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

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Reading Animals in Kafka and Coetzee a DISSERTATION SUBMITTED to the GRAD 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 By Sonia H. Li EVANSTON, ILLINOIS September 2018 2 © Copyright by Sonia Li 2018 All rights reserved 3 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 4 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.” 5 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. 6 TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract | 3 Acknowledgments | 5 Introduction | 7 Chapter 1: Performance | 18 Introduction | 18 Urszene | 21 Genealogy of “Ein Bericht für eine Akademie” | 32 Reading beyond language: embodiment and performance | 45 Failed performances: Hagenbeck’s “people shows” | 49 Fleshly wounds and free will | 57 Linguistic wounds | 62 Comparing Costellos | 65 Conclusion: jaguars, panthers, and artists | 71 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 Introduction | 106 Of Jackals and apes: in deserts and on stage | 116 “Translating Kafka”: transcendence in the modern age | 121 Canis familiaris | 129 Conclusion: between public profession and private belief | 141 Conclusion | 147 References | 155 7 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. 9 “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.
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