one cannot do or think what one wants? Though “Eigensinn” usually means “obstinacy” or “stubbornness,” a more literal parsing would be something more like one’s own sense [eigen-Sinn]. Further complicating the matter, he takes on ownership of the decision to forgo his own will (“das ich mir auferlegt hatte”).

He does not claim that his freedom or will has been taken from him; rather, he emphasizes his own agency in the matter, which can also be seen in his acceptance (“ich, freier Affe, fügte mich”) of his mental and physical restraints. In a similar way, his insistent distinctions between “Ausweg,”

“Freiheit,” and “Flucht” reflect the curious situation he is in: caught somewhere between freedom and compulsion, which, on the surface at least, maps on to his own conception of animal and human existence. All of the choices open to him are of the either/or sort: either he attempts escape and dies in the process, or he becomes a willing subject; either he gets sent to the zoo, or he submits to training with the hope of becoming a performer for the variety show.58 The choice between survival and non-survival is therefore a choice only in the barest sense of the word. In other words:

“[er] hatte keinen anderen Weg, immer vorausgesetzt, daß nicht die Freiheit zu wählen war” (332).

It is also no coincidence that he must decide between going to the zoo—where his task would be to perform a gross caricature of animal behavior in front of an audience desirous of glimpsing the

“life in nature” that Hagenbeck promised in his people shows—and to the variety show, where he will be trained to act in a gross caricature of human behavior.

58 The starkness of his either/or choices can be seen when he recounts: “Als ich in Hamburg dem ersten Dresseur übergeben wurde, erkannte ich bald die zwei Möglichkeiten, die mir offen standen: Zoologischer Garten oder Varieté” (331).

Earlier on in this chapter, I pointed to Butler’s differentiation between the terms

“performance” and “performativity,” with the former requiring an act of volition and the latter being involuntary. However, I believe Rotpeter’s ambiguous positioning troubles the sharp distinctions traditionally made between human and animal, freedom and constraint, and to a certain extent performance and performativity. In Excitable Speech, Butler refers to Elaine Scarry’s argument that “the threat of violence is a threat to language, its world-making and sense-making possibility” and that torture renders “the body's pain . . . inexpressible in language, that pain shatters language, and that language can counter pain even as it cannot capture it” (6). One of the effects of torture is thus the silencing of its own witness. Building in part on Scarry’s contention that torture destroys language (and thus agency, to a degree), Butler aims to make a “rhetorical and political” intervention by referring to the zone of exception that torture creates (15). The title of her book refers to the legal status of “‘excitable’ utterances . . . made under duress,” which

“cannot be used in court because they do not reflect the balanced mental state of the utterer.” (Her presumption, however, is that “speech is always in some ways out of our control.”) Keeping these notes in mind, I argue that Rotpeter—who exists in the threshold between free will and duress without escape, complaint and satisfaction59—also embodies the difficulty of determining whether performed actions are part of a self-determined, self-conscious performance or whether they unwittingly enact that which they represent. Is Rotpeter a free agent, capable of one-upping his human captors and putting on, like Milo, virtuoso performances of both humanity and animality?

Is he a cornered beast forced into producing concepts of the “human” and the “animal” by the very

59 Near the end of his report, Rotpeter reflects: “Überblicke ich meine Entwicklung und ihr bisheriges Ziel, so klage ich weder, noch bin ich zufrieden” (332, emphasis mine).

62 act of performing, that is, performatively and without intentionality or choice? It is my belief that with these difficult questions and irresolvable dualisms (including the opposition I discussed earlier between imitation/mimesis and authenticity/inauthenticity), Kafka draws attention to these categories only to destabilize them. The fact that “Bericht” is a variation on the theme of the gelehrten Affen and not wholly original in its concept only serves to highlight the ways in which the story differs from its predecessors—namely, in its ambiguous stance towards language, culture, and the idea of humankind as a beacon of reason and civilization.

Linguistic wounds

Though it is true that Rotpeter is tortured on board the Hagenbeck ship, his suffering begins earlier—before even his first memories as a human-ape. In short, declarative sentences replete with semicolons, he recounts the ambush that resulted in his capture:

Man schoß; ich war der einzige, der getroffen, wurde; ich bekam zwei Schüsse.

Einen in die Wange; der war leicht; hinterließ aber eine große ausrasierte rote Narbe, die mir den widerlichen, ganz und gar unzutreffenden, förmlich von einem Affen erfundenen Namen Rotpeter eingetragen hat, so als unterschiede ich mich von dem unlängst krepierten, hie und da bekannten, dressierten Affentier Peter nur durch den roten Fleck auf der Wange . . .

Der zweite Schuß traf mich unterhalb der Hüfte. Er war schwer, er hat es verschuldet, daß ich noch heute ein wenig hinke. (Kafka 323-4)

It is no coincidence that Rotpeter’s indignant remarks on the origins of his name appear within the same sentence as his physical assault. These wounds leave him with two visible scars on his flesh, and one that is invisible: his name. But if Rotpeter is named after his scar, he is also scarred by his name. As I will argue in Chapter Two, the power inherent in name-giving has tendencies towards violence when it comes to animals, given the uneven power dynamics between the namer (always

63 human) and the named.60 This instance is no exception, and even Rotpeter appears to be aware of what Spillers refers to as “the business of dehumanized naming” (69), even as he reacts by dehumanizing the ape after whom he was named. The other ape Peter is not simply deceased, but

“krepiert,”61 and, in a naked attempt to put distance between the two of them, Rotpeter refers to him redundantly as an “Affentier.” During his time in transit, he is thus not only stripped of the freedom he may have known as an ape and subjected to the indignities of fleshly torture,62 but he is also subject to the violence of being named.

Rotpeter may wear his name unwillingly, but he proudly shows off the scar below his hip to unwitting visitors. So when a journalist writes that his “Affennatur sei noch nicht ganz unterdrückt” because he, “wenn Besucher kommen, mit Vorliebe die Hosen auszieh[t], um die

Einlaufstelle jenes Schusses zu zeigen,” his reaction is indignant (Kafka 324). Defending himself against these charges, he exclaims: “Ich, ich darf meine Hosen ausziehen, vor wem es mir beliebt”

(324).What the journalist misunderstands as a slip in the ape’s performance of being human (here: the dignity of remaining clothed) is in fact a conscious choice. Rotpeter, who by this time has already achieved the “Durchschnittsbildung eines Europäers” and no longer has access to memories of his animal life, is not so much lapsing in his performance of humanity as performing the wounded animal on purpose (332). Similarly, by comparing her wounds to the ape’s, Costello seems to imply that she is not so much failing in her performance as an author as succeeding in

60 Chapter Two is a reworking of an article by Sonia Li, “Violence and Ventriloquism in J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace,” Mosaic (forthcoming). 61 This has a meaning akin to “croaks.” 62 Of freedom, Rotpeter says dismissively: “Als Affe kannte ich es vielleicht und ich habe Menschen kennen gelernt, die sich danach sehen. Was mich aber anlangt, verlangte ich Freiheit weder damals noch heute” (Kafka 326).

64 her role of a human performing the wounded animal. Though she keeps her clothes on, unlike

Rotpeter, it is to her vulnerable body that she refers, and it is the words she speaks that “touch” on her wound. Wounds, and the exhibition of these wounds, are what bind the two together.

Next, Costello offers the theory (supported by footnotes!) that Kafka got his idea for the story from Wolfgang Köhler’s experiments on apes. Geiger—mistakenly, I believe—reads The

Mentality of Apes as an integral part of the “mise en abîme” of intertextuality in Elizabeth Costello, arguing that “Coetzee is here, in his protagonist, finally thinking his way into Sultan’s life” (Geiger

157). Whereas he seems to take for granted that Kafka’s “Bericht” was certainly based on the life of Köhler’s ape subject Sultan, I believe such a leap is too unclear to treat as fact. However, this is not to say that The Mentality of Apes is not an important intertext for Costello, and through him

Coetzee. In fact, Costello’s excitement about her hypothesis—she “raises and brandishes the text of her lecture in the air”—is integral to understanding her obsession with Rotpeter. Like Köhler’s apes, Rotpeter found himself imprisoned and tested, and in both cases the apes “acquired at least a smattering of education” (EC 72). Imagining her way into Sultan’s mind, she speculates that “the fate of his brothers and sisters may be determined by how well he performs” (74). Though she does not go so far as to compare herself directly to Sultan, the parallels are implicit: the fate of her fellow animals may continue to be “an enterprise of degradation, cruelty and killing” if she does not perform well, if she does not convince the audience with her arguments (65). Again, we see that she takes the act of performance as necessary to an animal’s survival—including her own.

Comparing Costellos

By the time Elizabeth Costello was published in 2003, Coetzee had already performed and published four of its eight “lessons” at various events. I began this chapter with an excerpt from

Lesson Three, “The Philosophers and the Animals,” in part because it enacts many of the problems that I hope to address, and in part because it has attracted the most critical attention and thus offers the most entry points for dialogue. However, it is important to note that Costello’s visit to Appleton

College, mirroring Coetzee’s visit to Princeton in 1997, is temporally preceded by Lesson One in both real and fictional time. Lesson One, entitled simply “Realism” in Elizabeth Costello, first appeared as the short text “What is Realism?” and was read aloud by Coetzee at Bennington

College in 1996, a year prior to the Tanner Lectures. The action of “Realism” also takes place two years before that of Lesson Three. Though Coetzee made small adjustments to the “What is

Realism?” fragment to improve consistency with the rest of the novel, it may still be productive to approach the Urszene of Costello’s lecture at Appleton as a sort of “second draft” for both her and

Coetzee.63 While most critics have either glossed over this first lecture entirely or referred to it in the same breath as the second lecture, I believe that they must be treated as separate, though related, entities. Even Geiger, whose analysis of Kafka and Coetzee is otherwise quite astute, reads

Costello as relaying essentially the same point in both lectures: “On both occasions she says she feels like Red Peter and insists she is not being ironic: She says what she means” (156, emphasis mine). However, this is easily disproven. In the first lecture, she does not say she feels like

63 Derek Attridge, who was also in the audience at Princeton University in 1997, meticulously traces the publication history of Elizabeth Costello in the epilogue of J. M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading, called “A Writer’s Life.” He points out small details that Coetzee left unfixed between versions, such as Costello’s son John’s marital status and place of residence (194).

Rotpeter, but rather reminds her audience of his story; she also displays an altogether different attitude towards irony and allegorical meaning in it. In comparing these two scenes, my questions are thus: How does her focus shift from one lecture to the next? How do her explications of Kafka fit in with or contradict each other? And what do the fragmentary nature of Elizabeth Costello and its unorthodox publication history have to do with their content?

As I have shown above, Costello’s allusions to Rotpeter in Lesson Three are centered on the body: his wounds, the material conditions of his imprisonment, and her evocations of the millions of animal killed in abattoirs every year. She then builds on and attempts to refute Thomas

Nagel’s famous essay “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” Though she admits appreciating the goals of his project, she interprets him as trying to show how animal experiences are inaccessible to full human understanding—that although “what we really aspire to know is what it is like to be a bat, as a bat is a bat . . . we can never accomplish [this] because our minds are inadequate to the task – our minds are not bats’ minds” (EC 76). Yet where the rational mind falls short, she argues, the sympathetic imagination can fill in the blanks. Several pages later, she claims that “there are no bounds to the sympathetic imagination” and that she can imagine herself into the being, thus the body, of any creature (80). Embodiment is linked to the sympathetic imagination in that both offer an alternate pathway towards understanding and accepting the other. However, in order to get to this conclusion she must put aside allegory; “when Nagel writes about a bat, [she] take[s] him to be writing, in the first place, about a bat” (76). In this way, Costello appears to set up embodiment as the natural opposite of allegory—for it requires a “literal cast of mind.”

How strange, then, that in the first lesson of Elizabeth Costello (also the first story about

Costello to be read in public by Coetzee) she seems to be arguing almost the opposite point. As

67 the recipient of an award at Altona College, she gives an acceptance speech in response to the question “What is Realism?” (It is unclear whether she has chosen the topic herself or whether she has been asked to address it, though John’s wife Norma does imply that she at least chose the title.64) The talk is structured around Kafka’s “Bericht”—though this time, she does not name it outright. After some perfunctory words about the publication of her first book, she dives into the topic of realism via an unlikely allusion:

“There is a story by Franz Kafka – perhaps you know it – in which an ape, dressed up for the occasion, makes a speech to a learned society. It is a speech, but a test too, an examination, a viva voce. The ape has to show not only that he can speak his audience’s language but that he has mastered their manners and conventions, is fit to enter their society.

‘Why am I reminding you of Kafka’s story? Am I going to pretend I am the ape, torn away from my natural surroundings, forced to perform in front of a gathering of critical strangers? I hope not. I am one of you, I am not of a different species.” (18)

In this version, the comparison between herself and Rotpeter is implicit, not explicit, and she makes sure to combat the analogy right away by pointing it out (as she does later on with the Rotpeter- as-Kafka-the-Jew allegory). Moreover, her refusal to “pretend” to be the ape, alongside her insistence that she is one of them, seems almost an inversion of her claim in Lesson Three to unironic meaning and one-for-one comparison. Does she later on pretend to be Rotpeter? Or does all performance depend on a degree of pretending? And if this is so, why then does she contradict herself from one lecture to the next? Her resistance towards being allegorized then generalizes itself as a distrust of literary form and language, as she continues:

“If you know the story, you will remember that it is cast in the form of a monologue, a monologue by the ape. Within this form there is no means for either speaker or audience

64 Norma, who is hypercritical of Costello, says: “There was nothing wrong with the speech in itself. But the title was not appropriate. And she should not have relied on Kafka for her illustrations. There are better texts” (EC 25).

to be inspected with an outsider’s eye. For all we know, the speaker may not ‘really’ be an ape, may be simply a human being like ourselves deluded into thinking himself an ape, or a human being presenting himself, with heavy irony, for rhetorical purposes, as an ape. Equally well, the audience may consist not, as we may imagine, of bewhiskered, red-faced gents who have put aside their bushjackets and topis for evening dress, but of fellow apes, trained . . . to sit still and listen; or . . . chained to their seats and trained not to jabber and pick fleas and relieve themselves openly.” (18-9)

Trained apes, trained humans—what is the difference, after all? Though Rotpeter must rely on hearsay reports, he is told that he was “sehr dressurfähig” (Kafka 325); this, on top of his superior imitation skills, has ensured his success (which here means survival). Likewise, Costello’s son

John thinks of himself as “becoming – distasteful word – her trainer” (EC 3).

Because Kafka’s story takes the form of a report delivered by a lone voice, the reader is left with two options: to take Rotpeter at his word—or not to. In this particular reference to Kafka’s ape story, Costello seems unwilling or unable to take Rotpeter literally; in a performance of the

Realist discourse she is purporting to address, she pokes holes in the idea that a single narrative can exist. Whereas she makes a point of taking Rotpeter at his word in Lesson Three, this time she goes through all of the possibilities left open by the ambiguous form of the story. The ape may actually be a human, proclaiming to be an ape either out of insanity or rhetorical utility—and

“equally well,” the audience’s humanity is called into question. In a world where nothing is certain, least of all language, all possibilities are equally likely or unlikely. Imitation, mimesis—when all creatures are subject to training, I ask again: What is the difference?

However, it is important to note that Costello is operating from the official version of “Ein

Bericht für eine Akademie” published in 1917—which, as she points out, is “cast in the form of a monologue.” The published version, like she says, does not allow the reader an objective view of either the speaker or audience, and thus it is unclear how literally we as readers are supposed to

69 take Rotpeter’s account. A similar thing can be said of Costello. Having drawn attention to the single-sided nature of his report, her own refusal to take questions after her speech at Altona is rendered all the more conspicuous.65 Unlike her later lecture at Appleton, where she takes questions from the audience, discusses her talk with faculty at a special dinner, and follows up in a debate with philosopher Thomas O’Hearne, her performance at Altona is much more of a monologue. Interestingly, the additional Rotpeter fragments left unpublished until after Kafka’s death remove some of the very ambiguity that fuels Costello’s argument. In the first fragment, a visitor to the variety show interacts with the company’s impresario but is not admitted to see

Rotpeter; in the second, we witness an interview between him and an unnamed man (perhaps the same journalist who accuses him of ape-like rudeness?); and the third takes the form a brief letter from Rotpeter’s first teacher, from which the possibility arises that Rotpeter’s report may have been written and not performed.66 It is unclear whether these fragments constitute additions to the

Rotpeter story or alternative starts. Nevertheless, they seem to mirror the way Coetzee has structured and published his Costello stories to build on each other, at times, but also to modify and contradict one another.

Continuing her acceptance speech, Costello sums up her literary exegesis and reflections on Kafka with agnosticism:

65 When a young female student insistently asks “to address the speaker,” the college president deflects by saying, “Our format tonight does not allow for questions” (21). 66 The second fragment, consisting of an interview, appears to be a fleshing out of the moment Rotpeter refers to in his report where he undresses in order to show visitors his scar. In the third fragment, his former teacher writes: “ich habe den Bericht den Sie für unsere Akademie der Wissenschaften geschrieben haben mit großem Interesse, ja mit Herzklopfen gelesen” (Kafka 337). His letter suggests that Rotpeter may not have performed his report in front of the academy at all, but delivered it as a written document. Of course, since the teacher in question is in an asylum, it is also possible that he has read a write-up of the report delivered in person.

“We don’t know. We don’t know and will never know, with certainty, what is really going on in this story: whether it is about a man speaking to men or an ape speaking to apes or an ape speaking to men or a man speaking to apes (though the last is, I think, unlikely) . . .

‘There used to be a time when we knew. We used to believe that when the text said, ‘On the table stood a glass of water,’ there was indeed a table, and a glass of water on it, and we had only to look in the word-mirror of the text to see them.

‘But that has all ended. The word-mirror is broken, irreparably, it seems. About what is really going on in the lecture hall your guess is as good as mine: men and men, men and apes, apes and men, apes and apes. The lecture hall itself may be nothing but a zoo. The words on the page will no longer stand up and be counted, each proclaiming ‘I mean what I mean!’ . . . There used to be a time, we believe, when we could say who we were. Now we are just performers speaking our parts.” (19, emphasis mine)

It is no coincidence that Costello uses the word “lecture hall,” which creates an ambiguity over which lecture hall she means: Rotpeter’s, Costello’s, or Coetzee’s? Furthermore, these last two lines are linked by the adverb “now,” suggesting a temporal relationship of opposition—an implied

“then/now.” In this way, she appears to be setting up an opposition between belief—in the stability of language, the possibility of self-knowledge, and perhaps even the life cycle of the little

Dulgannon frogs—and the act of performance. As I have argued, however, both Coetzee’s

Elizabeth Costello and Kafka’s “Bericht” show not only that interactions between human and nonhuman animals always require an act of performance, but that the very idea of “humanity” and

“animality” depends on the unstable, performative nature of “being human.” So when John refers to himself as his mother’s “trainer” and “thinks of her as a seal, an old, tired circus seal . . . Up to him to . . . get her through the performance,” Coetzee is providing yet another example of Costello performing her animality (3).

Conclusion: jaguars, panthers, and artists

“Ein Bericht für eine Akademie” may be the main Kafkan intertext of Elizabeth Costello, but Coetzee does evoke another—albeit indirectly. In Lesson Four, which takes place the day after her lecture on animals at Appleton College (and was read by Coetzee at Princeton the day after

Lesson Three), Costello leads a seminar that she has elected to call “The Poets and the Animals.”

This lesson, like the first and third, is told through John’s third-person perspective. When he enters the room after having missed a portion of the seminar, she is debating the ethics of writing about animals as exemplified by three poems: “one by Rilke called ‘The Panther,’ two by Ted Hughes called ‘The Jaguar’ and ‘Second Glance at a Jaguar’” (95). In Rilke’s poem “The Panther,” she argues, the “animals stand for human qualities . . . the panther is there as a stand-in for something else” (94-5). In other words, Rilke’s panther is not meant to be taken literally. By contrast, she claims that “with Hughes it is a matter . . . not of inhabiting another mind but of inhabiting another body,” and that this mode of poetry seems (at first glance, at least) to be ethically superior (96).

Continuing her appeal to embodiment and the sympathetic imagination from the day before, she posits that poetry can be a vehicle for imagining oneself into another’s body; it is by becoming the animal that both author and reader can challenge anthropocentric allegorization, even if such a becoming-animal is complicated by the essentialism contained even in the body-centric poetry of

Hughes.67 Although Coetzee does not explicitly refer to Kafka’s “Ein Hungerkünstler” in Elizabeth

67 Geiger makes the excellent point that—despite many critics’ claims that in the fight between poetry and philosophy exemplified by The Lives of Animals, poetry wins—even the primitivist poetry of Ted Hughes has what Costello calls “Platonic” tendencies (Geiger 153). In the words of Costello: “It is also the kind of poetry with which hunters and the people I call ecology- managers can feel comfortable. When Hughes the poet stands before the jaguar cage, he looks at an individual jaguar and is possessed by that individual jaguar life. It has to be that way. Jaguars, the subspecies jaguar, the idea of a jaguar, will fail to move him because we cannot experience

Costello,68 his protagonist’s fixation on Rilke’s panther and Hughes’ jaguar calls to mind the young, healthy panther at the end of Kafka’s story who renders the titular hunger artist obsolete.

“Ein Hungerkünstler” tells the story of a man employed by an unspecified show, then circus, whose act consists in a lack of action: his art is to remain in a cage and abstain from food.

For years he lives “in scheinbarem Glanz, von der Welt geehrt” (Kafka 397)—until one day he is abandoned by “der vergnügungssüchtigen Menge . . . die lieber zu anderen Schaustellungen strömte” (399). The public appears to have lost its appreciation for and interest in the hunger artist’s craft, and eventually the management no longer bothers to update the number on the little chalkboard by his cage declaring the length of his fast. Many days later, a manager spots the dirty cage and wonders why it is not being used until he catches sight of the chalkboard and finds its occupant buried beneath straw. With his last words, the hunger artist confesses that he has been a fraud; the reason he did not eat was that he simply “nicht die Speise finden konnte, die [ihm] schmeckt” (403). After a quick burial, he is replaced by a young panther. Unlike the hunger artist

(or Rotpeter), “nicht einmal die Freiheit schien er [der Panther] zu vermissen; dieser edle, mit allem Nötigen bis knapp zum Zerreißen ausgestattete Körper schien auch die Freiheit mit sich

abstractions. Nevertheless, the poem that Hughes writes is about the jaguar, about jaguarness embodied in this jaguar. Just as later on, when he writes his marvellous poems about salmon, they are about salmon as transitory occupants of the salmon life, the salmon biography. So despite the vividness and earthiness of the poetry, there remains something Platonic about it” (98). So, using embodiment as a way of accessing the idea of an animal is not the same as creating an individual connection with an animal via embodiment and the sympathetic imagination. 68 Coetzee does make one brief reference to Kafka’s “Ein Hungerkünstler” in Lesson Eight, “At the Gate.” Remarking on her newfound loss of appetite in the Kafkaesque in-between world, she wonders: “Is a new career beginning to beckon: as one of the thin folk, the compulsive fasters, the hunger artists?” (215)

73 herumzutragen” (404). The panther’s powerful, lushly described body contrasts starkly with the human’s body, which has wasted away to the point of invisibility.

In many ways, the hunger artist can be read as a foil for Rotpeter. Though both spend time confined in a “Gitterkäfig” (324, 392), their circumstances are almost inverted. Whereas Rotpeter is an animal forced by human captors to adapt or die, the human hunger artist seems to be in control of his predicament. At any time, he could leave his self-imposed imprisonment or break his fast; no one need know. However, his “freedom” expresses itself only in negatives—for example, in the denial of nourishment. When Kafka describes the forty day cycle during which the hunger artist fasts and then is ceremonially presented with food, he writes that “in diesem Augenblick wehrte sich der Hungerkünstler immer” (395, emphasis mine). Like Rotpeter, who imposes restraint on himself (sich auferlegen, sich fügen) and actively submits to the yoke, the hunger artist also claims possession of his refusal. In the latter’s case, however, these choices are antithetical to survival; with the hunger artist’s extreme asceticism, it is as if Kafka is showing us Darwinian evolution in reverse. Moreover, the dying man’s confession highlights the necessity (rather than contingency) of his starvation. Explaining to the confused manager why the public should not admire his self-control, the hunger artist admits that he fasts “[w]eil [er] hungern muß, [er] kann nicht anders” (403, emphasis mine). This confession is strikingly similar to Rotpeter’s claim that he did not have any other choice but to choose freedom (332). In the end, then, what the two share is a lack of substantive choice.

In this story, performance and animality come once again into close contact—though in a different configuration than in Elizabeth Costello and “Bericht.” Rather than an animal performing as a human or a human claiming to feel “like” an animal, the hunger artist performs his humanity

74 by denying his animal nature, i.e. by refusing to eat. By comparing the performances of Rotpeter with the hunger artist, I conclude that Kafka removes the question of will or agency from the human-animal equation and shows, in satirizing the progressivist teleology of evolution by juxtaposing the ape struggling to survive with the human striving to destroy himself, how suffering destroys the illusion of “vorwärts gepeitschten Entwicklung” (322) promised by Western humanism.69

On that note, I would like to circle back to the question of form that I posed at the beginning of this chapter. As I have shown, in his on-stage readings as Elizabeth Costello, Coetzee repeatedly invokes a chain of performances contained one within the other like so many Russian dolls. In doing so, he draws attention to the liminal space shared by human and nonhuman animals in which simile and metaphor,70 the literal and allegorical, words and bodies break down. But if Kafka points to the lack of full, unbounded agency shared by human and animal “performers” in the modern age, and Coetzee to the difficulty of meaning what one says or expressing one’s beliefs despite speaking through various “amanuens[e]s” (EC 70), they both seem to invoke—by the omnipresent absence of invocation—the spectator. It is as though the authors, by focusing on performance, indirectly redirect the reader’s attention to him- or herself as part of an audience. In this way,

Coetzee seems to be bringing up a new, perhaps unanswerable question. With his performances of performance, the question appears no longer to be one of definition—What separates humans from

69 This is the same humanism that Derrida critiques and Costello defends. For more on this, see Lesson Five of Elizabeth Costello, entitled “The Humanities in Africa.” In this chapter, Costello visits her sister Blanche, who is a nun in Africa. Her sister gives a lecture applauding the death of the humanities, and Costello argues in turn for the admiration of beauty and idealism as set up by the Greeks. 70 For example, Costello feeling a little “like” Red Peter rather than “being” him (EC 62).

75 animals?—but rather of response: What ethical responsibility do we as readers—like the ladies and gentlemen of the academy—share with authors and performers as witnesses to everyday suffering?

Of course, the question of response has been crucial to Western intellectual thought on animals. As Derrida summarizes, philosophers from Aristotle to Lacan, Descartes to Kant, and

Heidegger to Levinas have argued that “the animal is deprived of language,” or, “more precisely, of a response, of a response that could be precisely and rigorously distinguished from a reaction”

(32). However, my point here is not to insert myself (at the end of a chapter, no less) into the often heated discussion over whether animals can “respond” or whether they possess the Levinasian

“face,” but to show how the responsibility of response has been pivoted to the audience through the works I have discussed in this chapter. It is my argument that with his eccentric metafictional and metaliterary performances, Coetzee is doing precisely this. When he stands in front of a stage and reads aloud a story such as “The Glass Abattoir,” in the third-person but with many direct quotes, he does not address the audience directly—as an author to his readers—but instead puts them in the position of bearing inadvertent witness to his words, which are also not his words. As

Coetzee writes and his narrator describes: “The skips are not part of the text, they are part of the performance” (EC 16). But which text? Which performance? Unfortunately (for those readers who crave certainty), Coetzee has proven himself much fonder of provoking questions than answering them, both as a public author and as a private person.

CHAPTER TWO – Representations

Introduction

At the end of Kafka’s Der Proceß, the bureaucratically beleaguered Josef K. is led out into an alley and stabbed in the heart by two unnamed men. “Wie ein Hund!” he says with his dying breath.71 The line continues with a final thought: “es war, als sollte die Scham ihn überleben” (97).

So concludes Kafka’s great unfinished novel—with shame, death, and the protagonist comparing himself to a dog. In an echo of this phrase, near the end of Coetzee’s Disgrace, protagonist David

Lurie responds to his daughter Lucy’s decision to give up her land and “start at ground level . . .

No cards, no weapons, no property, no rights, no dignity” with the same words: “Like a dog.”

“Yes, like a dog,” she repeats (205). Her father makes no secret of the fact that he finds her situation

“humiliating.” What these moments have in common, other than the repeated simile, is a link between canine rhetoric and a state of degradation. Furthermore, the co-occurrence of shame, death, and dogs is hardly coincidental, but is rather part of a larger pattern of association in Western literature that links dog figures and figurative dogs to negative affects such as shame and humiliation, especially in connection with death. In the previous chapter, I addressed the problem of literal reading as exemplified by Elizabeth Costello and “Ein Bericht für eine Akademie.” This chapter, however, seeks to elucidate the stakes of animal rhetoric in terms of affect.

Jacques Derrida once declared Kafka to be “more attuned than anyone else when it comes to animals” (The Animal That Therefore I Am 34). Many of Kafka’s famous Tiergeschichten not only feature animals, but like “Ein Bericht für eine Akademie” are narrated by them. “Josephine,

71 The entire line reads: “‘Wie ein Hund!’ er sagte, es war, als sollte die Scham ihn überleben.” Significantly, Kafka uses the word sagen and not schreien, implying a lack of passion on the part of Josef K. in his last living moment.

77 die Sängerin oder Das Volk der Mäuse” relates a mouse’s reflections on the most famous singer of his people; the paranoid creature of “Der Bau” burrows endlessly into the earth; and the titular investigator of “Forschungen eines Hundes” conducts his scientific investigations into the natural world without acknowledging the existence of humans. As I discussed in Chapter One, many of these stories about animals or focalized through animals have been subject to allegorical readings.

Just as Rotpeter the ape has often been read as a stand-in for Kafka the Jew, the mole-like digger of “Der Bau,” with his circular logic and endless toil, has also been read as a commentary on the obsessive nature of writing.72 That being said, my focus in this chapter is not so much on animal experience—of which I attempted to catch a glimpse through my analysis of “Bericht” via a language of body and performance—but on the ways humans reflect and often instantiate power relations through language. Where Chapter One focused on the figure of the ape and its evolution throughout Western scientific, philosophical, and literary discourse, Chapter Two examines the many appearances of dogs in Kafka and Coetzee. At the close of the first chapter, I argued that the relationship between performer and spectator evoked by Kafka’s “Bericht” and Coetzee’s

Elizabeth Costello renders visible a missing response. (As I have shown, the published version of

“Bericht” has Rotpeter delivering a “monologue” to the academy, and Elizabeth Costello in Lesson

One leaves without giving her audience a chance to respond to her lecture.)

72 In “Giving Up Control: Narrative Authority and Animal Experience in Coetzee and Kafka” (Mosaic, vol. 44, no. 2), Michael O’Sullivan discusses in detail the essay that Coetzee himself wrote about Kafka’s “Der Bau.” He comments: “These parallels between the diary entries, the earlier more humanized characters, and the voice of the creature in ‘The Burrow’ make it difficult for the reader to forget the authority of Kafka, the obsessive writer, behind the voice of his creature” (129).

Given the difficulty of gauging an animal’s capacity to respond (at least, as far as thinkers such as Derrida and Lacan have understood response), it may be more fruitful to rephrase the question.73 Instead of asking, Are animals capable of response, or only reaction? one might ask,

What does it mean to represent an animal on the page? Such a shift in focus returns the burden of response, and responsibility, to the human animals who persist in asking questions like these. The goal of this chapter is thus to examine the ways in which Kafka and Coetzee represent dogs in their fiction—a thread which the following chapter will continue in its exploration of the relationship between these representations, their use of canine rhetoric, and the elusive language of transcendence that permeates their work. In the first section, I sketch out a genealogy of representation and Fürsprache as concepts and discuss the difficulties that arise when animals are the subjects and objects of representation. Next, I perform a close reading of Coetzee’s Disgrace

(1999), arguing that while many critics have read it as a redemptive narrative in which the protagonist undergoes an ethical Bildung through his contact with animals, any possible moral development is dependent on violence that begins as a narrative act and ends with physical killing.

The Limits of Fürsprache

Despite Kafka’s preoccupation with the law, he only uses the word “fürsprechen” (along with the related “Fürsprecher,” “Fürsprache,” and “Fürspruch”) in one instance: a short, untitled text written in 1922 and left unpublished until 1936.74 The story is therefore often referred to by

73 See Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am: 32. 74 See Rüdiger Campe, “Kafkas Fürsprache,” https://www.degruyter.com/downloadpdf/books/9783839405086/9783839405086- 008/9783839405086-008.pdf, 2007: 189, 192. Moreover, absent in this piece is any mention of

79 its first line, “Es war sehr unsicher, ob ich Fürsprecher hatte . . .” but can also be found under the makeshift title “Fürsprecher.” In this curious tale, which Rüdiger Campe envisions as a potential

“Zwischenstück” for Kafka’s novels,75 a first-person narrator finds himself in search of a

“Fürsprecher”—an intercessor, supporter, or mediator; literally, a for-speaker—in what is strangely either a court building or everywhere (“überall”). Although the narrator is unsure of his surroundings, he is certain that it is necessary “Fürsprecher zu haben, Fürsprecher in Mengen, die besten Fürsprecher, einen eng neben dem andern” (Kafka 390). Going further, he urges the need for “eine lebende Mauer” to guard against accusers, which he refers to as “diese schlauen Füchse, diese flinken Wiesel, diese unsichtbaren Mäuschen” and who “schlüpfen durch die kleinsten

Lücken, huschen zwischen den Beinen der Fürsprecher durch.” Campe’s analysis of this brief text is quite meticulous; in light of this thoroughness, then, it is strange that he does not even mention this odd line that is uncharacteristic (within the story) in its focus on living bodies. Is Kafka’s narrator referring to a plague of literal foxes, weasels, and mice, or does he mean this line figuratively? Does he envision the “lebende Mauer” of Fürsprecher as being composed of nonhuman creatures as well? And if we choose to understand these animals as rhetorical devices, or preset figures—which Kafka seems almost to suggest by describing each with a stereotypical adjective: sly fox, nimble weasel, invisible mouse—how does that influence the way we understand the role of a Fürsprecher and Ankläger, one who represents and one who accuses?

Here it will be useful to provide some background on these words. Campe surmises that

Kafka may have been familiar with the history of the term “Fürsprecher” because of his experience

“Advokaten,” the word for legal representative used in Der Proceß and Das Schloss, just as “Fürsprecher” does not appear in these two juridically themed novels. 75 Campe: 192.

80 attending seminars on the law. In Middle German, for example, “Fürsprecher” designated the role of someone who spoke on behalf of another before the law, whereas an “Anwalt” provided authority over a trial; the word “Fürsprecher” thus emphasized the speaking-for portion of a representative’s duties, particularly for one unable to speak himself, or for himself.76 Although

“Fürsprech” is still used synonymously with “Rechtsanwalt” in Switzerland today, the term

“Fürsprecher” was replaced with “Advokat” in the second half of the nineteenth century in

Austria’s official juridical language and has fallen out of common usage elsewhere in the

Germanophone world.77

Since the goal of this section is to plot out a Bedeutungsfeld, or field of meaning, for the

English word “representation” in order to show how complicated it is to “represent” animals in fiction, I turn now to Gayatri Spivak and her famous problematization of two other German words that can both be translated as “representation”: “darstellen” and “vertreten.” Whereas “darstellen” can be seen as a “portrait” in writing, she outlines, “vertreten” has more the flavor of “proxy” (and is thus better aligned with “fürsprechen” in its connotations of substitution).78 In her 1989 essay

“Can the Subaltern Speak?”, she is less interested in the legal process (which is perhaps why the word “fürsprechen” does not appear) and more so in the political ramifications of representation.

Her close reading of Karl Marx’s The Eighteenth Brumaire of Napoleon Bonaparte probes the ways “darstellen” and “vertreten” interact with each other “within the theory of the Subject”

76 Campe writes: “Der >Fürsprech(er)< ist derjenige, der das Wort für eine Partei eingreift – besonders dann wenn sie selbst in ihrer Sache oder überhaupt nicht sprechen kann. In diesem Sinn kann der >Fürsprech(er)< auch ein Bürge oder Eidhelfer sein, der eine Aussage bekräftigt . . .” (194). 77 Campe: 195. 78 Gayatri Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. by Lawrence Grossberg and Cary Nelson, U of Illinois Press, 1989: 71.

(Spivak 70). Critiquing Foucault and Deleuze for “slid[ing] over” the contrast between proxy and portrait and using a “postrepresentationalist vocabulary [that] hides an essentialist agenda” (80), she stresses that the two “are related, but [that] running them together, especially in order to say that beyond both is where oppressed subjects speak, act and know for themselves, leads to an essentialist, utopian politics” (71). Representation in both its iterations “has not withered away”

(104) and continues to harm the subaltern. But where her conception of the “oppressed subject” here refers to abjectified humans—particularly women—in former Western colonies, my focus in this chapter is on animals.79 Critics have disagreed on the question of whether animals should count as oppressed subjects,80 especially in a postcolonial context, but I argue that it is possible to see them as a part of this category without claiming an essential likeness between animals and women, for example, or animals and oppressed ethnic groups. Spivak’s unpacking of the word

“representation” and its double meaning can still help to elucidate the uneven power dynamic between human and nonhuman animals, which is often magnified by literary representations.

Of course, her ultimate conclusion is that “[t]he subaltern cannot speak.” Silenced by the very act of being represented—both in terms of being depicted (“dargestellt”) and being spoken

79 Of course, the two subjects are related—as I will show further on in my discussion of Giorgio Agamben. 80 In “Dog Gambit: Shifting the Species Boundary in J. M. Coetzee’s Recent Fiction” (Mosaic, vol. 39, no. 4, 2006) Travis Mason argues that the speciesism in Age of Iron, Disgrace, and The Lives of Animals can be traced to racism, sexism, and colonialism. To give a literary example, the titular character of Elizabeth Costello compares animals in slaughterhouses to Jews in Treblinka (see Chapter One). Many Coetzee scholars, such as Marianne Dekoven (“Going to the Dogs in Disgrace”), have also written about David Lurie’s relationship to dogs and women in Disgrace as somehow coeval and connected—insinuating that the two are subject to comparable suffering and oppression. As I have discussed in Chapter One, and will continue to discuss further on in this chapter, Giorgio Agamben’s analysis in The Open of the animalization of man in terms of violence towards certain groups of people also puts animals and oppressed subjects into close alignment.

82 for (“vertreten”)—female subaltern subjects are denied voices with which to speak. The one example she gives of a female voice being heard is the story of a young Indian woman, an independence fighter, who hanged herself while menstruating so as to quell suspicions that she was committing suicide because of an illegitimate pregnancy (103-4). While Spivak emphasizes that she is not promoting suicide as a means of feminist action, she does see the young woman’s death as “an unemphatic, ad hoc subaltern rewriting of the social text of sati-suicide” (104) and thus as an expression of resistance. And yet, “the subaltern as female cannot be heard or read.”

This brings us back to the idea discussed in Chapter One that embodiment—particularly the body in pain—can provide a way out of the cycle of hierarchical power relations between human and nonhuman animals. While I do not deny the power of Spivak’s argument, I do find it troubling that she, as well as many animal studies scholars, ends by reading violence or suffering in a quasi- positive light: as a means to an end, or as somehow redemptive. With this in mind, I now turn to

J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace in order to explore the ways in which the novel problematizes animal representation(s).

Affect and representation in Disgrace

This chapter examines the relationship between a specific literary character and a specific animal through the exchange of affect between the two. The concern of my analysis is how this relationship, while appearing to be based upon a mutual human-animal connection, is actually marked by the animal’s silence. Although animal bodies are distinctly not absent (unlike the victimized bodies of women), their voices are consistently dubbed over by the voice of the novel’s protagonist, David Lurie. Coetzee’s decision to focalize the novel through Lurie in the third-person

83 is in this way conscious and careful, for by keeping the narrator claustrophobically focused on one person’s experience, he is able to lead the reader through the movements that Lurie himself undergoes while allowing a modicum of critical distance. By carefully examining the slippage between narrator and protagonist, and protagonist and object, it becomes clear that this animal silence is not passive, but rather the result of an act of narrative violence on the part of a human agent: a silencing and not an inherent muteness. The goal of this chapter, then, is not to give life to what is lifeless, but rather to draw attention to the ways in which power relations between man and animal are reinforced and in some cases born out of the narrative act itself as an act of representation. Furthermore, I show that this type of violence in Disgrace is not unique to human- animal relations, but can be seen in Lurie’s relationships with the other in its many iterations.

While much has been written about the role of silence in Disgrace—most often in terms of its female characters—as well as the ways in which Lurie is shaped by his contact with animals, less attention has been paid to the complex way in which these two themes function together in the novel. Elleke Boehmer, for example, writes chiefly about the novel’s female characters as figures of silence. Her main argument is that Coetzee has replaced Christian confession with a secular version of atonement, yet that this atonement has gendered access: whereas Lurie is able to redeem himself through his contact with and care for dogs, this redemption is not available to his daughter Lucy or his student and (as many see it) rape victim Melanie Isaacs.81 Along similar lines, Lucy Graham points out the novel’s elision of female voice and agency, calling attention in particular to the failure of post-apartheid South Africa to address the problem of rape (4). She also argues that Coetzee proposes a solution to the problem of violence as showcased in the novel and

81 Boehmer: 350.

84 embedded in the historical context: that “the body, with its frailty and suffering, is a counter to the endless scepticism that is a feature of both secular confession and textual analysis” (5). She seems to agree with Coetzee, arguing that the vulnerable body is not just opposed to textual analysis, but a counter to it—an antidote.82 Furthermore, she keenly observes that during the two scenes of explicit violence against women in the novel, the violated body is in fact “absent.” Yet if the violated female body is absent, as Graham declares, the bodies of dead, dying, and murdered animals lie strewn across the pages—a fact which she fails to point out. The idea that embodiment might somehow be the answer to animal and female exploitation, as suggested by Graham and the fictional Costello, would thus seem insufficient.

At the beginning of the novel, David Lurie has little to do with animals. A middle-aged

Romantic poetry scholar turned professor of “Communications” at a university in Cape Town, he has, “for a man of his age, fifty-two, divorced . . . solved the problem of sex rather well” (Disgrace

1). This solution consists of weekly visits to a prostitute named Soraya. However, after an unexpected meeting with Lurie in outside the confines of their meeting spot, Soraya withdraws her services, leaving him to find a new solution. He then sets his sights on his student Melanie Isaacs, initiating a brief affair that even he acknowledges as “not rape, not quite that, but undesired nevertheless, undesired to the core” (25). As a result, he is called before a university disciplinary committee and forced to leave his position after stubbornly refusing to express contrition.

Disgraced in the eyes of his peers, he retreats to his daughter Lucy’s smallholding in the Eastern

Cape, where she lives a simple life boarding dogs and running a small-scale farm with the help of

82 However, this claim is rendered ironic by the fact that Graham is, of course, writing a textual analysis.

85 a black man named Petrus. It is during this period in the countryside, “in darkest Africa” (95), that he begins to become more attuned to animal life—in particular, to a bulldog named Katy.

Quite a few critics have drawn a connection between Lurie’s (supposed) ethical development and his increased contact with animals,83 though opinions vary on how this happens and what his transformation—if it is indeed a transformation—means. While Marianne Dekoven goes to one extreme by labeling Disgrace a “bleak but coherently salvific narrative” (847) and arguing that Lurie undergoes a “radical transformation” (870), critics such as Graham and Louis

Tremaine trouble this reading of Lurie’s ethical Bildung (in Graham’s case, through the novel’s treatment of women; in Tremaine’s case, through its treatment of animals) even as they cautiously accept that salvation for Lurie may exist in some form or other. For Tremaine, Coetzee’s work seems to culminate in a denial of the possibility of transcendence; according to him, Coetzee refuses a certain belief “that places soul apart from body and beyond it, that places being apart from living and beyond it, that locates salvation in art” (610). Yet, he argues, even if “[a]rt is not salvation . . . art can point to where salvation may lie.” Similarly, Derek Attridge examines the relationship between the opera about Lord Byron and his lover Teresa that Lurie composes and his struggle to find “grace.” However, despite his skepticism—he argues that neither the production of art, nor human responsibility towards animals “constitutes any kind of answer or way out”

(Attridge, J. M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading 177)—he does ultimately argue that “Lurie achieves something that can be called grace” (180). While Tremaine’s and Attridge’s

83 In “The Trial of David Lurie: Kafka’s Courtroom in Coetzee’s Disgrace,” Textual Practice, vol. 30, no. 3, 2016, Christopher Conti asserts that “[t]he critical consensus suggests that Lurie undergoes moral transformation at the animal shelter” (485).

86 interpretations are certainly compelling, I wish to trouble the foundation upon which this potential salvation or grace is built: embodied and silenced (rather than silent) animals.

By focusing on the figure of Katy, the only named animal in the novel, I therefore argue that the “humanization” that David undergoes at the hand of animals can in fact be problematized by recognizing in his growing empathy for them a certain brand of violence: notably through a silencing of the animal voice, which ironically occurs through his projection of human affect onto the animals (both human and nonhuman) around him. This act of projection, which Michael Marais describes as the “inevitable violence of the sympathetic imagination,” I have decided to call ventriloquism (“Impossible” 18). Whereas ventriloquism is usually associated with a human actor pretending to speak for a non-human object, when applied to living beings ventriloquism necessitates not just a silence or falling-silent of the animal, but a making-silent. As I suggest in this chapter, ventriloquism can take the form of a projection of voice as well as a projection of affect in its function as non-linguistic expression. In his presumptuous attempts to represent

(vertreten) others, Lurie continues to subordinate them to his will and voice.

Sundhya Walther takes a similar line of questioning, focusing on Lurie’s appropriation of the other’s voice and linking the silence of animals to the silence of women.84 However, she makes one key error in referring to the dog of the final scene as being called “Driepoot” by Lurie. In fact,

“Driepoot” is simply a moniker that Bev Shaw has given the dog, as Lurie pointedly refuses to name him—a refusal which I read as deeply significant. Zeroing in on this discrepancy which has so far been neglected in the critical discussion surrounding Disgrace, I argue that this model of

84 See Sundhya Walther, “Refusing to Speak: The Ethics of Animal Silence and Sacrifice in Coetzee and Derrida,” Journal for Critical Animal Studies, vol. 12, no. 3, 2014: 75-96.

87 forced representation, or ventriloquism, is intimately related to the act of naming as the primal scene of power relations. As I argued in my discussion of the linguistic violence that Kafka’s ape

Rotpeter suffers by being named after his scar, the name is an emblem of power and often imbued with colonial overtones. An act that is both shrouded in ontological mysticism and rendered invisible by its quotidian usage, to give a name is at once to exert power over and to empower; likewise, the refusal to name can be seen as a refusal to enter into relationality with the other.85

Therefore, by tracing this act of naming one can gain a better understanding of the shifting balance of relational power in the novel. By examining Lurie’s relationship with the bulldog Katy as a counterpoint to his other relationships, this chapter thus interrogates the notions of silence, embodied violence, and the name in Disgrace. It will become clear that while Coetzee certainly evokes questions of animal response and responsibility towards animals in his work—a point which I made at the close of the last chapter—he addresses them obliquely, through the eyes of largely unsympathetic human focalizers such as Elizabeth Costello and David Lurie.

In the first section of this chapter, I introduce the figure of Katy and read Lurie’s emotional development throughout the novel in terms of their relationship. From there, I show how his ventriloquism is not limited to the animals in his life, but extends to gendered and racial others as well. Lastly, I address the final enigmatic scene of the novel in which he euthanizes a nameless dog, exploring the hermeneutic and rhetorical potentialities that this scene unlocks. As a way of

85 Hortense Spillers briefly mentions the autobiographical “Life of Olaudah Equiano” (1789), whose author underwent several name changes in his transition from free to enslaved: “The captivating party does not only ‘earn’ the right to dispose of the captive body as it sees fit, but gains, consequently, the right to name and ‘name’ it: Equiano, for instance, identifies at least three different names that he is given in numerous passages between his Benin homeland and the Virginia colony, the latter and England – ‘Michael,’ ‘Jacob,’ ‘Gustavus Vassa’” (69).

88 grounding my analysis, I enter into dialogue with Derrida, Agamben, and Walter Benjamin in order to explore different conceptions of the human-animal divide and show how the terms I seek to elucidate are in fact interrelated—pointing in some form or other to the violence inherent in relationality.

Upon his arrival at Lucy’s farm in the Eastern Cape, Lurie is immediately confronted by the cacophonous presence of dogs. On a tour of the premises, Lucy shows him the boarding kennels filled with anonymous watchdogs, recognizable to him only by their breed (and they are all purebred). However, from the throng he singles one out: “a tan-coloured bulldog bitch with a cage to herself who, head on paws, watches them morosely, not even bothering to get up” (62). “Katy?”

Lucy responds—“She’s sulking, but otherwise she’s all right.” Not only is she kept apart in a separate cage, but unlike the other dogs she is also granted expression; both Lurie and Lucy translate her physical posture into legible emotion. This translation of the physical into the emotional becomes even more apparent several pages later, when the two of them are taking a group of dogs for a walk and Katy shows signs of constipation: “Pinning her ears back, the bitch tries to defecate. Nothing comes . . . The bitch continues to strain, hanging her tongue out, glancing around shiftily as if ashamed to be watched” (68, emphasis mine).

The fact that Lurie chooses to read shame in Katy’s behavior is significant on several levels.

Significantly, thinkers from Darwin to Derrida have hypothesized that shame is a uniquely human emotion86—which, if true, would render Lurie’s affective interpretation of a basic bodily function

86 Linda Williams explains that while Darwin did believe in animal emotion, he placed shame squarely in the realm of the human (“Darwin and Derrida on Human and Animal Emotions: The Question of Shame as a Measure of Ontological Difference,” New Formations, vol. 76, 2012: 29- 30).

89 a particularly egregious instance of ventriloquism. For Derrida, the intimate web connecting modesty, shame, and the body, along with the fundamental difference between man and animal, can be traced back to the Book of Genesis. As he aptly summarizes, it has long been thought that

“the property unique to animals . . . is their being naked without knowing it. Not being naked therefore, not having knowledge of their nudity, in short, without consciousness of good and evil.

From that point on, naked without knowing it, animals would not be, in truth, naked” (Derrida,

Animal 5). He then goes on to link “every show of modesty” to “a reserve of shame” and argue that shame is inseparable from mankind’s erect posture (61). In other words, modesty (and by extension of his own argument, shame) is an exclusively human construct requiring a self- awareness of one’s nudity that animals supposedly lack. It would thus be reasonable to assume that Lurie, as a scholar entrenched within the philosophical and scientific logic that denies animals shame, is projecting his own affect onto Katy.

Lurie’s struggle with shame is a living thing that continually evolves throughout the novel.

Although he does initially acknowledge his guilt in the Melanie Isaacs affair, he does not experience this guilt as shame until much later. As he explains to a colleague, “Before that secular tribunal I pleaded guilty, a secular plea. That plea should suffice. Repentance is neither here nor there. Repentance belongs to another world, to another universe of discourse” (Disgrace 58).87

What makes him so compelling as a character is his subsequent transformation—the transmutation

87 This scene is reminiscent of Derek Attridge’s comments on confession in Coetzee’s autobiographical novel Boyhood, which was written at the same time as the Truth and Reconciliation Committee was investigating crimes in South Africa. In “J. M. Coetzee’s Boyhood, Confession, and Truth,” he writes of the TRC: “But it was a secular body, not a religious one, so its judgments necessarily had an element of the arbitrary in them, and the result was a great deal of controversy” (81). These words could almost be transposed onto his discussion of Lurie’s “tribunal.”

90 of his knowledge of juridical guilt into feelings of shame, whether religious or secular.88 Although this change does not manifest itself in any self-conscious revelation, the catalyst would appear to be the attack at Lucy’s farm. During the first weeks of his stay at the farm, Lurie maintains an ironic distance to his guilt, explaining to Lucy’s middle-aged friend Bev Shaw that he is “in what

[he] suppose[s] one would call disgrace” (85). However, this carefully maintained distance is obliterated when, one day, he and Lucy return from a walk with Katy to find three young black men at the farm. The men lock him in the bathroom after dousing him in alcohol and lighting him on fire, gang rape Lucy, and shoot the dogs in the kennel “[w]ith practiced ease” (95). Only after this attack does Lurie’s attitude begin to change. As the two recuperate, he passes his time by helping Bev Shaw at a volunteer animal welfare clinic, where their work consists primarily of euthanizing injured or unwanted dogs. It is during one of these sessions of dog-releasing (notably referred to by Lurie as Lösung, which can mean salvation, redemption, or dissolution, but also alarmingly close to the Endlösung of National Socialism89) that he observes: “If, more often than not, the dog fails to be charmed, it is because of his presence: he gives off the wrong smell (They can smell your thoughts), the smell of shame” (142). Yet even in this moment, where it would seem that Lurie is overtly acknowledging his shame, he can only do so through the mediation of an animal other: in this case, through the dog he is putting down.

88 Christopher Conti makes a useful distinction between shame and guilt: “Shame is felt before the eyes of others, and can lead to anger at one’s injured identity. Guilt is a private affair, a self- accusation that leads to remorse and contrition. Shame concerns one’s identity and is linked to pride or honour; guilt concerns one’s actions, what one says and does, and is linked to responsibility. The preference for the word shame subtly shifts the burden of guilt to others…” (475) For other elucidations of shame, guilt, and disgrace, see Camilla Nurka (312), Forrest Robinson (7), and Katherine Hallemeier (9). 89 Disgrace: 142.

As problematic as Lurie’s relationship to animals is, it is important to point out that he does not limit himself to using animals as emotional conduits, but also projects his affect onto the human beings around him. A key example of this human ventriloquism occurs shortly after the attack, when he confronts his daughter about her refusal to report her rape: “She does not reply. She would rather hide her face, and he knows why. Because of the disgrace. Because of the shame” (115).

The fact that Lurie identifies shame in his daughter (or believes he has) is a clear repetition of the moment where he takes the liberty of imagining that the bulldog Katy is ashamed of being watched while defecating. In both scenes, Lurie reads shame into the physical gestures of others while denying his own. However, he does not arrive at this conclusion out of empathy—after all, he does not sense why Lucy hides her face, but professes to know. More troubling still is the hypocrisy that this passage exposes. Even while he is indignant about how the attackers have used his daughter and “showed her what a woman was for,” he himself was forced to leave his job because he acted out of a similar lack of belief in the agency of women (115). Coetzee masterfully sets the two rapes—of Melanie Isaacs, and then of Lucy—in contrast with one another through the myopic perspective of his protagonist.

Although the two rapes take place under vastly different circumstances, what they have in common is a sense of ownership or entitlement on the part of the perpetrator(s). When Lurie first attempts to seduce Melanie at the beginning of the novel, he tells her that she should sleep with him “[b]ecause a woman’s beauty does not belong to her alone. It is part of the bounty she brings into the world. She has a duty to share it” (16). He then goes a step further in claiming that “[s]he does not own herself. Beauty does not own itself.” This language is repeated later on when he refers to a pair of sheep in eerily similar terms, remarking that “[s]heep do not own themselves, do

92 not own their lives” (123). Even more, they “exist to be used, every last ounce of them, their flesh to be eaten, their bones to be crushed and fed to poultry.” In each of these cases, the way he argues for the rights of collective ownership, essentially negating the independent subjectivity of women and animals, is diametrically opposed to the attitude he takes when the woman in question is his own kin. The thought that Lucy’s rapists are now the “owners” of her story is repugnant to him

(115). Yet even though Lurie’s thoughts on female and animal self-ownership may seem to have shifted now that the victimized woman is his daughter, he continues to claim possession in a subtler way: for while women and animals do not own themselves, he has no trouble naming their emotions and thus, in a way, owning them.

That being said, despite the similar way in which David relates to both animals and women, the power dynamic is slightly different in each case. Although the women for whom David speaks often choose not to speak up for themselves, they are nonetheless capable of responding in some way or another. In Lucy’s case, she first resists her father’s projections by refusing to discuss her rape with him and then through a fierce defense of her autonomy. Immediately after the attack, she refuses her father’s attempts to comfort her; as he forces her into an embrace, she says nothing and

“is stiff as a pole, yielding nothing” (99). When father and daughter attend a celebration at the farmhand Petrus’s home some time later, Lurie is furious to see the youngest of Lucy’s rapists mulling about: Pollux, “the dull-faced apprentice, the running-dog” (131). He threatens to call the police but is stopped by his daughter, who says: “This is my life. I am the one who has to live here.

What happened to me is my business, mine alone, not yours, and if there is one right I have it is the right not to be put on trial like this, not to have to justify myself—not to you, not to anyone else” (133). The pregnant Lucy then exerts her independence by refusing to leave the farm after

93 the attack despite her father’s urgings, even going so far as to agree to marry Petrus and become a shareholder on her own farm. Even Melanie, who does not accuse Lurie face-to-face, authors a statement that is read in his disciplinary hearing which she has chosen not to attend, just as she chooses to withdraw from his course. In both cases, the woman’s silence is certainly problematic, and I agree with Walther in her assertion that their silence cannot be seen as an act of autonomous resistance in itself.90 However, there remains at least a vestige of agency in the silence and absence of these women. By contrast, the animals in the novel are prevented from responding to the violence done to them in any meaningful way. Although they frequently make themselves heard by barking, whining, and growling, they are still at the mercy of men with guns—as one can see in the scene where Lucy’s and Lurie’s attackers slaughter the dogs in the kennel. Even the “biggest of the German Shepherds, slavering with rage,” is no match for a rifle’s “heavy report; blood and brains splatter the cage” (95). While not powerless—in fact, one could make the argument that they are killed because they are powerful and because they are a symbol of violent white

90 She writes: “Lucy's silence is indeed a way of resisting Lurie's domination of the narrative (although, with regard to her position as a whole, her decision not to speak is more complex): she will not allow him to take her story. While Lurie views Lucy's silence as wrongheaded, he sees his own as almost heroic. In both instances, the novel problematizes the idea of silence as resistance. Lucy's silence is clearly an attempt to navigate between passivity and resistance, atonement and autonomy; her silence is not a pure act of resistance, but rather a negotiation of priorities and desires to which the tight focalization through Lurie allows us no access. Lucy's silence results from a need to reconfigure a shattered self. Lurie's silence, by contrast, allows him to maintain his autonomous self-perception, and his narrative of himself as a wronged lover; his refusal to engage in any mutually responsive conversation about his actions is a manifestation of his extreme solipsism and his desperate attachment to autonomous selfhood. His narrative allows us to see how ‘speech’ -- with Lurie as the logocentre of the novel -- appropriates the silence of the other” (84-5, emphasis mine).

94 supremacy in the context of South Africa91—their nonhuman speech is understood by Lurie as reaction, not response; it is not that the animals are mute, but rather that their human companions are deaf.

While it may seem commonsensical to point out that the narrator always occupies a position of power over the narrated, this uneven power dynamic becomes even more skewed when the narrated object is an animal, as animals (alongside humans animalized by other humans) are frequently relegated to the category of things, not beings. Walther, remarking upon the similarities between Lurie’s “ascription of feelings and motivations to the novel’s female characters” and animals, also highlights “the convenient difference, here, . . . that there is no human language to resist Lurie’s dominating voice” (88). But if one cannot use human language to wage resistance, what other means might one have access to? Wendy Woodward addresses this quandary in The

Animal Gaze, in particular what she refers to as “the tired allegations of anthropomorphism in relation to the representations of nonhuman animals” (93). In brief, she makes a compelling case for the existence of real animal emotion, thus contradicting critics who read all emotion attributed to animals as anthropomorphic (in a negative sense) or who defend anthropomorphism as the only way to write about animals, since human language is the only means of communication to which we have access (93). However, my argument is not that animals do not have emotions, but rather that in this novel, Lurie projects his own onto them—ventriloquism, not anthropomorphism; forced representation, not advocacy. Thus, while I am certainly not in a position to suggest an alternative

91 In the words of Calina Ciobanu: “Viewed in this light, the men's massacre of the dogs constitutes both an act of retribution for and an attempt to break away from a history of racial strife, injustice, and dehumanization” (679).

95 way of writing about animals, what I am arguing for is a responsible reading of the text—in this instance, by applying pressure to the points where David Lurie believes he is connecting with animals but is in fact only interpreting them as an extension of himself.92

Some of the most blatant examples of Lurie’s ventriloquism occur during scenes of intense violence, thus reinforcing the link between physical and narrative violence.93 In the moments leading up to the attack at the farm, “The dogs, in a rage, bark and snap. The dog at Lucy’s side tries to tug loose. Even the old bulldog bitch, whom he seems to have adopted as his own, is growling softly” (Disgrace 92). The animal rage in this scene is later echoed when Lurie stumbles upon Pollux, the youngest of the attackers, at Lucy’s farm:

Katy has begun to growl . . . ‘You swine!’ he shouts, and strikes him a second time, so that he staggers. ‘You filthy swine!’ . . . At once the dog is upon him. Her teeth close over his elbow; she braces her forelegs and tugs, growling . . . The word still rings in the air: Swine! Never has he felt such elemental rage . . . So this is what it is like, he thinks! This is what it is like to be a savage! He gives the boy a good, solid kick, so that he sprawls sideways. Pollux! What a name! The dog changes position, mounting the boy’s body, tugging grimly at his arm, ripping his shirt . . . Then Lucy is on the scene. ‘Katy!’ she commands. (206- 07)

First of all, this scene is striking because it shows how within the span of a few pages, Katy can transform in Lurie’s eyes from a named companion into simply “the dog” and then back into Katy again. Just as during the initial attack on the farm, Katy loses her status as a named subject in the moment of rage (though whether it is her rage or Lurie’s, or a mirrored composite of the two, is unclear). She acts almost as an extension of Lurie, a physical expression of his affective state in

92 Anat Pick’s approach of “attentiveness” or “attention” (terms used by Benjamin and Simone Weil) offers an intriguing alternative to moralistic readings of animals by engaging with them in an “antiphilosophical” way (5). 93 As I discussed in Chapter One, Hortense Spillers is helpful here in thinking through the relationship between physical violence (the torture endured by enslaved Africans) and narrative or linguistic violence (“the destruction of the African name”) (73).

96 which his own rage gets translated into her growls. Complicating the matter still further, he uses the epithet “swine” to insult Pollux, who is not incidentally a young black man. At the moment where Lurie is treating Pollux like an animal and kicking him on the ground, he loses his connection to Katy as a named companion—thus re-animalizing her—until after the violence has passed. As Lucy tries to calm down her father, “Katy slumps down at her feet, panting lightly, pleased with herself, with her achievements” (208). Yet it would appear that it is Lurie and not

Katy who is pleased with himself. That he refers to the assault of Pollux as an achievement again betrays his projection of affect onto her, since a sense of pride in achievement—like shame—is most often seen as a human emotion. In this way, Lurie once again uses what he sees as a relationship between himself and an animal as a way of experiencing his own emotions without claiming responsibility for them. What this passage brings to light is not just how Lurie denies

Katy’s individuality when he is enraged (as represented by his choice to call her by name or simply

“the dog”), but how the same logic spills over into his relations with people. In moments of aggression, the dogs are just dogs. Which begs the question: what is it about rage and aggression that immediately gets relegated to the animal, to the unnamable other?

In The Open: Man and Animal, Giorgio Agamben does not provide an explicit answer to this question, but he does offer valuable insight into how we might go about addressing it.

According to him, understanding the way we fabricate divisions between man and non-man is essential to implementing human rights, as one must first determine what it means to be human.

To this end, he writes: “If, in the machine of the moderns, the outside is produced through the exclusion of an inside and the inhuman produced by animalizing the human, here the inside is obtained through the inclusion of an outside, and the non-man is produced by the humanization of

97 an animal: the man-ape, the enfant sauvage or Homo ferus, but also and above all the slave, the barbarian, and the foreigner, as figures of an animal in human form” (Agamben 37). For Agamben, the animalized human (or humanized animal) can most clearly be seen in the subaltern, the colonized subject, the racial other. Given the politico-historical context of Disgrace as a novel emerging from the ashes of South African apartheid, it is therefore especially troubling that Lucy’s attackers are characterized as animal-like—as seen in Lurie’s appellation of Pollux as the

“running-dog” (Disgrace 131) and the earlier description of his “flat, expressionless face and piggish eyes” and “flaring nostrils” (92). Of course, as I discussed in the first chapter, Agamben’s intervention in critical animal studies is rendered problematic by his configuring of the topic’s urgency around strictly human terms: animals merit being discussed because of their frequent conflation with marginalized humans such as slaves and foreigners. Nevertheless, the details of his argument hold true. His motives in discussing the human-animal border do not detract from the fact that this opposition has historically been used to justify violence towards groups of people.

As father and daughter struggle to come to terms with the attack, Lurie in particular appears to be at a loss for words to describe his emotions. Not long after, the two dance around the subject of her rape without addressing it outright. He tells Lucy, “Do you think that by meekly accepting what happened to you, you can set yourself apart?” and then, a few lines later, “Is it some form of private salvation you are trying to work out? Do you hope you can expiate the crimes of the past by suffering in the present?” (112) Lurie’s circumlocution—referring to the rape as “what happened to you”—indicates his discomfort with the word “rape” and its affective charge. In an echo of the pseudo-religious language that he so despised during his disciplinary hearing, he

98 decides to engage with the subject on an abstract, religious level (salvation, expiation, suffering) instead of on a personal, emotional level.

This inability to articulate his own feelings manifests itself on the following page, when, rather than trying to describe them himself, he returns to the old bulldog bitch: “Katy is coaxed out of her hiding-place and settled in the kitchen. She is subdued and timorous, following Lucy about, keeping close to her heels. Life, from moment to moment, is not as before. The house feels alien, violated” (113). In this scene, where neither he nor Lucy is able to talk about what happened, much less how they feel, he chooses to funnel his emotional state through what he imagines to be

Katy’s. He does not go so far as to say that he feels alien, violated—nor that Lucy does. Instead, he personifies the house, an inanimate object, preferring not to let the house speak for him (which would imply some sort of passive mutuality), but to make the house speak for him. As this scene shows, forced representation can operate both ways, and simultaneously; while Lurie projects his feelings onto the house, he is also conscripting the house as his proxy. This speaking for an object forms the third category of ventriloquism that he enacts, the others being speaking for an animal and speaking for a human.

One may feel impelled to ask: But doesn’t fiction by definition necessitate an act of imaginative reconstruction in terms of the other, a speaking-for? Strictly speaking, a certain narrative violence is perhaps inevitable. However, as I have argued, this relationship between narrator and narrated becomes especially fraught when the narrated object is an animal. (Although

Lurie is not the narrator of Disgrace, the story is told from his perspective—and as he himself says in relation to Lucy’s rapists, those who control the story hold the power.) In the final chapters of

Disgrace, narrative violence once again coalesces with physical violence when Lurie finds himself turning away from Katy and towards an unnamed, abandoned dog:

Of the dogs in the holding pens, there is one he has come to feel a particular fondness for . . . Its period of grace is almost over; soon it will have to submit to the needle . . . It is not ‘his’ in any sense; he has been careful not to give it a name (though Bev Shaw refers to it as Driepoot); nevertheless, he is sensible of a generous affection streaming out toward him from the dog. Arbitrarily, unconditionally, he has been adopted; the dog would die for him, he knows. (215)

Upon first glance, it may appear that Lurie is ventriloquizing this dog just as he has so many others—after all, expressing that he “knows” the dog would die for him is reminiscent of the way in which he “knows” why his daughter has chosen to remain silent about her rape. Nevertheless, in this moment he is finally engaging with his own emotions (if ever so slightly) by confessing to be “sensible” to the animal’s affection and by imagining himself into the affective life of the animal rather than the other way around. Furthermore, from this passage it is clear that Walther’s casual reference to this final dog as being named “Driepoot” is incorrect—and importantly so—for Lurie does not simply neglect to give the dog a name out of apathy. On the contrary, he betrays an uncharacteristic sense of involvement in being “careful not to give it a name.” Although most scholars have glossed over this peculiarity in analyzing the final chapters, Woodward does speculate briefly on the meaning of this namelessness, writing that “while Shaw calls him Driepoot

(an Afrikaans word meaning ‘three-legged’), Lurie refuses the name, possibly because it emphasises the dog’s disability, possibly because the very act of naming would be to possess or control him, or set up expectations in the dog that he had been adopted” (139). While Woodward is entirely correct to associate the act of naming with ownership, she does not take this line of questioning any further. As I will show, however, the name offers an enticing lens through which we can read Disgrace.

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In his essay “Über Sprache überhaupt und über die Sprache des Menschen,” Walter

Benjamin identifies the act of naming as one of the fundamental markers of difference between humans and animals. In this, he differs from iconic thinkers from Descartes to Lacan who identify language as something that animals do not possess, thus constituting a firm border between two orders of being.94 Benjamin, on the other hand, maintains that all animate and inanimate things in nature take part in language (147). What makes human language unique, however, is its propensity and power to name things.95 Further on, he connects naming to the silence of nature when he writes that “dieser Verbindung von Anschauung und Benennung ist innerlich die mitteilende Stummheit der Dinge (der Tiere) auf die Wortsprache des Menschen zu gemeint, die sie im Namen aufnimmt”

(152, emphasis mine).96 However, this Stummheit of things and animals is not quite the same as silence, as it is defined by an intrinsic lack: the inability to produce sound and not simply the absence of sound. (This is in contrast with the word Sprachlosigkeit, which he uses interchangeably with Stummheit to refer to nature, but not to animals.)97 But although several scholars have mentioned Benjamin’s work on naming in relation to Disgrace, so far no one has pointed out its relationship to violence.98

94 Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am: 121. 95 Benjamin writes: “Name as the heritage of human language therefore vouches for the fact that language as such is the mental being of man . . . Man is the namer; by this we recognize that through him pure language speaks. . . . Hence, he is the lord of nature and can give names to things.” (65). 96 In Selected Writings Volume 1, Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1997, Benjamin is translated as writing: “this combination of contemplation and naming implies the communicating muteness [Stummheit] of things (animals) toward the word-language of man, which receives them in name” (70). 97 “Sprachlosigkeit: das ist das große Leid der Natur” (Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften II 155). 98 Kari Weil and Michael Marais both briefly address naming in their work, but for them it is primarily a linguistic problem. In Thinking Animals, Weil references Benjamin in her discussion of animal naming—however, she does so in order to explore the problem of mourning animal

101

As I argue, though, what connects the name and animal muteness is indeed an act of violence: an active making-silent, or ventriloquism as I have called it in this chapter.99 On the one hand, having a name implies a certain amount of subjectivity and individual agency; as we have seen with Katy, she is given emotion and expression where many others are not. However, I have shown that these are not necessarily her emotions proper, but are projected onto her by Lurie. Her name is not her own, but is given to her by a human and used as a means of forcibly representing her. This other side of having a name—the having-been-given-a-name—implies a namer who, by naming, owns the named thing, which one can see in Lurie’s logic that if he were to give the three- legged dog a name, it would be “his” (Disgrace 215). Thus Derrida, reading Benjamin, points to the less benevolent aspects of naming when he writes that the “sadness, mourning, and melancholy

(Traurigkeit) of nature and of animality are born out of this muteness (Stummheit, Sprachlosigkeit), but they are also born out of and by means of the wound without a name: that of having been given a name” (Animal 19). Ironically, while Katy is the dog “whom he seems to have adopted as his own,” it is the unnamed dog at the end who reverses the affective and possessive flow between human and animal, making Lurie feel that the dog has adopted him (Disgrace 92). In this way,

lives and not human-animal power dynamics. For her, the “over-naming” to which Benjamin refers is a symptom of language’s inability to capture the essence of the thing, not of animal silence (104). Meanwhile, Marais reads “the moment in which the writer or reader encounters and attempts to name the unnameable” as the ultimate irony of Disgrace (Secretary 188). Neither directly identifies the violence inherent in naming. 99 In this, I differ from scholars such as Chloë Taylor, who views Disgrace “as an attempt to name and to grieve the deaths of animals which are normally considered unnameable and ungrievable, and to allow the frailty, the cries, and the faces of non-human animals to address us” (66). She reads the animals in Disgrace through the lens of Judith Butler’s concept of “grievable lives,” extending Butler’s concept to include nonhuman animals and criticizing her for this omission. Taylor connotes naming positively here, though, whereas I take a more skeptical stance.

102

Katy acts as a foil for this dog. Whereas Lurie does succeed in forging a bond with Katy, he sees himself as her master and owner; by contrast, his relationship with the nameless dog reveals a shifting balance of power. For, as Derrida writes, “to lose the name is not to attack it, to destroy it or wound it. On the contrary, to lose the name is quite simply to respect it: as name” (On the Name

58). One can thus read Lurie’s refusal to name this final dog in two ways. If one follows the logic of Benjamin and Derrida, the fact that Lurie chooses not to name this final dog is not a mark of disrespect or contrived distance, but rather a realization that he is not his owner. In this way, he would finally be allowing the animal his silence, rather than forcing upon him a state of muteness.

However, it could just as easily reflect an unwillingness to form a lasting bond with him. My argument is a mixture of these two interpretations—for while Coetzee leads the reader into thinking Lurie has changed for the better and learned to respect the other by giving up ownership, he complicates the matter by pointing out the fine line between respect and its double: the refusal to establish lasting intimacy disguised as altruism. In the words of Kari Weil, “it would seem that the responsibilities of such an ‘adopted’ relation are too much for Lurie to bear—more than he can manage and more than he has allowed from any human relation” (144).

Nevertheless, it is through naming—or rather, refusing to name—that Lurie is able to interrupt the cycle of ventriloquism in which he engages throughout most of the novel. It is only at the very end that he attempts to tell things like they are. During a final session of euthanizing dogs, “He and Bev do not speak. He has learned by now, from her, to concentrate all his attention on the animal they are killing, giving it what he no longer has difficulty in calling by its proper name: love” (219). At this moment, Lurie is finally claiming responsibility—not for the sins of his past or for his relationships with others; he does not go that far—but for the actions and emotions

103 of the moment. He does not parry around the word, as he did earlier by calling Lucy’s rape “what was done to her.” In accepting his own actions and emotions as his, no longer reflected or refracted through the body of an animal or a human other, he is finally speaking for himself. He has given up trying to own others, choosing instead to own himself. However, this moment cannot be read as unequivocally redemptive, as his self-ownership comes at the cost of sustained engagement with the other. Further complicating the matter, this revelation comes at a distinctly ironic moment: he is able to receive the “generous affection” streaming towards him from the nameless dog only when—or perhaps only because—“its period of grace is almost over.” Although Lurie does not deign to speak for this dog as he did for Katy or his own daughter, he has absolute control over the dog’s body and ends by exerting violence on it—a mercy killing, perhaps, but a killing nonetheless.

The novel’s last line—“‘Yes, I am giving him up,’” spoken by Lurie (220)—thus poses the question: what is he giving up?

As mentioned previously, Tremaine offers the most explicit answer to this question when he argues that Lurie is giving up the idea that soul and body are somehow separate, and that salvation can be found in art; what would remain, then, is the embodied soul. Philip Dickinson, on the other hand, borrows Agamben’s terminology in referring to the final nameless dog as the “anti- homo sacer,” or the animal that is destined for sacrifice and whose final moment both “assumes and abdicates a responsibility for the other” (17). Unlike Chris Danta, who sees this sacrifice as empty, Boehmer does see the possibility for atonement (if not salvation) in Disgrace; however, she argues that this atonement is founded upon “silent women-in-pain.”100 Following the lines of

100 This is not unlike Spivak’s identification of the young Indian woman’s suicide as an expression of voice, when other modes of self-representation have not been available.

104 argumentation that I have pursued in this chapter, I propose a different reading: namely, that

Lurie’s final words are indicative of an exchange rather than a pure relinquishment. He has given up the role of omnipotent narrator of his life in that he no longer presumes to speak for others by projecting his own affect onto the women and animals around him. In a similar way, he has (at least in this one instance) given up the primal power of name-giving. But in the end, he has abdicated one throne only to ascend another. Whereas some critics view this scene as the crowning moment in Lurie’s ethical development,101 such an interpretation is complicated by the fact that he has exchanged narrative violence for embodied violence—even if such violence is in the service of a “good death,” or euthanasia.

Conclusion: sacrifice and self-interest

While many have identified the sacrificial nature of Disgrace’s ending, I agree with Danta that it is a sacrifice without hope of redemption—for the sacrifice that Lurie believes he is making for the dog’s sake is, in fact, far from selfless. Questioning the logic of animal euthanasia, Colin

Dayan dares to ask: “Does the addition of the adjective ‘humane’ remove the fact of killing, of death itself?” (75) In reference to the legal confiscation and destruction of pit bulls in the United

States, she targets the dubious logic by which “they kill [the dogs] after rescuing them—kill them while speaking the language of salvation” (76). What she ironically refers to as Gnadentod

(literally, grace or mercy death), Lurie names Lösung; in this way, he too speaks the language of salvation as he doles out death. However, it is important to point out that this nameless dog is not irredeemable; euthanasia is not his last option. In this, I disagree with Michael Marais, who writes

101 See Dekoven.

105 that “Lurie must give up the dog because it is in the dog’s interests that he does so” (Secretary of the Invisible 174). At the end of the day, Lurie could reasonably either adopt this dog or set him free. Though missing a leg, the dog does not appear to be suffering and still displays a zest for life: despite his infirmity, he “frisks” around the yard and is “fascinated by the sound of the banjo”

(Disgrace 215). Yet Lurie does not even stop to consider the very real option of taking the dog home and giving him a name.102 And why not? Because despite having learned to relate to others on terms other than his own, he falls short of being able to enter into a state of permanent relationality with them. In other words, he is unwilling to surrender himself to “a love that is not easily managed” (Weil 137). Although he no longer speaks over others’ emotions, the novel ends with him claiming to represent—or speak for—their best interests. Under the guise of self- righteous abnegation, he sacrifices the dog to whom he has grown close in order to preserve the integrity of his selfhood.

102 Ciobanu asks a similar question in “Coetzee’s Posthumanist Ethics”: “must we understand Lurie's final failure to reciprocate—to adopt the dog, to save him from death, much less to die for him—as an act of betrayal, a decisive seal of Lurie's disgrace?” (683) However, her answer differs from mine in that she argues that “[u]ltimately, we can understand Lurie as having recognized the dog's appeal and having responded to it by delivering a final, merciful coup de grâce—not just a death-blow, but a de facto act of grace—to an animal that cannot be accommodated in any other way by the world it inhabits.”

106

CHAPTER THREE – Professions

Introduction

Zwei Wege gibt es, Kafkas Schriften grundsätzlich zu verfehlen. Die natürliche Auslegung ist der eine, die übernatürliche ist der andere; am Wesentlichen gehen beide - die psychoanalytische wie die theologische - in gleicher Weise vorbei.

- Walter Benjamin103

In the dream-like final “lesson” of J. M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello, to which I briefly referred in Chapter One, the title character faces an odd challenge that even she acknowledges is

“no more real than she” (195). Thrown into a situation which she reluctantly identifies as

“Kafkaesque” (despite her claim to be “no devotee of Kafka”), she finds herself in a similar position to the unnamed petitioner in Kafka’s “Vor dem Gesetz” (209). Both wind up mysteriously in front of a gate, and both are denied entry to what lies beyond for vague reasons. In Costello’s case, however, the hurdle she must overcome is specific: she must provide a statement of belief.

(Importantly, she clarifies that what is required of her is belief—not faith.) Also unlike Kafka’s hero, she has the opportunity to plead her case multiple times before her judges. At the beginning of the first hearing, she defends her lack of fixed beliefs by explaining: “I am a writer . . . It is not my profession to believe, just to write. Not my business. I do imitations, as Aristotle would have said” (194). She argues that a writer must remain open to all beliefs and voices; she hesitates to label “what [she] think[s] of as opinions and prejudices” as beliefs, instead viewing herself as a conduit through which others can speak (200).

103 Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften: 425.

107

Keeping in mind the importance of performance and representation to understanding the many layers of meaning at work in Coetzee and Kafka, I now turn to a third category with the potential to deepen our understanding of the former: profession. I use the term profession, with its many layers of meanings and connotations, quite deliberately. On the most basic level, a profession is what one does. And yet, a profession is more akin to a calling—Beruf—than to a career.

Furthermore, with its proximity to the word confession—which can refer to one’s religious affiliation—it also retains a faint flavor of belief, or the extra-rational. A profession is also by nature outward-facing. Unlike confessions, they need not be made in earnest; there is no assumed interior commitment. Nevertheless, to profess something is to enter into a relationship with belief—even if the substance of this relationship is the denial of belief or its cousin, doubt. It is interesting to note, then, that while Costello declares her profession to be that of a writer, she does not (at first) profess any beliefs, religious or otherwise.

My argument is that expressions of belief and doubt in Coetzee are closely entwined with his fixation on allegory. This can be seen throughout his work in novels such as Elizabeth Costello and Age of Iron, his scholarly essays, and shorter pieces like “He and His Man,” which he performed as an acceptance speech when he received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2003.

Similarly to his bouts as Elizabeth Costello, this text is a piece of third-person fiction that highlights the difficulties of interpretation. Its apogee (and one must remember that Coetzee declaimed these words in real life) reads: “It is an allegory! . . . but he can see no allegory for the life of him.”104 As I have shown in my examination of Costello’s references to Kafka’s ape

Rotpeter, allegory has the tendency in Coetzee to cluster and break down in the presence of

104 https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2003/coetzee-lecture-e.html.

108 animals. Zeroing in on several specific scenes in the two novels mentioned above, this chapter will pay close attention to the ways in which language functions around the numerous dogs in both

Kafka and Coetzee, with both authors frequently eschewing rational, juridical language (e.g. guilt, truth, knowledge) in favor of more abstract, transcendental terminology (e.g. shame, forgiveness, sin). Finally, I conclude that the practice of literal reading and meaning—the stakes of which I enumerated in Chapter One—comes into frequent, fraught contact with what Costello calls the

“literary.” By drawing connections between the canine rhetoric used by characters such as Costello and in Walter Benjamin’s writings on Kafka, I show how through his work, what Coetzee proposes is a living, organic view of literature and that, consequently, words carry material weight. His preoccupation with the literary is perhaps best demonstrated by the following scene.

Continually playing the skeptic, Costello repeatedly draws attention throughout her ordeal at the gate to the constructedness of her surroundings. In addition to the many references to

Kafka—some explicit and others less so, such as her remark that the scene is exactly what one would “expect in an obscure Italian or Austro-Italian border town in the year 1912” (206)—she complains more generally of the setting’s “literariness.” Facing her judges for the first time, for example, she notes: “Excessively literary . . . A caricaturist’s idea of a bench of judges” (200). But what does it mean to be “excessively” literary? And what exactly is the “right” amount of literariness? During her second appeal, her thoughts follow a similar path: “Like the interrogation of Joan of Arc . . . How do you know where your voices come from? She cannot stand the literariness of it all. Have they not the wit to come up with something new?” (204) To her, the

“literary” is synonymous with the generic—that which has already been said and is now being referenced. (Importantly, allegory also functions through a chain of reference.) Hemmed in on all

109 sides by heavy-handed allusions from literature and myth, she even imagines herself to be “in a kind of literary theme park” (208). Which begs the question: what is the effect of Coetzee, an author of literature, writing into existence the character of an author who herself finds distasteful the overuse of metatextual devices and referentiality? The mise en abîme created by Coetzee’s

“mirroring effect,” discussed at length in Chapter One, is thus stretched further as Elizabeth

Costello progresses.

The examples above showcase a certain self-conscious distancing on the part of both author and character—and yet, despite Costello’s professed resistance to “literariness,” she freely employs literary forms and tropes in her own life. In an attempt to make her second statement of belief worthy of admission, for example, she invents the story that as a child, she watched the frogs on the Dulgannon river in Australia come alive again each spring with the rains in what she grandly terms a “resurrection of the dead” (217). To her judges, she acknowledges that “[i]n [her] account

. . . the life cycle of the frog may sound allegorical, but to the frogs themselves it is no allegory, it is the thing itself, the only thing” (217). One popular reading of moments like these is that Coetzee preempts criticism (here, of writing allegorically; elsewhere, of clumsy references to great literature) by having a character signal awareness of the literary devices at play. In these instances,

Costello seems to be acknowledging her experience as textual, even if she does not see herself from an outside view as a character in this text.105 (Meanwhile, in Slow Man Costello does communicate with the protagonist of one of her novels, explaining to him that she is writing his life into existence.) However, even though she claims that these frogs do not view their own life

105 Derek Attridge expands on this self-referentiality in J. M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading, The University of Chicago Press, 2004: 34.

110 cycle as allegorical—just as the ram sacrificed by Odysseus “is not just an idea, the ram is alive”

(211)—she does not contradict her judges when they sum up her argument in the following way:

“At today’s hearing, however, you testify to a belief in frogs, or more accurately in the allegorical meaning of a frog’s life, if I understand your drift” (220, emphasis mine). While she professes to operate in a literal space, as she does when she declares that she “say[s] what she means” in Lesson

Three, her words and actions belie this claim (62).

Like the life cycle of the frogs to which Costello refers, this chapter returns to several of the driving themes of this dissertation, such as the problem of allegory; what lies beneath the intertextuality in Elizabeth Costello; and the question of whether (as well as in what way)

Coetzee’s extra-textual performances exercise influence over a reader’s interpretation of his oeuvre. As I will show, these questions come most clearly into focus when viewed through the lens of animality, in particular the dogs who make themselves heard in many scenes and in many ways throughout his work. I argue that for Coetzee, the difficulties that authors face in representing animals on the page—which run parallel to questions of how to engage with them in real life, a problem with which David Lurie contends—and the question of humankind’s responsibility towards their fellow beings is intimately connected with his preoccupation with allegory and the interpretive pitfalls and potential that it opens up.

Whereas Chapter One paired several lessons of Elizabeth Costello with “Ein Bericht für eine Akademie,” this chapter begins by examining the former in conjunction with the less frequently quoted of Kafka’s two canine stories, “Schakale und Araber.”106 This curious story

106 I use the word “canine” here on purpose, as dogs and jackals belong to the same genus. Over the years, scientists have disagreed over the nearness of their relation; however, they are chromosomally identical and are capable of interbreeding. The other dog story to which I refer is

111 appeared as a duet with “Bericht” in the same 1917 edition of Buber’s monthly magazine Der

Jude, under the heading “Zwei Tiergeschichten,” and has nearly always been discussed in tandem with “Bericht.” Likely because of their simultaneous publication in a journal known for its Zionist sympathies, the two have inspired a spate of similarly tinged allegorical interpretations (e.g. Kafka satirizing the assimilated Jew, Kafka either critiquing or embracing the idea of a Jewish nation).

That being said, it is interesting to note that there is much less secondary literature on “Schakale und Araber” than its counterpart—largely, I will argue, because of the ease with which it has been interpreted as a clear-cut religious allegory. Tracing the critical discussion surrounding this story and contrasting it with “Bericht,” I will show how it complicates the concept of “literal” reading as it has been proposed by Derek Attridge and others, including the fictional Costello.107

Next, I turn to an oft passed-over piece of Coetzee’s scholarly production: a review of a new translation of Kafka’s Das Schloss. I argue that just as knowing the context under which

Elizabeth Costello was published and performed can enrich the reader’s appreciation of its many layers, a familiarity with this essay can deepen one’s understanding of the religious themes and language of works such as Elizabeth Costello, Disgrace, and Age of Iron. While my focus in this dissertation is on Kafka’s Tiergeschichten and not the novels, it is important to note the following: that just as Kafka addresses similar themes in his works about humans and animals (e.g. the modern bureaucratic state, the impossibility of salvation), the language Coetzee uses in his scholarly work often bleeds into the language he uses in his fiction, and/or vice versa. As I will show, this is true of his academic discussion of Das Schloss and Costello’s engagement with “Bericht” in her two

Kafka’s “Forschungen eines Hundes.” See James Serpell, Prscilla Barrett, The Domestic Dog: Its Evolution, Behaviour and Interactions with People. 107 See Lesson Four of Elizabeth Costello and Attridge: 39.

112 lectures. By remaining attentive to how the scholarly inclinations and methods Coetzee shows in this essay cross over and inform his fiction, one thus gains access to another intertext—long neglected in Coetzee studies until now—which in turn can help make sense of the disconnect between the secular settings of his novels and the religious language he frequently employs.

In this section, I will show that it is no coincidence that the language Coetzee uses in his review of Das Schloss to discuss (mainly criticize) religious-allegorical readings of Kafka maps almost verbatim on to the language and themes one finds in his fiction. For if the word “profession” offered by Costello has connotations of vocation as well as the beliefs that one announces, if not holds, another obviously related word is “professor.” A professor is both a scholarly and didactic figure for whom it is traditionally frowned upon to offer unsupported opinions or beliefs. As a former professor and an author, Coetzee himself (alongside many of his protagonists) inhabits two roles.108 Like Kafka’s Katzenlamm, Odradek, or the civilized ape Rotpeter, he can be seen as a hybrid—at least, inasmuch as one believes that the role of author and scholar are separate to begin with.109

From there, I examine moments in Elizabeth Costello, Disgrace, and Age of Iron where characters profess beliefs, paying particular attention to the frequent confluence of animal life with language that exceeds the reach of “rational discourse”—for example, Costello’s explanation of her vegetarianism as stemming from “a desire to save [her] soul” (89). For the purposes of this

108 Lurie of Disgrace is a professor of communications; Mrs. Curren of Age of Iron is a former classics professor; Elizabeth Costello and Dostoevsky of The Master of Petersburg are writers. 109 Peter Haacke points out that “Kafka’s animals are to a large extent hybrids—not just literally, in the sense that the creature in ‘A Crossbreed’ is a mix between a cat and a lamb, but more generally, in that they cannot be identified as pure, distinct or exemplary types in a taxonomical or hierarchical system of differentiation” (141).

113 chapter, I use the term “rational discourse” to describe the language of logic, individualism, and scientific inquiry normally associated with the Enlightenment. This is the language that David

Lurie speaks at his disciplinary hearing, with his insistence on the secular concept of “guilt” over the more religiously tinged “repentance,” and which begins to fail him as the novel progresses

(Disgrace 58). It is also important to note the timing of this change from the rational to the affective, or spiritual: his shift in language coincides almost step-for-step with his increasing contact with animals, beginning with the attack at his daughter’s farm. Meanwhile, Costello’s increasing reliance on words such as “soul” and “sin” seems to coincide with her growing older.110

It is therefore no coincidence that the final scenes of both Disgrace and Elizabeth Costello revolve around a dog. Yet despite this similarity, on the surface these scenes appear vastly different. The penultimate paragraph of “At the Gate” reads:

She has a vision of the gate, the far side of the gate, the side she is denied. At the foot of the gate, blocking the way, lies stretched out a dog, an old dog, his lion-coloured hide scarred from innumerable manglings. His eyes are closed, he is resting, snoozing. Beyond him is nothing but a desert of sand and stone, to infinity. It is her first vision in a long while, and she does not trust it, does not trust in particular the anagram GOD-DOG. Too literary, she thinks again. A curse on literature! (Elizabeth Costello 224-5)

Unlike Lurie’s three-legged companion, whose infirmity constantly reminds the reader of his physical materiality, the only dog to grace the pages of Elizabeth Costello comes to her in a vision; it is a self-acknowledged product of her imagination. In a simpler story, this dog might be the answer to a woman’s long quest for secular salvation—a representation of all that stands between her and transcendence. Yet with characteristic suspicion, Costello dismisses this interpretation as

110 See Chapter 1 of this dissertation, in which I quote Coetzee’s most recent unpublished work, “The Glass Abattoir.” In this piece, a rapidly ageing Elizabeth Costello communicates these concerns about animals to her son John.

114 too straightforward. The “anagram GOD-DOG” is “too literary” to be trusted—and given the way she often conflates the terms, perhaps too allegorical as well—in the sense that it would be too easy to accept one as a substitute for the other. More interesting still is how she turns this moment of near-revelation into a commentary on literature. This anagram fits too well into the expected; the generic; the realm of literature (the literary) instead of life (the literal, or material essence of being). After all, what is the nature of the connection that is being drawn between the idea of a sleeping, mangy dog and the staged literariness that Costello so mistrusts? By comparing this scene to Kafka’s “Schakale und Araber,” as well as other similar moments in Coetzee, I reflect on the relationship between the literal and the literary. Without accepting that an idea must always stand in opposition to a “thing itself,” I suggest that the dance of these two words (literal/literary) has something to do with the anagram, opposition, or hybrid GOD-DOG. I argue that what Coetzee offers is the insight that while literature may offer an approximation of the literal, there remains a palpable difference between the idea and the flesh.

As I will show, when it comes to Kafka and Coetzee, animal figures and figurative animals often come hand in hand with ideas and emotions that cannot be contained within the language of reason. I propose that this resistance to being contained is one factor that gives rise to the frequent allegorization of animals while also rendering these allegories fundamentally flawed.

This chapter begins with Kafka’s “Schakale und Araber,” which has been read almost universally as a Gleichnis or Parabel despite the author’s documented refusal of the word in favor of the more neutral Tiergeschichte.111 From there, I turn to a short, unobtrusive scholarly piece on

Kafka’s Das Schloss that Coetzee wrote in 1998 in order to examine the delicate balance he

111 Haacke: 145.

115 maintains between his multiple professions. I suggest that his scholarly work sustains a dialogue with his fiction (or vice versa) that demands to be taken into account as critics have other intertexts, such as Kafka’s “Bericht” or Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe.112 Finally, I turn to several examples from Coetzee’s fiction to show how his depictions of dogs illustrate and problematize allegorical language. To paint a fuller picture of their import, I provide a brief overview of the political and historical significance of dogs in South Africa, focusing on the roles they have occupied in South African society and the imagined spaces they continue to fill. Jeanne-Marie

Jackson rightly warns of “subsuming . . . animal characters into a broader ‘figure of the dog’” and thus re-allegorizing “the animal,”113 erasing the very individuality which literature purports to capture. With the aim of probing points where these two subjects diverge—individual dogs as figures and “the figure of the dog,” a popular object of Coetzee scholars—I deliberately examine the one in light of the other.

Of Jackals and apes: in deserts and on stage

In “Schakale und Araber,” an unnamed man from an unnamed northern country narrates his encounter with a swarm of jackals in an unnamed desert. Finding himself surrounded in the deep night, he is greeted by the oldest of the jackals. Almost immediately, the jackal declares the

112 In Foe, Coetzee reimagines Robinson Crusoe from the perspective of a fellow female shipwreck. 113 Jeanne-Marie Jackson, “Going to the Dogs: Enduring Isolation in Marlene Van Niekerk’s Triomf,” Studies in the Novel, vol. 43, no. 3, 2011: 346.

116 man to be their Hoffnung: his kind has been awaiting a savior for generations. Handing over a pair of rusty scissors, the jackal beseeches the man to cut the Arabs’ throats and thus wash the land of their uncleanliness, which includes practices such as killing and eating animals. At this, the man’s

Arab guide returns, breaking the spell. He informs the northerner not to pay the jackals any heed— they give the same speech to every European who passes by—and signals to his attendants to release a dead camel. Despite their professed obsession with Reinheit, the animals abandon reasonable speech and thought, eagerly devouring the carcass—even as the drivers rain blows of the whip on them. The story ends with the Arab’s words: “Wunderbare Tiere, nicht wahr? Und wie sie uns hassen!” (Kafka, Die Erzählungen 284)

If Kafka’s animal stories have invited a multitude of allegorical readings over the years,

“Schakale und Araber” is perhaps unique in the nearly universal critical consensus that it must be an allegory for something. In the middle of the twentieth-century, critical responses tended towards the simplistic, or at least the biographical. To give one example, Herbert Tauber argued in 1948 that the Arabs represented the inexorable law of the world, while the scissors stood for the impotence of the individual; taken together, the point of the story is that any “revolt of humanity against natural law is futile and pathetic.”114 To Walter Sokel, on the other hand, Kafka’s animals

“illustrate aspects of Kafka’s personality”—specifically, the jackals betoken “Kafka’s revulsion at his failure to remain strictly vegetarian.”115 William Rubinstein, while claiming to distinguish himself from these scholars, applied an equally allegorical formula in 1967. Pointing to the connection between this story and “Bericht,” he posited that “Schakale und Araber” “is also

114 Summarized by William C. Rubinstein, “Kafka’s ‘Jackals and Arabs,’” Monatshefte, vol. 59, no. 1, 1967: 13. 115 Rubinstein: 14.

117 concerned with specifically Jewish material and that these two stories, published as ‘Zwei

Tiergeschichten,’ are thematically related” (13). And yet, far from proposing a new way into the story, he simply changed out the variables of the allegorical equation: to him, the northerner “is to kill the Arabs, who, [he] believe[s], represent the Gentiles” (14). With his biographical and Biblical references, he superimposes one layer of allegory atop another. Writing plainly, he concluded that

“[t]he jackals’ demands for carrion and cleanliness highlight in Kafka’s satire the self- contradictory attitudes of Western Jews, torn between holiness and materialism. Kafka never forgot that his father couldn't help pointing out the millionaire’s son in the synagogue” (16). In his analysis, the personal becomes political.

It is important to understand the uniform tone of this “older” secondary literature, if only to grasp how little has changed in the intervening years. Writing in 1996, Karen Piper proposed one of the first postcolonial readings of Kafka—once again switching out the players while leaving the accepted allegorical framework intact. Using “Bericht” as evidence that Kafka was aware of the “facts of empire” (Piper 42), she draws an explicit connection between Kafka’s “In der

Strafkolonie” and the history of French colonialism, in particular the use of one island as a penal colony. Ironically, she does not accept her postcolonial reading as allegorical. Instead, she writes:

“I intend to read the torture machine and penal colony literally rather than metaphorically or allegorically. I will ask not what the penal colony of Kafka's story might represent; instead, I will read the penal colony in a literal sense, as one of the many outposts of the colonial enterprise”

(43). Whereas Derek Attridge, if applying a literal reading to “In der Strafkolonie,” might focus on the way Kafka’s language evokes physical and emotional responses in the reader, Piper’s understanding of literal reading seems to be a one-to-one substitution in which Kafka’s penal

118 colony is the Île du Diable that existed in French Guiana.116 One heading of her article reads “The

‘Penal Colony’ is Not a Metaphor,” and yet it would appear obvious that even if she were right and Kafka deliberately modeled his story on these real French outposts, this relationship would be metaphorical; a historical allegory (43).

Other critics, while offering interesting connections and proposing nuanced new allegories, have fallen prey to similar fallacies. In contrast to Piper, Peter Haacke acknowledges the allegorical potential of “Schakale und Araber” while engaging with the story in a less reductive way. Although he agrees that “[t]he Messianic rhetoric in Kafka’s story is overt,” he stresses that “there is much debate about how it might actually reflect on either Jews or Judaism” (Haacke 147). While acknowledging the fact that Kafka knowingly published the story in a journal with Zionist leanings, he proposes that “the story may be read as a parody of Nietzsche’s idea of ressentiment and slave morality, especially since it bears remarkable resemblance to an animal story that appears in the pages of On the Genealogy of Morals” (148). According to this reading, he argues, “Kafka may well have been satirizing Zionism as a Nietzschean will to power based on a naturalist fantasy of purification” (149). Haacke’s interpretation, while compelling, is nevertheless inconsistent.

While taking care to differentiate his reading from the religious-allegorical ones that came before—and to point out that Kafka meant the story to be just that, a story and not a “parable”—

Haacke argues “that Kafka’s animals represent the extent to which political life confounds social divisions instead of overcoming them” (141, emphasis mine). By defining the stakes of his argument in terms of what the animals represent, rather than how they function, he too ends by reading them allegorically. My point is not that all allegorical readings are incorrect—although

116 Piper: 44.

119 some undoubtedly are. For, as Attridge puts it, “[i]f reading a work as literature means making the most of the event of reading, an event by which our habits and assumptions are tested and shifted

(if only momentarily), then part of the literary experience may be the event of allegorizing reading

. . . Allegory may thus be staged in literature, along with so many other aspects of the way we make sense of the world” (J. M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading 61). His conclusion, drawn from Coetzee’s body of work, proposes that “[a]llegory . . . deals with the already known, whereas literature opens a space for the other. Allegory announces a moral code, literature invites an ethical response” (64). This is why interpretations such as Piper’s and Rubinstein’s ultimately fail to satisfy: by treating the story as a code to be cracked and advancing their theory as the best—if not only—key, they lose sight of the very uncertainties and blank spaces that distinguish the parabolic from the literary.117

Despite the numerous theories about “Schakale und Araber” that have cropped up over the years, few critics have paid attention to the jackals as actual animals and not just ideas. This is not for want of interesting material. If one were attempting to avoid the obvious religious-allegorical readings here, the clearest image to emerge from this enigmatic story would be the body. While this is also true of “Bericht,” Rotpeter’s references to bodies—his own, and the ones around him— illuminate their potential for suffering (forced to crouch in a crate; burned with cigarettes), whereas the European appears fixated on the jackals as specifically animal bodies. As they encircle him, he describes them as “schlanke Leiber,” and throughout the story, he meticulously observes their

117 Christopher Conti writes that “Kafka’s work strives not for the symbol – or ‘meaning’ – but for allegory, ‘the key to which’, however, ‘has been stolen’, such that ‘any effort to make this fact itself the key is bound to go astray’” (471). While I do not wholly accept his premise that Kafka means his works to be allegories, I do agree that “any effort to make” allegory itself the meaning of his work is flawed.

120 breathing, among other gestures (280). At the beginning, for example, “alle atmeten kurz und fauchend,” and a few lines further, “alle atmeten noch schneller; mit gehetzten Lungen.” A foul smell escapes their “Mäulern” (280); he notices the jackals cleaning their “Pfoten” (282); and as they devour the camel, he refers to their “Schnauzen”(283). By using vocabulary that specifically denotes animal body parts (muzzles, paws, snouts), the narrator simultaneously separates himself from their kind and draws attention to the disconnect between the jackals’ physical presence— indicated by their bodily needs and hungers—and the high-flown language they use to describe their desire for Reinheit. Waxing eloquent, the oldest jackal cries: “Soviel Wasser hätte der Nil nicht, um uns rein zu waschen. Wir laufen doch schon vor dem bloßen Anblick ihres lebenden

Leibes weg, in reinere Luft, in die Wüste, die deshalb unsere Heimat ist” (281). And yet, the jackal also uses animal-specific language to describe the Arabs, who he claims “töten Tiere, um sie zu fressen”—“fressen” being a verb for eating that is reserved for animals.

As Haacke points out, there is no denying the Messianic language embedded in this piece.

After all, Kafka’s stories are replete with penal colony officers who seek Erlösung and sons who drown themselves upon hearing a father’s Urteil. The puzzle of how to interpret Kafka without resorting to reductive allegories, many of them religious, has challenged critics for over a century.

Acknowledging the difficulty of the matter, Walter Benjamin once wrote that “[e]in religionsphilosophisches Schema den Büchern Kafkas unterzuschieben, wie man es getan hat, lag freilich nahe genug . . . . Dennoch bedeutet er eine ganz eigentümliche Umgehung, beinahe möchte

[er] sagen Abfertigung der Welt von Kafka . . . Nur daß solche Methode sehr viel weniger ergibt als die gewiß viel schwierigere einer Deutung des Dichters aus der Mitte seiner Bildwelt”

(Gesammelte Schriften 677-8). Read in this light, it is apparent that many of the debates over

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Coetzee’s work reflect a similar logic and language. As I will show, these religious-allegorical discussions have arguably been created and curated by the author himself. Written by a scholar familiar with Kafka’s work and the industry of critique that it has spawned, his fiction self- consciously plays on Kafkaesque tropes and interpretations.

“Translating Kafka” : transcendence in the modern age

While David Lurie maintains a careful distance to his own shame throughout the first half of Disgrace, he does accept guilt—albeit ironically—in the Melanie Isaacs affair. For Lurie, guilt is a secular concept, and pleading guilty allows for the separation of the rational from the emotional and spiritual. By contrast, he views the call to repentance—a personal admission of shame—as

“belonging to another universe of discourse” (Disgrace 58). This other universe of discourse to which Lurie refers brings us back to the problem of religious language—a problem which is perhaps at its most visible in the title Disgrace, and which is at heart a question of allegory.

Although the opposite of “disgrace” is something more akin to “honor” than actual “grace,” as

Derek Attridge points out, the word nonetheless carries with it a heavy weight of religious association (Ethics 178). The difficulty of reconciling these two strains in Coetzee—the secular and the spiritual—has given rise to many political-allegorical and spiritual-allegorical readings of his work (e.g. Waiting for the Barbarians as a commentary on the bureaucratic cruelties of the apartheid state, Disgrace as a call to respect “the radical other”). In recent years, attempts to bring these two discourses to heel have often ended in the conclusion that nonhuman animals hold the

122 key to understanding what secular salvation means for Coetzee.118 Before sifting through these critical interpretations and evaluating the works themselves, however, I will examine a piece of

Coetzee’s own scholarly production.

Although critics have occasionally alluded to his 1981 essay on the formal and focalizing structures of Kafka’s “Der Bau,”119 the story of a mole-like creature obsessed with constructing the perfect fortress, analyses that compare Coetzee’s work as an academic to his work as an author are exceedingly rare. A reason for this may be the genre-bending nature of his texts (e.g. fictional characters who speak to an author’s travails, autobiographies such as Boyhood that are written in the third person). It can be difficult to distinguish what counts as a piece of scholarly production and what counts as literature. However, I argue that it is precisely this ambiguity that renders fruitful a consideration of his wider body of work—from interviews and Nobel Prize acceptances to literary criticism.

One example of a scholarly piece by Coetzee that has been neglected is a short essay, written in 1998, reviewing a new translation of Kafka’s Das Schloss for the New York Review of

Books. (Curiously, the title of the original review was “Kafka: Translators on Trial,” yet in his collection of “literary essays,” Stranger Shores, the same piece is called “Translating Kafka.”) He begins the review by pointing out that ever since Edwin and Willa Muir’s 1930 translation of Das

118 See Louis Tremaine, “The Embodied Soul: Animal Being in the Work of J. M. Coetzee”; Justin Neuman, Fiction Beyond Secularism; Michael Marais, “Impossible Possibilities: Ethics and Choice in J. M. Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals and Disgrace”; Jonathan Lamb, “Sympathy with Animals and Salvation of the Soul”; Michael S. Kochin, “Literature and Salvation in Elizabeth Costello or How to Refuse to Be an Author in Eight or Nine Lessons”; and Lucy Graham, “‘Yes, I Am Giving Him Up’: Sacrificial Responsibility and Likeness with Dogs in JM Coetzee’s Recent Fiction.” 119 See Michael O’Sullivan, “Giving up Control: Narrative Authority and Animal Experience in Coetzee and Kafka,” Mosaic, vol. 44, no. 2, 2011: 119-135.

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Schloss, the Muir versions of Kafka’s collected works have remained the most popular among

German-to-English translations. Accordingly, Coetzee addresses the historical background of their work and analyzes their translation choices in order to assess how the new version compares.

Chief among his criticisms of the Muirs is their overreliance on Max Brod, whose commentary on and curation of his friend’s literary estate shaped their understanding of the texts at hand. Coetzee stresses that “these [Brod’s] forewards proved highly influential. They proposed

Kafka as ‘a religious genius . . . in an age of skepticism’, a writer of ‘religious allegory’ preoccupied with the incommensurability of the human and the divine” (Coetzee, Stranger Shores

89). He goes on to claim that “[i]nevitably, the conception of Kafka as a religious writer influenced the choices the Muirs made as they translated his words.” Armed with intimate knowledge of

Kafka as a friend, Brod interpreted K. as seeking “a secure home and job [and] acceptance into a community” (94). In Coetzee’s words, Brod argued that “these simple goals had come to have a religious meaning. The minimal grace that K. seeks from the Castle is permission to settle down, to cease to be an outsider.” Even though Coetzee is summarizing Brod’s point of view here, calling out the latter’s conflation of his friend’s spiritual life with his authorly creations, it is interesting to note that he chooses the word “grace” to describe that which K. seeks—especially given that the concept of grace is virtually omnipresent in his own work. From the title Disgrace to a tangled web of protagonists who search (arguably in vain) for “redemption, “absolution,” or “forgiveness,” one might identify in his word choice a unique interpretive bias towards “religious-allegorical reading” (95)—or at least towards the language of such.120 This is in spite of the fact that he

120 Some of these protagonists include David Lurie of Disgrace, Mrs. Curren of Age of Iron, Elizabeth Costello of Elizabeth Costello, and Dostoevsky of The Master of Petersburg.

124 emphatically rejects such readings of Kafka, as he does in this review. Of course, just because an author chooses one interpretive strategy over another as a scholar does not commit him to such methods as an author of fiction. However, it is worth asking what the effect is of Coetzee mirroring two things in his fiction: first, Kafka’s own language and themes; and second, the overtones of religious allegory of which he remains so skeptical in fellow scholars’ readings.

After singling out several examples of inadequately translated lines, Coetzee goes on to highlight the unfinished nature of Das Schloss (it was published posthumously and divided into chapters by Brod), which can be seen in Kafka’s at times hasty, draft-like writing. While he points out that the characteristic sparseness of Kafka’s language was probably “influenced by the precision of good legal prose, the medium in which he worked day by day,” he also identifies

“inadequacy of a different kind in passages in The Castle, where Kafka, groping to record moments of transcendental insight, visibly reaches the limits of expression” (97-8). As when he refers to

K.’s search for grace, Coetzee once again ventures outside the vocabulary of rationalism in his seemingly earnest assumption that “moments of transcendental insight” do indeed exist in Das

Schloss—even if they are devoid of “religious meaning” of the sort Brod invokes.121

Coetzee’s modest book review offers not only a nuanced close reading of Kafka and a thoughtful evaluation of the two translations, but also sheds light on his own scholarly inclinations

121 Benjamin made a similar point in his 1931 radio talk: “Wir haben vorhin von der bedenklichen religionsphilosophischen Konstruktion gesprochen, die man dem Werk von Kafka untergelegt und in der man den Schloßberg zum Sitz der Gnade gemacht hat. Nun, daß sie unvollendet geblieben sind - das ist das eigentliche Walten der Gnade in diesen Büchern. Daß das Gesetz als solches bei Kafka sich nirgends ausspricht, das und nichts anderes ist die gnädige Fügung des Fragments” (Ges. Schriften 679). While taking issue with the way critics have interpreted the concept of grace [Gnade], he firmly believes in its existence, however unorthodox the form.

125 and interpretive biases. By observing the rhetorical moves and thematic choices he makes as a literary critic in his own right, the careful reader can access another perspective on fruitful ways to approach his fiction. While I am not arguing for a biographical reading of Coetzee’s oeuvre (as has been done with Kafka using his letters and diaries), it is nonetheless helpful to see where his fictional and scholarly work intersect. When reading “Translating Kafka” alongside novels such as Disgrace or Elizabeth Costello, for example, one becomes especially attuned to words that in their vague spiritualism do not seem to fit the secular, post-humanist settings in which they live:

“grace,” for example, or “transcendence.” Of the moments of “transcendental insight” Coetzee mentions where Kafka seems to come up against “the limits of expression,” he writes: “Passages such as these provide the harshest test of the translator, demanding not only an ability to follow the utmost nuances of phrasing but, beyond that, an intuitive sense of what the resistances are against which the language is pressing” (98).

Practically the same could be said of Coetzee’s own fiction. It is for this reason that I have attempted in this chapter to understand the “resistances” and “limits” that his language encounters when it grasps at that which cannot be fully described by the rationalist discourse, epitomized by the likes of Descartes and Heidegger, whose philosophies Costello so abhors.122 This phenomenon is all too familiar to those who work in critical animal studies for two main reasons. First, language has historically been accepted as the ultimate barrier separating human from nonhuman animals; and in recent years, animal studies scholars have struggled to find an adequate language to describe animal experiences without silencing or anthropomorphizing them. The fact that Coetzee pushes

122 See “The Glass Abattoir,” a recording of which can be found at https://johannesburgreviewofbooks.com/2017/09/25/the-jrb-daily-jm-coetzee-reads-a-new-story- the-glass-abattoir-and-announces-a-new-book-to-feature-elizabeth-costello/.

126 back against “religious-allegorical” readings of Kafka and yet uses a similar vocabulary to gesture towards something he terms transcendence—however ironic the appellation may be—is therefore the contradiction that forms the backbone of this chapter.

It is important to note that Coetzee often addresses the question of secular salvation in tandem with his characters’ treatment of animals. This preoccupation with salvation is perhaps best exemplified by the moralistic Costello, who is famous for making enigmatic, sweeping claims that appropriate the language of transcendence even while she personally rejects religion (much like Coetzee himself). In a key example, she declares that “if the humanities want to survive, surely it is those energies and that craving for guidance that they must respond to: a craving that is, in the end, a quest for salvation” (Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello 127). Here she is disagreeing with her sister Blanche (now Sister Bridget), who has just delivered a graduation address in which she celebrates the slow but imminent death of the humanities to a room full of aspiring humanists.

Afterwards, she makes the following observation: “Maybe that is the reason why Blanche raises people’s hackles here: she uses words like spirit and God inappropriately, in places where they do not belong” (126). The irony of this statement cannot be lost on the reader, given the fact that she herself is guilty of the same crime of misapplication—though in a different way. Whereas Blanche uses religious language in secular settings, her sister uses it to express secular ideas: she sees the pursuit of the humanities not as a quest for knowledge, but a “quest for salvation” (127) and explains that she is a vegetarian “out of a desire to save [her] soul” (89). For her part, Donna

Haraway acknowledges this conundrum of how to express intangible moral feelings without resorting to religious language by using such words as “wicked” and “forgiveness” to describe

127 human(e) treatment of animals, all the while “[granting] that overripe religious tones cling to those words like a bad smell” (89).

If such religious language leaves a “bad smell,” then Coetzee’s oeuvre is ripe with it. In

Age of Iron, the same Mrs. Curren who asserts that “God cannot help me” (137) refuses to “get over” the injustices she witnesses “for the sake of [her] own resurrection” (126). David Lurie tells himself that he will ask for “forgiveness” after eating mutton (131). Similarly, the fictionalized

Dostoevsky in The Master of Petersburg links his decision not to “save” a dog chained to a drainpipe to “signs he will not be saved” (83). In this section, I will show how Coetzee’s decision to stage such scenes around interactions with animals is no coincidence.

A number of critics have gestured toward the problem of “secular salvation” and religious language in Coetzee’s novels.123 Addressing the topic more generally, Attridge points out that despite “a recurrent concern” with souls and salvation, the terms are usually used “without any particular religious belief being implied” (Ethics 181). Instead, he argues that “[i]n his reaching for a register that escapes the terminology of the administered society Coetzee has often turned to religious discourse, and there is a continuity among several of his characters who find that, although they apparently have no orthodox religious beliefs, they cannot talk about the lives they lead without such language” (180). Similarly to how the language of physical harm is often used to express linguistic harm due to the lack of a specific vocabulary for the harm words can do (as I discussed in Chapter One), Attridge attributes Coetzee’s characters’ often clumsy use of religious words and imagery to the inadequate reach of language.

123 See Derek Attridge, J. M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading; Jonathan Lamb, “Sympathy with Animals and Salvation of the Soul”; and Richard Northover, “Schopenhauer and Secular Salvation in the Work of J. M. Coetzee.”

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Approaching this question from another angle, in Fiction Beyond Secularism Justin

Neuman explores “new modes and meanings of secularity that emerge in Anglophone and world literature in the period that begins, roughly, with the Iranian revolution of 1979, picks up speed with the collapse of communism, and gains full legibility in the aftermath of September 11, 2001”

(xi). Most interestingly, he identifies a resurgent, transnational preoccupation with religion in the works of non-religious writers such as Coetzee, Ian McEwan, Margaret Atwood, Salman Rushdie, and Nadine Gordimer. His chapter on Coetzee focuses on the figure of the “ascetic prophet” in

The Life & Times of Michael K, Age of Iron, and Elizabeth Costello. Tracing in Coetzee’s oeuvre a leitmotif of “ascetic antihumanism” (84), Neuman understands him as a “tragic theologian whose works improvise methods of world renunciation that are highly suspicious of, and sometimes antithetical to, human flourishing” (xiii). Essentially, he argues that if Coetzee does propose a route to salvation, it depends on an embrace of caritas.124

However, even this route is by no means certain, as it is difficult to gauge what qualifies as true caritas for Coetzee. It is neither “charity as alms” (83), nor do Elizabeth Costello’s sexual favors to an old invalid125 (which Neuman points out are perhaps unwanted, as are Lurie’s advances on Melanie) or Lurie’s “mercy fuck with Bev Shaw” (89) unequivocally pass an inspection of selflessness. Yet although Neuman does touch on terms such as “human” and

124 In “Coetzee’s Posthumanist Ethics” (Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 58, no. 4, 2012), Calina Ciobanu offers her interpretation of Coetzee’s self-stated thoughts on “grace”: “As we discover in Doubling the Point, grace for Coetzee does not manifest itself in the religious sense (‘As for grace, no, regrettably no: I am not a Christian, or not yet’ [250]), but rather, as ‘a measure of charity’ (249); this, he says, is "the way in which grace allegorizes itself in the world” (249). In this case, Lurie's imperfect act of charity in the novel's final scene might be understood, in Coetzean as well as in Levinasian terms, as opening up onto the possibility of grace in a world haunted by seemingly unremitting disgrace” (684). 125 Elizabeth Costello: 153.

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“animal” and briefly refers to Lurie’s care for the “carcasses of dead birds and dogs,” my work differs in drawing an explicit line from religious-allegorical discourse to animality. The connection between the two becomes especially apparent when looking at the role dogs play in Age of Iron.

Canis familiaris

In Coetzee’s world, dogs occupy a rich and uneven domain. Alternatingly (and occasionally simultaneously), they function as empty vessels of meaning waiting to be filled by the projections of human authors, characters, and readers and individual figures that appear painfully real. While Lurie forms a personal relationship with the nameless three-legged dog whose idiosyncrasies make him so much more than a “figure of the dog,” the religious symbolism of the final scene turns this same dog into a sacrificial lamb. According to Attridge, this moment represents to many critics Lurie’s achievement of a “state of grace” (“Age of Bronze, State of

Grace” 112). Some have gone so far as to interpret the act of killing this dog as an act of caritas, to use Costello’s language.126 However, even if this were true on some level, this interpretation would only hold meaning for Lurie; it whispers no words of comfort to the dog. By contrast,

Costello is skeptical of her vision of the old dog sleeping on the threshold of her personal portal precisely because she recognizes its provenance in her imagination; she intuits that the dog “stands for” her desire for salvation while embodying her care for animal life.

As the last novel of Coetzee’s to be published under apartheid (and the only one of these to be explicitly set in a contemporaneous South Africa), Age of Iron is bound to a distinct historical

126 For example, Calina Ciobanu writes that “Lurie's imperfect act of charity in the novel's final scene might be understood, in Coetzean as well as in Levinasian terms, as opening up onto the possibility of grace in a world haunted by seemingly unremitting disgrace” (684).

130 moment to a degree that none of his other works are. To better understand these overdetermined dogs and how they fit into the larger framework of the literal/literary and religious allegory that I reference, it will thus be helpful to provide a brief history of the “figure of the dog” in South Africa.

Only by appreciating the rich allegorical history that Coetzee plays with when he uses canine rhetoric (David Lurie referring to his daughter’s attacker as a “dog”), describes interactions with real dogs (Bev Shaw euthanizing animals in the clinic), and dresses them up as ideas (Costello imagining an old hound snoozing on the doorstep of her Kafkaesque gate), do the stakes become clear.

While Coetzee’s fiction has received accolades in many parts of the world, the reception in his home country has long been mixed. As some critics have argued, this is in large part because his fiction does not clearly espouse a political view—a fact which many South Africans find hard to forgive in light of the searing injustices written into the laws of his homeland until relatively recently.127 Accordingly, the themes, settings, and subjects of his work, whether human or animal, have long been subject to scrutiny. It is perhaps worth noting, then, that until Disgrace (his first post-apartheid work) animals did not feature centrally as subjects in his novels. In the words of

Wendy Woodward, “[w]hite writers during apartheid did not have dogs as significant figures in

127 In “‘Yes, I am giving him up’: sacrificial responsibility and likeness with dogs in JM Coetzee’s recent fiction,” Lucy Graham points out that “Coetzee's Disgrace has been a commercial success and, some would assert, an international literary triumph. In South Africa, however, the novel has had a more ambivalent reception, and there has been disenchantment with an author who, in the post-apartheid context, would choose to write about interracial rape and a disgraced academic who learns to care for dying dogs. Commentators have accused Coetzee of turning away from a ‘positive’ political agenda, and Disgrace was alluded to by the African National Congress (ANC), during South Africa’s recent Human Rights Commission hearings, in order to illustrate racist assumptions” (4). See also Molly Travis, “Beyond Empathy: Narrative Distancing and Ethics in Toni Morrison’s Beloved and J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace.”

131 their narratives perhaps because to do so might have engendered criticism of foregrounding animals at the expense of humans” (“Social Subjects” 251).

When trying to make sense of the abundant and often bizarre interactions that Coetzee’s characters have with dogs, it is important to acknowledge the long and fraught history that canines have had in South Africa. Although certain types of dogs and jackals were commonly used by

African communities before colonization,128 the breeding programs introduced by the colonists quickly turned the dog into a symbol of oppression and a marker of class. However, the preference for “purebred” dogs by European colonizers and their descendants itself has a complicated history.

The Rhodesian Ridgeback, for example, recognized by the South African Kennel Club in 1920 and easily the most iconic South African breed, originated from the native “Hottentot dog” and was thus long denied first-class status.129 With law enforcement’s implementation of dogs as investigative tools and weapons, combined with the white obsession with canine bloodlines and breeding, these hybrid dogs would ironically become the policers of racial, cultural, and geographic borders. One particularly grotesque manifestation of this fixation on “purity” took place in 1904, when a magistrate chose simply to fine a couple accused of beating to death a black farm labourer “for letting his dog mate with their bitch.”130 The African National Congress commented: “Once again, white man’s justice was dispensed in a white man’s court, where a black man’s life is worth less than a dog’s.”131 As such, dogs readily became associated with apartheid and racial oppression.

128 See Lance van Sittert and Sandra Swart, “Canis Familiaris: A Dog History of South Africa,” Canis Africanis, Brill 2008: 7. 129 Van Sittert and Swart: 16. 130 Van Sittert and Swart: 30. 131 Qtd. in Van Sittert and Swart: 30.

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Grasping these culturally specific details becomes crucial when reading scenes like the one in Disgrace where Lurie’s and Lucy’s attackers shoot the dogs in the kennel with brutal efficiency.

As Lance van Sittert and Sandra Swart write in their introduction to Canis Africanis, “[d]ogs are invested with human identity—both individual identity as part of a human family and domestic unit, and an identity derived from belonging to a group or community. Dogs thus serve as a proxy— and a blow against them therefore serves as a blow against their owners” (34, emphasis in original).

Their emphasis on dogs as proxies for their owners helps to contextualize the violence suffered by

Lucy’s dogs. It also adds a welcome layer of complexity to an idea that I proposed in Chapter Two: that representing animals, either in terms of a portrait or proxy, necessitates some kind of violence.

Yet while van Sittert and Swart are correct in pointing out that the street goes both ways—dogs can be proxies for their owners as well as vice versa—to what extent must one view them as victims of their human-led breeding, training, and consequent symbolic power?

Any history of domestication is by nature a history of subjection and discipline. As Keith

Shear points out, the South African Police justified their expensive canine programs by referring to dogs as “modern scientific investigative technology.”132 Treated like tools in the context of policing, these dogs were undoubtedly victims of human exploitation. Regardless of their own status as individual creatures under human control, however, they also cast an outsized shadow on

South African social relations as symbols, proxies, and metaphors. Wendy Woodward captures the effect of this on and through African literature featuring dogs, taking care to point out their function as “ciphers, as hated signs of racialised privilege” (235). Furthermore, in her analysis of Es’kia

132 Keith Shear, “Police Dogs and State Rationality in Early Twentieth-Century South Africa,” Canis Africanis, Brill 2008: 194.

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Mphahlele’s short story “Mrs Plum,” she states that for the main character, “dogs function metonymically as markers of white uncaring insularity” (249, emphasis mine). Although she convincingly argues that this is not just a story about white employers who value their dogs more than their black employees, but also “a narrative which has the exploited workers analyzing dogs as social subjects,” the dogs in this text still have no agency (251). As proxies, metonymic markers, ciphers, or symbols, dogs have for centuries been subject to over-interpretation. Which begs the question: What are we to make of Coetzee’s use of dogs, which ranges from an increasing attention to dogs as individual beings (Disgrace) to the sweeping allegorical gestures of Elizabeth Costello?

To address this question, I propose reading “At the Gate” alongside a group of scenes from

Age of Iron that weave in and out of canine rhetoric and canine relations while overtly questioning the practice of reading dogs allegorically. Whereas Disgrace subtly draws attention to the way purebred dogs in South Africa have been demonized and revered (while mixed-race dogs are neglected and euthanized), Age of Iron reflects what happens when humans refer to dogs as metaphors as well as flesh and blood companions. It will become clear that the extra-rational, religious language that Coetzee favors in his nonhuman animal depictions is linked to the concepts of profession as well as the literal/literary.

Age of Iron tells the story of an old woman living in Cape Town, South Africa who has just been diagnosed with terminal cancer. A professor of classics, Mrs. Curren—who shares a first name with Elizabeth Costello—often phrases her reflections on the state of South Africa in terms of Hesiod’s Five Ages of Man. For example, in response to her domestic employee Florence comparing her children positively to iron, she thinks: “The age of iron. After which comes the age of bronze. How long, how long before the softer ages return in their cycle, the age of clay, the age

134 of earth?” (Coetzee, Age of Iron 50) The novel takes the form of a letter composed over a longer period of time to her daughter, who has emigrated to the United States out of a desire to escape the injustices of her homeland. Like David Lurie, another white South African academic, Mrs. Curren is forced to face her complicity with a violent, racist regime. Set to her evolving relationships with human and nonhuman others (also like Lurie), her reluctant moral transformation provides much of the novel’s emotional force. Her world is doubly changed when she comes home on the day of her diagnosis to find a homeless man taking up residence on her doorstep. Referring to himself only as “Vercueil,” the bristly alcoholic and his nameless dog eventually insinuate themselves into the fabric of her life. Other strange events conspire to trouble her dying days: in a short span of time she witnesses the burning of a black township, the killing of Florence’s son, as well as the police shooting of a young black activist who takes refuge in her house.

Despite Mrs. Curren’s professed lack of religion (alongside her author’s), the word “soul” appears twelve times throughout the course of the novel.133 More fascinating still is the fact that each time the soul is mentioned, the word “dog” appears in some form within a page. Likewise, the words “redemption,” “saved,” and “resurrection” come up once each—134 and in every instance, within a page of a reference to dogs. A key instance of this triple convergence begins with Mrs. Curren sitting side-by-side with Vercueil in a car, noting:

I am even getting used to the smell . . . Is this how I feel toward South Africa: not loving it but habituated to its bad smell? Marriage is fate. What we marry we become. We who marry South Africa become South Africans: ugly, sullen, torpid, the only sign of life in us a quick flash of fangs when we are crossed. South Africa: a bad-tempered old hound snoozing in the doorway, taking its time to die. (70, emphasis mine)

133 Coetzee, Age of Iron: 7, 25, 71, 107, 130, 132, 141, 185. 134 Coetzee, Age of Iron: 117, 136, 126.

135

The two are accompanying Florence and her son Bheki on their search for a friend of his at a township hospital. Surrounded by death, she reflects on her own finitude. Though she feels that she is about to cry, she declares this a “private matter, a disturbance of the pool of the soul, which

[she] take[s] less and less trouble to hide” (71, emphasis mine). But if she is South African, South

Africans are those who are married to South Africa, and South Africa is a disgruntled, dying dog, then it becomes difficult to tell who she is in this equation. Herself? An old hound? Herself as a an old hound? She, like her country, occupies a liminal space between life and death; self and other. Like Lurie, whose part in euthanizing dogs is instrumental in weakening the careful separation he set up at the beginning of the novel between public and private, Mrs. Curren finds that the soul she does not even believe in is slowly baring itself; in an ironic twist, both of these former professors end up finding that they have something to profess.135

Moreover, Mrs. Curren’s “bad-tempered old hound snoozing in the doorway” clearly foreshadows the scene in Elizabeth Costello in which Costello envisions the old, mangled dog

“snoozing” “at the foot of the gate”—and not just any gate, but the gate that stands between her and potential enlightenment (Elizabeth Costello 224). The imagery, even the language, is almost identical. Neither of them is referencing an actual, living dog; Mrs. Curren is speaking metaphorically, and Costello is aware that what she sees is a product of her imagination. It is worth noting, however, that the metaphorical hound in Age of Iron is in the process of dying, whereas death does not seem to exist in Costello’s imagined purgatory. With this small discrepancy,

135 Unlike Mrs. Curren, however, Lurie does cry; after a session of euthanizing dogs (what he calls Lösung) he must stop his car at the side of the road as “[t]ears flow down his face that he cannot stop” (Disgrace 143).

136

Coetzee seems almost to invite an allegorical comparison. Knowing that Age of Iron appeared during apartheid and that Elizabeth Costello was published shortly after its dismantling, it would be simple to chalk up the differing tone of these two scenes to historical context: in 1994, the hound that is South Africa is bad-tempered and dying; in post-apartheid 2004, the image is less morbid without exactly being hopeful. And yet, Costello mistrusts this vision as too easy, too constructed—like the comparison between these scenes. Once again, Coetzee offers an enticing interpretation, only to bring attention to its slightly false sheen.

In fact, perpetual disappointment could also be the theme of “At the Gate.” To give a key example, early on in the lesson Costello is granted a privilege that the petitioner of “Vor dem

Gesetz” is not: a peek through the doorway. However, what she finds is less than satisfying:

Despite her unbelief, she had expected that what lay beyond this door fashioned of teak and brass but also no doubt of the tissue of allegory would be unimaginable: a light so blinding that earthly senses would be stunned by it. But the light is not unimaginable at all. It is merely brilliant, more brilliant perhaps than the varieties of light she has known hitherto, but not of another order, not more brilliant than, say, a magnesium flash sustained endlessly. (196)

Just as the longed-for embrace that Mrs. Curren finally finds in the arms of Vercueil fails to warm her, Costello’s “desire to save her soul”136 and her search for belief culminate in a revelation that is decidedly underwhelming: not nothing, not darkness beyond the door, just ordinary light. More fascinating still, in one breath she describes the door separating this world as being composed of traditional materials such as wood and metal, but also of “the tissue of allegory.” Like wood and metal, which serve as the raw materials from which a door can be fashioned, words are literally the stuff from which allegory is made. While words are typically seen as lacking in physical

136 Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello: 89.

137 substance, Costello assigns them weight. The literal, with its building blocks of letters and words, is material.

Furthermore, with this meta-reference to allegory—a signature move of Coetzee’s which

Attridge calls a “self-reflexive gesture” (Ethics 35)—the author disrupts the reader’s straightforward A-for-B identification (“At the Gate” as an allegory for “Vor dem Gesetz”) by drawing attention to its very constructedness. Therefore, while it would be easy to read this passage and conclude that Coetzee means allegory to be that which stands in the way of salvation (the

“tissue” of the door), it is important to note that what lies beyond is nothing special. Even if allegorical interpretation stands in the way of the search for true meaning, one might deduce that the value of this meaning is lessened by the fact of its ordinariness. (But of course, this too would be an allegorical reading.) In other words: if salvation does exist in this world, it has been “reduced and flattened to a parody,” like Coetzee’s version of Kafka’s parable (Elizabeth Costello 209).

Costello’s use of the expression “tissue of allegory” is peculiar in another way, too. While teak and brass are static plant- or earth-based materials, the word “tissue” has a strong connection to animal flesh and its ability to flourish and die. Tissue can in practice refer to any thin film, but it is also the scientific term for the pieces which together compose living matter: muscle tissue

(such as the heart), epithelial tissue, etc. What business does a word like tissue, with its organic connotations of blood and body in all its immediate physicality, have being attached to allegory, with its inorganic (human-driven) abstraction of ideas? My suggestion is that this question is closely related to one raised at the beginning of this chapter—namely, what differentiates the literal from the literary. Just as allegorical reading has often been set against literal reading, literature— which, when broken down, consists of letters forming words forming texts—would seem to be

138 opposed to the fleshly. However, as I discussed in Chapter One, words do have the power to wound, and Coetzee seems to be proposing the possibility that language is capable of forming a sort of “tissue” with which to capture the body’s experience.

In a radio talk on Kafka given by Benjamin in 1931, he noted that “[s]o wie der K. im Dorf am Schloßberg lebt der heutige Mensch in seinem Körper: ein Fremder, Ausgestoßener, der nichts von den Gesetzen weiß, die diesen Leib mit höheren weiteren Ordnungen verbinden. Es kann gerade über diese Seite der Sache viel Aufschluß geben, daß Kafka in den Mittelpunkt seiner

Erzählungen so oft Tiere stellt” (GS 680-1). For Benjamin, the sense of alienation that Kafka’s characters experience stems from an uncomfortable relationship with their own bodies, especially in a modern world in which unknown, unknowable laws exercise force on their physical containers. Interestingly, he interprets this as the reason why Kafka places so many animals front and center in his work. A few years later, he reiterated this position. After remarking that animals in Kafka function as “Behältnisse des Vergessenen,” he explains: “Weil aber die vergessenste

Fremde unser Körper - der eigene Körper - ist, versteht man, wie Kafka den Husten, der aus seinem

Innern brach, »das Tier« genannt hat. Er war der vorgeschobenste Posten der großen Herde” (430-

1). Benjamin seems to be pointing out that while human animals frequently associate raw physical existence with “lower” orders of being—i.e. nonhuman animals—they often forget that they too consist of a complex network of tissue, bone, and neurons. This is one of the reasons why Kafka’s protagonists (like K. of Das Schloss) are strangers in their own bodies.

But what does this have to do with literature and allegory? In the same essay, Benjamin compares Kafka’s parables (and he does call them parables, despite Kafka’s explicit resistance to the term) to a flower that turns from a bud to a blossom. Reflecting on the genre of the novel, he

139 plays with the idea that “der Roman sei nichts als die entfaltete Parabel” (420). On the same page, he goes on to explain that “[das] Wort »entfaltet« ist aber doppelsinnig. Entfaltet sich die Knospe zur Blüte, so entfaltet sich das aus Papier gekniffte Boot, das man Kindern zu machen beibringt, zum glatten Blatt. Und diese zweite Art »Entfaltung« ist der Parabel eigentlich angemessen, des

Lesers Vergnügen, sie zu glätten, so daß ihre Bedeutung auf der flachen Hand liegt.” The transitive act of unfolding an object connotes a flattening—like the decoding of a fable designed only to yield one meaning. However, the intransitive, organic process of unfolding is more akin to a flowering; an opening-up. After laying out these two possibilities, he asserts: “Kafkas Parabeln entfalten sich aber im ersten Sinne; nämlich wie die Knospe zur Blüte wird. Darum ist ihr Produkt der Dichtung ähnlich.” (It is curious to note that this last sentence has been translated by Suhrkamp

Verlag as: “That is why their effect is literary.”) With this analogy, he sets up a relationship between literature and the organic, by which I mean that which is alive.137 Although Benjamin refers to Kafka’s stories at times as parables, it is clear that he does not interpret them as simple one-to-one allegories. Whereas “Romane sind sich selbst genug . . . Kafkas Bücher sind sich das nie, sie sind Erzählungen, die mit einer Moral schwanger gehen, ohne sie je zur Welt zur bringen”

(679). What makes Kafka’s work unique is its unfinished, fragmentary nature—the asking of questions without pausing for answers. In this, Benjamin even sees a sort of “Gnade” (679).

After her statement of belief is rejected, Costello digs deep inside herself to see if she can root out any beliefs. However, she finds it difficult to focus on this task:

For the moment, all she hears is the slow thud of the blood in her ears, just as all she feels is the soft touch of the sun on her skin . . . this dumb, faithful body that has accompanied her every step of the way, this gentle, lumbering monster that has been given to her to look

137 Even the word “Blatt,” which can refer to a leaf and to a sheet of paper, reinforces this connection between writing and nature.

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after, this shadow turned to flesh that stands on two feet like a bear and laves itself continually from the inside with blood. Not only is she in this body, this thing which not in a thousand years could she have dreamed up . . . she somehow is this body; and all around her on the square, on this beautiful morning, these people, somehow, are their bodies, too. (Elizabeth Costello 210)

This scene is rendered all the more striking by the fact that it, like much of Coetzee’s fiction, is written in the simultaneous present tense, by which events are recounted as they happen.138 The effect is an immediacy that is mirrored in Costello’s attention to the physicality of her existence: blood coursing through her veins, sunlight caressing her skin. By paying attention to her body— described as a “gentle, lumbering monster” that some unnamed or unknown source has given her— she, like Benjamin, recognizes that humans are one with their bodies, and that they are at the same time foreigners or strangers [Fremde] within them. The “tissue of allegory” is another seeming paradox: an intellectual abstraction that has been imbued with physiological qualities. Just as I argued earlier that Kafka breaks down longstanding binaries between the original and the copy, art and imitation, human and animal, I suggest that Coetzee here is presenting the literal (associated with letters and bodies) and the allegorical (transpositions of meanings and ideas) not as opposites, but as coexisting terms within the same equation. Similarly, Coetzee’s use of dogs as figures and figures of speech in Age of Iron and Disgrace is, among other things, a self-conscious meditation on the relationship between physical presence and narrative absence. In an extension of the argument I advanced in Chapter Two about the inevitability of representational violence, these

138 Matt DelConte discusses this unique writing style at length in his article “A Further Study of Present Tense Narration: The Absentee Narratee and Four-Wall Present Tense in Waiting for the Barbarians and Disgrace,” Journal of Narrative Theory, vol. 37, no. 3, 2007: 427-446. He argues that the use of simultaneous present tense narration, which is rare, allows the reader to relate to the text as a report, interpreting and evaluating the text him- or herself (430) and experiencing the text’s emotions as they occur (438-9).

141 scenes also reveal a portrait of power, with humans projecting historical allegories onto the domesticated bodies of dogs. For if these dogs function as “Behältnisse,” to use Benjamin’s word, the understanding to which Costello comes at the end of Elizabeth Costello is that humans are one and the same with their bodies—and thus are vessels, too.

Conclusion: between public profession and private belief

For my final example, I turn to another scene in Age of Iron with strong connections to

Elizabeth Costello’s concluding lines. Writing to her daughter, the dying Mrs. Curren expresses her deteriorating state of mind using a peculiar (but to readers of Coetzee, familiar) metaphor:

This letter has become a maze, and I a dog in the maze, scurrying up and down the branches and tunnels, scratching and whining at the same old places, tiring, tired. Why do I not call for help, call to God? Because God cannot help me. God is looking for me but he cannot reach me. God is another dog in another maze. I smell God and God smells me. I am the bitch in her time, God the male. God smells me, he can think of nothing else but finding me and taking me. Up and down the branches he bounds, scratching at the mesh. But he is lost as I am lost. (137-8)

Despite Mrs. Curren’s attempts to redeem herself by loving the unlovable, by embracing the unembraceable—which, as I have shown, some critics have argued is the key to understanding

Coetzean ethics139—this passage highlights the inevitable failure of her pursuit. In a premonition of the GOD-DOG anagram that Costello will offer, only to reject it, not only is God a dog in this formulation, but so is Mrs. Curren. They are on the same level, but both are lost.140 Moreover, she

139 See Attridge, “Expecting the Unexpected,” J. M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading. 140 As Justin Neuman observes, “[i]n passages such as this, Coetzee is engaged in many levels of narrative play. Intentionally haptic, corporeal, and vulgar, Elizabeth’s troping fashions an immanent and antihumanist tradition. Outside a protective transcendental canopy, defenses of charity tend to be coded through the language of altruism or, in political theory, grounded on values like egalitarianism or modeled on the premise of economic redistribution. In a world conceived without God, as Elizabeth’s clearly is, both charity and love remain horizontal

142 envisions the source of their confusion as a maze of words; letters. Writing, which was meant to unburden her, has instead weighed her down. Even at the beginning of the novel, she apologizes to her daughter for her long-windedness, having written six pages about Vercueil, “a man [her daughter] ha[s] never met and never will. In another world,” she continues, “I would not need words . . . I would embrace you and be embraced. But in this world, in this time, I must reach out to you in words” (19). At this moment, Mrs. Curren finds language to be inadequate—a theme which persists throughout the novel. Though letters were devised to overcome physical distance, she sees hers as a “rope of words” from which she promises to release her daughter (197).

In the end, however, she does find herself locked in an embrace—but not with her daughter, nor with the unlovable child seeking refuge in her house. The hope that she once had of using words to bridge the distance of time and space has since faded. Continuing on in this bleak vein, the very last lines of Age of Iron read: “I got back into bed, into the tunnel between the cold sheets.

The curtains parted; he [Vercueil] came in beside me. For the first time, I smelled nothing. He took me in his arms and held me with mighty force, so that the breath went out of me in a rush. From that embrace there was no warmth to be had” (198). Like the nameless three-legged dog of

Disgrace, Mrs. Curren finds her own Gnadentod in the arms of someone who just might count as a friend. However, just as she describes Vercueil’s hold as an embrace without warmth, hers is a death without transcendence. In an echo of the sadomasochistic officer of Kafka’s “In der

Strafkolonie” who is denied the “versprochene Erlösung” by his torture machine, Mrs. Curren does

filiations deprived of the vertical dimension she is invoking. It is important, then, that Coetzee has not staged anything like a deathbed conversion narrative in which a lifetime nonbeliever ‘returns’ to the fold of a once-abandoned tradition” (80).

143 not seem to find the salvation that she—like the fictional Dostoevsky, David Lurie, and Elizabeth

Costello—has sought, whether desperately or begrudgingly (196). In both cases, the promise of redemption through suffering is shown to be a hoax. But whereas the officer remains a fervent believer in his machine, Mrs. Curren is marked by persistent doubt.141

This doubt is something that nearly all of Coetzee’s protagonists share.142 For Costello, who throughout most of Elizabeth Costello professes strong beliefs about the way humans treat their fellow creatures and is rarely seen backing down, this doubt manifests as skepticism—or as she calls it, “mistrust”—in “At the Gate.” For David Lurie, the attack at the farm causes him to question the way he relates to others, including the sheep destined for dinner. It is hardly a coincidence that none of them arrive at any kind of moral or intellectual clarity. Each of these characters is caught in the middle of her public professions (professor of classics, acclaimed writer and defender of animals, professor of communications) and private beliefs, or lack thereof.

So what are we to make of Costello’s conclusion that the parody of Kafka’s gate, as well as its keeper which she imagines at the end, are “too literary”? Like the tissue of allegory standing between her and what lies beyond, the old dog snoozing on the doorstep is both flesh and blood and an idea—in this case, a metaphor that joins the visceral and the cerebral in one “lion-coloured” figure. (Kafka’s jackals, who clearly lend themselves to allegorical interpretation even while they exist on the page as physical beings who breathe, cower, and hunger, arguably operate in a similar way.) Building on my argument that Coetzee’s work shows how the literal and allegorical often

141 For example, at one point she tells Vercueil: “You want to know what is going on with me and I am trying to tell you. I want to sell myself, redeem myself, but am full of confusion about how to do it” (Age of Iron 117). 142 The one exception is perhaps Michael K. of The Life and Times of Michael K.

144 work together in a kind of symbiosis, I go a step further in proposing that for him, literature is at its best an allegorical interpretation of the literal. In other words, it can be productive to read

Coetzee’s fiction as an imaginative reconstruction of what it means to think and mean literally.

This thoughtfulness towards the reading process can be seen elsewhere in Coetzee’s work, too. Comparing the relatively lukewarm public reception of Disgrace and Toni Morrison’s Beloved against that of more morally straightforward novels such as Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird

(which enjoyed immense popularity in South Africa), Molly Travis argues that “the most ethical act for literature is not the bridging of gaps through the creation of empathy, but the articulation and keeping alive of intractable ethical questions about the asymmetrical relationship between self and other” (232). By this logic, the narrative distancing techniques that she points out in

Disgrace—the fact that it is written in the third-person present tense, for example, or Coetzee’s decision to focalize the novel through a largely unsympathetic protagonist—serve not to cultivate empathy in its readers, but rather to “[keep] alive questions about the limits of the imagination in dealing with radical difference” (246). When Coetzee depicts lapses in empathy or alludes to the literariness of a scene, he is thus drawing attention to the way empathy, or literature, works— alongside the necessary limitations of each.

Pointing out inconsistencies in her “literary theme park” environment, Costello (and through her, Coetzee) diverts the reader’s attention to the strings that are being pulled behind the scenes. In fact, just as in her lectures involving Rotpeter, the language of the theater is one that pervades this “lesson.” Before speaking to her judges for the first time, she thinks to herself: “A performance will be required of her; she hopes she can pick up the cues” (Elizabeth Costello 198).

While killing time, she later muses: “Why should she think that she alone has it in her power to

145 hold herself back from the play? And what would true stubbornness, true grit, consist in anyway but going through with the performance, no matter what? . . . And if that is a cliché too – being a professional, playing one’s part – then let it be a cliché” (206-7). With this quote, we come full circle in two ways. First, we return to the concept of life as a stage on which all creatures are players. Secondly, with Costello’s equation of “being a professional” with “playing one’s part,” we find ourselves face-to-face with the problem of profession with which this chapter began. Using these words, she beckons the idea of the profession, being a professional, not only into the sphere of the public, but into the communal. One who plays one’s part acknowledges that she is but a piece in the machine, a part of the whole; even if the people around her are nothing but “extras”

(212) or “actors made up to look like writers” (208), they appear together on the same stage.

In a way, the final scene of Elizabeth Costello also reflects one of the beliefs that Coetzee the scholar casually lets slip in his book review of Das Schloss: that transcendence may exist in some form, even as human language falters in its attempts to capture it. While his works feature characters who yearn for this “transcendental insight,” seeking meaning in caring for animals, housing drifters, or amphibian ecology—all while using the language of religion where the language of reason seems inadequate—he does not allow his characters or readers any interpretive closure. Each step of the way, Costello sabotages all iterations of belief (except a belief in her body). These judges are caricatures; this scene is too literary. Looking once more to Benjamin’s observation that a story can unfold either like a piece of paper or like a bud, I propose that

Coetzee’s refusal to deliver an emotionally satisfying resolution in Elizabeth Costello (a flattened reading) indicates a commitment to an organic view of literature and allegory—one in which

146 questions open up, or bloom. Costello’s speeches may be littered with abstractions, but at the end of the day she is a “shadow turned to flesh” (210).

147 CONCLUSION

In a letter to Felice Bauer dated July 7, 1913, Kafka confessed: “Often—and in my innermost self possibly all the time—I doubt that I am a human being.”143 Although she did not know it at the time, he was hard at work on “Die Verwandlung” and, with family tensions higher than ever, found himself haunted by an image of himself that Rainer Stach describes as “the wretched animal from the dark adjoining room” (197). Although Kafka’s story of a dutiful son who wakes up one morning to find himself transformed into an Ungeziefer did not make it into this dissertation, it is the shadow lurking behind every mention of animals and allegory in Kafka.

Like many of Kafka’s creatures, including the Katzenlamm of “Eine Kreuzung” and Odradek of

“Die Sorge des Hausvaters,” Gregor Samsa finds himself the victim of biological uncertainty; despite the specificity which the author uses to describe his body and its “kläglich dünnen Beine”

(96), for example, he (like the story) remains stubbornly underdetermined. What kind of vermin is he? Would it make a difference if he were turned into, say, a garden beetle, or perhaps something closer to a cockroach? Much of the story’s grotesqueness seems to stem from the fact of his ambiguous hybridity.

Keeping this in mind, it is difficult not to read Kafka’s declaration of self-alienation— doubting that he numbers among the human beings that walk and talk beside him—as the operating metaphor behind “Die Verwandlung.” However, regardless of the author’s inspiration or intentions, it is quite clear that both he and Gregor find themselves toeing the line between humanity and something else—but this something else may not be as simple to pin down as the

143 Qtd. in Rainer Stach, Kafka: The Decisive Years: 197.

148 catchword “animality.” In fact, I would argue that just as “Ein Bericht für eine Akademie” breaks down and reconfigures questions of science and aesthetics as they had been discussed in the centuries prior, both Kafka’s remarks on his own humanity and “Die Verwandlung” reframe the

“problem” of the “human-nonhuman” divide. An eminently human author questions his human nature, while his fictional creation is physically turned into an insect but retains the mental capacity and memory of his formerly human self. The real question, thus, seems not to be whether Gregor is more human or animal, but rather why it matters in the first place.

This dissertation took as its starting point the many connections between Kafka and

Coetzee, focusing on what bubbles to the surface when their characters are animals, interact with animals, or use animal imagery. In Chapter One I traced the leitmotif of animal performance as it weaves in and out of the two authors’ work—in particular, Elizabeth Costello and “Ein Bericht für eine Akademie.” Taking Costello at her word (as per her request) when she compares herself to

Rotpeter, I analyzed the hermeneutic and rhetorical gymnastics set in motion by her claim to “say what [she] mean[s]” (Elizabeth Costello 62). What binds the two together, I argue, is their role as performers. Rotpeter performs his humanity in front of the academy and Costello her authorial persona in front of a university audience; at the same time, Coetzee has performed as Costello on numerous occasions, also in front of various academies, and many critics have read Rotpeter’s story as an allegory for Kafka the Jew performing for Gentiles. The result of these many intertextual, dialogic layers of performance is that the players’ bodies feature front and center.

In the genealogy I outlined of the trope of the civilized ape, I explored literary forebears of

Kafka such as Rétif de la Bretonne and E. T. A. Hoffmann; scientific influences like Darwin and his theory of evolution; philosophical inspirations and commentaries from the likes of Nietzsche

149 and Benjamin; as well as modern cultural historical perspectives from Hortense Spillers on the transport of slaves across the Atlantic and Nigel Rothfels on the business of importing both human and nonhuman animals to Europe to perform in captivity. From virtuoso apes to homo sapiens as part of the animal kingdom; from man striving to reclaim his animal roots to ogling other humans in Hagenbeck’s “people shows,” each of these stories has at its core the organic body. While some animal studies critics such as Elizabeth Anker and Louis Tremaine have also stressed the importance of the body, putting forward the concept of embodiment as a way of “bridging the gap” between human and nonhuman animals, I believe that there is another way to reframe the idea of the “human/animal divide.” Instead of focusing chiefly on the body as a site of violence and suffering—a hallmark of the interpretive pessimism perhaps best represented by Bentham’s “can they [animals] suffer?”—I made a case for viewing the body as a vehicle for performance.

Although my framework does not fully expel suffering as a centerpiece, I argue that understanding performance (with the possibilities and constraints it entails) is indispensable to considering physical bodies as a common substrate which human and nonhuman animals share.

This attention to bodies continues (at times circuitously) in Chapter Two, where I focused on several characters in particular: Disgrace’s David Lurie and the dogs, named and unnamed, that he encounters. Through the double-sided lens of representation, I reflected on the potential violence inherent in its two definitions—both as advocacy (speaking-for) and portrayal— especially in terms of animal others. At bottom, my goal was to show how seemingly abstract or symbolic acts of cruelty or callousness can have reverberating, even material effects. For example,

Lurie’s neglectfulness in taking into account Melanie Isaacs’ voice is inextricable from the sexual violence he enacts upon her; likewise, it is no coincidence that he calls his daughter’s attacker a

150

“dog” while kicking him as he lies on the ground. Reiterating the point I made in Chapter One, words, or the lack thereof—I am thinking here of imposed silence and the glaring omissions it engenders—have the potential to wound.

Keeping in mind that language can function as the source, executor, and enforcer of uneven power dynamics, I questioned the foundation upon which many scholars have built Disgrace up as the tale of a man’s moral transformation. Namely, I demonstrated that Lurie’s tendency to ventriloquize others, while improved by the end, takes on a troubling new form in his unorthodox

“advocacy” for the unwanted dogs in his care. By delivering them to the needle and choosing to honor their corpses over caring for their living bodies, he betrays the same fear of intimacy as at the beginning of the novel, which in turn motivates him to silence others. However, this is not to suggest that his character remains wholly static. While he does end by killing the three-legged dog to whom he has grown attached, he refuses to give the dog a name. This refusal can be read in two ways: either as an unwillingness to grow attached (keeping the dog at arm’s length) or as respect for the dog’s individuality and independence. The fact that Lurie does not give the dog a name could indicate his lack of desire to “own” him. This would seem positive—and yet the word

“ownership,” like representation, operates on two levels. Lurie’s desire to possess other beings, whether the prostitute Soraya or his student Melanie, has gotten him into trouble in the past.

However, ownership also connotes responsibility. In this way, the fact that he is reluctant to own his emotions or commit himself to taking any lasting responsibility for the animals at the clinic (or his own daughter) also complicates salvific readings of the text. Ownership, representation, responsibility: all three are rooted in language, and in turn each is inextricably linked to the body.

The dual nature of these terms, I argue, mirrors the way the linguistic and the literary can find

151 echoes in the physical world. Ultimately, Coetzee’s avoidance of offering fixed moral terms comes to a head in Disgrace—particularly in his refusal to offer an explicit view on what real ownership, or real responsibility, would look like for both Lurie and Lucy.

This tendency of Coetzee’s to highlight matters of belief while cautiously avoiding outright commitment to them forms the crux of Chapter Three. In it, I took a step back and returned to several of the major themes discussed in Chapter One: allegory and the difficulties posed by

“literal” reading; authorial performance and Coetzee’s and Kafka’s use of religious language to describe secular phenomena; and the “figure of the dog” versus flesh and blood dogs—in other words, the abstract versus the material. Framing this inquiry around the word “profession,” I examined belief and disbelief in their public and private iterations. I demonstrated how in

Coetzee’s work, non-rational discourse (e.g. references to “grace,” “sin,” “soul”) often coincides with allegorical, rhetorical, or literal animal figures. This, I argued, is no random co-occurrence, which I illustrated by probing the final scene of Elizabeth Costello. After multiple failed attempts to convincingly articulate her beliefs, Costello envisions an old dog sleeping on the threshold of the Kafkaesque door that is all that stands between her and what lies beyond—presumably some kind of “answer,” or transcendence. Dismissing the vision because of its obvious allegorical weight, she also refers to the door as being made up of the “tissue of allegory” (alongside more conventional components such as wood and metal). Drawing from Benjamin’s essays on Kafka, I suggested that Coetzee’s curious choice of the word “tissue” here links the “literary”—and

Costello accuses this whole scene of being “excessively literary”—with the biological, or organic.

In this turn from the transcendental (what lies beyond the door) to the organic (the tissue separating the two worlds), many of the threads that hold together this dissertation meet again. To

152 return briefly to an anecdote discussed in Chapter One, Costello attempts in the middle of Elizabeth

Costello to explain the powers of the sympathetic imagination by referencing Thomas Nagel’s

“What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” She seems confident in her ability to think her way into the mind of anyone, whether human or nonhuman. As I suggested, however, this claim is not entirely convincing—which in turn sets the stage for the modification that will arrive at the end of the novel. When Costello closes her eyes in “At the Gate” and desperately searches within for a belief, only to become entranced by the warmth and flow of her own breath and blood, it is as though

Coetzee is suggesting that in a world where humans cannot truly know what it is like to be a bat, the best one can do is to know oneself and cling to what is certain: that we are our bodies. And yet, in a cruel paradox these bodies that we inhabit—that we indeed are—remain Fremde, to use

Benjamin’s terminology. Like the protagonists of Kafka’s novels, who shuffle about in search of the law, for any reason for their persecution, Coetzee’s characters seem to recognize that the one certain thing in life is one’s body, but that this body is simply a vehicle or a shell; a Behältnis.

By investigating the relationship between language and bodies, the literary and the literal, this dissertation has offered a number of fresh perspectives on Kafka and Coetzee—particularly regarding their treatment of animals and animality. Of course, there remain several ways in which this study could be expanded. While I began Chapter One with an analysis of Coetzee’s still- unpublished story “The Glass Abattoir,” upon the publication of Moral Lessons it would be fascinating to pursue the function of the didactic in his work. Though I touched on this topic obliquely in my discussion of profession (with its relationship to professors) and disputed interpretations of Disgrace as a modern Bildungsroman, exploring the relationship between education and performance could be a fruitful way to complicate our understanding of Coetzee’s

153 hybrid roles and the didactic rhetoric he employs. Are the “Eight Lessons” of Elizabeth Costello directed at the title character, or at the reader? Or are they a parody of education, much in the way that Rotpeter’s training in the human arts of spitting and drinking are a parody of civilization?

Where Coetzee positions himself simultaneously (or contiguously) as author, scholar, and educator, an inquest into the function of hybridity as it appears in Kafka and is overtaken by

Coetzee might further enrich this study. Given the importance of liminality to critical animal studies, here it would be useful to work through “Die Verwandlung” in order to discuss seemingly dichotomous conceptual pairings such as original/copy, allegorical/literal, and human/animal.

Likewise, it would be interesting to consider my argument about performance as that which brings living creatures together in light of Kafka’s “Das Naturtheater von Oklahoma,” the eerily utopic

(or perhaps dystopic)144 final chapter of Amerika, also known as Der Verschollene. In this novel

Karl Rossmann, the only protagonist of Kafka’s novels with a full name, stumbles into scrape after scrape in search of a home until eventually coming across a cryptic ad promising employment to every seeker in a giant theater. But when everyone has a role to play—as Costello muses in “At the Gate”—what is the difference between life and the stage? Perhaps it is fitting, then, that this novel, like all of Kafka’s novels, remained unfinished.

Finally, any continuation of this study would need to address the question that I first posed at the end of Chapter One, and which remains tantalizingly difficult to answer. After suggesting that the ghost subject evoked by the many scenes of performance in Elizabeth Costello and

“Bericht” is actually the spectator, I asked: What ethical responsibility do we as readers share with

144 It is unclear whether the newly hired actors packed into trains heading westward are hurtling towards their death or deliverance. The motives of the company offering this employment are obscured.

154 authors and performers as witnesses to everyday suffering? Although I have not ventured an explicit answer to this question, I would like to suggest that in terms of Coetzee, the beginnings of an answer may be found in a deeper study of the same “response” that, according to Descartes, animals lack. It is my suspicion that by interpellating readers—and viewers, keeping in mind his performances off the page—as inadvertent witnesses, Coetzee may be drawing attention to the impossibility of claiming moral ignorance or innocence. Could it be that by acknowledging one’s role (or part) as a witness, one enters into a contract of sorts with the other? By this, I do not mean that Coetzee offers the act of witnessing as a fulfillment of responsibility in itself, or even the promise of fulfillment. Rather, I wonder whether the culmination of unanswered questions surrounding response and responsibility posed in his work—such as Lurie’s handling of the attack at the farm and his subsequent engagement with animals—underlines a belief that in serving as witness, one signs a contract that cannot possibly be fulfilled. Or more precisely: not a belief in the impossibility of fulfilling one’s ethical obligation to the other, but a lack of belief in the utopian idea that there is an end to responsibility, whether temporally or in the sense of a finite goal.

Perhaps one of the reasons why his novels seem purposely to raise more questions than answers is that some tasks cannot simply be checked off. In other words, I contend that Coetzee’s work points to the inevitable insufficiency of response.

155

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